How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

The result of these conditions was to quicken the growth of local feeling. Patriotism was replaced by intense civic pride, which centred in the city or commune and made it vie with others in self-development. And this self-centering resulted, firstly, in each nucleus of energy developing an independent type of community and, secondly, in bringing to the surface the personal force of individual citizens. The Duke who had been elevated to or usurped the headship of the community, was compelled to maintain his position by force of character and by acts that would redound to the pride and power of the community. He needed the assistance of other men of parts and employed their services, no matter from what class of the community they had sprung. There was room higher up for every citizen who could contribute something to the community’s power and dignity. As one result of these conditions there sprang into existence a class of professional soldiers, or condottieri, who sold their services and those of their trained bands to the highest bidder, and who, when occasion offered, lifted themselves, as in the case of Colleoni and Gattamelata, to high military commands. Moreover, the perpetual intriguing that the conditions of politics had developed between cities and rival authorities, encouraged the employment of a large body of secretaries and diplomatic go-betweens, men of education and superior sharpness of wit. In fact, any one who by his brains or his handiwork could furnish eminent service to the community was eagerly sought after and promoted. Such men were held in high esteem and regarded as an honour to the community.

In an environment such as this it followed that the Italian Rinascimento was the product of men of powerful individuality and that the trend of it led to the exaltation of individualism. The first great personality associated with it is that of Petrarch.

Son of a man who had shared Dante’s exile, he himself emulated the poet of Beatrice in canzoniere, composed to his ideal mistress, Laura. He too helped to refine and vivify, as Boccaccio did a little later, the Italian tongue; but he was filled with the pride of being a descendant of the Roman People, and looked back to Latin literature as the worthiest object of his study. In his zeal for collecting and collating manuscripts and through the richness of his imagination and critical judgment, joined to a tireless devotion, he became the pioneer in that Italian scholarship which restored to Western Europe the knowledge of the Classics and laid the foundation of modern thought.

For hitherto, although an acquaintance with Latin had survived, it was chiefly in the monkish form, and the Latin authors were known only by fragments, often mutilated in the process of copying. The knowledge of the Greek tongue, while preserved in Byzantium, had all but entirely disappeared from Western Europe, and Petrarch, realising the need of recovering it, urged Boccaccio to begin the work. Accordingly the latter took lessons of an adventurer, named Leone Pilato, a native of Calabria who had resided in Thessaly, and succeeded also in having him appointed professor of Greek language and literature in the University of Florence. Boccaccio, like his friend Petrarch, was indefatigable in the search for manuscripts among the libraries and, as often, the lumber-rooms of the monasteries. And frequently he had to mourn their mutilation, as on one occasion when he found the precious sheets of vellum had been scraped clean of the classic text and inscribed with psalms for the use of the choirboys, while the decorated margins had been cut into bits and sold to women as amulets.

During the fifteenth century the pursuit of scholarship continued, receiving a great advancement when Constantinople, in 1451, was conquered by the Turks. For many of the Greek scholars found refuge in Italy, where they were received with the highest enthusiasm in universities and the palaces of princes. Thus for a century the keenest spirits of what was then the most intellectually advanced people of Europe, devoted themselves to classical erudition. The world’s debt to them is incalculable, but the boon they conferred on others was not without detriment to themselves. Preoccupation with scholarship produced a certain affectation and pedantry of mind; led to an extravagant valuation of the antique over everything modern and undermined Christianity with Paganism. Nor was it the Stoic side of Paganism that was emulated. The pleasures of life were pursued as an ideal, and with no moral curb on conduct; freedom was confused with license and the desire of the senses ousted the restraint of law. The organisation alike of the Church and of society in time became honeycombed with corruption.

In such an intellectual and moral atmosphere the ego in man was worshipped as divinity. Individualism, extolled to a fetish and unbridled by any considerations of good and bad, engendered faculties of glorious capabilities and also of monstrous depravity. Individualism, in fact, ran its hot and heady course at the expense of everything that had once counted for strength in communal and civic spirit. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the culmination of the Renaissance, a few giants survived, but the Italian people, while intellectually in the ascendant, had degenerated physically and morally and fell an easy prey to foreign aggression.

The expedition which Charles VIII made to Naples in 1494 brought the French into Italy. They were soon followed by the Spaniards, until Italy became the cockpit of European rivalries. Political as well as moral degradation was reached when, by the League of Cambrai, 1508, Pope Julius II made alliance with Louis XII of France, the Emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand “The Catholic” of Spain for the partition of the Venetian territories. Humiliation ensued sixteen years later, when German and Spanish mercenaries, led by the renegade Constable Bourbon, sacked Rome. Italy, after having led the van in the emancipation of human intellect and will, had prostituted both. Even the Counter-Reformation, instituted by the Church to reform her own abuses as well as to resist the tide of Protestantism, could not save Italy to the Italians. Three hundred and fifty years had to elapse before they could recover their nationality and once more set themselves upon the road of progress.

GERMAN RENAISSANCE

The influence of the Italian Renaissance was firstly and most directly absorbed by France. But the consideration of this may conveniently be postponed until after a review of its operation in Germany and Spain. For in both these countries the Renaissance influence bred antagonisms: in Germany the Reformation and in Spain the Counter-Reformation.

The Renaissance which the Italians had initiated as a thing of Beauty, began to operate in Germany as a thing of Power; the emancipation of the human intellect and will was supplemented by the emancipation of the human conscience. The Italian indifference to the latter was more than a source of decadence to themselves; for it cleft into two channels what should have been united in a single stream of human endeavour; it forged barriers between what should be component elements in human ideals. It started that antagonism between Beauty and Morality, between Æsthetics and Ethics by which even to this day civilisation is being retarded in its richest and most beneficent possibilities of progress.