On these lines of fitness the Germans and French perfected their style, and imported it into England. The differences are great, between this northern Gothic and the Italian Gothic, which is always more or less Romanesque. Now if in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries[169] the Germans had not begun to build their glorious pointed minsters, what did Vasari mean by _quei Tedeschi_? I will show from his own description. In his chapter called "_dell' Architettura_," forming the introduction to his _Lives_, after discussing the three classical orders, he says (I will translate literally)--"There is another kind of work which they call _Tedesco_ (German), in which the ornamentation and proportions are very different from the ancient or the modern. (Modern in Vasari's time would be the Renaissance style of Michael Angelo.) This is not used by good architects of these days, but is shunned by them as monstrous and barbarous. Every sign of order is forgotten, it ought rather to be called confusion and disorder. In the buildings, which are so many that they have infected the whole world, you see the portals adorned with thin columns twisted like a vine, and so slight that they could not be supposed to support the weight. And then on their façades and other places they made a cursed mass of little tabernacles (archlets) one on the other, with many pyramids and points, and such foliage (here Vasari evidently has his eye on Pisa Baptistery), that it seems impossible how they clung together; they seem made of paper, rather than of stone or marble. In these works there are many protuberances, broken lines, brackets, and _intrecci_, quite disproportionate to the building; and frequently, by piling one thing on another, they run up so high that the top of a door touches the roof. (Here Vasari is certainly thinking of the porches of San Zeno at Verona, and the cathedral of Bergamo.) This style was invented by the Goths (does he mean Longobards perhaps?), who having ruined the buildings, and murdered the architects, made the ones who remained build in this way. They arched their roofs with acute _quarti_ (vaulted roofs) and filled all Italy with this cursed style of building.... God save any country from coming to such ideas and orders of architecture, which, being utterly deformed and unlike the beauty of our buildings, do not deserve that we should speak any more of them." Again, in the _Proemio delle Vite_, when praising the solid buildings of the Goths in Ravenna, especially the tomb of Theodoric, with its huge monolithic roof, he goes on to speak of the Dark Ages--"After which," he says, "there arose new architects, who from their barbarous nation derived the kind of buildings which we of to-day call _tedeschi_, the which seem ridiculous to us, although to them they may have appeared to be praiseworthy."