The Vestibule, 349
* * * * *
APPENDIX.
1. Foundation of Venice, 359
2. Power of the Doges, 360
3. Serrar del Consiglio, 360
4. S. Pietro di Castello, 361
5. Papal Power in Venice, 362
6. Renaissance Ornament, 369
7. Varieties of the Orders, 370
8. The Northern Energy, 371
9. Wooden Churches of the North, 381
10. Church of Alexandria, 381
11. Renaissance Landscape, 381
12. Romanist Modern Art, 384
13. Mr. Fergusson's System, 388
14. Divisions of Humanity, 394
15. Instinctive Judgments, 399
16. Strength of Shafts, 402
17. Answer to Mr. Garbett, 403
18. Early English Capitals, 411
19. Tombs near St. Anastasia, 412
20. Shafts of the Ducal Palace, 413
21. Ancient Representations of Water, 417
22. Arabian Ornamentation, 429
23. Varieties of Chamfer, 429
24. Renaissance Bases, 431
25. Romanist Decoration of Bases, 432
LIST OF PLATES.
Facing Page
Plate 1. Wall Veil Decoration, Ca' Trevisan and Ca' Dario, 13
" 2. Plans of Piers, 100
" 3. Arch Masonry, 134
" 4. Arch Masonry, 137
" 5. Arch Masonry, Bruletto of Como, 141
" 6. Types of Towers, 207
" 7. Abstracts Lines, 222
" 8. Decorations by Disks, Ca' Badoari, 241
" 9. Edge Decoration, 268
" 10. Profiles of Bases, 283
" 11. Plans of Bases, 288
" 12. Decorations of Bases, 289
" 13. Wall Veil Decorations, 295
" 14. Spandril Decorations, Ducal Palace, 298
" 15. Cornice Profiles, 306
" 16. Cornice Decorations, 311
" 17. Capitals--Concave, 323
" 18. Capitals--Convex, 327
" 19. Archivolt Decoration, Verona, 333
" 20. Wall Veil Decoration, Ca' Trevisan, 369
" 21. Wall Veil Decoration, San Michele, Lucca, 378
THE STONES OF VENICE.
CHAPTER I.
THE QUARRY.
§ I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three
thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the
thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers
only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which
inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through
prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.
The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets
of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a
lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for
the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we
forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and
the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."
Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in
endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final
period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so
quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt,
as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which
was the City, and which the Shadow.
I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like
passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.
§ II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which
might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange
and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless
chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred with
brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the
surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which
we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their
results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear
upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that
usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in
the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a
clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian
character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest which the
true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from
the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.
§ III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a
period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days
of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe
examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in
the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part,
to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.
The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from
the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the
Rialto,[1] to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of
Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this
period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six[2] years were passed in a nominal
subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an
agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been
entrusted to tribunes,[3] chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the
principal islands. For six hundred years,[4] during which the power of
Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective
monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much
independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority
gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its
prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable
magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a
king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the
fruits of her former energies, consumed them,--and expired.
§ IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian
state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred,
the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what
was called the "Serrar del Consiglio;" that is to say, the final and
absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the
establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of
the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the
doge on the other.
Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most
interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order
and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and
noblest man whom they could find among them,[5] called their Doge or
Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself
around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an
aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and
wealth of some among the families of the fugitives from the older
Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into
a separate body.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements,
and the circumstances which determined her character and position among
European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated,
we find the names of all her hero princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo
Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
§ V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most
eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418;[6] the _visible_ commencement from that of another
of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who
expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with
pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were
made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace,
significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at
Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first of
the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk: in the same
year was established the Inquisition of State,[7] and from this period
her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it
is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror
to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the league of Cambrai marks
the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the
Venetian power;[8] the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of
the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence
of the diminution of her internal strength.
§ VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the
establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the
diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question
at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or
determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple
question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of
individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the
Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy
itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national
enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of
Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction
of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a
people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long
disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live
nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for
three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their
call was heard.
§ VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at many
periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the
man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king,
sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her:
the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what
powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made
masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress,
impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from
the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into
prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to
sign covenant with Death.[9]
§ VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to be fixed
throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double interest to
every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the evidence
which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both
frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political prosperity
was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion.
I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I
wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all
Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its
deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or
fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to
last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial
interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or
enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,
but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her
conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten;
and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be
reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her
princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in
which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its
devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from
its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement
of her own private interests, at once broke her faith[10] and betrayed
her religion.
§ IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall be
struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual
feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they
could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit
of assigning to religion a direct influence over all _his own_ actions,
and all the affairs of _his own_ daily life, is remarkable in every
great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are
instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches
the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course
where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely
trust that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to
trace any more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of
Alexander III. against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by
the character of their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked
by the insolence of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only
in her hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency
whenever she has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or
when they are sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the
entire subjection of private piety to national policy is not only
remarkable throughout the almost endless series of treacheries and
tyrannies by which her empire was enlarged and maintained, but
symbolised by a very singular circumstance in the building of the city
itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in which its cathedral was
not the principal feature. But the principal church in Venice was the
chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and called the "Chiesa
Ducale." The patriarchal church,[11] inconsiderable in size and mean in
decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its
name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of
travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of
remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal
chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to
the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast
organization of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and
countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the
most wise, of all the princes of Venice,[12] who now rests beneath the
roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by
the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his
tomb.
§ X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we
have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual
religion characterising the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct
even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a
simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which
a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that
religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his
conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy
serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and
a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate
motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this
spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with
its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which
it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to
demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry
presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping
short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence
national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with
several characteristics of the temper of our present English
legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious
interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of
my present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment
of which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be
able to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.
§ XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the policy
of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a Romanist
would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the
magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the
temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid
survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama
to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in
the portico of St. Mark's,[13] the central expression in most men's
thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is
true that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of
her prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service
thus rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years
more than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement
V., which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to
Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the
great tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the
doge or the ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo
blotted out the shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of
ecclesiastics from all share in the councils of Venice became an
enduring mark of her knowledge of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and
of her defiance of it.
To this exclusion of Papal influence from her councils, the Romanist
will attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success.[14]
The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy
of the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects
that the English legislature sacrificed their principles to expose
themselves to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed
theirs to avoid.
§ XII. One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the Venetian
government, the singular unity of the families composing it,--unity far
from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when contrasted with the
fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the restless successions of
families and parties in power, which fill the annals of the other states
of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be ended by the dagger, or
enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of law, could not but be
anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was subjected to so severe a
restraint: it is much that jealousy appears usually unmingled with
illegitimate ambition, and that, for every instance in which private
passion sought its gratification through public danger, there are a
thousand in which it was sacrificed to the public advantage. Venice may
well call upon us to note with reverence, that of all the towers which
are still seen rising like a branchless forest from her islands, there
is but one whose office was other than that of summoning to prayer, and
that one was a watch-tower only: from first to last, while the palaces
of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of
rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the
bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and
her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes
suspended on the leaves of lilies.[15]
§ XIII. These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief general
interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I would next
endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which the
testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the
arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true connexion
with the history of the state.
1st. Receive the witness of Painting.
It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice
as far back as 1418.
Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini,
and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the
sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith
animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of
Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or
sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His
larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial
rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made
subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the
Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connexion
between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who
surround her.
Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and
Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the
school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their
artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own
natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up
in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the
vital religion of Venice had expired.
§ XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward observance
was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted, in
almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St.
Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the
Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the ducal
palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a
curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of
Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye
is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice
was in her wars, not in her worship.
The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of
Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects
which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the
principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute
subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or
portraiture.
The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of
Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century
had taken away the religious heart of Venice.
§ XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of Architecture
will be our task through many a page to come; but I must here give a
general idea of its heads.
