126 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
growth gradually blossoming with all the exuberance of Eastern imagery, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Gothic architecture and Gothic handicraft owe very much to the absorption by the bauhutten of Germany, and other Western craft-guilds, of Asiatic art and science, brought by the thousands of Asiatic craftsmen who entered Europe in the first millennium of the Christian era, a period which in the minds of Europeans is generally a blank, because the 'Great Powers' were then located in Asia instead of in Europe, Byzantine art and Gothic art derived their inspiration from the same source — the impact of Asiatic thought upon the civilisation of the Roman Empire. The first shows its effect upon the art of the Greek and Latin races, the other its influence upon the Romanesque art of Teutonic and Celtic races. The spirit of Indian idealism breathes in the mosaics of St. Mark's at Venice, just as it shines in the mystic splendours of the Gothic cathedrals ; through the delicate tiacery of their jewelled windows, filled with the stories of saints and martyrs ; in all their richly sculptured arches, fairy vaulting and soaring pinnacles and spires. The Italian Renaissance marks the reversion of Christian art to the pagan ideals of Greece, and the capture of art by the bookmen, leading to our present dilettantism and archaeological views of art."
The Indian San Marco
There is outside Florence a Dominican monastery which is famous for the fact that once upon a time Fra Giovanni of Fiesole * — better known as Fra
1 Fra Giovanni of Fiesole lived from a.d. 1387 to I45S«
