uced
them further. Nothing, for instance, taken by itself alone, can be
more satisfactory than the facade of the Certosa at Pavia; but it is
not, like the front of Chartres or Rheims or Amiens, a natural
introduction to the inner sanctuary. At the end of the Gothic period
architecture had thus come to be conceived as the art of covering
shapeless structures with a wealth of arabesques in marble, fresco,
bronze, mosaic.

The revival of learning and a renewed interest in the antique withdrew
the Italians for a short period from this false position. With more or
less of merit, successive builders, including those I have above
mentioned, worked in a pure style: pure because it obeyed the laws of
its own music, because it was intelligible and self-consistent, aiming
at construction as the main end, subordinating decoration of richer
luxuriance or of sterner severity to the prime purpose of the total
scheme. But this style was too much the plaything of particular minds
to create a permanent tradition. It varied in the several provinces of
Italy, and mingled personal caprice with the effort to assume a
classic garb. Meanwhile the study of Vitruvius advanced, and that
pedantry which infected all the learned movements of the Renaissance
struck deep and venomous roots into the art of building.

Michelangelo arrived at the moment I am attempting to indicate. He
protested that architecture was not his trade. Over and over again he
repeated this to his Medicean patrons; but they compelled him to
build, and he applied himself with the predilections and
prepossessions of a plastic artist to the task. The result was a
retrogression from the point reached by his immediate predecessors to
the vicious system followed by the pseudo-Gothic architects in Italy.
That is to say, he treated the structure as an inert mass, to be made
as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details
agreeable to the eye. At the beginning of his career he had a
defective sense of the harmonic ratios upon which a really musical
building may be constructed out of mere bricks and mortar--such, for
example, as the Church of S. Giustina at Padua. He was overweighted
with ill-assimilated erudition; and all the less desirable licenses of
Brunelleschi's school, especially in the abuse of square recesses, he
adopted without hesitation. It never seems to have occurred to him
that doors which were intended for ingress and egress, windows which
were meant to