moulded the creations of others into new shapes, might well take to
himself a name from the supreme deity of his creed, the deity of whom
he loved to be deemed the special votary. The conception which had
grown up in the mind, and had been carried out by the hand, of the
peasant of Salona might well entitle him to his proud surname. Nor did
the organizing hand of Jovius confine its sphere to the polity of the
Empire only. He built himself an house, and, above all builders, he
might boast himself of the house that he had builded. Fast by his own
birthplace--a meaner soul might have chosen some distant
spot--Diocletian reared the palace which marks a still greater epoch
in Roman art than his political changes mark in Roman polity. On the
inmost shore of one of the lake-like inlets of the Hadriatic, an inlet
guarded almost from sight by the great island of Bua at its mouth, lay
his own Salona, now desolate, then one of the great cities of the
Roman world. But it was not in the city, it was not close under its
walls, that Diocletian fixed his home. An isthmus between the bay of
Salona and the outer sea cuts off a peninsula, which again throws out
two horns into the water to form the harbour which has for ages
supplanted Salona. There, not on any hill-top, but on a level spot by
the coast, with the sea in front, with a background of more distant
mountains, and with one peaked hill rising between the two seas like a
watch-tower, did Diocletian build the house to which he withdrew when
he deemed that his work of empire was over. And in building that
house, he won for himself, or for the nameless genius whom he set at
work, a place in the history of art worthy to rank alongside of
Iktinos of Athens and Anthemios of Byzantium, of William of Durham and
of Hugh of Lincoln.
And now the birthplace of Jovius is forsaken, but his house still
abides, and abides in a shape marvellously little shorn of its ancient
greatness. The name which it still bears comes straight from the name
of the elder home of the Cæsars. The fates of the two spots have been
in a strange way the converse of one another. By the banks of the
Tiber the city of Romulus became the house of a single man; by the
shores of the Hadriatic the house of a single man became a city. The
Palatine hill became the _Palatium_ of the Cæsars, and _Palatium_ was
the name which was borne by the house of Cæsar by the Dalmatian shore.
The house became a city; but its name still clave to it, and the house
of Jovius still, at least in the mouths of its own inhabitants, keeps
its name in the slightly altered form of Spálato.
He placed his home in a goodly land, on a spot whose first sight is
striking at any moment; but special indeed is the good luck of him who
for the first time draws near to Spalato at the hour of sunset. It is
a moment to be marked in a life, as we round the island headland, one
of the stony Dalmatian hills rising bleak and barren from the sea, and
catch the first glimpse of the city, the tall bell-tower, the proud
rampart of mountains which forms its background. But the sight is more
spirit-stirring still if we come on that sight at the very moment
when--in sight of the home of the great persecutor we may use the
language of mythology--the sun-god has just sunk into its golden cup.
The sinking sun seems no unfit symbol, as we look on the spot where
the lord of the world withdrew to seek for rest after his toils.
Another moment, the headland is rounded; its top is kindled like
Vesuvius in the last rays of the sunlight; the lesser light is kindled
before the greater has wholly failed us, and, by the light of sun and
moon together, we can trace out the long line of the sea-front of the
palace which became a city. No nobler site could surely have been
found within the bounds of the Empire of the two Augusti and their
Cæsars. The sea in front, the mountains behind, the headlands, the
bays, the islands scattered around, might indeed have formed a realm
from which the prince who had there fixed his home would have been
unwise to go forth again to wrestle with the storms of the world which
lay beyond its borders. The mountains have drawn nearer to the shore;
the islands have gathered round the entrance of the haven, as if to
shut out all but the noble bay and its immediate surroundings, as if
to fence in a dominion worthy of Jovius himself.
