those splendors of the dazzling

those splendors of the dazzling

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, palestrina, sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts.The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into Catholicism.The sixteenth century breaks religious unity.Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a revolution.Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it be providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther .

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced.The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it.It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated.It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time.Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists.Glass replaces the painted windows.The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy.Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair.That Titan of art piled the pantheon on the parthenon, and made Saint-peter's at Rome.A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever.With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do?It takes Saint-peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it.It is a mania. It is a pity.Each century has its Saint-peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève.Each country has its Saint-peter's of Rome.London has one; petersburg has another; paris has two or three.The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies .

If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just described, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis.Beginning with Fran?ois II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent.The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry.An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity.Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa.It is still the pantheon on the parthenon: Saint-peter's of Rome.Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the place Royale, the place Dauphine.Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together, loaded with a dome like a hump.Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome.Here, finally, is Louis XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old architecture.From Fran?ois II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical progression.Art has no longer anything but skin upon its bones.It is miserably perishing .