akes it in a way easier to
grasp the special delicate austerity of their beauty. But they are
humble offshoots, naturally, of two great and complex masterpieces,
and very modest sisters of a masterpiece only a degree less
marvellous: Pisa Cathedral, the Baptistery of Florence and San
Miniato. The wonderful nature of the most perfect of these three
buildings (and yet I hesitate to call it so, remembering the apse and
lateral gables of Pisa) can be the better understood that, standing
before the Baptistery of Florence, one has by its side Giotto's very
beautiful belfry. Looking at them turn about, one finds that the
Gothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile makes the windows,
pillars and cornices of the Baptistery seem at first very flat and
uninteresting. But after the first time, and once that sense of
flatness overcome, it is impossible to revert to the belfry with the
same satisfaction. The eye and mind return to the greater perfection
of the Baptistery; by an odd paradox there is deeper feeling in those
apparently so slight and superficial carvings, those lintels and
fluted columns of green marble which scarcely cast a shadow on their
ivory-tinted wall. The Tuscan quality of these buildings is the better
appreciated when we take in the fact that their architectural items
had long existed, not merely in the Romanesque, but in the Byzantine
and late Roman. The series of temple-shaped windows on the outside of
the Florence Baptistery and of San Miniato, has, for instance, its
original in the Baptistery of Ravenna and the arch at Verona. What the
Tuscans have done is to perfect the inner and subtler proportions, to
restrain and accentuate, to phrase (in musical language) every detail
of execution. By an accident of artistic evolution, this style of
architecture, rather dully elaborated by a worn-out civilisation, has
had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung
people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we
be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in
a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity),
that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called
_spirit_: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle
Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and
details: this spiritual quality affects us in their carved and inlaid
marbles, their fluted pilasters and undercut capitals, as a re