BOOK FIFTH.
CHAPTER 2. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
(continued)
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no
longer anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no
longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,--it
has no longer the power to retain the other arts. So they
emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take
themselves off, each one in its own direction. Each one of
them gains by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything.
Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting,
the canon becomes music. One would pronounce it an empire
dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces
become kingdoms.
Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina,
those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.
Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time
as the arts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already
made large incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century
breaks religious unity. Before the invention of printing,
reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted
it into a revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated.
Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor
of Luther.
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely
set, when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon
the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes
more and more effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm
of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded
of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it
is poor, it is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not
even the memory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself,
abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning
it, it summons bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces
the painted windows. The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor.
Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence.
It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to
copy. Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth
century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of
despair. That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the
Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter's at Rome. A great work,
which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of
architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of
the colossal register of stone which was closed forever. With
Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture,
which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes
Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania.
It is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in
the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grâce; in the eighteenth,
Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint-Peter's of
Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has
two or three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of
a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.
|