supreme ability the great architect of Casteldurante blended sublimity with suavity, largeness and breadth with naivete and delicately studied detail.  But these first endeavours of the Romantic spirit to assimilate the Classic mannerism—­essays no less interesting than those of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, of Donatello and Omodei in sculpture—­all of them alike, whether buildings, poems, paintings, or statues, displaying the genius of the Italic race, renascent, recalcitrant against the Gothic style, while still to some extent swayed by its influence (at one and the same time both Christian and chivalrous, Pagan and precociously cynical; yet charmingly fresh, unspoiled by dogma, uncontaminated by pedantry)—­these first endeavours of the Romantic spirit to assimilate the Classic mannerism could not create a new style representative of the national life.  They had the fault inherent in all hybrids, however fanciful and graceful.  They were sterile and unprocreative.  The warring elements, so deftly and beautifully blent in them, began at once to fall asunder.  The San Galli attempted to follow classical precedent with stricter severity.  Some buildings of their school may still be reckoned among the purest which remain to prove the sincerity of the Revival of Learning.  The Sansovini exaggerated the naivete of the earlier Renaissance manner, and pushed its picturesqueness over into florid luxuriance or decorative detail.  Meanwhile, humanists and scholars worked slowly but steadily upon the text of Vitruvius, impressing the paramount importance of his theoretical writings upon practical builders.  Neither students nor architects reflected that they could not understand Vitruvius; that, if they could understand him, it was by no means certain he was right; and that, if he was right for his own age, he would not be right for the sixteenth century after Christ.  It was just at this moment, when Vitruvius began to dominate the Italian imagination, that Michelangelo was called upon to build.  The genial adaptation of classical elements to modern sympathies and uses, which had been practised by Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante, yielded now to painful efforts after the appropriation of pedantic principles.  Instead of working upon antique monuments with their senses and emotions, men approached them through the medium of scholastic erudition.  Instead of seeing and feeling for themselves, they sought by dissection to confirm the written precepts of a defunct Roman writer.  This diversion of a great art from its natural line of development supplies a striking instance of the fascination which authority exercises at certain periods of culture.  Rather than trust their feeling for what was beautiful and useful, convenient and attractive, the Italians of the Renaissance surrendered themselves to learning.  Led by the spirit of scholarship, they thought it their duty to master the text of Vitruvius, to verify his principles by the analysis of surviving antique edifices, and, having formed their own conception of his theory, to apply this, as well as they were able, to the requirements of contemporary life.