the rapid advance of luxury and refinement in both public and private life. +THE RENAISSANCE OF THE ARTS.+ Classic Roman architecture had never lost its influence on the Italian taste. Gothic art, already declining in the West, had never been in Italy more than a borrowed garb, clothing architectural conceptions classic rather than Gothic in spirit. The antique monuments which abounded on every hand were ever present models for the artist, and to the Florentines of the early fifteenth century the civilization which had created them represented the highest ideal of human culture. They longed to revive in their own time the glories of ancient Rome, and appropriated with uncritical and undiscriminating enthusiasm the good and the bad, the early and the late forms of Roman art, Naïvely unconscious of the disparity between their own architectural conceptions and those they fancied they imitated, they were, unknown to themselves, creating a new style, in which the details of Roman art were fitted in novel combinations to new requirements. In proportion as the Church lost its hold on the culture of the age, this new architecture entered increasingly into the service of private luxury and public display. It created, it is true, striking types of church design, and made of the dome one of the most imposing of external features; but its most characteristic products were palaces, villas, council halls, and monuments to the great and the powerful. The personal element in design asserted itself as never before in the growth of schools and the development of styles. Thenceforward the history of Italian architecture becomes the history of the achievements of individual artists.