Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/31

Rh acquainted with the Roman antique, animated with desire to appropriate what they apprehended of its principles, and at the same time ambitious to achieve personal fame. A building of the Renaissance is thus always the product of the fancy of a particular designer, as a building of the Middle Ages is not. But architecture of the highest excellence can hardly be produced by an individual working independently. The noblest architecture of the past has always been an evolution of a people, the joint product of many minds, and the natural expression of many conditions. The importance of the opportunity for the development of the individual opened by the Renaissance has been exaggerated, and the conditions conducive to such development which had existed before have been too much overlooked. We are apt to forget that the mediæval communal life stimulated the faculties of the individual in many noble ways, and we do not always enough consider that individuality may be exercised in harmful as well as in salutary directions. The individuality that had been developed by the institutions and the intellectual life of the Middle Ages was vastly different from that which was produced by the influences of the Renaissance, and it was in many ways more excellent. The individuality of the Middle Ages was obedient to the demands of corporate and cooperative life, while that of the Renaissance was independent and capricious. Conditions favourable to individual development had arisen early in the Middle Ages in connection with organized monastic life. The cultivation of literature, philosophy, and the Fine Arts in the monasteries had given considerable range to the exercise of individual powers, though in limited directions, and the rise of the great communal organizations tended still further to stimulate an admirable individual development. But the individual of the Middle Ages felt himself a part of an organized body from which' he derived moral support, and with which he felt that he must cooperate. It was the strong communal spirit, giving unity of purpose to the varied faculties of individuals, that made possible the production of the noble arts of the Middle Ages; and it is as the expression of this unity of purpose coordinating the fine artistic energies of the time, that these arts are preeminently notable. In so far