Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the
general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations
of the antique also occur, so too monastic scholarship had not only
gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but
the style of it, from the days of Einhard onwards, shows traces of
conscious imitation.
But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in Italy from
that which it assumed in the North. The wave of barbarism had scarcely
gone by before the people, in whom the former life was but half
effaced, showed a consciousness of its past and a wish to reproduce it.
Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this
or the other element of classical civilization; in Italy the sympathies
both of the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the
side of antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past
greatness. The Latin language, too, was easy to an Italian, and the
numerous monuments and documents in which the country abounded
facilitated a return to the past. With this tendency other elements--
the popular character which time had now greatly modified, the
political institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry
and other northern forms of civilization, and the influence of religion
and the Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which
was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western
world.
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