ongly of the life of a man.
The birth of an art is due often to some technical invention, the full
possibilities of which are only gradually developed. But after the newly
opened fields have been exhausted the epigoni can do little but
recombine, often in fantastic ways, the old elements; public taste turns
from them and demands something new.

[Sidenote: Churches]

So the supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral as seen at Pisa or
Florence or Perugia or Rheims or Cologne, was never equalled in the
sixteenth century. As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take
St. Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously unequal in
execution. With characteristic pride and self-confidence Pope Julius II
to make room for it tore down the old church, and other ancient
monuments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve centuries.
Even by his contemporaries the architect, Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante!
He made a plan, which was started; then he died. In his place were
appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, together or in turn,
and towers were added after the close of the sixteenth century. The
result is the hugest building in the world, and almost the worst
proportioned. After all, there is something appropriate in the fact
that, just as the pretensions of the popes expanded and their powers
decreased, so their churches should become vaster and yet less
impressive. St. Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but
like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was but a _brutum
fulmen_ in the end!

The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible
in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at
Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line
that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne
du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of
the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great
cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England
portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge date from these years,
but these portions are grafted on to an older style that really
determined them. The greatest glory of English university architecture,
the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, was finished in the first
years of the century. The noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass
windows will be remembered by all who have seen t