31. I closed my last lecture with the statement, on which I desired to
give you time for reflection, that Christian architecture was, in its
chief energy, the adornment of tombs,--having the passionate function of
doing honour to the dead.
But there is an ethic, or simply didactic and instructive architecture,
the decoration of which you will find to be normally representative of
the virtues which are common alike to Christian and Greek. And there
is a natural tendency to adopt such decoration, and the modes of design
fitted for it, in civil buildings. [1]
[Footnote: "These several rooms were indicated by symbol and device:
Victory for the soldier, Hope for the exile, the Muses for the poets,
Mercury for the artists, Paradise for the preacher."--(Sagacius Gazata,
of the Palace of Can Grande. I translate only Sismondi's quotation.)]
32. _Civil_, or _civic_, I say, as opposed to military. But again
observe, there are two kinds of military building. One, the robber's
castle, or stronghold, out of which he issues to pillage; the other, the
honest man's castle, or stronghold, into which he retreats from pillage.
They are much like each other in external forms;--but Injustice,
or Unrighteousness, sits in the gate of the one, veiled with forest
branches, (see Giotto's painting of him); and Justice or Righteousness
_enters_ by the gate of the other, over strewn forest branches. Now, for
example of this second kind of military architecture, look at Carlyle's
account of Henry the Fowler, [1] and of his building military towns, or
burgs, to protect his peasantry. In such function you have the first and
proper idea of a walled town,--a place into which the pacific country
people can retire for safety, as the Athenians in the Spartan war.
Your fortress of this kind is a religious and civil fortress, or burg,
defended by burgers, trained to defensive war. Keep always this idea of
the proper nature of a fortified city:--Its walls mean protection,--its
gates hospitality and triumph. In the language familiar to you, spoken
of the chief of cities: "Its walls are to be Salvation, and its gates to
be Praise." And recollect always the inscription over the north gate of
Siena: "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit."--"More than her gates, Siena opens
her heart to you."
[Footnote 1: "Frederick," vol. i.]
33. When next you enter London by any of the great lines, I should like
you to consider, as you approach the city, what the feelings of the
heart of London are likely to be on your approach, and at what part of
the railroad station an inscription, explaining such state of her heart,
might be most fitly inscribed. Or you would still better understand
the difference between ancient and modern principles of architecture by
taking a cab to the Elephant and Castle, and thence walking to London
Bridge by what is in fact the great southern entrance of London. The
only gate receiving you is, however, the arch thrown over the road to
carry the South-Eastern Railway itself; and the only exhibition either
of Salvation or Praise is in the cheap clothes' shops on each side; and
especially in one colossal haberdasher's shop, over which you may see
the British flag waving (in imitation of Windsor Castle) when the master
of the shop is at home. 34. Next to protection from external hostility,
the two necessities in a city are of food and water supply;--the latter
essentially constant. You can store food and forage, but water must flow
freely. Hence the Fountain and the Mercato become the centres of civil
architecture.
Premising thus much, I will ask you to look once more at this cloister
of the Campo Santo of Pisa.
35. On first entering the place, its quiet, its solemnity, the
perspective of its aisles, and the conspicuous grace and precision of
its traceries, combine to give you the sensation of having entered a
true Gothic cloister. And if you walk round it hastily, and, glancing
only at a fresco or two, and the confused tombs erected against them,
return to the uncloistered sunlight of the piazza, you may quite easily
carry away with you, and ever afterwards retain, the notion that
the Campo Santo of Pisa is the same kind of thing as the cloister of
Westminster Abbey.
36. I will beg you to look at the building, thus photographed, more
attentively. The "long-drawn aisle" is here, indeed,--but where is the
"fretted vault"?
A timber roof, simple as that of a country barn, and of which only the
horizontal beams catch the eye, connects an entirely plain outside wall
with an interior one, pierced by round-headed openings; in which are
inserted pieces of complex tracery, as foreign in conception to the rest
of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to
Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of
the windows of some church in an advanced stage of fantastic design at
Nuremberg or Frankfort.
37. If you begin to question, hereupon, who was the Italian robber,
whether of marble or thought, and look to your Vasari, you find the
building attributed to John the Pisan; [1]--and you suppose the son to
have been so pleased by his father's adoption of Gothic forms that he
must needs borrow them, in this manner, ready made, from the Germans,
and thrust them into his round arches, or wherever else they would go.
[Footnote 1: The present traceries are of fifteenth century work,
founded on Giovanni's design.]
We will look at something more of his work, however, before drawing such
conclusion.
