ion. In all London there is no palace so fine as
this old prison, nor a square so beautiful as Piazza della Signoria.
Instead of Palazzo Pitti (so much more splendid is our civilisation than
theirs) we are content with Buckingham Palace, and instead of Palazzo
Riccardi we have made the desolate cold ugliness of Devonshire House.
Our craftsmen have become machine-minders, our people, on the verge of
starvation, as we admit, without order, with restraint, without the
discipline of service, having lost the desire of beauty or splendour,
have become serfs because they are ignorant and fear to die. And it is
we who have claimed half the world and thrust upon it an all but
universal domination. In thus bringing mankind under our rule, it is
ever of our civilisation that we boast, that immense barbarism which in
its brutality and materialism first tried to destroy the Latin Church
and then the Latin world, which alone could have saved us from
ourselves. Before our forests were cleared here in Italy they carved
statues, before our banks were founded here in Italy they made the
images of the gods, and in those days there was happiness, and men for
joy made beautiful things. And to-day, half dead with our own smoke,
herded together like wild beasts, slaves of our own inventions, ah,
blinded by our unthinkable folly, before the statues that they made,
before the pictures that they painted, before the palaces that they
built, in the churches where they still pray, stupefied by our own
stupidity, brutalised by our own barbarism, we boast of a civilisation
that has already made us ridiculous, and of which we shall surely die.
Here in the Bargello, the ancient palace of the Podesta of a Latin city,
let us be silent and forget our madness before the statues of the Gods,
the images of the great and beautiful people of old.

Tuscan sculpture, that of all the arts, save architecture, was the first
to rise out of the destruction with which the barbarians of the North
had overwhelmed the Latin world, came to its own really in the fifteenth
century. After the beautiful convention of Byzantium had passed away,
and Gruamone and Adeodatus had carved at Pistoja, Biduinus at S.
Cassiano, Robertus at Lucca, Bonamicus and Bonannus at Pisa, and Guido
da Como again at Pistoja, in the work of Niccolo Pisano at Pisa we come
upon the first thought of the Renaissance, the reliefs of the pulpit in
the Baptistery, in which the Middle Age seems to have passe