Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Selected Poems of Pierre De Ronsard
If the traveller is on his way north from Venice, where, at the cost of a morning spent in a gondola, you may see all the architecture of the world displayed in a crowded, im possible pageant between sea and heaven, and where you retreat breathless from Veronese only to be blinded by Titian, he will probably be distressed by the formal beauties of the great castles of the Touraine the last ?ourishes of the Flamboyant in the church of Brou will seem to him the artifice of a style grown too old to possess natural graces; domestic architecture will be either neat without simplicity or grandiose without dignity. But if he returns from F lorence, the inevitable revulsion, the sense of some light lost from the sky or dreamy loveliness from the earth, will be less strong in him; he will observe that behind the brier-like luxuriance of the Flamboyant style no less than amid the urbane splendours of the great Chateaux there is a latent quality that he will have dimly realized to be present in all Florentine art before Michelangelo, - a tranquil strength, a restrained rhythm of line. The tree may glow with a thousand ?owers, but the dark, sinewy boughs are beneath them, defiant of time and the winds.
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