Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,
For many generations laboured with him,
Children that came to see these saints in stone,
As day by day out of the blocks they rose,
Grew old and died, and still the work went on,
And on and on and is not yet completed."
The first is typical of the ingenuity and genius of the French, the second of the painstaking labour of the Teuton; what more were needed to define the two?
"In Germany and throughout all the territory under the spell of Germanic influence the growth of Gothic was not so readily accomplished as in France," says Gonse.
"At best such Gothic as is to be seen at Bacharach, Bonn, Worms, etc., is but a variety, so far as the vaulting goes, of superimposed details on a more or less truthful Romanesque framework. At Mayence, Roermond, and Sinzig, too, it is the domical vault which still qualifies the other Gothic essentials, and so depreciates the value of the Gothic of the Rhine valley when compared with that of the Royal Domain of France."
The range of mediæval art and architecture has been said to run between the fourth century and the fourteenth, or from the peace of the Church to the coming of the Renaissance.
This is perhaps definite enough, but the scope is too wide to limit any special form of art expression, so that one may judge it comparatively with that which had gone before or was to come after.
Mostly, mediæval art groups itself around the two distinct styles of Byzantine and Gothic, and they are best divided, one from the other, by the two centuries lying between the tenth and the twelfth.
In truth, the architecture of Germany, up to the end of the tenth century, was as much Byzantine as it was Romanesque, and the princes and prelates alike drew the inspiration for their works from imported Italians and Greeks, a procedure which gave the unusual blend that developed the distinct Rhenish architecture.
The Popes themselves gave a very material aid when they sent or allowed colonies of southern craftsmen to undertake the work on these great religious edifices of the Rhine valley.
The grander plan of the cathedrals at Speyer, Worms, Mayence, Basel, and even Trèves are all due somewhat to this influence, and for that reason they retain even to-day evidences of these foreign and even Eastern methods, though for the most part it is in the crypt and subterranean foundations only that this is found.
Carlovingian architecture was perhaps more indigenous to Germany than to any other part of the vast Empire. "This extraordinary man," as the historians speak of Charlemagne, did much toward developing the arts.
In the southeast, the Grecian Empire was already become decrepit in its influences, and a new building spirit was bound to have sprung up elsewhere. "If Charlemagne," says Gibbon, "had fixed the seat of his empire in Italy, his genius would have aspired to restore, rather than violate the works of the Cæsars." He confined his predilections to the virgin forests of Germany, however, and he despoiled Lombardy to enrich his northern possessions; as witness the columns which he brought from Ravenna and Rome wherewith to decorate his palace and church at Aix-la-Chapelle.
No country has preserved finer or more numerous examples of Romanesque architecture than Germany. The Rhine was so powerfully under Roman sway that it adopted as a matter of course and without question quite all of the tenets and principles of the Romanesque; not only with respect to ecclesiastical structures, but as regards civil and military works as well.
On the Rhine, as in Lorraine, Lyonnaise, and Central France, the Romanesque endured with little deviation from Latin traditions till quite the end of the thirteenth century.
Later, in the Gothic period, Germany returned the compliment and sent Zamodia of Freiburg and Ulric of Ulm to lend their aid in the construction of the grand fabric at Milan; and John and Simon of Cologne to Spain to erect that astonishingly bizarre cathedral at Burgos.
Beginning with the revival of the arts in Italy, the Renaissance German architects, in other countries than Germany, were apparently few in number and not of their former rank.
Not alone did Italy aid Germany in the erection of ecclesiastical monuments, but France as well, with the Norman variation of the Romanesque and the later developed Gothic, sent many monkish craftsmen to lend their aid and skill. Their work, however, was rather the putting on of finishing touches than of planning the general outlines.
German architecture on the Rhine then was but a development and variation of alien importations, which came in time, to be sure, to be recognized as a special type, but which in reality resembled the Lombardic and the Romanesque in its round-arched forms, and the Gothic of France in its ogival details. German architecture in time, though not so much with respect to churches, even went so far as to imitate the rococo and bizarre ornamentation fathered and named by the Louis of France.
Germany was a stranger to the complete development of Gothic architecture long after it had reached its maturity elsewhere; so, too, it was quite well into the fifteenth century before the slightest change was made toward the interpolation of Renaissance details, and even then it was Renaissance art, more than it was Renaissance architecture, which was making itself felt.
The Renaissance came to Germany through the natural gateway of the north of Italy; although it spread perhaps to some extent from France into the Rhine district.
In truth, German Renaissance has ever been heavy and ugly, though undeniably imposing. In both the ecclesiastical and the secular varieties it lacked the lightness and grace which in France, so far as domestic architecture went, soon developed into a thing of surprising beauty.
What the Renaissance really accomplished in Germany toward developing a new or national style is in grave doubt, beyond having left a legacy of bizarre groupings and grotesque and superabundant ornament. In France the case was different, and, while in ecclesiastical edifices the result was poor and banal enough, there grew up the great and glorious style of the French Renaissance, which, for civic and private buildings of magnitude, has never been excelled by the modern architecture of any land.
In Germany proper, as well as in Switzerland, one finds house-fronts and walls covered with paintings, which is certainly one phase of Renaissance art. But the brush alone could not popularize the new style, and in religious edifices, at least, the Renaissance, as contrasted with the earlier Romanesque, never attained that popularity along the Rhine that it did in France or England, or even in Belgium.
Civic architecture took on the new style with a certain freedom, but religious architecture almost not at all. Possibly the "Thirty Years' War" (1618-48) had somewhat to do with stunting its growth; certainly no church-building was undertaken in those years, and they were the very ones in which, elsewhere, the Renaissance was making its greatest headway.
Another very apparent reason is that, as the major part of the population became Protestant, the need of a beautiful church edifice itself, as a stimulus to the faith, had grown less and less. There was a steady growth, perhaps one may as well say a great development, in civil architecture throughout Germany at this time, but, to all intents and purposes, from the early seventeenth century onward, the founding and erecting of great churches was at an end.
If one would study the Renaissance in Germany he must observe the town halls of such cities as Cologne, Paderborn, or Nuremberg, or the great châteaux or castles, such as are best represented by ruined Heidelberg.
Of religious architecture Renaissance examples are practically lacking; the most convincing details along the Rhine being seen in the western tower of the cathedral at Mayence.
At Hildesheim, at Nuremberg, and at Prague there are something more than mere "evidences" of the style, and throughout Germany, as elsewhere, there are many sixteenth and seventeenth century accessories, such as altars, baldaquins, tombs, and even entire chapels, which are nothing but Renaissance in motive and execution. But there are no great Renaissance ground-plans, façades, or clochers, which are in any way representative of the style which crept in to ring the death-knell of Gothic in France and England.
Perhaps it is for this