indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again, is the _only_ foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression- means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia. We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is to be found. And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something wonderful that music _could not_ reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of perfect _nearness_, for pure, restful and _liberating_ space-effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence, the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget itself. VI