Renaissance in Italy the Fine Arts Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LOMBARD, BOMANESQUE, GOTHIC S5 Hie; for the main currents of the world's history move not by chance ; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destin... more »y without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was ? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Eomanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England ? 1 The pyramidal fa9ade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aerial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape. If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of the Tuscan Eomanesque. The 1 The essential difference between Italy and either Northern Francs or Englan...« less