This Tuscan, and more than Attic, quality--for there is something akin
to it in certain Greek archaic sculpture--is to be found, already
perfect and most essential, in the façades of the early mediæval
churches of Pistoia. _Is to be found_; because this quality, tense and
restrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itself
only to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking. The little
churches (there are four or five of them) belong to the style called
Pisan-Romanesque; and their fronts, carved arches, capitals, lintels,
and doorposts, are identical in plan, in all that the mind rapidly
inventories, with the fronts of the numerous contemporary churches of
Lucca. But a comparison with these will bring out most vividly the
special quality of the Pistoia churches. The Lucchese ones (of some of
which, before their restoration, Mr. Ruskin has left some marvellous
coloured drawings at Oxford) run to picturesqueness and even
something more; they do better in the picture than in the reality,
and weathering and defacement has done much for them. Whereas the
little churches at Pistoia, with less projection, less carving in the
round, few or no animal or clearly floral forms, and, as a rule,
pilasters or half-pillars instead of columns, must have been as
perfect the day they were finished; the subtle balancings and tensions
of lines and curves, the delicate fretting and inlaying of flat
surface pattern, having gained only, perhaps, in being drawn more
clearly by dust and damp upon a softer colour of marble. I have
mentioned these first, because their apparent insignificance--tiny
flat façades, with very little decoration--makes it in a way easier to
grasp the special delicate austerity of their beauty. But they are
humble offshoots, naturally, of two great and complex masterpieces,
and very modest sisters of a masterpiece only a degree less
marvellous: Pisa Cathedral, the Baptistery of Florence and San
Miniato. The wonderful nature of the most perfect of these three
buildings (and yet I hesitate to call it so, remembering the apse and
lateral gables of Pisa) can be the better understood that, standing
before the Baptistery of Florence, one has by its side Giotto's very
beautiful belfry. Looking at them turn about, one finds that the
Gothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile makes the windows,
pillars and cornices of the Baptistery seem at first very flat and
uninteresting. But after the first time, and once that sense of
flatness overcome, it is impossible to revert to the belfry with the
same satisfaction. The eye and mind return to the greater perfection
of the Baptistery; by an odd paradox there is deeper feeling in those
apparently so slight and superficial carvings, those lintels and
fluted columns of green marble which scarcely cast a shadow on their
ivory-tinted wall. The Tuscan quality of these buildings is the better
appreciated when we take in the fact that their architectural items
had long existed, not merely in the Romanesque, but in the Byzantine
and late Roman. The series of temple-shaped windows on the outside of
the Florence Baptistery and of San Miniato, has, for instance, its
original in the Baptistery of Ravenna and the arch at Verona. What the
Tuscans have done is to perfect the inner and subtler proportions, to
restrain and accentuate, to phrase (in musical language) every detail
of execution. By an accident of artistic evolution, this style of
architecture, rather dully elaborated by a worn-out civilisation, has
had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung
people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we
be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in
a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity),
that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called
_spirit_: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle
Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and
details: this spiritual quality affects us in their carved and inlaid
marbles, their fluted pilasters and undercut capitals, as a result of
actual work of eye and of chisel: they altered the expression by
altering the stone, even as the frosts and August suns and trickling
water had determined the expression, by altering the actual surface,
of their lovely austere hills.