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style of Catholic architecture; and almost all traces of Gothic Art have been carefully effaced from the churches of Naples.

"What then (he says) is the ecclesiastical architecture of Italy? An innumerable series of combinations, in general unfortunate, where the round arch of Rome and the Greek triangle alternate, intermingle, intersect one another, almost always without character and without taste; occasionally some of the elements of Gothic art are mixed up as if by chance. Nothing in the world can be colder in a religious point of view, and we never feel at Rome the profound religious impression that steals over us, for example, under the long nave of the church of St. Ouen at Rouen. Nothing, as art, is falser, more distorted, more pitiful, than these perpetual façades which one encounters at Rome in all the streets, and often the interior is no better than the exterior. It is a mélange of vertical, horizontal, oblique, straight and curved lines."

Our author afterwards proceeds to criticize the façade of St. Peter's; its interior, whose vastness unhappily does not at first strike the eye; and the fatal change of M. Angelo's plan of a Greek cross into a Latin one, by Carlo Maderno, at the command of a pope, which has destroyed the effect of its distinctive and principal feature, the stupendous dome. Some other celebrated Italian churches are subsequently examined, and the inability of the Italians to construct the spire is noticed; there was too much paganism in the fine arts of Rome to permit her to invent that simple Christian symbol arising from earth to Heaven, like prayer breathed from the soul to God. The conclusion arrived at is, that Rome, with all her vast resources, with the treasures of a world at her command, has failed to create in Italy an ecclesiastical architecture worthy of the name. It is to civil, and not to ecclesiastical buildings that we must turn, if we desire to study the architecture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in all the riches of its development, in all the variety of its powers, in all the affluence of its life and expansion. In church architecture, as in painting and sculpture, Art subjected to sacerdotal tradition constantly failed; while, in civil architecture, the same art left to itself has achieved signal successes, and has even turned the difficulties it encountered into occasions for new beauties and fresh triumphs. The finest buildings in the great cities of Italy are proofs of this. At Verona the Porta de Borsari, the Piazza dei Signori, the tombs of the Della Scala; at Padua the Palazzo della raggione, which contains the largest hall in Italy, adorned with astrological emblems; at Bologna the ancient University; at Sienna, the Palio, and the Palace of the Communes; at Vicenza, the two columns marking the dominion of Venice; at Florence the Loggia de' Lanzi; at Genoa, the Exchange and the Bank of St. George; at Venice, the Palace of the

Doges, with its superb Porta della Carta, and its Giants' Staircase, connected by the Bridge of Sighs with that other palace, whose smiling façade was the dwelling of the principal jailor, while behind, along the Orfano Canal, stretched the prisons from which many a captive never returned.

In the conclusion of his work M. Coquerel repeats and enforces what he has been previously endeavouring to prove, and also glances at the future of the Fine Arts. He states that he has nowhere asserted that, in the infancy of Art, Catholicism, or rather the Christian elements which it contained, has not sometimes communicated a happy inspiration to artists; while, at the same time, he has affirmed that it has also kept them in bondage and materially impeded their progress. Priestcraft, and the authority of tradition, sadly oppressed the Fine Arts until they were delivered from that bondage at the epoch of the Renaissance. Indeed, in spite of the important, far too important part, which Catholicism has assigned to the fine arts in her worship, it is not too much to say that the Romish Church has not been able to keep them at their true height for a single instant. She has hastened their downfall by a triple and fatal influence; by always more and more materializing religion, which is the fatal defect of Catholicism; by seeking the colossal and the unmeasured, instead of the beautiful, which is the malady of Roman taste; by sacrificing Art to luxury and show, which is the tactic of Jesuitism.*

M. Coquerel afterwards inquires, how it happens that the masters of the French school of painting have not equalled the great artists of Italy, Belgium, and Holland, in originality, power, or fertility. And he replies, because the double absolutism of Catholicism and of royalty destroyed in France the liberty of art. The truly national, bold, independent, fertile school of French art-a school in the highest degree original and initiative-died Huguenot and proscribed. It perished in the dungeons of the Bastille, with Bernard Palissy; in the carnage of St. Bartholomew, with Jean Goujon, and Goudimel; and we cannot too deeply regret the untimely

M. Coquerel adopts as his own the following remarks of a celebrated critic: "Whilst painting and sculpture are subjected to sacerdotal influences, they remain in infancy, and consequently incomplete. Art only merits the name when philosophical ideas combine themselves with religious habitudes. In Italy, Dante and Petrarch opened the path along which Raphael and Michel Angelo proceeded. But, between these last geniuses, there appeared a man essentially a philosopher, who mastered and developed with the utmost power and sagacity all the resources of art. That man was Leonardo da Vinci."-M. Delécluze, Journal des Debats, 25th Nov., 1856.

+ Goudimel is the principal author of the melodies of the French Pro

destruction of that promising and brilliant school. To these Protestant artists may be added the names of Jean Cousin, painter and sculptor, the true founder of the national school; Androuet Ducerceau, the architect who joined the Louvre to the Tuileries; Salomon de Brosse, the builder of the Luxembourg; the painters and engravers, Sébastian Bourdon, Abraham Bosse, Petitot; and, among the labourers in the industrial arts, Gobelin and Boule. A crowd of other distinguished artists might be referred to, but, says M. Coquerel:

If

"Are not these great names sufficient to prove the radical falsity of that prejudice, often accepted without reply by Protestants themselves, that Protestantism is essentially hostile to the fine arts? that were the fact, it would condemn our church and our faith; because the sentiment of art is a sublime gift of the Creator, one of the talents which he has given us to be made use of; all religion which would deny the beautiful, or forbid the love and the study of it, would mutilate and debase, instead of entirely regenerating man. It is very true that the Puritans proscribed, with ignorant and illiberal rigour, most of the forms of the beautiful. They were in the wrong, but let us be just towards them, and remember that imagination, banished by them from all the realms of art, except a single one, strictly confined within the field of poetry, sought out the beautiful under that, the most immaterial of all its forms, and found, what will always be awanting to the genius of France, an epic poem. Milton is our Homer, and Italian Catholicism, in spite of Tasso and Ariosto, has nothing comparable to what Algarotti terms the Gigantesca sublimita Miltoniana. All the grandeur of Michel Angelo, with more love, more faith, more purity, is to be found in Milton; and his faults, with which he has been so much reproached, cannot be weighed against the sublime elevation, and the incomparable power of his genius. The double poetry of Protestantism, that of the Bible and that of personal faith, is there in its energy and splendour, its deep religion, its richness of colour and of imagery. Like Milton in England, and Luther in Germany, the illustrious French Protestants above-named prove the fact that the glories of the imagination are not forbidden to us. There is but one thing more to say. We believe it clear that the time when religious art was merely a matter of formality, is past, never to return. Painters, sculptors, architects, would you wish to create? which is, after all, the ultimate object of art. Would you attain to a sublime originality? Would you be fertile and powerful? Know assuredly that we only express with greatness, that which we think or feel with freedom. Learn that there is no moral resort of equal power with that to be found in one's own mind, no vivacity or freshness of imagination comparable to those of a soul at once independent and believing. The individual

testant Psalter. At Rome, he was the master of Palestrina, and, through that illustrious composer, has exercised a mighty influence upon modern

music.

spirituality, the free faith, the frank, spontaneous piety of the Protestant, can alone open to you that glorious career. There only burns the sacred fire; there only breathes the spirit of life; there only is the assured conquest of the future."

We have thus endeavoured, at considerable length, to give some idea of M. Coquerel's learned and interesting volume. He has shown himself an eloquent writer, as well as a bold and original thinker; occasionally, perhaps, he may push his conclusions a little too far, and venture upon assertions somewhat too sweeping; but, in the main, we believe him to be thoroughly in the right, and we hail his work with pleasure, both as a vigorous defence of Protestantism against an undeserved reproach, and as a most valuable contribution to the literature of the Fine Arts.

