Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.
To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over both successors and contemporaries.

What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect.

He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point.

His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor cupolas--elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to determine the future of architecture for all Italy.

Nature had gifted Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry was just.