Philippe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, says,--
"Chascun me feit seoir au meillieu de ces deux ambassadeurs qui est
l'honneur d'Italie que d'estre au meillieu; et me menerent au long de la
grant rue, qu'ilz appellent le Canal Grant, et est bien large. Les
gallees y passent à travers et y ay ven navire de quatre cens tonneaux
ou plus pres des maisons: et est la plus belle rue que je croy qui soit
en tout le monde, et la mieulx maisonnee, et va le long de la ville. Les
maisons sont fort grandes et haultes, et de bonne pierre, et les
anciennes toutes painctes; les aultres faictes depuis cent ans: toutes
ont le devant de marbre blanc, qui leur vient d'Istrie, à cent mils de
là, et encores maincte grant piece de porphire et de sarpentine sur le
devant.... C'est la plus triumphante cité que j'aye jamais vene et qui
plus faict d'honneur à ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus
saigement se gouverne, et où le service de Dieu est le plus
sollempnellement faict: et encores qu'il y peust bien avoir d'aultres
faultes, si je croy que Dieu les a en ayde pour la reverence qu'ilz
portent au service de l'Eglise."[16]
[Illustration: Plate I. Wall-Veil-Decoration.
CA'TREVISAN
CA'DARIO.]
§ XVI. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons. Observe,
first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of Venice: of
which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with some
glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real life
had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression
instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder
palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have
their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away,
and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their
fronts."
On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces
which so struck the French ambassador.[17] He was right in his notice of
the distinction. There had indeed come a change over Venetian
architecture in the fifteenth century; and a change of some importance
to us moderns: we English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe
in general owes to it the utter degradation or destruction of her
schools of architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may
understand this, it is necessary that he should have some general idea
of the connexion of the architecture of Venice with that of the rest of
Europe, from its origin forwards.
§ XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is derived
from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the East. The
history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the various modes
and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once for all: if you
hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of
successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric
and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque,
massy-capitaled buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you
can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English,
French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the
shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch. The
shaft and arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture, are from
the race of Japheth: the spirituality and sanctity of it from Ismael,
Abraham, and Shem.
§ XVIII. There is high probability that the Greek received his shaft
system from Egypt; but I do not care to keep this earlier derivation in
the mind of the reader. It is only necessary that he should be able to
refer to a fixed point of origin, when the form of the shaft was first
perfected. But it may be incidentally observed, that if the Greeks did
indeed receive their Doric from Egypt, then the three families of the
earth have each contributed their part to its noblest architecture: and
Ham, the servant of the others, furnishes the sustaining or bearing
member, the shaft; Japheth the arch; Shem the spiritualisation of both.
§ XIX. I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the
roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five
orders; but there are only two real orders, and there never can be any
more until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex:
those are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the
other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,
Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional
form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the centre or root of
both. All other orders are varieties of those, or phantasms and
grotesques altogether indefinite in number and species.[18]
§ XX. This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was clumsily
copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they
begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized
upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it; invented a
new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the
Roman empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest at hand,
to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman Christian
architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of the time,
very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many respects
ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of imagination,
which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores of the
Bosphorus and the Ægean and the Adriatic Sea, and then gradually, as the
people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes Corpse-light. The
architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange, gilded, and embalmed
repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so would have remained
for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has been undisturbed.[19]
But rough wakening was ordained for it.
§ XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into two
great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other at
Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque, properly
so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative perfection by
Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But I wish the
reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art together in
his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the same; that is to
say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of the art of old Rome
itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the fountain-head, and
entrusted always to the best workmen who could be found--Latins in Italy
and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may be ranged under the
general term of Christian Romanesque, an architecture which had lost the
refinement of Pagan art in the degradation of the empire, but which was
elevated by Christianity to higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek
workmen endowed with brighter forms. And this art the reader may
conceive as extending in its various branches over all the central
provinces of the empire, taking aspects more or less refined, according
to its proximity to the seats of government; dependent for all its power
on the vigor and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as
that vigor and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking
into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed and
incapable of advance or change.
§ XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in
Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by
inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of
this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;
and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art
was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and
borrowed art was organising itself into strength and consistency. The
reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as
broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately
languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the
imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early
organisation, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely
nominal extent.
§ XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible
of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the
Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated
Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they mingle,
without materially affecting its intellectual character. But others,
both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back to the
beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice creeks of the
North Sea on the other. On the north and west the influence was of the
Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations, pre-eminent
above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind on either
side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected light
gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had done
their work, and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a
glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons, and the
fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over its golden
paralysis.
§ XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the
enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was
to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The
Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.[20] The Arab
banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and
proclaimed from their minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they
came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava
stream: they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and
the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead
water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the
Roman wreck, is VENICE.
The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of
the world.
§ XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between
the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.
§ XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to mark
the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures were
developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the
distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian
Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and
well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;
mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered
with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of
sacred symbols.
The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the
Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly
introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts
and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and
writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,
and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace
it: this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates
it on features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines
of color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the
dome, and adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.
§ XXVII. The changes effected by the Lombard are more curious still, for
they are in the anatomy of the building, more than its decoration. The
Lombard architecture represents, as I said, the whole of that of the
northern barbaric nations. And this I believe was, at first, an
imitation in wood of the Christian Roman churches or basilicas. Without
staying to examine the whole structure of a basilica, the reader will
easily understand thus much of it: that it had a nave and two aisles,
the nave much higher than the aisles; that the nave was separated from
the aisles by rows of shafts, which supported, above, large spaces of
flat or dead wall, rising above the aisles, and forming the upper part
of the nave, now called the clerestory, which had a gabled wooden roof.
These high dead walls were, in Roman work, built of stone; but in the
wooden work of the North, they must necessarily have been made of
horizontal boards or timbers attached to uprights on the top of the nave
pillars, which were themselves also of wood.[21] Now, these uprights
were necessarily thicker than the rest of the timbers, and formed
vertical square pilasters above the nave piers. As Christianity extended
and civilisation increased, these wooden structures were changed into
stone; but they were literally petrified, retaining the form which had
been made necessary by their being of wood. The upright pilaster above
the nave pier remains in the stone edifice, and is the first form of the
great distinctive feature of Northern architecture--the vaulting shaft.
In that form the Lombards brought it into Italy, in the seventh century,
and it remains to this day in St. Ambrogio of Milan, and St. Michele of
Pavia.
§ XXVIII. When the vaulting shaft was introduced in the clerestory
walls, additional members were added for its support to the nave piers.
Perhaps two or three pine trunks, used for a single pillar, gave the
first idea of the grouped shaft. Be that as it may, the arrangement of
the nave pier in the form of a cross accompanies the superimposition of
the vaulting shaft; together with corresponding grouping of minor shafts
in doorways and apertures of windows. Thus, the whole body of the
Northern architecture, represented by that of the Lombards, may be
described as rough but majestic work, round-arched, with grouped shafts,
added vaulting shafts, and endless imagery of active life and fantastic
superstitions.
§ XXIX. The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one of the
Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but
without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of
their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it
ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of
Gothic architecture is the history of the refinement and
spiritualisation of Northern work under its influence. The noblest
buildings of the world, the Pisan-Romanesque, Tuscan (Giottesque)
Gothic, and Veronese Gothic, are those of the Lombard schools
themselves, under its close and direct influence; the various Gothics of
the North are the original forms of the architecture which the Lombards
brought into Italy, changing under the less direct influence of the
Arab.