We land with the moon lighting up the water, with the stars above us,
the northern wain shining on the Hadriatic, as if, while Diocletian
was seeking rest by Salona, the star of Constantine was rising over
York and Trier. Dimly rising above us we see, disfigured indeed, but
not destroyed, the pillared front of the palace, reminding us of the
Tabularium of Rome's own Capitol. We pass under gloomy arches, through
dark passages, and presently we find ourselves in the centre of palace
and city, between those two renowned rows of arches which mark the
greatest of all epochs in the history of the building art. We think
how the man who re-organized the Empire of Rome was also the man who
first put harmony and consistency into the architecture of Rome. We
think that, if it was in truth the crown of Diocletian which passed to
every Cæsar from the first Constantius to the last Francis, it was no
less in the pile which rose into being at his word that the germ was
planted which grew into Pisa and Durham, into Westminster and Saint
Ouen's. There is light enough to mark the columns put for the first
time to their true Roman use, and to think how strange was the fate
which called up on this spot the happy arrangement which had entered
the brain of no earlier artist--the arrangement which, but a few years
later, was to be applied to another use in the basilica of the Lateran
and in Saint Paul without the walls. Yes, it is in the court of the
persecutor, the man who boasted that he had wiped out the Christian
superstition from the world, that we see the noblest forestalling of
the long arcades of the Christian basilica. It is with thoughts like
these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us where every outline is
clear and every detail is invisible, that we tread for the first time
the Court of Jovius--the columns with their arches on either side of
us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock the art of
those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel upon
earth. Nowhere within the compass of the Roman world do we find
ourselves more distinctly in the presence of one of the great minds of
the world's history; we see that, alike in politics and in art,
Diocletian breathed a living soul into a lifeless body. In the bitter
irony of the triumphant faith, his mausoleum has become a church,
his temple has become a baptistery, the great bell-tower rises proudly
over his own work; his immediate dwelling-place is broken down and
crowded with paltry houses; but the sea-front and the Golden Gate are
still there amid all disfigurements, and the great peristyle stands
almost unhurt, to remind us of the greatest advance that a single mind
ever made in the progress of the building art.
[Illustration: THE TOWER, SPALATO.]
At the present time the city into which the house of Diocletian has
grown is the largest and most growing town of the Dalmatian coast. It
has had to yield both spiritual and temporal precedence to Zara, but,
both in actual population and all that forms the life of a city,
Spalato greatly surpasses Zara and all its other neighbours. The
youngest of the Dalmatian towns, which could boast neither of any
mythical origin nor of any Imperial foundation, the city which, as it
were, became a city by mere chance, has outstripped the colonies of
Epidauros, of Corinth, and of Rome. The palace of Diocletian had but
one occupant; after the founder no Emperor had dwelled in it, unless
we hold that this was the villa near Salona where the deposed Emperor
Nepos was slain, during the patriciate of Odoacer. The forsaken palace
seems, while still almost new, to have become a cloth factory, where
women worked, and which therefore appears in the Notitia as a
Gynæcium. But when Salona was overthrown, the palace stood ready to
afford shelter to those who were driven from their homes. The palace,
in the widest sense of the word--for of course its vast circuit took
in quarters for soldiers and officials of various kinds, as well as
the rooms actually occupied by the Emperor--stood ready to become a
city. It was a _chester_ ready made, with its four streets, its four
gates, all but that towards the sea flanked with octagonal towers, and
with four greater square towers at the corners. To this day the
circuit of the walls is nearly perfect; and the space contained within
them must be as large as that contained within some of the oldest
_chesters_ in our own island. The walls, the towers, the gates, are
those of a city rather than of a house. Two of the gates, though their
towers are gone, are nearly perfect: the _porta aurea_, with its
graceful ornament; the _porta ferrea_ in its stern plainness,
strangely crowned with its small campanile of later days perched on
