Think of Italian architecture, and one is likely to think of St. Peter's and the Vatican in Rome, the works of architecture that represent the Italian Renaissance in its fullest senses of harmony and balance of line and form. However, the influence of Renaissance architecture did not begin and end with the Renaissance period of the 15th century. Rather the influence of Italian Renaissance architecture can still be seen in many of the modern styles and rules of architecture today. The Renaissance heralded development of "a new architecture" from the 15th to the 16th centuries "that was the first 'modern' architecture. When we look at Renaissance buildings, they look familiar, almost as if they were built one hundred years ago." (Hooker, 1996) For example, a simple wander through the city of Washington, D.C. will reveal tall, pale marble columns that harkens back to Renaissance or ancient Italy in both their shapely domed and colonnaded forms, as well as their details of stone faces and facades. The architects of the Renaissance derived their architecture in part from a revived interest in Roman and Greek ruins, and they sought to improve upon these classical designs in a way that glorified the public space of the cities of the High Renaissance. "In the Renaissance, architecture was seen as the supreme art.it also represented the highest artistic achievement a human being could attain. (Hooker, 1996).

             The architectural language invented by the Italian Renaissance architects became the dominant architectural language of the modern world, "displaced only by the advent of modernist architecture in the twentieth century." (Hooker, 1996) But even the modern architect Richard Meier notes that "the quality of light, expression of structure, as expressed in an interior like Sant' Ivo Sapienza," remains influential in the way buildings are designed today. The idea of buildings that reach into the heavens, or the principle that an interior should welcome the light into the interior rooms can be traced to this period.