§ XXX. Understanding thus much of the formation of the great European
styles, we shall have no difficulty in tracing the succession of
architectures in Venice herself. From what I said of the central
character of Venetian art, the reader is not, of course, to conclude
that the Roman, Northern, and Arabian elements met together and
contended for the mastery at the same period. The earliest element was
the pure Christian Roman; but few, if any, remains of this art exist at
Venice; for the present city was in the earliest times only one of many
settlements formed on the chain of marshy islands which extend from the
mouths of the Isonzo to those of the Adige, and it was not until the
beginning of the ninth century that it became the seat of government;
while the cathedral of Torcello, though Christian Roman in general form,
was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and shows evidence of Byzantine
workmanship in many of its details. This cathedral, however, with the
church of Santa Fosca at Torcello, San Giacomo di Rialto at Venice, and
the crypt of St. Mark's, forms a distinct group of buildings, in which
the Byzantine influence is exceedingly slight; and which is probably
very sufficiently representative of the earliest architecture on the
islands.
§ XXXI. The Ducal residence was removed to Venice in 809, and the body
of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria twenty years later. The first
church of St. Mark's was, doubtless, built in imitation of that
destroyed at Alexandria, and from which the relics of the saint had been
obtained. During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the
architecture of Venice seems to have been formed on the same model, and
is almost identical with that of Cairo under the caliphs,[22] it being
quite immaterial whether the reader chooses to call both Byzantine or
both Arabic; the workmen being certainly Byzantine, but forced to the
invention of new forms by their Arabian masters, and bringing these
forms into use in whatever other parts of the world they were employed.
To this first manner of Venetian architecture, together with vestiges as
remain of the Christian Roman, I shall devote the first division of the
following inquiry. The examples remaining of it consist of three noble
churches (those of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part of St.
Mark's), and about ten or twelve fragments of palaces.
§ XXXII. To this style succeeds a transitional one, of a character much
more distinctly Arabian: the shafts become more slender, and the arches
consistently pointed, instead of round; certain other changes, not to be
enumerated in a sentence, taking place in the capitals and mouldings.
This style is almost exclusively secular. It was natural for the
Venetians to imitate the beautiful details of the Arabian
dwelling-house, while they would with reluctance adopt those of the
mosque for Christian churches.
I have not succeeded in fixing limiting dates for this style. It appears
in part contemporary with the Byzantine manner, but outlives it. Its
position is, however, fixed by the central date, 1180, that of the
elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, whose capitals are the
two most important pieces of detail in this transitional style in
Venice. Examples of its application to domestic buildings exist in
almost every street of the city, and will form the subject of the second
division of the following essay.
§ XXXIII. The Venetians were always ready to receive lessons in art from
their enemies (else had there been no Arab work in Venice). But their
especial dread and hatred of the Lombards appears to have long prevented
them from receiving the influence of the art which that people had
introduced on the mainland of Italy. Nevertheless, during the practice
of the two styles above distinguished, a peculiar and very primitive
condition of pointed Gothic had arisen in ecclesiastical architecture.
It appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab forms, which
were attaining perfection upon the continent, and would probably, if
left to itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab school, with
which it had from the first so close a fellowship, that it will be found
difficult to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those which seem to
have been built under this early Gothic influence. The churches of San
Giacopo dell'Orio, San Giovanni in Bragora, the Carmine, and one or two
more, furnish the only important examples of it. But, in the thirteenth
century, the Franciscans and Dominicans introduced from the continent
their morality and their architecture, already a distinct Gothic,
curiously developed from Lombardic and Northern (German?) forms; and the
influence of the principles exhibited in the vast churches of St. Paul
and the Frari began rapidly to affect the Venetian-Arab school. Still
the two systems never became united; the Venetian policy repressed the
power of the church, and the Venetian artists resisted its example; and
thenceforward the architecture of the city becomes divided into
ecclesiastical and civil: the one an ungraceful yet powerful form of the
Western Gothic, common to the whole peninsula, and only showing Venetian
sympathies in the adoption of certain characteristic mouldings; the
other a rich, luxuriant, and entirely original Gothic, formed from the
Venetian-Arab by the influence of the Dominican and Franciscan
architecture, and especially by the engrafting upon the Arab forms of
the most novel feature of the Franciscan work, its traceries. These
various forms of Gothic, the _distinctive_ architecture of Venice,
chiefly represented by the churches of St. John and Paul, the Frari, and
San Stefano, on the ecclesiastical side, and by the Ducal palace, and
the other principal Gothic palaces, on the secular side, will be the
subject of the third division of the essay.
§ XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic) style of
the Venetian work is centralised by the date 1180, and is transformed
gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from the middle
of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century; that is to
say, over the precise period which I have described as the central epoch
of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year 1418; Foscari
became doge five years later, and in his reign the first marked signs
appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe de Commynes
notices as above, the change to which London owes St. Paul's, Rome St.
Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be their
noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of every art she has
since practised.
§ XXXV. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality in
existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps," chap.
ii.) All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted
at once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of
extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a
strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the
mainland into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and
the Cathedral of Como (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian
Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della
Carta and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all
architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked
the state of religion over all Europe,--the peculiar degradation of the
Romanist superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which
brought about the Reformation.
§ XXXVI. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of
adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France
and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its
destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the
heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he
injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one
of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. It
may be a serious question how far the Pausing of the Reformation has
been a consequence of this error.
The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This
rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a
return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for
Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In
Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in
Architecture by Sansovino and Palladio.
§ XXXVII. Instant degradation followed in every direction,--a flood of
folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted
into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of
Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of
men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity,
nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups
upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets
with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused
intellect; the base school of landscape[23] gradually usurps the place
of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,--the
Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of
Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps,
and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation
of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus Christianity and
morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together into
one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in
France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism
from severer penalty) in the time of George II.
§ XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything
towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape
painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is
as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi,
and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no
serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their
works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very
slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor
mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.
Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the
magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by
men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino,
Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its
influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons
are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number
regard it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with
architecture, and have at some time of their lives serious business with
it. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three
hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a
nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous
building. Nor is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which
we have to regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in
it partly the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of
modern times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one
destroying the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our
schools and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass
through them.
Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most
corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre
of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline
the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of
the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in
the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation,
and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude
than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the
grave.
§ XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that effectual
blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy
its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else.
This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay. I
shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader with
successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of the
earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features with
those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and pause, in
the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as I have
made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon two
distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by
particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the
builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be
bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite
in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of
the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may
be immediately useful in fixing in the readers mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.
§ XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above attached
to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The tomb of
that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of the same
general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the period, and it
is one of the last which retains it. The classical element enters
largely into its details, but the feeling of the whole is as yet
unaffected. Like all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is a
sarcophagus with a recumbent figure above, and this figure is a faithful
but tender portrait, wrought as far as it can be without painfulness, of
the doge as he lay in death. He wears his ducal robe and bonnet--his
head is laid slightly aside upon his pillow--his hands are simply
crossed as they fall. The face is emaciated, the features large, but so
pure and lordly in their natural chiselling, that they must have looked
like marble even in their animation. They are deeply worn away by
thought and death; the veins on the temples branched and starting; the
skin gathered in sharp folds; the brow high-arched and shaggy; the
eye-ball magnificently large; the curve of the lips just veiled by the
light mustache at the side; the beard short, double, and sharp-pointed:
all noble and quiet; the white sepulchral dust marking like light the
stern angles of the cheek and brow.
This tomb was sculptured in 1424, and is thus described by one of the
most intelligent of the recent writers who represent the popular feeling
respecting Venetian art.
"Of the Italian school is also the rich but ugly (ricco ma non bel)
sarcophagus in which repose the ashes of Tomaso Mocenigo. It may be
called one of the last links which connect the declining art of the
Middle Ages with that of the Renaissance, which was in its rise. We
will not stay to particularise the defects of each of the seven
figures of the front and sides, which represent the cardinal and
theological virtues; nor will we make any remarks upon those which
stand in the niches above the pavilion, because we consider them
unworthy both of the age and reputation of the Florentine school,
which was then with reason considered the most notable in Italy."[24]
It is well, indeed, not to pause over these defects; but it might have
been better to have paused a moment beside that noble image of a king's
mortality.