38. In the centres of the great squares of Siena and Perugia, rose,
obedient to engineers' art, two perennial fountains Without engineers'
art, the glens which cleave the sand-rock of Siena flow with living
water; and still, if there be a hell for the forger in Italy, he
remembers therein the sweet grotto and green wave of Fonte Branda.
But on the very summit of the two hills, crested by their great civic
fortresses, and in the centres of their circuit of walls, rose the two
guided wells; each in basin of goodly marble, sculptured--at Perugia, by
John of Pisa, at Siena, by James of Quercia.
39. It is one of the bitterest regrets of my life (and I have many which
some men would find difficult to bear,) that I never saw, except when I
was a youth, and then with sealed eyes, Jacopo della Quercia's fountain.
[1] The Sienese, a little while since, tore it down, and put up a model
of it by a modern carver. In like manner, perhaps, you will some day
knock the Elgin marbles to pieces, and commission an Academician to put
up new ones,--the Sienese doing worse than that (as if the Athenians
were _themselves_ to break their Phidias' work).
[Footnote 1: I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune denied to
me. "The market-place, or great Piazza, is a large square, with a great
broken-nosed fountain in it." ("Pictures from Italy.")]
But the fountain of John of Pisa, though much injured, and glued
together with asphalt, is still in its place.
40. I will now read to you what Vasari first says of him, and it. (I.
67.) "Nicholas had, among other sons, one called John, who, because he
always followed his father, and, under his discipline, intended (bent
himself to, with a will,) sculpture and architecture, in a few years
became not only equal to his father, but in some things superior to him;
wherefore Nicholas, being now old, retired himself into Pisa, and
living quietly there, left the government of everything to his son.
Accordingly, when Pope Urban IV. died in Perugia, sending was made for
John, who, going there, made the tomb of that Pope of marble, the which,
together with that of Pope Martin IV., was afterwards thrown down, when
the Perugians
[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE FOUNTAIN OF PERUGIA.]
enlarged their vescovado; so that only a few relics are seen sprinkled
about the church. And the Perugians, having at the same time brought
from the mountain of Pacciano, two miles distant from the city, through
canals of lead, a most abundant water, by means of the invention and
industry of a friar of the order of St. Silvester, it was given to John
the Pisan to make all the ornaments of this fountain, as well of bronze
as of marble. On which he set hand to it, and made there three orders
of vases, two of marble and one of bronze. The first is put upon twelve
degrees of twelve-faced steps; the second is upon some columns which
put it upon a level with the first one;" (that is, in the middle of it,)
"and the third, which is of bronze, rests upon three figures which have
in the middle of them some griffins, of bronze too, which pour water out
on every side."
41. Many things we have to note in this passage, but first I will show
you the best picture I can of the thing itself.
The best I can; the thing itself being half destroyed, and what remains
so beautiful that no one can now quite rightly draw it; but Mr. Arthur
Severn, (the son of Keats's Mr. Severn,) was with me, looking reverently
at those remains, last summer, and has made, with help from the sun,
this sketch for you (Plate III.); entirely true and effective as far as
his time allowed.
Half destroyed, or more, I said it was,--Time doing grievous work on it,
and men worse. You heard Vasari saying of it, that it stood on twelve
degrees of twelve-faced steps. These--worn, doubtless, into little
more than a rugged slope--have been replaced by the moderns with four
circular steps, and an iron railing; [1] the bas-reliefs have been
carried off from the panels of the second vase, and its fair marble lips
choked with asphalt:--of what remains, you have here a rough but true
image.
[Footnote 1: In Mr. Severn's sketch, the form of the original foundation
is approximately restored.]
In which you see there is not a trace of Gothic feeling or design of any
sort. No crockets, no pinnacles, no foils, no vaultings, no grotesques
in sculpture. Panels between pillars, panels carried on pillars,
sculptures in those panels like the Metopes of the Parthenon; a Greek
vase in the middle, and griffins in the middle of that. Here is your
font, not at all of Saint John, but of profane and civil-engineering
John. This is _his_ manner of baptism of the town of Perugia.
42. Thus early, it seems, the antagonism of profane Greek to
ecclesiastical Gothic declares itself. It seems as if in Perugia, as in
London, you had the fountains in Trafalgar Square against Queen Elinor's
Cross; or the viaduct and railway station contending with the Gothic
chapel, which the master of the large manufactory close by has erected,
because he thinks pinnacles and crockets have a pious influence; and
will prevent his workmen from asking for shorter hours, or more wages.
