BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Anderson, _Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy_. Burckhardt, _The Civilization of the Renaissance_; _Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien_; _Der Cicerone_. Cellesi, _Sei Fabbriche di Firenze_. Cicognara, _Le Fabbriche più cospicue di Venezia_. Durm, _Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Italien_ (in _Hdbuch. d. Arch._). Fergusson, _History of Modern Architecture_. Geymüller, _La Renaissance en Toscane_. Montigny et Famin, _Architecture Toscane_. Moore, _Character of Renaissance Architecture_. Müntz, _La Renaissance en Italie et en France à l’époque de Charles VIII._ Palustre, _L’Architecture de la Renaissance_. Pater, _Studies in the Renaissance_. Symonds, _The Renaissance of the Fine Arts in Italy_. Tosi and Becchio, _Altars, Tabernacles, and Tombs_. +THE CLASSIC REVIVAL.+ The abandonment of Gothic architecture in Italy and the substitution in its place of forms derived from classic models were occasioned by no sudden or merely local revolution. The Renaissance was the result of a profound and universal intellectual movement, whose roots may be traced far back into the Middle Ages, and which manifested itself first in Italy simply because there the conditions were most propitious. It spread through Europe just as rapidly as similar conditions appearing in other countries prepared the way for it. The essence of this far-reaching movement was the protest of the individual reason against the trammels of external and arbitrary authority--a protest which found its earliest organized expression in the Humanists. In its assertion of the intellectual and moral rights of the individual, the Renaissance laid the foundations of modern civilization. The same spirit, in rejecting the authority and teachings of the Church in matters of purely secular knowledge, led to the questionings of the precursors of modern science and the discoveries of the early navigators. But in nothing did the reaction against mediæval scholasticism and asceticism display itself more strikingly than in the joyful enthusiasm which marked the pursuit of classic studies. The long-neglected treasures of classic literature were reopened, almost rediscovered, in the fourteenth century by the immortal trio--Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The joy of living, the hitherto forbidden delight in beauty and pleasure for their own sakes, the exultant awakening to the sense of personal freedom, which came with the bursting of mediæval fetters, found in classic art and literature their most sympathetic expression. It was in Italy, where feudalism had never fully established itself, and where the municipalities and guilds had developed, as nowhere else, the sense of civic and personal freedom, that these symptoms first manifested themselves. In Italy, and above all in the Tuscan cities, they appeared throughout the fourteenth century in the growing enthusiasm for all that recalled the antique culture, and in