Renaissance fronts. The pilasters of this order are again four in number, and are set in pairs on either side of the circular opening, the width of this opening making it impossible to space them otherwise. We thus have in the clerestory compartment of this façade a forced arrangement of pilasters, which may have led to that alternation of wide and narrow intervals that became very common in the subsequent architecture of the Renaissance. The attic over the ground story, which extends across the entire front and answers to nothing in the interior of the building, is presumably also by Alberti.
The front of Santa Maria Novella is notable as the first mediæval one which was worked over by a Renaissance architect, and as a whole, notwithstanding that it is a patchwork of incongruous elements, it exhibits a remarkable unity of effect. The merit of Alberti's work here consists in its quietness. The applied orders are in low relief, their details are unobtrusive, and the mellowing effect of age on the beautiful marble incrusting has fused the whole front into an exquisite colour harmony that is almost unmatched elsewhere.
Very different is the west front of San Francesco of Rimini, in which Alberti has introduced a Roman composition without any admixture of mediæval elements. It is substantially a reproduction of the arch of Septimius Severus. The details are in higher relief here in conformity with the ancient model, and the ressauts of the entablature become correspondingly more salient. A ressaut of this kind is another feature of Roman art which has no justification on structural grounds, and to which there is nothing analogous in any reasonable style of architecture. To set a useless column in advance of an entablature and then make a ressaut to cover it, is irrational.
Alberti's capital work in church architecture is Sant' Andrea of Mantua, begun in 1472, the year of the architect's death, in which he made a frank return to Roman models in the structural forms of the whole edifice, as well as in the ornamental details—a thing that was rarely done by the architects of the Renaissance. The plan (Fig. 18) is, however, cruciform, and the dome over the crossing is supported in the Byzantine manner on pendentives. The nave (Plate II) has a barrel vault on massive square piers connected by arches, the intervals between the piers forming side chapels, and the lower part of each pier having a small
