r and banal enough, there grew up the great and glorious style of
the French Renaissance, which, for civic and private buildings of
magnitude, has never been excelled by the modern architecture of any
land.

In Germany proper, as well as in Switzerland, one finds house-fronts and
walls covered with paintings, which is certainly one phase of
Renaissance art. But the brush alone could not popularize the new style,
and in religious edifices, at least, the Renaissance, as contrasted with
the earlier Romanesque, never attained that popularity along the Rhine
that it did in France or England, or even in Belgium.

Civic architecture took on the new style with a certain freedom, but
religious architecture almost not at all. Possibly the "Thirty Years'
War" (1618-48) had somewhat to do with stunting its growth; certainly no
church-building was undertaken in those years, and they were the very
ones in which, elsewhere, the Renaissance was making its greatest
headway.

Another very apparent reason is that, as the major part of the
population became Protestant, the need of a beautiful church edifice
itself, as a stimulus to the faith, had grown less and less. There was a
steady growth, perhaps one may as well say a great development, in civil
architecture throughout Germany at this time, but, to all intents and
purposes, from the early seventeenth century onward, the founding and
erecting of great churches was at an end.

If one would study the Renaissance in Germany he must observe the town
halls of such cities as Cologne, Paderborn, or Nuremberg, or the great
chateaux or castles, such as are best represented by ruined Heidelberg.

Of religious architecture Renaissance examples are practically lacking;
the most convincing details along the Rhine being seen in the western
tower of the cathedral at Mayence.

At Hildesheim, at Nuremberg, and at Prague there are something more than
mere "evidences" of the style, and throughout Germany, as elsewhere,
there are many sixteenth and seventeenth century accessories, such as
altars, _baldaquins_, tombs, and even entire chapels, which are nothing
but Renaissance in motive and execution. But there are no great
Renaissance ground-plans, facades, or _clochers_, which are in any way
representative of the style which crept in to ring the death-knell of
Gothic in France and England.

Perhaps it is for this reason alone that the great Gothic cathedral at
Cologne was completed at a late day w