Hence certain images of the saints and of Mary, rude in shape and coloring, have won the veneration of the people, and inspired that calm content which comes from God and lifts to God.
A bolder fancy produced the edifices, constructed at first on the style of the basilicas, and then modified into that order of architecture which from its planes or arches was called Roman or Lombard, and finally Gothic.
He who can only admire the Greek and the Roman styles finds in the Gothic merely ignorance of caprice; with its shafts tapering aloft in slender grace, or short and heavy, or in clusters; its capitals where the crude cabbage-leaf creeps in side by side with the graceful acanthus; its members incoherent, and made out of proportion; a crowd of small obelisks and tabernacles, buttresses and enormous water-spouts; bracketed statues and windows of a dizzy height, sometimes parted into two, sometimes curved into a rose or twisted into a trefoil; and its figures of uneducated fancy, an eyesore to the lover of classic harmony.
But in its variety reigns a system far above the order of the Greeks; derived in part from the basilicas, in part from mystic allegory. Its ornaments are the productions of our climate, the strawberry, the parsley, the fig, the oak-tree; as the Arab uses his palm, the Chinese his inverted coral. Its forms are symbolic. The number three regulates even those portions of the structure which are secondary. On the plan of a cross rises the triangulation of the edifice; and a hundred obelisks, lifted up equally to heaven, express the concordant homage of love and of faith. In its dedication everything was allegoric of the origin of true worship; of the mystic destiny of the church; of the fact that it is not a building of stones but a living edifice, whose corner-stone is Christ, whose members are the faithful, whose space is filled by God, like the universe of which it is an image.
In this association of the real with the symbolic world, of the fitness of parts in themselves foreign with the united expression of Christianity, the middle ages produced what those of Leo X., of Louis XIV., of Napoleon, could not produce: they created a novelty. Architecture was sacred as in its opening, and those wonders of a beauty most sublime and spiritual were not wrought at the decrees of princes, but at the inspiration of faith and charity.
The Gothic made its first grand essay in the holy time of St. Francis of Assisi, and this became the chosen order of the Franciscans, as the Basilican was of the Benedictines, and the mixed architecture of a later date of the Jesuits. St. Francis and his children, with that greatness which inheres in simplicity, accompanied by an ascetic spirit, came to imitate nature and true men rather than to copy types or antique art. But in those days, the whole of society was animated by faith, and built upon the dogma of the expiation. The laical body was in harmony with the ecclesiastical; prayer mingled with warlike exploits; the home was at peace with the church; the banner bore the same device as the altar. The plastic art, side by side with poetry, penetrated every turn of life. Religion was the universal and, as it were, only inspirer of the artist. Theophilus dedicated his “Lombard Tract” to holy pictures, missals, vases, the window-panes of the church, and, step by step, he elevated the mind of the artist to the God from whom art emanates. The artistic confraternity proposed in their constitutions the purity and independence of art. That of the Siennese painters, of 1355, said: “By the grace of God, we are to rude men, who know not letters, manifestors of the miraculous things worked by the virtue and in the virtue of the holy faith, and our faith is founded principally in adoring and believing one God in the Trinity, and in God infinite power and infinite wisdom, and infinite love and mercy.” In a like sense says Bufalmacca: “We aim at naught else than to make saints by our frescoes and pictures, and by so doing, in spite of the devils, to make men more devout and better.” Philarete designed a city on the conception of the “Nisi Dominus Ædificaverit,” wherein the church founded on the cross should be superior to the palace of the prince, rich with pictures, religious, symbolic, allegorical, and historic. There was a portico devoted to sacred history; close by were memorial monuments of heroic Christians, namely, the churches of St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Augustine, St. Benedict. There was a gymnasium wherein to educate the youth, chiefly with prayer, fasting, and the holy sacraments. Without the fortifications, the city had an advanced guard, to wit, holy hermits, who should watch it with the mightiest of arms—prayer. And Brunelleschi said of Santa Maria del Fiore: “Recollecting that this temple is sacred to God and the Virgin, I trust that in erecting it in memory of them it will not cease to infuse knowledge where there is need of it, and to aid by power and wisdom and wit whoever shall accomplish such work.” In like manner, Giovanni Villani inscribed his Chronicles “to the reverence of God and of Blessed St. John, in commendation of our city of Florence.” How often has the painter given us his own portrait on his knees, or with some verse recommended himself to God and the saints! Beneath a picture in the Venetian gallery we read:
“Gentile Bellino, with filial love of the most holy cross, painted this.”
And beneath another picture of Gian Bellino:
“Sure Gate of Heaven, lead my mind, guide my life:
All the works which I perform are committed to thy care.”
We may perceive a like inspiration in Giotto, Mino da Fiesole, Benedetto da Majano, Boninsegna da Siena, Simon Memmi, L’Orgagna, the Pisani, Franco Bolognese, and other spiritual artists, who attained a perfection to which the moderns in vain aspire. On the tomb of Blessed Angelico was written: