In the fifteenth century Orcagua built the Loggia dei Lanzi, in Florence, and boldly substituted round arches for the pointed ones then in vogue. This was the turning-point in the tide of Gothic architecture, for it needed but little more to induce the delighted Italians to throw off the yoke of an art which they had adopted but unwillingly, and which had never been sympathetic to their taste. Consistently with their impetuous nature, the change was effected without hesitation in a marvellously short period, and with scarcely any of the usual intervening transitional stages. The ancient forms reappeared and replaced the dying Gothic as rapidly as in the days of the French monarchy the cry “Le roi est mort. Vive le roi!” heralded at once the king’s death and his son’s succession to power. It is strange that there should have been so little to connect the succeeding styles, that the revival should have been so completely independent of and uninfluenced by a style which had been steadily growing for four centuries, and which men must have become accustomed to consider the only one suited to their times. Delicate workmanship was, however, the only Gothic legacy the Renaissance architects accepted, and this was the chief characteristic of the work of the early period. The proportions and scale of their buildings were small; a whole order: pedestal, column, and entablature generally occupying and marking the height of an ordinary story of fifteen or twenty feet, and the ornament used, while profuse, was executed in the lowest relief and with most minute detail. If the revolution in art was great, it had proportionately great exponents: Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Sangallo, Vignola, Michael Angelo are names as prominent in history as those of much-lauded victors in the battlefield. Brunelleschi, architect of the dome of St. Mary’s in Florence, was one of the earliest innovators. He designed the Strozzi and Pitti Palaces in that city, with the horizontal lines and round arches of the Classic school, although still retaining the feudal traditions in their massive stonework and in the austerity of their exteriors. The great palaces of Rome which belong to this period partake also of this external severity, and confine their brilliancy to interior display. The palaces of the Cancelleria by Bramante, the Palazzo Massini by Balthasar Perruzzi, of Sienna, the Sacchetti and Corsini Palaces by Sangallo, the Barberini designed by Bernini, and the Farnese Palace upon which Sangallo, Vignola, and Michael Angelo devoted their labors in turn, are a few among the most celebrated.