its top. Within the walls, besides the splendid buildings which still
remain, besides the broken-down walls and chambers which formed the
immediate dwelling-place of the founder, the main streets were lined
with massive arcades, large parts of which still remain. Diocletian,
in short, in building a house, had built a city. In the days of
Constantine Porphyrogenitus it was a [Greek: kastron]--Greek and
English had by his day alike borrowed the Latin name; but it was a
[Greek: kastron] which Diocletian had built as his own house, and
within which was his hall and palace. In his day the city bore the
name of Aspalathon, which he explains to mean [Greek: palation
mikron]. When the palace had thus become a common habitation of men,
it is not wonderful that all the more private buildings whose use had
passed away were broken down, disfigured, and put to mean uses. The
work of building over the site must have gone on from that day to
this. The view in Wheler shows several parts of the enclosure occupied
by ruins which are now covered with houses. The real wonder is that so
much has been spared and has survived to our own days. And we are
rather surprised to find Constantine saying that in his time the
greater part had been destroyed. For the parts which must always have
been the stateliest remain still. The great open court, the peristyle,
with its arcades, have become the public piazza of the town; the
mausoleum on one side of it and the temple on the other were preserved
and put to Christian uses. We say the mausoleum, for we fully accept
the suggestion made by Professor Glavinich, the curator of the museum
of Spalato, that the present _duomo_, traditionally called the temple
of Jupiter, was not a temple, but a mausoleum. These must have been
the great public buildings of the palace, and, with the addition of
the bell-tower, they remain the chief public buildings of the modern
city. But, though the ancient square of the palace remains wonderfully
perfect, the modern city, with its Venetian defences, its Venetian and
later buildings, has spread itself far beyond the walls of Diocletian.
But those walls have made the history of Spalato, and it is the great
buildings which stand within them that give Spalato its special place
in the history of architecture. In the face of them we hardly stop to
think of the remains of Venetian or even of earlier times. Yet both
within and without the palace walls, scraps of Venetian work may be
found which would attract the eye on any other spot, and hard by the
north-western tower of Diocletian there remains a small desecrated
church of the Byzantine type, which out of Spalato might be set down
as a treasure. But, as we stand beneath the arcades of Jovius, things
which would elsewhere be treasures seem as nothing. They, and the
other buildings which stand in artistic connexion with them, form an
epoch in the history of art, apart from the general history and
general impression of the city which they have at once created and
made famous.
SPALATO REVISITED.
1877--1881.
I thought it right to reprint the foregoing sketch of Spalato, the
record of my first visit there in 1875, exactly as it was first
written, with the change of two or three words only. It seemed worth
while to keep the first impressions of such a place as they were set
down at once after the first sight of it. Instead therefore of
recasting this piece, as I have done several of the others, I will
mention a few points on which later visits and further reading might
have led to some change in what I first wrote nearly on the spot.
Another paper of a strictly architectural character, headed
"Diocletian's Place in Architectural History," has been reprinted in
the third series of my Historical Essays, as an appendix to the essay
headed "The Illyrian Emperors and their Land."
First, with regard to the name of the place itself. I seem, when I
wrote my paper of first impressions, to have had no doubt as to the
received derivation from _Palatium_. That derivation is wonderfully
tempting, and it enables one to make an epigrammatic contrast between
the _Palatium_ of Rome and the _Palatium_ of Spalato, between the city
which became a house and the house which became a city. But the fact
remains the same, whatever may be the name. The city did become a
house, and the house did become a city, whether the two were called by
the same name or not. And I am now convinced, chiefly by Mr. Arthur
Evans, that the name of Spalato has nothing to do with _Palatium_. I
began to doubt rather early, as I did not see how the =s= could have
got into the name; in a Greek name the origin of the =s= would have
been plain enough, but it seemed to have no place in a Latin name.
