Renaissance classicism and eighteenth-century Neoclassicism looked to the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. Both styles developed at times when the previous dominant styles of architecture had become elaborate and overblown. Both styles also developed in conjunction with significant changes in European society. An example of Renaissance classicism is the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, designed by the Humanist architectural theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), and built some time between 1450 and 1470 (Kostof 409). An example of Neoclassicism is Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, built by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698-1782) in 1763-69 (facade, Kostof 560; entrance, Greenhalgh 189).
The International Gothic had become formulaic and its development had stopped, except for local variations, when the Humanist revival of classical learning began in Italy. In architecture, this movement offered the merchant families, who were refashioning the Italian city-states, a style that identified them with the reawakening of learning and distinguished them from the unenlightened near past. This new learning claimed that people could think for themselves, and understand classical sources without relying on the authority of the Church. Renaissance Classicism was a modernizing movement that identified the improvement of life, society, and the arts with the new class of merchant princes who sponsored it.
In architecture, the economy of the city-states did not allow for extensive building projects. Clients in fifteenth-century Italy were, therefore, often content with the remodeling of existing buildings to give them a veneer of classicism. Alberti designed the Palazzo Rucellai, a new building, for Florence's Medieval streets where space was at a premium. Previously, such buildings had been primarily horizontal in emphasis. But classicism implied greater verticality, and Alberti's building met this requi...