f craftsmen; since in these Lucchese
churches the architectural forms proclaim one thing and the sculptural
details another. The first speak only of logic and serenity; the second
only of the most abominable nightmare. The truth is, that these churches
of Lucca, and their more complex and perfect prototypes, like Sant'
Ambrogio of Milan, and San Miniato of Florence, are not the real outcome
of the century which built them. It is quite natural that, with their
stately proportions, their harmonious restrained vaultings, their easy,
efficient colonnades, their ample and equable illumination, above all
their obvious pleasure in constructive logic, these churches should
affect us as being _classic_ as opposed to romantic, and even in a very
large measure actually antique; for they have come, through generations
as long-lived and as scanty as those of the patriarchs, straight from
the classic, the antique; grandchildren of the courts of law and temples
of Pagan Rome, children of the Byzantine basilicas of early Christian
days; strange survivals from distant antiquity, testifying to the lack
of artistic initiative in the barbarous centuries between Constantine to
Barbarossa. No period in the world's history could have produced anything
so organic without the work of previous periods; and when the Middle
Ages did in their turn produce an architecture original to themselves,
it was by altering these still classic forms into something absolutely
different: that thirteenth-century Gothic which answers to the material
and necessities of the democratic and romantic times heralded by St.
Francis. The twelfth century, therefore, could not express itself in
the architectural forms and harmonies of those Lucchese churches; but
it could express itself in their rude and thoroughly original sculpture.
Hence, while there is in them no indication of the symbolism of the coming
ogival Gothic, there is no trace either of the symbolism belonging to
Byzantine buildings. None of the Gothic imagery testifying faith and
joy in God and His creatures; no effigies of saints; at most only of
the particular building's patron; no Madonnas, infant Christs, burning
cherubim, singing and playing angels, armed romantic St. Michael or
St. George; none of those goodly rows of kings and queens guarding the
portals, or of those charming youthful heads marking the spring of the
pointed arch, the curve of the spandril. Nor, on the other hand, any
remnant of Byzantin