§ XLI. In the choir of the same church, St. Giov. and Paolo, is another
tomb, that of the Doge Andrea Vendramin. This doge died in 1478, after a
short reign of two years, the most disastrous in the annals of Venice.
He died of a pestilence which followed the ravage of the Turks, carried
to the shores of the lagoons. He died, leaving Venice disgraced by sea
and land, with the smoke of hostile devastation rising in the blue
distances of Friuli; and there was raised to him the most costly tomb
ever bestowed on her monarchs.
§ XLII. If the writer above quoted was cold beside the statue of one of
the fathers of his country, he atones for it by his eloquence beside the
tomb of the Vendramin. I must not spoil the force of Italian superlative
by translation.
"Quando si guarda a quella corretta eleganza di profili e di
proporzioni, a quella squisitezza d'ornamenti, a quel certo sapore
antico che senza ombra d'imitazione traspare da tutta l'opera"--&c.
"Sopra ornatissimo zoccolo fornito di squisiti intagli s'alza uno
stylobate"--&c. "Sotto le colonne, il predetto stilobate si muta
leggiadramente in piedistallo, poi con bella novità di pensiero e di
effetto va coronato da un fregio il più gentile che veder si
possa"--&c. "Non puossi lasciar senza un cenno l'_arca dove_ sta
chiuso il doge; capo lavoro di pensiero e di esecuzione," &c.
There are two pages and a half of closely printed praise, of which the
above specimens may suffice; but there is not a word of the statue of the
dead from beginning to end. I am myself in the habit of considering this
rather an important part of a tomb, and I was especially interested in it
here, because Selvatico only echoes the praise of thousands. It is
unanimously declared the chef d'oeuvre of Renaissance sepulchral work,
and pronounced by Cicognara (also quoted by Selvatico)
"Il vertice a cui l'arti Veneziane si spinsero col ministero del
scalpello,"--"The very culminating point to which the Venetian arts
attained by ministry of the chisel."
To this culminating point, therefore, covered with dust and cobwebs, I
attained, as I did to every tomb of importance in Venice, by the
ministry of such ancient ladders as were to be found in the sacristan's
keeping. I was struck at first by the excessive awkwardness and want of
feeling in the fall of the hand towards the spectator, for it is thrown
off the middle of the body in order to show its fine cutting. Now the
Mocenigo hand, severe and even stiff in its articulations, has its veins
finely drawn, its sculptor having justly felt that the delicacy of the
veining expresses alike dignity and age and birth. The Vendramin hand is
far more laboriously cut, but its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes
us feel that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for
it has been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the
joints. Such as the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought
it had been broken off, but, on clearing away the dust, I saw the
wretched effigy had only _one_ hand, and was a mere block on the inner
side. The face, heavy and disagreeable in its features, is made
monstrous by its semi-sculpture. One side of the forehead is wrinkled
elaborately, the other left smooth; one side only of the doge's cap is
chased; one cheek only is finished, and the other blocked out and
distorted besides; finally, the ermine robe, which is elaborately
imitated to its utmost lock of hair and of ground hair on the one side,
is blocked out only on the other: it having been supposed throughout the
work that the effigy was only to be seen from below, and from one side.
§ XLIII. It was indeed to be so seen by nearly every one; and I do not
blame--I should, on the contrary, have praised--the sculptor for
regulating his treatment of it by its position; if that treatment had
not involved, first, dishonesty, in giving only half a face, a
monstrous mask, when we demanded true portraiture of the dead; and,
secondly, such utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an
extreme of intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his
breast, could have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old
man's countenance--unmajestic once, indeed, but at least sanctified by
the solemnities of death--could have stayed his hand, as he reached the
bend of the grey forehead, and measured out the last veins of it at so
much the zecchin?
I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much
talent should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this
base and senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation
of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a
pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called
chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling
on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea
by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.
But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This
lying monument to a dishonored doge, this culminating pride of the
Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in
its testimony to the character of its sculptor. _He was banished from
Venice for forgery_ in 1487.[25]
§ XLIV. I have more to say about this convict's work hereafter; but I
pass at present, to the second, slighter, but yet more interesting piece
of evidence, which I promised.
The ducal palace has two principal façades; one towards the sea, the
other towards the Piazzetta. The seaward side, and, as far as the
seventh main arch inclusive, the Piazzetta side, is work of the early
part of the fourteenth century, some of it perhaps even earlier; while
the rest of the Piazzetta side is of the fifteenth. The difference in
age has been gravely disputed by the Venetian antiquaries, who have
examined many documents on the subject, and quoted some which they never
examined. I have myself collated most of the written documents, and one
document more, to which the Venetian antiquaries never thought of
referring,--the masonry of the palace itself.
§ XLV. That masonry changes at the centre of the eighth arch from the
sea angle on the Piazzetta side. It has been of comparatively small
stones up to that point; the fifteenth century work instantly begins
with larger stones, "brought from Istria, a hundred miles away."[26] The
ninth shaft from the sea in the lower arcade, and the seventeenth, which
is above it, in the upper arcade, commence the series of fifteenth
century shafts. These two are somewhat thicker than the others, and
carry the party-wall of the Sala del Scrutinio. Now observe, reader. The
face of the palace, from this point to the Porta della Carta, was built
at the instance of that noble Doge Mocenigo beside whose tomb you have
been standing; at his instance, and in the beginning of the reign of his
successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This is not disputed; it
is only disputed that the sea façade is earlier; of which, however, the
proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the
masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that
in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the
costumes of the figures introduced in the sea façade being purely
Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena Chapel at
Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is Renaissance-Classic:
and the lions' heads between the arches change at the same point. And
there are a multitude of other evidences in the statues of the angels,
with which I shall not at present trouble the reader.
§ XLVI. Now, the architect who built under Foscari, in 1424 (remember my
date for the decline of Venice, 1418), was obliged to follow the
principal forms of the older palace. But he had not the wit to invent
new capitals in the same style; he therefore clumsily copied the old
ones. The palace has seventeen main arches on the sea façade, eighteen
on the Piazzetta side, which in all are of course carried by thirty-six
pillars; and these pillars I shall always number from right to left,
from the angle of the palace at the Ponte della Paglia to that next the
Porta della Carta. I number them in this succession, because I thus have
the earliest shafts first numbered. So counted, the 1st, the 18th, and
the 36th, are the great supports of the angles of the palace; and the
first of the fifteenth century series, being, as above stated, the 9th
from the sea on the Piazzetta side, is the 26th of the entire series,
and will always in future be so numbered, so that all numbers above
twenty-six indicate fifteenth century work, and all below it, fourteenth
century, with some exceptional cases of restoration.
Then the copied capitals are: the 28th, copied from the 7th; the 29th,
from the 9th; the 30th, from the 10th; the 31st, from the 8th; the 33rd,
from the 12th; and the 34th, from the 11th; the others being dull
inventions of the 15th century, except the 36th, which is very nobly
designed.
§ XLVII. The capitals thus selected from the earlier portion of the
palace for imitation, together with the rest, will be accurately
described hereafter; the point I have here to notice is in the copy of
the ninth capital, which was decorated (being, like the rest, octagonal)
with figures of the eight Virtues:--Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice,
Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it
Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are
somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain
every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples
(perhaps loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his
arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears
open a lion's jaws; Faith lays her hand on her breast, as she beholds
the Cross; and Hope is praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging
from sunbeams--the hand of God (according to that of Revelations, "The
Lord God giveth them light"); and the inscription above is, "Spes optima
in Deo."
