In Italy, with hardly less sun, yet by no means beyond the reach of wintry cold, severe winds, great rains and sometimes snow, yet with a burning summer for the most part, which has decidedly fixed the types in her architecture, we find a union of many elements, a halfway house between east and west, where Asiatic feeling unites with Greek and Roman, Saracen and Norman, Gothic with Renascence, in an unexampled wealth and profusion of inventive design in architecture, sculpture, painting, and all the family of artistic handicrafts, which makes her a happy hunting ground for the artist, an inexhaustible treasure-house of beauty and suggestion.
We might follow the chariot of the sun, from the land of its rising, Japan, a climate more near to our own, and note her wonderful display of manipulation and imitative skill, in all ways of handicrafts dominating by a certain grotesqueness as well as naturalistic impressionism; or, passing to her great foe China, see something of the same tendencies and stages in the rising of her art, breaking off, as it were, at a stage of restrained conventionalism—or westward, along the southern shores of the blue Mediterranean, following in the footsteps of the Moors, and note the wonderfully ornate but somewhat heartless splendour of their art in Spain: the gilded magnificence of the Alhambra, with its glittering pendentive ceilings, borrowed, as some think, in the first place from Persia, and the wonderful jewel-like sparkle and intricate fancy of its ornament with its ever-recurring star-forms and scimitar-like scrolls.
And then turning northwards into France, with one hand touching the sunny south and the other dipped in the gray English Channel, we should find some of the same elements, but very differently mixed, with a very distinct character of art. Cold in colour, correct in form, brilliant in workmanship, quick-witted, dramatic; ever experimenting and inquiring, and desiring, like the ancient Greeks, some new thing.
Pursuing our journey northwards, we might pause in Flanders and Holland and mark how closely associated with local conditions of life and climate are their forms of art, more especially as illustrated in the art of their past days—the pictures of rich Flemish burgher life of the Middle Ages, the knights and ladies with a certain sternness and stiffness of demeanour, as of an energetic and yet patient people accustomed to contend with difficulties, proud, yet devotional, and fond of comfort, kneeling, well-clad in velvets and rich furs against a northern climate.
SPAIN. PORTION OF THE ALHAMBRA. DRAWN BY GUSTAVE DORÉ.
Germany would tell a similar tale in her arts, though with a more dominant military and religious note, more fantasy and more melancholy, and with a wild grotesque element corresponding with her more varied conditions of climate and scenery. The latter quality is still more marked among the old towns of Bohemia. The two sketches here give some of the architectural characteristics of both town and country dwellings.
OLD HOUSE IN TURNOV, BOHEMIA, DATED 1816.
