Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/28

20 and arches of the Florence duomo and its campanile do not constitute it a Gothic church. The square cornices, vast masses of wall, heavy pilasters, and, in general, the horizontal outlines and heavy expression of all these churches, have a character very remote from that of the airy, upspringing, fantastic German architecture, in which every shaft, arch, vault-girdle, pillar, window-frame, pinnacle, seems struggling and panting upward with an almost audible eloquence. This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect of the ancient basilica—the Roman business-hall, compounded of Greek elements, and transformed into a Grecian temple—is ever at work repressing that devotional ecstasy which is the characteristic of the Gothic church. The Italian language in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was like the Italian architecture of the same period. The different intellectual manifestations, subjected to the same influences, obeyed one general law. The conquering German mind of the Dark Ages easily impressed itself where the soil was still virgin. Throughout savage Europe the dominion was yielded at once to the new power which succeeded to the decrepit empire of Rome. Gaul, Germany, Britain, Iberia obeyed instinctively the same impulse. The children born of that vigorous embrace were of fresh and healthy beauty. The manifestations of the German mind in the cathedrals of Paris, Cologne, Antwerp are undimmed and unrivalled. The early German architecture in the actual realms of Germany is as romantic, energetic, and edifying as its poetry at the same epoch. A great German cathedral is a religious epic in stone. All the ornaments, all the episodes, spring from and cluster around one central, life-giving principle.

In Italy, on the other hand, the architecture of the so-called Gothic period embodies a constant struggle between the ancient and the new-born mind,—a contest in which the eventual triumph of the elder is already foreshadowed, even while the new has apparently gained the ascendency. Why was this? Because in Italy the German conquerors had invaded the land of ancient culture, of settled and organized form. The world could not be created de novo, as in the shaggy deserts of Hercynia and Belgica. The seeds of human speech, planted in those vast wildernesses, sprouted readily into new and luxuriant languages. English, Flemish, German, French spring from German roots hidden in Celtic soil. The Latin element, afterwards engrafted, is exotic, excrescent, and not vital to the organization. In Italy, where a language, a grammar, a literature already existed in full force, the German element was almost neutralized. The Goths could only deface the noble language of Rome. They gave it auxiliary verbs,—that feeblest form of assistance to human eloquence,—and they took away its declensions. Architecture presented the same phenomenon. It submitted to what seemed the German tyranny for a time, but it submitted under a perpetual and visible protest. The Gothic details in the campanile and the duomo look altogether extraneous and compulsory; they are not assimilated into the constitution of the structure. The severe Roman profile is marked as distinctly as ever, notwithstanding the foreign ornaments which it has been forced to assume.

Santa Maria Novella, then, is as good a German Italian church as can be found; but, for the reasons stated, it is not particularly interesting as a piece of architecture. Its wealth is in its frescos. In the quadrangle of the cloister is a series of pictures by Paolo Uccello, who, by the introduction of linear perspective, of which he is esteemed the inventor, made a new epoch in art. In the "chapel of the Spaniards" is a famous collection of frescos by Giotto's scholars. A large, thoughtful, and attractive composition is called the Wisdom of the Church. On the opposite side is a very celebrated