Renaissance Akchjtecture. 105 had already reached his seventy-second year. He designed the dome, and at the age of ninety saw the greater part of his task fulfilled. When he died, he left models for the completion of the church ; but his successors, Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, altered his plan by prolonging the nave westward beyond the length which would have har- monised with the dome. The church of St. Peter became the model of the most ambitious of the later churches of the Renaissance style. In North Italy the school of Venice alone attained to any importance during this, the golden age, of Roman art. For this she was indebted to the great master, Jacopo Tatti, called Sansovino (1479 — 1570;, who built the library of St. Mark's (1536), which is considered his masterpiece, and sculptured the magnificent gate of the sacristy of the church of the same name. In Vicenza, in the sixteenth century, a group of build- ings was erected by Palladio (1518 — 1580;, remarkable not only on their own account, but because they became the models upon which a very large proportion of the Renais- sance work in our own country was based ; the manner of Palladio having become the fashion in England, while that of Vignola (1507 — 1573) was more followed in France. Third Period : Baroque (quaint) style, 1600 — 1800. The simple beauty which distinguished the works of art of the fifteenth century, and the richness and dignity which they displayed in the sixteenth, were succeeded in the seven- teenth by a style in which were exaggerated all the defects of the Renaissance, and from which almost all its merits were left out, and which reflected the unbridled licence and effeminate luxury of the age. It was neither classical
