+GENERAL CHARACTER.+ The various Romanesque styles which had grown up in Italy before 1200 lacked that unity of principle out of which alone a new and homogeneous national style could have been evolved. Each province practised its own style and methods of building, long after the Romanesque had given place to the Gothic in Western Europe. The Italians were better decorators than builders, and cared little for Gothic structural principles. Mosaic and carving, sumptuous altars and tombs, veneerings and inlays of colored marble, broad flat surfaces to be covered with painting and ornament--to secure these they were content to build crudely, to tie their insufficiently buttressed vaults with unsightly iron tie-rods, and to make their church façades mere screen-walls, in form wholly unrelated to the buildings behind them. When, therefore, under foreign influences pointed arches, tracery, clustered shafts, crockets and finials came into use, it was merely as an imported fashion. Even when foreign architects (usually Germans) were employed, the composition, and in large measure the details, were still Italian and provincial. The church of St. Francis at Assisi (1228-53, by _Jacobus of Meruan_, a German, superseded later by an Italian, Campello), and the cathedral of Milan (begun 1389, perhaps by _Henry of Gmund_), are conspicuous illustrations of this. Rome built basilicas all through the Middle Ages. Tuscany continued to prefer flat walls veneered with marble to the broken surfaces and deep buttresses of France and Germany. Venice developed a Gothic style of façade-design wholly her own (see p. 267). Nowhere but in Italy could two such utterly diverse structures as the Certosa at Pavia and the cathedral at Milan have been erected at the same time. +CLIMATE AND TRADITION.+ Two further causes militated against the domestication of Gothic art in Italy. The first was the brilliant atmosphere, which made the vast traceried windows of Gothic design, and its suppression of the wall-surfaces, wholly undesirable. Cool, dim interiors, thick walls, small windows and the exclusion of sunlight, all necessary to Italian comfort, were incompatible with Gothic ideals and methods. The second obstacle was the persistence of classic traditions of form, both in construction and decoration. The spaciousness and breadth of interior planning which characterized Roman design, and its amplitude of scale in every feature, seem never to have lost their hold on the Italians. The narrow lofty aisles, multiplied supports and minute detail of the Gothic style were repugnant to the classic predilections of the Italian builders. The Roman acanthus and Corinthian capital were constantly imitated in their Gothic buildings, and the round arch continued all through the Middle Ages to be used in conjunction with the pointed arch (Figs. 149, 150).