In the course of the history of Classical architecture, an Italianate style of architecture was a istinct nineteenth-century phase, in which Italian sixteenth-century models and architectural vocabulary, which had served as inspiration for both Palladianism and Neoclassicism, were now synthesized with picturesque aesthetics, to create an architecture that, though it was also characterized as "Neo-Renaissance", was essentially of its own time. "The backward look transforms its object," Siegfried Giedion wrote of historicist architectural styles; "every spectator at every period— at every moment, indeed— inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature."