137. I told you in my last lecture that the exquisiteness of Florentine
thirteenth century masonry was founded on the strength and splendour of
that which preceded it.
I use the word 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While
the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the
war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to
lift higher the walls of their churches. For the most part, the Early
Norman or Basilican forms were too low to please them in their present
enthusiasm. Their pride, as well as their piety, desired that these
stones of their temples might be goodly; and all kinds of junctions,
insertions, refittings, and elevations were undertaken; which, the
genius of the people being always for mosaic, are so perfectly executed,
and mix up twelfth and thirteenth century work in such intricate
harlequinade, that it is enough to drive a poor antiquary wild.
138. I have here in my hand, however, a photograph of a small church,
which shows you the change at a glance, and attests it in a notable
manner.
You know Hubert of Lucca was the first captain of the Florentine people,
and the march in which they struck their florin on the pine trunk was
through Lucca, on Pisa.
Now here is a little church in Lucca, of which the lower half of the
façade is of the twelfth century, and the top, built by the Florentines,
in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur-de-lys, let
into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is
in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts. But the most
palpable difference is in the Cyclopean simplicity of irregular bedding
in the lower story; and the delicate bands of alternate serpentine and
marble, which follow the horizontal or couchant placing of the stones
above.
139. Those of you who, interested in English Gothic, have visited
Tuscany, are, I think, always offended at first, if not in permanence,
by these horizontal stripes of her marble walls. Twenty-two years ago
I quoted, in vol. i. of the "Stones of Venice," Professor Willis's
statement that "a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur
could hardly be conceived;" and I defended my favourite buildings
against that judgement, first by actual comparison in the plate opposite
the page, of a piece of them with an example of our modern grandeur;
secondly, (vol. i., chap. v.,) by a comparison of their aspect with
that of the building of the grandest piece of wall in the Alps,--that
Matterhorn in which you all have now learned to take some gymnastic
interest; and thirdly, (vol. i., chap. xxvi.,) by reference to the
use of barred colours, with delight, by Giotto and all subsequent
colourists.
140. But it did not then occur to me to ask, much as I always disliked
the English Perpendicular, what would have been the effect on the
spectator's mind, had the buildings been striped vertically instead of
horizontally; nor did I then know, or in the least imagine, how much
_practical_ need there was for reference from the structure of the
edifice to that of the cliff; and how much the permanence, as well as
propriety, of structure depended on the stones being _couchant_ in the
wall, as they had been in the quarry: to which subject I wish to-day to
direct your attention.
141. You will find stated with as much clearness as I am able, in
the first and fifth lectures in "Aratra Pentelíci," the principles of
architectural design to which, in all my future teaching, I shall have
constantly to appeal; namely, that architecture consists distinctively
in the adaptation of form to resist force;--that, practically, it may be
always thought of as doing this by the ingenious adjustment of various
pieces of solid material; that the perception of this ingenious
adjustment, or structure, is to be always joined with our admiration
of the superadded ornament; and that all delightful ornament is the
honouring of such useful structures; but that the beauty of the ornament
itself is independent of the structure, and arrived at by powers of mind
of a very different class from those which are necessary to give skill
in architecture proper.
142. During the course of this last summer I have been myself very
directly interested in some of the quite elementary processes of true
architecture. I have been building a little pier into Coniston Lake, and
various walls and terraces in a steeply sloping garden, all which had to
be constructed of such rough stones as lay nearest. Under the dextrous
hands of a neighbour farmer's son, the pier projected, and the walls
rose, as if enchanted; every stone taking its proper place, and the
loose dyke holding itself as firmly upright as if the gripping cement of
the Florentine towers had fastened it. My own better acquaintance with
the laws of gravity and of statics did not enable me, myself, to build
six inches of dyke that would stand; and all the decoration possible
under the circumstances consisted in turning the lichened sides of the
stones outwards. And yet the noblest conditions of building in the world
are nothing more than the gradual adornment, by play of the imagination,
of materials first arranged by this natural instinct of adjustment. You
must not lose sight of the instinct of building, but you must not think
the play of the imagination depends upon it. Intelligent laying of
stones is always delightful; but the fancy must not be limited to its
contemplation.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--DOOR OF THE BAPTISTERY. PISA.]
143. In the more elaborate architecture of my neighbourhood, I have
taken pleasure these many years; one of the first papers I ever wrote
on architecture was a study of the Westmoreland cottage;--properly,
observe, the cottage of West-mereland, of the land of western lakes.
Its principal feature is the projecting porch at its door, formed by two
rough slabs of Coniston slate, set in a blunt gable; supported, if far
projecting, by two larger masses for uprights. A disciple of Mr. Pugin
would delightedly observe that the porch of St. Zeno at Verona was
nothing more than the decoration of this construction; but you do not
suppose that the first idea of putting two stones together to keep off
rain was all on which the sculptor of St. Zeno wished to depend for your
entertainment.
144. Perhaps you may most clearly understand the real connection between
structure and decoration by considering all architecture as a kind of
book, which must be properly bound indeed, and in which the illumination
of the pages has distinct reference in all its forms to the breadth of
the margins and length of the sentences; but is itself free to follow
its own quite separate and higher objects of design.
145. Thus, for instance, in the architecture which Niccola was occupied
upon, when a boy, under his Byzantine master. Here is the door of the
Baptistery at Pisa, again by Mr. Severn delightfully enlarged for us
from a photograph. [1] The general idea of it is a square-headed opening
in a solid wall, faced by an arch carried on shafts. And the ornament
does indeed follow this construction so that the eye catches it
with ease,--but under what arbitrary conditions! In the square door,
certainly the side-posts of it are as important members as the lintel
they carry; but the lintel is carved elaborately, and the side-posts
left blank. Of the facing arch and shaft, it would be similarly
difficult to say whether the sustaining vertical, or sustained curve,
were the more important member of the construction; but the decorator
now reverses the distribution of his care, adorns the vertical member
with passionate elaboration, and runs a narrow band, of comparatively
uninteresting work, round the arch. Between this outer shaft and inner
door is a square pilaster, of which the architect carves one side, and
lets the other alone. It is followed by a smaller shaft and arch, in
which he reverses his treatment of the outer order by cutting the shaft
delicately and the arch deeply. Again, whereas in what is called the
decorated construction of English Gothic, the pillars would have
been left plain and the spandrils deep cut,--here, are we to call it
decoration of the construction, when the pillars are carved and the
spandrils left plain? Or when, finally, either these spandril spaces
on each side of the arch, or the corresponding slopes of the gable, are
loaded with recumbent figures by the sculptors of the renaissance, are
we to call, for instance, Michael Angelo's Dawn and Twilight, only the
decorations of the sloping plinths of a tomb, or trace to a geometrical
propriety the subsequent rule in Italy that no window could be properly
complete for living people to look out of, without having two stone
people sitting on the corners of it above? I have heard of charming
young ladies occasionally, at very crowded balls, sitting on the
stairs,--would you call them, in that case, only decorations of the
construction of the staircase?
[Footnote 1: Plate 5 is from the photograph itself; the enlarged drawing
showed the arrangement of parts more clearly, but necessarily omitted
detail which it is better here to retain.]
146. You will find, on consideration, the ultimate fact to be that to
which I have just referred you;--my statement in "Aratra," that the idea
of a construction originally useful is retained in good architecture,
through all the amusement of its ornamentation; as the idea of the
proper function of any piece of dress ought to be retained through its
changes in form or embroidery. A good spire or porch retains the first
idea of a roof usefully covering a space, as a Norman high cap or
elongated Quaker's bonnet retains the original idea of a simple covering
for the head; and any extravagance of subsequent fancy may be permitted,
so long as the notion of use is not altogether lost. A girl begins by
wearing a plain round hat to shade her from the sun; she ties it down
over her ears on a windy day; presently she decorates the edge of it, so
bent, with flowers in front, or the riband that ties it with a bouquet
at the side, and it becomes a bonnet. This decorated construction may be
discreetly changed, by endless fashion, so long as it does not become
a clearly useless riband round the middle of the head, or a clearly
useless saucer on the top of it.
147. Again, a Norman peasant may throw up the top of her cap into a
peak, or a Bernese one put gauze wings at the side of it, and still be
dressed with propriety, so long as her hair is modestly confined, and
her ears healthily protected, by the matronly safeguard of the real
construction. She ceases to be decorously dressed only when the material
becomes too flimsy to answer such essential purpose, and the flaunting
pendants or ribands can only answer the ends of coquetry or
ostentation. Similarly, an architect may deepen or enlarge, in fantastic
exaggeration, his original Westmoreland gable into Rouen porch, and his
original square roof into Coventry spire; but he must not put within his
splendid porch, a little door where two persons cannot together get
in, nor cut his spire away into hollow filigree, and mere ornamental
perviousness to wind and rain.
148. Returning to our door at Pisa, we shall find these general
questions as to the distribution of ornament much confused with others
as to its time and style. We are at once, for instance, brought to a
pause as to the degree in which the ornamentation was once carried out
in the doors themselves. Their surfaces were, however, I doubt not,
once recipients of the most elaborate ornament, as in the Baptistery of
Florence; and in later bronze, by John of Bologna, in the door of the
Pisan cathedral opposite this one. And when we examine the sculpture and
placing of the lintel, which at first appeared the most completely Greek
piece of construction of the whole, we find it so far advanced in many
Gothic characters, that I once thought it a later interpolation cutting
the inner pilasters underneath their capitals, while the three statues
set on it are certainly, by several tens of years, later still.
149. How much ten years did at this time, one is apt to forget; and
how irregularly the slower minds of the older men would surrender
themselves, sadly, or awkwardly, to the vivacities of their pupils. The
only wonder is that it should be usually so easy to assign conjectural
dates within twenty or thirty years; but, at Pisa, the currents of
tradition and invention run with such cross eddies, that I often find
myself utterly at fault. In this lintel, for instance, there are
two pieces separated by a narrower one, on which there has been an
inscription, of which in my enlarged plate you may trace, though, I
fear, not decipher, the few letters that remain. The uppermost of
these stones is nearly pure in its Byzantine style; the lower, already
semi-Gothic. Both are exquisite of their kind, and we will examine them
closely; but first note these points about the stones of them. We are
discussing work at latest of the thirteenth century. Our loss of the
inscription is evidently owing to the action of the iron rivets which
have been causelessly used at the two horizontal joints. There was
nothing whatever in the construction to make these essential, and,
but for this error, the entire piece of work, as delicate as an ivory
tablet, would be as intelligible to-day as when it was laid in its
place. [1]
[Footnote: Plates 6 and 7 give, in greater clearness, the sculpture of
this lintel, for notes on which see Appendix.]
150. _Laid_. I pause upon this word, for it is an important one. And
I must devote the rest of this lecture to consideration merely of what
follows from the difference between laying a stone and setting it up,
whether we regard sculpture or construction. The subject is so wide, I
scarcely know how to approach it. Perhaps it will be the pleasantest
way to begin if I read you a letter from one of yourselves to me. A
very favourite pupil, who travels third class always, for sake of better
company, wrote to me the other day: "One of my fellow-travellers, who
was a builder, or else a master mason, told me that the way in which red
sandstone buildings last depends entirely on the way in which the stone
is laid. It must lie as it does in the quarry; but he said that very few
workmen could always tell the difference between the joints of planes
of cleavage and the--something else which I couldn't catch,--by which he
meant, I suppose planes of stratification. He said too that some people,
though they were very particular
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. ADVENT.]
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. DEPARTURE.]
about having the stone laid well, allowed blocks to stand in the rain
the wrong way up, and that they never recovered one wetting. The
stone of the same quarry varies much, and he said that moss will grow
immediately on good stone, but not on bad. How curious,--nature helping
the best workman!" Thus far my favourite pupil.
151. 'Moss will grow on the best stone.' The first thing your modern
restorer would do is to scrape it off; and with it, whatever knitted
surface, half moss root, protects the interior stone. Have you ever
considered the infinite functions of protection to mountain form
exercised by the mosses and lichens? It will perhaps be refreshing to
you after our work among the Pisan marbles and legends, if we have a
lecture or two on moss. Meantime I need not tell you that it would not
be a satisfactory natural arrangement if moss grew on marble, and that
all fine workmanship in marble implies equal exquisiteness of surface
and edge.
152. You will observe also that the importance of laying the stone in
the building as it lay in its bed was from the first recognised by all
good northern architects, to such extent that to lay stones 'en delit,'
or in a position out of their bedding, is a recognized architectural
term in France, where all structural building takes its rise; and in
that form of 'delit' the word gets most curiously involved with the
Latin delictum and deliquium. It would occupy the time of a whole
lecture if I entered into the confused relations of the words derived
from lectus, liquidus, delinquo, diliquo, and deliquesco; and of
the still more confused, but beautifully confused, (and enriched by
confusion,) forms of idea, whether respecting morality or marble,
arising out of the meanings of these words: the notions of a bed
gathered or strewn for the rest, whether of rocks or men; of the various
states of solidity and liquidity connected with strength, or with
repose; and of the duty of staying quiet in a place, or under a law,
and the mischief of leaving it, being all fastened in the minds of early
builders, and of the generations of men for whom they built, by the
unescapable bearing of geological laws on their life; by the ease
or difficulty of splitting rocks, by the variable consistency of the
fragments split, by the innumerable questions occurring practically as
to bedding and cleavage in every kind of stone, from tufo to granite,
and by the unseemly, or beautiful, destructive, or protective, effects
of decomposition. [1] The same processes of time which cause your Oxford
oolite to flake away like the leaves of a mouldering book, only warm
with a glow of perpetually deepening gold the marbles of Athens and
Verona; and the same laws of chemical change which reduce the granites
of Dartmoor to porcelain clay, bind the sands of Coventry into stones
which can be built up halfway to the sky.
[Footnote 1: This passage cannot but seem to the reader loose and
fantastic. I have elaborate notes, and many an unwritten thought, on
these matters, but no time or strength to develop them. The passage is
not fantastic, but the rapid index of what I know to be true in all the
named particulars. But compare, for mere rough illustration of what I
mean, the moral ideas relating to the stone of Jacob's pillow, or the
tradition of it, with those to which French Flamboyant Gothic owes its
character.]
153. But now, as to the matter immediately before us, observe what a
double question arises about laying stones as they lie in the quarry.
First, how _do_ they lie in the quarry? Secondly, how can we lay them so
in every part of our building?
A. How do they lie in the quarry? Level, perhaps, at Stonesfield and
Coventry; but at an angle of 45° at Carrara; and for aught I know, of
90° in Paros or Pentelicus. Also, the _bedding_ is of prime importance
at Coventry, but the _cleavage_ at Coniston. [1]
[Footnote 1: There are at least four definite cleavages at Coniston,
besides joints. One of these cleavages furnishes the Coniston slate
of commerce; another forms the ranges of Wetherlam and Yewdale crag;
a third cuts these ranges to pieces, striking from north-west to
south-east; and a fourth into other pieces, from north-east to
south-west.]
B. And then, even if we know what the quarry bedding is, how are we
to keep it always in our building? You may lay the stones of a wall
carefully level, but how will you lay those of an arch? You think these,
perhaps, trivial, or merely curious questions. So far from it, the fact
that while the bedding in Normandy is level, that at Carrara is steep,
and that the forces which raised the beds of Carrara crystallized them
also, so that the cleavage which is all-important in the stones of my
garden wall is of none in the duomo of Pisa,--simply determined the
possibility of the existence of Pisan sculpture at all, and regulated
the whole life and genius of Nicholas the Pisan and of Christian art.
And, again, the fact that you can put stones in true bedding in a
wall, but cannot in an arch, determines the structural transition from
classical to Gothic architecture.
154. The _structural_ transition, observe; only a part, and that not
altogether a coincident part, of the _moral_ transition. Read carefully,
if you have time, the articles 'Pierre' and 'Meneau' in M. Violet le
Duc's Dictionary of Architecture, and you will know everything that
is of importance in the changes dependent on the mere qualities of
_matter_. I must, however, try to set in your view also the relative
acting qualities of _mind_.
You will find that M. Violet le Duc traces all the forms of Gothic
tracery to the geometrical and practically serviceable development of
the stone 'chassis,' chasing, or frame, for the glass. For instance, he
attributes the use of the cusp or 'redent' in its more complex forms, to
the necessity, or convenience, of diminishing the space of glass which
the tracery grasps; and he attributes the reductions of the mouldings in
the tracery bar under portions of one section, to the greater facility
thus obtained by the architect in directing his workmen. The plan of
a window once given, and the moulding-section,--all is said, thinks M.
Violet le Duc. Very convenient indeed, for modern architects who have
commission on the cost. But certainly not necessary, and perhaps even
inconvenient, to Niccola Pisano, who is himself his workman, and cuts
his own traceries, with his apron loaded with dust.
155. Again, the _re_dent--the 'tooth within tooth' of a French
tracery--may be necessary, to bite its glass. But the cusp, cuspis,
spiny or spearlike point of a thirteenth century illumination, is not in
the least necessary to transfix the parchment. Yet do you suppose that
the structural convenience of the redent entirely effaces from the mind
of the designer the aesthetic characters which he seeks in the cusp?
If you could for an instant imagine this, you would be undeceived by a
glance either at the early redents of Amiens, fringing hollow vaults,
or the late redents of Rouen, acting as crockets on the _outer_ edges
of pediments. 156. Again: if you think of the tracery in its _bars_, you
call the cusp a redent; but if you think of it in the _openings_, you
call the apertures of it foils. Do you suppose that the thirteenth
century builder thought only of the strength of the bars of his
enclosure, and never of the beauty of the form he enclosed? You will
find in my chapter on the Aperture, in the "Stones of Venice," full
development of the aesthetic laws relating to both these forms, while
you may see, in Professor Willis's 'Architecture of the Middle Ages,' a
beautiful analysis of the development of tracery from the juxtaposition
of aperture; and in the article 'Meneau,' just quoted of M. Violet le
Duc, an equally beautiful analysis of its development from the masonry
of the chassis. You may at first think that Professor Willis's
analysis is inconsistent with M. Violet le Duc's. But they are no more
inconsistent than the accounts of the growth of a human being would be,
if given by two anatomists, of whom one had examined only the skeleton
and the other only the respiratory system; and who, therefore,
supposed--the first, that the animal had been made only to leap, and the
other only to sing. I don't mean that either of the writers I name
are absolutely thus narrow in their own views, but that, so far as
inconsistency appears to exist between them, it is of that partial kind
only.
157. And for the understanding of our Pisan traceries we must introduce
a third element of similarly distinctive nature. We must, to press our
simile a little farther, examine the growth of the animal as if it
had been made neither to leap, nor to sing, but only to think. We must
observe the transitional states of its nerve power; that is to say, in
our window tracery we must consider not merely how its ribs are built,
(or how it stands,) nor merely how its openings are shaped, or how it
breathes; but also what its openings are made to light, or its shafts
to receive, of picture or image. As the limbs of the building, it may
be much; as the lungs of the building, more. As the _eyes_ [1] of the
building, what?
[Footnote 1: I am ashamed to italicize so many words; but these
passages, written for oral delivery, can only be understood if read with
oral emphasis. This is the first aeries of lectures which I have printed
as they were to be spoken; and it is a great mistake.]
158. Thus you probably have a distinct idea--those of you at least
who are interested in architecture--of the shape of the windows in
Westminster Abbey, in the Cathedral of Chartres, or in the Duomo of
Milan. Can any of you, I should like to know, make a guess at the shape
of the windows in the Sistine Chapel, the Stanze of the Vatican, the
Scuola di San Rocco, or the lower church of Assisi? The soul or anima of
the first three buildings is in their windows; but of the last three, in
their walls.
All these points I may for the present leave you to think over for
yourselves, except one, to which I must ask yet for a few moments your
further attention.
159. The trefoils to which I have called your attention in Niccola's
pulpit are as absolutely without structural office in the circles as in
the panels of the font beside it. But the circles are drawn with evident
delight in the lovely circular line, while the trefoil is struck out by
Niccola so roughly that there is not a true compass curve or section in
any part of it.
Roughly, I say. Do you suppose I ought to have said carelessly? So
far from it, that if one sharper line or more geometric curve had been
given, it would have caught the eye too strongly, and drawn away the
attention from the sculpture. But imagine the feeling with which a
French master workman would first see these clumsy intersections
of curves. It would be exactly the sensation with which a practical
botanical draughtsman would look at a foliage background of Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
But Sir Joshua's sketched leaves would indeed imply some unworkmanlike
haste. We must not yet assume the Pisan master to have allowed himself
in any such. His mouldings may be hastily cut, for they are, as I have
just said, unnecessary to his structure, and disadvantageous to his
decoration; but he is not likely to be careless about arrangements
necessary for strength. His mouldings may be cut hastily, but do you
think his _joints_ will be?
160. What subject of extended inquiry have we in this word, ranging from
the cementless clefts between the couchant stones of the walls of the
kings of Rome, whose iron rivets you had but the other day placed in
your hands by their discoverer, through the grip of the stones of the
Tower of the Death-watch, to the subtle joints in the marble armour of
the Florentine Baptistery!
Our own work must certainly be left with a rough surface at this place,
and we will fit the edges of it to our next piece of study as closely as
we may.