Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.


Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism
in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must
be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or
figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared
for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted
on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found
herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle
for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany
against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and
splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and
of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who
subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the
cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her
duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the
fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other
pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the
Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and
was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which,
after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a
wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this
great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth
that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the
same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen
gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa,