, since literature always precedes its more heavily cumbered
fellow-servant art, we must look for the literary counterpart of the
painters of the Renaissance among the writers who preceded them by
many generations, men more obviously in touch with the great mediaeval
revival: Dante, Boccaccio, the compilers of the "Fioretti di San
Francesco," and, as we have just seen, Fra Jacopone da Todi.

V

What art would there have been without that Franciscan revival, or
rather what emotional synthesis of life would art have had to record?
This speculation has been dismissed as futile, because it is impossible
to conceive that mankind could have gone on without some such enthusiastic
return of faith in the goodness of things. But another question remains
to be answered, remains to be asked; and that is, what was the spiritual
meaning of the art which immediately preceded the Franciscan revival?
what was the emotional synthesis of life given by those who had come too
early to partake in the new religion of love?

The question seems scarcely to have occurred to any one, perhaps because
the Church found it expedient to obliterate, to the best of her power,
all records of her terrible mediaeval vicissitudes, and to misinterpret,
for the benefit of purblind antiquarians, the architectural symbolism of
the earlier Middle Ages.

Since, in the deciphering of such expressions of mankind's moods and
intuitions, scientific investigation is scarcely more important than
the moods and intuitions of the looker-on, it seems quite fitting that
I should begin these suggestions about pre-Franciscan Italian art by
saying that some years ago there met by accident in my mind a certain
impression of Lombard twelfth-century art, and a certain anecdote of
Lombard twelfth-century history.

It was at Lucca, a place most singularly rich in round-arched buildings,
that I was, so to speak, overwhelmed by the fact that the Italian churches
of immediately pre-Franciscan days possess by way of architectural
ornamentation nothing but images of deformity and emblems of wickedness.
This fact, apart from its historical bearing, may serve also to illustrate
a theory I have already put forth, to wit, that the only art which is
necessarily expressive of contemporary thought and feeling is such as
embodies very little skill, and as expresses but very few organic
necessities of form, both of which can result only from the activity
and the influence of generations o