CHAPTER II

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture of Mediaeval Italy--Milan, Genoa, Venice--The Despots as

Builders--Diversity of Styles--Local Influences--Lombard, Tuscan,

Romanesque, Gothic--Italian want of feeling for Gothic--Cathedrals of

Siena and Orvieto--Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages--Florence and

Venice--Private Palaces--Public Halls--Palazzo della Signoria at

Florence--Arnolfo di Cambio--S. Maria del Fiore--Brunelleschi's

Dome--Classical Revival in Architecture--Roman Ruins--Three Periods in

Renaissance Architecture--Their Characteristics--Brunelleschi

--Alberti--Palace-building--Michellozzo--Decorative Work of the

Revival--Bramante--Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja--Palazzo del

Te--Villa Farnesina--Sansovino at Venice--Michael Angelo--The Building of

S. Peter's--Palladio--The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--Lombard

Architects--Theorists and Students of Vitruvius--Vignola and

Scamozzi--European Influence of the Palladian Style--Comparison of

Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.

Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism

in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must

be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or

figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared

for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted

on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found

herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle

for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany

against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and

splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and

of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who

subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the

cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her

duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the

fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other

pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the

Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and

was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which,

after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a

wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this

great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth

that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the

same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen

gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa,

between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in

1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct

worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and

sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their

preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared

upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the

rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved

with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian

cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very

startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London

and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.

Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican.

They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the

expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the

communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the

Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the

octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle,

the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its

neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the

adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan

applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their

power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much

at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they

were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian

tyranny implied aesthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.

In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so

noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a

well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the

inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some

cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical

position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of

Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the

period of Lombard ascendency.[10] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of

their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions;

the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many

instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque

features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po

produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and

Vercelli. To their quarries of _mandorlato_ the Veronese builders owed the

peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans

with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato

supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the _pietra

serena_ of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine

buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce

or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the

unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left

ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still

bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we

here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into mediaeval

Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices

of a later period.

Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by

the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled

styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and

German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding

genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and

subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor

can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in

richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may

well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that

these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the

Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the

mosques of Alexandria, decking its façade with the horses of Lysippus, and

panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern

emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the

ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their

massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics,

interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of

the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile,

at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The

Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the

Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the

Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the

Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made

a castle of Caecilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults

swarmed a brood of mediaeval _bravi_--like the wasps that hang their

pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the

dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were

carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the

Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near

the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one

Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more

potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny

southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with

ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols

of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits

beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low

colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely

Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with

Etruscan domes; covering the façade with bas-reliefs, the roof with

statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins;

flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in

isolation on the open square--these wonderful buildings, the delight and

joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of

a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all

influences and to assimilate all nationalities.

Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy,

three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These

were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. Chronologically

the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic,

coming from without, suspended their development. But chronology is of

little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features

being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and

salience of local type. What remained fixed through all changes in Italy

was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the

Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of

the whole nation.

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just

failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their

architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.[11] From

some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive

that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken

down local distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for

the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how,

moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms

of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before

some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps

with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of

architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians

which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and

England?[12] The pyramidal façade common in these buildings, the campanili

that suspend aërial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising

tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in

minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the

open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and

rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and

the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been

carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged

horses, lizards, and knights in armour--all these are elements that might,

we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the

churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their

peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long

reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue

hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.

If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence

and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of

the Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, near Florence [about

1013], and the cathedral of Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention other less

eminent examples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in

the darkest period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at an

architectural Renaissance. The influence of classical models is apparent

both in the construction and the detail of these basilicas; while the

deeply grounded preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for

colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces,

with low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction in these

original and noble buildings. It is impossible to refrain from deploring

that the Romanesque of Tuscany should have been checked in its development

by the intrusion of the German Gothic. Had it run its course unthwarted, a

national style suited to the temperament of the people might have been

formed, and much that was pedantic in the revival of the fifteenth century

have been obviated.

The place of Gothic architecture in Italy demands fuller treatment. It was

due partly to the direct influence of German emperors, partly to the

imperial sympathies of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan friars,

who aimed at building large churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration

excited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern

Europe, that Gothic--so alien to the Italian genius and climate--took

root, spread widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus

enumerating the conditions favourable to the spread of Gottico-Tedesco, I

am far from wishing to assert that this style was purely foreign. Italy,

in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of

evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the

latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation. Yet

the first Gothic church, that of S. Francis at Assisi, was designed by a

German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically

German.[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the

Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The mood of mind

in which they Gothicised was partial and transient. The evolution of this

style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so

uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North. While it produced

the church of S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto,

Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of

Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the

national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity

that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness.

It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to

revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned

the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it

half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in

which they comprehended chivalry.

The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic

architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and

blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at

covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of

construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first

object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the

proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the

Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the

negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal

lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows;

aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to

complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The

whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the

spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless

soaring lines--lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent

growth--converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The

campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings.

It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the

bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is

rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of

the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the

nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six

arches raised on simple piers. The façade of an Italian cathedral was

studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior;

in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks

through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof

of the nave. For the total effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to

anyone who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, no thought was

taken. In this way the Italians missed the point and failed to perceive

the poetry of Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was lost

upon them; perhaps we ought to say that the Italian temperament, in art as

in religion, was incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful

mysticism of the Teutonic races.

On the other hand, what they sacrificed of genuine Gothic character, was

made good after their own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco

or mosaic, bronze-work or bas-relief, wood-carving or panelling in marble,

baked clay or enamelled earthenware was never carried to such perfection

in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had sculpture in the North an

equal chance of detaching itself from the niche and tabernacle, which

forced it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the comparative

defects of Italian Gothic were directly helpful in promoting those very

arts for which the people had a genius unrivalled among modern nations.

It is only necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style,

those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of

Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of

the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic

purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a façade of

surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the

nave and aisles, a cupola surmounting the intersection of nave, choir, and

transepts; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached campanile, round

columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed

arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo.

But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the

dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot

of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices

loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines,

altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid

wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens,

gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli--the

masterpieces of men famous each in his own line--delight the eye in all

directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and

glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred

master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best.

All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so

brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that

the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one

paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in

the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that

make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one

architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their

individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect.

The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the

southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern

Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races,

organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the

southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent

personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific

qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by

no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the

creation of citizens--of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by

alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but

capable themselves of sovereign power.[14]

What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto.

Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the façade is more

architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice

shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the

style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls,

broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the

nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few

pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the

northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand,

the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect

has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed,

though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive

by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated

details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge,

there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won.

The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of

Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work

and mosaics of the façade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the

wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters--these are the objects

for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto. On approaching a

building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic

architecture: only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that

epithet. We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design.

Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to

welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent

genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements

become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of

Milan. Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different

styles--the pyramidal façade of Lombard architecture and the long thin

lights of German Gothic, for example--a clumsier misuse of

ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more

disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave

and aisles, could scarcely be imagined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in

Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy. The

splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or

of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath

the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear

blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the

immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of

the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the

painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in

Christendom.

The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which I have been speaking, were

both in a certain sense exotic. Within the great cities the pith of the

population was Latin; and no style of building that did not continue the

tradition of the Romans, in the spirit of the Roman manner, and with

strict observance of its details, satisfied them. It was a main feature of

the Renaissance that, when the Italians undertook the task of reuniting

themselves by study with the past, they abandoned all other forms of

architecture, and did their best to create one in harmony with the relics

of Latin monuments. To trace the history of this revived classic

architecture will occupy me later in this chapter; but for the moment it

is necessary to turn aside and consider briefly the secular buildings of

Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper.

About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles

filled the towns with fortresses. These at first were gaunt and unsightly;

how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediaeval Italian city could be, is

still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the

_torroni_ have been left untouched.[15] In course of time, when the

aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was

maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious

palaces. The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character

of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of

ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define what are the

social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco

Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at

Florence, we feel that the _genius loci_ has in each case controlled the

architect. The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta

traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown

mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other. That the one was raised

by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the

dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some

way to explain the difference. In like manner the court-life of a dynastic

principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and

adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants. It is

not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is

represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine

dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock

about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade--in their

torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we

trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the

parties of Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter and more

elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving;

while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in

the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings

which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure

of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the

contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold,

moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the

water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public

square and overawe the homes of men.

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls

and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city

architecture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful States is

symbolised in the _broletti_ of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned

now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something

strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wandering through the vast hall

of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide

over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was

once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh

was utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces have the good

fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by

world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The

spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building.

Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors

may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that

the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater

lustre. Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born

palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that

here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.

Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers

above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic

beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of

Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than

the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped

Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and

sloping piazza, where the _contrade_ of Siena have run their _palio_ for

centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home

Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city. During their

term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory. All

deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell

was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed. The architect

of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest

builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo

of the thirteenth century[16]. In 1298 he was ordered to erect a

dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that the people might be

protected in their fortress from the violence of the nobles. The building

of the palace and the levelling of the square around it were attended with

circumstances that bring forcibly before our minds the stern conditions of

republican life in mediaeval Italy. A block of houses had to be bought from

the family of Foraboschi; and their tower, called Torre della Vacca, was

raised and turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was not room

enough, however, to construct the palace itself with right angles, unless

it were extended into the open space where once had stood the houses of

the Uberti, "traitors to Florence and Ghibellines." In destroying these,

the burghers had decreed that thenceforth for ever the feet of men should

pass where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had blazed. Arnolfo

begged that he might trespass on this site; but the people refused

permission. Where the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred

foundations of the public house should not be laid. Consequently the

Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be cramped of its correct

proportions[17].

No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own

individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo; and for this

reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his labours here. When we take

our stand upon the hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes her

physiognomy in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the Palazzo

Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa

Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers

from the gardens round about her.[18] Even the master-works of his

successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's

campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in

spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he

had planned.

In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a

scale of unexampled grandeur. The commission given to their architect

displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these burghers set about

the work, that, though it has been often quoted, a portion of the document

shall be recited here. "Since the highest mark of prudence in a people of

noble origin is to proceed in the management of their affairs so that

their magnanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their outward acts, we

order Arnolfo, head-master of our commune, to make a design for the

renovation of Santa Reparata in a style of magnificence which neither the

industry nor the power of man can surpass, that it may harmonise with the

opinion of many wise persons in this city and state, who think that this

commune should not engage in any enterprise unless its intention be to

make the result correspond with that noblest sort of heart which is

composed of the united will of many citizens."[19] From Giovanni Villani

we learn what taxes were levied by the Wool-Guild, and set apart in 1331

for the completion of the building. They were raised upon all goods bought

or sold within the city in two separate rates, the net produce amounting

in the first year to 2,000 lire.[20] The cathedral designed by Arnolfo

was of vast dimensions: it covers 84,802 feet, while that of Cologne

covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, "as far as mere conception of

plan goes, there can be little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far

surpasses its German rival."[21] Nothing, indeed, can be imagined more

noble than the scheme of this huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and

noting how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which in its turn

displays three well-proportioned apses, we are induced to think that a

sublimer thought has never been expressed in stone. At this point,

however, our admiration receives a check. In the execution of the parts

the builder dwarfed what had been conceived on so magnificent a scale;

aiming at colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity of

subordinated members essential to the total effect of size. "Like all

inexperienced architects, he seems to have thought that greatness of parts

would add to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence used only four

great arches in the whole length of his nave, giving the central aisle a

width of fifty-five feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of that

of Cologne, and the height about the same; and yet, in appearance, the

height is about half, and the breadth less than half, owing to the better

proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details

on the part of the German cathedral."[22] The truth of these remarks will

be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has

weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding

chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are

few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through

them; and broad barren spaces of grey walls oppress the eye. Externally

the whole church is panelled with parti-coloured marbles, according to

Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure:

it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the

colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be

placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form

he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to

adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a

succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.[23]

Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles

where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for

richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European

building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally

entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an

octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size

rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the

Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in

Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo

employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic

in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or

subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the

dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome

for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply,

naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the

need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as

compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of

simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical

ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that

the gain of vast aërial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the

impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very

strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo

Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius

of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his

powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception

through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably

defective.[25]

The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately

felt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be

fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have

already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had

checked the free development of national architecture, which in the

eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details.

But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio,

as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the

Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.[26] The

ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook

themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and

which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.[27]

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to

restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the

modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of

Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek

architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as

Roman--itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern

uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they

possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths,

theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little

immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All

that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the

remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to

clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure

of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models.

A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of

those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour;

and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period

display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are

remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of

light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition

of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the

borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.[28] The

edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in

surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye; their real greatness,

meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial proportions and for linear

harmonies possessed by their architects.

Three periods in the development of Renaissance architecture may be

roughly marked.[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of

experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first

forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the

Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The

third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward

to the reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the Italians

_barocco_. In itself the third period is distinguished by a scrupulous

purism bordering upon pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and

sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. To do more than

briefly indicate the masterpieces of these three periods, would be

impossible in a work that does not pretend to treat of architecture

exhaustively: and yet to omit all notice of the builders of this age and

of their styles, would be to neglect the most important art-phase of the

time I have undertaken to illustrate.

In the first period we are bewildered by the luxuriance of creative powers

and by the rioting of the fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately

mingled. In general we detect a striving after effects not fully realised,

and a tendency to indulge in superfluous ornament without regard for

strictness of design. The imperfect comprehension of classical models and

the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account

for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy;

the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at

the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages.

Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to

assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety

of the Romans. Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of

imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired

Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be

classic work of the Revival. The result of these combined influences was a

wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by

the façade of the Certosa at Pavia. While characterising the work of the

earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it

was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard

sincere. It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and

gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by

admiration for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite

exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and

Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped

from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own

sphere, piped ditties of romance.

To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine

architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era

in the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of taste and firmness

of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of

Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their

treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them--and

in my opinion justly--with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in

1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly

classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had

learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own

artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and

semicircular apses. Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly

speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect

resembles nothing we possess of antique work. It is a masterpiece of

intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, built

in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according to his plans. The

extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more

homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and

the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal

originality. What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity

of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic

or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this. The domestic

habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against

invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this

forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that

the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun. To speak of the

cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste,

would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour de force of individual

genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and

penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless

audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.

Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a

Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more

closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.[31] In

his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of

the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful façade,

remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned

pilasters and nobly curved arcades.[32] The same principle is carried out

in S. Andrea at Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch

of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts,

adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these antique

details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a

moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced

to method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we

consider that here the lofty central arch of the façade serves only for a

decoration. Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman

triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a

Christian church.

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace

in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo

Rucellai retains many details of the mediaeval Tuscan style, especially in

the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced

by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are

transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in

Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the

palaces they constructed at Pienza.

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the

early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of

dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those

times. The just medium between mediaeval massiveness and classic simplicity

was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond

description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace,

contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet

here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After

Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of

Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo;

and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no

man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by

Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo.

Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the

Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the

model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of

architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but

comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga,

which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their

chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo

Pitti.[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed

at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo

Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a

grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo

Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic

architecture.[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders,

and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio

Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation

from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier

Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the

pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space

and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly

Cinque Cento.[35]

In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more

inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver,

who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief,

pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral

garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys,

ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics,

vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable

wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades

that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his

mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels,

torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and

portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.[36] The wood carver

contributes _tarsia_ like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.[37] The worker

in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra

Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for

the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta

work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little

cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.[38] Meanwhile mosaics

are provided for the dome or let into the floor;[39] agates and marbles

and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;[40]

stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed

with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.[41] Tapestry is woven

from the designs of excellent masters;[42] great painters contribute

arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is

coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.

Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated

in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The

fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in

relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and

that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main aesthetical

purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts,

and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades

of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and

inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details,

and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a

feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As

the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every

detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance

have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest

literary extravagances--the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, for

instance--have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to

sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders

were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production

of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless

employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without

the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the

construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct

for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more

true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of

the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and

unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over

both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the

proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity

and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had

been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister

arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy

accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single

columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor

cupolas--elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by

Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to

determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted

Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right

limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for

structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold

and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier

Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous

and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be

preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say

how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine;

most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of

S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at

Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the

general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S.

Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent

modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features--especially in the

distribution of the piers and rounded niches.

Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils,

Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, carried out his principles of

building at Pavia and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umiltà in the latter

city is a pure example of conscientious neo-Roman architecture. It

consists of a large octagon surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty

vaulted atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this vestibule

repeats the _testudo_ of a Roman bath, and the decorative details are

accurately reproduced from similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio

Vasari, who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its effect by

raising it upon an ugly attic; it is probable that the church, as designed

by Vitoni, would have presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. At

Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated through Raphael, Giulio

Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an

architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Cappella Chigi

in S. Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The last-named building,

executed by Giulio Romano after Raphael's design, is carried out in a

style so forcible as to make us fancy that the pupil had a larger share in

its creation than his teacher. These works, however, sink into

insignificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of

Giulio's genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-houses remains to

show what the imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the

splendour of old Rome and adapt to the use of his own age. The vaults of

the Thermae of Titus, with their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques,

are here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of invention that

surpass the model. Open loggie yield fair prospect over what were once

trim gardens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the vehement and

gorgeous style of the Roman school, form a fit theatre for the grand

parade-life of an Italian prince. The whole is Pagan in its pride and

sensuality, its prodigality of strength and insolence of freedom. Having

seen this palace, we do not wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the

Alps and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his master-work at

Mantua he collected, as it were, and epitomised in one building all that

enthralled the fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of Italy.

A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the

banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino

Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and

quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal

spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of

Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this

villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman

banker's splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in

the history of Renaissance manners.[44]

Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo

Sansovino's buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the

style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of

decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the

development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth

during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in

monuments of the florid style. Something of their own delight in sensuous

magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among

them. The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo

Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet

fanciful _bravura_ style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere

else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible

degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the

impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense. The Library of

S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning

triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to contemplate its noble double

row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant,

without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or

beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.

Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of

the sixteenth century--of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications;

of Baccio d'Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; of

Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely

edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the

builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city. Yet the

greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted: Michael Angelo must be

added to the list of builders in the golden age. In architecture, as in

sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual

energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also

prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his

example the extravagances of the decadence. Without noticing the façade

designed for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of

Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of the Capitoline buildings, and

the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese--works that either exist only in

drawings or have been confused by later alterations--it is enough here to

mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and the cupola of S. Peter's.

The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who

required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed

statues to enhance the structure he had planned. Both arts are used with

equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully

with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this

chapel. He seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have

taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the

building. It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the

modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of

composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of

mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that

brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and

plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the

Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michael Angelo achieved a

triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and

this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a

stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise

propriety and violate the laws of structure. The same may be said with

even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false

windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the

insincerity of the _barocco_ style, are found here almost for the first

time.

What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it,

can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved. It must

always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far

altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome

is Michael Angelo's supreme achievement as an architect. It not only

preserves all that is majestic in the cupola of Brunelleschi; but it also

avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of

abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to

soar and float in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it is--the

adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned mediaevalism and

produced a new type of civility for the modern nations. On the connection

between the building of S. Peter's and the Reformation I have touched

already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer

cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to

Latin races. At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when

the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the decree for

its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North

had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's

remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church,

unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of

the classical revival. She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly

destroyed the Basilica of Constantine. By rebuilding the mother church of

Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if

Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading

to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their

universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit

alien to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. Peter's produces an

impression less ecclesiastical, and less strictly Christian, than almost

any of the elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised by proud and

secular pontiffs in the heyday of renascent humanism, it seems to wait the

time when the high priests of a religion no longer hostile to science or

antagonistic to the inevitable force of progress will chaunt their hymns

beneath its spacious dome.

The building of S. Peter's was so momentous in modern history, and so

decisive for Italian architecture, that it may be permitted me to describe

the vicissitudes through which the structure passed before reaching

completion. Nicholas V., founder of the secular papacy and chief patron of

the humanistic movement in Rome, had approved a scheme for thoroughly

rebuilding and refortifying the pontifical city.[46] Part of this plan

involved the reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was to be

removed, and on its site was to rise a mighty church, shaped like a Latin

cross, with a central dome and two high towers flanking the vestibule.

Nicholas died before his project could be carried into effect. Beyond

destroying the old temple of Probus and marking out foundations for the

tribune of the new church, nothing had been accomplished;[47] nor did his

successors until the reign of Julius think of continuing what he had

begun. In 1506, on the 18th of April, Julius laid the first stone of S.

Peter's according to the plans provided by Bramante. The basilica was

designed in the shape of a Greek cross, surmounted by a colossal dome, and

approached by a vestibule fronted with six columns. As in all the works of

Bramante, simplicity and dignity distinguished this first scheme.[48] For

eight years, until his death in 1514, Bramante laboured on the building.

Julius, the most impatient of masters, urged him to work rapidly. In

consequence of this haste, the substructures of the new church proved

insecure, and the huge piers raised to support the cupola were imperfect,

while the venerable monuments contained in the old church were ruthlessly

destroyed.[49] After Bramante's death Giuliano di S. Gallo, Fra Giocondo,

and Raphael successively superintended the construction, each for a short

period. Raphael, under Leo X., was appointed sole architect, and went so

far as to alter the design of Bramante by substituting the Latin for the

Greek cross. Upon his death, Baldassare Peruzzi continued the work, and

supplied a series of new designs, restoring the ground-plan of the church

to its original shape. He was succeeded in the reign of Paul III. by

Antonio di S. Gallo, who once more reverted to the Latin cross, and

proposed a novel form of cupola with flanking towers for the façade, of

bizarre rather than beautiful proportions. After a short interregnum,

during which Giulio Romano superintended the building and did nothing

remarkable, Michael Angelo was called in 1535 to undertake the sole charge

of the edifice. He declared that wherever subsequent architects had

departed from Bramante's project, they had erred. "It is impossible to

deny that Bramante was as great in architecture as any man has been since

the days of the ancients. When he first laid the plan of S. Peter's, he

made it not a mass of confusion, but clear and simple, well lighted, and

so thoroughly detached that it in no way interfered with any portion of

the palace."[50] Having thus pronounced himself in general for Bramante's

scheme, Michael Angelo proceeded to develop it in accordance with his own

canons of taste. He retained the Greek cross; but the dome, as he

conceived it, and the details designed for each section of the building,

differed essentially from what the earlier master would have sanctioned.

Not the placid and pure taste of Bramante, but the masterful and fiery

genius of Buonarroti, is responsible for the colossal scale of the

subordinate parts and variously broken lineaments of the existing church.

In spite of all changes of direction, the fabric of S. Peter's had been

steadily advancing. Michael Angelo was, therefore, able to raise the

central structure as far as the drum of the cupola before his death. His

plans and models were carefully preserved, and a special papal ordinance

decreed that henceforth there should be no deviation from the scheme he

had laid down. Unhappily this rule was not observed. Under Pius V.,

Vignola and Piero Ligorio did indeed continue his tradition; under Gregory

XIII., Sixtus V., and Clement VIII., Giacomo della Porta made no

substantial alterations; and in 1590 Domenico Fontana finished the dome.

But during the pontificate of Paul V., Carlo Maderno resumed the form of

the Latin cross, and completed the nave and vestibule, as they now stand,

upon this altered plan (1614). The consequence is what has been already

noted--at a moderate distance from the church the dome is lost to view; it

only takes its true position of predominance when seen from far. In the

year 1626, S. Peter's was consecrated by Urban VIII., and the mighty work

was finished. It remained for Bernini to add the colonnades of the piazza,

no less picturesque in their effect than admirably fitted for the

pageantry of world-important ceremonial. At the end of the eighteenth

century it was reckoned that the church had cost but little less than

fifty million scudi.

Michael Angelo forms the link between the second and third periods of the

Renaissance. Among the architects of the latter age we have to reckon

those who based their practice upon minute study of antique writers, and

who, more than any of their predecessors, realised the long-sought

restitution of the classic style according to precise scholastic

canons.[51] A new age had now begun for Italy. The glory and the grace of

the Renaissance, its blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young

strength, were over. Strangers held the reins of power, and the

Reformation had begun to make itself felt in the Northern provinces of

Christendom. A colder and more formal spirit everywhere prevailed. The

sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up. Scholarship had

pined away into pedantic purism. Correct taste was coming to be prized

more highly than originality of genius in literature. Nor did architecture

fail to manifest the operation of this change. The greatest builder of the

period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete

analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and

precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners. It is useless

to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive

genius in the Palladian style. All is cold and calculated in the many

palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza;

they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the

labour of the calculating reason. One great public building of Palladio's,

however--the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--may be cited as, perhaps,

the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture. In its simple and

heroical arcades, its solid columns, and noble open spaces, the strength

of Rome is realised to the eyes of those who do not penetrate too far

inside the building.[52] Here, and here only, the architectural problem of

the epoch--how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and use

again--was solved according to the spirit and the letter of the past.

Palladio never equalled this, the earliest of all his many works.

In the first half of the sixteenth century the dictatorship of art had

been already transferred from Florence and Rome to Lombardy.[53] The

painters who carried on the great traditions were Venetian. Among the

architects, Palladio was a native of Vicenza; Giacomo Barozzi, the author

of the "Treatise on the Orders," took the name by which he is known from

his birthplace, Vignola; Vincenzo Scamozzi was a fellow-townsman of

Palladio; Galeazzo Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and

developed his talents in Genoa; Andrea Formigine, the palace-builder, was

a Bolognese; Bartolommeo Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of

sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction. Vignola, Palladio's

elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically

frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic impulse,

and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the

sixteenth century in Italy. Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that

Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian

style. Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, felt the influences of a rich and

splendour-loving aristocracy. His church of S. Maria di Carignano is one

of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings of the late Renaissance,

combining the principles of Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation

of S. Peter's, and adhering in detail to the canons of the new taste.

These canons were based upon a close study of Vitruvius. Palladio,

Vignola, and Scamozzi were no less ambitious as authors than as

architects;[54] their minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of

construction led to the formation of exact rules for the treatment of the

five classic orders, the proportions of the chief parts used in building,

and the correct method of designing theatres and palaces, church-fronts

and cupolas. Thus architecture in its third Renaissance period passed into

scholasticism.

The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as

writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their

predecessors. We English, for example, have given Palladio's name to the

Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century. This selection of

one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of

Palladio's great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the

facility with which his principles could be assimilated. Depending but

little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily

imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where

a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been

developed. To have rivalled the façade of the Certosa would have been

impossible in London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of

comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices. Moreover, the

principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were

such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the

more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods.

After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it

is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this

age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with

the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin

metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.[55] The object in each case

was the same--to be as true to the antique as possible, and without

actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon

it the limitations of a bygone civilisation. At first the enthusiasm for

antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate

_per saltum_, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic

intuition were produced. In course of time the laws both of language and

construction were more accurately studied; invention was superseded by

pedantry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo and Palladio. In

proportion as architects learned more about Vitruvius, and scholars

narrowed their taste to Virgil, the style of both became more cramped and

formal. It ceased at last to be possible to express modern ideas freely in

the correct Latinity required by cultivated ears, while no room for

originality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in the elaborated

method of the architects. Neo-Latin literature dwindled away to nothing,

and Palladio was followed by the violent reactionaries of the _barocco_

mannerism.

In one all-important respect this parallel breaks down. While the labours

of the Latinists subserved the simple process of instruction, by purifying

literary taste and familiarising the modern mind with the masterpieces of

the classic authors, the architects created a new common style for Europe.

With all its defects, it is not likely that the neo-Roman architecture, so

profoundly studied by the Italians, and so anxiously refined by their

chief masters, will ever wholly cease to be employed. In all cases where a

grand and massive edifice, no less suited to purposes of practical

utility than imposing by its splendour, is required, this style of

building will be found the best. Changes of taste and fashion, local

circumstances, and the personal proclivities of modern architects may

determine the choice of one type rather than another among the numerous

examples furnished by Italian masters. But it is not possible that either

Greek or Gothic should permanently take the place assigned to neo-Roman

architecture in the public buildings of European capitals.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The question of the genesis of the Lombard style is one of the most

difficult in Italian art-history. I would not willingly be understood to

speak of Lombard architecture in any sense different from that in which

it is usual to speak of Norman. To suppose that either the Lombards or

the Normans had a style of their own, prior to their occupation of

districts from the monuments of which they learned rudely to use the

decayed Roman manner, would be incorrect. Yet it seems impossible to deny

that both Normans and Lombards in adapting antecedent models added

something of their own, specific to themselves as Northerners. The

Lombard, like the Norman or the Rhenish Romanesque, is the first stage in

the progressive mediaeval architecture of its own district.

[11] I use the term Lombard architecture here, as defined above (p. 31,

note), for the style of building prevalent in Italy during the Lombard

occupation, or just after.

[12] The essential difference between Italy and either Northern France or

England, was that in Italy there existed monuments of Roman greatness,

which could never be forgotten by her architects. They always worked with

at least half of their attention turned to the past: nor had they the

exhilarating sense of free, spontaneous, and progressive invention. This

point has been well worked out by Mr. Street in the last chapter of his

hook on the _Architecture of North Italy_.

[13] Even though it be now proved that not Heinrich von Gmunden, but

Marco Frisone da Campione, not a German, but a Milanese, was the first

architect, this is none the less true about its style.

[14] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 153.

[15] Pavia, it may be mentioned, has still many towers standing, and the

two at Bologna are famous.

[16] Arnolfo was born in 1232 at Colle, in the Val d'Elsa. He was a

sculptor as well as architect, the assistant of Niccola Pisano at Siena,

and the maker of the tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Orvieto. This tomb is

remarkable as the earliest instance of the canopy withdrawn by attendant

angels from the dead man's form, afterwards so frequently adopted by the

Pisan school.

[17] Giov. Villani, viii. 26.

[18] See Milizia, vol. i. p. 135. These walls were not finished till

some, time after Arnolfo's death. They lost their ornament of towers in

the siege of 1529, and they are now being rapidly destroyed.

[19] From Perkins's _Tuscan Sculptors_, vol. i. p. 54. A recent work by

Signor G.J. Cavallucci, entitled _S. Maria del Fiore_, Firenze, 1881, has

created a revolution in our knowledge regarding this church.

[20] Giov. Villani, x. 192.

[21] _Illustrated Handbook of Architecture_, book vi. chap. i.

[22] _Ib._

[23] See Grüner's _Terra Cotta Architecture of North Italy_, plates 3 and

4.

[24] Compare what Alberti says in his preface to the Treatise on

Painting, _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 12. "Chi mai sì duro e sì invido non

lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo quì struttura si grande, erta sopra i

cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti i popoli toscani, fatta sanza

alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname, quale artificio certo,

se io ben giudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, così

forse appresso gli antiqui fu non saputo nè conosciuto?"

[25] What the church of S. Petronio at Bologna would have been, if it had

been completed on the scale contemplated, can hardly be imagined. As it

stands, it is immense, and coldly bare in its immensity. Yet the present

church is but the nave of a temple designed with transepts and choir. The

length was to have been 800 feet, the width of the transepts 625, the

dome 183 feet in diameter. A building so colossal in extent, and so

monotonously meagre in conception, could not but have been a failure.

[26] Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, chap, 1.

[27] The following passage quoted from Milizia, _Memorie degli

Architetti_, Parma, 1781, vol. i. p. 135, illustrates the contemptuous

attitude of Italian critics to Gothic architecture. After describing

Arnolfo's building of the Florentine Duomo, he proceeds: "In questo

Architetto si vide qualche leggiero barlume di buona Architettura, come

di Pittura in Cimabue suo contemporaneo. Ma in tutte le cose e fisiche e

morali i passaggi si fanno per insensibili gradagioni; onde per lungo

tempo ancora si mantenne il corrotto gusto, che si può chiamare

Arabo-Tedesco."

[28] Observe, for example, the casing of a Gothic church at Rimini by

Alberti with a series of Roman arches; or the façade of S. Andrea at

Mantua, where the vast and lofty central arch leads, not into the nave

itself, but into a shallow vestibule.

[29] See Burckhardt, _Cicerone_, vol. i. p. 167.

[30] See De Stendhal, _Histoire de la Peinture en Italie_, p. 122.

[31] For a notice of his life, see Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p.

247.

[32] The Arch of Augustus at Rimini was the model followed by Alberti in

this façade. He intended to cover the church with a cupola, as may be

seen from the design on a medal of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. See too

the letter written by him to Matteo da Bastia, Alberti, _Opere_, vol. iv.

p. 397.

[33] This ancestral palace of the Medici passed in 1659 to the Marchese

Gabriele Riccardi, from the Duke Francesco II.

[34] Von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, vol. ii. pp. 187-191, may be

consulted for an interesting account of the building of this Casa Grande

by Filippo Strozzi. The preparations were made with great caution, lest

it should seem that a work too magnificent for a simple citizen was being

undertaken; in particular, Filippo so contrived that the costly _opus

rusticum_ employed in the construction of the basement should appear to

have been forced upon him. This is characteristic of Florence in the days

of Cosimo. The foundation stone was laid in the morning of August 16,

1489, at the moment when the sun arose above the summits of the

Casentino. The hour, prescribed by astrologers as propitious, had been

settled by the horoscope; masses meanwhile were said in several churches,

and alms distributed.

[35] Antonio Filarete, or Averulino, architect and sculptor, was author

of a treatise on the building of the ideal city, one of the most curious

specimens of Renaissance fancy, to judge from the account rendered of the

manuscript by Rio, vol. iii. pp. 321-328.

[36] Matteo Civitale, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Luca della

Robbia, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, Lo Scalza, Omodeo, and the

Sansovini, not to mention less illustrious sculptors, filled the churches

of Italy with this elaborate stone-work. Among the bronze-founders it is

enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pollajuolo, Donatello

and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master of the candelabrum in

S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the master of the door of the

sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro Leopardi, the master of the

standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. Mark's. I do not mean these lists

to be in any sense exhaustive, but simply to remind the reader of the

rare and many-sided men of genius who devoted their abilities to this

kind of work. Some of their masterpieces will be noticed in detail in the

chapter on Sculpture.

[37] Especially his work at Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and in the church

of Monte Oliveto at Naples. The Sala del Cambio at Perugia may also be

cited as rich in tarsia-work designed by Perugino, while the church of S.

Pietro de' Cassinensi outside the city is a museum of masterpieces

executed by Fra Damiano da Bergamo and Stefano da Bergamo from designs of

Raphael. Not less beautiful are the inlaid wood panels in the Palace of

Urbino, by Maestro Giacomo of Florence.

[38] The churches and palaces of Lombardy are peculiarly rich in this

kind of decoration. The façade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino at

Perugia, designed and executed by Agostino di Duccio, is a masterpiece of

rare beauty in this style.

[39] Not to mention the Renaissance mosaics of S. Mark's at Venice, the

cupola of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome, executed in mosaic by Raphael,

deserves special mention. A work illustrative of this cupola is one of

Ludwig Grüner's best publications.

[40] South Italy and Florence are distinguished by two marked styles in

this decoration of inlaid marbles or _opera di commesso_. Compare the

Medicean chapel in S. Lorenzo, for instance, with the high altar of the

cathedral of Messina.

[41] The roof of the Duomo at Volterra is a fine specimen.

[42] It will not be forgotten that Raphael's cartoons were made for

tapestry.

[43] Bramante Lazzari was born at Castel Durante, near Urbino, in 1444.

He spent the early years of his architect's life in Lombardy, in the

service of Lodovico Sforza, and came probably to Rome upon his patron's

downfall in 1499.

[44] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 342.

[45] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 344. See Gregorovius,

_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 127, and the quotation there

translated from Pallavicini's _History of the Council of Trent_.

[46] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 296-298. Vol. II., _Revival

of Learning_, pp. 161-166. For his architectural designs see his Life, by

Manetti, book ii., in Muratori, vol. iii. part ii.

[47] Gregorovius, vol. vii. p. 638.

[48] Besides the great work of Bonanni, _Templi Vaticani Historia_, I may

refer my readers to the atlas volume of _Illustrations, Architectural and

Pictorial, of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti_, compiled by Mr.

Harford (Colnaghi, 1857). Plates 1 to 7 of that work are devoted to the

plans of S. Peter's. Plate 4 is specially interesting, since it

represents in one view the old basilica and the design of Bramante,

together with those of Antonio di S. Gallo and Michael Angelo.

[49] The subterranean vaults of S. Peter's contain mere fragments of

tombs, some precious as historical records, some valuable as works of

art, swept together pell-mell from the ruins of the old basilica.

[50] See the original letter to Ammanati, published from the Archivio

Buonarroti, by Signor Milanesi, p. 535.

[51] I am far from meaning that the earlier architects had not been

guided by ancient authors. Alberti's _Treatise on the Art of Building_ is

a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that Fabio

Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the later

Renaissance this study passed into purism.

[52] It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque structure

is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice.

[53] Compare Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 370, for the same

transference of power in literature from Central to Northern Italy at

this time.

[54] Palladio's _Four Books of Architecture_, first published at Venice

in 1570, and Vignola's _Treatise on the Five Orders_, have been

translated into all the modern languages. Scamozzi projected, and partly

finished, a comprehensive work on _Universal Architecture_, which was

printed in 1685 at Venice.

[55] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, chap. viii.