onounce it an empire dismembered at the death
of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors
of the dazzling sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the
arts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large
incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious
unity. Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merely
a schism; printing converted it into a revolution. Take away the press;
heresy is enervated. Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the
precursor of Luther.

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when
the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture
grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printed
book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes
bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty,
it is poor, it is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not even the
memory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the
other arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it summons
bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The
stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality,
all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop
mendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even
in the sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of
despair. That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon, and made
Saint-Peter's at Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain unique,
the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at
the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever.
With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which
survived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peter
in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each
century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the
Val-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Genevieve. Each country has its
Saint-Peter's of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has
two or three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit
grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.

If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just