Gothic, as we have already seen, was an alien in Italy.

Its importation from the North had checked the free development of national architecture, which in the eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details.
But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.[26] The ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.[27] The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings.

Of Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as Roman--itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece.

At the same time they possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work.