It must be remembered that the Magistri of the Comacine Guild were no longer of the same calibre as those mediæval men who built for the Longobards. Those were the products of an age of slavery and degeneration, who, lacking literature, clung to tradition, and could only act according to the small portion of intellectual light vouchsafed to the Dark Ages. They put stone and stone together, precisely as their forefathers had taught them. In form they clung to their ancient teacher, Vitruvius, and for their ornamentation to their ancient pagan superstitions, grafted on a mystical Christianity. Yet, as we have seen, they so far improved on these, as to build several Basilican churches which might be called grand for the time, though still holding close to traditional forms.
The Comacine after A.D. 1000 was a man beginning to feel his intellect; the feudal system was breaking up, republics beginning to be established, schools were opened, and man began to feel himself no longer a vassal bound hand and foot, but a human being who might use his own intellect for his own pleasure and good.
What wonder then, that the arts began to flourish, commerce to increase, and riches to accrue in this joyous freedom?
And what wonder that man's thankfulness for freedom first took the form of building churches for the glory of the God of the free?
The architects of the Masonic loggie (lodges) who had held together through the troublous times, became alive with new enthusiasms. They compared their own buildings with others, and instead of varying the principles of Vitruvius, to suit early Christian demands as heretofore, they passed on to new and freer lines. Instead of solid and rude strength, elegance of form and aspiring lines gave lightness and beauty.
The starting-point of the change was, of course, the adoption of the pointed arch, which at this time began to be substituted for the circular one as giving greater strength with greater lightness. "Curvetur arcus ut fortior," says an old chronicler of Subiaco. According to their method of gradual development the Comacine Masters did not blindly throw themselves into new forms. They went cautiously, and first tried their acute arches in clerestories, and triforia, over naves supported by the old Lombard arches of sesto intiero, as we see in several churches of the Transition period. A little later they mixed the two inextricably, as in Florence cathedral, where the windows are pointed with Gothic tracery, the interior arches round and Roman in form.
"The early Lombard architecture," said Cesare Cantù,[128] "was not an order, nor a system, so much as a delirium. Balance and symmetry utterly disregarded, no harmony of composition or taste, shameful neglect in form proportion; to the perfect classic design which satisfies the eye, they substituted incoherent and useless parts, with frequently the weak placed to support the strong, in defiance of all laws of statics. Columns—which used to be composed of a base, shaft, and capital, in just proportions, supporting a well-adapted architrave or frieze more or less fitly adorned, and a cornice which only added beauty and strength—were exchanged for certain colonnettes, either too short or too slight, knotted, spiral, and grouped so as to torture the eye, and above the disproportioned and inharmonious abacus of the capitals were placed the arches, which in a good style should rest on the architrave. In fine, there was an endless modanature, ribs, reliefs, and windows of elongated form and walls of extraordinary height." In spite of Cantù's leanings to the classic, this tirade shows the first indication of the change towards the Gothic, and it only proves that the Comacine Masters did not take up new forms borrowed entire from other nations, but assimilated what they saw in other places, gradually developing their style.
To find the origin of the pointed arch would be difficult. Was it evolved from the arching trees in the German forest? or was it from the rich Arabian mosque or ancient Indian temple? or did the Comacines find it, just as they acquired their Basilican forms, on Italian soil?
Germany, it is pretty well proved, got the seed of her glorious Gothic from France or Italy, and nourished it right royally. But the pointed arch is much more ancient than German Gothic. It is to be seen in the tomb of Atreus at Mycenæ, in an Etruscan tomb at Tarquinii, and even in the subterranean gallery at Antequere in Mexico.[129] The pointed arches in the Mosque El Haram on Monte Morea date from Caliph Omar's time, between 637 and 640. The Mosque of Amrou, with its curious combination of pointed and horse-shoe arches, dates from 640.
The church of St. Francis at Assisi (1226) has generally been accepted as the first instance in Italy, and it was soon followed in the design for the church of S. Antonio at Padua five years later; but there are two little churches annexed to the monastery of Subiaco on Monte Telaso, which were built, so say the chroniclers, one in A.D. 981, the other in 1053, in which some arches are round and others acute.[130] Hope[131] quotes examples of this mixture of round and acute arches in the ninth and tenth centuries at Cluny, 1093-1134; the Abbey of Malmesbury in England, which is in Lombard style; St. Mark's at Venice, 976-1071; Subiaco, 847, and others.