impulse, and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy.  Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian style.  Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, felt the influences of a rich and splendour-loving aristocracy.  His church of S. Maria di Carignano is one of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings of the late Renaissance, combining the principles of Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation of S. Peter’s, and adhering in detail to the canons of the new taste.

These canons were based upon a close study of Vitruvius.  Palladio, Vignola, and Scamozzi were no less ambitious as authors than as architects;[54] their minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of construction led to the formation of exact rules for the treatment of the five classic orders, the proportions of the chief parts used in building, and the correct method of designing theatres and palaces, church-fronts and cupolas.  Thus architecture in its third Renaissance period passed into scholasticism.

The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their predecessors.  We English, for example, have given Palladio’s name to the Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century.  This selection of one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of Palladio’s great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the facility with which his principles could be assimilated.  Depending but little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been developed.  To have rivalled the facade of the Certosa would have been impossible in London.  Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices.  Moreover, the principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods.

After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.[55] The object in each case was the same—­to be as true to the antique as possible, and without actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon it the limitations of a bygone civilisation.  At first the enthusiasm for antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate per saltum, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic intuition were produced.