However, it is not possible to connect the art of Italy with that of any other country in any comprehensive sense. Italian art may be said to have died out more completely in the beginning of the middle ages than did the art of northern nations; its period of decline, too, was longer; but when its awakening came it aroused itself and took on new strength by a method of its own, and may be said to have been distinct from northern art in every respect, and divided from it by its different spirit as clearly as Italy was divided from other lands by the towering summits of the Alps.
About the beginning of the thirteenth century there dawned upon the northern nations a new era in literature. Hitherto the written language had been the monkish Latin; now the poets began to use their own tongues. This new writing may be said to have commenced with the Provençal poets, who were followed by those of Northern France; but it was in Germany that such song broke forth as showed how the national feeling had been repressed, and how, now that it had burst its bonds, it resembled the freshets of spring when they escape from the icy hand of Winter and rush from one point to another, brushing aside every obstacle which lies in their way. I cannot here speak in detail of these poets and their works, but Hartmann of Aue, Walther von der Vogelweid, Wolfram and Gottfried of Strasburg are names which grow brighter with passing centuries.
At the same time with this advance in letters there came, in North-eastern France, the new Gothic style of architecture, which had the effect to revive sculpture and in a degree restore to it the importance it had in classic days. Now, the same artist was both architect and sculptor, and the result was that architecture was so arranged as to afford an honorable place to sculpture, which, in its turn, added much to the grand and full effect of architecture.
Artists now began to study nature and the life about them in preference to the antique, and the sculptors of the thirteenth century were fortunate in living in a time when costumes were picturesque and suited to artistic representations. The dress of a knight was as graceful as one could wish, with its flowing lines and the mantle clasped at one side of the neck, or thrown loosely over the arm and shoulder; and the costume of the other sex, with the full folds of the lower garment fastened by the girdle, and veiling without hiding the movement of the figure, was scarcely less fitting for the artists use than were the classic robes of the Greeks.