EARLY MEDIÆVAL DESIGN
The unequalled grandeur of the Empire as it endured from 50 B. C. to
about 350 A. D. is most strongly felt when we think of the Pax
Romana--that Roman peace which forbade armed conflicts in the
Mediterranean lands in which war had been the rule. To this Peace an
altar was erected in Rome by the orders of Augustus. From the Caspian
Sea to the Atlantic, and from the shores of the Baltic to the Atlas
Mountains a consecutive and orderly government was maintained, fully as
beneficent as has ever prevailed in any single nation of the earth,
except in very recent years in Western Europe, and immeasurably superior
to what has existed in those same regions, taken together during the
past dozen centuries. One curiously complete difference existed,
however, between the west and east halves of the Empire. In the West,
Roman domination brought with it a civilization so superior to that
known in those lands before the conquest that Gaul and Iberian must have
looked upon the Italian domination as synonymous with all that makes for
enlightenment and intellectual advance as well as good order. On the
other hand, the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria,
must have felt that in yielding to the Italian power they were yielding
to a force, which, however beneficial politically, represented a lower
intellectual civilization than their own. The business of the Empire
was, as we now see it, to develop and hand on to the future, Hellenic
civilization. The first dawn of this extended Hellenism must have been
to the West a clear intellectual gain: but in the East it was not
noticeable. The holders of Greek traditions may have enjoyed the
apparent willingness of the conquerors to defer to the mental and moral
superiority of the conquered: but they could not have bowed to Rome as
the one civilizer known, as did the people of the west of Europe. And
so it was that the people of the East took one view of the architectural
problem when the Imperial system had fallen, while the Gallo-Romans,
Britons and Spaniards took quite another view, which they impressed at
once upon their Frankish, Visigothic and Saxon conquerors. The Roman
builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the
open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and
the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when
practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the
light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited
a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was
destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after
the Middle Ages. (See Chapters VI, VII, VIII.) The other prevailed at
once: the needs of the Christian church were served by it; and the
Westerners followed it in one way, the Easterners in a very different
way. The people of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain developed
Romanesque[33] architecture, the people of the Eastern Empire--which
held together for centuries the Greeks, Albanians, Macedonians, Syrians,
Phrygians--created Byzantine[34] architecture. The Romanesque is not
ill-named: it is indeed quasi-Roman, Roman as near as the poor and
scattered communities could make it. The Byzantine is a mixture of
Persian and Roman habits and rules, and is the very finest thing that
ever came out of such an almost conscious mixing of diverse element. It
could not have been created but for the Roman Peace, which still held
sway over the Eastern seas and lands after Italy and the West had gone
back to pristine barbarism: but under that domination it spread all over
the Balkan Peninsula with Greece, over southern and western Italy and
Sicily, Syria, Egypt, and the coast regions of Asia Minor.
Now it so happens that both of these great styles were superseded in
their turn by other and very vigorous styles: by the Gothic in Europe
and the Saracen or Mohammedan in Asia: and therefore it is that we have
only churches, and not many of them, from which to judge Romanesque and
Byzantine architecture. At least, however, these are erect and complete,
not too much altered, roofed and floored as of old, with window-openings
and doorways, porches and apses in working order. It is with the present
chapter, then, that we begin to study buildings which we can see
complete. And, after all, the church was much the most important
structure of the time. Here and there a ruined palace, like Barbarossa’s
at Gelnhausen and the Hebdomon at Constantinople, makes us regret what
we have lost: but these also prove the truth of our assumption that it
was the Church Building in which was determined the growth of
architecture. Indeed that was to be the march of events until the
fifteenth century: only then did the residence and the house of state
come to the front.
The earliest western churches are the Basilicas, buildings of a form and
style derived partly from the Roman civic basilica[35], and partly from
the well known peristyle or garden-like court of the large Roman house,
with its pillars supporting the roofs of open galleries on three or four
sides. The buildings of this character built or adapted for Christian
uses were themselves basilicas--Christian basilicas or post-classic
basilicas. They were flat roofed, without vaulting, imitating in this
the majority of the older, classical basilicas. A good example of these
buildings is seen in the still existing church in Rome, the Liberian
basilica called commonly St. Mary the Greater (S. Maria Maggiore). Plate
XV gives the interior of this building as drawn by Gutensohn for the
great work of Bunsen: the late alteration which spoils the uniformity of
the colonnade on either side being ignored. The columns of this
colonnade are entirely antique, excepting repairs and slight
alterations. It is probable that in this as well as in many similar
structures the ancient pillars of a great outdoor portico, such as are
described in Chapter II, were taken bodily for the interior of the
church. The clergy of the fifth century cared much less for the beauty
and completeness of the city outside than for, each, his own special
dominion--the church which he controlled; and there was no municipality
to prevent such spoliation. The plan of the church is easy to understand
from the plate itself; apart from the numerous
[Illustration: BASILICA OF SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE, ROME.
(From Gutensohn, Die Basiliken des Christlichen Roms.)]
[Illustration: PLATE XV.]
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SAN MINIATO, NEAR FLORENCE, TUSCANY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVI.]
outside chapels and sacristies of later time, a simple parallelogram
about two hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, which width
is divided into a broad nave and two much narrower aisles. And therefore
a single glance reveals the whole structural character and the whole
architectural design of the church. Three parallel halls divided by two
rows of columns; the central hall (the nave) rising much higher than the
roofs on either side, and showing, therefore, a broad space of wall
towards the interior; and, towards the exterior, a wall less high by the
vertical height of the aisle-roof. This great wall surface will be
certain to have windows in it, because that is the obvious way of
lighting the nave: then the roofs either finished within by a flat
ceiling, as in the present instance, or showing the timbers of the roof,
with only such decoration as color and a little very simple carving may
supply. This type of building endured through the whole epoch of what we
call the Middle Ages, and has never been wholly abandoned since. Our
larger churches are close studies of it.
Substitute a series of equal arches for the straight horizontal lintels
which stretch from column to column and carry the clearstory[36] wall,
and you have the very root of the Western Romanesque, and of its higher
development in the Gothic style. (See Chapter IV.) Basilicas
contemporaneous, or nearly so, with S. Maria Maggiore are often so
built, with round arches sprung from column to column; and if we take a
church of a much later period of central Italy we find often the
basilica type in its simplicity--developed and made more complex only in
detail. Plate XVI gives the interior of the church of San Miniato al
Monte outside the walls of Florence. The noticeable peculiarity in this
is the change of the arcade, supporting the clearstory wall, from a
single uniform line of equal columns supporting equal arches, to a more
organized structure of two great piers with two responds[37] and in
each of the three spaces so left, two columns with three round arches.
This system is found in churches as early as Santa Agnese outside the
walls of Rome, and was never abandoned. To satisfy in some way the
instinctive desire of the builders for a more complex plan than the
perfectly unbroken nave and aisles, there was introduced the wall
supported on a great round arch, which, as seen in Plate XVI, spans the
nave at two points in its length and may be thought to stiffen the
otherwise long and unbuttressed clearstory wall. The painted decoration
of the timbers of this roof of San Miniato is very attractive, the color
effect is more elaborate than the photograph can show: it is really a
very beautiful thing: and it is rare in Europe to find an open timber
roof treated so frankly as a thing susceptible of adornment. In other
ways it is curious to see the way in which the poverty and lack of skill
of the tenth century men alter the style of design from the huge Roman
way of doing things. Lightness has to be substituted for ponderous
masses; the walls are as thin as would stand alone and fairly steady:
only the columns, taken from antique structures, can be thought capable
of bearing more weight than is laid upon them; the decoration is by
means of a marble inlay of large and bold design on the walls and of
minute pattern in the pulpit, the altar rail and the like, and, in the
half dome over the apse,[38] a mosaic picture of sacred
significance--Christ with the emblems of the four evangelists and with
the Virgin and San Miniato the patron of the church. In these mosaics
and inlays there is to be noted a great interest in abstract patterns; a
characteristic of Asiatic art, but unfrequent in Greek or in Roman art
as we know it. Basilicas of the fifth century and of the sixth century
at Ravenna (S. Apollinare
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SANT’ AMBROGIO, MILAN.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVII.]
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF TOURNAI, BELGIUM, INTERIOR LOOKING NORTHWARD
ALONG THE TRANSEPT.]
