Outside Italy, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the approaches of spiritual bankruptcy are more obvious, though here, too, painting makes a better fight than architecture.  Seven hundred years of glorious and incessant creation seem to have exhausted the constructive genius of Europe.  Gothic architecture becomes something so nauseous[17] that one can only rejoice when, in the sixteenth century, the sponge is thrown up for good, and, abandoning all attempt to create, Europe settles down quietly to imitate classical models.  All true creation was dead long before that; its epitaph had been composed by the master of the “Haute Oeuvre” at Beauvais.  Only intellectual invention dragged on a sterile and unlucky existence.  A Gothic church of the late Middle Ages is a thing made to order.  A building formula has been devised within which the artificer, who has ousted the artist, finds endless opportunity for displaying his address.  The skill of the juggler and the taste of the pastrycook are in great demand now that the power to feel and the genius to create have been lost.  There is brisk trade in pretty things; buildings are stuck all over with them.  Go and peer at each one separately if you have a tooth for cheap sweet-meats.

Painting, outside Italy, was following more deliberately the road indicated by architecture.  In illuminated manuscripts it is easy to watch the steady coarsening of line and colour.  By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Limoges enamels have fallen into that state of damnation from which they have never attempted to rise.  Of trans-Alpine figuration after 1250 the less said the better.  If in Italian painting the slope is more gentle, that is partly because the spirit of the Byzantine renaissance died harder there, partly because the descent was broken by individual artists who rose superior to their circumstances.  But here, too, intellect is filling the void left by emotion; science and culture are doing their work.  By the year 1500 the stream of inspiration had grown so alarmingly thin that there was only just enough to turn the wheels of the men of genius.  The minor artists seem already prepared to resign themselves to the inevitable.  Since we are no longer artists who move, let us be craftsmen who astonish.  ’Tis a fine thing to tempt urchins with painted apples:  that makes the people stare.  To be sure, such feats are rather beneath the descendants of Giotto; we leave them to the Dutchmen, whom we envy a little all the same.  We have lost art; let us study the science of imitation.  Here is a field for learning and dexterity.  And, as our patrons who have lost their aesthetic perceptions have not lost all their senses, let us flatter them with grateful objects:  let our grapes and girls be as luscious as lifelike.  But the patrons are not all sensualists; some of them are scholars.  The trade in imitations of the antique is almost as good as the trade in imitations of nature.  Archaeology and connoisseurship, those twin ticks on palsied art, are upon us.  To react to form a man needs sensibility; to know whether rules have been respected knowledge of these rules alone is necessary.  By the end of the fifteenth century art is becoming a question of rules; appreciation a matter of connoisseurship.