FROM THE PREFACE.........THE First Edition of this volume has been so long out of print that I had almost ceased to regard myself as responsible for all that it contains. It was the rapid and fresh summary of a happy journey undertaken in the early y ... Read more

FROM THE PREFACE.........THE First Edition of this volume has been so long out of print that I had almost ceased to regard myself as responsible for all that it contains. It was the rapid and fresh summary of a happy journey undertaken in the early years of my artistic career. There were, I knew, many details in which it could easily be improved, and many journeys taken over the same ground might have enabled me to go far more into detail than I was able to do when I published it. I find, however, on reading again what I wrote so long ago, that age and greater knowledge of the subject have generally confirmed my old ideas, and that, as far as regards the principles of my book, I still believe them to be true and just. In revising what I wrote, however, I have found myself obliged to make many alterations and additions, sometimes in relation to towns not visited on my first journey, sometimes in reference to buildings either not described at all or at best insufficiently described before. In doing this I have endeavoured not to increase too much the bulk of the volume, and as far as possible not to interfere with the general character or tone of its contents, though in the process of revision the larger portion of the book has had to be re-written. I hope, if other occupations admit of it, before long to add to this volume a second, containing notes of tours in the centre and south of Italy, undertaken with the same object of studying and describing the too little appreciated art of Italy in the Middle Ages, which seems to me to be almost equally full of interest in all parts of the Peninsula. The materials which I have accumulated for this purpose are only too considerable, and the very richness of the subject has made me shy of approaching it; but the necessity of publishing another edition of this volume has revived my resolution to complete as soon as possible the work which I originally proposed to myself, and of which I have never lost sight. But whether I accomplish this or not, the volume which I now republish may, I hope, give a tolerably complete view of Italian Gothic architecture north of the Apennines. Those who wish for further archæological details as to the age and history of buildings, will not find great difficulty in supplementing what I have written. For myself I confess at once that I have not had time or opportunity for examining the documentary history of the buildings I have described, and that the dates where I have given them are generally obtained at second-hand, though never given save where they accord with the architectural character of the work. It was never for merely archæological purposes that I made my many journeys in Italy. Before I first travelled there I had made myself well acquainted with all the best remains of the Middle Ages in England: I had travelled, sketch-book in hand, through France and Germany, and I knew, therefore, something of the art of our fathers in most districts north of the Alps. But so far I had found no time or opportunity for the study of those early Italian buildings which give the key to the history and style of ours, or of those later works in which, with more or less distinctness, the architects north of the Alps repaid the debt they had previously incurred to the South. Less