ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.
When French Gothic had reached its highest development; when Germany no longer borrowed, altered, and worked single elements into her native art, but adopted the foreign forms in their entirety and treated them as necessity required,—then the outward form ceased to be regarded as an essential practical result of the impulse and sway of the inward forces, and was considered as entirely independent, as modelled purely after an outward foreign ideal. It was not only in the domain of Archi tecture that this was the case: it was also evident in all departments of life. The empire had lost its importance, and had become a form for which the outward scheme alone was definitely established: feudalism had lost its significance: it was no longer based on unlimited fealty and devo tion the recompense for which was the possession of a fief, but the vassals considered their fiefs as a property loaded with burdens. They longed for the diminution of these burdens, and in an order of things arranged according to the most precise formulas regarded the outward forms alone, since all things must have their forms.
Chivalry and the chivalric spirit, which once permeated all conditions of life and everywhere moulded those conditions as the inward impulse gave them shape, had itself become a mere formalism which had estab lished a conventional scheme and developed it to an artistic height— which retained all imaginable excrescences, but which had nothing in common with the original spirit. Since all that appeared outwardly had thus become mere form and was only respected and retained power as such, it necessarily depended upon the will of the influential classes to choose what forms should be established, what they should allow to be considered an authority.
The expression that the form was no longer the result of the inwardly impelling forces must not be misunderstood. How the phrase should be taken is shown by the history of development before given, and by the reflections connected therewith (p. 194). It was no longer the inward working physical forces that determined the form, but abstract considera tions lying in popular ideas, which under the guidance of the sense of outward beauty gave an ideal differing from that which was the outcome of construction and of the display of the forces at work in construction.
This direct influence of popular ideas upon the development of forms had firmly woven each Gothic form-system into a scholastic harmony, and had, as the influence of the popular spirit proceeded no longer from indi vidual classes, but from all grades, directly wrought out that mannerism —in a sense, realistic—which gave to the later German Gothic so entirely the character of the German boll;:greoisic, and to the English that of the English people.
As in Italy the way had been led toward the search for a form-system which should correspond with popular taste, the general environment there was of a nature to lead the thought in the direction of the antique classical period. In Italy mankind lived among the works of a grand past, and in their contemplation imbibed that freedom of ideas which was sought by the popular spirit, but which was not founded upon a sentiment of the purest intimacy with and deepest piety toward the traditions and decrees of the Church, as was the case in the North, and especially in Germany. In all directions Italy had made the spirit of classical antiquity its own. As far as was possible under the circumstances the philosophers, poets, and prose-writers of the olden time formed the read ing and ruled the productions of the literature both in spirit and in form. The Italians had the opportunity, when the creations of their writers were not consonant with the buildings of antiquity, to examine the numerous extant antique edifices still more or less intact. The equals of these structures had been destroyed in the earlier centuries, because by this means only could convenient columns and other adaptable portions of buildings be procured for the construction of new edifices, and thus the practice of Architecture had remained in steadfast relationship to the antique.