File:A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance (1901) (14597829730).jpg

Identifier: historyofarchit02cumm (find matches)
Title: A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Cummings, Charles Amos, 1833-1905
Subjects: Architecture
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin and company
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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wine, even as they are to-day. ^ But it is not in Rome that we must look for the earliest move-Decay of nients in the direction of civic architecture. Rome wasRome. £qj. centuries the one point in Italy which showed mostforcibly the prostration and decay which followed the extinctionof the old civilization. Lying under the immediate shadow of thepai^acy, and having neither manufacturing nor commercial industry,she had no industrial middle class, but only a crowd of imperiousand half-savage nobles, with their brutal men-at-arms, entrenched intheir strongholds either within or without the walls, and a degradedrabble who found a precarious living by the favor of one or anothernoble family. The monuments of ancient Rome were already inruins, and with the exception of the basilicas of the early Churchnothing had replaced them. The traveller, says Mr. Bryce, who, 1 DAgincourt, vol. iv., pi. 34 ; Mothes, p. 664. ^ Gregorovius, vol. iii., p. 537, Hamiltons translation. CIVIL ARCHITECTURE 233
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Fig. oS9. House of Ilienzi. journeying to Rome, found himself gazing from the summit of theMonte Mario, over the eternal city, saw it, not as now a sea ofbillowy cupolas, but a mass of low red-roofed houses, varied by tallbrick towers, and at rarer intervals by masses of ancient ruin, thenlarger far than now; while over all rose those two monuments of thebest of the heathen emperors, — monuments that still look down,serene and changeless, on the armies of new nations and the festivalsof a new religion, — the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan. ^In the north, the stagnation of Rome was strongly contrasted bya new and vio^orous life. In Florence, in Pisa, in Genoa, in ^., ^ ,^Milan, commerce had in the eleventh century reached a sur- northernprising development. With the steady increase of the com-mercial spirit, and in spite of the wasting wars in which the citieswere continually involved, came a rapid increase of wealth, and anintense local patriotism. This municipal spirit was

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