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Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture withers away little by little, beco, the sap departing, the thought of the ti from it! The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful architecture a superabundance of life But practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the er the expression of society; it beco Gallic, European, indigenous, it beco true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic It is this decadence which is called the Renaissance A enius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian colu sun which we mistake for the dawn

Nevertheless, fro 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 theains by this divorce Isolation aggrandizes everything Sculpture beco, the canon becomes music One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces becoelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the saes had already e incisions into Catholicisious unity Before the invention of printing, refor 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 coenius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, beco worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it It becorows visibly eer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because hulers in place of artists Glass replaces the painted s The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence It drags along, a laelo, 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 reat work, which deserved to renature of a giant artist at the bottoister 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 Rohteenth, Sainte-Geneviève Each country has its Saint-Peter's of Ro has another; Paris has two or three The insignificant testa back into infancy before it dies