Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the originaldocument have been preserved.
The anchor for Footnote 11 is missing in the text. Its locationhas been approximated.
The reference to Hexham church on page 157 is a possible typo.
The comma in the Roman numeral on page 204 is a possible typo.
Schmarzow on pages 230 and 405 should possibly be Schmarsow.
The index entry to Giovanni Buoni da Bissone points to entries for bothBuoni and Bono, and Bissone and Bissoni.
THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS
Cloister of S. John Lateran, Rome, 12th century.
(From a photograph by Alinari.)
Frontispiece
See page 66.
THE
CATHEDRAL BUILDERS
THE STORY OF A GREAT MASONIC GUILD
BY LEADER SCOTT
Honorary Member of the 'Accademia delle Belle Arti,' Florence
Author of 'The Renaissance of Art in Italy,''Handbook of Sculpture,' 'Echoes of Old Florence,' etc.
With Eighty-three Illustrations
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
153-157 Fifth Avenue
1899
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
PROEM
In most histories of Italian art we are conscious of avast hiatus of several centuries, between the ancient classicart of Rome—which was in its decadence when the WesternEmpire ceased in the fifth century after Christ—and thatearly rise of art in the twelfth century which led to theRenaissance.
This hiatus is generally supposed to be a time whenArt was utterly dead and buried, its corpse in Byzantinedress lying embalmed in its tomb at Ravenna. But alldeath is nothing but the germ of new life. Art was not acorpse, it was only a seed, laid in Italian soil to germinate,and it bore several plants before the great refloweringperiod of the Renaissance.
The seed sown by the Classic schools formed the linkbetween them and the Renaissance, just as the RomanceLanguages of Provence and Languedoc form the linkbetween the dying out of the classic Latin and the rise ofmodern languages.
Now where are we to look for this link?
In language we find it just between the Roman andGallic Empires.
In Art it seems also to be on that borderland—Lombardy—wherethe Magistri Comacini, a mediævalGuild of Liberi Muratori (Freemasons), kept alive in theirtraditions the seed of classic art, slowly training it throughRomanesque forms up to the Gothic, and hence to the fullviRenaissance. It is a significant coincidence that thisobscure link in Art, like the link-languages, is styled bymany writers Provençal or Romance style, for the Gothicinfluence spread in France even before it expanded sogloriously