§ XLVIII. This design, then, is, rudely and with imperfect chiselling,
imitated by the fifteenth century workmen: the Virtues have lost their
hard features and living expression; they have now all got Roman noses,
and have had their hair curled. Their actions and emblems are, however,
preserved until we come to Hope: she is still praying, but she is
praying to the sun only: _The hand of God is gone._
Is not this a curious and striking type of the spirit which had then
become dominant in the world, forgetting to see God's hand in the light
He gave; so that in the issue, when that light opened into the
Reformation, on the one side, and into full knowledge of ancient
literature on the other, the one was arrested and the other perverted?
§ XLIX. Such is the nature of the accidental evidence on which I shall
depend for the proof of the inferiority of character in the Renaissance
workmen. But the proof of the inferiority of the work itself is not so
easy, for in this I have to appeal to judgments which the Renaissance
work has itself distorted. I felt this difficulty very forcibly as I
read a slight review of my former work, "The Seven Lamps," in "The
Architect:" the writer noticed my constant praise of St. Mark's: "Mr.
Ruskin thinks it a very beautiful building! We," said the Architect,
"think it a very ugly building." I was not surprised at the difference
of opinion, but at the thing being considered so completely a subject of
opinion. My opponents in matters of painting always assume that there
_is_ such a thing as a law of right, and that I do not understand it:
but my architectural adversaries appeal to no law, they simply set their
opinion against mine; and indeed there is no law at present to which
either they or I can appeal. No man can speak with rational decision of
the merits or demerits of buildings: he may with obstinacy; he may with
resolved adherence to previous prejudices; but never as if the matter
could be otherwise decided than by a majority of votes, or pertinacity
of partizanship. I had always, however, a clear conviction that there
_was_ a law in this matter: that good architecture might be indisputably
discerned and divided from the bad; that the opposition in their very
nature and essence was clearly visible; and that we were all of us just
as unwise in disputing about the matter without reference to principle,
as we should be for debating about the genuineness of a coin, without
ringing it. I felt also assured that this law must be universal if it
were conclusive; that it must enable us to reject all foolish and base
work, and to accept all noble and wise work, without reference to style
or national feeling; that it must sanction the design of all truly great
nations and times, Gothic or Greek or Arab; that it must cast off and
reprobate the design of all foolish nations and times, Chinese or
Mexican, or modern European: and that it must be easily applicable to
all possible architectural inventions of human mind. I set myself,
therefore, to establish such a law, in full belief that men are
intended, without excessive difficulty, and by use of their general
common sense, to know good things from bad; and that it is only because
they will not be at the pains required for the discernment, that the
world is so widely encumbered with forgeries and basenesses. I found the
work simpler than I had hoped; the reasonable things ranged themselves
in the order I required, and the foolish things fell aside, and took
themselves away so soon as they were looked in the face. I had then,
with respect to Venetian architecture, the choice, either to establish
each division of law in a separate form, as I came to the features with
which it was concerned, or else to ask the reader's patience, while I
followed out the general inquiry first, and determined with him a code
of right and wrong, to which we might together make retrospective
appeal. I thought this the best, though perhaps the dullest way; and in
these first following pages I have therefore endeavored to arrange those
foundations of criticism, on which I shall rest in my account of
Venetian architecture, in a form clear and simple enough to be
intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture before. To
those who have, much of what is stated in them will be well known or
self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a simplicity on which
the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From that which appears a
mere truism when first stated, they will find very singular consequences
sometimes following,--consequences altogether unexpected, and of
considerable importance; I will not pause here to dwell on their
importance, nor on that of the thing itself to be done; for I believe
most readers will at once admit the value of a criterion of right and
wrong in so practical and costly an art as architecture, and will be apt
rather to doubt the possibility of its attainment than dispute its
usefulness if attained. I invite them, therefore, to a fair trial, being
certain that even if I should fail in my main purpose, and be unable to
induce in my reader the confidence of judgment I desire, I shall at
least receive his thanks for the suggestion of consistent reasons, which
may determine hesitating choice, or justify involuntary preference. And
if I should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of Venice
touchstones, and detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more
subtle than ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal; and if thus
I am enabled to show the baseness of the schools of architecture and
nearly every other art, which have for three centuries been predominant
in Europe, I believe the result of the inquiry may be serviceable for
proof of a more vital truth than any at which I have hitherto hinted.
For observe: I said the Protestant had despised the arts, and the
Rationalist corrupted them. But what has the Romanist done meanwhile? He
boasts that it was the papacy which raised the arts; why could it not
support them when it was left to its own strength? How came it to yield
to Classicalism which was based on infidelity, and to oppose no barrier
to innovations, which have reduced the once faithfully conceived imagery
of its worship to stage decoration? Shall we not rather find that
Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown
itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of
Protestantism from its side?[27] So long as, corrupt though it might be,
no clear witness had been borne against it, so that it still included in
its ranks a vast number of faithful Christians, so long its arts were
noble. But the witness was borne--the error made apparent; and Rome,
refusing to hear the testimony or forsake the falsehood, has been struck
from that instant with an intellectual palsy, which has not only
incapacitated her from any further use of the arts which once were her
ministers, but has made her worship the shame of its own shrines, and
her worshippers their destroyers. Come, then, if truths such as these
are worth our thoughts; come, and let us know, before we enter the
streets of the Sea city, whether we are indeed to submit ourselves to
their undistinguished enchantment, and to look upon the last changes
which were wrought on the lifted forms of her palaces, as we should on
the capricious towering of summer clouds in the sunset, ere they sank
into the deep of night; or whether, rather, we shall not behold in the
brightness of their accumulated marble, pages on which the sentence of
her luxury was to be written until the waves should efface it, as they
fulfilled--"God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Appendix 1, "Foundation of Venice."
[2] Appendix 2, "Power of the Doges."
[3] Sismondi, Hist. des Rép. Ital., vol. i. ch. v.
[4] Appendix 3, "Serrar del Consiglio."
[5] "Ha saputo trovar modo che non uno, non pochi, non molti,
signoreggiano, ma molti buoni, pochi migliori, e insiememente, _un
ottimo solo_." (_Sansovino._) Ah, well done, Venice! Wisdom this,
indeed.
[6] Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.
[7] Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the discovery
of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.
[8] Ominously signified by their humiliation to the Papal power (as
before to the Turkish) in 1509, and their abandonment of their right
of appointing the clergy of their territories.
[9] The senate voted the abdication of their authority by a majority
of 512 to 14. (Alison, ch. xxiii.)
[10] By directing the arms of the Crusaders against a Christian
prince. (Daru, liv. iv. ch. iv. viii.)
[11] Appendix 4, "San Pietro di Castello."
[12] Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, § V.
[13] "In that temple porch,
(The brass is gone, the porphyry remains,)
Did BARBAROSSA fling his mantle off,
And kneeling, on his neck receive the foot
Of the proud Pontiff--thus at last consoled
For flight, disguise, and many an aguish shake
On his stone pillow."
I need hardly say whence the lines are taken: Rogers' "Italy" has, I
believe, now a place in the best beloved compartment of all
libraries, and will never be removed from it. There is more true
expression of the spirit of Venice in the passages devoted to her in
that poem, than in all else that has been written of her.
[14] At least, such success as they had. Vide Appendix 5, "The Papal
Power in Venice."
[15] The inconsiderable fortifications of the arsenal are no
exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city itself.
They are little more than a semblance of precaution against the
attack of a foreign enemy.
[16] Mémoires de Commynes, liv. vii. ch. xviii.
[17] Appendix 6, "Renaissance Ornaments."
[18] Appendix 7, "Varieties of the Orders."
[19] The reader will find the _weak_ points of Byzantine
architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the
opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever
opened,--Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."
[20] Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."
[21] Appendix 9, "Wooden Churches of the North."
[22] Appendix 10, "Church of Alexandria."
[23] Appendix 11, "Renaissance Landscape."
[24] Selvatico, "Architettura di Venezia," p. 147.
[25] Selvatico, p. 221.
[26] The older work is of Istrian stone also, but of different
quality.
[27] Appendix 12, "Romanist Modern Art."
