literature will
provide the historian of art with a pretty piece of collateral evidence.
For instance, the fact that Charles the Great ordained that the Frankish
songs should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the
renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the
first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France
towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished
triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the
_Chanson de Roland_, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church.
Chretien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters
and twisted them into fine-spun conceits. He produced a poem as
pinnacled, deft, and insignificant as Rouen Cathedral. In literature, as
in the visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell
like Lucifer, never to rise again. In Italy there was no literary
renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap. If ever man
was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio. Dante died at Ravenna in 1321.
His death is a landmark in the spiritual history of Europe. Behind him
lies that which, taken with the _Divina Commedia_, has won for Italy an
exaggerated literary reputation. In the thirteenth century there was
plenty of poetry hardly inferior to the _Lamento_ of Rinaldo; in the
fourteenth comes Petrarch with the curse of mellifluous phrase-making.

May God forget me if I forget the great Italian art of the fifteenth
century. But, a host of individual geniuses and a cloud of admirable
painters notwithstanding, the art of the fifteenth century was further
from grace than that of the Giottesque painters of the fourteenth. And
the whole output of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is
immeasurably inferior to the great Byzantine and Romanesque production
of the eleventh and twelfth. Indeed, it is inferior in quality, if not
in quantity, to the decadent Byzantine and Italian Byzantine of the
thirteenth. Therefore I will say that, already at the end of the
fourteenth century, though Castagno and Masolino and Gentile da
Fabriano and Fra Angelico were alive, and Masaccio and Piero and Bellini
had yet to be born, it looked as if the road that started from
Constantinople in the sixth century were about to end in a glissade.
From Buda-Pest to Sligo, "late Gothic" stands for something as foul
almost as "revival." Having come through the high passes, Europe, it
seemed, was