Page:Alexis de Chateauneuf - The Country House.djvu/19

 The two daughter arts were unknown to, or did not exist for the earliest Asiatic architecture; on which account, imposing as its gigantic remains are, they oppress the mind by the feeling they excite of stern and monstrous vastness. In the Egyptian style the growth of the children arts appears to have been stunted and repressed by the servitude in which they were kept; nor have any later race or nation attempted to rival the massiveness of its edifices, tattooed over with hieroglyphics.

It is only in the genuine architecture of ancient Greece itself, and in the Italian style of the fifteenth century, that we meet with all the three arts growing up to completeness together, and as is universally acknowledged, brought to a very high degree of refinement and perfection.

Notwithstanding the long continued progressive formation and manifold development of Gothic architecture, that style failed to attach to, and as it were to incorporate with itself the two kindred arts, which were checked both by unfavourableness of climate, and by war and political disturbances. Architecture was therefore compelled to trust chiefly to its own power and resources, employing sculpture and painting merely as subordinate decoration. And who shall say that this style, so full of creative power, would not have preserved itself more pure, have avoided falling into the cold and gloomy on the one hand, the bizarre and overloaded on the other, could it have availed itself of the assistance of sculpture and painting, so that they should have accompanied it in all the varieties of its times and developments? This was to an extent the case with Arabian architecture, which, both in regard to the dominion it obtained and its organization, has many points of similarity with the nearly contemporary Gothic style, notwithstanding the marked distinctions which prevail between them. This reminds me of the remark of a poetical friend, who once said to me, "Like a rainbow on the horizon of art, Gothic architecture stretches itself across Europe from Byzantium to Portugal; while Arabian architecture may be compared to its reflection, somewhat flattened however, commencing from the same point, and crossing along the north coast of Africa till it reaches Spain: or to a reflection in the water, whose wavy surface occasions some little difference of appearance; and in fact we behold both styles united together in the amphibious city of Venice."