THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
over Gothic art or things medieval would have seemed to him little better than raving. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century travelers seldom let slip an opportunity to show contempt for Gothic architecture as unworthy the attention of a man of cultivated taste.[1] Already in the time of the Renaissance, Tasso, as Babeau points out, had found Gothic[2] architecture barbarous.[3] Montaigne "troubled himself in no way with Gothic buildings. For him the cathedral of Châlons seems not even to exist."[4] When later travelers approve a minor detail of a Gothic building, they usually qualify their commendation with an added slur. In Evelyn's opinion St. John Lateran is "for outward form, not comparable to St. Peter's, being of Gothic ordonnance."[5] Santa Croce of Jerusalem "without is Gothic, but very glorious within."[6] Of Monreale, with its glorious array of ancient mosaics and its unrivaled cloisters, which Spanish soldiers had enjoyed hacking and mutilating, one tourist can say only that "the cathedral exhibits a very disagreeable specimen of the Gothic taste,"[7] and Breval observes that "The Isles are filled with historical Representations in a barbarous Mosaic, out of the old and new Testament."[8] Northall (1752) patronizingly says of "the old churches of Florence" that they "are built in the Gothic taste, and fine in their way; but the more modem churches are built in a good taste."[9] Of Siena, he apologetically remarks, "There is nothing in this city so extraordinary as the cathedral, which a man may view with pleasure after he has seen St. Peter's; though it is quite of another make, and can only be looked upon as one of the masterpieces of Gothic architecture."[10] De La Lande is full of the same prejudice. Of Colleoni's tomb at Bergamo, one of the most notable works of the early Renaissance, he says: "It is very bad. It is of a time that had not yet emerged from the Gothic."[11] The author of an anonymous "Tour through Germany" (1792) remarks of the exquisite cathedral of Regensburg: "The cathedral is not admired for its beauty, or
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- ↑ See the remarks on Gothic architecture in a paper in the World, No. 26 (1753).Chalmers, British Essayists, xxii, 143, 144.
- ↑ It is hardly necessary to point out that the term "Gothic" is very loosely used in the eighteenth century and applied to "every ancient building which is not in the Grecian mode." See citation from Langley's Ancient Architecture Restored (1742), in the Oxford Dictionary, s.v. "Gothic" was a common synonym for "barbarous."
- ↑ Les Voyageurs en France, p. 43.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 62.
- ↑ Diary, i, 130.
- ↑ Ibid., i, 179. Cf. his remarks on "St. Stephen's" (St. Étienne) in Paris, ibid., i, 265, which he thinks beautiful, "though Gothic."
- ↑ Wyndham, Travels, i, 398.
- ↑ Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, i, 48.
- ↑ Travels through Italy, p. 39.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 108.
- ↑ Voyage en Italie, viii, 423.
