THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY I 18

strange, composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small, well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened men—the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in the other—working together towards the consummation of great undertakings amid a populace for the most part oblivious of the profound and subtle meanings with which their work was full. In Medieval Europe, as in ancient Egypt, fragments of the Secret Doctrine—transmitted in the symbols and secrets of the cathedral builders—determined much of Gothic architecture.

The architecture of the Renaissance period, which succeeded the Gothic, corresponds again, in the spirit which animates it, to Greek architecture, which succeeded the Egyptian; for the Renaissance, as the name implies, was nothing other than an attempt to revive Classical antiquity. Scholars writing in what they conceived to be a Classical style, sculptors modeling Pagan deities, and architects building according to their understanding of Vitruvian methods, succeeded in producing works like, yet different from the originals they followed—different because, animated by a spirit unknown to the ancients, they embodied a new ideal.

In all the productions of the early Renaissance, “that first transcendent springtide of the modern world,” there is that evanescent grace and beauty of youth which was seen to have pervaded Greek art, but it is a grace and beauty of a different sort. The Greek artist sought to attain to a certain abstract perfection of type; to build a temple which should combine all the excellencies of every similar temple; to carve a figure impersonal in the highest sense, which should embody every beauty. The artist of the Renaissance, on the other hand, delighted not so much in the type as in the variation from it. Preoccupied with the unique mystery of the individual soul—a sense of which was Christianity’s gift to Christendom—he endeavored to portray that wherein a particular person is unique and singular. Acutely conscious also of his own individuality, instead of effacing it, he made his work the vehicle and expression of that individuality. The history of Renaissance architecture, as Symonds has pointed out, is the history of a few eminent individuals, each one molding and modifying the style in a manner peculiar to himself alone. In the hands of Brunelleschi it was stern and powerful; Bramante made it chaste, elegant and graceful; Palladio made