Meanwhile, humanists and scholars worked slowly but steadily upon the text of Vitruvius, impressing the paramount importance of his theoretical writings upon practical builders.
Neither students nor architects reflected that they could not understand Vitruvius; that, if they could understand him, it was by no means certain he was right; and that, if he was right for his own age, he would not be right for the sixteenth century after Christ.

It was just at this moment, when Vitruvius began to dominate the Italian imagination, that Michelangelo was called upon to build.

The genial adaptation of classical elements to modern sympathies and uses, which had been practised by Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante, yielded now to painful efforts after the appropriation of pedantic principles.
Instead of working upon antique monuments with their senses and emotions, men approached them through the medium of scholastic erudition.

Instead of seeing and feeling for themselves, they sought by dissection to confirm the written precepts of a defunct Roman writer.

This diversion of a great art from its natural line of development supplies a striking instance of the fascination which authority exercises at certain periods of culture.