43. It _seems_ only; the antagonism is quite of another kind,--or,
rather, of many other kinds. But note at once how complete it is--how
utterly this Greek fountain of Perugia, and the round arches of Pisa,
are opposed to the school of design which gave the trefoils to Niccola's
pulpit, and the traceries to Giovanni's Campo Santo.
The antagonism, I say, is of another kind than ours; but deep and wide;
and to explain it, I must pass for a time to apparently irrelevant
topics.
You were surprised, I hope, (if you were attentive enough to catch the
points in what I just now read from Vasari,) at my venturing to bring
before you, just after I had been using violent language against the
Sienese for breaking up the work of Quercia, that incidental sentence
giving account of the much more disrespectful destruction, by the
Perugians, of the tombs of Pope Urban IV., and Martin IV.
Sending was made for John, you see, first, when Pope Urban IV. died in
Perugia--whose tomb was to be carved by John; the Greek fountain being a
secondary business. But the tomb was so well destroyed, afterwards, that
only a few relics remained scattered here and there.
The tomb, I have not the least doubt, was Gothic;--and the breaking of
it to pieces was not in order to restore it afterwards, that a living
architect might get the job of restoration. Here is a stone out of one
of Giovanni Pisano's loveliest Gothic buildings, which I myself saw with
my own eyes dashed out, that a modern builder might be paid for putting
in another. But Pope Urban's tomb was not destroyed to such end. There
was no qualm of the belly, driving the hammer,--qualm of the conscience
probably; at all events, a deeper or loftier antagonism than one on
points of taste, or economy.
44. You observed that I described this Greek profane manner of design
as properly belonging to _civil_ buildings, as opposed not only
to ecclesiastical buildings, but to military ones. Justice, or
Righteousness, and Veracity, are the characters of Greek art. These
_may_ be opposed to religion, when religion becomes fantastic; but they
_must_ be opposed to war, when war becomes unjust. And if, perchance,
fantastic religion and unjust war happen to go hand in hand, your Greek
artist is likely to use his hammer against them spitefully enough.
45. His hammer, or his Greek fire. Hear now this example of the
engineering ingenuities of our Pisan papa, in his younger days.
"The Florentines having begun, in Niccola's time, to throw down many
towers, which had been built in a barbarous manner through the whole
city; either that the people might be less hurt, by their means, in the
fights that often took place between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or
else that there might be greater security for the State, it appeared
to them that it would be very difficult to ruin the Tower of the
Death-watch, which was in the place of St. John, because it had its
walls built with such a grip in them that the stones could not be
stirred with the pickaxe, and also because it was of the loftiest;
whereupon Nicholas, causing the tower to be cut, at the foot of it, all
the length of one of its sides; and closing up the cut, as he made it,
with short (wooden) under-props, about a yard long, and setting fire
to them, when the props were burned, the tower fell, and broke itself
nearly all to pieces: which was held a thing so ingenious and so useful
for such affairs, that it has since passed into a custom, so that when
it is needful, in this easiest manner, any edifice may be thrown down."
46. 'When it is needful.' Yes; but when is that? If instead of the
towers of the Death-watch in the city, one could ruin the towers of the
Death-watch of evil pride and evil treasure in men's hearts, there would
be need enough for such work both in Florence and London. But the walls
of those spiritual towers have still stronger 'grip' in them, and are
fireproof with a vengeance.
"Le mure me parean die ferro fosse,
. . . e el mi dixe, il fuoco eterno
Chentro laffoca, le dimostra rosse."
But the towers in Florence, shattered to fragments by this ingenious
engineer, and the tombs in Perugia, which his son will carve, only
that they also may be so well destroyed that only a few relics remain,
scattered up and down the church,--are these, also, only the iron
towers, and the red-hot tombs, of the city of Dis?
Let us see.
47. In order to understand the relation of the tradesmen and working
men, including eminently the artist, to the general life of the
thirteenth century, I must lay before you the clearest elementary charts
I can of the course which the fates of Italy were now appointing for
her.
My first chart must be geographical. I want you to have a clearly
dissected and closely fitted notion of the natural boundaries of her
states, and their relations to surrounding ones. Lay hold first, firmly,
of your conception of the valleys of the Po and the Arno, running
counter to each other--opening east and opening west,--Venice at the end
of the one, Pisa at the end of the other.
48. These two valleys--the hearts of Lombardy and Etruria--virtually
contain the life of Italy. They are entirely different in character:
Lombardy, essentially luxurious and worldly, at this time rude in art,
but active; Etruria, religious, intensely imaginative, and inheriting
refined forms of art from before the days of Porsenna.
49. South of these, in mid-Italy, you have Romagna,--the valley of
the Tiber. In that valley, decayed Rome, with her lust of empire
inextinguishable;--no inheritance of imaginative art, nor power of it;
dragging her own ruins hourly into more fantastic ruin, and defiling her
faith hourly with more fantastic guilt.
South of Romagna, you have the kingdoms of Calabria and Sicily,---Magna
Graecia, and Syracuse, in decay;----strange spiritual fire from the
Saracenic east still lighting the volcanic land, itself laid all in
ashes.
50. Conceive Italy then always in these four masses: Lombardy, Etruria,
Romagna, Calabria.
Now she has three great external powers to deal with: the western,
France--the northern, Germany--the eastern, Arabia. On her right the
Frank; on her left the Saracen; above her, the Teuton. And roughly, the
French are a religious chivalry; the Germans a profane chivalry; the
Saracens an infidel chivalry. What is best of each is benefiting Italy;
what is worst, afflicting her. And in the time we are occupied with, all
are afflicting her.
What Charlemagne, Barbarossa, or Saladin did to teach her, you can trace
only by carefullest thought. But in this thirteenth century all these
three powers are adverse to her, as to each other. Map the methods of
their adversity thus:---
51. Germany, (profane chivalry,) is vitally adverse to the Popes;
endeavouring to establish imperial and knightly power against theirs. It
is fiercely, but frankly, covetous of Italian territory, seizes all it
can of Lombardy and Calabria, and with any help procurable either from
robber Christians or robber Saracens, strives, in an awkward manner, and
by open force, to make itself master of Rome, and all Italy.
52. France, all surge and foam of pious chivalry, lifts herself in
fitful rage of devotion, of avarice, and of pride. She is the natural
ally of the church; makes her own monks the proudest of the Popes;
raises Avignon into another Rome; prays and pillages insatiably; pipes
pastoral songs of innocence, and invents grotesque variations of crime;
gives grace to the rudeness of England, and venom to the cunning of
Italy. She is a chimera among nations, and one knows not whether to
admire most the valour of Guiscard, the virtue of St. Louis or the
villany of his brother.
53. The Eastern powers--Greek, Israelite, Saracen--are at once the
enemies of the Western, their prey, and their tutors.
They bring them methods of ornament and of merchandise, and stimulate in
them the worst conditions of pugnacity, bigotry, and rapine. That is
the broad geographical and political relation of races. Next, you must
consider the conditions of their time.
54. I told you, in my second lecture on Engraving, that before the
twelfth century the nations were too savage to be Christian, and after
the fifteenth too carnal to be Christian.
The delicacy of sensation and refinements of imagination necessary to
understand Christianity belong to the mid period when men risen from a
life of brutal hardship are not yet fallen to one of brutal luxury. You
can neither comprehend the character of Christ while you are chopping
flints for tools, and gnawing raw bones for food; nor when you have
ceased to do anything with either tools or hands, and dine on gilded
capons. In Dante's lines, beginning
"I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad
In leathern girdle, with a clasp of bone,"
you have the expression of his sense of the increasing luxury of the
age, already sapping its faith. But when Bellincion Berti walked abroad
in skins not yet made into leather, and with the bones of his dinner in
a heap at his door, instead of being cut into girdle clasps, he was just
as far from capacity of being a Christian.
55. The following passage, from Carlyle's "Chartism," expresses better
than any one else has done, or is likely to do it, the nature of this
Christian era, (extending from the twelfth to the sixteenth century,) in
England,--the like being entirely true of it elsewhere:--
"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes, much had
been going on. Not only had red deer in the New and other forests been
got preserved and shot; and treacheries [1] of Simon de Montfort, wars
of Red and White Roses, battles of Crecy, battles of Bosworth, and many
other battles, been got transacted and adjusted; but England wholly,
not without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires and
the millions of sons of eighteen generations, had been got drained and
tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beautiful and rich in possessions.
The mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters had become steepled, tile-roofed,
compact towns. Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield
whittles. Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same
into stockings or breeches for men. England had property valuable to the
auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing, commercial, economic
skill which lay impalpably warehoused in English hands and heads, what
auctioneer could estimate?
[Footnote 1: Perhaps not altogether so, any more than Oliver's dear
papa Carlyle. We may have to read _him_ also, otherwise than the British
populace have yet read, some day.]
"Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do something; some
cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's head with battle-axes.
