双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史70 黑暗中的亮光

 
  总分: _______
70 LIGHTS IN THE DARK黑暗中的亮光
 
“WHAT goes up must come down.” The Roman Empire had reached the height of its power. The Romans had conquered, ruled, and civilized almost all of Europe. Then the mighty empire that the Romans had built up came tumbling down. 
It began with the split between the eastern part of the empire and the western. When the capital was moved to Constantinople, naturally Rome, the old capital, lost power. Finally the East and West separated. Constantinople remained the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Rome was capital of the Western Roman Empire. So then there were two Roman Empires and two emperors. But this didn’t last long. 
Savage men from the North began pushing and fighting their way down across France to Italy. These men were fierce and rough. They had never learned to read or write. We call them Teutons. The Teutons finally overran France, Spain, and Italy. They took Rome itself, and that ended the old Roman Empire in the West. I wonder what the Teutons thought when they entered Rome and saw the great palaces and theaters, the temples and monuments. 
The Teutons were rude and rough and ignorant. But they were strong and brave and good fighters. They became Christians. Gradually, they learned the languages of the parts of Europe where they settled. All parts of the Roman Empire had once upon a time spoken Latin, the language of Rome. Now under the Teuton tribes the language of each part of Europe became different. The Latin used in France gradually became French. The Latin used in Spain became Spanish, and the Latin used in Italy and in Rome itself became Italian. No longer could a man from Spain talk with a man from France in his own language. 
But Spain and France and Italy did not become real nations right away. Everywhere there was fighting, everywhere mix-ups. One tribe fought with another. One town fought with another town. The old civilized life was upset. Everything became darker and darker for civilization. The ways of the Romans were forgotten. There would have been no time for architecture, on account of so much fighting, even if almost everybody had not forgotten what architecture was. The old basilican churches were still used, but few new ones were built. Things got so bad that we call the time from about 500 A.D. to about 1000 A.D. the Dark Ages. 
Now, although everything certainly looked black for Europe, there were a few lights to be seen in the darkness. One bright spot was the reign of Charlemagne. Charlemagne was a Teuton. He grew up uneducated and he never learned to write. Can you imagine a ruler nowadays—the President of the United States, for instance—who couldn’t write a letter? But Charlemagne had a good mind and he wanted to learn all there was to know. He became King of France, but he wasn’t satisfied until he had brought Germany and Italy under his rule, too. 
Charlemagne encouraged building. He brought to his court all the wisest men he could find. He helped get back for the world some of the knowledge and learning that had been lost when the old Romans ceased to govern. He was crowned emperor of a new Roman Empire in 800 A.D. 
Another light, flickering in the Dark Ages, was kept burning by the Christian monks. As you know, monks are men who live in monasteries. A monastery was ruled by a chief monk called an abbot. The monks thought they could live better lives if they worked hard and kept away from all the fighting and badness going on in the world. 
Those old monks worked hard in the monasteries. They raised vegetables, built churches and houses, taught school, made paintings, wrote histories, helped the poor and sick people who came to them. Best of all for you and me, they studied the old Roman writings and kept them safe, so that we can know much more about the old Roman ways than we could if it hadn’t been for the learned monks. 
The monastery that the monks lived in was built around a church. Such a church was called the abbey because of the abbot who ruled the monastery. On one side of the abbey was a courtyard. Across the courtyard from the church was generally the dining hall, which was called the refectory. The church and the refectory were connected along each end of the courtyard by hallways. These hallways were like long porches with columns on the sides facing the courtyard, and were called cloisters. The columns in the cloisters were not like the old Greek and Roman columns. They weren’t Doric or Ionic or Corinthian or Tuscan or Composite, but were of many different shapes, even in the same cloister. Some were twisted in shape like a screw or like a wet towel when you try to wring the water out of it. Some were decorated with bands around them or with criss-cross stripes. In many cloisters the columns were in pairs, two and two, like animals going into Noah’s ark, and these were called coupled columns. Not much like the columns on the Parthenon, are they? 
 
No.70　CLOISTER, SICILY（西西里回廊） 
Courtesy of The University Prints