"When Europeans began to draw on ancient precedents in the Renaissance, they did so loosely and freely, and each country did so in its own way, such that French, German, Spanish and Italian Renaissance styles are highly distinct from each other. These national renaissance traditions continued in various forms for over three centuries. There was then a brief period of international neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after which European architects mostly returned to their national idioms. "

1. Renaissance architecture began in Italy, and was copied internationally, with variations, but it still forms a single international style, as did the Gothic and Baroque. 2. This account leaves out the Baroque completely, another international style with high unity and some level of difference. 3. Some damage gets done with these crude reductions; we lose sight of our cultural heritage and replace it with a crude inaccuracy.