columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed
arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo.
But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the
dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot
of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices
loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines,
altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid
wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens,
gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli--the
masterpieces of men famous each in his own line--delight the eye in all
directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and
glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred
master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best.
All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so
brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that
the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one
paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in
the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that
make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one
architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their
individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect.
The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the
southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern
Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races,
organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the
southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent
personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific
qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by
no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the
creation of citizens--of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by