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. MARTIN (DER GROSS S. MARTIN) AT COLOGNE,
RHENISH PRUSSIA.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVIII.]
in Classe and S. Apollinare Nuovo), of those and later centuries in
Rome, of the eighth century at Parenzo in Istria, of the tenth century
at Lucca (San Frediano) of the twelfth century in Palermo and Monreale
in Sicily, and others, still exist with their main characteristics
unchanged. They retain the simpler plan of rows of columns of uniform
size and placed uniformly. Another whole family of churches are of the
San Miniato type: the length of the nave divided into three or four
greater bays,[39] subdivided into minor bays. Such are the famous
churches of San Zeno at Verona, and of San Michele at Pavia and Sant’
Ambrogio in Milan (see Plate XVII): but these two last named churches
have vaulted roofs of stone. Plate XVIII gives the exterior of Gross St.
Martin at Cologne and the interior of the cathedral of Tournai in
Belgium, interesting in the highest degree as showing plainly how the
Northern builders were not content with the simple programme of the
Italians--an interior upon which all pains were lavished while the
exterior was left to come as it might, a mere brick box with the
round-headed windows cut plainly through the wall. These builders of
French Flanders in the eleventh century made the exterior of their
church effective by the process of building four square towers of very
simple design, involving no sort of complexity in their construction,
and grouping these towers at the four corners of a larger and lower
central mass also of tower-like aspect, while to the westward stretched
the long nave pierced with a series of precisely similar round arches,
above and below, with long roofs of uniform section, and all this
brought sharply up against the great rising mass of the towers from
which again three semicircular apses went off to the east, the north and
the south. In this way an external architectural effect was produced far
more elaborate than anything that the Italians of that time had
imagined. As the church of Tournai now stands, a late Gothic chancel
has replaced the old eastern apse: it is easy, however, to restore
mentally the original exterior of the church, and, if it were more
difficult, the contemplation of other Romanesque churches, especially in
Germany, would provide us with the material necessary. Plate XIX shows
from the east end the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, and it is
easy to imagine the three apses of somewhat different design grouped
about the central and dominating mass of the Flemish church. This church
at Cologne has two nearly round towers connecting the apses and seems to
have had four such towers originally, or in the first design, with one
square tower in the middle of the west front. The church of St. Martin
in the same place (p. 77; Plate XVIII) differs from these and from most
Romanesque churches in having a very noble central tower, one of the
finest productions of the Northern Romanesque.
It is evident that the admiration which we give to even the most
important of these churches is a different thing from that which the
great monuments of antiquity compel. The construction of the mediæval
churches is as complex as that of the greatest Roman monuments; this
coming from a necessity of providing interiors relatively larger than
those of the Roman imperial epoch. The builders even of the twelfth
century, and even in the most nearly well governed countries of Europe,
had but limited resources. No king, no great noble controlling a
province, no bishop, no convent, however rich, could dispose of
resources for one instant comparable to those of a Roman pro-consul in
even a small town of the empire. The mediæval men had to get as much
building as they could for their money. If they built their walls thick,
as they seem to the modern traveller, this was because they were unable
to get good masons. A stone wall may be carried up forty feet high with
a thickness of only three feet, even when pierced with windows, if you
have good workmen in your employ and fairly good
[Illustration: CHURCH OF THE HOLY APOSTLES, COLOGNE, RHENISH PRUSSIA.]
[Illustration: PLATE XIX.]
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF SAINT MARTIN, MAINZ, (MAYENCE) HESSE,
GERMANY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XX.]
flat-bedded stone with tolerable mortar; but as your material is the
worse and as your masons are the more unskilled, you have to build the
thicker. Indeed the history of Romanesque architecture is that of a
long-continued fight between the problem and the would-be solvers
thereof. It was desirable to roof with masonry, partly as a safeguard
when, as often happened, the wooden structure of the high roof above the
walls caught fire and was destroyed, and also because of the comparative
stateliness of effect, and because each bishop thought of building not
for his own brief time only, but for his successors. And this very
requirement, that each part of the building should be closed at the top
with masonry, kept the builders of Western Europe busy from the time of
Clovis on. The history of any one great church is a record of continual
failure of walls, foundations or abutments; some part of the vaulting is
forever crumbling and threatening to fall so that it has to be rebuilt;
and now and then there’s a crash and a catastrophe. The buttresses[40]
have to be enlarged; iron ties have to be inserted; even the plan of the
vaulting has to be changed every now and then and a new experiment tried
with a view to its greater permanence in another style of work. Hence it
is that the modern student of such buildings has at once that delight in
them which comes from their very archaism mingled with a kind of
deprecatory pity: we sympathize with their builders’ aims and regret
their feeble resources and their small knowledge: we love their
buildings as we love the stammering speech of childhood. There is
something else, no doubt: such a splendid tower-group as that at
Tournai, such a noble interior as that of Mayence (Mainz) cathedral (see
Plate XX), are individually, and as works of art, powerful enough to
command our sincere admiration: but these are the exceptions.
Exceptions in another way are found in northern and central France. The
buildings there are not so remarkable for their superiority in general
design as they are for their unparalleled richness in sculptural
adornment. They have at the same time many larger features which are of
peculiar interest. Thus the tower of St. Radegonde at Poitiers (see
Plate XXI), square below and coming to an octagon for the belfry, is a
wonderfully spirited composition: and close to it is that famous church
of Notre Dame la Grande, of which the west front is shown in the next
plate. The builders of this latter church were lovers of sculpture and
knew how to handle it in order to produce a great result, so they
composed boldly in groups of statuary, floral sculpture, or sculpture as
rich made up of wholly conventional forms. Plate XXII gives the wall
above the three great portals of the west front of this extraordinary
church; and while inferior in tasteful harmony to the cathedral at
Angoulême near by, or indeed to many a noble church of the centre of
France, the richness of conception, and the easy way in which the
constructional parts of the building are loaded with carved adornment
without injury to its massiveness and its dignity are surprising enough.
The sculpture is barbaric in its lack of knowledge, but to be barbaric
is not to be weak or insignificant. The nineteenth century workmen of
Europe had no such power of effective design. In this, as in building,
the eleventh century men were surpassed by those of the years to follow:
and but for that still greater Gothic art (see Chapter IV) we should
have to go to Romanesque architecture for constant stimulus.
The architecture of the Eastern half of the Empire was much less nearly
Roman in its plan. Basilicas there were; but at a very early epoch the
type of what the Germans call the _Centralbau_ prevailed. The centred
building; so we might designate the plan and structure which presuppose
a supremely important central feature, a hall, however opened up on
three sides or four
[Illustration: TOWER OF CHURCH OF ST. RADEGONDE, POITIERS, (VIENNE)
FRANCE.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXI.]
[Illustration: DETAIL OF WEST FRONT, CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME LA GRANDE, AT
POITIERS.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXII.]
sides to minor divisions, aisles, porches, and apses. See page 86. This
great hall might be covered by a cupola, or, as often is found in the
smaller churches, its vertical walls are carried up into a drum or round
tower roofed in any one of several ways. The essence of the distinction
between this plan and the Western plan is the absence of the “long drawn
aisle”; and the arrangement of the whole around a central point from
which the structures of the church may be said to radiate. There were,
as has been said, straight-lined churches in the East: and in like
manner there were radiating buildings in the West, notably, the round
churches of San Stefano in Rome and the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle,
St. Gereon at Cologne, and the rather numerous baptisteries, as at
Florence, Parma, Ravenna and Pisa, which in their original state of
being, were not baptisteries only, but became so after the basilica
churches with nave and aisle had been built in the same towns for the
cathedrals proper. Still, in connection with our immediate question,
that of
[Illustration: Plan of Church of S. Sophia at Constantinople. Scale
about 100 feet to one inch.]
[Illustration: Plan of Church of S. Theodore, Athens. Scale about 25
feet to one inch.]
the artistic appreciation of a building of any epoch, it is better to
study round or radiating buildings in their own home of the Eastern
provinces, as we study the basilica-shaped buildings in Western Europe.
Now the peculiarity of the Eastern church-building, that of the central
hall, is generally the absence of any very impressive exterior. This was
not necessarily the result of the plan adopted. One does not see readily
any sufficient cause for the general neglect among Eastern designers of
the appearance from outside; unless it be this--that the cities of the
Levant were then as they are now made up, so far as the stranger who
walks their streets can discern, of blind whitewashed walls upon which
open only the doorways of the dwellings, and here and there, in the
ground story, a small unarchitectural and carefully grated window. The
street effects, common to the cities of the north of Europe, even as
early as the eleventh century, and well known to us for their
picturesque and varied character, are, in the Levant, simply
non-existent, except in those few cities which show strong external
marks of commercial intercourse with Europe. The interior is indeed the
chief thing in church building, anywhere, but in the Byzantine art it is
everything, or so the student thinks. Plate XXIII shows the interior of
the great church of Santa Sophia, at Constantinople, which seems to many
the noblest architectural conception of the Christian world in any of
its parts. Plate XXIV gives the exterior of the same building: and it
will be seen at once how much there needs to be taken from it that its
true Byzantine character may be judged. The tall round minarets are
modern Turkish additions, put there for the muezzin who calls to prayer,
the enormous buttresses, looking like lofty houses without windows,
which rise one on either side of the great arch in the flank of the
church, are additions resulting partly from the fall of the original
cupola in the sixth century and partly from much later reparations; and
all the small cupolas near, with the buildings which they cover, are
wholly modern,
[Illustration: CHURCH HAGIA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE. INTERIOR.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXIII.]
[Illustration: CHURCH HAGIA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE. EXTERIOR.]
[Illustration: CHURCH OF S. THEODORE, ATHENS, GREECE.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXIV.]
at least in their present form, whatever foundations of fifth century
work there may be enclosed within them. It appears then that the only
striking external feature of the original building would be the slow
rise and swell of the central cupola, led up to by the similar curves of
the two half cupolas covering the semicircular apses at the northeast
and southwest, and contrasting boldly with the huge flat wall beneath
the arch, on the northwest and southeast.
The magnificent conception of this interior is well known to be unique
among the Byzantine churches; that is to say, no one of them has this
same remarkable system of construction with four very open arches (one
hundred foot span) supporting this low-pitched cupola which is then
buttressed in a way by the half cupolas on two sides producing the
striking interior form quite visible in the Plate XXIII. In other
respects, however, this great church is rather the typical Byzantine
church than a building apart. The other churches are like it in
construction; they are like it in having the central mass nearly
circular, and the minor parts ranged around it on every side; they are
like it in having drawn their constructional character from the vaulted
buildings of Persia and the neighboring lands. Thus the church of St.
Theodore at Athens, of which the plan is given on page 86, though it has
three apses turned towards the east and a narthex at the west end, is
still a building with a dominant central feature around which other
parts are grouped. Plate XXIV shows this plainly, for nothing can be
more remote from the basilica type than the group here shown. The cupola
is evidently not complete--not a fully organized design--it has been
roofed as cheaply as possible and at as low a level as the windows would
allow: for these windows replace the great light-openings of the western
clearstory. In Moldavia and in the southern provinces of Russia these
cupolas are found by hundreds with their design fairly well worked out.
Plate XXV shows a monastery in the region of the Caucasus, in which the
principal church
[Illustration: MONASTERY OF GELATI NEAR KUTAIS IN THE CAUCASUS.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXV.]
[Illustration: CHAPEL, NOW A MUSEUM, AT NANCY, (MEURTHE ET MOSELLE)
FRANCE.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXVI.]
and three smaller chapels are all completed by the carrying up of just
such cupolas above these central divisions. Now these buildings are all
very small. The cupolas are twenty-five feet, eighteen feet, sixteen
feet wide, within: St. Theodore’s little shrine would not hold a hundred
worshippers. It is easy to see that the exterior design with the high
cupola was worked out for these small buildings; but it is easy to see
also that the general plan is capable of nobler exterior treatment. If,
therefore, there should ever be an attempt made to build in modern
Europe in the Byzantine style, it will be modified, inevitably, by this
possibility, and by the obvious necessity of satisfying the general
demand for a splendid outside. The recently built cathedral in London,
spoken of below in Chapter X, is an instance of this.
Still, the glory of the Byzantine style must be found in its interior
decoration. The Greek half of the Empire took from the Roman masters of
the world the taste for splendid material; and, wherever some money
could be had, the alabaster and the rosy and gray marbles of Greek and
Asiatic quarries were brought to the spot. Mosaic gave a more vivid
color; and this gave also the opportunity for the telling of the Gospel
story and the legends of saints in permanent pictures. St. Mark’s church
at Venice is the type for Europeans to study. The sense of pure delight
in glowing and harmonious color, combined with soft and flowing line, is
nowhere so strongly felt: no building, until Santa Sophia can be
cleansed of Turkish whitewash, will affect the lover of splendid
decoration so powerfully.