Roger de Leybourne who had just joined his cause. He furnished it with
sufficient arms, garrison, and provisions to stand a siege. Early in
April, the attack being imminent, the king’s brother-in-law, the Earl
of Surrey, arrived at the castle with reinforcements. Just before
Easter, Simon de Montfort came to besiege the castle. On reaching
the western bank of the Medway, he found the passage of the bridge
disputed, and a palisade and breastwork thrown up on the opposite side,
well defended. Having sent Gilbert de Clare to attack the south side
of the town, the Earl of Leicester in person assaulted the bridge,
but was twice driven back by the citizens. At length, with the aid of
boats loaded with combustibles, he set fire to the bridge and the tower
upon it which were both built of wood. During the confusion caused by
the fire, he crossed the river and destroyed the church and what was
left of the priory. Richard de Leybourne for purposes of defence had
already burned down all the suburbs and part of the priory. Simon de
Montfort next made a furious assault upon the castle and captured the
outworks and all the towers except the great keep. The latter made
such an obstinate resistance that after a seven days’ close siege,
Simon suddenly relinquished the attempt and retreated to London.
Shortly afterwards, in 1264, most of the garrison, under Leybourne,
who had been badly wounded, left Rochester and joined the Royal army
at Lewes. The king’s disastrous defeat there resulted in the surrender
of Rochester castle to the Baron’s forces. When however the tide of
success turned two years later, on the death of de Montfort at Evesham,
and the fall of Kenilworth, Leybourne resumed his governorship.
In 1274, Robert de Hougham died constable of this castle, and was
followed by Robert de Septvans. Two other constables of Rochester
during this reign were Sir John de Cobham and Stephen de Dene. During
the next two centuries the following names occur among the holders of
this office: William Skarlett, Lord Grey of Codnor, John de Newtrun,
William Criol and Sir Thomas Cobham.
In 1367–8, extensive repairs were undertaken by Edward III., under
Prior John of Rochester as chief of the works. Stone was imported from
Beer, Caen, and Reigate, with copings and crests for battlements,
probably for buildings in the court. Edward IV. also repaired the
castle, but afterwards it lost its military importance and fell into
decay. A drawing, of the year 1518, shows the turrets domed over and
capped with vanes, like those of the White Tower.
Rochester much resembles Hedingham, which is a very perfect Norman keep
with three floors, the remains of a forebuilding and upper gallery
in the main floor. In each ornamentation, the chevron moulding is
profusely employed.
SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE
JOHN RUSKIN
Your Murray’s Guide tells you that this chapel of the Bardi della
Libertà, in which you stand, is covered with frescoes by Giotto; that
they were whitewashed, and only laid bare in 1853; that they were
painted between 1296 and 1304; that they represent scenes in the life
of St. Francis; and that on each side of the window are paintings of
St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Louis King of France, St. Elizabeth of
Hungary, and St. Claire,--“all much restored and repainted.” Under such
recommendation the frescoes are not likely to be much sought after;
and accordingly, as I was at work in the chapel this morning, Sunday
6th September, 1874, two nice-looking Englishmen, under guard of their
valet de place, passed the chapel without so much as looking in.
You will perhaps stay a little longer in it with me, good reader, and
find out gradually where you are. Namely, in the most interesting and
perfect little Gothic chapel in all Italy--so far as I know or can
hear. There is no other of the great time which has all its frescoes in
their place. The Arena, though far larger, is of earlier date--not pure
Gothic, nor showing Giotto’s full force. The lower chapel at Assisi is
not Gothic at all, and is still only of Giotto’s middle time. You have
her developed Gothic, with Giotto in his consummate strength, and
nothing lost, in form, of the complete design.
[Illustration: SANTA CROCE, ITALY.]
By restoration--judicious restoration, as Mr. Murray usually calls
it--there is no saying how much you have lost. Putting the question of
restoration out of your mind, however, for a while, think where you
are, and what you have got to look at.
You are in the chapel next the high altar of the great Franciscan
Church of Florence. A few hundred yards west of you, within ten
minutes’ walk, is the Baptistery of Florence. And five minutes’ walk,
west of that is the great Dominican Church of Florence, Santa Maria
Novella.
Get this little bit of geography, and architectural fact, well into
your mind. There is the little octagon Baptistery in the middle; here,
ten minutes’ walk east of it, the Franciscan Church of the Holy Cross;
there, five minutes’ walk west of it, the Dominican Church of St. Mary.
Now, that little octagon Baptistery stood where it now stands (and
was finished, though the roof has been altered since) in the Eighth
Century. It is the central building of Etrurian Christianity,--of
European Christianity.
From the day it was finished, Christianity went on doing her best, in
Etruria and elsewhere, for four hundred years,--and her best seemed
to have come to very little,--when there rose up two men who vowed to
God it should come to more. And they made it come to more, forthwith;
of which the immediate sign in Florence was that she resolved to have
a fine new cross-shaped cathedral instead of her quaint old little
octagon one; and a tower beside it that should beat Babel:--which two
buildings you have also within sight.
But your business is not at present with them; but with these two
earlier churches of Holy Cross and St. Mary. The two men who were the
effectual builders of these were the two great religious Powers and
Reformers of the Thirteenth Century;--St. Francis who taught Christian
men how they should behave, and St. Dominic, who taught Christian men
what they should think. In brief, one the Apostle of Works; the other
of Faith. Each sent his little company of disciples to teach and to
preach in Florence: St. Francis in 1212; St. Dominic in 1220.
The little companies were settled--one, ten minutes’ walk east of the
old Baptistery; the other five minutes’ walk west of it. And after they
had stayed quietly in such lodgings as were given them, preaching and
teaching through most of the century; and had got Florence, as it were
heated through, she burst out into Christian poetry and architecture,
of which you have heard so much talk:--burst into bloom of Arnolfo,
Giotto, Dante, Orcagna, and the like persons, whose works you profess
to have come to Florence that you may see and understand.
Florence then, thus heated through, first helped her teachers to build
finer churches. The Dominicans, or White Friars, the Teachers of Faith,
began their church of St. Mary’s in 1279. The Franciscans, or Black
Friars, the Teachers of Works, laid the first stone of this church of
the Holy Cross in 1294. And the whole city laid the foundations of its
new cathedral in 1298. The Dominicans designed their own building;
but for the Franciscans and the town worked the first great master of
Gothic art, Arnolfo; with Giotto at his side, and Dante looking on, and
whispering sometimes a word to both.
And here you stand beside the high altar of the Franciscan’s Church,
under a vault of Arnolfo’s building, with at least some of Giotto’s
colour on it still fresh; and in front of you, over the little altar,
is the only reportedly authentic portrait of St. Francis, taken from
life by Giotto’s master. Yet I can hardly blame my two English friends
for never looking in. Except in the early morning light, not one touch
of all this art can be seen. And in any light, unless you understand
the relations of Giotto to St. Francis, and of St. Francis to humanity,
it will be of little interest.
Observe, then, the special character of Giotto among the great painters
of Italy is his being a practical person. Whatever other men dreamed
of, he did. He could work in mosaic: he could work in marble; he
could paint; and he could build; and all thoroughly: a man of supreme
faculty, supreme common sense. Accordingly, he ranges himself at once
among the disciples of the Apostle of Works, and spends most of his
time in the same apostleship.
Now the gospel of Works, according to St. Francis, lay in three things.
You must work without money, and be poor. You must work without
pleasure, and be chaste. You must work according to orders, and be
obedient.
Those are St. Francis’s three articles of Italian opera. By which grew
the many pretty things you have come to see here.
And now if you will take your opera-glass and look up to the roof above
Arnolfo’s building, you will see it is a pretty Gothic cross vault,
in four quarters, each with a circular medallion, painted by Giotto.
That over the altar has the picture of St. Francis himself. The three
others, of his Commanding Angels. In front of him, over the entrance
arch, Poverty. On his right hand, Obedience. On his left, Chastity.
Poverty, in a red patched dress, with grey wings and a square nimbus of
glory above her head, is flying from a black hound, whose head is seen
at the corner of the medallion.
Chastity veiled, is imprisoned in a tower, while angels watch her.
Obedience bears a yoke on her shoulders, and lays her hand on a book.
Now, this same quatrefoil, of St. Francis and his three Commanding
Angels, was also painted, but much more elaborately, by Giotto, on the
cross vault of the lower church of Assisi, and it is a question of
interest which of the two roofs was painted first.
Your Murray’s Guide tells you the frescoes in this chapel were painted
between 1296 and 1304. But as they represent, among other personages,
St. Louis of Toulouse, who was not canonized till 1317, that statement
is not altogether tenable. Also, as the first stone of the church was
only laid in 1294, when Giotto was a youth of eighteen, it is little
likely that either it would have been ready to be painted, or be ready
with his scheme of practical divinity, two years later.
Farther, Arnolfo, the builder of the main body of the church, died in
1310. And as St. Louis of Toulouse was not a saint till seven years
afterwards, and the frescoes therefore beside the window not painted
in Arnolfo’s day, it becomes another question whether Arnolfo left the
chapels or the church at all, in their present form.
On which point--now that I have shown you where Giotto’s St. Louis
is--I will ask you to think awhile, until you are interested; and then
I will try to satisfy your curiosity. Therefore, please leave the
little chapel for the moment, and walk down the nave, till you come to
two sepulchral slabs near the west end, and then look about you and see
what sort of a church Santa Croce is.
Without looking about you at all, you may find, in your Murray, the
useful information that it is a church which “consists of a very wide
nave and lateral aisles, separated by seven fine pointed arches.” And
as you will be--under ordinary conditions of tourist hurry--glad to
learn so much, _without_ looking, it is little likely to occur to
you that this nave and two rich aisles required also, for your complete
present comfort, walls at both ends, and a roof on the top. It is just
possible, indeed, you may have been struck on entering, by the curious
disposition of painted glass at the east end;--more remotely possible
that, in returning down the nave, you may this moment have noticed the
extremely small circular window at the west end; but the chances are a
thousand to one that, after being pulled from tomb to tomb round the
aisles and chapels, you should take so extraordinary an additional
amount of pains as to look up at the roof,--unless you do it now,
quietly. It will have had its effect upon you, even if you don’t,
without your knowledge. You will return home with a general impression
that Santa Croce is, somehow, the ugliest Gothic church you ever were
in. Well, that is really so; and now, will you take the pains to see
why?
There are two features, on which, more than on any others, the grace
and delight of a fine Gothic building depends; one is the springing of
its vaultings, the other the proportion and fantasy of its traceries.
_This_ church of Santa Croce has no vaultings at all, but the roof
of a farmhouse barn. And its windows are all of the same pattern,--the
exceedingly prosaic one of two pointed arches, with a round hole above,
between them.
And to make the simplicity of the roof more conspicuous, the aisles are
successive sheds, built at every arch. In the aisles of the Campo Santo
at Pisa, the unbroken flat roof leaves the eye free to look to the
traceries; but here, a succession of up-and-down sloping beam and lath
gives the impression of a line of stabling rather than a church aisle.
And lastly, while, in fine Gothic buildings, the entire perspective
concludes itself gloriously in the high and distant apse, here the nave
is cut across sharply by a line of ten chapels, the apse being only
a tall recess in the midst of them, so that, strictly speaking, the
church is not of the form of a cross, but of a letter T.
Can this clumsy and ungraceful arrangement be indeed the design of the
renowned Arnolfo?
Yes, this is the purest Arnolfo-Gothic; not beautiful by any means;
but deserving, nevertheless, our thoughtfullest examination. We
will trace its complete character another day: just now we are only
concerned with this pre-Christian form of the letter T, insisted upon
in the lines of chapels.
Respecting which you are to observe, that the first Christian churches
in the catacombs took the form of a blunt cross naturally; a square
chamber having a vaulted recess on each side; then the Byzantine
churches were structurally built in the form of an equal cross; while
the heraldic and other ornamental equal-armed crosses are partly signs
of glory and victory, partly of light, and divine spiritual presence.
But the Franciscans and Dominicans saw in the cross no sign of triumph,
but of trial. The wounds of their Master were to be their inheritance.
So their first aim was to make what image to the cross their church
might present, distinctly that of the actual instrument of death. And
they did this most effectually by using the form of the letter T, that
of the Furca or Gibbet,--not the sign of peace.
Also their churches were meant for use; not show, nor
self-glorification, nor town-glorification. They wanted places for
preaching, prayer, sacrifice, burial; and had no intention of showing
how high they could build towers, or how widely they could arch vaults.
Strong walls and the roof of a barn,--these your Franciscan asks
of his Arnolfo. These Arnolfo gives,--thoroughly and wisely built;
the successions of gable roof being a new device for strength much
practised in his day.
This stern humour did not last long. Arnolfo himself had other notions;
most of all, Nature and Heaven. Something else had to be taught about
Christ than that He was wounded to death. Nevertheless, look how grand
this stern form would be, restored to its simplicity. It is not the old
church which is in itself unimpressive. It is the old church defaced by
Vasari, by Michael Angelo, and by modern Florence. See those huge tombs
on your right hand and left, at the sides of the aisles, with their
alternate gable and round tops, and their paltriest of all sculpture,
trying to be grand by bigness, and pathetic by expense. Tear them
all down in your imagination; fancy the vast hall with its massive
pillars,--not painted calomel-pill colour, as now, but of their native
stone, with the rough true wood for roof,--and a people praying beneath
them, strong in abiding, and pure in life, as their rocks and olive
forests. That was Arnolfo’s Santa Croce. Nor did his work remain long
without grace.
That very line of chapels in which we found our St. Louis shows signs
of change in temper. They have no pent-house roofs, but true Gothic
vaults: we found our four square type of Franciscan Law on one of them.
It is probable, then, that these chapels may be later than the
rest--even in their stonework. In their decoration, they are so,
assuredly; belonging already to the time when the story of St. Francis
was becoming a passionate tradition, told and painted everywhere with
delight.
And that high recess, taking the place of apse, in the centre,--see how
noble it is in the coloured shade surrounding and joining the glow of
its windows, though their form be so simple. You are not to be amused
here by patterns in balanced stone, as a French or English architect
would amuse you, says Arnolfo. “You are to read and think, under these
severe walls of mine; immortal hands will write upon them.”
THE CERTOSA OF PAVIA
The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewildering
sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with a
lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once been
driven round together with the crew of sightseers can carry little
away but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze work, inlaid agates and
labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair painted
faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardens
with rows of pink primroses in Spring and bigonia in Autumn, blooming
beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The striking contrast
between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance façade, each
in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; and thoughts of the
two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride of power it is a
monument, may be blended with the recollection of art treasures alien
to their spirit.
[Illustration: THE CERTOSA OF PAVIA, ITALY.]
Two great artists, Ambrognio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo are the
presiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon the
accurate investigation of records and comparison of styles, must
be left the task of separating their work from that of numerous
collaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the
whole music is struck by them. Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni
chapel at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the façade
of the Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the
distribution of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The only
fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento
inspiration is that the façade is a frontispiece, with hardly any
structural relation to the church it mocks: and this, though serious
from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its
sculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seems a
wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering
raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures
of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and
cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details
to the main design, clear, rhythmical and lucid, like the chant of
Pergolese, or Stradella, will enrapture one who has the sense for unity
evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the
harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy to find the
instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in its expenditure of
rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship
on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and
simple structural effect.
All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession
on this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained
perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of
exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the
triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness
and self abandonment to inspiration which we lack in the severer
masterpieces of the Tuscan school.
To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and
choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately
Gothic style. Borgognone, again, is said to have designed the saints
and martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes
are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at
the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in
the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting
in spite of partial decay.
The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone’s
majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini’s Christian grace, or
mark the influence of Leonardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by
his pupil Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Leonardesque
spirit, this great picture was left unfinished; yet Northern Italy has
nothing finer to show than the landscape outspread in its immeasurable
purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles, and the ascendant Mother
of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and
Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe lacus
sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink
in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as
all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or
Perugino.
The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into
a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of
sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic
canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble
biers--we read in all these sculptured forms a strange record of human
restlessness resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of
Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_; the blood-thirst of
Gian Maria; the dark designs of Fillipo and his secret vices; Francesco
Sforza’s treason; Galeazzo Maria’s vanities and lusts; their tyrant’s
dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and
the assassin’s poniard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and
fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts
of broken faith;--all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what
Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution:
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay’s now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed!
From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters flooded
with sunlight, where the swallows skim and the brown hawks circle
and the mason bees are at work among the carvings. The arcades of
the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta.
The memory fails before such infinite invention, such facility and
felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the arches among
grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of angels, like
rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave, ascending and
descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on their pedestals
and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of cherubs and courses
of stars and acanthus-leaves in woven lines and ribands incessantly
inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich red light and
purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance sympathizes more
completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad plain space of
waving summer grass beneath our feet.