Chapter VIII.

The generally chronological view which we are taking of all these

changing styles, is a good help to memory, and through this, to swift

and almost instinctive comparison. It helps the student also in his

search for causes. In this way it becomes curious to note what the

English were doing at the time that the classical Renaissance was thus

safely begun in France; with Spain in the lead, Flanders (influenced by

Spain) alongside, Germany only a little behind. The English were

building the Tudor and Elizabethan country houses. Those built of

timber with filling of masonry between the timbers belong to an old

system of construction once as common in the northwestern parts of the

Continent as in England: but those of more pretension have generally

some slight invasion of forms derived from Italy mingled with the Tudor

or semi-Gothic design. Thus Wollaton Hall, of which the principal front

is shown in Plate LII, dates from a time later than Écouen, but it is a

long way from the classic feeling shown in that stately edifice. We are

not to compare it with any classical standard; we have to consider it

abstractly, to note its merits as an exterior, expressing the use of the

building and its character as a residence, and a certain abstract charm,

as of propriety, which invests it. The huge windows are a mark of the

time; they express the joy which all the more intelligent classes were

feeling at the new cheapness and accessibility of glass: and it is

noticeable how well the difficulty is met, how much more useful are the

pilasters here than when we found them in Florence. (See Chapter VI.)

The great building is not left a mere lantern: the opening up of the

walls is almost as successful as we found it in the Gothic churches.

(See Chapter IV.)

As noted above, the English cared less for vaulted roofs than did the

people of the Continent. They developed a splendid system of decorative

timbered construction, of which the finest mediæval example is the roof

of Westminster Hall. Nearly two hundred years later than that splendid

roof is the almost equally fine piece of timber work which covers

Middle-Temple Hall, Plate LIII. This Hall shows us also the finest

possible screen of Jacobean architecture. These screens were used when

the plans of buildings were simple, when the great Hall of a

country-house or a college or the building of a company of merchants

filled the whole of the pavilion devoted to it, occupying all the space

under its roof and within its four walls. To make a vestibule of

entrance for protection against the cold and against undue publicity,

the screens were built athwart one end of the interior space: and their

[Illustration: HALL OF MIDDLE TEMPLE, LONDON.]

[Illustration: PLATE LIII.]

[Illustration: CHURCH OF THE THEATINER MONKS AT MUNICH, BAVARIA.]

DUCAL PALACE, GENOA, ITALY.]

[Illustration: PLATE LIV.]

upper stories formed galleries of communication between the smaller

buildings to left and right. We are to consider this room then as the

meeting-room and dining-room of a great number of companions and

associates whose semi-privacy would not be invaded too seriously by the

coming and going behind the screen. So much for the fitness of the

building for its purposes: as to other considerations, the vigor of

design, both in constructive and purely decorative members, hardly needs

demonstration.

In Italy, the changes between 1550 and the close of the seventeenth

century are to be found generally in the way of increasing formality and

a declining sense of the beautiful and the fit. And yet throughout this

decline, there is seen the Italian feeling for composition. The

Italians, though never a great building people--never originators in

building--have always, since antiquity, known how to make fine

designs--how to work with but little detail, how to handle that little

with good effect, how to avoid solecism.

In this connection it will be well to study the Frontispiece. The great

church of San Pietro in Vaticano was begun very early in the sixteenth

century, to replace a very early basilica. Bramante (Donato d’Agnolo:

called also Donato Lazzari; d. 1514) one of the most renowned of

architects, made designs for it. He worked out the plan again and again

in many forms; and achieved so much actual success that the great piers

intended to carry the cupola and the pendentives above them were nearly

completed, and the principal apse--that of the western end (for in this

church the orientation is reversed)--was vaulted during his lifetime.

After that time there were seemingly endless delays, unceasing

controversy, never-ending changes; but the model of the cupola was

completed by Michelangelo Buonarroti, and the cupola itself carried up

as far as the top of the great drum below the rounded shell before the

death of that great artist in 1564. Michelangelo, then, must have seen

the church, in his imagination, almost exactly as it is shown in the

Frontispiece. To any one who approaches the church from the city,

crossing the bridge of Sant’ Angelo and walking up the Borgo to the

Piazza San Pietro, the aspect of the building is altogether different;

for the late additions, the unfortunate entrance-front, and the still

more unfortunate long nave, mar the effect; the first by its absolute

inferiority as a design, the second by its concealment of the cupola

which, on that side, can only be seen when you are at least a mile and a

half distant and halfway up the slopes of the Pincian Hill.

It has seemed worth while to insert this little bit of history, because

such considerations of chance and change or such balancing of the

qualities of different succeeding designs and their makers are

inevitably part of every great and costly building; such a building as

strains the resources of a nation or a church--such as takes, and must

take, years in its completion. St. Peter’s cannot be judged in a morning

nor qualified in a paragraph. There is in it the work of the masters of

the Risorgimento in its very highest flight, and there is, more visible,

the work of the artists of the Decadenza--of the better and the worse

men, of the greater and the more ignoble epochs. A building so vast and

of such prodigious variety can only be judged as a landscape might be

judged; its details taking shape only after hours of patient looking,

and that with a practiced eye.

It will generally be admitted that the church as seen in the

Frontispiece is far more attractive than it is when seen from the East;

also that the great Order of pilasters, 112 feet high, resting upon a

basement of eighteen feet, is too colossal even for the “colossal

Order”--the separate pilasters showing too much like towers of masonry

and requiring a different architectural treatment from that which they

received as mere subordinate details; that the design suffers from the

absence of the complete group of minor cupolas, of which only two out of

the four have been erected; that the great attic is too heavy even for

the lower architectural story made up of the colossal order, and this

very largely because of the dwarfing of that lower architectural story

by the windows of the actual stories within giving the lie to the chief

ordonnance, and cutting up that vast and mountainous exterior. All this

will be granted generally by most students of European architecture as a

whole rather than of one school or one epoch; and those students will

also be of one mind as to the dignity of the whole group and as to the

beauty of the cupola, drum and shell together, effective without and

extremely beautiful when seen from within. Those who regard with an

especial love the delicate architectural sculpture of the fifteenth

century will find the huge church hard and cold. Those who care for

reason and for intelligent growth of design out of building will care

for it, while admitting its lack of charm, for it is of thoroughgoing

masonry throughout, and what it appears outwardly to be that it really

is. As we get to know it we find that the colossal order and the rest

of the clumsy adornment within and without are mere excrescences, hardly

affecting the massive pile. The cupola is one of the very few in Europe

which have no wooden building-out to a metal outer shell: like the

Pantheon and Florence cathedral and the smaller dome at Constantinople,

it is of solid masonry within and without.

CHAPTER VIII

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN

In rather less than a century from the beginning of the Risorgimento all

play of fancy or vivacity had gone out of the designs of the Italians.

As early as 1510 there is little left except reserve and a dignified

rejection of all exterior ornament which could be spared.

A very similar result is seen in the North as well; and here also it

comes within less than a century of the complete establishment of the

classical Renaissance in France, Germany or the Low Countries. It began

in the North, this classical renascence, about 1510, and was well

established by 1525. Accordingly, as early as 1600, the independent and

vigorous life has gone out and it becomes an architecture of the

decadence. Now, it is not to be assumed that decadence is the same thing

as decay. Decadence in fine art is a term applied to the slow, and

often very interesting, decline from the highest pitch of enthusiastic

work and of combined energy and good taste. Defined in this way, there

was a decadence of Roman imperial art from the reign of Trajan; or, as

some would have it, from the reign of Vespasian. And yet what noble

things were built even more than two hundred years after the later of

those two dates! So there was a decadence in Gothic art dating from the

middle of the thirteenth century; for everywhere there was a replacing

of the energy of the new style by formality, by regularity, by the

constant repetition of closely similar parts: and the pride of the

skillful builder carried it over the refined taste of the artist. And

still we have to remember with admiration and amazement such wonderful

conceptions as the church of Saint Urbain at Troyes (begun after 1265),

such masterly combinations as those of Saint Ouen at Rouen (begun 1320),

and all the finer buildings of the florid Gothic in France--of the

perpendicular architecture with fan vaulting in England. All these are

works of the decadence, and what is needed is the substitution for the

term we are using of another term which shall not sound so much like our

English word, “decay.”

In like manner, there is decadence in the South from 1510, or

thereabout,--in the North from a point of time eighty-five years later,

and this decadence continued until the whole ancient world of

traditional art was destroyed in the stormy time of the French

Revolution. Since then, there has been neither decadence nor growth, but

a bewildering series of experiments, none of which have as yet brought

the world into a state of wholesome and natural progress in the arts of

decorative design, that is to say, of design based upon structure and

utility. Decadence in the South, then, lasted for two centuries and

three quarters: in the North it lasted nearly two centuries. It stands

to reason that during such long spaces of time there were ups and downs,

periods of more rapid decline, periods of attempted restoration, of

almost a new birth. Thus, there are fantastical and baroque designs as

early as 1620 in the North, and much earlier in the South: whereas, in

either case, fine, pure, stately buildings were erected at a much later

period; still, the general tendency is from the more simple and more

reasonable to the more extravagant; and this from the natural desire of

the designers to try something new and not to be fettered too closely by

the traditions of neo-classic design. There was, of course, a reaction

from that greater freedom, and the boldness of the men of 1720 and

thereabout was offensive to their successors who established the latest

neo-classic with its Roman colonnades and a general absence of other

details of interest.

Some part of this twofold tendency--of this revolution and

counter-revolution--this drag towards an unseemly lack of dignity and

quietness, with the inevitable pull backward to a more tranquil method

of design--is to be seen in the church of the Theatiner monks, at

Munich. The local authorities, which seem to be trustworthy, say that

this church, which is dedicated to Saint Cajetan, was built in 1675,

except the front and the towers, which are later--the date usually given

being a century after the completion of the church, though this can only

apply to the upper stories. As long as the low buildings, the

three-story houses with not very lofty roofs, remained unaltered, the

view of this church from the Ludwigstrasse (as in Plate LIV) or from the

Square in front of the theatre, looking over the houses between, is one

of the most impressive to be had anywhere when a single building is

under consideration. The proportion between the dome and the two towers,

and secondarily, between the towers and the front of the clearstory

raised high between them, and between this, with its long nave roof, and

the cupola, again, is uniformly beautiful. In our American cities we can

only secure such a result by building at great, and generally

impossible, cost, on a free open plot of ground: but for a town or a

neighborhood in which the height of the houses could be guaranteed for

a term of years, no better type of metropolitan church can be imagined.

You cannot get away from its towering masses; from far and from near

they are alike impressive. Whatever reluctance there has been to admit

and insist upon the beauty of this church is caused by the inferiority

of its details. Let us, therefore, consider those details. In the first

place, for the cupola itself and the drum which supports it there would

be a general acceptance of it as sufficiently of the graver style to

which it belongs, that which the Germans call the Hoch-Renaissance,

except for some part of the copper lantern at the top which smacks of a

less pure style. But when the towers are considered, then there would be

a general rejection of that treatment of the pilasters which causes them

to appear as members, only, of a continuous group of vertical mouldings,

emphasizing the corners, but also out of keeping as parts of a

recognized neo-classic style.

Such pilasters as these do not come into any Order which you can

reproduce from the pages of Vignola; nor would the curious entablatures

forming three horizontal string-courses on each tower, and two on the

church front, proper, be accepted as forming part of any systematized

and intelligible order of architecture. The liking and disliking of such

details is very largely a matter of fashion; and the difficulty is with

all such questions concerning the mere adornment of architecture without

regard to its structural essence--that when a style, a detail, a method

of adornment, is out of fashion, it often seems offensive to those who

are working in the fashion; even as the most elegant coat or the most

elegant ball-dress of 1840 is a monster of ugliness to-day and would be

thought to disfigure the elegant man or woman who might endue it. There

is a large building in New York, the butt of endless ridicule, which is

nevertheless extremely sensible in its dispositions, well arranged, well

lighted, well imagined for its purposes. But the unlucky adoption of a

style of design not unlike this of the Theatiner towers has prevented

it from receiving even a moment’s serious consideration. By 1920 it may

be respected, and even admired as the premature attempt to introduce a

style then popular. The view to take of such a design is, then, that

which we would take of a work of art whose epoch we did not pretend to

know. It is a good rule for collectors of expensive works of art of the

portable kind, _objêts de la haute curiosité_, not to worry about dates

or makers unless the things belong to a well-known and much studied

class. If it concerns prints from engravings by Aldegrever and Paul

Potter, or signed enamels by the sixteenth century masters, or by

Petitot, it may be worth while to be sure of your authenticity; but it

is also delightful to decide to buy the Chinese porcelain, the unsigned

fifteenth century drawing, the Italian peasant pottery of the eighteenth

century, and before, without other voucher than the beauty of the piece.

He is the safest in his collecting who holds firmly to his own sense of

what is lovely and intelligent in decorative art, recognizing this mark

of authenticity as at least equal to signatures and perfectly

ascertained dates of fabrication. So to a certain extent with works of

architecture. It will never do to dismiss an attractive, and perhaps

even an impressive, building with the judgment easy to be gathered from

the guidebooks, that this is of a late date, or a corrupt style, or was

designed by a master of the baroque in art. That very word baroque means

originally an irregular pearl, a pearl so remote in shape from the

perfect sphere that no respectable jeweller would set it in an earring

or pierce it for the necklace of a millionaire’s wife; but the artistic

jewellers of the old times would take those irregular pearls and put

heads and tails of gold with touches of enamel to them, producing

abnormal birds or indescribable monsters, most admirable for decorative

jewelry. If there were an opportunity in this brief inquiry to consider

interior decoration, we should find that the domestic buildings going up

in France, even while these towers were in the way of completion in

southern Germany, were admirably designed within. The beginnings of the

Rocaille[49] are of this time; and the Rocaille system of design is as

attractive in its best examples, in the delicate goldsmith’s work, ivory

work, and varnish painting, of 1750, as any courtly and magnificent

system of adornment ever used among peoples of European descent. Of

course the European designer has a heavy touch if you compare him to a

Japanese artist of an equivalent rank: of course an uninterrupted

development in a certain line of decoration at last leads to bad taste

and violence. The point is the simple one that even those styles which

are considered fair game for ridicule and are hardly treated with grave

consideration are charming in their more perfect monuments. It is only

the rational styles based on structure, which in architecture have any

uniform greatness. It is only a real style like the Egyptian of 3000 B.

C., or the Grecian-Doric, or, so far as we can judge, the Roman of

Augustus, or the Gothic of Central France, or any derived and

self-conscious styles of the neo-classic Renaissance, such as are based

upon a new system of planning like that of the sixteenth century

chateaux, or a new system of roof building like the fan vaulted

interiors of England (three or four of them only); it is these alone

which are always fine and great; all other styles have not only their

ups and downs, their rise and fall, they have also their normal and,

therefore, respectable, but moreover their abnormal and fantastic

compositions.

Plate LV shows the front of a well-known building in Turin, and here

architectural detail has been so handled that it is indeed a

disfigurement. If the reader will look past the astonishing window

casings and the really hideous filling of panels like those in the

pilasters of the basement, he will see a well understood front. There

is a high architectural basement, containing the basement story proper

and a mezzanine; a grand story with the order, containing three stories

of the interior, the pilasters well proportioned and well placed; and

above this, a high entablature planned for the whole front with a story

of rooms in it, and another story of rooms showing in little dormer

windows above the cornice. Here are six “flats” of rooms, all abundantly

lighted, and yet the front has been laid out in such a way that it has

all the elements of a very imposing and stately structure. Even the

singular soft rounding, with a plan made up of several curves, of the

projecting central mass which includes the porch of entrance, is capable

of perfectly dignified, and even stately, treatment. The appearance

above of the great rotunda which holds the staircase, completes the

composition of this central mass, and leaves one regretting that it

might not be given to some modern designer of good taste, and a hard

hand on the vagaries of his assistants, to work out the problem of this

curious central mass, so manifold and so capable of unity. But, now, if

one leaves for a moment that abstract way of regarding the whole front

and allows those window casings to secure his attention, why then all is

lost, of course: one cannot be expected to stand very long in front of

such a building; it is a monster, but it is that merely because of the

exceptionally ugly and wholly unreasonable gimcracks that are stuck all

over it. If you should take the Hermes of Olympia and dress him like

those “fantasticals” at an old-fashioned Paris masked ball, you would no

doubt produce a very unsightly object and it would take the eye of an

expert in human form, a sculptor, namely, to discover the beauty of the

figure within.

That Turin building is of about 1690; see now what the reaction brought

forth and what gravity of design was possible to the artists of thirty

years later in the same city! There seems no doubt that this front of

the Palazzo Madama (see Plate LV) was built by Filippo Juvara about

1715. To look at it is a rest indeed after the enormities of the

Palazzo Carignano: and yet even here one finds himself wishing that the

wretched device of carved trophies of arms, as the single motive of the

exterior sculpture, were absent here. Sculptured ornament was beyond the

strength of the eighteenth century: when they tried to introduce it,

then the result was a failure. It is with relief that one looks at the

front, Plate LIV, of the Ducal Palace at Genoa, which front seems to

have been built by Cantoni, a well-known reformer in architectural

style. The tendency has been through the whole century away from

variety, away from the unexpected and the surprising, away from all

external ornamentation, whether in color or in sculpture: the wheel has

come full circle and there is nothing now entertaining or attractive in

the details of the front, except only the neo-classic column with its

accompanying entablature. The columns may be arranged in a continuous

row or they may be coupled, as in the case before us, or they

[Illustration: PALAZZO CARIGNANO, TURIN, PIEDMONT, ITALY.]

[Illustration: PALAZZO MADAMA, TURIN, PIEDMONT, ITALY.]

[Illustration: PLATE LV.]

[Illustration: EXHIBITIONS BUILDING (KUNSTAUSSTELLUNGS-GEBÄUDE), MUNICH,

BAVARIA.]

[Illustration: GATEWAY BUILDING (PROPYLAEA), MUNICH.]

[Illustration: PLATE LVI.]

may be grouped in other ways with a nearer and a more distant placing,

especially when they are “engaged” or partly built into the solid wall

behind them. But however placed and however grouped, they, the columns,

are the one decorative feature, the entablature acting in reality as

their restraining limit, the needed link between them and the necessary

structure. This building is of 1777. Ten years later the clock of the

centuries marked that moment of time when architectural out-of-door

growth was to stop and architectural transplanting and forcing were to

begin. By that time in Paris, the centre of the architectural world for

the eighteenth century, they had accumulated a number of very worthy

buildings. The famous École Militaire, south of the Champs de Mars, was

built about 1760, and the most accessible front of its principal mass

has no artistic charm except that obtainable from the even succession of

large windows, the well drilled, the exact, the highly organized lay out

of a large front. The two admirable buildings on the north side of the

Place de la Concorde were built in 1765-70 and these contain the whole

style, for they have the great free colonnades of the centre, the

engaged columns of the wings, the high basement without any adornment

beyond that feeble breaking-up of the surface which we call Rustication,

and they have for all external sculpture the feeblest and most

insufficient little carved frames of what look like round mirrors hung

here and there. These are the two typical buildings of the time and they

are typical too of the whole tendency of neo-classic architecture

throughout the decadence, a tendency away from variety, away from

movement and charm, towards gravity and dignity, but also towards cold

uniformity, with nothing to break it except the semi-Roman Order, more

or less well understood, more or less graceful in itself but having no

real mission to fulfill and therefore not forming part of the organized

and perfect whole which we call style in architecture. It has one

fitness, however, for a hurried headlong modern civilization, a

civilization too busy with its physical development to spend much

thought or much energy on the working of pure intelligence. This

advantage is that it is so easy to manage. It is very easy to handle for

those who can handle it at all. There is needed to make it sightly that

good taste which controls the fancy and the memory, and prevents the

designer from even recalling those well-known details and architectural

effects which will not suit his purpose. Given such good taste, and a

certain moderate acquaintance with the books, and designs as good as the

best can be made with great speed and with perfect satisfaction to all

concerned: nor does the designer need to go beyond the walls of his

draughting-room to decide upon all things which are of first-rate

importance to his conception.

CHAPTER IX

NINETEENTH CENTURY: IMITATIVE DESIGN

So far as architectural history is known to us there has never been

since the beginning of civilization a condition of art at all resembling

that which surrounded the people of the nineteenth century. There have

been epochs of deliberate revival, not only the famous one of the

fifteenth century in Italy, and the sixteenth century in the North,

which we call especially the New Birth (see definitions, Risorgimento,

etc.), but also some as important as that one, to the people concerned.

There will be always such attempts in every epoch of self-conscious

civilization. Under Hadrian, in the second century, A. D., there was a

deliberate attempt at reviving the Grecian purity of style.

Egyptologists know that traces are plainly to be seen of similar

movements 2000 and 3000 B. C. In Byzantine art there has been much

conscious restoring of archaic forms and methods. In France, in the

reign of Louis XVI, there was a deliberate recall of the world of art

back from the too loose and irregular, too fantastical and violent style

of the mid-eighteenth century, to a graver and, as it were, purified

taste. One peculiarity, however, marks all of these reasoned-out and

deliberate, rather than spontaneous, movements: they succeeded, and the

ideas embodied in them soon dominated the situation. There have been

some abortive attempts at reform: but those which we cite as rebirths

succeeded altogether. All the tendencies of the day, good, and not so

good, went out towards the revival, and the change was accepted by the

whole world of designers. Nor is it hard to see sufficient reasons for

this uniform tendency, for this simple development of a new style,

however introduced: the designers of the time and their more instructed

critics, the connoisseurs or dilettanti of the day, knew nothing very

positive nor had even any special idea of any style of the past. There

were no photographs and scarcely any books of historical record--no such

books at all, indeed, if by historical record is meant an accurate

account of the architecture of earlier times. Wealthy and influential

men of the later years of Louis XV might have been divided into those

who rather liked the fantastical style of the rococo and those who

contemned it and would fain have had something more refined. The purists

saw in the seventeenth century reproductions of Roman orders a finer

taste than their own. That much help from the past they may have got,

but the work they did in the course of their reformatory movements shows

that they were pursuing a perfectly natural evolution of art with no

more conscious guidance from their theories than that which led them

towards more and more severe lines--more and more slender parts--more

and more constructional methods of design. And as this movement was so

natural and easy we never think of it as a rebirth: by that term we mean

something much more radical.

When, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, men began to breathe free

again in Europe, it became evident to those who observed the tendencies

of their own time that there was no restraint of tradition left--at

least no restraint which was recognized by more than a small group of

men, while another group of men equally intelligent, perhaps, rejected

those traditions and set up their own standard. King Ludwig of Bavaria

(reigned 1825-48) had studied and travelled before his accession to the

crown; he had purchased and brought to Munich the Greek sculptures from

the temple at Ægina; he had seen the buildings of the Italian

Renaissance and admired them; he was a comparatively unprejudiced

dilettante with a liking for many styles, a sympathy for many forms of

artistic thought. He and his architects started in his capital, Munich,

the Ludwigskirche (Church of St. Louis) only a dozen years after

Napoleon’s final dethronement, and the royal Library a few years

later--each of these being in a kind of Southern Romanesque style

without columned porticoes or other attempts at classicism. The

Allerheiligenhofkirche (Court Church of All Saints) is of the same

character of design with a somewhat more frank observance of Italian

models. The Old Pinakothek was begun in 1826, contemporaneously with the

Ludwigskirche, or nearly so, but this building is a careful study of the

Italian Renaissance. The southern front of the Royal Palace, the

Königsbau, is again of the same year as to its commencement, and this

also is studied from Florentine fifteenth century palazzi. The north

front of the Post Office, directly opposite the Königsbau, has a

Florentine loggia of thirteen arches--fifteenth century style, not badly

carried out. The Glyptothek is the earliest of all: it was begun before

Ludwig’s accession, and almost immediately after the restoration of

peace to Europe, and the outside of this was meant to be as Greek as it

was possible for a modern designer to make a building. Within, it had

indeed to resort to the non-Greek device of vaulting, to cover its large

halls: but it was still of Grecian taste in its details. The Valhalla,

by which term the King designated a Temple of Honor built on a noble

hill by the Danube, above Ratisbon, is of the same epoch and of the same

deliberately Hellenic character of design; a really fine exterior,

studied closely from a Doric Temple of the best period. Another such

temple of honor stands at the southeastern edge of the new town of

Munich, the Ruhmeshalle (Hall of Fame), begun in 1843, and as completely

Greek as the two others. The basilica of St. Boniface was begun in 1835

and is a most faithful study of the later basilicas of the pure Latin

style, that is to say, a basilica of the sixth or the seventh century.

To complete the circle of the styles from the fifth century B. C. to the

sixteenth century A. D., and to cover all the important styles which

mark the circuit of those two thousand years, there was built in the Au

suburb a Gothic church as completely in the fourteenth century spirit

as the intelligence of the builder would enable him to make it. Roman

imperial art was not represented, for the scholars had hardly begun to

differentiate it from the pure Greek: and for some such reason, probably

because the Germans have always been inclined to use the term

“Byzantine” for all round-arched mediæval work, the King’s advisers made

no attempt at a piece of rugged northern Romanesque: but all the other

epoch-making styles of Europe were included in the enlarged capital

city.

All of these imitations are as careful as possible. If in any detail the

style imitated has been abandoned, even for a moment, it has been with a

feeling of “needs must”; no pains have been spared to keep close to the

ancient spirit. The interior is what is fine in the basilica of St.

Boniface and it is a favorable way of regarding this epoch of copying to

take this building as our example, because the construction and the

system of design are so very simple, so easy to grasp and to imitate,

that nothing more than a delicate care for details and the power of

reproducing them is needed. The mosaics and the paintings of the

interior are indeed not equal to those of a great Roman basilica, either

in its original state or as it has come down to us; the painters and

designers of the time were not competent to reproduce those; a critical

judge would say that the carving of the marble capitals lacked something

of initiative--something of energy; the general effect of color of the

interior, though far from unpleasing, though even agreeable to the

visitor, may be thought much less noble than that of a fine Italian

church. And yet this is one of the most attractive interiors in Europe,

and one may visit it many times during a season and like it better all

the time. It is to be heartily enjoyed, and yet when there is a question

of its artistic merit as a design, the favorable comment is much less

unreserved. For what have we to admire? Only sympathy in observing, and

fidelity in reproducing, monuments of the past. Do we feel as we speak

the word “only” that such sympathy and such fidelity are so rare that

they deserve very hearty recognition? That may be, and yet the praise

given to the architectural effort may be not great. It is not by

sympathy and fidelity alone that great designs are made.

Let it be admitted that if the architects of all Europe had been so

delighted by this, or by some similar undertaking, as to begin to work,

altogether, in the Latin style--to build all their churches in that

style and to study the problem of designing civic buildings, and

dwellings also, to correspond--a new style and a worthy one might have

originated. Let that be admitted: the failure of the nineteenth century

has been in the absence of any such unanimity. No great body of

architects has ever agreed on what was to be done. There has always been

a competing school, a rival school, sometimes several of them, armed

with reasoning and enthusiasm as strong as that of the school in

question and prepared to beat down its feeble growth.

Or let us take the Glyptothek, a composition as completely Greek as the

feeling and the perception of the day enabled the architect to make it;

are we to take the shafts without flutings, which seem to be called for,

as so many violations of Greek verity? In all Grecian art, moreover,

there are no round-headed niches, that is to say, niches covered by

semi-domes, because there are no arches therein. There are no

frontispieces made up of an entablature, a pediment and two pilasters,

used for mere ornament and surrounding a round-topped opening. There are

no entablatures constructed with flat arches which replace, or, as in

this case, relieve a flat lintel composing the epistyle. None of those

things are Greek: and yet it is clear that Klenze meant to be as Greek

as Ictinos. Let us compare with that front the façade which immediately

confronts it from the south side of the broad Königsplatz, the

Exhibition building, finished about 1840. (See Plate LVI.) Here is a

building which is more purely classic than the Glyptothek in almost

every respect, Roman rather than Greek in its proportions, in the free

use of the Corinthian column, very elaborately worked, in the free use

of pilasters with sculptured capitals, in the employment of carved

modillions: and yet it is more truly Greek in its mouldings, which are

studied with extreme care, and in the absence from it of such violations

of archæological accuracy as those already mentioned with regard to the

Glyptothek. It would be thought by many to be a finer design, attracting

less attention merely because not the home of a very important

collection of classical sculpture, and a mere shelter for temporary

exhibitions of modern art.

The Propylæa (see Plate LVI), also at Munich, is the most nearly Greek

of all, for even its use of details not known to us in ancient work, is

very careful and marked by perfect feeling for the style. It is,

however, only a gateway of honor: and in that capacity it has been easy

to treat. The designer, Klenze, deserves credit for not having copied

some one of the ancient gateways more closely, so as to avoid

responsibility.

It is impossible to escape from this method of criticism. You cannot

judge of these nineteenth century buildings without asking whether they

are or are not faithful copies of some structure of the sixth century,

A. D., or the fifth century B. C., or of whatever epoch of the past.

Those who deprecate the unfavorable character of the general criticism

which is based upon regret for this ceaseless copying, tell us

constantly that the artists of the great times copied also, that they

were always studying the buildings already erected and trying to improve

upon them. That is true; but the buildings they copied, with

alterations, with improvements, with enlargements, with refinements,

with natural striving for growth, were the buildings of their own time,

called forth by the same necessity which controlled them, fitted for the

same community, based upon the same well understood method of

construction. The familiar comparison and lesson drawn from the modern

art of the shipbuilder (for instance) illustrates this. The skilled

shipbuilder whittles out his model with an eye on the past and on the

present, and he proposes to modify the lines of his own latest partial

success or of his rival’s endeavor in such a way as to give his new hull

more speed, more carrying capacity, more stiffness--whatever may be his

immediate object. He never goes back to the ships of the time of Queen

Elizabeth with a deliberate intention of building an Elizabethan hull

and sparring it and rigging it in an Elizabethan way. No matter now

about the causes of this difference; the fact remains, and we are face

to face with this curious condition of things, that whereas every

important change in building, in the past, has been accompanied by a

change in the methods of design, so that even in the times of avowed

revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing

while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth

century and in what we have seen of the twentieth century our great new

systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without

effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a

stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and

great springing arches outside of a structure of thin, light,

scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal--the appearance of a

solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.

The mediæval styles, that is to say, Romanesque in all its forms and

Gothic of all epochs, have been copied in the nineteenth century with an

accuracy even greater than that used for the classical and neo-classic

styles. In all such reproductions the standard of criticism must be the

same. Plate LVII shows the great church at Doncaster in Yorkshire, a

building erected with singular care and forethought and at great

expense, with the deliberate purpose of imitating what is often called

the “decorated” style of English Gothic. The architect, and his

principal adviser, a gentlemen who had given much thought and pains to

the study of English Gothic, agreed that the perpendicular style, of

the years from 1350 on, had been allowed too great an influence in the

Gothic revival of the time (about 1860) and chose the work of the first

half of the fourteenth century as their prototype. To this style they

were faithful. It is nearly true to say that an imitation so close as to

be deceptive would have been the greatest success, in the opinion of the

designer and his employers. The main exception to this statement--the

main difference avowedly preserved between the modern and an accurate

transfer or cast of an ancient building is to be found in the sculpture

of the capitals in which a modern realistic study of natural plant forms

is evident; and in like manner the design of the font in the near

foreground which is not like any old English font, but is an abstract

design showing much study of old English metal work, silver altar

vessels and the like. Plate LVII also shows the exterior of this

interesting building which is very large for an English parish church,

the tower being one hundred and seventy

[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. GEORGE, DONCASTER, YORKS, ENGLAND,

INTERIOR.]

[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. GEORGE, DONCASTER, YORKS, ENGLAND,

EXTERIOR.]

[Illustration: PLATE LVII.]

[Illustration: TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON, MASS.]

[Illustration: PLATE LVIII.]

feet high and almost exactly equal to the total length.

As there is no architectural style peculiar to the nineteenth century in

any of the lands occupied by Europeans, it is inevitable that the

greater number of modern buildings should be more or less completely

suggested by the fine art of the time when there was a style of interest

and of individual character. Very few are the nineteenth century

buildings which are absolutely without such suggestion. At the same time

there are a certain number in which only a general study of ancient art

is visible, and it is of these that our tenth chapter treats.

CHAPTER X

NINETEENTH CENTURY: ORIGINAL DESIGN

The work of Henry Hobson Richardson may be named as a noticeably

intelligent attempt to regain the lost excellence of an ancient style

without copying it closely. This appreciation has to do only with his

buildings of the years from 1875 to a short time before his early death

in 1886. He studied deliberately the Romanesque architecture of the

middle and south of France, and as the elaborate sculpture of human

subject, so common in the churches of that style, would not have been

practicable in America in the nineteenth century, he developed, with the

assistance of certain American sculptors, a semi-Byzantine system of

foliated design which adapted itself well to his arched porticoes and

his elaborate interior compositions of woodwork. Other lands than France

were visited and their treasures put to use: thus, the central tower

and the general grouping of the masses in his celebrated design, Trinity

Church in Boston, Massachusetts (see Plate LVIII), are evidently studied

from a Spanish original. This is well shown in the illustration named,

which shows the church as Richardson left it. The tower on the extreme

left has been replaced by the accessories of the new west porch.

Now in such a design as this we have to separate that which is frankly

copied and that which is of independent design. Thus, the inlay of

different colored stones, so marked in the apse, and in a simpler way in

the transept, on the left of the picture, is taken directly from

churches of Auvergne. The question, then, would be whether, the idea of

a mosaic on a large scale being once adopted, the design furnished is a

good one for the place. Such designs are almost common property: they

float around the world and every designer has his mind stored with them:

the question is not of originality in combining a star with some

zigzags, but rather of providing a pattern of just the right size and

character to fill the given spot, as well as to have an independent

beauty of its own. The great central tower, studied probably from the

cathedral of Salamanca in Spain, is evidently open to question as to

whether it is sufficiently massive in appearance. There is to many

persons an appearance as if the stone work were composed of too many and

too slight colonnettes, lintels, arches, and the rest, involving the use

of a great number of small stones, laid up not in a massive wall but in

a slighter and more exposed fashion, not a skeleton, but suggesting the

idea of something very open to the weather. The Spanish originals have

somewhat the same effect but it is less marked in the old buildings and

with them it is not combined with that mosaic of different colored

stones which, although the practiced builder knows it to be superficial

merely, yet gives to most spectators a feeling as if the wall were not

solidly laid up. The building is certainly faulty in lacking the

appearance of ponderosity. Seen through a haze or by dim light it is a

noble composition, the forms exquisitely balanced, the central tower

perfectly well marking its place and its structure. It is not until the

building is seen in a brilliant light and its detailed effect begins to

tell upon its general masses that any exception can be taken to its

merit as a general central tower. That the lack of solidity in

appearance may be the more clearly understood, it is well to compare

with the church itself the porch which was built long after Richardson’s

death, though avowedly according to his general design. This porch,

though a small structure, has a massiveness in all its parts, which the

church has been said to lack. The sculpture is also especially

noteworthy as being full of that mediæval feeling which forced even the

carefully modelled human figure, with elaborate drapery, into the

service of the architectural design; while still the modelling has that

anatomical truth which modern school-taught generations require.

The conclusion is, with regard to this church, that we are free to judge

of it as an independent design once we have cleared away some few doubts

of archæological accuracy: once it is established that the designer has

felt at liberty to take a general form of his central tower from

impressions received in Spain, while many of the details are taken

almost bodily from the heart of France, the rest is to be accepted, as

also the adaptation and working-in of the borrowed details, as a design

well adapted to the requirements of the building, to its place in an

open and uncrowded site where the building stands free on every side,

and to its material, a sandstone, not very fine nor very hard. It is one

of the best designs in the picturesque fashion which modern times have

seen.

A similar piece of bold adaptation to an ancient style is seen in Truro

Cathedral (Plate LIX) in Cornwall, begun about 1880. No person who has

lived among English cathedrals could ever mistake this building for a

design of the Middle Ages; and yet

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT TRURO, CORNWALL, ENGLAND.]

[Illustration: PLATE LIX.]

[Illustration: APARTMENT HOUSE, “ST. ALBAN’S MANSIONS,” LONDON.]

[Illustration: PLATE LX.]

its character as a Gothic structure is perfectly maintained. It is to be

judged, then, as an ancient Gothic building is to be judged. One asks

whether the system of vaulting with ribs, and a filling or shell of

light stone work between the ribs, is supported and resisted in the best

and most economical way by the system of buttressing, and whether this

system of buttressing without, and the system of vaulting within, are

equally expressed in the artistic design. The fact that the modern

building cannot be allowed the cost of much architectural sculpture in

its exterior, though unfortunate, cannot be urged as a serious defect,

in view of the fact that the English mediæval churches have but little

sculpture as compared with those of the Continent, their adornment being

concentrated more generally upon the West front, or parts of the

interior.

If now we try to call to mind some building inspired, on the whole, by

classical taste and the classical spirit of design, but showing also

independence and a strictly modern conception, we shall find that the

search is not a rewarding one. There are few modern buildings in which

the classic orders are used at all, or in which classic details have

been carefully studied, without what seems to be a strict adherence to

recognized types of classic or neo-classic general design. The Greek who

was building oblong temples, very strictly limited to a given number of

columns and a given slope of roof, might still group small shrines as

they are grouped in the Erectheum; and he, the Greek designer, generally

careful of his Orders, may substitute for his columns a row of draped

statues with perfect success. The designers of imperial Rome, dealing

with dwelling houses, all on one floor, with columned courtyards and

covered porticoes surrounding gardens open to the sky, were still

capable of building on the side of a cliff and in the Imperial City,

too, and producing a house three stories high on one side and one story

on the other--handling their semi-Greek and semi-Italian details with

perfect ease and nearly perfect grace, and investing the whole with a

consistent scheme of ornament. The modern designer in the classical

styles will not do that very often. In the first place, he will have

studied only the grandiose buildings of antiquity, the great temples and

porticoes with their minutely accurate symmetry of plan: and in the

second place, he will have conceived of the modern use of classic forms

as being, on the whole, a simple thing, easy to the naturally gifted

designer. The one thing which the modern workman in classic styles

expects to get from his building is refinement of proportion, reaching

on the one side towards dignity and on the other side towards grace.

Now, to one who is naturally strong in such things, the obtaining of

these beauties of proportion is an easy thing: it is achieved or it is

not achieved in the course of a very few hours of preparation and study

of the problem. It is hardly conceivable that a modern adept in the

classical system of design should think much of detail except as to the

accurate copying of sculpture and of the curvature of mouldings from

ancient examples.

In mediæval styles, we moderns study the small town house, the humble

parish church, with its squat tower and plain windows without tracery,

as well as the great cathedral, typical of the style and embodying its

full character. Of classical antiquity there were no such things to

study, during the years when the modern feeling for classical art took

shape; nor have there been until the present day many opportunities for

judging of the smaller and simpler designs. And therefore we take from

classical art mainly its colonnades, its stately use of the three great

Orders of Greco-Roman antiquity, with a very few of their slighter

modifications. Those buildings of the great days of the empire in which

no columnar adornment existed, we have hardly learned to respect--we

still look upon them as exceptions hardly worthy of the attention of one

who would study the great arts of antiquity. Now it appears to one who

will study the past closely and fearlessly, that the Romans themselves

were a little overawed by their system of columnar architecture, and

were slow to abandon or even modify it during the long centuries of its

constant application to the diverse needs of the old Mediterranean

world. Still more are we moderns overawed by the columns and

entablatures, so that we dare not play with them: and yet, how can you

hope to design if you are afraid to play with the members of your

composition? The taste of the American communities, our great cities

within the borders of the United States, is markedly for that kind of

gravity which we associate with the classical styles--with the few large

openings, the horizontal cornices, the low-pitched or invisible roofs,

the smooth white, or light colored, surfaces of unbroken simplicity, the

carefully studied classical colonnade. The taste of similar communities

in England is as evidently based upon a long familiarity with the

picturesque forms of the Middle Ages and of the Elizabethan and earlier

Jacobean styles, that is to say, of so much of the Renaissance as

reached England before the foundation, by Inigo Jones, of the Italian

semi-classical style in that country. Similar to this is the feeling in

Germany: for it is most surprising to Americans living, as they have

done since 1880, in a time of almost complete agreement among the

architects as to the unique and solitary importance of Italian

neo-classic methods of design, to see the numerous German publications

teem with studies of sixteenth century half timbered fronts, of

seventeenth century stepped gables and turrets crowned with

“extinguishers,” and of eighteenth century florid modifications of the

rococo style. In France there is an orthodox style, a recognized style:

and yet it is in France that the most seriously considered departures

from that style have been made.

The difficulty of expressing in words this complication of architectural

thought is very great. The English designers are in one sense the most

original of all, for they follow less closely in the general

arrangements of the mass, or of the street front, the example set by

former ages. In Germany, such indifference to what the past has taught

is more seldom seen, and when seen, it takes, most generally, an ugly

form of unrestrained fancy, guided neither by tradition nor by strong

over-ruling good taste. In France, good taste is rather the rule. As in

literature, so in all departments of fine art, the fault of the French

work is in the desire not to be rash in the way of innovation, and good

taste is always ready to instruct its votaries to follow the path marked

out by the men who have just passed by in the human procession and who

had needs to supply quite like those of the present day.

It will be well to rehearse these conclusions in the immediate presence

of special examples. Plate LX is an apartment house in that region of

West London which is just northwest of Kensington Gardens. It is not a

costly building in proportion to its size; it is not adorned by

sculpture except for an unimportant piece above the large arches of the

entrance front and slight adornment of the frontons; it is built of

brick with stone moderately used for the purpose of color-contrast, and

its architectural ordonnance is limited to the marshalling of a certain

number of pilasters supporting the simulacra of entablatures and the

reality of very obvious pediments--these, and a tower well enough shaped

and placed at the angle. And the point that the student should make at

once in looking upon such a building is that it is so decidedly removed

from the world of obvious copying. Nothing is copied except a detail

here and there. One has the pleasant conviction that not a square yard

of space has been sacrificed nor a square foot of possible or desirable

window space abandoned for the purpose of archæological verity or the

repute of having built something beautiful in a recognized style. So in

the case of the building shown in Plate LXI, that planned for the West

Ham Institute and built about 1895 in that suburban village which lies

just north of “Woolwich Reach” on the Thames. The design is as

independent of

[Illustration: WEST HAM INSTITUTE--SUSSEX, ENGLAND.]

[Illustration: PLATE LXI.]

[Illustration: HOUSE AND BEER-SHOP (ZUM SPATEN) BERLIN, PRUSSIA.]

[Illustration: PLATE LXII.]

any past style as in the simpler and more commercial building. There is

much sculpture, rather carefully designed and cut with great brilliancy.

There is a rather free use of pseudo-classic columns and colonnettes;

there is a daring combination of larger architectural details, such as

gables of cut stone with rounded outline, capped with bold drip moulds,

pinnacle-towers wrought into niches with statuary, a porch of entrance

with a very boldly projecting hood, well handled, with caryatid figures,

a staircase tower with a cut stone attic of great merit, and ventilation

towers combined with the roof structure and differentiated finely from

the masonry-built forms near them. It is a costly building, a refined

and thought-out design; and yet one cannot say that there is anything of

the past in it more than this--that it is based upon the spirit and

taste of the Renaissance rather than upon that of the classic epoch, or

of the mediæval epoch, early or late, or of the Post-Renaissance epoch,

beginning in the North about 1650. This relative independence is what

the foreigner sees most strongly in modern English architectural

practice.

Now, in German lands, there is a little less freshness of artistic

thought; the artist is always in the presence of the great past, in such

a way that even his deviations from its spirit are self-conscious in a

way; and this feeling it is which drives the daring designer--the man

who would be original and who asks us to sympathize with his manly

desire to build for the nineteenth century what the nineteenth century

needs, not what a former century made for itself--to very strange

vagaries. Plate LXII is one of the best of these dashing attempts at

novelty. Every part of the wall-surface is occupied with painting in

neutral colors, which painting is in some cases reinforced by reliefs in

plaster. It is not a polychromatic design, but a design in light and

shade wrought into emblematic, armorial, purely decorative, and even

representative forms. It is noticeable that the realized painting of

human figures and accessories, so marked a feature of the ground story,

with its splendid King Gambrinus at the left, and the Lady Hopfen at the

right, stops with the sill-course, and that the rest of the painting is

much more abstract and conventional. Apart from the painting, the design

is somewhat commonplace in its main masses; though that statement is

unfair as it stands, because it was not intended to be seen without the

painting, while the details, as of the window jambs and mullions, are

very carefully wrought and very interesting. It is only above the eaves

that the design becomes commonplace, and even there it is redeemed by

the very bold fire wall on each side broken into gable-steps of unusual

design.

In this inquiry we are taking smaller buildings as more likely to

express the general thought of the community than are those exceptional

monuments which form landmarks in history. We are compelled, of course,

to select the designs of men who are famous, however unknown they may

have been when the buildings we select were put into shape: but even

the work of such renowned architects as Charles Garnier shows and

explains the general trend of thought, especially when seen in their

earlier tasks. Thus, the building shown in Plate LXIII, the Club-house

of the Cercle de la Librairie, which was completed about 1880, shows the

exceptional merit (exceptional in modern cities) of the Paris fronts,

together with their comparative lack of significance, at least in

detail. The entrance on the corner and the round tower forming a

vestibule below and an admirable card-room above, are characteristic of

Paris streets. Straight from this doorway, and, therefore, diagonally to

both the fronts, goes a passageway into a staircase which forms another

round tower-like structure. In the upper story, the large room at the

left is a billiard room, that on the right, a salon of reception and

entertainment, the “conversation room” of the club. All this is

perfectly well expressed in the external design: and that credit--the

credit of that sort of realism always restrained and always

[Illustration: CLUB HOUSE, CERCLE DE LA LIBRAIRIE, PARIS.]

[Illustration: PLATE LXIII.]

[Illustration: BUILDING OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, ST. PAUL,

MINNESOTA.]

[Illustration: PLATE LXIV.]

guided by good taste, is to be given without reserve to the French

designers of the long years beginning with 1860. Good taste is visible

everywhere, not in an exceptional measure in this building; on the

contrary, it is to be thought by a careful student of the street fronts

of Paris that there is a relative clumsiness which other and less

noticeable buildings have escaped: but there is everywhere the visible

presence of thought--of matured study of the problem, and that is a

thing so rare in the modern architecture of other lands that we are

never brought face to face with the French instances of its active

presence without a new thrill of admiration.

In the United States, some of the most thoughtful buildings have been

those inspired by the semi-Spanish style of the provinces torn from

Mexico in 1848; the missions of California and New Mexico. Inspired by

those blessings of a temperate region, a steady warmth, a brilliant sun,

they are most assuredly: and yet there is originality, so much as to

cause the student almost to forget the origin of their design in such

work of the not very famous past. Such buildings are the hotels built in

Saint Augustine about 1885--the Ponce de Leon, in which the architecture

of old Spain has been studied more carefully, the Alcazar, where the

simpler appliances of Western America are more in evidence.

One of the best things in modern original design is the building shown

in plate LXIV. Its treatment is picturesque rather than severe; and a

sufficient reason for that treatment is the recognized difficulty of

applying the classically simple method of design to one of the modern

high and narrow buildings of many stories and of many, similar,

window-openings. The walls of the side, on the by-street and on the

court, are diminished by the adoption of a roof of abnormally steep

pitch with two stories in it. The two gable-walls are broken, as a

result of the same device, by the beginning of the slope or step inward

of the gable itself. In this way the use of a great many windows all of

the same size is made practicable; the slight differences in design, as

where one story has a row of round arches, and the like, are perhaps

even more marked than was essential; the monotonous repetition of these

openings is prevented from hurting the design by the very

picturesqueness of that design, which overcomes their monotony. The

treatment of the two gables themselves is a remarkable achievement,

securing, as it does, a vivacity which we associate with the Renaissance

of the North: while it is still restrained in such a way as not to clash

with the extreme refinement of the porch of entrance, which in its

general design, as in its sculptured details, has the delicate and

subtile quality of the art of Italy a hundred years before.

This is, it appears, the way in which modern men might design; and this

is the way in which they might succeed if they were able, more often, to

give personal thought to the matter of design. It is obvious, however,

that this giving of personal thought is exactly the most difficult

thing which can be proposed to a twentieth century architect. He must do

everything else first. He must see that the heating apparatus, the

ventilating apparatus, the electrical lighting, the ventilating system,

the cooking appliances, which will come in somewhere, the plumbing,

which will come in everywhere, and the endless modifications of

drainage--he must see that all that is faultless. The owner, or owners,

really care about those things--they do not care about the design. Then

he must see to it that no time is lost. From the moment when the

previous tenants move out and tearing down of the old structure has

begun there must not elapse too many weeks before the new tenants may

move in. Ten months may be allowed; when every consideration demands two

years and a half, or thirty months. And throughout the few weeks before

and after the beginning of that ten-months’ space, the architect

employed will have so very little opportunity to “retire into

himself”--to retire at least into his study and lock the door and think

out that design, taken in its artistic sense, that the hours so given

are hardly to be reckoned with, at all. Uninterrupted thought is not for

the busy architect. The altogether likely sequence of things will be

this--that the design is sketched in a drawing-room car and turned over

next day to a high-paid subordinate to work out according to the

well-known office scheme.

Such traditional ways of doing have proved good in the great days of

art: but the nineteenth century was not, and the twentieth century is

not as yet certain to be a great day of art in the decorative or

artistic sense. It becomes the writer on architecture to treat those two

adjectives as synonymous, for in architecture they are synonymous; and

the decorative, or in other words, the architectural treatment of a

building has grown to be so foreign to our habits, and, from the nature

of the case, so difficult (as urged in the last paragraph), that nothing

but long-continued and enthusiastic thinking over the scheme will

conduce to fine designing.

It is for these reasons that the building of the New York Life Insurance

Company at St. Paul has been shown in our final plate. There seems to be

evidence there of much and of well applied artistic thought. If a

similar instance be sought in the older homes of art, and among more

costly structures, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of London, now

approaching completion in the district south of Buckingham Palace, may

be chosen as such an instance. A few such buildings there are; a few

works of art which show that the power of thoughtfully working out a

complex design is not wholly lost to the world.

Index.

A.

Abbeville: Church of S. Wulfrau, 126

Aisle (def.), (note) 54

Ægina: Sculptures from Greek Temple, at, 179

Aix-la-Chapelle: Cathedral, 85

Albi: Cathedral, 128

Amiens: Cathedral, Exterior, 102

Amiens: Cathedral, Interior, 96

Angoulême: Cathedral, 83

Anthemion (def.), (note) 37

Apse (def.), (note) 76

Arch, discharging, 57

Arch, flat, replacing lintel, 57

Architrave (def.), (note) 20

Archivolt (def.), (note) 135

Artists of the classical revival, (ff) 131

Athens: Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, 40

Athens: Church of St. Theodore, 86, 90

Athens: Erectheum, 35, 39, 198

Athens: Parthenon, 14

Athens: Restored model of Parthenon, 26

Athens: Sculptures of Parthenon, 28

Athens: “Portico of the Maidens”, 37

Athens: Temple of Victory, 39

Athens: Theseion, 14

Audenarde: Town Hall, 127

Augustan Roman Art, 47

B.

Barbaric art not unintelligent, 84

Baroque, 167

Barrel-vault (def.), (note) 54

Basilica (def.), (note), 71, 74, 76

Bay (def.), (note) 77

Bell (def.), (note) 23

Benevento: Arch of Trajan, 48, 57

Berlin (Prussia) decorative house front, 206

Blois: Château, Wing of Louis XII, 145

Blois: Château (Wing of François I.), 145

Boston (Mass.): Trinity Church, 193

Porch of that Church, 195

Bourg-en-Bresse: Ch. of Brou, 124

Bourges: Cathedral, 31

Budroun (Halicarnassos): Tomb of Mausolus, 58

Buttress (def.), (note) 82

Byzantine (def.), (note) 69

Byzantine Architecture, 69, 87

C.

Cambridge: King’s College Chapel, 121

Centralbau (centred building), (ff) 84

Chaîne (def.), (note) 146

Chartres: Cathedral, 105

Chevet (def.), (note) 103

Choir (def.), (note) 32

Choragic (def.), (note) 40

Church Architecture predominant, (ff) 70

Classical Architecture, only the more stately buildings

studied in modern times, 197-199

Classical Revival in Italy, 131

the same affecting Architecture, (ff) 133, (ff) 143

Classicismo (def.), (note) 141

Clearstory (def.), (note) 74

Cologne: Ch. Gross St. Martin, 77, 79

Cologne: Church of The Holy Apostles, 79

Cologne: Church of St. Gereon, 85

Color, external decoration in, (ff) 193

Columnar architecture in Roman interiors, 53

overawes designer, 200

Constantinople: Church of Santa Sophia, Exterior, 88

Constantinople: Church of Santa Sophia, Interior, 88

Constantinople: The Hebdomon palace, 70

Constructional origin of design less marked after 1400 A.D., 118

Corinthian (def.), (note) 39

Coupled columns, 141, 172

Cupola (def.), (note) 51

Curvature in Greek horizontal lines, 21

D.

Decadence in Art; its true nature, (ff) 159

Decorative Art (def.), (note) 13

Design as suggested by structure and purpose, 31, 34, 187-188

Detail, inferior, injuring a good mass, 164, 169, 171

Doncaster (Yorkshire), Church of, 189

Doric (def.), (note) 14

Doric Order (def.), (note) 19

E.

Écouen: Château, 149

Egg & Dart (def.), (note) 37

Eleusis: The Telesterion, 33

English building in the 16th century, 150

Entablature (def.), (note) 18

Entasis, 22

Epidaurus: Temple of Asclepios (restored façade), 26

Epidaurus: The Tholos, 39

European Art founded upon Roman, 55

F.

Fan vaulting, 116, 120

Fashion governs architecture except in the great

original styles, 165, (ff) 168

Florence: Baptistery, 85

Florence: Campanile, 111

Florence: Cathedral, 96

Florence: Church of San Miniato al Monte, 74

Florence: Chapel of the Pazzi (Ch. of Santa Croce), 134

Florence: Loggia dei Lanzi, 132

Florence: Palazzo dei Medici, 137

Florence: Palazzo Pitti, 137

Florence: Palazzo Rucellai, 137

Florence: Palazzo Strozzi, 137

Florid Gothic a new style, 115

its nature and epoch, (ff) 116

its origin not constructional, 117

in civic buildings, 127-145

Flying Buttress (def.), (note) 82

Frieze (def.), (note) 20

G.

Gelnhausen: Palace of Barbarossa, 70

Genoa: Ducal Palace, 172

Gerasa (Jerash), Syria, 60

Gloucester: Cloisters of Cathedral, 120

Gothic Architecture, 70

Gothic Architecture analysis and dates as in Amiens Cathedral, (ff) 98

Gothic Architecture constructional in origin, 93, 99, 101, 103, 117, 118, 124

Gothic Architecture Details as in Reims Cathedral, (ff) 101

Gothic Architecture: English contrasted with French, 108

Gothic Architecture: Exterior design as exemplified in Chartres, 105

Gothic Architecture: Geographical limitations of, 95-96

Gothic Architecture not strong in Italy, 96

Gothic large churches generally incomplete, 107

Gothic Vaulting, 93, 94

Greek buildings: Their simple plan, 32, 56

Greek buildings: Their simple structure, 33, 56

Greek buildings: Modern opinion of, when first discovered and later, 44-45

Groin-vaulting (def.), (note) 51

H.

Hall, the, of a Country House, or College, 152

Hellenic civilization preserved by the Roman Empire, 67-68

Hexastyle (def.), (note) 18

Hypæthral (def.), (note) 42

I.

Imitative 19th century work--accurate, (ff) 182

--inaccurate, (ff) 182

In antis (def.), (note) 62

Independent judgment of art, how formed, 11-12

Inlay of Marble, 76

Intercolumniation, why varied, 17-18, 21

Interior, architecture of the, originates with the Romans, 52

Intrados (def.), (note) 135

Ionic (def.), (note) 35

L.

London: Middle-Temple Hall, 152

London: Recent Apartment House, 203

London: Westminster Abbey, Chapel of Henry VII, 121

London: Westminster Hall (roof), 152

Louvain: Town Hall, 116

Lucca: Church of San Frediano, 77

M.

Masonry, Roman, 50

Masonry with dry joints, ch. I, II, 56

Masonry with mortar, 50

Mayence (Mainz): Cathedral, 82

Metope (def.), (note) 17

Milan: Church of Sant’ Ambrogio, 77

Modern Design:

English the freest, 202

French the most tasteful, 203, 208

German marked by innovations, 206

How marked by thought in U. S., 209, 210

How marked by thought in England, 214

why made difficult, 212

Modern Taste in the U. S.--in England, 201

in Germany, in France, 202

Mohammedan Architecture, 70

Monreale: Cathedral, 77, 96

Mosaic, 76

Munich: Allerheiligenhofkirche, 180

Munich: Auer-Kirche (Mariahilf-Kirche), 181

Munich: Basilica of St. Boniface, 181

Munich: Church of All Saints (see Ch. of Allerheiligenhofkirche).

Munich: Church of St. Boniface (Basilica), 181

Munich: Church of St. Louis, (see Ludwigskirche).

Munich: Church of The Theatiner Monks, 162

Munich: Exhibition Building, 185

Munich: Glyptothek, 180-185

Munich: Königsbau, southern front, 180

Munich: Ludwigskirche, 179

Munich: Pinakothek, the old, 180

Munich: Post Office, north front, 180

Munich: Propylæa, 186

Munich: Royal Library, 180

Munich: Royal Palace (see Königsbau).

Munich: Ruhmeshalle, 181

N.

Naos (def.), (note) 18

Nave (def.), (note) 53

Neo-classic (def.), (note) 32

Neo-classic architecture begins to decline in less than a century, 159

O.

Octastyle (def.), (note) 18

Olympia: Temple of Zeus, 26, 29

Orders of columnar architecture, the Roman use of them, 56

Orvieto: Cathedral, 94

P.

Pæstum: Temple, 14, 24, 29

Painting of Greek buildings, 24

Palazzo, the, in Florence, 137

Palazzo, the, in Rome, 138

Palermo: Cathedral, 77

Pandrosion (def.), (note) 38

Parenzo (in Istria): Basilica (8th century), 77

Paris: Buildings on Place de la Concorde, 174

Paris: Cathedral, 31

Paris: Cercle de la Librairie, 208

Paris; École Militaire, 173

Paris: Louvre (east front), 141

Parma: Baptistery, 85

Parthenon (Athens), 14, 26, 28

Pavia: Church of San Michaele, 77

Pediment (def.), (note) 28

Peterborough: Vault of Choir-aisle of Cathedral, 120

Pilaster in ancient and modern works, 135, 137

Pisa: Baptistery, 85

Poitiers: Tower of St. Radegonde, 83

Poitiers: Church of Notre Dame la Grande, 83

Portico of the Maidens (Caryatides), 36-37

Priene (in Asia Minor): Temple of Athena Polias, 43

Proportion varied in Greek art, 19-20, 29-30

Cathedral, (ff) 102, 105

Pteroma (def.), (note) 17, 27

Purpose of the artist, the important thing, 16

R.

Ravenna: Baptistery, 84

Ravenna: Basilica of St. Apollinare Nuovo, 77

Ravenna: Basilica of St. Apollinare in Classe, 77

Refinements of Design (see Curvature, Intercolumniation, Slope).

Reims: Cathedral, 31, 101

Renaissance in Italy; (see Classical Revival, Risorgimento).

Renaissance in the North, cause and dates, 144

Renaissance in art at first not classic, (ff) 145

Renaissance introduced gradually, 148

Renaissance classical at Écouen, 149

Respond (def.), (note) 75

Revivals in architecture numerous, 176

Revivals, those only which succeed are notable, 177

Revivals, those of the 19th century did not succeed, 179, 184

Risorgimento (def.), (note) 46

Rocaille (def.), (note) 168

Roman Art of the Empire, 47

Roman changes in Greek design, 56

Roman Empire, intellectual influence, 66-67

Roman Empire, its divergent influence East and West, 66-68

Romanesque (def.), (note) 69

Romanesque Architecture, (ff) 69, 74, 77

Roman Order, the, 139

Rome: Altar of Peace (Arar Pacis), 66

Rome: Basilica of Maxentius, 53

Rome: Basilica of Septa Julia, 53

Rome: Church of S. Maria Maggiore, 72

Rome: Church of S. Maria della Pace Cloister, 141

Rome: Church of San Pietro in Vaticano, 154

Rome: Church (round) San Stefano, 85

Rome: Column of Trajan, 63

Rome: Courtyard of the Cancellaria, 138

Rome: Double Temple of Venus and Rome, 53

Rome: Forum of Nerva, Enclosing Wall, 60

Rome: Forum of Trajan, 47

Rome: Forum Transitorium of Nerva, 60

Rome: Liberian Basilica, (see St. Maria Maggiore).

Rome: Palatine Hill, Dwellings on, 53

Rome: Palazzo Borghese, 141

Rome: Palazzo di Venezia, interior court, 138

Rome: Temple of Antoninus Pius, 48

Rome: Temple of Augustus (Ruined), 49

Rome: Temple of Castor, 48, 49

Rome: Temple of Mars, 49

Rome: Temple of Mars the Avenger (in the Forum of Augustus), 48

Rome: Temple of Minerva, 60

Rome: Temple of Saturn, 48

Rome: Temple of Trajan, 62

Rome: Temple of Vespasian, 48

Rome: Temple of Vespasian, part of Entablature, 57

Rome: Pantheon, 47, 49, 50, 51, 133

Rome: Ulpian Basilica, 53, 62

Ruins not to be judged as works of art, 14, 15

Russia: (Caucasus) Monastery of Gelati near Kutais, 90

S.

Saint Augustine (Florida) Hotel Alcazar, 210

Saint Augustine (Florida) Hotel Ponce de Leon, 210

St. Paul (Minnesota), Building of New York Life Insurance Co., 214

Salamanca: University portal, 116

Salisbury: Cathedral, 108

Saracen: (see Mohammedan).

Screen, the, of a hall, 152-3

Sculpture, architectural, in Doric buildings, 36

Sculpture, architectural, in Ionic buildings, 36

Sculpture, architectural, in Roman buildings, 57

Sculpture, architectural, feeble in 18th century,

(see Romanesque Gothic), 172

Sculpture, architectural, foliated, 19th century, 192

Sculpture, architectural, of the figure, 19th century, 195

Siena: Cathedral, 96

Slope of Grecian columns, 22

Standard of Excellence hard to fix, 30-31

Stylobate (def.), (note) 21

Sunion: Temple of Athena, 29

T.

Tetrapylon (four fronted gateway), 59

Thermæ (def.), (note) 112

Tholos (def.), (note) 39

Tournai: Cathedral, 78

Tournai: Tower-group, 82

Trabeated (def.) (note), 64

Triforium (def.) (note), 97

Troyes: Church of Saint Urbain, 160

Truro, (Cornwall, England) Cathedral, 196

Turin: Palazzo Carignano, 169

Turin: Palazzo Madama, 171

V.

Valencia: Casa Lonja, 116

Valhalla, The, (near Ratisbon, Bavaria), 181

Valladolid: Portal of Church of St. Paul, 116

Vaulting, 50-51

Vaulting, Roman, 50

Venice: Church of San Marco, 92

Verona: Church of San Zeno, 77

W.

West Ham (Essex), England, West Ham Institute, 204

Windsor Castle, St. George’s Chapel, 121

Wollaton Hall, England, 151

Workmanship of Greek buildings, 24

* * * * *

Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures

BY HENRY R. POORE, A.N.A.

_A Companion Volume to “How to Judge Architecture.”_

Quarto, Handsomely Illustrated with 80 Reproductions. Net $1.50.

Postage 14 Cents.

The book develops the processes of pictorial construction, setting forth

the principles which, as a necessary foundation, underlie the work of

the artist.

R. SWAIN GIFFORD, N.A., Director of the Cooper Union Art School,

New York

“ ‘Fills the bill’ admirably and must be of great use not only to

beginners, but to professional artists. I shall use it and refer to it.”

IRVING R. WILES, N.A.

“Not only charmingly written, but remarkably able and instructive. I

have read nothing on the subject that compares with it in clear

explanations of qualities in painting that are always most mysterious to

the layman and frequently so to the professional artist.”

THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY

_Publishers_

33-37 E. 17TH STREET, UNION SQ. NORTH, N. Y.

Mr. Sturgis is acknowledged the leading critic of art and architecture

in the country. In this book he has sketched the history of modern

opinion of architecture. Aided by plentiful illustrations from the early

Grecian temples, and passing through the great Cathedrals to the modern

business blocks, he has shown the influences which have brought about

the various styles and deduced simple rules for the architectural

judgment of these buildings. No attempt is made to set up absolute

standards, but the reader is enabled to form bases for his own opinion,

and to learn the fundamentals of good and bad in buildings. A reading of

the book will give even the common buildings which are passed every day

a new interest and a new meaning. This book is a companion to “Pictorial

Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures,]” by H. R. Poore.

* * * * *

ERRATA.

(Corrected in etext)

Page 14, for “Campagna,” read Campania.

Plate II, for “Southeast,” read Northeast.

Page 36, line 6, for “plan given here shows,” read views given here

show.

Page 70, last line, for “make,” read makes.

Page 89, middle, for “North, west,” read Northwest.

Page 95, middle, for “Mercy,” read Mersey.

Page 102, middle, delete comma after “them”; insert comma after

“nave.”

Page 120, the plate opposite this page should be lettered XXXIII.

Page 145, middle, for “was called,” read is called.

Page 172, middle, for “LV,” read LIV.

Plate LV, upper figure, for “Madama,” read Carignano.

Plate LVI, for “Gebaude,” read Gebäude.

Page 173, 5th line from bottom, delete comma.

Page 193, middle, for “left of the church,” read left of the

picture.

Page 206, middle, for “--what,” read not what.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Decorative Art: Fine art which is applied to the beautifying of that

which has primarily a useful purpose. Architecture is the most complex

of the decorative arts, and for this reason, and because it is also

carried out on a large scale with great possibilities of noble effects,

the most important of the decorative arts.

[2] Doric: Belonging to the Dorians, a Greek people. The term, Doric

style, was first applied to the very few Roman buildings and parts of

buildings of which the basement story of the Theatre of Marcellus and

that of the Colosseum at Rome, are good instances. When the Grecian

buildings of Athens, Girgenti and Pæstum were studied, the term was

extended to them; and these give us what we call Grecian-Doric.

[3] Metope: The word means originally the space between two triglyphs

(see definition of entablature); but is generally applied in English

writing to the slab or block of stone which fills this space in the

Doric temples known to us. It is evident that the outer surface of this

block was sometimes painted, and it is known that it was sometimes

carved in low relief, as at Selinuntum, of which temple sculptured slabs

are preserved in the museum at Palermo; while those of the Theseion and

the Parthenon were in very high relief.

[4] Pteroma: The side or flank, hence, in modern usage, the space

covered by the roof of a portico, and therefore including the columns

and intercolumniations, although in general usage it applies only to the

passage between the columns and the wall behind.

[5] Naos: Called also cella: the enclosed part of a Greek temple, that

which has solid walls and may be divided into two or three rooms: also

sometimes the larger of these subdivisions as distinguished from the

Opisthodomos, or Treasury.

[6] Octastyle: Having eight columns, when said of a portico; having

eight columns in front, when said of a temple or similar building.

[7] Hexastyle: Having six columns; as in the case of octastyle for

eight.

[8] Entablature: In a piece of classic architecture, the three

horizontal members above the columns when these three are taken together

as forming one part of the order. The entablature consists of architrave

or epistyle, immediately above the columns, the frieze, and the cornice,

each of which may have several decorative subdivisions. Thus in the

Ionic Order the epistyle may be divided horizontally into three surfaces

projecting slightly more and more from the bottom upward. The frieze in

the Doric style (Roman or Greek) is divided by triglyphs into metopes;

and in the other orders has often sculptured ornament. The varieties of

form in the cornice are very considerable. A triglyph is one of those

blocks cut with vertical channels, which seem to rest upon the epistyle

and to support the cornice. The metopes are the spaces between; and also

the non-structural slabs or blocks which fill those spaces. In a very

few instances the entablature is irregular in some respect; thus the

portico of Caryatides, Pl. VI, may be said to have no frieze, but

epistyle and cornice only. In Roman work the whole entablature is

occasionally arched up, bent to a curve, as in a temple at Baalbec, and

as in a palace at Spalato.

[9] Doric Order: In Greek and Roman architecture, and in those

neo-classic styles founded upon antiquity, the Order is the unit of

design and consists of one complete column (shaft and capital, with

base, if any, and pedestal, if any) and so much of the entablature as

may be sufficient to show its whole character. The Grecian Doric Order

alluded to in the text, is peculiar in the shape and number of the

channels of the shaft, in the echinos-shaped bell of the capital, in the

square and unadorned abacus, in having no base, in having the frieze

broken up into short lengths by the triglyphs, and in the minor details

depending upon the above.

[10] Architrave:

[11] Frieze: for these terms see footnote Entablature above.

[12] Stylobate: The flat, continuous surface upon which the columns

stand, as in a colonnade. When the whole flat surface forming the floor

of the passageway (see Pteroma) is considered, the word stereobate is

employed.

[13] Bell: That part of the capital of a column which is between the

necking below and the abacus above. The term is applied also to the

imagined general form of the same member apart from the ornamentation;

thus the bell of a Corinthian capital is to be traced beneath the

acanthus leaves.

[14] Pediment: The triangular wall at the end of the low pitched roof,

in a Greek or Roman building. The sunken panel alone, above the

horizontal cornice and beneath the raking cornice, is called the

Tympanum, or, in Greek temples, often the Aetos (ἀετός) or Eagle.

[15] Neo-classic: Studied from Greco-Roman monuments; said of a work of

art or of a style. The neo-classic architecture of Europe begins about

1420 in Italy. (See Risorgimento and Renaissance.)

[16] Choir: Properly, the space in a church reserved for the clergy and

their assistants, especially the singers: hence, by extension I--The

enclosure itself which is sometimes very massive and elaborate, a high

stone wall sculptured or otherwise richly adorned, and

II--That part of a cruciform church which contains this enclosure,

namely, the fourth arm of the cross, that one which extends generally

towards the east from the meeting of the nave and transept.

[17] Ionic: Belonging to the Ionian Greeks; Ionic style, that

characterized by capitals adorned with volutes, shafts much more slender

than in the Doric style and decorated by flutes instead of channels;

these flutes having a nearly semicircular section and being separated by

narrow fillets or flat bands instead of meeting at the sharp arris.

[18] Anthemion: Any floral ornament arranged like a bouquet; an abstract

decoration of sprigs or branches rising from a common point and

separating into a broader head. The Greek anthemion, often called

palmette, or honeysuckle ornament, seems to be composed of slender

leaves; whereas the anthemion in Persian and other Asiatic art is often

a group of flowers, perhaps alternating with leaves.

[19] Egg-and-Dart: An ornament consisting of an alternation of flattened

balls or bosses with sharp pointed members like arrow heads. The minor

details vary much; but it is usual for the flattened eggs to be

surrounded by a deep cutting or a raised rim, and for the arrow points

to be alternated with these.

[20] Pandrosion: The shrine temple or enclosure of the nymph Pandrosos,

a daughter of Cecrops. It is known that this was situated close to the

temple of Erectheus, and therefore the portico of Caryatides on the

south flank of the Erectheion has been called by that name.

[21] Corinthian: Derived from Corinth; Corinthian Order, the latest to

be introduced of the three Grecian Orders and the one taken over most

readily by the Romans. The details are very like those of the Ionic

Order except the capital which is the first instance in antiquity of a

generally concave bell invested thickly with leafage.

[22] Tholos: A circular building; used in archæological writing to

describe one whose purpose is not certainly known, as the Tholos of

Atreus at Mykenai, generally thought to be a tomb; that near Epidauros

thought by some to be the spring-house, or the sacred well of Asklepios.

[23] Choragic: Having to do with the Choragos, the manager of the sacred

chorus in Athens. This was an honorary post involving much expense and

labor to the occupant.

[24] Hypæthral: Open to the sky; Hypæthral opening, a space uncovered,

part of a Greek temple, perhaps entirely unroofed, perhaps only having a

roof partly opened in sky-lights. Hypæthral Theory: any one of several

opinions as to the possible lighting of the interior of a temple from

above, either through the roof, or by the partial omission of a roof so

as to form a central open court.

[25] Risorgimento: In Italian, a new arising; this is the common term

for the revival of classical learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, coupled with the advance in expressional painting and

sculpture of the same epoch, and developing later in the revival of

classical design in architecture. The term Rinascimento (rebirth) is

used in the same sense, but is apparently rather a reflection of the

prevailing French word Renaissance. It would be well if English writers

would employ the term Risorgimento for the Italian movement of the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Renaissance for the French

movement of the sixteenth century with its equivalents in northern

Europe. As for Spain, in which the classical revival followed very

closely upon that of Italy, the term Renacimiento seems to correspond

very closely to the Italian Risorgimento and the French Renaissance.

[26] Cupola: A cup-shaped roof, either built of solid masonry and so

really a vault, or a mere decorative shell.

[27] Groin-vaulting: Vaulting in which one barrel vault meets and

intersects another, so that the projecting solid angles, called groins,

are formed by the meeting of the hollow rounded surfaces.

[28] Nave: In a building with three or more parallel subdivisions,

forming together one great hall, like a large Gothic church, that part

which rises highest, and has generally windows above the roofs of the

lower aisles.

[29] Aisle: See the definition of nave.

[30] Barrel-vault: A vault whose cross-section is everywhere the same as

if part of a tube.

[31] In antis: Latin, between the antæ. The anta is the end of a wall

treated so as to be an almost independent member, like a square pillar

in which the wall ends. The portico made by two of these set opposite

one another and with columns between, is said to have two columns or

four columns in antis.

[32] Trabeated: Built with beams or lintels (said of a building, or part

of a building) or characterized by the use of beams and lintels to the

exclusion of arches (said of a building or a style). Thus the Pantheon

at Rome though entirely vaulted in its main structure has a trabeated

portico, and the screens in front of the great niches within (see Pl.

IX) are of trabeated construction as far as they go--that is they

consist of an entablature supported on columns. The term “arcuated” is

used in direct contradistinction from trabeated and denotes that which

is constructed on the principle of the arch or that which is

characterized by the use.

[33] Romanesque: Literally, semi-Roman, or would-be Roman; applied to

any or all styles of art, especially architecture, which were developed

directly from the Roman imperial art of the years before 450. In

ordinary usage, the basilica style of Italy and even the similar art in

the northwest of Europe are called Latin, and the style built up in

eastern Europe with Constantinople for its centre, is called Byzantine;

but Romanesque may be considered a term covering all these, and as

including, too, all European art until the complete establishment of the

Gothic art in the northwest, and in the East until the establishment of

Saracenic or Mohammedan art about the ninth century, A. D.

[34] Byzantine: The art of the Eastern Empire centred in Byzantium or

Constantinople. Modern developments of this art, without radical

changes, exist in Moldavia and the Caucasian regions, and its influence

is seen in the native architecture of Russia.

[35] Basilica: Originally, under the Roman imperial system, a building

for varied business, public and private, having often a courtroom

connected with the open hall: hence, under the earlier Christian

control, a church built like most of the earlier basilicas, that is to

say, with a nave and two or more aisles. A special feature of the

Christian basilicas was the transept, a high and open hall built across

the upper end of the nave and aisles: and beyond this (that is, farther

from the entrance doorways) was often the apse, a generally semicircular

projection.

[36] Clearstory: That part of the nave which rises above the aisle

roofs, and has windows to light the interior.

[37] Respond: The pilaster, or engaged column, or pier of any shape,

which forms the end of an arcade or colonnade marking the place of

meeting with the enclosing wall.

[38] Apse: A projecting member of a building, usually forming an

enlargement or addition to a large hall, as a Roman basilica, or

especially, a Church. The plan is usually a semicircle, or a semicircle

with an added parallelogram to lengthen it, or a polygon approaching a

half circle.

[39] Bay: One division of a long building whose successive parts are

alike, or very similar.

[40] Buttress: A mass of material, usually masonry, intended to resist,

by its dead weight, the thrust of an arch, or vault, or, more rarely,

the spread of a framed roof or the like.

Flying buttress: A sloping bar of stone, supported on an arched

structure which serves to carry the thrust of an arch or vault across a

space to the buttress beyond.

[41] Triforium: Properly, a gallery more or less open, built in the wall

opposite the aisle roof, and therefore above the great arches of the

nave and choir and below the clearstory windows. Often, a gallery in the

wall below the clearstory but less accurately placed.

[42] Chevet: In mediæval and especially Gothic architecture the rounded

end of the choir including the aisles which pass around the sanctuary

and the chapels outside of the aisles. The shape may be curvilinear or

polygonal. The original term in French is applied to square east ends

also; but this is hardly accepted in the English usage.

[43] Thermæ: In Latin an establishment for warm baths: a plural noun

used for a single building or group of buildings. The Thermæ of

Caracalla mentioned in this chapter, occupied all the space within a

bounding wall which formed a square of 1,100 feet (about twenty-eight

acres) and within this were gardens, running grounds and the like, and

among these the massive central building itself, 400 × 750 feet, twice

the space occupied by the capitol at Washington, which is also

immeasurably less massive and permanent in structure.

[44] Risorgimento: See note, p. 46.

[45] Archivolt: the outer vertical face of an arch; and, where there are

several concentric arches, the general outer face of the whole group;

that face which seems to form part of the wall in which the arch is

built.

[46] Intrados: The under or concave face of the solid structure of an

arch.

[47] Classicismo: The epoch of close study of antiquity, 1520 to 1570.

[48] Chaîne: In French, a system usually vertical of larger and more

perfectly dressed stones in a wall of lighter or rougher material. Thus

the quoins at the corner of a building and the alternately long and

short stones at a window opening or door opening are chaînes, but the

same device may be used to stiffen a long and unbroken wall.

[49] Rocaille Decoration: That which had originally a rough imitation of

natural rock forms mingled with shells; a fashion passing rapidly into

scroll-work in relief, giving very peculiar shapes to panels, doors,

window-casements and even to details of masonry. The rococo style is

partly based upon rocaille decoration.

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the cloister of S. Maria delle Pace=> the cloister of S. Maria della

Pace {pg 141}

(see Ch. of Allerheiligenkirche=> (see Ch. of Allerheiligenhofkirche {pg

217}

End of Project Gutenberg's How to judge architecture, by Russell Sturgis