And I was staggered by the form _Aspalato_ found as early as the
Notitia Imperii. Nothing goes for less than the etymologies of
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and anyhow it is hard to see how [Greek:
Aspalathon], the form which he uses, could mean [Greek: mikron
palation]. But, as I had nothing better to propose, I thought it
better, when I wrote the fuller paper which appears in the Historical
Essays, to say nothing about the matter either way. I need not stop to
dispute against the intrusive r in the vulgar form _Spalatro_, as both
Sir Gardner Wilkinson and Mr. Neale have done that before me. But it
is wonderful to see how early it got in. It is as old as the Ravenna
Geographer, who has three forms--_Spalathon_, _Spalathron_, and
_Spalatrum_. I need hardly say that the _r_ is unknown in the country,
unless perhaps now and then in the mouth of some one who thinks it
fine. So one has known people in England destroy etymology, by
sounding _Waltham_ as if it had a _thorn_, and _Bosham_ with the sound
of the German _sch_. I am now fully convinced that the name has
nothing to do with _Palatium_. It is plain that the oldest form that
we can find is _Aspalathum_, and I am inclined to accept the view of
Mr. Evans, who connects the name with _Aspalathus_, or perhaps with
[Greek: asphaltos]. But I must not venture myself in any quarter which
savours of botany or geology.
With the newer lights which I have made use of in Historical Essays, I
think I should no longer speak of Diocletian as "the great
persecutor." Galerius ought in fairness to take that name off his
shoulders. Mr. A. J. Mason has certainly proved thus much; and it is a
great comfort to think so in visiting Spalato. Nor should I have
spoken of him as a native of Salona. He was of Doclea, Dioclea,
however we are to spell it, within the present bounds of Tzernagora.
Those who at various times have spoken of Saint Alban as "protomartyr
_Anglorum_," and of King Lucius as becoming "a _Swiss_ bishop," might
also speak of Diocletian as a Montenegrin.
I was doubtless right in saying that no Emperor, strictly so called,
inhabited the Palace after Diocletian. In strictness indeed no Emperor
ever inhabited it at all, as Diocletian had ceased to be Emperor when
he went there. But I think that, at the time of my first visit, I had
not fully taken in the story of Nepos and his father Count Marcellian.
One is strongly tempted to think that, when Nepos was killed "haud
longe a Salonis, sua in villa," the place meant is the palace of
Spalato. On the other hand, we have the earlier entry in the Notitia,
which certainly looks as if the palace had already become a kind of
Imperial factory. But Nepos would hardly live in the same style as
Jovius, and the palace is quite big enough to lodge the deposed
Emperor and the work-women at the same time.
On the special importance of Spalato in the history of architecture I
have spoken in several places, specially in the paper in my Historical
Essays to which I have already referred. My main position is that, in
the palace at Spalato, after a series of approaches, many of which may
be seen in the building itself, Diocletian or his architect hit on the
happy device of making the arch spring directly from the capital of
the column. To merely classical critics this seems to mark the depth
of degradation into which art had fallen in Diocletian's day. To me it
seems to be the greatest step ever taken, the beginning of all later
forms of consistent arched architecture, Romanesque, Gothic, or any
other. The importance of the step is of course the same whoever took
it; and if the same feature can be shown in any building earlier than
Spalato, we must transfer our praises from, the designer of Spalato to
the designer of that building. Spalato would in that case lose
something of its strictly architectural interest; but that would be
all. But, as far as I know, no such rival has appeared. If the same
form really was used in the baths of Diocletian at Rome, that would
not be a rival building, but a case of the same mind working in the
same way in two places. And to establish an earlier use of the form,
it would be needful to show that it was deliberately employed in some
considerable building. There is nothing commoner in the history of
architecture than the casual and isolated appearance of some form,
which the designer had not so much chosen as stumbled on, long before
the time when it really came into use. I put in this caution, because
I know that there is a kind of feeble approach to the arrangement at
Spalato in one or two buildings at Pompeii. And, great as was the
advance at Spalato, it had, like many other cases of advance, its weak
side. The Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital were both of
them shifts to relieve, as it were, the light abacus of the Corinthian
capital from the weight which the arch laid upon it. The heavy abacus
of Pisa and Lucca was a better escape from this difficulty. Again, the
lightness of the columns used at Spalato and in the basilicas which
followed its model forbade the use of the vault, and condemned the
roofs of the basilicas to be among their poorest features. In the
peristyle itself of course no roof was needed, though to an eye used
to Rome and Ravenna it has so much the air of an unroofed basilica
that it is really hard to believe that it was always open. But, though
the basilican arrangement forbade the use of the vault, yet the step
taken at Spalato was not without its effect on later vaulted
buildings. When the vault came in again, as in the heavier forms of
the German Romanesque, men had learned that the arch and its pier,
whether that pier was a light column or a massive piece of wall, were
enough for all artistic purposes, without bringing in, as in the
classical Roman, purely ornamental features from a style which
followed another system of construction. I came to my belief in the
architectural importance of Spalato thirty years before I saw the
building itself, and, now that repeated visits have made the peristyle
of Diocletian as familiar to me as Wells cathedral, I admire and
approve just as much, though of course I cannot undertake to be quite
as enthusiastic now as I was on the evening when I first saw it.
