It remains a tour de force of individual genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome.

Its spirit of dauntless audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.
Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.[31] In his remodelling of S.Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful facade, remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned pilasters and nobly curved arcades.[32] The same principle is carried out in S.Andrea at Mantua.

The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome.

The combination of these antique details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to method.

Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we consider that here the lofty central arch of the facade serves only for a decoration.