Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation ligatures, diacritical marks and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Characters which can't be represented in the Unicode character set have been marked as follows: ligatures: [AV] double letters with arch above: [^IF] The anchor for Footnote 11 is missing in the text. Its location has 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 both Buoni and Bono, and Bissone and Bissoni. THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS [Illustration: CLOISTER OF S. JOHN LATERAN, ROME, 12TH CENTURY. _Frontispiece_ (_From a photograph by Alinari._) _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 a vast hiatus of several centuries, between the ancient classic art of Rome--which was in its decadence when the Western Empire ceased in the fifth century after Christ--and that early rise of art in the twelfth century which led to the Renaissance. This hiatus is generally supposed to be a time when Art was utterly dead and buried, its corpse in Byzantine dress lying embalmed in its tomb at Ravenna. But all death is nothing but the germ of new life. Art was not a corpse, it was only a seed, laid in Italian soil to germinate, and it bore several plants before the great reflowering period of the Renaissance. The seed sown by the Classic schools formed the link between them and the Renaissance, just as the Romance Languages of Provence and Languedoc form the link between the dying out of the classic Latin and the rise of modern languages. Now where are we to look for this link? In language we find it just between the Roman and Gallic Empires. In Art it seems also to be on that borderland--Lombardy--where the _Magistri Comacini_, a mediæval Guild of _Liberi Muratori_ (Freemasons), kept alive in their traditions the seed of classic art, slowly training it through Romanesque forms up to the Gothic, and hence to the full Renaissance. It is a significant coincidence that this obscure link in Art, like the link-languages, is styled by many writers Provençal or Romance style, for the Gothic influence spread in France even before it expanded so gloriously in Germany.