Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/338

314 it was rather as a model which it seemed desirable to copy, than as an influence quickening new invention.

Whatever may have been thought of the pointed architecture of Italy, few have supposed that there was ever any original development of the Gothic style in that country. The large infusion of foreign blood through the various incursions of the Northern races had been absorbed into purely Italian veins. Italian tastes, traditions, and needs were all favourable to the ancient forms of building, which were their natural inheritance; and in the revival of the arts, after the stagnant period which followed the downfall of the ancient civilisation, it was not only natural that the Italians should have recourse to these ancient forms, but that they should permanently retain a preference for them.

The Italians of the Middle Ages were never constructive builders. The Romanesque architecture of Italy (excepting always the semi-Teutonic Lombard-Romanesque) was not an organic style. The Cathedral of Pisa, for instance, though subtle in its proportions, and beautiful in its details, is almost as childish in construction as a house of toy-blocks. Its superposed colonnades are without organic connection; and its whole system is one that could give rise to no further developments. A comparison of Pisa with the nearly contemporaneous Cathedral of Durham will show how widely the Italian Romanesque system differs from that rudimentary organic system which contained some of the most potent germs of the Gothic style.

There can certainly be no question, on the score of social or political conditions, with regard to an original development of Gothic art in Spain. The Christian civilisation of the country was, from the time of the Moorish invasion, far too warlike and unsettled to admit of such development, even had the ethnological constitution of the race been favourable. Of all the nations of the West the Spanish, in the Middle Ages, were the least advanced in those conditions of political and social organisation, and of intellectual and moral life, which favour the development of the fine arts.

It does not, then, from historical considerations, any more than from those which the buildings of the different