The sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up.

Scholarship had pined away into pedantic purism.

Correct taste was coming to be prized more highly than originality of genius in literature.

Nor did architecture fail to manifest the operation of this change.

The greatest builder of the period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners.