heraldic emblem of Florence. The ceremony of laying the first stone
took place on September 8th, 1298; Pope Boniface VIII. was represented
by his legate, Cardinal Pietro Valeriano. Arnolfo’s plan was a Latin
cross with three naves, each nave divided into four arcades with
sharp pointed arches. In the centre of the cross, under the vault
of the dome, was reserved a space enclosed by a _ringhiera_, having
open sides, with an altar in its axis, and in each of its little arms
five rectangular chapels were placed. The walls were naked, and the
architecture alone served for decoration; the effect, however, was
altogether imposing.
Arnolfo did not finish his work; he died about 1230, leaving the church
completed only as far as the capitals destined to support the arches.
In 1332 Giotto was nominated to succeed him, and for about two hundred
years the work was continued without interruption, under the direction
of the most worthy men.
It is to Giotto that we owe that extraordinary annex to the Duomo,
so celebrated throughout the world under the name of Campanile; its
foundation was laid in 1334, after the little church of San Zanobio was
razed. It is 85 metres high; Giotto, however, had calculated 94 metres
in his plan and intended to finish the square column with a pyramid,
like the Campanile of Saint Mark’s in Venice; but he was unable to
complete his work, and his successor, Taddeo Gaddi, suppressed this
appendix. The Campanile has six divisions; the first and the second,
which are easily examined, are ornamented with sculpture executed by
Andrea Pisano, after Giotto’s designs....
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF SANTA MARIA DEL FIORE]
Even at the risk of banality, the saying attributed to Charles V. when
he entered Florence after the siege should be mentioned here; he
paused before the Campanile, contemplated it for a long while, and then
exclaimed: “They should make a case for the Campanile and exhibit it as
a jewel.”
Mounting to the top of the tower, we can count, one by one, the domes,
the towers, and the monuments, and gaze upon the beautiful landscape
which surrounds the city of flowers. There are in this tower seven
bells, the largest of which, cast in 1705 to replace the one that had
been broken, does not weigh less than 15,860 pounds.
Among the architects who succeeded Giotto, we must count the master
of masters, who was, perhaps, the most incontestably illustrious of
the Fifteenth Century architects--Filippo Brunelleschi. It was in 1421
that he began the superb dome which crowns the Cathedral. This was
his masterpiece, surpassing in audacity and harmony all the monuments
of modern art. Everyone knows that this dome is double: the interior
casing is spherical, and between it and the exterior dome are placed
the stairways, chains, counter-weights, and all the accessories of
construction which render it enduring. It was only fifteen years after
the death of the great Philippo that this dome was finished (1461). It
inspired Michael Angelo for Saint Peter’s in Rome, and Leon Battista
Alberti took it for his model in building the famous temple of Rimini
which he left unfinished. Andrea del Verocchio, the beautiful sculptor
of the _Enfant au dauphin_ and the Tomb of the Medicis in the old
sacristy, designed and executed the ball, and Giovanni di Bartolo
completed the node on which the Cross stands.
The church contains several tombs, among others those of Giotto,
commissioned to Benedetto da Maiano by Lorenzo the Magnificent, and
that of the famous organist, Antonio Squarcialupi, a favourite of
Lorenzo to whom “The Magnificent” wrote an epitaph. It is thought
that the Poggio rests in Santa Maria del Fiore. The sarcophagus of
Aldobrandino Ottobuoni is near the door of the Servi.
I have said that the walls are naked, that is to say that architecture
does not play a great part on them, but the building contains a number
of works of the highest order by Donatello, Michelozzo, Ghiberti,
della Robbia, Sansovino, Bandinelli, and Andrea del Castagno. It was
by the door of the Servi that Dominico di Michelino on January 30,
1465, painted Dante, a tribute paid tardily to the memory of the prince
of poets by the society of Florentines, who were none other than the
workmen employed in the construction of the Cathedral. Under these
arches where Boccaccio made his passionate words resound to the memory
of the author of the _Divina Comedia_, Michelino painted Dante clothed
in a red toga and crowned with laurel, holding in one hand a poem and
with the other pointing to the symbolical circles. The inscription
states that the execution of this fresco is due to one of Dante’s
commentators, Maestro Antonio, of the order of the Franciscans.
_Florence: l’histoire--Les Medicis--Les humanistes--Les
lettres--Les arts_ (Paris, 1881).
GIOTTO’S CAMPANILE.
MRS. OLIPHANT.
Of all the beautiful things with which Giotto adorned his city, not
one speaks so powerfully to the foreign visitor--the _forestiere_
whom he and his fellows never took into account, though we occupy
so large a space among the admirers of his genius nowadays--as the
lovely Campanile which stands by the great Cathedral like the white
royal lily beside the Mary of the Annunciation, slender and strong and
everlasting in its delicate grace. It is not often that a man takes
up a new trade when he is approaching sixty, or even goes into a new
path out of his familiar routine. But Giotto seems to have turned
without a moment’s hesitation from his paints and panels to the less
easily-wrought materials of the builder and sculptor, without either
faltering from the great enterprise or doubting his own power to do
it. His frescoes and altar-pieces and crucifixes, the work he had been
so long accustomed to, and which he could execute pleasantly in his
own workshop, or on the cool new walls of church or convent, with his
trained school of younger artists round to aid him, were as different
as possible from the elaborate calculations and measurements by which
alone the lofty tower, straight and lightsome as a lily, could have
sprung so high and stood so lightly against that Italian sky. No longer
mere pencil or brush, but compasses and quaint mathematical tools,
figures not of art by arithmetic, elaborate weighing of proportions
and calculations of quantity and balance, must have changed the
character of those preliminary studies in which every artist must
engage before he begins a great work. Like the poet or the romancist
when he turns from the flowery ways of fiction and invention, where he
is unincumbered by any restrictions save those of artistic keeping and
personal will, to the grave and beaten path of history--the painter
must have felt when he too turned from the freedom and poetry of
art to this first scientific undertaking. The Cathedral was so far
finished by this time, its front not scarred and bare as at present,
but adorned with statues according to old Arnolfo’s plan, who was dead
more than thirty years before; but there was no belfry, no companion
peal of peace and sweetness to balance the hoarse old _vacca_ with its
voice of iron. Giotto seems to have thrown himself into the work not
only without reluctance but with enthusiasm. The foundation-stone of
the building was laid in July of that year, with all the greatness of
Florence looking on; and the painter entered upon his work at once,
working out the most poetic effort of his life in marble and stone,
among masons’ chippings and the dust and blaze of the public street.
At the same time he designed, though it does not seem sure whether he
lived long enough to execute, a new façade for the Cathedral, replacing
Arnolfo’s old statues by something better, and raising over the doorway
the delicate tabernacle work which we see in Pocetti’s picture of St.
Antonino’s consecration as bishop of St. Mark’s. It would be pleasant
to believe that while the foundations of the Campanile were being laid
and the ruder mason-work progressing, the painter began immediately
upon the more congenial labour, and made the face of the Duomo fair
with carvings, with soft shades of those toned marbles which fit so
tenderly into each other, and elaborate canopies as delicate as foam;
but of this there seems no certainty. Of the Campanile itself it is
difficult to speak in ordinary words. The enrichments of the surface,
which is covered by beautiful groups set in a graceful framework of
marble, with scarcely a flat or unadorned spot from top to bottom, has
been ever since the admiration of artists and of the world. But we
confess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords
us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before
which the mind stops short, silenced and filled with the completeness
of beauty unbroken, which Art so seldom gives, though Nature often
attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a
flower or a stretch of summer sky. Just as we have looked at a sunset,
we look at Giotto’s tower, poised far above in the blue air, in all
the wonderful dawns and moonlights of Italy, swift darkness shadowing
its white glory at the tinkle of the Ave Mary, and a golden glow of
sunbeams accompanying the midday Angelus. Between the solemn antiquity
of the old Baptistery and the historical gloom of the great Cathedral,
it stands like the lily--if not, rather, like the great Angel himself
hailing her who was blessed among women, and keeping up that lovely
salutation, musical and sweet as its own beauty, for century after
century, day after day.
_The Makers of Florence_ (London, 1876).
[Illustration: THE CAMPANILE OF FLORENCE]
GIOTTO’S CAMPANILE.
JOHN RUSKIN.
In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something
unpleasing; a mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with
over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other
consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy, I used to despise that
Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since
lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by
sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and
gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic, when I
afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury.
The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, between
the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet swarded space,
like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude,
mouldering, rough-grained shafts, and triple lights, without tracery
or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them, and
that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral
shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that
their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the
Eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like
a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell. And if this be, as I
believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not
something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who
raised it? I said that the Power of human mind had its growth in the
Wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty,
whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image
of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star of creation, be
given chiefly in the places which He has gladdened by planting there
the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among
the far away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to
raise that head-stone of Beauty above the towers of watch and war.
Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he
filled Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet;
and when you have numbered his labours, and received their testimony,
if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this His servant
no common nor restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he was indeed
a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon
his crown was that of David’s:--“I took thee from the sheepcote, and
from following the sheep.”
_The Seven Lamps of Architecture_ (London, 1849).
THE HOUSE OF JACQUES CŒUR IN BOURGES.
AD. BERTY.
Certainly Jacques Cœur, that citizen of humble birth, who, by his merit
reached the highest dignity of state at an epoch when aristocracy
reigned supreme, this man of genius, who, while creating a maritime
commerce for France, amassed so great a fortune for himself that he was
able to help towards the deliverance of his own country in supporting
at his own expense four armies at the same time, was not one of the
least important figures of the Fifteenth Century. Posterity has not
always been just to this illustrious upstart: he should be ranked
immediately after Jeanne d’Arc, for the sword of the Maid of Domrémy
would, perhaps, have been powerless to chase the enemy from the soil
(which a cowardly king did not think of repulsing), without the wise
economy and the generous sacrifices of him, who, at a later period, was
abandoned by the king to the rapacity of his courtiers with that same
ignoble ingratitude which he had shown to the _sainte libertrice_ of
the great nation over which he was so unworthy to rule.
Jacques Cœur was the son of a furrier, or according to some
authorities, a goldsmith of Bourges. He was probably following his
father’s business when his intelligence and talents brought him
into the notice of Charles VII., who had been forced to take refuge
in the capital of Berry on account of the English conquests. The
king appointed him to the mint, then made him master of this branch
of administration, and, finally, _argentier_, a title equivalent to
superintendent of finance. Cœur, in his new and brilliant position, did
not abandon commerce to which he owed his fortune; his ships continued
to furrow the seas, and three hundred clerks aided him in bartering
European products for the silks and spices of the East and in realizing
a fortune. Always fortunate in his enterprises, ennobled[9] by the king
in 1440, and charged by him with many important political missions,
he probably did not know how to resist the vertigo which always
seizes those of mean origin who attain great eminence. He exhibited
an extraordinary luxury, whose splendours humiliated the pride of the
noble courtiers, excited their hatred and envy, and contributed to his
ruin. With little regard for the great services which he had rendered
to the country, such as, for example, the gift of 200,000 crowns in
gold at the time of the expedition of Normandy, the nobles only saw
in the magnificent _argentier_ an unworthy gambler, who should be
deprived of his immense wealth[10] for their profit. For this purpose
they organized a cabal. Cœur was charged with a multitude of crimes:
he was accused of having poisoned Agnès Sorel, who had made him her
testamentary executor, of having altered money, and of various other
peculations; he was also reproached for having extorted money for
various purposes in the name of the king....
The sentence of Jacques Cœur was not entirely executed; he was not
banished, but, on the contrary, was imprisoned in the Convent des
Cordeliers de Beaucaire. Aided by one of his clerks, Jean de Village,
who had married his niece, he made his escape and went to Rome, where
Pope Calixtus III., at that moment preparing an expedition against the
Turks, gave him command of a flotilla. Cœur then departed, but, falling
ill on the way, he disembarked at Chio, where he died in 1461. His body
was buried in the church of the Cordeliers in that island.
Of the different houses which Jacques Cœur possessed, the one
considered among the most beautiful in all France, exists almost
intact, and is still known under the name of the _Maison de Jacques
Cœur_, although it now serves for a hall of justice and mayoralty.
This house, or rather this _hôtel_, was built between the years 1443
and 1453, and cost a sum equal to 215,000 francs of our money. For its
construction, Cœur, having bought one of the towers of the ramparts
of Bourges, commonly called _Tour de la chaussée_, from the fief of
this name, built on a level with it another and more beautiful tower,
and these two towers served as a beginning for the _manoir_, which
was called, in consequence, the _Hôtel de la chaussée_. In building
it they used stones taken from the old Roman walls of the town, which
were on the site of the new _hôtel_, and which had already been
pulled down by virtue of a charter given by Louis VIII. in 1224,
by which, permission had been granted for building upon the ramparts
and fortifications. At the time of the revision of the law-suit of
Jacques Cœur under Louis XI. the _hôtel_ was given back to his heirs,
who in 1552 sold it to Claude de l’Aubespine, secretary of state. By a
descendant of the latter it was ceded to Colbert in 1679; Colbert sold
it again to the town of Bourges on January 30, 1682, for the sum of
33,000 livres. Jacques Cœur’s house was therefore destined to become a
_hôtel-de-ville_, and, as we have said, still exists to-day.
[Illustration: HOUSE OF JACQUES CŒUR, BOURGES]
The plan of the building is an irregular pentagon, composed of
different bodies of buildings joined without any symmetry, according
to the general disposition of almost all mediæval civil and military
buildings. The large towers are Jacques Cœur’s original ones. One was
entirely reconstructed by him with the exception of the first story,
which is of Roman work, as the layers of brick and masonry indicate;
the other, on the contrary, received only its crown and a new interior
construction, and, like the first, was flanked by a tower destined to
serve as a cage for the stairway. The court of honour is vast, and
arranged so that it was easy to communicate with the different parts of
the _hôtel_.
The façade is composed of a pavilion flanked by two wings. Following
an arrangement borrowed from military architecture, two doors were
contrived, the little one for the foot-passengers and the large one,
which was the door of honour, through which the Cavaliers entered.
Both had pointed arches and were ornamented with an archivolt with
crockets. One of them still possessed, until about a dozen years ago,
its ancient sculptured panels and ornamental iron-work. Above these
doors is a large niche with very rich ornamentation, which originally
sheltered the equestrian statue of Charles VII. On its right and left
is a false window, in which you see the statue of a man-servant in
the one and that of a maid-servant in the other, both in the costume
of the period. Above this niche the wall is pierced by a large window
with four panes, whose tracery reproduces hearts, _armes parlantes_
of the proprietor, and a _fleur-de-lis_, a sign of his recognition by
King Charles. A cornice of foliage forms the top of the wall of the
pavilion, which is crowned by a very high roof with four sloping and
concave sides. Upon the front and back faces of this roof is a large
skylight-window and on its lateral faces, a stock of chimneys. On the
summit of the roof is an imposing ridge which ends with two long spikes.
The back of the pavilion is exactly like the front, with the exception
of a statue of Cœur corresponding to that of the king. To the right of
the pavilion there rises an octagonal campanile of great elegance; at
its base is a balustrade in whose open-work runs a phylactery, carrying
the motto, which is frequently repeated in the building and which
characterizes perfectly him who adopted it:
_À vaillans cœurs[11] rien d’impossible._
Notwithstanding the mutilations to which the house of Jacques Cœur has
been condemned by its fate, it is certainly one of the most interesting
and best preserved of all the civil buildings of the Middle Ages. A
vast amount of information regarding the intimate life of the people,
which has so great an attraction for the archæologist, is to be found
here. If the fact that the study of buildings should be the inseparable
companion to that of history was less evident, the house of Jacques
Cœur would afford us an opportunity to demonstrate the truth; in
reality, when we have studied this building we certainly gain a much
clearer idea of the manners of Charles VII.’s reign than could be
obtained from a host of lecturers upon history.
Jules Gailhabaud, _Monuments anciens et modernes._ (Paris, 1865).
WAT PHRA KAO.
CARL BOCK.
The first glimpse of Siam which the traveller obtains at Paknam is a
fair sample of what is to be seen pretty well throughout the country.
As Constantinople is called the City of Mosques, so Bangkok may, with
even more reason, be termed the City of Temples. And not in Bangkok
only and its immediate neighbourhood, but in the remotest parts of
the country, wherever a few people live now, or ever have lived, a
Wat with its image, or collection of images, of Buddha, is to be
found, surrounded by numberless phrachedees, those curious structures
which every devout Buddhist--and all Buddhists are in one sense or
another devout--erects at every turn as a means of gaining favour with
the deity, or of making atonement for his sins. On the rich plains,
in the recesses of the forests, on the tops of high mountains, in
all directions, these monuments of universal allegiance to a faith
which, more perhaps than any other, claims a devotee in almost every
individual inhabitant of the lands over which it has once obtained
sway, are to be found. The labour, the time, and the wealth lavished
upon these structures are beyond calculation....
The work which, in popular estimation at least, will make his Majesty’s
reign most memorable in Siam, is the completion and dedication of
the great royal temple, Phra Sri Ratana Satsadaram, or, as it is
usually called, Wat Phra Kao. The erection of this magnificent pile of
buildings was commenced by Phra Puttha Yot Fa Chulalok, “as a temple
for the Emerald Buddha, the palladium of the capital, for the glory
of the king, and as an especial work of royal piety.” This temple was
inaugurated with a grand religious festival in the year Maseng, 7th of
the cycle, 1147 (A. D. 1785), but, having been very hastily got ready
for the celebration of the third anniversary of the foundation of the
capital, it was incomplete, only the church and library being finished.
Various additions were made from time to time, but the Wat remained in
an unfinished state until the present king came to the throne. The vow
to complete the works was made on Tuesday, the 23rd of December, 1879.
The works were commenced during the next month and completed on Monday,
the 17th of April, 1882, a period of two years, three months, and
twenty days. Thus it was reserved for King Chulalonkorn, at an enormous
outlay, entirely defrayed out of his private purse, and by dint of
great exertions on the part of those to whom the work was immediately
entrusted, to complete this structure, and, on the hundredth
anniversary of the capital of Siam, to give the city its crowning glory.
[Illustration: WAT PHRA KAO.]