CHAPTER II.
THE VIRTUES OF ARCHITECTURE.
§ I. We address ourselves, then, first to the task of determining some
law of right which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and
of all time; and by help of which, and judgment according to which, we
may easily pronounce whether a building is good or noble, as, by
applying a plumb-line, whether it be perpendicular.
The first question will of course be: What are the possible Virtues of
architecture?
In the main, we require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of
goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be
graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of
duty.
Then the practical duty divides itself into two branches,--acting and
talking:--acting, as to defend us from weather or violence; talking, as
the duty of monuments or tombs, to record facts and express feelings; or
of churches, temples, public edifices, treated as books of history, to
tell such history clearly and forcibly.
We have thus, altogether, three great branches of architectural virtue,
and we require of any building,--
1. That it act well, and do the things it was intended to do in the best
way.
2. That it speak well, and say the things it was intended to say in the
best words.
3. That it look well, and please us by its presence, whatever it has to
do or say.[28]
§ II. Now, as regards the second of these virtues, it is evident that
we can establish no general laws. First, because it is not a virtue
required in all buildings; there are some which are only for covert or
defence, and from which we ask no conversation. Secondly, because there
are countless methods of expression, some conventional, some natural:
each conventional mode has its own alphabet, which evidently can be no
subject of general laws. Every natural mode is instinctively employed
and instinctively understood, wherever there is true feeling; and this
instinct is above law. The choice of conventional methods depends on
circumstances out of calculation, and that of natural methods on
sensations out of control; so that we can only say that the choice is
right, when we feel that the means are effective; and we cannot always
say that it is wrong when they are not so.
A building which recorded the Bible history by means of a series of
sculptural pictures, would be perfectly useless to a person unacquainted
with the Bible beforehand; on the other hand, the text of the Old and
New Testaments might be written on its walls, and yet the building be a
very inconvenient kind of book, not so useful as if it had been adorned
with intelligible and vivid sculpture. So, again, the power of exciting
emotion must vary or vanish, as the spectator becomes thoughtless or
cold; and the building may be often blamed for what is the fault of its
critic, or endowed with a charm which is of its spectator's creation. It
is not, therefore, possible to make expressional character any fair
criterion of excellence in buildings, until we can fully place ourselves
in the position of those to whom their expression was originally
addressed, and until we are certain that we understand every symbol, and
are capable of being touched by every association which its builders
employed as letters of their language. I shall continually endeavor to
put the reader into such sympathetic temper, when I ask for his judgment
of a building; and in every work I may bring before him I shall point
out, as far as I am able, whatever is peculiar in its expression; nay, I
must even depend on such peculiarities for much of my best evidence
respecting the character of the builders. But I cannot legalize the
judgment for which I plead, nor insist upon it if it be refused. I can
neither force the reader to feel this architectural rhetoric, nor compel
him to confess that the rhetoric is powerful, if it have produced no
impression on his own mind.
§ III. I leave, therefore, the expression of buildings for incidental
notice only. But their other two virtues are proper subjects of
law,--their performance of their common and necessary work, and their
conformity with universal and divine canons of loveliness: respecting
these there can be no doubt, no ambiguity. I would have the reader
discern them so quickly that, as he passes along a street, he may, by a
glance of the eye, distinguish the noble from the ignoble work. He can
do this, if he permit free play to his natural instincts; and all that I
have to do for him is to remove from those instincts the artificial
restraints which prevent their action, and to encourage them to an
unaffected and unbiassed choice between right and wrong.
§ IV. We have, then, two qualities of buildings for subjects of separate
inquiry: their action, and aspect, and the sources of virtue in both;
that is to say, Strength and Beauty, both of these being less admired in
themselves, than as testifying the intelligence or imagination of the
builder.
For we have a worthier way of looking at human than at divine
architecture: much of the value both of construction and decoration, in
the edifices of men, depends upon our being led by the thing produced or
adorned, to some contemplation of the powers of mind concerned in its
creation or adornment. We are not so led by divine work, but are content
to rest in the contemplation of the thing created. I wish the reader to
note this especially: we take pleasure, or _should_ take pleasure, in
architectural construction altogether as the manifestation of an
admirable human intelligence; it is not the strength, not the size, not
the finish of the work which we are to venerate: rocks are always
stronger, mountains always larger, all natural objects more finished;
but it is the intelligence and resolution of man in overcoming physical
difficulty which are to be the source of our pleasure and subject of our
praise. And again, in decoration or beauty, it is less the actual
loveliness of the thing produced, than the choice and invention
concerned in the production, which are to delight us; the love and the
thoughts of the workman more than his work: his work must always be
imperfect, but his thoughts and affections may be true and deep.
§ V. This origin of our pleasure in architecture I must insist upon at
somewhat greater length, for I would fain do away with some of the
ungrateful coldness which we show towards the good builders of old time.
In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work,
and our admiration of the workman's mind, than in architecture, and yet
we rarely ask for a builder's name. The patron at whose cost, the monk
through whose dreaming, the foundation was laid, we remember
occasionally; never the man who verily did the work. Did the reader ever
hear of William of Sens as having had anything to do with Canterbury
Cathedral? or of Pietro Basegio as in anywise connected with the Ducal
Palace of Venice? There is much ingratitude and injustice in this; and
therefore I desire my reader to observe carefully how much of his
pleasure in building is derived, or should be derived, from admiration
of the intellect of men whose names he knows not.
§ VI. The two virtues of architecture which we can justly weigh, are, we
said, its strength or good construction, and its beauty or good
decoration. Consider first, therefore, what you mean when you say a
building is well constructed or well built; you do not merely mean that
it answers its purpose,--this is much, and many modern buildings fail of
this much; but if it be verily well built, it must answer this purpose
in the simplest way, and with no over-expenditure of means. We require
of a light-house, for instance, that it shall stand firm and carry a
light; if it do not this, assuredly it has been ill built; but it may do
it to the end of time, and yet not be well built. It may have hundreds
of tons of stone in it more than were needed, and have cost thousands
of pounds more than it ought. To pronounce it well or ill built, we must
know the utmost forces it can have to resist, and the best arrangements
of stone for encountering them, and the quickest ways of effecting such
arrangements: then only, so far as such arrangements have been chosen,
and such methods used, is it well built. Then the knowledge of all
difficulties to be met, and of all means of meeting them, and the quick
and true fancy or invention of the modes of applying the means to the
end, are what we have to admire in the builder, even as he is seen
through this first or inferior part of his work. Mental power, observe:
not muscular nor mechanical, nor technical, nor empirical,--pure,
precious, majestic, massy intellect; not to be had at vulgar price, nor
received without thanks, and without asking from whom.
§ VII. Suppose, for instance, we are present at the building of a
bridge: the bricklayers or masons have had their centring erected for
them, and that centring was put together by a carpenter, who had the
line of its curve traced for him by the architect: the masons are
dexterously handling and fitting their bricks, or, by the help of
machinery, carefully adjusting stones which are numbered for their
places. There is probably in their quickness of eye and readiness of
hand something admirable; but this is not what I ask the reader to
admire: not the carpentering, nor the bricklaying, nor anything that he
can presently see and understand, but the choice of the curve, and the
shaping of the numbered stones, and the appointment of that number;
there were many things to be known and thought upon before these were
decided. The man who chose the curve and numbered the stones, had to
know the times and tides of the river, and the strength of its floods,
and the height and flow of them, and the soil of the banks, and the
endurance of it, and the weight of the stones he had to build with, and
the kind of traffic that day by day would be carried on over his
bridge,--all this specially, and all the great general laws of force and
weight, and their working; and in the choice of the curve and numbering
of stones are expressed not only his knowledge of these, but such
ingenuity and firmness as he had, in applying special means to overcome
the special difficulties about his bridge. There is no saying how much
wit, how much depth of thought, how much fancy, presence of mind,
courage, and fixed resolution there may have gone to the placing of a
single stone of it. This is what we have to admire,--this grand power
and heart of man in the thing; not his technical or empirical way of
holding the trowel and laying mortar.
