Chap II.

ITALIAN. 135
attest his skill. We are not to examine them with tlie eye of an architect flourisliing even
half a century later, though under that catej;ory they do him honour, but with tlie eye
of an artist of his own day, and we shall then find our veneration for his memory cannot be
too strongly expressed. In Florence he finished the Ruccellai palace, and built the choir
of the Annunziata. At Mantua he built a church of singular beauty, consisting of a simple
nave, crowned with a vault decorated with caissons, which rivals the works of the ancients.
Tiie additions he made to the church of St. Francesco at Rimini, a pointed church, though
not in the same style, because it then came into disrepute, show an extraordinary aptitude
for overcoming the most difficult and repulsive subjects with which an architect has to deal,
and that work alone would stamp him as a man of genius. On his other acquirements it is
not within our province to dwell ; we shall merely sum them up by saying that he was jjoet,
painter, sculptor, philosopher, mathematician, and antiquary. Such was Alberti, in whom
was concentrated more refinement and learning than have hardly since appeared in a single
individual of our species. The time of his death is not accurately known
;
some place it at
the end of the fifteenth, and others at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
326. About the time that Alberti was engaged on the practice and literature of the art,
a very extraordinary volume, written by a member of the Colonna family, was published by
Aldus, at Venice, in 1499, folio. Its title is as follows: Polyphili Hijjmerotomuchia
i
opus itulicd lingua conscriptum ;
ubi humana omnia jion nisi somnium esse docet. This work
deserves to be better known than we fear its rarity will ever permit. With the singularity
of the plan, it unites the advantage of placing before the reader many elevated and elegant
ideas, and, under the veil of a fable, of inculcating precepts of the greatest utility to artists
and those that love the art. llie testimony of Felibien in favour of this work runs so fa-
vourably, that we must transcribe it:

" Sans prejudice," says that author,

"
du grand profit
qu'on pent tirer de la lecture de Vitruve, et de I'etude qu'on doit faire de ses principes et de
ses regies, il ne faut i)as
moins examiner les tableaux curieux de plusieurs superbes edifices,
monumens ou jardins, (jue I'imagination riante et feconde de I'auteur du Sonpe a mis sous
les yeux de ses lecteurs." When it is recollected that the manuscripts of Vitruvius were
extremely rare, and that when Colonna wrote (1467)
that author had not been translated,

when we reflect that in his descriptions he rears edifices as magnificent and regular as
those which Vitruvius presents to us, we cannot withhold our surprise at the genius and pene-
tration of the author. With him architecture appears in all her majesty. Pyramids,
obelisks, mausolea, colossal statues, circi, hippodromi, amphitheatres, temples, aqueducts,
baths, fountains, noble jialaces, delicious gardens, all in the purest taste and of the most
perfect jjroportion, attend in her train, and administer to the pomp with which the author
attires her. With him all these ideal productions of the art were not merely the result of
an ardent imagination, but were the fruit of an intimate acquaintance with its rules, which
he explains to his reader, and inspires him at the same time with a taste for the subject of
his pages. lie often breaks out against the gross ignorance of the architects of his day,
and endeavours to inculcate in them the sound principles of the art. He demonstrates
that it is not enough that an edifice possesses stability and solidity, but that it must be
impressed with a character suitable to the jnirpose for which it is destined
;
that it is not
enough that it be well decorated, but that the ornaments used arise from necessity, or at
the least from utility. Architecture thus treated in fiction was much more pleasantly
studied than it would have been by mere application to the dry rules of Vitruvius. The
imiiression made by the work was increased by the poetic glow with which the precepts
were delivered; the allegories it contained warmed the imaginations of a people easily excited,
and Italy soon saw realised what Polyphilus had seen in a dream. This work is decorated
with wood engravings of singular beauty, in which the details and accessories are strictly
classical; it is written with great spirit and elegance, and we are not amazed at the magical
effect which, with the accompaniment of Alberti's book above mentioned, it every where
produced.
327. The Italian school, which ultimately appropriated and adapted the ancient Roman
orders and their details to comparatively modern habits, was for a long while engrafted
on or amalgamated with what is.called Gothic. We here
(fiij. 165.)
place before the reader
an instance of this, in the celebrated Loggia at Florence, designed by Orgagna. The same
feeling appears, indeed, in what Brunelleschi did in his Duomo, and in many other buildings
in Florence, in Pisa, Sienna, and other cities. Brunelleschi doubtless made a strong effort to
emancipate himself altogether from the mixture of two discordant styles, and in some mea-
sure succeeded. Still there continued, as is evident in the Ricardi, Strozzi, and other palaces
in Florence, a lingering love for the mixture, which the architects had great apparent diffi-
culty in shaking off. It is, however, extraordinary that with all this lingering love for the
ancient style, in which there was much littleness, when the architects of this period came
to the crowning members of their edifices, they placed on them such massive and finely
fiomposcd cornices that the other parts are cjuite lost; and in this member it is evident tliey
were influenced by those feelings of unity and breadth that gave so much value to the best
works of the ancients.