antique taste, fell only upon a lifeless
light, that between a pure light and a colored light.

The more we contemplate architectural works the more do we find them
adapted to express the prevailing spirit of an epoch. Here, on the flank
of the Duomo, stands the Campanile by Giotto, erect, isolated, like St.
Michael's tower at Bordeaux, or the tower of St. Jacques at Paris; the
medieval man, in fact, loves to build high; he aspires to heaven, his
elevations all tapering off into pointed pinnacles; if this one had been
finished a spire of thirty feet would have surmounted the tower, itself
two hundred and fifty feet high. Hitherto the northern architect and the
Italian architect are governed by the same instinct, and gratify the
same penchant; but while the northern artist, frankly Gothic, embroiders
his tower with delicate moldings, and complex flower-work, and a stone
lacework infinitely multiplied and intersected, the southern artist,
half-Latin through his tendencies and his reminiscences, erects a
square, strong and full pile, in which a skilful ornamentation does not
efface the general structure, which is not frail sculptured bijou, but a
solid durable monument, its coating of red, black and white marble
covering it with royal luxuriance, and which, through its healthy and
animated statues, its bas-reliefs framed in medallions, recalls the
friezes and pediments of an antique temple.

In these medallions Giotto has symbolized the principal epochs of human
civilization; the traditions of Greece near those of Judea; Adam,
Tubal-Cain, and Noah, Daedalus, Hercules, and Antaeus, the invention of
plowing, the mastery of the horse, and the discovery of the arts and the
sciences; laic and philosophic sentiment live freely in him side by side
with a theological and religious sentiment. Do we not already see in
this renaissance of the fourteenth century that of the sixteenth? In
order to pass from one to another, it will suffice for the spirit of the
first to become ascendant over the spirit of the second; at the end of a
century we are to see in the adornment of the edifice, in these statues
of Donatello, in their baldness so expressive, in the sentiment of the
real and natural life displayed among the goldsmiths and sculptors,
evidence of the transformation begun under Giotto having been already
accomplished.

Every step we take we encounter some sign of this persistency or
precocity of a Latin and classic spirit. Facing