SPALATO REVISITED.
1877—1881.
I thought it right to reprint the foregoing sketch of Spalato, the record of my first visit there in 1875, exactly as it was first written, with the change of two or three words only. It seemed worth while to keep the first impressions of such a place as they were set down at once after the first sight of it. Instead therefore of recasting this piece, as I have done several of the others, I will mention a few points on which later visits and further reading might have led to some change in what I first wrote nearly on the spot. Another paper of a strictly architectural character, headed "Diocletian's Place in Architectural History," has been reprinted in the third series of my Historical Essays, as an appendix to the essay headed "The Illyrian Emperors and their Land."
First, with regard to the name of the place itself. I seem, when I wrote my paper of first impressions, to have had no doubt as to the received derivation from Palatium. That derivation is wonderfully tempting, and it enables one to make an epigrammatic contrast between the Palatium of Rome and the Palatium of Spalato, between the city which became a house and the house which became a city. But the fact remains the same, whatever may be the name. The city did become a house, and the house did become a city, whether the two were called by the same name or not. And I am now convinced, chiefly by Mr. Arthur Evans, that the name of Spalato has nothing to do with Palatium. I began to doubt rather early, as I did not see how the s could have got into the name; in a Greek name the origin of the s would have been plain enough, but it seemed to have no place in a Latin name. And I was staggered by the form Aspalato found as early as the Notitia Imperii. Nothing goes for less than the etymologies of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and anyhow it is hard to see how Ἀσπάλαθον, the form which he uses, could mean μικρὸν παλάτιον. But, as I had nothing better to propose, I thought it better, when I wrote the fuller paper which appears in the Historical Essays, to say nothing about the matter either way. I need not stop to dispute against the intrusive r in the vulgar form Spalatro, as both Sir Gardner Wilkinson and Mr. Neale have done that before me. But it is wonderful to see how early it got in. It is as old as the Ravenna Geographer, who has three forms—Spalathon, Spalathron, and Spalatrum. I need hardly say that the r is unknown in the country, unless perhaps now and then in the mouth of some one who thinks it fine. So one has known people in England destroy etymology, by sounding Waltham as if it had a thorn, and Bosham with the sound of the German sch. I am now fully convinced that the name has nothing to do with Palatium. It is plain that the oldest form that we can find is Aspalathum, and I am inclined to accept the view of Mr. Evans, who connects the name with Aspalathus, or perhaps with ἄσφαλτος. But I must not venture myself in any quarter which savours of botany or geology.
With the newer lights which I have made use of in Historical Essays, I think I should no longer speak of Diocletian as "the great persecutor." Galerius ought in fairness to take that name off his shoulders. Mr. A. J. Mason has certainly proved thus much; and it is a great comfort to think so in visiting Spalato. Nor should I have spoken of him as a native of Salona. He was of Doclea, Dioclea, however we are to spell it, within the present bounds of Tzernagora. Those who at various times have spoken of Saint Alban as "protomartyr Anglorum," and of King Lucius as becoming "a Swiss bishop," might also speak of Diocletian as a Montenegrin.
I was doubtless right in saying that no Emperor, strictly so called, inhabited the Palace after Diocletian. In strictness indeed no Emperor ever inhabited it at all, as Diocletian had ceased to be Emperor when he went there. But I think that, at the time of my first visit, I had not fully taken in the story of Nepos and his father Count Marcellian. One is strongly tempted to think that, when Nepos was killed "haud longe a Salonis, sua in villa," the place meant is the palace of Spalato. On the other hand, we have the earlier entry in the Notitia, which certainly looks as if the palace had already become a kind of Imperial factory. But Nepos would hardly live in the same style as Jovius, and the palace is quite big enough to lodge the deposed Emperor and the work-women at the same time.
