The Evolution of Architecture. 335 



style. This style was very far from being a debased Roman 

 style, as many enthusiasts for the Gothic and the Greco- 

 Roman have too willingly believed. It was more Roman 

 than the Roman. It recognized the superficiality of the 

 Greco- Roman decoration, a veil that hid the structural prop- 

 erties of a constructive art that had no call to be ashamed. 

 It stripped away all this, or kept only so much as served a 

 purpose. Ravenna and Milan/^the Christian church of San 

 Lorenzo) and Constantinople are rival claimants for the 

 honor of this newxlepafture. But what is certain is that 

 Constantinople developed it the most freely and that there 

 the decorative qualities of the style were taken on. I say 

 " were taken on," for that they were original with Byzan- 

 tium no one has so far essayed to prove. They have a dis- 

 tinct Oriental quality. The capital especially has no classical 

 traits. Judea has been treated so contemptuously by the 

 architectural critic, as if she had no architectural life in her- 

 self, that her horn may well be exalted by the suggestion of 

 Viollet le Due that Byzantine ornament detached itself 

 from the friezes, capitals, and spandrels of Jerusalem, where 

 their derivative history is lost in the dim labyrinth of Orien- 

 tal art. 



Meantime Germany and France were carrying on the de- 

 velopment of the old basilica by methods which received 

 only the most superficial aid from the Byzantine school 

 the development which is called Norman, as it was, in Eng- 

 land, but in Germany and France is known as Romanic, or 

 more commonly as Romanesque. If these designations are 

 not altogether vain, the line of evolution was not broken 

 here any more than it had been between Egypt and Asia 

 and Greece, or between Greece and Etruria and Rome, or be- 

 tween Rome and the Byzantine architects, who were truer to 

 her genius than she was herself. But Romanesque is itself 

 a species which has several distinct varieties, as different as 

 the Cathedral of Pisa is from Speyer and both from Dur- 

 ham, while southern France has its own special traits. In 

 southern France there were more Greco-Roman architectural 

 "remains than Italy could boast. And from the influence of 

 these the Provenqal architects could not escape. They clung 

 to classical details. If they did not incorporate the columns 

 and the entablatures of old Roman buildings in their churches, 

 they copied them with free or careless hand. But at the 

 same time they engaged the column that had been merely 

 ornamental and gave it real work to do something to actually 



