style transitional from a general prevalence of Gothic forms to Classic, the change to the new mode is much less marked and the disparity in character between the structure and the decoration of its surface much less evident than in the Early French Renaissance, commonly called François Premier; for in Italy, as previously indicated, the structure itself was never truly Gothic in principle, whereas the buildings upon which the Italians imported by Francis wrought were not merely Mediaeval but Feudal - and feudalism was a plant which never flourished in Italy, where its flower, chivalry, languished also. From this time on, however, the Classic influence was to gather strength and at last to modify, profoundly and fundamentally, the structure of the buildings, step for step with the changes in the fabric of society; and from this time on, the stages of the development of the Renaissance in France are to be identified by and with the name of the reigning monarch - François I, Henri II, III and IV, Louis XIII, XIV, XV and XVI. The art of the Renaissance was to become monarchical, just as the politics of all Europe were drifting toward monarchy more or less absolute, to depend for its prosperity upon the will of the King, to become less and less an emotional, and more and more an intellectual, expression of life and manners. But before we follow the main stream of that development, which will lead us to the very threshold of today through the natural channels of consanguinity and racial sympathies, we must turn aside for a moment to examine the course of the Spanish branch, its causes, character, and direction.

VI. SPANISH CONTACT WITH THE

ARTS OF ITALY

Spain, like Italy, is a peninsula, and is shut off from France by the Pyrenees. Her easterly and southerly coasts are washed by the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and on her westerly and northerly shores the cold waves of the At

lantic break. The interior, in the north-central portion, is a table-land of considerable altitude from which the land slopes toward the ocean and the sea, a conformation which produces a wide variety in climate, and extremes of temperature. Added to the old Iberian stock were Carthaginian blood that is to say, Phoenician-Semitic - Roman blood, and the residuum of the Kingdom of the Visigoths who conquered and held the peninsula. In the early eighth century was added that of the Moorish warriors who overran it, pushed into France as far north as Tours and were flung back by Charles the Hammer beyond the Pyrenees. By the close of the thirteenth century the Christians had pressed the Moslems toward the sea until their last foothold was the province of Granada on the south-east coast. Their sojourn was long enough everywhere to leave an indelible impress upon the arts of Spain. The Mohammedans were by no means a horde of illiterate camel-drivers who made a cult of bloodshed; during the Dark Ages, when all Christendom was sunk in a horrible morass of mental and political gloom, western Europe was almost enveloped by the Moslems and their virile, refined, and cultivated civilization. To them, in Spain, equally perhaps with Rome, is due the introduction of the dome, brought from Syria and Persia. The distinctly Oriental arts' of glazed tile and colored terra-cotta and pottery came with them by way of North Africa, or in the fleets of feluccas which for so long disputed the supremacy of the Mediterranean with the navies of Venice and Genoa. But that which acted more strongly upon the character of Spanish architecture than any other influence, that which gives a Spanish city its peculiar physiognomy, is a Moorish, Mohammedan, Oriental, social custom - the seclusion of women. To this is due the bare walls pierced high up with heavily latticed windows from which the women of the Moorish household four wives by the Prophet's allowance, and many servants could watch the street without themselves being seen; to this is due the plan of the typical Spanish

house, built around courtyards like the houses of the East, where the family life might go on unseen.

Spain may be said to have had no indigenous art. When the Moorish wave receded, the Romanesque and then the Gothic flowed in from France, and these in turn were followed by the foam carried by the tide of the Renaissance. But to each of these successive waves of style that broke on Spanish soil, the Spaniard gave a local color, an accent racy of that soil; and the irrigation of their flux and union yielded a harvest frequently bizarre, often extravagant and even ugly, but always virile, interesting, and significant.

When Ferdinand and Isabella had driven the Moor into the sea, when Spain had become a part of the Holy Roman Empire through the inheritance by King Charles I of Spain, of the realms of his two grandfathers, Ferdinand and Emperor Maximilian I, and when he, as the Emperor Charles V, thus reigned from 1519 over an empire comprising all of modern Germany and Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Sicily, Sardinia, the kingdom of Naples which meant all southern Italy - and everything in the two Americas west of Brazil, then France and Spain made Italy their cock-pit in their struggle for supremacy in Europe; and in the course of this conflict Italy was definitely brought within the Spanish sphere of influence, to which an earlier contributing factor had been the Spanish atmosphere of the Papal court and politics when the Spaniard, Alexander VI, the unspeakable Borgia, sat in the chair of St. Peter. An incident of this struggle was the descent upon Rome of the Imperial army, who clamored for their pay at Milan and were led to Rome that they might pay themselves by sack and pillage. These were the ruffians who tortured Baldassare Peruzzi; and it was another great artist, Benvenuto Cellini, who claimed to have shot and killed their commander, the Constable de Bourbon, with his own hand, from the ramparts of the Castle of S. Angelo in 1527. These military and political contacts bore their usual fruit in the arts. The Spaniards, be it observed however, came