On the special importance of Spalato in the history of architecture I have spoken in several places, specially in the paper in my Historical Essays to which I have already referred. My main position is that, in the palace at Spalato, after a series of approaches, many of which may be seen in the building itself, Diocletian or his architect hit on the happy device of making the arch spring directly from the capital of the column. To merely classical critics this seems to mark the depth of degradation into which art had fallen in Diocletian's day. To me it seems to be the greatest step ever taken, the beginning of all later forms of consistent arched architecture, Romanesque, Gothic, or any other. The importance of the step is of course the same whoever took it; and if the same feature can be shown in any building earlier than Spalato, we must transfer our praises from, the designer of Spalato to the designer of that building. Spalato would in that case lose something of its strictly architectural interest; but that would be all. But, as far as I know, no such rival has appeared. If the same form really was used in the baths of Diocletian at Rome, that would not be a rival building, but a case of the same mind working in the same way in two places. And to establish an earlier use of the form, it would be needful to show that it was deliberately employed in some considerable building. There is nothing commoner in the history of architecture than the casual and isolated appearance of some form, which the designer had not so much chosen as stumbled on, long before the time when it really came into use. I put in this caution, because I know that there is a kind of feeble approach to the arrangement at Spalato in one or two buildings at Pompeii. And, great as was the advance at Spalato, it had, like many other cases of advance, its weak side. The Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital were both of them shifts to relieve, as it were, the light abacus of the Corinthian capital from the weight which the arch laid upon it. The heavy abacus of Pisa and Lucca was a better escape from this difficulty. Again, the lightness of the columns used at Spalato and in the basilicas which followed its model forbade the use of the vault, and condemned the roofs of the basilicas to be among their poorest features. In the peristyle itself of course no roof was needed, though to an eye used to Rome and Ravenna it has so much the air of an unroofed basilica that it is really hard to believe that it was always open. But, though the basilican arrangement forbade the use of the vault, yet the step taken at Spalato was not without its effect on later vaulted buildings. When the vault came in again, as in the heavier forms of the German Romanesque, men had learned that the arch and its pier, whether that pier was a light column or a massive piece of wall, were enough for all artistic purposes, without bringing in, as in the classical Roman, purely ornamental features from a style which followed another system of construction. I came to my belief in the architectural importance of Spalato thirty years before I saw the building itself, and, now that repeated visits have made the peristyle of Diocletian as familiar to me as Wells cathedral, I admire and approve just as much, though of course I cannot undertake to be quite as enthusiastic now as I was on the evening when I first saw it.
When I was last at Spalato, a process was going on which always makes one tremble. The peristyle and the inside of the mausoleum were surrounded by scaffoldings. As for the mausoleum, it was perhaps a mistake ever to make it into a church; but, as it has been made into a church, the additions and changes which were needed for that purpose have become part of the history, and ought not to be meddled with. It must always have been nearly the smallest, and quite the darkest, metropolitan church in Christendom; but that it is so is part of the wonder of the place. And, if some of the details were restored in plaster at the time of a certain famous royal visit, it seems hardly worth while to knock them away, with the chance of knocking away some of the genuine stone along with them. That royal visit is commemorated in a tablet at the end of the peristyle, which professes great loyalty to a personage described as "Franciscus Primus, Austriæ Imperator et Dalmatiæ Rex." The man so labelled in Diocletian's own house had been the last successor to Diocletian's empire.
In the changes which are being made in the peristyle, it is said that this tablet was first taken down as being modern, and then set up again, because official loyalty overrode all considerations of what was old and what was new. But some care should be taken in removing what is modern in such a place as Spalato. It is very well to get rid of some mean excrescences; but, where the arches have been filled up by Venetian buildings of respectable work, it would seem to be a great mistake to open them, to say nothing of the chance that such opening may endanger the columns and arches themselves. Though built up, they are not so blocked as to hinder a full study of their details. Indeed the building up, both of the arches of the peristyle and of the heavier arches in the other parts of the palace, is really a part of the history which should be preserved. It marks the distinctive character of Spalato as the house which became a city.
That city, as it now stands, stretches, I need hardly say again, a long way beyond the bounds of the ancient house. Yet one cannot conceive Spalato without Diocletian's palace. It is something much more than the chief object and ornament of Spalato, as this or that building is the chief object and ornament of any other city. It is more than the castle or monastery round which a city has often grown. It is not merely that, but for the existence of the palace, the city would never have come into being; the palace still is the city in a sense in which we could hardly use those words of any other building elsewhere. Yet there are things to see at Spalato besides the palace. The museum is eminently a thing to see; but then it is within the palace, and moreover, though it is locally placed at Spalato, it belongs historically to Salona. There is a good deal of pretty Venetian work scattered up and down, both within the walls of Diocletian and without them. The piazza just outside the gate of iron, where the traveller will most likely seek his breakfast, his coffee, and his maraschino, would have some attractions in itself, if it did not lie just outside the gate of iron. The eye naturally turns to the gate, and to the little campanile perched on it; otherwise it might very fairly rest on the Venetian loggia, with its columns and their wide—yet not sprawling—pointed arches. It might rest none the less because the building so strongly suggests that class of English town-halls or market-houses of which I said something when speaking of Udine. The octagonal tower too, and the remains of the Venetian fortifications generally, are worth a glance. The difficulty is, in the home of Jovius, to give even a glance to anything but the works of Jovius.
The mausoleum, now the once metropolitan church, and the temple, now the baptistery, have both of them become churches by accident. Besides these, the first impression is that Spalato has little to show in the ecclesiastical line. And further examination will not take away that impression as to quantity, though it will modify it somewhat as to quality. The little desecrated church which in 1875 I saw just within the palace walls, embodied in military buildings, I could not find in 1881. I was told that it had been burned, and there certainly was a burned building thereabouts; but I did not feel quite sure that I had hit upon the right site, and whether the church that I was looking for might not still be there, imprisoned in some of the queer devices of Austrian occupation. But in 1881 I and my companion lighted by way of recompense on one most curious building which neither of us had seen in earlier visits. This is the little church of Saint Nicolas in the suburb on the slope of the hill. It is very small, of a rude kind of Byzantine type, with four of the very strangest columns I ever saw. Save that they have a mighty entasis, they really have more of an Egyptian cut than anything Greek, Roman, Gothic, or any of the forms to which Aryan eyes are used. The Franciscan church at the foot of the hill, with its cloister, would be worth a glance for its own sake; and it is worth much more than a glance on account of the precious sarcophagus which the cloister shelters. But this, like the objects in the museum, is an outlying fragment of Salona, to be talked of there. To the modern church on the other side of the city it would be only kindness to shut our eyes. But we cannot help looking at it; it aims at the style of the place, and clearly fancies itself to be Romanesque, if not Roman. We look at its tower, and we look back to the mighty campanile within the walls. Somehow the fourteenth century could adapt itself to the fourth; but the nineteenth cannot adapt itself to the fourteenth. Yet it is something for Spalato to say that it contains the noblest and the most ignoble of all towers that do profess and call themselves Romanesque.
Eitelberger has well hit off the character of the three chief Dalmatian cities in three pithy epithets. Zara is bureaukratisch; Spalato is bürgerlich; Ragusa is alt-aristokratisch. The burghers seem to make more progress than either the foreign officials or the native patricians. Both better quarters and better dinners can be had at Spalato in 1881 than were to be had there in 1875. In 1881 we can walk on shore, while in 1877 boats were needed. And in 1881 the railway—a wonder in Dalmatia—was ready to carry us to Salona or even to Sebenico, but not to Traü. On the other hand in some other respects, if not Spalato, at least its foreign rulers, seem to advance backwards, if they advance at all. Those who dwell under the shadow of Apostolic Majesty are used to the daily suppression of such newspapers as venture to proclaim inconvenient truths. At Spalato that Apostolic and constitutional power has gone a step further by suppressing the municipality. With us, when a Stewart king suppressed an ancient corporation, he at least set up another of a new Stewart fashion. But at Spalato the podestà—the potestas still lingers in Dalmatia, while in Italy only syndics are tolerated—and the other elders of the city seem to have become altogether things of the past, no less than Jovius and his Empire.