This façade appears to have been originally designed in the Pisan Romanesque style, with a tall, shallow blind arcade on pilaster-strips reaching across the ground story. But the Romanesque character was modified in some details, the portals having pointed arches, pointed arched niches sheltering tombs being ranged in the intervals between the pilaster-strips. How far the upper part of this façade had been left incomplete until Alberti took it in hand we have no means of knowing; but no mediæval features occur in it as it now stands, except the circular opening in the central compartment. Upon this front, then, Alberti appears to have ingrafted the great Corinthian order, placing a wide pilaster paired with a column on each angle, breaking the entablature into ressauts to cover the columns, which have nothing else to support, and replacing the central portal with the existing one in the revived classic style. The preservation of the greater part of the mediæval work in the ground story made it impossible to get in more than the four columns in the great order, and these are necessarily spaced in an unclassic way, with a narrow interval in the middle and very wide ones on either side. To the upper compartment the architect has given an order of pilasters surmounted by a classic pediment, and flanked by screen walls over the aisle compartments in the form of gigantic reversed consoles, apparently the first of these features which became common thereafter in 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.