of spirited old architecture than these mixtures of florid and even fantastical design with the grave solemnity of fortress towers and the harsh line of battlements intended for the service of war. Passing through this gateway which is pierced in a fortress-wall merely and leads directly to no covered apartment of any sort, the visitor mounts some twenty-five stone steps and reaches the porch shown in [Plate X]LI, but he does not enter it by the larger archway; that is the south archway to which there is meant to be access on the level of its own sill. On the right and partly hidden by the huge buttress-pier is the narrower eastern doorway, to which access by the steps is had, from the outer porch, [Plate X]L. The great inner porch ([Plate X]LI) dates from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and is one of the greatest triumphs as it is one of the very latest productions of that strange art which has abandoned the essential character and basis of Gothic architecture without losing its derived and secondary charm, which may be defined as the charm of picturesque variety and sharp contrast—the very reverse, or so it seems, of the calm harmony of Greek design.
CHAPTER VI
REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN
ABOUT the year 1420 A. D. there was a great change in the architectural outlook in central Italy. The Risorgimento[44] was already in full vigor, and this had to do especially with the study of the literature of classical antiquity which had been going on for nearly a century. Latin authors were studied afresh, and, for the first time in Europe Greek authors were inquired for and discussed, though the time had not yet come for the serious study of the language. There was also a very marked change in the feelings, the aspirations, and the power of painters and sculptors. Giotto had done his work and had been dead nearly a century, and Simone Martini as long: Niccolò Pisano had been dead so long that his influence was felt chiefly in the work of his son Giovanni who also had died a century before our present enquiry begins: Orcagna, architect as well as painter and sculptor, had opposed in the spirit of Italian tradition the influence of the Northern school of Gothic art, and had left behind him when he died, about 1380, the admirable portico in Florence known as that of the Lancers. (See [Plate X]LII.) Each of these men had done what he could to lead the direction of artists’ thought away from the non-national Gothic style. As sculptor and as painter, each of these artists had much to aid him in the ruins of antiquity. Had there been only the sarcophagi and other portable relief-sculptures they would have had material enough to begin their work in the direction of a higher realism, a more perfect study of the human body, a more refined casting of drapery, a more severe style of composition, than previous centuries had allowed. The classical feeling had taken possession of the painters and the sculptors: Paolo Ucelli, Castagno, Gentile, Masolino, and most of all the great Masaccio, were at work: and as for sculpture, Lorenzo Ghiberti was forty years old and Donatello thirty-four, and the modern arts of form had taken shape. The sculptors and the painters had been encouraged in their ambitions by the works of Greco-Roman art about them: but monuments of ancient architecture were so much defaced, even in the fifteenth century, that it required a very different lesson before their significance could be learned, and this lesson, this strong teaching, was to be given through scholarship rather than through the observation of the artist. It was not until ancient literature had been well studied for half a century that an enthusiastic young builder, Fillipo Brunellesco, undertook to study the Roman ways of vaulting and went for that purpose to Rome as the place where the greater number of important classical buildings remained, or perhaps as the place where stood the always famous Pantheon. (See Chapter II.) It was 1430 before the first building was begun in which an attempt was made to use the classical orders in wholly new work. This was the Chapel of the Pazzi, attached to the church of Santa Croce, in Florence, and the exterior of this is shown in [Plate X]LIII as far as it is possible to obtain an intelligible photograph of its more important parts. It is a small thing; but assuredly it is marvellous to see, because of the boldness required on the part of its designer. If we try to imagine the habit of mind of a man who had never seen anything built in Greco-Roman orders in any form, or designed in the Greco-Roman spirit, who knew buildings of classical design only as fragmentary ruins and who himself had carried out many designs of his own in a spirit, not Gothic indeed, but assuredly not classic, and who then, at the age of fifty-five, in a time when life was shorter and began earlier than now, undertook and carried out such a composition as this, there will indeed seem cause for surprised admiration. There is a modern Italian feeling in the little rondels which