-circle, which would have been flat and awkward, he resolved to turn
certain small arches at the corners from one projection to another; and
this lack of judgment in design gives us to know clearly that practice
is necessary as well as science, for the judgment can never become
perfect unless science attains to experience by actual work.

It is said that the same man made the design for the house and garden of
these Rucellai in the Via della Scala. This house is built with much
judgment and very commodious, for, besides many other conveniences, it
has two loggie, one facing south and the other west, both very
beautiful, and made without arches on the columns, which is the true and
proper method that the ancients used, for the reason that the
architraves which are placed on the capitals of the columns lie level,
whereas a four-sided thing like a curving arch cannot rest on a round
column without the corners jutting out over space. The good method,
therefore, demands that architraves should rest on columns, and that,
when arches are to be turned, pilasters and not columns should be made.

For the same Rucellai Leon Batista made a chapel in the same manner in
S. Pancrazio, which rests on great architraves placed on two columns and
two pilasters, piercing the wall of the church below; which is a
difficult thing, but safe; wherefore this work is one of the best that
this architect ever made. In the middle of this chapel is a tomb of
marble, wrought very well in the form of a rather long oval, and
similar, as may be read on it, to the Sepulchre of Jesus Christ in
Jerusalem.

[Illustration: FACADE OF S. ANDREA

(_After =Leon Batista Alberti=. Mantua_)

_Alinari_]

About the same time Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, wished to build
the tribune and the principal chapel in the Nunziata, the Church of the
Servi in Florence, after the design and model of Leon Batista; and
pulling down a square chapel, old, not very large, and painted in the
ancient manner, which stood at the head of the church, he built the
said tribune in the bizarre and difficult form of a round temple
surrounded by nine chapels, all curving in a round arch, and each within
in the shape of a niche. Now, since the arches of the said chapels rest
on the pilasters in front, the result is that the stone dressings of the
arches, inclining towards the wall, tend to draw ever backwards in order
to meet the said wall, which turns in the opposite direction acco