r the production
of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless
employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without
the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the
construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct
for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more
true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of
the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and
unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over
both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the
proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity
and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had
been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister
arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy
accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single
columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor
cupolas--elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by
Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to
determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted
Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right
limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for
structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold
and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier
Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous
and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be
preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say
how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine;
most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of
S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at
Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the
general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S.
Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent
modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features--especially in the
distribution of the piers and rounded niches.

Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils,
Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, ca