ITALY. We can speak of a Gothic age but not of a Gothic style in Italy, for the Italians never mastered or cared to master the principles underlying Gothic construction, but adopted at their good pleasure, and with modifications to suit their genius, a good proportion of Gothic forms. The first Gothic inroads naturally appear to be by the hand of Frenchmen, such as the Cistercian monasteries of Fossanova, Casamari, San Gal gano, and San Martino: as well as the gem Sant' Andrea at Vercelli, all belonging to the primitive transitional style. Then, at the mother church of the Franciscan Order, San Francesco at Assisi, the Gothic type was accepted by these monks as it was by the Dominicans. These two Orders were the main agents for diffusing Gothic forms throughout Italy; for, strange to say, while Northern Europe was replacing monastic archi tects by lay guilds in imitation of what Italy had done earlier, Italy meanwhile veered about, and nearly all her architects during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were monks. It is the churches of these two Orders at Bologna (San Francesco, San Domenico), Florence (Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce), Venice (Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Santa Maria dei Frari), Rome (Santa Maria, Sopra Minerva), Treviso, etc., in which the type of Italian Gothic churches is de veloped, and the necessity with these preaching Orders of having an interior suitable as an audi torium, determined largely their artistic char acter. Nowhere else are there so many hall churches of a single nave or with aisles nearly as lofty as the nave. There is some good tracery, but usually the southern proclivity to exclude light and the inability to understand the constructive laws of equilibrium that would make possible the elimination of wall-spaces, led to the use of al most as small windows as in the Romanesque period. Many so-called Gothic buildings, such as the cathedrals of Orvieto, Siena, and Lucca, are round-arched or wooden-roofed, or have col umns in place of grouped piers, so that we miss every Gothic element. Even where groin-vaulting is used, as at Santa Maria Novella, at Florence, and Sant' Anastasia at Verona, two of the most beautiful examples in Italy, one misses the moldings of the grouped piers connecting struc turally with the arcades and vaults, or with piers so widely spaced. For this reason it is that
amid all the provincial differences there are cer tain traits common to most Italian churches. The wide spacing of the piers or columns, the height of the aisles, and the lack of detail make the interiors look much smaller than they are. The old simple apse was never abandoned for the rich polygonal choir with radiating chapels. Then, in place of sculpture, we find either a marble veneer in different colors (Tuscany) or terra-cotta ornaments (Lombardy). In most parts of Italy this is a sterile period. There was little building in Sicily and the south. Rome suffered from the Papal exile. The Lombard cities lost their freedom under tyrants. Only Venice, Flor ence, Siena, and neighboring cities produced much that was notable. In the fourteenth century cathedral architecture had adopted Gothic fea tures from the monastic churches, as at San Petronio in Bologna, and in the most pretentious and un-Italian of cathedrals, that of Milan, in which so many French and German architects were employed. The bareness of the Italian inte riors was occasionally redeemed by fresco-paint ings, as in San Francesco at Assisi. It was in civil architecture that the Italians excelled. The pleasure palace of Venice, beginning as a Byzan tine and Romanesque type, developed during the Gothic period into a beautiful creation, whose climax is the Ca d'Oro, and the Doge's Palace. The type spread to the mainland at Padua, Vicenza, Udine, and elsewhere. The fortress palace is a different type, especially well developed at Florence, with its heavy bossed-work and stern aspect. The communal palaces were monuments rivaling the cathedrals; those at Florence (Pa lazzo Vecchio, Bargello, etc.), Siena, Perugia, Gubbio, and those farther north at Brescia, Ber gamo, Cremona, Milan, Padua, etc., are superb compositions. Consult: Mothes, Die Baukunst des Mittelalters in Italien (Jena, 1884) ; Street, Brick and Marble Architecture of North Italy (London, 1874) ; Fleury, La Toscana au moyen age (Paris,. 1874).