Church of the Umilta at Pistoja—­Palazzo del
Te—­Villa Farnesina—­Sansovino at Venice—­Michael Angelo—­The Building of
S. Peter’s—­Palladio—­The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—­Lombard
Architects—­Theorists and Students of Vitruvius—­Vignola and
Scamozzi—­European Influence of the Palladian Style—­Comparison of
Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.

Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism in the service of religion and of civic life.  A house, as Hegel says, must be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or figured in mosaic, can be placed there.  Council chambers must be prepared for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted on the walls.  Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed.  The domes and towers of Florence and of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood.  Lombardy, at the end of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other pastureland in Europe.  The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and was finished in 1258.  The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe.  At the same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength.  Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in 1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome.  Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and sand.  So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon the bosom of the deep.  Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved with flags.  Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.