The basic form of Gothic art is juxtaposition. Whether the individual work is made up of several comparatively independent parts or is not analyzable into such parts, whether it is a pictorial or a plastic, an epic or dramatic representation, it is always the principle of expansion and not of concentration, of co-ordination and not of subordination, of the open sequence and not of the closed geometric form, by which it is dominated. The beholder is, as it were, lead through the stages and stations of a journey, and the picture of reality which it reveals is like a panoramic survey, not a one-sided, unified representation dominated by a single point of view. … The important thing in Gothic art is not the subjective viewpoint, not the creative, formative will expressed in the mastering of the material, but the thematic material itself, of which both artists and public can never see enough. Gothic art leads the onlooker from one detail to another and causes him, as has been well said, to “unravel” the successive parts of the work one after the other; the art of the Renaissance, on the other hand, does not allow him to linger on any detail, to separate any single element from the whole composition, but forces him rather to grasp all the parts at one and the same time. … For the new conception of art, the work forms an indivisible unity; the spectator wants to be able to take in the whole range of the stage with a single glance, just as he grasps the whole space of a painting organized on the principles of central perspective, with a single glance. But the development from a successive to a simultaneous conception of art implies, at the same time, a lessened appreciation of those silently accepted “rules of the game” on which, in the final analysis, every artistic illusion is based. For, if the Renaissance regards it as nonsensical “to behave on the stage as if one could not hear what one person is saying about another” although the persons in question are standing next to each other, this can perhaps be described as a symptom of a more highly developed naturalistic approach, but it also no doubt implies a certain atrophy of the power of imagination. However that may be, the art of the Renaissance owes the impression of totality—that is to say, the appearance of a genuine, self-dependent, autonomous world, and with that its greater truth as compared with the Middle Ages—above all to this uniformity of the artistic presentation. …
… The new artistic culture appears on the scene in Italy, because this country also has a lead over the West in economic and social matters, because the revival of economic life starts here, the financial and transport facilities of the crusades are organized from here, free competition first develops here, in opposition to the guild ideal of the Middle Ages, and the first European banking system arises here, because the emancipation of the urban middle class takes place here earlier than in the rest of Europe, because from the very outset feudalism and chivalry are less developed here than in the North and the rural aristocracy not only have town residences very early but adapt themselves absolutely to the urban financial aristocracy…
