The Tuscan quality in architecture must not be sought for during the
hundred years of Gothic--that is to say, of foreign--supremacy and
interregnum. The stonemasons of Pisa and of Florence did indeed apply
their wholly classic instincts to the detail and ornament of this
alien style; and one is struck by the delicacy and self-restraint of,
say, the Tuscan ones among the Scaliger tombs compared with the more
picturesque looseness of genuine Veronese and Venetian Gothic
sculpture. But the constructive, and, so to speak, space enclosing,
principles of the great art of mediæval France were even less
understood by the Tuscan than by any other Italian builders; and, as
the finest work of Tuscan façade architecture was given before the
Gothic interregnum, so also its most noble work, as actual spatial
arrangement, must be sought for after the return to the round arch,
the cupola and the entablature of genuine Southern building. And then,
by a fortunate coincidence (perhaps because this style affords no real
unity to vast naves and transepts), the architectural masterpieces of
the fifteenth century are all of them (excepting, naturally,
Brunelleschi's dome) very small buildings: the Sacristies of S.
Lorenzo and S. Spirito, the chapel of the Pazzi, and the late, but
exquisite, small church of the Carceri at Prato. The smallness of
these places is fortunate, because it leaves no doubt that the sense
of spaciousness--of our being, as it were, enclosed with a great part
of world and sky around us--is an artistic illusion got by
co-ordination of detail, greatness of proportions, and, most of all,
perhaps, by quite marvellous distribution of light. These small
squares, or octagons, most often with a square embrasure for the
altar, seem ample habitations for the greatest things; one would wish
to use them for Palestrina's music, or Bach's, or Handel's; and then
one recognises that their actual dimensions in yards would not
accommodate the band and singers and the organ! Such music must remain
in our soul, where, in reality, the genius of those Florentine
architects has contrived the satisfying ampleness of their buildings.
That they invented nothing in the way of architectural ornament, nay,
took their capitals, flutings, cornices, and so forth, most
mechanically from the worst antique, should be no real drawback to
this architecture; it was, most likely, a matter of negative instinct.
For these meagre details leave the mind free, nay, force it rather, to
soar at once into the vaultings, into the serene middle space opposite
the windows, and up into the enclosed heaven of the cupolas.