that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main aesthetical
purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts,
and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades
of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and
inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details,
and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a
feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As
the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every
detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance
have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest
literary extravagances--the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, for
instance--have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to
sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders
were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production
of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless
employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without
the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the
construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct
for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more
true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of
the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and
unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over
both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the
proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity
and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had
been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister