But it was just then that the South received from the North those decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris[303]—the counter- pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low- Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil- painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little “Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance.[304] It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that _contrapuntal method_ of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still effective even in Galileo. The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of _apparent_ expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and essentially defensive—an image of the Classical so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for us the Classical _is_, an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.