+EARLY BEGINNINGS.+ Already in the 13th century the pulpits of Niccolo Pisano at Sienna and Pisa had revealed that master’s direct recourse to antique monuments for inspiration and suggestion. In the frescoes of Giotto and his followers, and in the architectural details of many nominally Gothic buildings, classic forms had appeared with increasing frequency during the fourteenth century. This was especially true in Florence, which was then the artistic capital of Italy. Never, perhaps, since the days of Pericles, had there been another community so permeated with the love of beauty in art, and so endowed with the capacity to realize it. Nowhere else in Europe at that time was there such strenuous life, such intense feeling, or such free course for individual genius as in Florence. Her artists, with unexampled versatility, addressed themselves with equal success to goldsmiths’ work, sculpture, architecture and engineering--often to painting and poetry as well; and they were quick to catch in their art the spirit of the classic revival. The new movement achieved its first architectural triumph in the dome of the cathedral of Florence (1420-64); and it was Florentine--or at least Tuscan--artists who planted in other centres the seeds of the new art that were to spring up in the local and provincial schools of Sienna, Milan, Pavia, Bologna, and Venice, of Brescia, Lucca, Perugia, and Rimini, and many other North Italian cities. The movement asserted itself late in Rome and Naples, as an importation from Northern Italy, but it bore abundant fruit in these cities in its later stages. +PERIODS.+ The classic styles which grew up out of the Renaissance may be divided for convenience into four periods. THE EARLY RENAISSANCE or FORMATIVE PERIOD, 1420-90; characterized by the grace and freedom of the decorative detail, suggested by Roman prototypes and applied to compositions of great variety and originality. THE HIGH RENAISSANCE or FORMALLY CLASSIC PERIOD, 1490-1550. During this period classic details were copied with increasing fidelity, the orders especially appearing in almost all compositions; decoration meanwhile losing somewhat in grace and freedom. THE EARLY BAROQUE (or BAROCO), 1550-1600; a period of classic formality characterized by the use of colossal orders, engaged columns and rather scanty decoration. THE DECLINE or LATER BAROQUE, marked by poverty of invention in the composition and a predominance of vulgar sham and display in the decoration. Broken pediments, huge scrolls, florid stucco-work and a general disregard of architectural propriety were universal. During the eighteenth century there was a reaction from these extravagances, which showed itself in a return to the servile copying of classic models, sometimes not without a certain dignity of composition and restraint in the decoration.