For eight centuries they have been heaping up here the rarest jewels
and the most astonishing marvels of art. As our eyes become rested from
the outside sunlight, and get accustomed to the shadowy interior, the
diamonds begin to sparkle everywhere. Things in profusion, without age
or price, classified by species upon shelves. Arms of all periods, from
Genghis Khan to Mahomet; weapons of silver and gold set with jewels.
Then there are collections of golden coffers of all sizes and of all
styles; some are covered with rubies, others with diamonds and others
with sapphires; some of them are even cut out of a single emerald
as big as an ostrich’s egg. Then there are services for coffee, for
drinking, and ewers of antique and exquisite forms. And the stuffs fit
for fays; the saddles; the harness, the housings of parade in brocades
of gold and silver, embroidered and encrusted with flowers in precious
stones; the large thrones made to sit upon cross-legged: all these in
ruby and fine pearl together produce a rosy brilliancy; elsewhere,
others covered with emeralds and brilliant in their green reflections,
look as if bathed in sea-water.
In the last hall, there is waiting for us behind the windows a
motionless and terrible company: twenty-eight _macabre_ dolls,
of human size, standing up straight in a military row with their
elbows touching each other. They all wear that high pear-shaped turban
that has not been in use for a century, and which is only to be seen
upon the catafalques of distinguished personages, in the twilight of
mortuary kiosks, or carved upon the tombs--so that this kind of a
turban is for me absolutely associated with the idea of death. Until
the beginning of this century, whenever a sultan died, they brought
here a doll clothed in the ceremonial robes of the dead sovereign,
they placed marvellous arms in his belt, put on his turban, and his
magnificent jewelled aigrette,--and it remained here forever covered
with this eternally wasted wealth. The twenty-eight Sultans who
succeeded each other from the capture of Constantinople until the end
of the Seventeenth Century are standing here in their imperial robes in
facsimile; slowly has the sombre and sumptuous assembly increased, new
funeral dolls came one by one to range themselves in line with the old
ones, who had awaited them for hundreds of years, sure of seeing them
at last--and they are now touching each other’s elbows.
Their long robes are of the strangest brocades, with great mysterious
designs whose tints are dimmed by time; priceless poignards with large
handles made of a single precious stone, rust, notwithstanding the
care, in the silken belts; it even seems that the enormous diamonds of
the aigrettes have lost some of their fire, and shine with a yellowish
and dulled light.
And this unheard of luxury, all powdered with dust, is sad to look
upon. Fabulously magnificent, the dolls with the high coiffure,
objects of so much human covetousness guarded there behind the double
doors of iron, useless and dangerous, see the seasons, years, reigns,
revolutions and centuries pass by with the same immobility and the
same silence, with scarcely any daylight through the gratings of the
old windows and in total darkness after the sun sets. Each one bears
his name, written like a common name upon a faded ticket--illustrious
names that were formerly terrible: Mourad the Conqueror, Soliman the
Magnificent, Mohammed and Mahmoud. I believe that these dolls give me
the most terrifying lesson of fragility and nothingness.
THE DUOMO, THE LEANING TOWER. THE BAPTISTERY AND THE
CAMPO-SANTO OF PISA
H. A. TAINE
There are two Pisas: one in which people are bored and where they have
lived in a provincial manner since the decadence; this is the greater
part of the city, with the exception of a secluded corner: the other
is this corner, a marble sepulchre, where the Duomo, the Baptistery,
the Leaning Tower and the Campo-Santo repose silently like beautiful
things that are dead. The true Pisa is here, and in these relics of an
extinguished life, you find a world.
A renaissance before the renaissance, a second and almost antique
budding of an antique civilization, a spring-time after six centuries
of snow,--such are the ideas and words that crowd into the mind.
Everything is of marble, white marble, whose immaculate whiteness
shines in the azure. On all sides are large solid forms, the cupola,
the full wall, the balanced stories, the firmly-planted round or square
mass; but over these forms, revived from the antique, like delicate
foliage that clothes an old tree-trunk, there is spread an individual
invention and a new decoration of the small columns surmounted by
arcades, and the originality and grace of this architecture thus
renewed cannot be described.
[Illustration: DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, BAPTISTERY AND CAMPO SANTO,
ITALY]
In 1083, to honour the Virgin who had given them the victory over the
Saracens of Sardinia, the Pisans began to build their Duomo.
This is almost a Roman basilica, I should say a temple surmounted by
another temple, or if you like better, a house having its gable for
a façade, and this gable is cut off at the peak to support a still
smaller house. Five stories of columns cover the entire façade with
their superimposed porticoes. Two by two they are coupled together
to support the little arcades; all these lovely columns of white
marble under their black arcades make an aërial population that is
most graceful and unexpected. In no place here do you perceive that
sorrowful reverie of the Mediæval north; it is the holiday of a young
nation that is awakening, and, in the joy of its newly acquired wealth,
honours its gods. She has gathered from the distant shores to which
her wars and trade led her, capitals, ornaments and entire columns and
these fragments of antiquity fit into the work without any incongruity;
for the work is instinctively cast into the ancient mould and is only
developed with a grain of fantasy on the side of delicacy and charm.
All the antique forms re-appear, but remodelled in the same spirit, by
a new and original vivacity. The exterior columns of the Greek temple
are reduced, multiplied and elevated into the air and are not only
a support but have become an ornament. The Roman or Byzantine dome
is elongated and its natural heaviness diminished beneath a crown of
slender little columns with a mitre ornament which girds it in the
centre with its delicate gallery. On the two sides of the great door
two Corinthian columns are enveloped with the luxuriant leaves, buds
and twining stems of the acanthus, and from the threshold we see the
church with its rows of black, and white columns of nave and transept,
with their multitude of slender and beautiful forms rising up like an
altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sense
of feeling; it is not excessive and confused as in the north, but, at
the same time, it is not contented with merely the grave simplicity and
the robust nudity of antique architecture. This spirit is the daughter
of a pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more feminine than her mother.
She is not yet an adult, sure of her steps; she makes awkward mistakes.
The lateral façades outside are monotonous. The cupola within is a
reversed funnel, of a strange and disagreeable form. The union of
the two arms of the cross is unpleasing, and a number of modernized
chapels dispel the charm of the purity found in Sienna. At the second
glance, however, all this is forgotten, and the effect of the whole is
felt again. Four rows of Corinthian columns, surmounted by arcades,
divide the church into five naves and form a forest. A second passage
also as richly peopled with columns crosses the first one, and above
the beautiful grove, rows of still smaller columns are carried along
and intersect each other in order to uphold in the air the quadruple
gallery, also prolonged and intersected. The ceiling is flat; the
windows are little, and most of them without panes; they allow the
walls to exhibit the grandeur and solidity of their mass, and down
these long lines of straight and simple windows the untempered
daylight makes these innumerable columns glow with the serenity of an
ancient temple.
It is not, however, wholly an ancient temple, and there lies its
peculiar charm: at the back of the choir the entire hollowed out apsis
is occupied with a large Christ[11] in a golden robe, with the Virgin
and another smaller saint. His face is gentle and sad: on this golden
background in the dimness of the pale daylight he seems like a vision.
Certainly, a number of pictures and constructions of the Middle Ages
supply all the needs of ecstasy. Other fragments show the decadence
and the deep barbarism from which they sprang. There remains one of
those ancient bronze doors covered with formless and horrible bronze
bas-reliefs.
Such is what the descendants of the sculptors preserved out of
antiquity, such is what the human mind became in the chaos of the
Tenth Century at the time of the Hungarian invasions, of Marozzia and
Theodora: sad, mournful, anæmic, dislocated and mechanical figures, God
the Father and six angels, three on one side and three on the other,
all leaning at the same angle like a row of cards leaning against one
another; the twelve apostles all in a row, six in front and six in the
intervening spaces, like those round rings with holes for eyes and
long lines for arms that children scribble in their exercise-books. On
the other hand, the entrance doors, carved by John of Bologna,[12]
are full of life: leaves of the rose, the grapevine, the medlar, the
orange and the laurel with their berries, their fruits and their
flowers, amongst which are birds and animals, twine about and make
frames for animated figures and groups that are energetic and imposing.
This wealth of truthful and vital forms is peculiar to the Sixteenth
Century: it discovered nature and man at the same time. Five centuries
lie between the work of these two doors.
There is nothing more to say about the Baptistery or the Leaning Tower;
the same idea, the same taste and even the same style are seen in them.
The one is a simple isolated dome; the other is a cylinder; each has
its exterior decoration of columns. However, each has its own distinct
and speaking physiognomy; but too much time would be occupied in either
talking or writing about them and too many technical terms would be
needed to distinguish the subtle differences. I will only mention
the inclination of the Tower. It is supposed that when the Tower was
half-finished, it leaned and that the architects kept on, and since
they went on with it this inclination did not seem to have troubled
them. At all events, there are other leaning towers in Italy,--at
Bologna, for instance; voluntarily, or involuntarily, this fondness for
oddity, this search for paradox and this yielding to fantasy, is one of
the characteristics of the Middle Ages.
In the centre of the Baptistery is a superb eight-sided basin; each
one of three sides is incrusted with a rich and complicated flower
in full bloom, and each flower is different. There is a circle of
large Corinthian columns around it, supporting round-arched arcades;
most of them are ancient and are ornamented with antique bas-reliefs:
Meleager with his barking dogs and the nude bodies of his companions
is assisting at Christian mysteries. On the left, there is a pulpit
similar to the one in Sienna, the first work of Nicholas of Pisa,[13]
a simple marble coffer supported on marble columns and covered with
carvings. The feeling of the strength and nudity of antiquity is
exhibited here in a striking manner. The sculptor understood the
postures and movements of the body. His figures, a little massive, are
grand and simple; sometimes he reproduces the tunics and the folds
of the Roman costume; one of his nude personages, a kind of Hercules
carrying a lion on his shoulders, has that large chest and the strained
muscles that the sculptors of the Sixteenth Century loved so much.
What a difference to human civilization and what a hastening of it
there would have been if these restorers of ancient beauty, these young
Republics of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, these precocious
creators of modern thought had been left to themselves like the ancient
Greeks, if they had followed their natural bent, if mystical tradition
had not intervened to limit and divert their effort, if secular genius
had developed among them, as it formerly did in Greece, amongst free,
rude and healthy institutions, and not, as it did, two centuries later,
in the midst of the servitude and the corruptions of the decadence.
The last of these edifices, the Campo-Santo, is a cemetery, the
earth of which, brought from Palestine, is holy. Four high walls of
polished marble surround it with their white and highly ornamented
panels. Within, a square gallery forms a promenade and opens upon a
court through arcades trellised with ogival windows. It is filled with
mortuary monuments, busts, inscriptions, and statues of every form
and of every age. Nothing could be nobler or simpler. A framework of
dark wood supports the vault, and the naked crest of the roof cuts
the crystal of the sky. At the corners four cypresses rustle their
leaves in the light breeze. The grass grows in the court with freshness
and wild luxuriance. Here and there a climbing flower twines itself
around a column, a little rosebush, or tiny shrub, glowing in a ray of
sunlight. Not a sound,--this quarter is deserted; now and then you hear
only the voice of a stroller which echoes as if beneath the vault of
a church. It is the veritable cemetery of a free and Christian city;
here before the tombs of the great, you can well reflect upon death and
public affairs.
[Illustration: ROCHESTER CASTLE, ENGLAND.]
ROCHESTER CASTLE
ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN
The Romans, who always had a keen eye for favourable defensive sites,
were scarcely likely to miss the high ground in the great bend of the
Medway not far from where it falls into the Thames. The Watling Street
from Dover to London passed the river, moreover, at this point and
received protection from the Roman camp. The Saxons and Danes also
maintained the Castle of Hrofa here. The usual timber fortifications
were constructed in an oblong enclosure of about seven acres, including
a large conical mound of the Eastern chalk range called Bully Hill.
It must even at that date have been a place of some strength, because
when it was besieged by the Danes in 885, it was able to hold out long
enough for Alfred to come to its relief. At the Conquest, the Normans
recognized the strength of the position and added their own improved
methods of fortification, enclosing a quadrangular space close to the
river with a strong curtain wall and afterwards building a massive
square keep in the enclosure. The Saxon works were left outside and
used merely as an outpost, as was the case at Warwick and Canterbury.
The original quadrangular enclosure had a wall-circuit of 580 yards,
the North and South walls measuring 160, and the East and West 130
each. The East front faced the cathedral which even at that day was
venerable. The West wall ran along the river front. The other three
walls were defended by a broad and deep moat, traces of which still
remain. Much of the outer wall, with square open towers recurring at
intervals also exists. The main entrance or gatehouse with drawbridge,
which no longer exists, was at the North-east angle, from which there
was a steep descent to what is now the High Street. At the North-west
angle, was a bastion tower with a postern gate. Although this tower
no longer exists, it was still standing as late as 1735, immediately
on the shore, commanding the bridge. A large round tower still stands
at the South-east angle. It measures thirty feet in diameter; it has
two floors and is loop-holed for archery. Two rectangular towers
that defended the East front are still in existence. Throughout the
constructions, we cannot fail to notice and admire the strength and
massiveness of the masonry. To this the ruin owes its preservation,
for besides the destroying hand of time, the neglect of unappreciative
generations, and the destruction wrought by greed and fanaticism, it
has also suffered from several sieges.
On the highest ground of the enclosure, near the South-east angle,
stands the keep. In grandeur and impressiveness, this tower does
not suffer in comparison with any English keep of the Norman
period. Neither the smaller keep of Newcastle, nor the larger ones
of Colchester, Canterbury, Norwich and Hedingham show the original
arrangement better than Rochester. Its base is more than seventy feet
square, and it is 113 feet high. It is buttressed at the angles with
four small towers each twelve feet square. These, rising twelve feet
above the principal mass, add greatly to the picturesque effect of
the whole. Clinging like a limpet to the East angle of the keep is a
smaller tower twenty-eight feet square and about seventy-five feet
high. This contained the chief entrance to the keep. It had a flight
of steps and an arched gateway enriched. This and the other arches are
constructed of Caen stone brought from Normandy; the walls, from ten to
twelve feet thick, are built with Kentish rag. Even when this smaller
tower was taken in an assault, the besiegers still had trouble to get
into the keep proper, for the vestibule was divided from the rooms of
the great keep by a portcullis in the main wall. The groove in which it
worked and traces of the ironwork still remain.
The keep contains three storeys of lofty apartments, with a vault
beneath. As in the tower of London, it is divided into two nearly equal
parts by a wall running East and West that rises to the roof. Its
thickness allows it to contain a well two feet nine inches in diameter
with openings by which each apartment might be supplied with water.
By this arrangement, it was impossible for besiegers to cut off the
drinking supply of the garrison. The thickness of the walls also admits
of mural galleries, as in the White Tower, and a well staircase leading
from the vault to the roof, communicating with each apartment. The
basement and first floor received their light through loop-holes; the
rooms of the higher storeys have their walls pierced with windows.
On the second storey were the rooms of state, thirty-two feet high.
It has two tiers of windows, the upper tier having a passage in the
wall in front of the windows. On this floor, the apartments open into
one another through the central dividing wall by four arches; and in
the north-east corner is a large doorway leading into an oratory or
chapel built over the great entrance. A flight of steps ascends to the
wall gallery which goes all round the tower: as in the White Tower,
it is vaulted. It is three feet high. In these apartments, there are
fireplaces with enriched arches from which the smoke escaped through
openings in the wall near the hearth. This primitive contrivance must
have rendered the council-chamber and banqueting-hall uncomfortable
with draughts.
Twenty-three steps lead from the wall gallery to the top floor which
contains two handsome rooms twenty-five feet high. From this storey,
the visitor may enjoy a lovely view, including the town and banks
of the winding river, the Cathedral and its close, extending in the
distance to the junction of the Thames and Medway.
Above the third floor, are the battlements which had a rampart walk.
The floorings were all carried by timber joists, and in the basement
was a prison.
The striking resemblance between this keep and the White Tower at
London of the same date would lead us to conclude that both were
designed by the same architect. They were in fact both planned
originally by Gundulf, who was consecrated Bishop of Rochester in the
year after the Conquest. Besides his other great attainments, this
bishop was a very able architect, and when the Conqueror wanted to
erect a strong castle at Rochester, Gundulf was naturally entrusted
with the task.
The first important historical event connected with the castle was
the rebellion of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, half (and
perhaps full) brother to William the Conqueror. Kent had already
suffered greatly from his rapacity, and his conduct finally led to
his dramatic arrest by William’s own hands. After William’s death, he
plotted in Robert’s interest against his nephew Rufus. He attributed
his imprisonment to Archbishop Lanfranc, and when war broke out between
the brothers Robert and William in 1088, he plundered Kent, paying
especial attention to the Archbishop’s estates. Finally, being captured
at Pevensey, he was forced to give up all his possessions in England,
including Rochester, and leave the country. He was sent under guard to
Rochester to complete the surrender and take ship for Normandy; but
on his arrival, Eustace of Boulogne and Robert de Belême and other
supporters rescued Odo and refused to surrender the city. The castle
was garrisoned and William Rufus besieged it in person. It surrendered
after a blockade of six weeks. William was very reluctant to grant any
terms, and indignantly refused Odo’s request for the honours of war.
The English portion of William’s army, who were principally Kentishmen,
were very bitter against the Bishop who had harried and oppressed them,
and cried: “Halters! halters for the traitor bishop! Let not the doer
of evil go unharmed!” Counsels of clemency, however, prevailed; and
Odo was allowed to go; and on this occasion Rochester saw the last of
him.
The castle had been considerably injured in the siege, and William
commissioned Gundulf to spend £60, a large sum in those days, in
building a new tower.
In the twenty-seventh year of William’s successor, Henry, the king,
with the consent of his barons, granted to the church of Canterbury,
William (of Corbeil), archbishop of that see, the custody of the
castle of Rochester for ever, with liberty to build a fort and a
tower. This archbishop, who had the support of the king in the rivalry
of Canterbury and York, was a great builder. He rebuilt Rochester
Cathedral and attended its dedication in 1130. Shortly before, he
had with great pomp completed and dedicated the great cathedral at
Canterbury begun by Lanfranc. It was therefore about 1130 that the new
castle was also completed.
The castle with its splendid and strong keep was far too important a
military post to remain in possession of the see of Canterbury for
any length of time in that turbulent age. When the see became vacant,
and on other occasions, the Crown resumed possession of it. In 1141,
William of Ypres, a Fleming, was its governor for Stephen, as the
archbishop had sworn allegiance to the Empress Maud. When the Earl of
Gloucester, a natural son of Henry I. was captured at Winchester, he
was imprisoned in this castle until exchanged for Stephen, who was
taken at Lincoln later in the year. William of Ypres being banished,
Henry II. gave his earldom of Kent and the castle of Rochester to
Philip, Earl of Flanders, but the Earl never took possession.
In 1202, the castle was again restored to the archbishop, then Stephen
Langton, who later, during John’s wars with his barons, turned it over
to William de Albini, a valiant and able commander, to be held in the
interests of the barons. John invested the stronghold in 1215, and
succeeded in gaining possession after an obstinate defence lasting
three months. The military engines could produce little impression, but
the walls were undermined, and then the keep was attacked in the same
way. The following year, Louis the Dauphin, being invited over by the
barons to assist them against John, landed at Sandwich and led his army
to Rochester. The damage had not yet been repaired and so the castle
easily fell. With other Crown possessions, it then came into the hands
of Henry III. Much money was spent in repairs, especially in 1225–6–7.
This was while Hubert de Burgh was constable of Rochester castle. In
1240, the tower was ordered to be whitewashed where it had not yet been
done; and in 1247 both chapels were ordered to be wainscoted. One of
these was in the outer ward, and used by the garrison.