national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity
that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness.
It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to
revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned
the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it
half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in
which they comprehended chivalry.

The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic
architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and
blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at
covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of
construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first
object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the
proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the
Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the
negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal
lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows;
aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to
complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The
whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the
spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless
soaring lines--lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent
growth--converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The
campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings.
It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the
bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is
rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of
the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the
nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six