Michael Angelo forms the link between the second and third periods of the Renaissance.  Among the architects of the latter age we have to reckon those who based their practice upon minute study of antique writers, and who, more than any of their predecessors, realised the long-sought restitution of the classic style according to precise scholastic canons.[51] A new age had now begun for Italy.  The glory and the grace of the Renaissance, its blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young strength, were over.  Strangers held the reins of power, and the Reformation had begun to make itself felt in the Northern provinces of Christendom.  A colder and more formal spirit everywhere prevailed.  The sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up.  Scholarship had pined away into pedantic purism.  Correct taste was coming to be prized more highly than originality of genius in literature.  Nor did architecture fail to manifest the operation of this change.  The greatest builder of the period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners.  It is useless to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive genius in the Palladian style.  All is cold and calculated in the many palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza; they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the labour of the calculating reason.  One great public building of Palladio’s, however—­the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—­may be cited as, perhaps, the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture.  In its simple and heroical arcades, its solid columns, and noble open spaces, the strength of Rome is realised to the eyes of those who do not penetrate too far inside the building.[52] Here, and here only, the architectural problem of the epoch—­how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and use again—­was solved according to the spirit and the letter of the past.  Palladio never equalled this, the earliest of all his many works.

In the first half of the sixteenth century the dictatorship of art had been already transferred from Florence and Rome to Lombardy.[53] The painters who carried on the great traditions were Venetian.  Among the architects, Palladio was a native of Vicenza; Giacomo Barozzi, the author of the “Treatise on the Orders,” took the name by which he is known from his birthplace, Vignola; Vincenzo Scamozzi was a fellow-townsman of Palladio; Galeazzo Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and developed his talents in Genoa; Andrea Formigine, the palace-builder, was a Bolognese; Bartolommeo Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction.  Vignola, Palladio’s elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic