REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN
About the year 1420 A. D. there was a great change in the architectural
outlook in central Italy. The Risorgimento[44] was already in full
vigor, and this had to do especially with the study of the literature of
classical antiquity which had been going on for nearly a century. Latin
authors were studied afresh, and, for the first time in Europe Greek
authors were inquired for and discussed, though the time had not yet
come for the serious study of the language. There was also a very marked
change in the feelings, the aspirations, and the power of painters and
sculptors. Giotto had done his work and had been dead nearly a century,
and Simone Martini as long: Niccolò Pisano had been dead so long that
his influence was felt chiefly in the work of his son Giovanni who also
had died a century before our present enquiry begins: Orcagna, architect
as well as painter and sculptor, had opposed in the spirit of Italian
tradition the influence of the Northern school of Gothic art, and had
left behind him when he died, about 1380, the admirable portico in
Florence known as that of the Lancers. (See Plate XLII.) Each of these
men had done what he could to lead the direction of artists’ thought
away from the non-national Gothic style. As sculptor and as painter,
each of these artists had much to aid him in the ruins of antiquity. Had
there been only the sarcophagi and other portable relief-sculptures they
would have had material enough to begin their work in the direction of a
higher realism, a more perfect study of the human body, a more refined
casting of drapery, a more severe style of composition, than previous
centuries had allowed. The classical feeling had taken possession of the
painters and the sculptors: Paolo Ucelli, Castagno, Gentile, Masolino,
and most of all the great Masaccio, were at work: and as for sculpture,
Lorenzo Ghiberti was forty years old and Donatello thirty-four, and the
modern arts of form had taken shape. The sculptors and the painters had
been encouraged in their ambitions by the works of Greco-Roman art about
them: but monuments of ancient architecture were so much defaced, even
in the fifteenth century, that it required a very different lesson
before their significance could be learned, and this lesson, this strong
teaching, was to be given through scholarship rather than through the
observation of the artist. It was not until ancient literature had been
well studied for half a century that an enthusiastic young builder,
Fillipo Brunellesco, undertook to study the Roman ways of vaulting and
went for that purpose to Rome as the place where the greater number of
important classical buildings remained, or perhaps as the place where
stood the always famous Pantheon. (See Chapter II.) It was 1430 before
the first building was begun in which an attempt was made to use the
classical orders in wholly new work. This was the Chapel of the Pazzi,
attached to the church of Santa Croce, in Florence, and the exterior of
this is shown in Plate XLIII as far as it is possible to obtain an
intelligible photograph of its more important parts. It is a small
thing; but assuredly it is marvellous to see, because of the boldness
required on the part of its designer. If we try to imagine the habit of
mind of a man who had never seen anything built in Greco-Roman orders in
any form, or designed in the Greco-Roman spirit, who knew buildings of
classical design only as fragmentary ruins and who himself had carried
out many designs of his own in a spirit, not Gothic indeed, but
assuredly not classic, and who then, at the age of fifty-five, in a time
when life was shorter and began earlier than now, undertook and carried
out such a composition as this, there will indeed seem cause for
surprised admiration. There is a modern Italian feeling in the little
rondels which
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF THE PAZZI, CHURCH OF SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE,
TUSCANY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLIII.]
[Illustration: PALAZZO RUCELLAI, FLORENCE, TUSCANY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLIV.]
adorn the frieze above the columns: but these rondels are filled with
cherubs and the whole composition may be set down to the Christian
ecclesiastic feeling. Again the fifteenth century spirit is seen in the
sculpture of the central arch, both on the archivolt[45] and the
intrados:[46] but he had no antique example of a decorated arch and as
an artist he felt the need of one. There is a mistaken use of ancient
forms in the carved flutings of the uppermost frieze, the strigil
ornament taken from some sarcophagus; but this also may be condoned in
view of the fact that sculptor as he was he dared not undertake
architectural carving of would-be classical intent. The coupled
pilasters of the upper story are hardly classic; in fact the pilaster in
any form is a rarity in external architecture, so far as we know the
buildings of Imperial Rome; and this feature was destined to be
altogether characteristic of the Neo-classic architecture: but in first
introducing it here, Fillipo must have seemed to himself to be doing
only what a Roman designer of the second century would have done had he
undertaken so small and so refined a design. We are not to forget that
it was huge monuments, the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the basilica
of Constantine, which the Italian masters had to study when there was
question of general dispositions. They had indeed something which we
have not in the as yet unspoiled interiors of certain structures on the
Palatine Hill and near the Forum: but they can hardly have had many
examples of design on a small scale--of the best architectural treatment
applied to buildings of very small size. This portico cannot exceed
thirty-five feet in total height and its length is not much greater:
there cannot have been many jewels of refinement like that left among
the ancient ruins of Italy, even in the first quarter of the fifteenth
century.
So far, the revival in architecture was conducted along lines of common
sense, and when the scholar and humanist, Leo Battista Alberti, came to
the front as an independent designer of architectural compositions and
created the front of the Rucellai Palace, (Plate XLIV) which was begun
in 1451, he added the flat pilaster of slight relief to a well-known
type of house front. The curious thing about this introduction of the
pilasters is that no sooner was it seen than it was disliked, at least
in the front of the palazzo, with its round-arched window-heads. The
Palazzo Pitti had been begun by Brunellesco himself and without any
pilasters at all; then came his rival’s Rucellai front, and thirty years
later we are back again at the old standpoint, and the Strozzi Palace
(see Plate XLV) and the Medici Palace (afterwards Riccardi) are
buildings without these seemingly inappropriate additions. It is
surprising to see how much common sense there was among these early
lovers of the antique grandeur.
The use of the northern style, the pointed Gothic, with its ribbed vault
and its picturesque treatment, ceased altogether in Italy with the
first examples of revived classical architecture: but not on that
account did the ancient Roman way of building come into favor, nor did
the Roman methods of design succeed without a struggle. Plate XLVI shows
the courtyard of the Cancellaria in Rome, which can hardly have been
built before 1475; and contemporaneous with this are many exquisite
porticoes of similar design, porticoes in which the vaulting springs
from the capitals of the columns; and the outer ordonnance--the seemly
ordering of parts which had become to the Italians of the fifteenth
century as important, relatively, as it had been to their ancestors
eleven centuries before, very unlike the ordonnance of those ancestors.
Only on the rarest occasions did the Roman architects of the classic
period build in this way, with the arches springing from the capitals
directly. The complete Roman Order is indeed seen side by side with this
modern type. Plate XLVIII shows the interior court of the Palazzo di
Venezia in
[Illustration: PALAZZO STROZZI, FLORENCE, TUSCANY.]
[Illustration: PALAZZO RICCARDI, FLORENCE, TUSCANY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLV.]
[Illustration: PALAZZO DELLA CANCELLARIA, ROME COURTYARD.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLVI.]
Rome, the date of which is always given as 1460, and here is the Roman
Order indeed! Here is the complete reproduction of that most singular
system of design according to which the engaged column, known to be a
mere ornament or with a constructional utility limited to this slight
thickening of the pier at that point, is made to look like the chief
supporting member; while the arch which really does the work is treated
as a subordinate filling of the panel between. This curious device,
invented when the Romans of the Empire wished to build freely and yet to
design as the Greeks designed, brought up again by their imitators in
the fifteenth century and never abandoned since, has so passed into our
modern life that we neither know nor see its inconsistency. A designer
who might have a strong sense for the constructional in his work would
find it impossible to reproduce this motive: on the other hand, those
many designers who are sincerely enamored of the traditions of the
schools accept it as one of the necessary features of great and
dignified classical architecture. It is curious to compare with the
examples just given that shown in Plate XLVII, in which the ground story
arcade is classical Roman, except that a very shallow pilaster is
substituted for the engaged column and in this way becomes a confessed
ornament, while there is no definite archivolt furnished the arches
between, so that the pilaster remains the single decoration of this
story; while above, the most realistic method possible has been
followed. Except for that odd little doubling of the consoles above the
larger piers, this upper story is as logical and obvious as if it had
been built in France in the thirteenth century. The lintel-course,
resting alternately upon these larger piers with their pilaster-like
treatment, and upon the small and slender columns of completely
Renaissance design, carries in its turn the roof timbers and the gutter
in front of them, and that is all. There is absolutely no pretense about
it; no affectation of being that which it is not; and the combination of
the two stories has
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DELLA PACE, ROME. CLOISTER.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLVII.]
[Illustration: PALAZZO DI VENEZIA, ROME. COURTYARD.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII.]
resulted in one of the loveliest pieces of composition in Italy. The
date of this charming design, the cloister of S. Maria della Pace, may
be set as the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fashions change
even in neo-classic architecture, and when the Palazzo Borghese was
under consideration in the last years of that same great century, the
coupled column was in use as a favorite device. Long afterwards it
appeared in Paris, adorning the famous eastern front of the Louvre; but
here, as early as the days when Queen Elizabeth and her nobles were
resisting the Spanish Armada, the coupling of the columns, almost
unknown in antiquity, and never a device of the Rinascimento, finds
itself in complete favor in that which we call the Classicismo.[47]
Indeed this portico and loggia, Plate XLIX, has little real classical
feeling about it, except the care with which the simpler Order, Tuscan
or modified Doric, is kept in the ground story, and the Ionic Order
above--the proportions of those columns being also carefully observed.
The reader will hardly ignore the coldness of the design, the absence of
flavor and freshness which marks it: the designer is so very sure of his
methods and so fixed in advance as to his intentions that there is no
longer any trace of the Rebirth left. If we cross the Alps, we shall
find in buildings of this time the Renaissance in its full glory, but
the Renaissance in France is nearly a century behind the Rinascimento in
Italy.
[Illustration: PALAZZO BORGHESE, ROME. COURTYARD.]
[Illustration: PLATE XLIX.]
[Illustration: CHATEAU AT BLOIS (LOIR ET CHER), FRANCE, WING OF LOUIS
XII.]
[Illustration: PLATE L.]