ART. II.--THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF
CHRYSOSTOM.

1. Chrysostomi, S. Joannis, Opera omnia quæ extant, vel quæ ejus nomine circumferuntur, ad MSS. codices Gallicanos, Vaticanos, Anglicanos, Germanicanosque; necnon ad Savilianam et Frontonianam editiones castigata, innumeris aucta; nova interpretatione, ubi opus erat, præfationibus, monitis, notis, variis lectionibus illustrata; nova sancti doctoris vita, appendicibus onomastico, et copiosissimis indicibus locupletata. Gr. et Lat. Studio D. Bernardi de Montfaucon, Monachi Ordinis S. Benedicti. Editio Parisina altera aucta. 8vo. Tom. XIII. Parisiis: 1837.

2. Histoire de Saint Jean Chrysostome, Archevêque de Constantinople, Docteur de l'Eglise sa vie, ses œuvres, son siècle, influence de son genie. Par M. l'Abbé J. B. Bergier, Missionnaire de Beaupré Paris: 1856.

The troubles which attended the infancy and early growth of Christianity gave place to troubles of another, and scarcely less pernicious, order in the fourth century. By means of the pressure of persecution from without, and the consequent greater cohesion within, the church grew up through three centuries of trial heavenward, like a city built upon a narrow base, to which story after story is added, as is Coleridge's fine figure. But when it had conquered its freedom, and was at liberty to expand at will, it shot out with a weakening effect on every side, like a primitive town encroaching upon unoccupied territory, the principle of disintegration operating upon its fortunes and principles without any countervailing

check. While, therefore, there is in the history of this period no little to thank Heaven for in the disarmament of the forces of paganism, in the recognition of the social status of the Christians, and in the very general diffusion and acceptance of the religion of Jesus throughout the Roman Empire, there are nevertheless some serious drawbacks to be taken into account. This was the age of heresies. The mind, flung at liberty from the conservative influence of persecution on the one hand, and on the other, left free to canvass the modifications of paganism of all sorts and shades, no few of which had by this time. contrived to infuse a portion of their vices into the Christian system, recklessly pursued, in too many cases, a career of heretical pravity and superstition. To this age belonged Arius and Apollinaris, and Marcellus of Ancyra, and Photinus, and Macedonius, and Priscillian, and Audeus, and heretics of inferior name besides, while the Donatists, the Manicheans, the Gnostics, Euchites and the Collyridians form only specimens of the mosaic into which the unity of Christian doctrine was distributed. Nor were these multifarious opinions maintained with the unclouded front of philosophy, or put forth with the quiet assertion of speculation. The many-headed Cerberus of ecclesiastical disputation barked with all his mouths, and wounded and killed wherever he could fasten his teeth. The persecution unto death of ecclesiastical opponents was as rife within the Church, as the violence and oppression of heathen rulers had once been from without. Mercy, which could weep over a broken bone or an untimely grave, was bereft of its bowels when only a heretic was concerned-could sentence a recusant in the early morning to the mines or the scaffold, and coolly eat its breakfast afterwards, with the consciousness of having done a meritorious action. But this course of procedure has not been confined to those days; for the weapons of the persecutor are marked by a strange uniformity of temper, and keep that temper long. To crush the body with a view to cure the soul is not merely the device of the self-macerating ascetic; others are prepared to do it for him, should he be unconcerned about the state of his soul's health. Now, to persecution from heretics we owe one half of John Chrysostom's history; his sufferings being, at the same time, professedly due to the heresies ascribed to himself. But ere we enter on the details of that history, let us glance at the scenes amid which he was born, where his character was formed, and that perilous celebrity was obtained which advanced him to the highest ecclesiastical dignity in New Rome.

Antioch was built on the Orontes, but rather on the south side of that river than on the north, which only boasted an

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