VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia.
At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the iter ad Brundisium is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire, or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi, has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder, while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent. Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar it. It was—indeed, with all mutilations, it still is—a fine front of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as they do a kind of earlier and more healthy Renaissance, which, taking classical form as its general models, took them only as general models, and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.
Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller—at least the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and Benevento—by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place, if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms—not without a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen—which is the characteristic style of this region, the natural result of its political history. Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades, and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports. The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of the whole region at Bari.
Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.
The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle—better suited for the purpose than anything else—all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come—as they possibly may have come—from a mosque.
Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of styles—more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style, for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly, by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.