A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man, strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the devout^[8].

This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an impossibility. In like manner there are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.^[9] Yet, while we recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an æsthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity, variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.

The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not foreseen. Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and confirmed the cult of local saints; because its sensuousness was not at variance with a creed that had been deeply sensualised—the painters were allowed to run their course unchecked. Then came a second stage in their development of art. By placing the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and anatomical accuracy, they began to make representation an object in itself, independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the old powers of the earth—Aphrodite and Galatea and the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the Nymphs of the woods and the waves.

When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway the hearts of men in the new age, it was found that something had been taken from their ancient bloom of innocence, something had been added of emotional intensity. Italian art recognised their claim to stand beside Madonna and the Saints in the Pantheon of humane culture; but the painters re-made them in accordance with the modern spirit. This slight touch of transformation proved that, though they were no longer objects of religious devotion, they still preserved a vital meaning for an altered age. Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though suppressed and ignored by militant and mediæval Christianity, were strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and air.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis. All that æsthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts. Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures. It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose. Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be. The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new art had arisen, for which it remained, within the æsthetic sphere, to achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words, are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the Italians put it, la musica è il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli dei. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions, fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance, when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident, landscape, genre, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended, with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world and God are incapable of personification by any æsthetic process; they never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.

CHAPTER II--ARCHITECTURE

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in 1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.

Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican. They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle, the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian tyranny implied æsthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.

In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the period of Lombard ascendency.^[10] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions; the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To their quarries of mandorlato the Veronese builders owed the peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into mediæval Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices of a later period.

Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the mosques of Alexandria, decking its façade with the horses of Lysippus, and panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics, interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile, at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made a castle of Cæcilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults swarmed a brood of mediæval bravi—like the wasps that hang their pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with Etruscan domes; covering the façade with bas-reliefs, the roof with statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins; flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in isolation on the open square—these wonderful buildings, the delight and joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all influences and to assimilate all nationalities.

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.^[11] From some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken down local distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England?^[12] The pyramidal façade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aërial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.

If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of the Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, near Florence [about 1013], and the cathedral of Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention other less eminent examples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in the darkest period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at an architectural Renaissance. The influence of classical models is apparent both in the construction and the detail of these basilicas; while the deeply grounded preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces, with low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction in these original and noble buildings. It is impossible to refrain from deploring that the Romanesque of Tuscany should have been checked in its development by the intrusion of the German Gothic. Had it run its course unthwarted, a national style suited to the temperament of the people might have been formed, and much that was pedantic in the revival of the fifteenth century have been obviated.

The place of Gothic architecture in Italy demands fuller treatment. It was due partly to the direct influence of German emperors, partly to the imperial sympathies of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan friars, who aimed at building large churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration excited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern Europe, that Gothic—so alien to the Italian genius and climate—took root, spread widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus enumerating the conditions favourable to the spread of Gottico-Tedesco, I am far from wishing to assert that this style was purely foreign. Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation. Yet the first Gothic church, that of S. Francis at Assisi, was designed by a German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically German.^[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The mood of mind in which they Gothicised was partial and transient. The evolution of this style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North. While it produced the church of S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness. It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in which they comprehended chivalry.

The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows; aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless soaring lines—lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent growth—converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings. It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six arches raised on simple piers. The façade of an Italian cathedral was studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior; in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof of the nave. For the total effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to anyone who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, no thought was taken. In this way the Italians missed the point and failed to perceive the poetry of Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was lost upon them; perhaps we ought to say that the Italian temperament, in art as in religion, was incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful mysticism of the Teutonic races.

On the other hand, what they sacrificed of genuine Gothic character, was made good after their own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco or mosaic, bronze-work or bas-relief, wood-carving or panelling in marble, baked clay or enamelled earthenware was never carried to such perfection in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had sculpture in the North an equal chance of detaching itself from the niche and tabernacle, which forced it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the comparative defects of Italian Gothic were directly helpful in promoting those very arts for which the people had a genius unrivalled among modern nations.

It is only necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style, those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a façade of surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the nave and aisles, a cupola surmounting the intersection of nave, choir, and transepts; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached campanile, round columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo. But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines, altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens, gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli—the masterpieces of men famous each in his own line—delight the eye in all directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best. All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect. The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races, organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the creation of citizens—of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but capable themselves of sovereign power.^[14]

What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto. Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the façade is more architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won. The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work and mosaics of the façade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters—these are the objects for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto. On approaching a building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic architecture: only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that epithet. We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design. Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of Milan. Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different styles—the pyramidal façade of Lombard architecture and the long thin lights of German Gothic, for example—a clumsier misuse of ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave and aisles, could scarcely be imagined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy. The splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in Christendom.

About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles filled the towns with fortresses. These at first were gaunt and unsightly; how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediæval Italian city could be, is still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the torroni have been left untouched.^[15] In course of time, when the aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces. The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define what are the social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the genius loci has in each case controlled the architect. The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other. That the one was raised by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some way to explain the difference. In like manner the court-life of a dynastic principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants. It is not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade—in their torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the parties of Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter and more elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving; while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold, moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public square and overawe the homes of men.

