Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/26

2. The Greek and Roman types of building were not only the natural inheritance of the Italians, but they were the best for them as being suited to their climate and as supplying all their demands of convenience and taste.

On the north and west of the Alps the case was different. Here the traditions of classic art were not, in the same sense, an inheritance. The ancient forms of building had here been an importation. They had never here been wholly understood, and they were not well suited to the conditions of climate and of race. But the Gothic style which gradually took form in France was a natural outgrowth and expression of the genius of the people, and it was as well suited to them and- to the local conditions as the classic styles had been to the people and the climate of the South.

Yet here, too, at length, the fashion of distaste for Gothic set in—following the lead of the more natural Italian reaction,—though the change did violence to much that in architecture was proper to Northern temperament and Northern needs.

This fashion had its root in the prevalent, yet often insincere, feeling characteristic of an artificial state of society, such as that which Northern Europe, and especially France, exhibited at the end of the fifteenth century,—a state of society in which display of private wealth and pleasurable indulgence became the chief animating motives of an art that found its main expression in vast and luxurious private dwellings. In the former time private dwellings, even those of the rich, had been comparatively unpretentious and plain in character, while the Church edifice, the great centre of social and communal interest, and the product of the joint energy and enthusiasm of all classes, had been enriched by generous expenditure of toil and public and private treasure, but now it was the dwellings of the rich that chiefly demanded the services of art. The ambition of Charles VIII to possess a palace equal in splendour to those which he had seen in Italy, indicates the early stage of a movement which, gathering force under Francis I, and greatly stimulated by the genius of De L'Orme, reached its height in the sumptuous architecture of the reign of Louis XIV.

The taste for the new style was long confined to the