The seven incorporated trades, with their million guild-brethren, with
their hammers, their shuttles, and tools, what an army,--fit to conquer
that land of England, as we say, and hold it conquered! Nay, strangest
of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of
thinking,--even of believing; individual conscience had unfolded itself
among them;--Conscience, and Intelligence its handmaid. [1] Ideas
of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one
Shakspeare, a wool-comber, poacher or whatever else, at Stratford, in
Warwickshire, who happened to write books!--the finest human figure,
as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely
Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt, or Sarmat, I find no human soul
so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;--our supreme modern
European man. Him England had contrived to realize: were there not
ideas?
[Footnote 1: Observe Carlyle's order of sequence. Perceptive Reason is
the Handmaid of Conscience, not Conscience hers. If you resolve to do
right, you will soon do wisely; but resolve only to do wisely, and you
will never do right.]
"Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, that had to seek utterance in the
notablest way! England had got her Shakspeare, but was now about to get
her Milton and Oliver Cromwell. This, too, we will call a new expansion,
hard as it might be to articulate and adjust; this, that a man could
actually have a conscience for his own behoof, and not for his priest's
only; that his priest, be he who he might, would henceforth have to take
that fact along with him."
56. You observe, in this passage, account is given you of two
things--(A) of the development of a powerful class of tradesmen and
artists; and, (B) of the development of an individual conscience.
In the savage times you had simply the hunter, digger, and robber; now
you have also the manufacturer and salesman. The ideas of ingenuity
with the hand, of fairness in exchange, have occurred to us. We can do
something now with our fingers, as well as with our fists; and if we
want our neighbours' goods, we will not simply carry them off, as of
old, but offer him some of ours in exchange.
57. Again; whereas before we were content to let our priests do for us
all they could, by gesticulating, dressing, sacrificing, or beating of
drums and blowing of trumpets; and also direct our steps in the way of
life, without any doubt on our part of their own perfect acquaintance
with it,--we have now got to do something for ourselves--to think
something for ourselves; and thus have arrived in straits of conscience
which, so long as we endeavour to steer through them honestly, will be
to us indeed a quite secure way of life, and of all living wisdom.
58. Now the centre of this new freedom of thought is in Germany; and the
power of it is shown first, as I told you in my opening lecture, in the
great struggle of Frederick II. with Rome. And German freedom of thought
had certainly made some progress, when it had managed to reduce the Pope
to disguise himself as a soldier, ride out of Rome by moonlight, and
gallop his thirty-four miles to the seaside before
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--NORMAN IMAGERY.]
summer dawn. Here, clearly, is quite a new state of things for the Holy
Father of Christendom to consider, during such wholesome horse-exercise.
59. Again; the refinements of new art are represented by
France--centrally by St. Louis with his Sainte Chapelle. Happily, I am
able to lay on your table to-day--having placed it three years ago in
your educational series--a leaf of a Psalter, executed for St. Louis
himself. He and his artists are scarcely out of their savage life yet,
and have no notion of adorning the Psalms better than by pictures of
long-necked cranes, long-eared rabbits, long-tailed lions, and red and
white goblins putting their tongues out. [1] But in refinement of touch,
in beauty of colour, in the human faculties of order and grace, they are
long since, evidently, past the flint and bone stage,--refined enough,
now,--subtle enough, now, to learn anything that is pretty and fine,
whether in theology or any other matter.
[Footnote 1: I cannot go to the expense of engraving this most subtle
example; but Plate IV. shows the average conditions of temper and
imagination in religious ornamental work of the time.]
60. Lastly, the new principle of Exchange is represented by Lombardy and
Venice, to such purpose that your Merchant and Jew of Venice, and your
Lombard of Lombard Street, retain some considerable influence on your
minds, even to this day.
And in the exact midst of all such transition, behold, Etruria with her
Pisans--her Florentines,--receiving, resisting, and reigning over all:
pillaging the Saracens of their marbles--binding the French bishops
in silver chains;--shattering the towers of German tyranny into
small pieces,--building with strange jewellery the belfry tower for
newly-conceived Christianity;--and, in sacred picture, and sacred song,
reaching the height, among nations, most passionate, and most pure.
I must close my lecture without indulging myself yet, by addition
of detail; requesting you, before we next meet, to fix these general
outlines in your minds, so that, without disturbing their distinctness,
I may trace in the sequel the relations of Italian Art to these
political and religious powers; and determine with what force of
passionate sympathy, or fidelity of resigned obedience, the Pisan
artists, father and son, executed the indignation of Florence and
fulfilled the piety of Orvieto.