Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/33

 two classes, the one consisting of buildings of transitional character, and comprising all organic and progressive types of Romanesque, and the other composed of styles made up of mixed elements not in process of organic fusion. The first architecture of the second class is that of imperial Rome with its offshoots, the Christian Roman and the numerous subsequent forms of the basilican type, and the second is the architecture of the Renaissance. When, after studying the architecture of Greece, we come to examine that of Rome, we are at once struck by the incongruous mixture of elements which it exhibits; and although we may be impressed by its grandeur, we are unable to give it our unqualified admiration. In Byzantine art we find Greek, Roman, and Oriental elements, logically modified in adaptation to new uses, and fused into a radically new and distinctive style of entire consistency and great nobility. In the transitional art of western Europe we see the creative genius of Northern races gradually evolving the Gothic style, in which elements derived from the older systems are wholly recreated and assimilated in a wonderful manner, and when we turn from the beauty, and the structural logic, of the consummate Gothic Art to the architecture of the Renaissance, a similar contrast is again apparent.

In one branch of art, however, the best achievements of the Renaissance period command our unqualified admiration; namely, the art of painting. As before remarked, the Italian genius appears to have been primarily a genius for painting, and in this field the conditions all conspired to produce results that were without precedent for excellence, and that still remain unrivalled. Yet here, too, we shall need to discriminate. Italian painting of the sixteenth century presents a variety of phases that are by no means of equal merit, and the noblest forms of it show the least of the essentially Renaissance spirit. The Christian painters of the fourteenth century had laid a foundation on which their successors could build, and this gave a character to much of the art of the Early Renaissance which the dominant influences of the time itself could not give. But