of monuments for public benefit and enjoyment. It was the cathedral, the largest, the most comprehensive, and the most popular form of Christian church, that brought out the full development of Gothic architecture.
Nevertheless, the first steps of change from Romanesque to Gothic were taken before the great cathedral movement set in. They were taken in the monastic churches, and with them the study of this change must begin.
The vast new impulse in building which, in the eleventh century, extended all over Christian Europe, assumed a peculiar and potent character with the religious orders of the North. In Italy, while buildings of great extent and magnificence, such as the Cathedral of Pisa, were at this time begun, no new system was foreshadowed in their construction, no new principle was introduced. Italian art, excepting always that of Lombardy—which was not an outcome of native genius,—was, in the eleventh century, as strictly classic in principle as that of Christian Rome had been in the fifth. But north of the Alps, or rather north of the Loire, a new style of architecture was in process of development. The monastic orders of the North, less given than those of the South to seclusion, contemplation, and inaction, became very energetic builders. With them, at this time, mutual intercourse and interchange of ideas were general, a spirit of invention was active, and constructive enterprise was astir in all directions. [1] The immunity from pillage which the monastic establishments had enjoyed during the most troubled times had enabled them to accumulate wealth which, together with their enlarged relations with the masses of the people, suggested the need of more ample and more elegant accommodations. The churches of former times seemed poor and unworthy, and their rebuilding on a more extended and more magnificent scale became frequent.
These monasteries had early taken every means to qualify large bodies of men to practise the arts. They had organised and maintained schools where art and science were taught—where architecture, sculpture, and painting were cultivated under the guidance of traditions which
- ↑ The monastic buildings were not only planned, and the work on them directed by the monks, but they were also, in many cases, largely constructed with their own hands. See Lenoir's Architecture Monastique, p. 36, et seq.