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city architecture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful States is symbolised in the broletti of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wandering through the vast hall of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh was utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces have the good fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building. Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater lustre. Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.

Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping piazza, where the contrade of Siena have run their palio for centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city. During their term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory. All deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed. The architect of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth century^[16]. In 1298 he was ordered to erect a dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that the people might be protected in their fortress from the violence of the nobles. The building of the palace and the levelling of the square around it were attended with circumstances that bring forcibly before our minds the stern conditions of republican life in mediæval Italy. A block of houses had to be bought from the family of Foraboschi; and their tower, called Torre della Vacca, was raised and turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was not room enough, however, to construct the palace itself with right angles, unless it were extended into the open space where once had stood the houses of the Uberti, "traitors to Florence and Ghibellines." In destroying these, the burghers had decreed that thenceforth for ever the feet of men should pass where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had blazed. Arnolfo begged that he might trespass on this site; but the people refused permission. Where the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred foundations of the public house should not be laid. Consequently the Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be cramped of its correct proportions^[17].

No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo; and for this reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his labours here. When we take our stand upon the hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes her physiognomy in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers from the gardens round about her.^[18] Even the master-works of his successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he had planned.

In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a scale of unexampled grandeur. The commission given to their architect displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these burghers set about the work, that, though it has been often quoted, a portion of the document shall be recited here. "Since the highest mark of prudence in a people of noble origin is to proceed in the management of their affairs so that their magnanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their outward acts, we order Arnolfo, head-master of our commune, to make a design for the renovation of Santa Reparata in a style of magnificence which neither the industry nor the power of man can surpass, that it may harmonise with the opinion of many wise persons in this city and state, who think that this commune should not engage in any enterprise unless its intention be to make the result correspond with that noblest sort of heart which is composed of the united will of many citizens."^[19] From Giovanni Villani we learn what taxes were levied by the Wool-Guild, and set apart in 1331 for the completion of the building. They were raised upon all goods bought or sold within the city in two separate rates, the net produce amounting in the first year to 2,000 lire.^[20] The cathedral designed by Arnolfo was of vast dimensions: it covers 84,802 feet, while that of Cologne covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, "as far as mere conception of plan goes, there can be little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far surpasses its German rival."^[21] Nothing, indeed, can be imagined more noble than the scheme of this huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and noting how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which in its turn displays three well-proportioned apses, we are induced to think that a sublimer thought has never been expressed in stone. At this point, however, our admiration receives a check. In the execution of the parts the builder dwarfed what had been conceived on so magnificent a scale; aiming at colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity of subordinated members essential to the total effect of size. "Like all inexperienced architects, he seems to have thought that greatness of parts would add to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence used only four great arches in the whole length of his nave, giving the central aisle a width of fifty-five feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of that of Cologne, and the height about the same; and yet, in appearance, the height is about half, and the breadth less than half, owing to the better proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details on the part of the German cathedral."^[22] The truth of these remarks will be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through them; and broad barren spaces of grey walls oppress the eye. Externally the whole church is panelled with parti-coloured marbles, according to Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure: it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.^[23] Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the need of staff or crutch."^[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that the gain of vast aërial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably defective.^[25]

The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately felt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had checked the free development of national architecture, which in the eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details. But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio, as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.^[26] The ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.^[27]

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as Roman—itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths, theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models. A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour; and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.^[28] The edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye; their real greatness, meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial proportions and for linear harmonies possessed by their architects.

Three periods in the development of Renaissance architecture may be roughly marked.^[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward to the reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the Italians barocco. In itself the third period is distinguished by a scrupulous purism bordering upon pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. To do more than briefly indicate the masterpieces of these three periods, would be impossible in a work that does not pretend to treat of architecture exhaustively: and yet to omit all notice of the builders of this age and of their styles, would be to neglect the most important art-phase of the time I have undertaken to illustrate.

In the first period we are bewildered by the luxuriance of creative powers and by the rioting of the fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately mingled. In general we detect a striving after effects not fully realised, and a tendency to indulge in superfluous ornament without regard for strictness of design. The imperfect comprehension of classical models and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediæval fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans. Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be classic work of the Revival. The result of these combined influences was a wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by the façade of the Certosa at Pavia. While characterising the work of the earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard sincere. It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by admiration for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own sphere, piped ditties of romance.

To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era in the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of taste and firmness of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—and in my opinion justly—with hardness and frigidity.^[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and semicircular apses. Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect resembles nothing we possess of antique work. It is a masterpiece of intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, built in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according to his plans. The extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal originality. What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this. The domestic habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun. To speak of the cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste, would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour de force of individual genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.

Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.^[31] In his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful façade, remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned pilasters and nobly curved arcades.^[32] The same principle is carried out in S. Andrea at Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these antique details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we consider that here the lofty central arch of the façade serves only for a decoration. Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a Christian church.

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the mediæval Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza.

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those times. The just medium between mediæval massiveness and classic simplicity was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo; and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo. Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.^[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic architecture.^[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly Cinque Cento.^[35]

In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.^[36] The wood carver contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.^[37] The worker in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.^[38] Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or let into the floor;^[39] agates and marbles and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;^[40] stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.^[41] Tapestry is woven from the designs of excellent masters;^[42] great painters contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.

Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main æsthetical purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details, and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances—the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance—have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.