The northern Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races, organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes.

In the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will.

Thus the specific qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments.

They are emphatically the creation of citizens--of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but capable themselves of sovereign power.[14] What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto.
Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the facade is more architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used.

What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture?
It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived.