Yes, assuredly. That is the beginning and end of all my teaching to you.
But the noble natural fact, not the ignoble. You are to study men; not
lice nor entozoa. And you are to study the souls of men in their bodies,
not their bodies only. Mulready's drawings from the nude are more
degraded and bestial than the worst grotesques of the Byzantine or even
the Indian image makers. And your modern mob of English and American
tourists, following a lamplighter through the Vatican to have pink light
thrown for them on the Apollo Belvidere, are farther from capacity of
understanding Greek art, than the parish charity boy, making a ghost out
of a turnip, with a candle inside.
17. Niccola followed the facts, then. He is the Master of Naturalism
in Italy. And I have drawn for you his lioness and cubs, to fix that in
your minds. And beside it, I put the Lion of St. Mark's, that you may
see exactly the kind of change he made. The Lion of St. Mark's (all
but his wings, which have been made and fastened on in the fifteenth
century), is in the central Byzantine manner; a fine decorative piece
of work, descending in true genealogy from the Lion of Nemea, and the
crested skin of him that clothes the head of the Heracles of Camarina.
It has all the richness of Greek Daedal work,--nay, it has fire and
life beyond much Greek Daedal work; but in so far as it is non-natural,
symbolic, decorative, and not like an actual lion, it would be felt
by Niccola Pisano to be imperfect. And instead of this decorative
evangelical preacher of a lion, with staring eyes, and its paw on
a gospel, he carves you a quite brutal and maternal lioness, with
affectionate eyes, and paw set on her cub.
18. Fix that in your minds, then. Niccola Pisano is the Master of
Naturalism in Italy,--therefore elsewhere; of Naturalism, and all that
follows. Generally of truth, common-sense, simplicity, vitality,--and of
all these, with consummate power. A man to be enquired about, is not
he? and will it not make a difference to you whether you look, when you
travel in Italy, in his rough early marbles for this fountain of life,
or only glance at them because your Murray's Guide tells you,--and think
them "odd old things"?
19. We must look for a moment more at one odd old thing--the sarcophagus
which was his tutor. Upon it is carved the hunting of Meleager; and it
was made, or by tradition received as, the tomb of the mother of the
Countess Matilda. I must not let you pass by it without noticing two
curious coincidences in these particulars. First, in the Greek subject
which is given Niccola to read.
The boar, remember, is Diana's enemy. It is sent upon the fields of
Calydon in punishment of the refusal of the Calydonians to sacrifice
to her. 'You have refused _me_,' she said; 'you will not have Artemis
Laphria, Forager Diana, to range in your fields. You shall have the
Forager Swine, instead.'
Meleager and Atalanta are Diana's servants,--servants of all order,
purity, due sequence of season, and time. The orbed architecture of
Tuscany, with its sculptures of the succession of the labouring months,
as compared with the rude vaults and monstrous imaginations of the past,
was again the victory of Meleager.
20. Secondly, take what value there is in the tradition that this
sarcophagus was made the tomb of the mother of the
[Illustration: PLATE I:--THE PISAN LATONA. Angle of Panel of the
Adoration, in Niccola's Pulpit.]
Countess Matilda. If you look to the fourteenth chapter of the third
volume of "Modern Painters," you will find the mythic character of the
Countess Matilda, as Dante employed it explained at some length. She is
the representative of Natural Science as opposed to Theological.
21. Chance coincidences merely, these; but full of teaching for us,
looking back upon the past. To Niccola, the piece of marble was,
primarily, and perhaps exclusively, an example of free chiselling, and
humanity of treatment. What else it was to him,--what the spirits
of Atalanta and Matilda could bestow on him, depended on what he was
himself. Of which Vasari tells you nothing. Not whether he was gentleman
or clown--rich or poor--soldier or sailor. Was he never, then, in those
fleets that brought the marbles back from the ravaged Isles of Greece?
was he at first only a labourer's boy among the scaffoldings of the
Pisan apse,--his apron loaded with dust--and no man praising him for his
speech? Rough he was, assuredly; probably poor; fierce and energetic,
beyond even the strain of Pisa,--just and kind, beyond the custom of his
age, knowing the Judgment and Love of God: and a workman, with all his
soul and strength, all his days.
22. You hear the fame of him as of a sculptor only. It is right that you
should; for every great architect must be a sculptor, and be renowned,
as such, more than by his building. But Niccola Pisano had even more
influence on Italy as a builder than as a carver.
For Italy, at this moment, wanted builders more than carvers; and a
change was passing through her life, of which external edifice was a
necessary sign. I complained of you just now that you never looked at
the Byzantine font in the temple of St. John. The sacristan generally
will not let you. He takes you to a particular spot on the floor, and
sings a musical chord. The chord returns in prolonged echo from the
chapel roof, as if the building were all one sonorous marble bell.
Which indeed it is; and travellers are always greatly amused at being
allowed to ring this bell; but it never occurs to them to ask how it
came to be ringable:--how that tintinnabulate roof differs from the dome
of the Pantheon, expands into the dome of Florence, or declines into the
whispering gallery of St. Paul's.
23. When you have had full satisfaction of the tintinnabulate roof, you
are led by the sacristan and Murray to Niccola Pisano's pulpit; which,
if you have spare time to examine it, you find to have six sides, to be
decorated with tablets of sculpture, like the sides of the sarcophagus,
and to be sustained on seven pillars, three of which are themselves
carried on the backs of as many animals.
All this arrangement had been contrived before Niccola's time, and
executed again and again. But behold! between the capitals of the
pillars and the sculptured tablets there are interposed five cusped
arches, the hollow beneath the pulpit showing dark through their foils.
You have seen such cusped arches before, you think?
Yes, gentlemen, _you_ have; but the Pisans had _not_. And that
intermediate layer of the pulpit means--the change, in a word, for all
Europe, from the Parthenon to Amiens Cathedral. For Italy it means the
rise of her Gothic dynasty; it means the duomo of Milan instead of the
temple of Paestum.
24. I say the duomo of Milan, only to put the change well before your
eyes, because you all know that building so well. The duomo of Milan is
of entirely bad and barbarous Gothic, but the passion of pinnacle and
fret is in it, visibly to you, more than in other buildings. It will
therefore serve to show best what fulness of change this pulpit of
Niccola Pisano signifies.
In it there is no passion of pinnacle nor of fret. You see the edges of
it, instead of being bossed, or knopped, or crocketed, are mouldings
of severest line. No vaulting, no clustered shafts, no traceries, no
fantasies, no perpendicular flights of aspiration. Steady pillars, each
of one polished block; useful capitals, one trefoiled arch between them;
your panel above it; thereon your story of the founder of Christianity.
The whole standing upon beasts, they being indeed the foundation of us,
(which Niccola knew far better than Mr. Darwin); Eagle to carry your
Gospel message--Dove you think it ought to be?
[Illustration: PLATE II.--NICCOLA PISANO'S PULPIT.]
Eagle, says Niccola, and not as symbol of St. John Evangelist only, but
behold! with prey between its claws. For the Gospel, it is Niccola's
opinion, is not altogether a message that you may do whatever you like,
and go straight to heaven. Finally, a slab of marble, cut hollow
a little to bear your book; space enough for you to speak from at
ease,--and here is your first architecture of Gothic Christianity!
25. Indignant thunder of dissent from German doctors,--clamour from
French savants. 'What! and our Treves, and our Strasburg, and our
Poictiers, and our Chartres! And you call _this_ thing the first
architecture of Christianity!' Yes, my French and German friends, very
fine the buildings you have mentioned are; and I am bold to say I love
them far better than you do, for you will run a railroad through any of
them any day that you can turn a penny by it. I thank you also, Germans,
in the name of our Lady of Strasburg, for your bullets and fire; and
I thank you, Frenchmen, in the name of our Lady of Rouen, for your new
haberdashers' shops in the Gothic town;--meanwhile have patience with me
a little, and let me go on.
26. No passion of fretwork, or pinnacle whatever, I said, is in this
Pisan pulpit. The trefoiled arch itself, pleasant as it is, seems
forced a little; out of perfect harmony with the rest (see Plate II.).
Unnatural, perhaps, to Niccola?
Altogether unnatural to him, it is; such a thing never would have come
into his head, unless some one had shown it him. Once got into his head,
he puts it to good use; perhaps even he will let this somebody else put
pinnacles and crockets into his head, or at least, into his son's, in
a little while. Pinnacles,--crockets,--it may be, even traceries. The
ground-tier of the baptistery is round-arched, and has no pinnacles;
but look at its first story. The clerestory of the Duomo of Pisa has no
traceries, but look at the cloister of its Campo Santo.
27. I pause at the words;--for they introduce a new group of thoughts,
which presently we must trace farther.
The Holy Field;--field of burial. The "cave of Machpelah which is before
Mamre," of the Pisans. "There they buried Abraham, and Sarah his wife;
there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah."
How do you think such a field becomes holy,--how separated, as the
resting-place of loving kindred, from that other field of blood, bought
to bury strangers in?
When you have finally succeeded, by your gospel of mammon, in making
all the men of your own nation not only strangers to each other, but
enemies; and when your every churchyard becomes therefore a field of the
stranger, the kneeling hamlet will vainly drink the chalice of God
in the midst of them. The field will be unholy. No cloisters of noble
history can ever be built round such an one.
28. But the very earth of this at Pisa was holy, as you know. That
"armata" of the Tuscan city brought home not only marble and ivory, for
treasure; but earth,--a fleet's burden,--from the place where there was
healing of soul's leprosy: and their field became a place of holy tombs,
prepared for its office with earth from the land made holy by one tomb;
which all the knighthood of Christendom had been pouring out its life to
win.
29. I told you just now that this sculpture of Niccola's was the
beginning of Christian architecture. How do you judge that Christian
architecture in the deepest meaning of it to differ from all other?
All other noble architecture is for the glory of living gods and men;
but this is for the glory of death, in God and man. Cathedral, cloister,
or tomb,--shrine for the body of Christ, or for the bodies of the
saints. All alike signifying death to this world;--life, other than of
this world.
Observe, I am not saying how far this feeling, be it faith, or be it
imagination, is true or false;--I only desire you to note that the power
of all Christian work begins in the niche of the catacomb and depth
of the sarcophagus, and is to the end definable as architecture of the
tomb.
30. Not altogether, and under every condition, sanctioned in doing
such honour to the dead by the Master of it. Not every grave is by His
command to be worshipped. Graves there may be--too little guarded, yet
dishonourable;--"ye are as graves that appear not, and the men that
walk over them are not aware of them." And graves too much guarded, yet
dishonourable, "which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within
full of all uncleanness." Or graves, themselves honourable, yet which
it may be, in us, a crime to adorn. "For they indeed killed them, and ye
build their sepulchres."
Questions, these, collateral; or to be examined in due time; for the
present it is enough for us to know that all Christian architecture, as
such, has been hitherto essentially of tombs.
It has been thought, gentlemen, that there is a fine Gothic revival in
your streets of Oxford, because you have a Gothic door to your County
Bank:
Remember, at all events, it was other kind of buried treasure, and
bearing other interest, which Niccola Pisano's Gothic was set to guard.