When, therefore, under foreign influences pointed arches, tracery, clustered shafts, crockets and finials came into use, it was merely as an imported fashion. Even when foreign architects (usually Germans) were employed, the composition, and in large measure the details, were still Italian and provincial. The church of St. Francis at Assisi (1228–53, by Jacobus of Meruan, a German, superseded later by an Italian, Campello), and the cathedral of Milan (begun 1389, perhaps by Henry of Gmund), are conspicuous illustrations of this. Rome built basilicas all through the Middle Ages. Tuscany continued to prefer flat walls veneered with marble to the broken surfaces and deep buttresses of France and Germany. Venice developed a Gothic style of façade-design wholly her own (see [p. 267]). Nowhere but in Italy could two such utterly diverse structures as the Certosa at Pavia and the cathedral at Milan have been erected at the same time.
CLIMATE AND TRADITION. Two further causes militated against the domestication of Gothic art in Italy. The first was the brilliant atmosphere, which made the vast traceried windows of Gothic design, and its suppression of the wall-surfaces, wholly undesirable. Cool, dim interiors, thick walls, small windows and the exclusion of sunlight, all necessary to Italian comfort, were incompatible with Gothic ideals and methods. The second obstacle was the persistence of classic traditions of form, both in construction and decoration. The spaciousness and breadth of interior planning which characterized Roman design, and its amplitude of scale in every feature, seem never to have lost their hold on the Italians. The narrow lofty aisles, multiplied supports and minute detail of the Gothic style were repugnant to the classic predilections of the Italian builders. The Roman acanthus and Corinthian capital were constantly imitated in their Gothic buildings, and the round arch continued all through the Middle Ages to be used in conjunction with the pointed arch (Figs. [149], [150]).
FIG. 147.—DUOMO AT FLORENCE. PLAN.
a, Campanile.
EARLY BUILDINGS. It is hard to determine how and by whom Gothic forms were first introduced into Italy, but it was most probably through the agency of the monastic orders. Cistercian churches like that at Chiaravalle near Milan (1208–21), and most of those erected by the mendicant orders of the Franciscans (founded 1210) and Dominicans (1216), were built with ribbed vaults and pointed arches.
The example set by these orders contributed greatly to the general adoption of the foreign style. S. Francesco at Assisi, already mentioned, was the first completely Gothic Franciscan church, although S. Francesco at Bologna, begun a few years later, was finished a little earlier. The Dominican church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and the great Franciscan church of Sta. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, both at Venice, were built a little later. Sta. Maria Novella at Florence (1278), and Sta. Maria sopra Minerva at Rome (1280), both by the brothers Sisto and Ristoro, and S. Anastasia at Verona (1261) are the masterpieces of the Dominican builders.
S. Andrea at Vercelli in North Italy, begun in 1219 under a foreign architect, is an isolated early example of lay Gothic work. Though somewhat English in its plan, and (unlike most Italian churches) provided with two western spires in the English manner, it is in all other respects thoroughly Italian in aspect. The church at Asti, begun in 1229, suggests German models by its high side walls and narrow windows.