When I was last at Spalato, a process was going on which always makes
one tremble. The peristyle and the inside of the mausoleum were
surrounded by scaffoldings. As for the mausoleum, it was perhaps a
mistake ever to make it into a church; but, as it has been made into a
church, the additions and changes which were needed for that purpose
have become part of the history, and ought not to be meddled with. It
must always have been nearly the smallest, and quite the darkest,
metropolitan church in Christendom; but that it is so is part of the
wonder of the place. And, if some of the details were restored in
plaster at the time of a certain famous royal visit, it seems hardly
worth while to knock them away, with the chance of knocking away some
of the genuine stone along with them. That royal visit is commemorated
in a tablet at the end of the peristyle, which professes great loyalty
to a personage described as "Franciscus Primus, Austriæ Imperator et
Dalmatiæ Rex." The man so labelled in Diocletian's own house had been
the last successor to Diocletian's empire.
In the changes which are being made in the peristyle, it is said that
this tablet was first taken down as being modern, and then set up
again, because official loyalty overrode all considerations of what
was old and what was new. But some care should be taken in removing
what is modern in such a place as Spalato. It is very well to get rid
of some mean excrescences; but, where the arches have been filled up
by Venetian buildings of respectable work, it would seem to be a great
mistake to open them, to say nothing of the chance that such opening
may endanger the columns and arches themselves. Though built up, they
are not so blocked as to hinder a full study of their details. Indeed
the building up, both of the arches of the peristyle and of the
heavier arches in the other parts of the palace, is really a part of
the history which should be preserved. It marks the distinctive
character of Spalato as the house which became a city.
That city, as it now stands, stretches, I need hardly say again, a
long way beyond the bounds of the ancient house. Yet one cannot
conceive Spalato without Diocletian's palace. It is something much
more than the chief object and ornament of Spalato, as this or that
building is the chief object and ornament of any other city. It is
more than the castle or monastery round which a city has often grown.
It is not merely that, but for the existence of the palace, the city
would never have come into being; the palace still is the city in a
sense in which we could hardly use those words of any other building
elsewhere. Yet there are things to see at Spalato besides the palace.
The museum is eminently a thing to see; but then it is within the
palace, and moreover, though it is locally placed at Spalato, it
belongs historically to Salona. There is a good deal of pretty
Venetian work scattered up and down, both within the walls of
Diocletian and without them. The piazza just outside the gate of iron,
where the traveller will most likely seek his breakfast, his coffee,
and his maraschino, would have some attractions in itself, if it did
not lie just outside the gate of iron. The eye naturally turns to the
gate, and to the little campanile perched on it; otherwise it might
very fairly rest on the Venetian _loggia_, with its columns and their
wide--yet not sprawling--pointed arches. It might rest none the less
because the building so strongly suggests that class of English
town-halls or market-houses of which I said something when speaking of
Udine. The octagonal tower too, and the remains of the Venetian
fortifications generally, are worth a glance. The difficulty is, in
the home of Jovius, to give even a glance to anything but the works of
Jovius.