Architecture had in the Middle Ages the same character as the other arts, as indeed all the manifestations of life then harmonized so marvelously with one another.  The tendency to parable shows itself here, as in poetry.  When we now enter a Gothic cathedral, we hardly suspect the esoteric sense of its stone symbolism; only a general impression pierces our soul; we realize an elevation of feeling and mortification of the flesh.  The interior is a hollow cross, and we wander among the instruments of martyrdom itself; the variegated windows cast on us red and green light, like blood and corruption; funeral songs wail about us; under our feet are mortuary tablets and decay; and the soul soars with the colossal columns to a giddy height, tearing itself with pain from the body, which falls like a weary, worn-out garment to the ground.  But when we behold the exteriors of these Gothic cathedrals, these enormous buildings which are wrought so aerially, so finely, delicately, transparently, cut as it were into such open work that one might take them for Brabant lace in marble, then we feel truly the power of that age which could so master stone itself that it seems spectrally transfused with spiritual life, and thus even the hardest material declares Christian spirituality.

But arts are only the mirror of life, and, as Catholicism died away, so its sounds grew fainter and its lights dimmer in art.  During the Reformation Catholic song gradually disappeared in Europe, and in its place we see the long-slumbering poetry of Greece re-awakening to life.  But it was only an artificial spring, a work of the gardener, not of the sun, and the trees and flowers were in close pots, and a glass canopy protected them from cold and northern winds.

In the world’s history no event is the direct result of another; all events rather exert a mutual influence.  It was by no means due only to the Greek scholars who emigrated to Europe after the fall of Byzantium that a love for Grecian culture and the desire to imitate it became so general among us; a similar Protestantism prevailed then in art as well as in life.  Leo X., that splendid Medici, was as zealous a Protestant as Luther, and as there was a Latin prose protest in Wittenberg, so they protested poetically in Rome in stone, color, and ottaverime.  And do not the mighty marble images of Michelangelo, the laughing nymphs of Giulio Romano, and the joyous intoxication of life in the verses of Ludovico Ariosto form a protesting opposition to the old, gloomy, worn-out Catholicism?  The painters of Italy waged a polemic against priestdom which was perhaps more effective than that of the Saxon theologian.  The blooming rosy flesh in the pictures of Titian is all Protestantism.  The limbs of his Venus are more thorough theses than those which the German monk pasted on the church door of Wittenberg.  Then it was that men felt as if suddenly freed from the force and pressure of a thousand years; the artists, most of all, again breathed freely as the nightmare of Christianity seemed to spin whirling from their breasts, and they threw themselves with enthusiasm into the sea of Greek joyousness from whose foam rose to them goddesses of beauty.  Painters once more limned the ambrosial joys of Olympus; sculptors carved, with the joy of yore, old heroes from the marble; poets again sang the house of Atreus and Laius; and so the age of new classic poetry began.