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Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation ligatures, diacritical marks and spelling in
  the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical
  errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  Characters which can't be represented in the Latin 1 character set
  have been marked as follows:
       oe/OE ligature:  replaced with oe or OE
       other ligatures:  [AV]
       single or double letters with macron:  [=MR]
       letter with breve: [)e]
       letter with ring above: [ deg.V]
       dagger symbol:  +
       single or double letters with tilde: [~AD]
       single or double letters with arch above:  [^IF]

  The anchor for Footnote 11 is missing in the text. Its location has
  been approximated.

  The reference to Hexham church on page 157 is a possible typo.

  The comma in the Roman numeral on page 204 is a possible typo.

  Schmarzow on pages 230 and 405 should possibly be Schmarsow.

  The index entry to Giovanni Buoni da Bissone points to entries for both
  Buoni and Bono, and Bissone and Bissoni.







THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS




  [Illustration: CLOISTER OF S. JOHN LATERAN, ROME, 12TH CENTURY.
   _Frontispiece_   (_From a photograph by Alinari._)   _page 66._]




     THE
     CATHEDRAL BUILDERS

     _THE STORY OF A GREAT MASONIC GUILD_

     BY LEADER SCOTT

     Honorary Member of the 'Accademia delle Belle Arti,' Florence
     Author of 'The Renaissance of Art in Italy,' 'Handbook of
     Sculpture,' 'Echoes of Old Florence,' etc.

     With Eighty-three Illustrations

     NEW YORK
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
     153-157 FIFTH AVENUE

     1899




     RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
     LONDON & BUNGAY.




PROEM


In most histories of Italian art we are conscious of a vast hiatus of
several centuries, between the ancient classic art of Rome--which was
in its decadence when the Western Empire ceased in the fifth century
after Christ--and that early rise of art in the twelfth century which
led to the Renaissance.

This hiatus is generally supposed to be a time when Art was utterly
dead and buried, its corpse in Byzantine dress lying embalmed in its
tomb at Ravenna. But all death is nothing but the germ of new life.
Art was not a corpse, it was only a seed, laid in Italian soil to
germinate, and it bore several plants before the great reflowering
period of the Renaissance.

The seed sown by the Classic schools formed the link between them and
the Renaissance, just as the Romance Languages of Provence and
Languedoc form the link between the dying out of the classic Latin and
the rise of modern languages.

Now where are we to look for this link?

In language we find it just between the Roman and Gallic Empires.

In Art it seems also to be on that borderland--Lombardy--where the
_Magistri Comacini_, a mediaeval Guild of _Liberi Muratori_
(Freemasons), kept alive in their traditions the seed of classic art,
slowly training it through Romanesque forms up to the Gothic, and
hence to the full Renaissance. It is a significant coincidence that
this obscure link in Art, like the link-languages, is styled by many
writers Provencal or Romance style, for the Gothic influence spread in
France even before it expanded so gloriously in Germany.

I think if we study these obscure Comacine Masters we shall find that
they form a firm, perfect, and consistent link between the old and the
new, filling completely that ugly gap in the History of Art. So fully
that all the different Italian styles, whose names are legion--being
Lombard-Byzantine at Ravenna and Venice, Romanesque at Pisa and Lucca,
Lombard-Gothic at Milan, Norman-Saracen in Sicily and the south,--are
nothing more than the different developments in differing climates and
ages, of the art of one powerful guild of sculptor-builders, who
nursed the seed of Roman art on the border-land of the