THE GOTHIC STYLE IN ITALY
moment just before the ornamental imagination of the kte Middle
Ages was harnessed into the Renaissance yoke.
The Renaissance on the other hand could never have been con-
ceived in a country which had as recklessly indulged in ornamental
vagaries as Spain and Portugal, or as daringly explored spatial
mysteries as Germany. In Italy there thus exists no Late Gothic style
at all—the most striking illustration of the fact that by the I5th
century the present natural divisions of Europe were more or less
established. The Romanesque style had been international though
regionally subdivided, just as the Holy Roman Empire and the
Church of the nth and I2th centuries had been international forces.
Then, in the I3th century, France became a nation and created the
Gothic style.
Germany went through the crisis of the Interregnum and decided
on a national, as against the previous international policy. The same
decision was taken at the same time in England, while in Italy -a
wholly different development of many small town-states set in.
Gothic came into Germany, Spain, England and Italy as a French
fashion. Cistercian monasteries first, and then Cologne, Burgos and
Leon, Canterbury and Frederick iTs Castel del Monte (see p. 54)
followed it closely. But already in Frederick II's Italian buildings
there appear purely antique pediments side by side with the novel
rib-vaults of France. The appreciative treatment of Roman motifs
in Frederick iTs Capua Gate is unparalleled anywhere in the
North, and in the Soujh only by Nicolo Pisano's pulpits. Nicolo
Pisano was the first of the great Italian sculptors, the first in whose
work the Italian character dominates over international conventions.
His transformation of the current style in sculpture into something
more static and more harmonious was paralleled by similar trans-
formations of Gothic architecture. The role of the friars in this trans-
formation has been mentioned. There is no excelsior in their wide,
airy, aisleless halls. The large ones with aisles, such as S. Maria Novella
and S. Croce in Florence, have such wide arcades and such shallow
aisles that the static nature of the rooms is hardly disturbed. The
cathedral of Florence—a cathedral, but due to the financial enter-
prise of the guild of the wool merchants—belongs to the same
family (pi. xxvi). Its piers with their substantial bases and heavy
capitals do not point upward. The uninterrupted cornice provides
a strong horizontal division. The cross-vaults are dome-shaped, and
clearly isolate bay from bay. Clarity is also the expression of the dark
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