produce an
impression as a whole is rarely felt to be successful. No better
example of this can be given than the straggling, unsatisfactory
Palace of Versailles, magnificent as it is in dimensions and rich in
treatment. To the production of a homogeneous impression the
arrangement of plan, the proportion of storeys, the contrasts of voids
and solids, and above all the outline of the entire building, should
be devoted.

The general arrangement of buildings is usually strictly symmetrical,
one half corresponding to the other, and with some well-defined
feature to mark the centre. Of course in very large buildings this
does not occur, nor in the nature of things can it often take place in
the sides of churches; but the individual features of such buildings,
and all those parts of them which permit of symmetry in their
arrangement, always display it.

Proportion plays an important part in the design of Renaissance
buildings. The actual shape of openings, the proportion which they
bear to voids, the proportion of storeys to one another; and, going
into details, the proportions which the different features--_e.g._,
cornice, and the columns supporting it--should bear to one another,
have to be carefully studied. It is to the possession of a keen sense
of what makes a pleasing proportion and one satisfactory to the eye,
that the great architects of Italy owed the greater part of their
success.

Renaissance architecture is so familiar in its general features, and
these have been so constantly repeated, that we may not easily
recognise the great need for skill and taste which exists if they are
to be designed so as to produce the most refined effect possible. Many
of the successful buildings of the style owe their excellence to the
great delicacy and elegance of the mode in which the details have been
studied, rather than to the vigour and boldness with which the masses
have been shaped and disposed; and though grandeur is the noblest
quality of which the style is capable, yet many more opportunities for
displaying grace and refinement than for attaining grandeur offer
themselves, and by nothing are the best works of the style so well
marked out as by the success with which those opportunities have been
grasped and turned to account.

The concealment both of construction and arrangement is largely
practised in Renaissance buildings. Behind an exterior wall filled by
windows of uniform size and equally spaced, rooms large