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ITALY did not know the centuries of silence into which the annihilation of the Latin world plunged Gaul. Visited, as Gaul was, and more frequently than Gaul, by invasion, Italy retained, nevertheless, the memory of a well-ordered world of imposing aspect, one which resembled her own desire. The world of the ancient Mediterranean was to enter the modern world along the slope of her natural genius. Rome installed in the basilicas its rebaptized gods. The old races called upon the old civilizations to furnish them the means of awaiting the return of life.
ITALY did not know the centuries of silence into which the annihilation of the Latin world plunged Gaul. Visited, as Gaul was, and more frequently than Gaul, by invasion, Italy retained, nevertheless, the memory of a well-ordered world of imposing aspect, one which resembled her own desire. The world of the ancient Mediterranean was to enter the modern world along the slope of her natural genius. Rome installed in the basilicas its rebaptized gods. The old races called upon the old civilizations to furnish them the means of awaiting the return of life.
The
Barbarians overthrew the temples, their Italianized sons set them up again. And
nothing is changed. From the ruin of yesterday still another basilica comes
forth. The role of the conqueror is not to teach new processes, but to infuse
new energy. He offers his virgin senses to the revelation of the glorious
landscape. Thus was Greece rendered fecund by the Dorians. New generalizations
are born from the melting of the human material from the north in the
Greco-Latin crucible.
We know
it well. We must tell it. The greatest men have confessed it to us. Montaigne
will ask Italy to approve his wisdom, Shakespeare invokes her name daily to
justify his passion. Goethe lives through her, and Stendhal, and Nietzsche.
Byron dies through her. In the days of Rembrandt's affluence, Giorgione reigns
over his studio, and when he becomes poor there is always something of the
Italian flame at the center of the ray of light which follows his descent into
the shadows of the mind. It is Italy that organizes the tumult of Rubens, that
reveals space to Velasquez, to Poussin the architecture of the earth, to Claude
Lorrain the architecture of the sky. As soon as one touches Italy, one feels
oneself overwhelmed by the intoxication that comes of understanding.
Intelligence and instinct merge, the scientist agrees that the artist shall
take possession of mechanics and of geometry, the artist willingly grinds the
colors and mixes the mortar. The most atrocious voluptuousness is only a step
from sainthood; chastity burns like an orgy. Here love is as funereal as death;
death has the attraction and the mystery of love. The ambition to dominate
increases the thirst for conquest and knowledge, and yet knowledge and conquest
are never definitive enough to make him who desires them worthy to command.
Here pride is so strong that it will invariably abase itself before the things
it still must learn in order that, with them, it may affirm itself before the
world. Nowhere do crime and genius approach so closely to each other. Cain and
Prometheus may be divined in the curve of every brow, in the depths of all
eyes, and in all the hands that clutch the handle of the dagger or the tool of
the workman. The earth trembles, and yet one feels something eternal in the
profile of these mountains and the curve of these shores. Everywhere in Italy
the world incorporates the mind with its form, and demands insatiably that the
passion of men's hearts shall tear it forth. Italy! There is something that
pains in the love that we have for you; we are afraid that we shall never know
fully what you desire to teach us.
The
potential force which is there must impose itself despite everything. Byzantium
itself contributes less than is generally believed. Save at Ravenna, a colony
of the Greek empire, save at Venice, where the Orient lives, save in Sicily, a
Greek country where the Byzantine elements mingle with the Arab and Norman
elements developing, in the Middle Ages, a voluptuous, cruel, paradoxical, and
barbarous style that is impossible to define and difficult to recognize,
Byzantium does not furnish Italy with a single idea which, on being
transplanted, can originate a new architectural order. Italy accepts the cupola
only because it already covers the Pantheon. In the middle of the thirteenth
century, when the French image makers, the masters of Occidental sculpture, are
in demand everywhere, Nicola Pisano studies Roman sarcophagi to learn the
working of marble; he cuts, as if with a hatchet, his crowds of figures,
glowing with life, rough and tense from brutal effort; and so he sets up the
trenchant claim of the primitive Latin genius as opposed to the claims of the
artists of the north. Italy does not forget, because she remains Italy.
Too
often people look upon the perpetuation of certain essential forms as the
result of a traditional desire transmitted by the schools, when in reality the
forms are only an expression of the desires of a race and of the indications of
its soil. In all the Mediterranean countries, where palm trees, pines, and yew
trees detached their smooth trunks against a hard sky, the column which
reappears on the front of the churches and which is used from the top to the
bottom of the towers of Romanesque Italy was a natural expression that could
not disappear. Antiquity and the new Italy are in accord in these lines of galleries
bordered by arcades which spread their carved tracery over the round
baptisteries, the bare façades of the temples, and the square campaniles. The
basilica has called to its aid the trees whose clearly marked foliage allows
the transparence and the limpidity of the world to shine through their
overhanging branches, and it is with their grace and pride that it covers the
great Roman vessel.
The
daily needs and the riches of Italy required this architecture. The image of
her powerful cities and her villas, scattered over the sides of the hills among
the cypresses, is imprinted on the hearts of those who cannot forget the
educating power of her severe and melodious contours; it is in the hearts of
all those who retain the clear memory of the white arcades and of the
sheathings of black and white marble which from afar mingle the cathedrals with
the blurred reds of the roofs. At the hour when the theocratic Romanesque was
defining architectural dogma in the north and west of Europe, Pisa and Lucca
and many other cities of continental Italy were already passing beyond the
towers and the temples to the popular expression that suited the Italians, as
the French Commune was to pass on, a century later, to the popular expression
that suited the French. The Italian Romanesque derives from the living spirit
of the race with perfect ease. Italy will not have to rise up throughout its
whole extent, as the north of France had to, in order to claim the right to
assert its vision. Catholicism here never ceased to employ external
magnificence as an expression of political domination, which, if it does not
leave freedom of thought to man, at least permits him complete freedom of
sensation. The gallery with colonnades defines the church and the loggia, and
the city house and the country house which the Tuscans and Lombards would still
be building to-day, had they been left to their own devices. Along the streets
paved with their broad flagstones, it is still the gallery with colonnades that
shelters the crowd from showers and sun, and supports the pink or white façades
whose rows of green shutters rise to the line of the roof. Under the pines
shaped like parasols, it is the gallery that detaches its profiles against the
straight-lined terraces of the Florentine villas. And at the gates of the
cities, it protects the cool Campo Santo, paved with marble, where one walks
over the dead.
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