THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
knowledge and no critical judgment. The whole might have been taken from the guide-book, without the trouble of a visit. Note what Northall says of Vicenza, which boasts in its town hall the greatest achievement of Palladio. The entire account is as follows: "On the 3d of June (1752) we came to Vicenza; a small town, but very populous; the manufacture of silk being very considerable here. The townhouse was built by Palladio; and here is a beautiful piece of architecture by the same, a theatre built after the antique manner. Near this town is a famous country seat belonging to the Marquis of Capra, built by Palladio."[1]
Especially marked was the general failure to appreciate the works of the Middle Ages. To most tourists before the French Revolution the Middle Ages were a sealed book, and to the average man the great cathedrals and castles, though surpassing almost anything of a later day, made slight appeal. Prepossessed with the notion that medieval art and architecture could be naught but barbarous, tourists in France and Italy bestowed only a passing glance upon delightful medieval cities and hastened on to Rome. Naturally, then, we must not expect to find many tourists visiting for mere sight-seeing old hill towns like Assisi or Perugia or Orvieto or Urbino or San Gimignano or Volterra. To many an Englishman Italy was interesting chiefly as a vast museum of antiquity which enabled him to vivify his recollections of the classics. On a lower plane, but nevertheless not to be despised, he placed the work of the Renaissance, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Bramante, Guido Reni. The great ancient world and the great Renaissance he could fairly well understand, for their life was expressed in terms with which he was familiar. But to the thousand years preceding the fifteenth century he gave httle thought.[2] For the buildings and pictures and mosaics of that age he sometimes had a word of condescending praise, but of insight into the medieval temper he had very little. The rhapsodies of Ruskin
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- ↑ Travels through Italy, p. 447.
- ↑ Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared between 1776 and 1788.