§ VIII. Now there is in everything properly called art this concernment
of the intellect, even in the province of the art which seems merely
practical. For observe: in this bridge-building I suppose no reference
to architectural principles; all that I suppose we want is to get safely
over the river; the man who has taken us over is still a mere
bridge-builder,--a _builder_, not an architect: he may be a rough,
artless, feelingless man, incapable of doing any one truly fine thing
all his days. I shall call upon you to despise him presently in a sort,
but not as if he were a mere smoother of mortar; perhaps a great man,
infinite in memory, indefatigable in labor, exhaustless in expedient,
unsurpassable in quickness of thought. Take good heed you understand him
before you despise him.
§ IX. But why is he to be in anywise despised? By no means despise him,
unless he happen to be without a soul,[29] or at least to show no signs
of it; which possibly he may not in merely carrying you across the
river. He may be merely what Mr. Carlyle rightly calls a human beaver
after all; and there may be nothing in all that ingenuity of his greater
than a complication of animal faculties, an intricate bestiality,--nest
or hive building in its highest development. You need something more
than this, or the man is despicable; you need that virtue of building
through which he may show his affections and delights; you need its
beauty or decoration.
§ X. Not that, in reality, one division of the man is more human than
another. Theologists fall into this error very fatally and continually;
and a man from whom I have learned much, Lord Lindsay, has hurt his
noble book by it, speaking as if the spirit of the man only were
immortal, and were opposed to his intellect, and the latter to the
senses; whereas all the divisions of humanity are noble or brutal,
immortal or mortal, according to the degree of their sanctification; and
there is no part of the man which is not immortal and divine when it is
once given to God, and no part of him which is not mortal by the second
death, and brutal before the first, when it is withdrawn from God. For
to what shall we trust for our distinction from the beasts that perish?
To our higher intellect?--yet are we not bidden to be wise as the
serpent, and to consider the ways of the ant?--or to our affections?
nay; these are more shared by the lower animals than our intelligence.
Hamlet leaps into the grave of his beloved, and leaves it,--a dog had
stayed. Humanity and immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love;
not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the
thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it,--but in the dedication of
them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.
§ XI. It is not, therefore, that the signs of his affections, which man
leaves upon his work, are indeed more ennobling than the signs of his
intelligence; but it is the balance of both whose expression we need,
and the signs of the government of them all by Conscience; and
Discretion, the daughter of Conscience. So, then, the intelligent part
of man being eminently, if not chiefly, displayed in the structure of
his work, his affectionate part is to be shown in its decoration; and,
that decoration may be indeed lovely, two things are needed: first, that
the affections be vivid, and honestly shown; secondly, that they be
fixed on the right things.
§ XII. You think, perhaps, I have put the requirements in wrong order.
Logically I have; practically I have not: for it is necessary first to
teach men to speak out, and say what they like, truly; and, in the
second place, to teach them which of their likings are ill set, and
which justly. If a man is cold in his likings and dislikings, or if he
will not tell you what he likes, you can make nothing of him. Only get
him to feel quickly and to speak plainly, and you may set him right. And
the fact is, that the great evil of all recent architectural effort has
not been that men liked wrong things: but that they either cared nothing
about any, or pretended to like what they did not. Do you suppose that
any modern architect likes what he builds, or enjoys it? Not in the
least. He builds it because he has been told that such and such things
are fine, and that he _should_ like them. He pretends to like them, and
gives them a false relish of vanity. Do you seriously imagine, reader,
that any living soul in London likes triglyphs?[30]--or gets any hearty
enjoyment out of pediments?[31] You are much mistaken. Greeks did:
English people never did,--never will. Do you fancy that the architect
of old Burlington Mews, in Regent Street, had any particular
satisfaction in putting the blank triangle over the archway, instead of
a useful garret window? By no manner of means. He had been told it was
right to do so, and thought he should be admired for doing it. Very few
faults of architecture are mistakes of honest choice: they are almost
always hypocrisies.
§ XIII. So, then, the first thing we have to ask of the decoration is
that it should indicate strong liking, and that honestly. It matters not
so much what the thing is, as that the builder should really love it and
enjoy it, and say so plainly. The architect of Bourges Cathedral liked
hawthorns; so he has covered his porch with hawthorn,--it is a perfect
Niobe of May. Never was such hawthorn; you would try to gather it
forthwith, but for fear of being pricked. The old Lombard architects
liked hunting; so they covered their work with horses and hounds, and
men blowing trumpets two yards long. The base Renaissance architects of
Venice liked masquing and fiddling; so they covered their work with
comic masks and musical instruments. Even that was better than our
English way of liking nothing, and professing to like triglyphs.
§ XIV. But the second requirement in decoration, is a sign of our liking
the right thing. And the right thing to be liked is God's work, which He
made for our delight and contentment in this world. And all noble
ornamentation is the expression of man's delight in God's work.
§ XV. So, then, these are the two virtues of building: first, the signs
of man's own good work; secondly, the expression of man's delight in
better work than his own. And these are the two virtues of which I
desire my reader to be able quickly to judge, at least in some measure;
to have a definite opinion up to a certain point. Beyond a certain point
he cannot form one. When the science of the building is great, great
science is of course required to comprehend it; and, therefore, of
difficult bridges, and light-houses, and harbor walls, and river dykes,
and railway tunnels, no judgment may be rapidly formed. But of common
buildings, built in common circumstances, it is very possible for every
man, or woman, or child, to form judgment both rational and rapid. Their
necessary, or even possible, features are but few; the laws of their
construction are as simple as they are interesting. The labor of a few
hours is enough to render the reader master of their main points; and
from that moment he will find in himself a power of judgment which can
neither be escaped nor deceived, and discover subjects of interest where
everything before had appeared barren. For though the laws are few and
simple, the modes of obedience to them are not so. Every building
presents its own requirements and difficulties; and every good building
has peculiar appliances or contrivances to meet them. Understand the
laws of structure, and you will feel the special difficulty in every new
building which you approach; and you will know also, or feel
instinctively,[32] whether it has been wisely met or otherwise. And an
enormous number of buildings, and of styles of buildings, you will be
able to cast aside at once, as at variance with these constant laws of
structure, and therefore unnatural and monstrous.
§ XVI. Then, as regards decoration, I want you only to consult your own
natural choice and liking. There is a right and wrong in it; but you
will assuredly like the right if you suffer your natural instinct to
lead you. Half the evil in this world comes from people not knowing what
they do like, not deliberately setting themselves to find out what they
really enjoy. All people enjoy giving away money, for instance: they
don't know _that_,--they rather think they like keeping it; and they
_do_ keep it under this false impression, often to their great
discomfort. Every body likes to do good; but not one in a hundred finds
_this_ out. Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever
really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.
So in this lesser matter of ornament. It needs some little care to try
experiments upon yourself: it needs deliberate question and upright
answer. But there is no difficulty to be overcome, no abstruse reasoning
to be gone into; only a little watchfulness needed, and thoughtfulness,
and so much honesty as will enable you to confess to yourself and to all
men, that you enjoy things, though great authorities say you should not.
§ XVII. This looks somewhat like pride; but it is true humility, a trust
that you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you, and a
willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is the
child's spirit, which we are then most happy when we most recover; only
wiser than children in that we are ready to think it subject of
thankfulness that we can still be pleased with a fair color or a dancing
light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures
reasonable, nor to connect the delight which you take in ornament with
that which you take in construction or usefulness. They have no
connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the
other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensations
altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world
was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to
be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to
other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things
in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance; at
least I suppose this quill I hold in my hand writes better than a
peacock's would, and the peasants of Vevay, whose fields in spring time
are as white with lilies as the Dent du Midi is with its snow, told me
the hay was none the better for them.
