It is impossible to contemplate its noble double row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant, without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.
Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of the sixteenth century--of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications; of Baccio d'Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S.Spirito at Florence; of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city.

Yet the greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted: Michael Angelo must be added to the list of builders in the golden age.

In architecture, as in sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his example the extravagances of the decadence.

Without noticing the facade designed for S.Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of the Capitoline buildings, and the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese--works that either exist only in drawings or have been confused by later alterations--it is enough here to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S.Lorenzo and the cupola of S.Peter's.
The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed statues to enhance the structure he had planned.

Both arts are used with equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel.