and is crowned with a heavy cornice from which the vaulting springs. We have here a structural system of imperial Roman massiveness, necessitated by the use of the great barrel vault.
After the early part of the sixteenth century Italy produced few architects of a high order of genius. Most of the more advanced neo-classic art is the work of mediocre men who, while professing to be ardent advocates of grammatical correctness according to the ancient rules, were hardly less capricious in their misuse of classic elements than their predecessors had been. To enter upon the examination of any large number of buildings in this later Renaissance style would be tedious and unnecessary; but in addition to what we have already seen of it in the work of Michael Angelo in St. Peter's, we may give some attention to a few characteristic works of the two leading architects of the later time: Vignola and Palladio.
Few men did more to make the neo-classic ideas authoritative than Giacomo Barrozzi, called Vignola. Beginning like so many others with painting, Vignola was led early to the study of architecture, in which he strove to gain an exact knowledge of classic Roman forms by drawing and measuring the remains of the ancient edifices. He thus became a devoted partisan of the antique, and he wrote a treatise on the Five Orders which has been widely accepted as an authoritative guide in modern architectural practice. To him, says Milizia, "Architecture is under lasting obligations because he established it upon system, and prescribed its rules."[1] And the same author tells us further that Vignola "purified architecture from some abuses which neither his contemporaries nor the ancients had perceived"; yet nevertheless, he adds, "his book has produced more harm than good, for to make the rules more general, and more easy of application, he has altered the finest proportions of the antique." No system of architecture, Milizia says further, "is more easy than that of Vignola, but the facility of it is obtained at the expense of architecture itself." In his book,[2] which is made up largely of drawings and diagrams, Vignola shows how the proportions of an order may be regulated by a module down to the smallest details. He explains how to construct Ionic volutes and other curves from centres, and how to describe the details of Corinthian and composite