§ XVIII. Our task therefore divides itself into two branches, and these
I shall follow in succession. I shall first consider the construction of
buildings, dividing them into their really necessary members or
features; and I shall endeavor so to lead the reader forward from the
foundation upwards, as that he may find out for himself the best way of
doing everything, and having so discovered it, never forget it. I shall
give him stones, and bricks, and straw, chisels, and trowels, and the
ground, and then ask him to build; only helping him, as I can, if I find
him puzzled. And when he has built his house or church, I shall ask him
to ornament it, and leave it to him to choose the ornaments as I did to
find out the construction: I shall use no influence with him whatever,
except to counteract previous prejudices, and leave him, as far as may
be, free. And when he has thus found out how to build, and chosen his
forms of decoration, I shall do what I can to confirm his confidence in
what he has done. I shall assure him that no one in the world could, so
far, have done better, and require him to condemn, as futile or
fallacious, whatever has no resemblance to his own performances.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Appendix 13, "Mr. Fergusson's System."
[29] Appendix 14, "Divisions of Humanity."
[30] Triglyph. Literally, "Three Cut." The awkward upright ornament
with two notches in it, and a cut at each side, to be seen
everywhere at the tops of Doric colonnades, ancient and modern.
[31] Pediment. The triangular space above Greek porticoes, as on the
Mansion House or Royal Exchange.
[32] Appendix 15: "Instinctive Judgments."
CHAPTER III.
THE SIX DIVISIONS OF ARCHITECTURE.
§ I. The practical duties of buildings are twofold.
They have either (1), to hold and protect something; or (2), to place or
carry something.
1. Architecture of Protection. This is architecture intended to
protect men or their possessions from violence of any kind, whether
of men or of the elements. It will include all churches, houses, and
treasuries; fortresses, fences, and ramparts; the architecture of the
hut and sheepfold; of the palace and the citadel: of the dyke,
breakwater, and sea-wall. And the protection, when of living
creatures, is to be understood as including commodiousness and
comfort of habitation, wherever these are possible under the given
circumstances.
2. Architecture of Position. This is architecture intended to carry
men or things to some certain places, or to hold them there. This
will include all bridges, aqueducts, and road architecture;
light-houses, which have to hold light in appointed places; chimneys
to carry smoke or direct currents of air; staircases; towers, which
are to be watched from or cried from, as in mosques, or to hold
bells, or to place men in positions of offence, as ancient moveable
attacking towers, and most fortress towers.
§ II. Protective architecture has to do one or all of three things: to
wall a space, to roof it, and to give access to it, of persons, light,
and air; and it is therefore to be considered under the three divisions
of walls, roofs, and apertures.
We will take, first, a short, general view of the connection of these
members, and then examine them in detail: endeavoring always to keep the
simplicity of our first arrangement in view; for protective architecture
has indeed no other members than these, unless flooring and paving be
considered architecture, which it is only when the flooring is also a
roof; the laying of the stones or timbers for footing being pavior's or
carpenter's work, rather than architect's; and, at all events, work
respecting the well or ill doing of which we shall hardly find much
difference of opinion, except in points of æsthetics. We shall therefore
concern ourselves only with the construction of walls, roofs, and
apertures.
§ III. 1. _Walls._--A wall is an even and united fence, whether of wood,
earth, stone, or metal. When meant for purposes of mere partition or
enclosure, it remains a wall proper: but it has generally also to
sustain a certain vertical or lateral pressure, for which its strength
is at first increased by some general addition to its thickness; but if
the pressure becomes very great, it is gathered up into _piers_ to
resist vertical pressure, and supported by _buttresses_ to resist
lateral pressure.
If its functions of partition or enclosure are continued, together with
that of resisting vertical pressure, it remains as a wall veil between
the piers into which it has been partly gathered; but if it is required
only to resist the vertical or roof pressure, it is gathered up into
piers altogether, loses its wall character, and becomes a group or line
of piers.
On the other hand, if the lateral pressure be slight, it may retain its
character of a wall, being supported against the pressure by buttresses
at intervals; but if the lateral pressure be very great, it is supported
against such pressure by a continuous buttress, loses its wall
character, and becomes a dyke or rampart.
§ IV. We shall have therefore (A) first to get a general idea of a wall,
and of right construction of walls; then (B) to see how this wall is
gathered into piers; and to get a general idea of piers and the right
construction of piers; then (C) to see how a wall is supported by
buttresses, and to get a general idea of buttresses and the right
construction of buttresses. This is surely very simple, and it is all we
shall have to do with walls and their divisions.
[Illustration: Fig. I.]
§ V. 2. _Roofs._--A roof is the covering of a space, narrow or wide. It
will be most conveniently studied by first considering the forms in
which it may be carried over a narrow space, and then expanding these on
a wide plan; only there is some difficulty here in the nomenclature, for
an arched roof over a narrow space has (I believe) no name, except that
which belongs properly to the piece of stone or wood composing such a
roof, namely, lintel. But the reader will have no difficulty in
understanding that he is first to consider roofs on the section only,
thinking how best to construct a narrow bar or slice of them, of
whatever form; as, for instance, _x_, _y_, or _z_, over the plan or area
_a_, Fig. I. Having done this, let him imagine these several divisions,
first moved along (or set side by side) over a rectangle, _b_, Fig. I.,
and then revolved round a point (or crossed at it) over a polygon, _c_,
or circle, _d_, and he will have every form of simple roof: the arched
section giving successively the vaulted roof and dome, and the gabled
section giving the gabled roof and spire.
As we go farther into the subject, we shall only have to add one or two
forms to the sections here given, in order to embrace all the
_uncombined_ roofs in existence; and we shall not trouble the reader
with many questions respecting cross-vaulting, and other modes of their
combination.
§ VI. Now, it also happens, from its place in buildings, that the
sectional roof over a narrow space will need to be considered before we
come to the expanded roof over a broad one. For when a wall has been
gathered, as above explained, into piers, that it may better bear
vertical pressure, it is generally necessary that it should be expanded
again at the top into a continuous wall before it carries the true roof.
Arches or lintels are, therefore, thrown from pier to pier, and a level
preparation for carrying the real roof is made above them. After we have
examined the structure of piers, therefore, we shall have to see how
lintels or arches are thrown from pier to pier, and the whole prepared
for the superincumbent roof; this arrangement being universal in all
good architecture prepared for vertical pressures: and we shall then
examine the condition of the great roof itself. And because the
structure of the roof very often introduces certain lateral pressures
which have much to do with the placing of buttresses, it will be well to
do all this before we examine the nature of buttresses, and, therefore,
between parts (B) and (C) of the above plan, § IV. So now we shall have
to study: (A) the construction of walls; (B) that of piers; (C) that of
lintels or arches prepared for roofing; (D) that of roofs proper; and
(E) that of buttresses.
§ VII. 3. _Apertures._--There must either be intervals between the
piers, of which intervals the character will be determined by that of
the piers themselves, or else doors or windows in the walls proper. And,
respecting doors or windows, we have to determine three things: first,
the proper shape of the entire aperture; secondly, the way in which it
is to be filled with valves or glass; and thirdly, the modes of
protecting it on the outside, and fitting appliances of convenience to
it, as porches or balconies. And this will be our division F; and if the
reader will have the patience to go through these six heads, which
include every possible feature of protective architecture, and to
consider the simple necessities and fitnesses of each, I will answer for
it, he shall never confound good architecture with bad any more. For, as
to architecture of position, a great part of it involves necessities of
construction with which the spectator cannot become generally
acquainted, and of the compliance with which he is therefore never
expected to judge,--as in chimneys, light-houses, &c.: and the other
forms of it are so closely connected with those of protective
architecture, that a few words in Chap. XIX. respecting staircases and
towers, will contain all with which the reader need be troubled on the
subject.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WALL BASE.