CHAPTER III.
Applicability is the most useful characteristic of the style popularly known as the Renaissance; it is confined to no one branch of art, but is capable of extension to all, from the most delicate work of the jeweller to the boldest scroll-ornament adopted by the sculptor in wood or stone. The Loggie of the Vatican is the best original example of the style as perfected by Raffaelle and his scholars, and applied to wall-painting. It was a free rendering of the antique fresco ornament then just discovered in the Baths of Petus, where extensive excavations were undertaken in 1506, under the superintendence of the Papal authorities. The classic forms were “severer” than those in use by the artists who resuscitated the style, and were somewhat overlaid with ornament. The details of Raffaelle’s own work will not always bear adverse criticism, inasmuch as there are heterogeneous features introduced occasionally, which are not visible in the purer style of antiquity. As the fashion for this decoration travelled northward, it increased in freedom from classic rule, and more completely deserved the term “grotesque,” which it occasionally received, a term derived from grotte, an underground room of the ancient baths, and which we now use chiefly in the sense of a ludicrous composition. Such compositions were not unfrequent on the walls of Greek and Roman buildings; and the German and Flemish artists, with a nationally characteristic love of whimsical design, occasionally ran riot in invention, having no rule beyond individual caprice. This unfortunate position offering too great a licence to mere whimsicality, was felt in ancient as well as in modern times. Pliny objected, on the grounds of false or incongruous taste, to the arabesques of Pompeii, though they approached nearer to the Greek model; and Vitruvius, with that purity of taste which was his grand characteristic, endorsed the opinion, and enforced it in his teaching. We are often in error when we blindly admire, or unhesitatingly adopt, the works of the ancients as perfection. In Athens and Rome in past time, as in Paris and London at present, we may meet with instances of bad taste; for vulgarity belongs to no age or station, and may be visible in the costly decoration of a rich mansion, whose owner is uneducated in art, and insists on having only what he comprehends.
The decadence of the better-class Renaissance design was a natural consequence of the licence its features might assume, and in the progress of the sixteenth century it became thoroughly vitiated. The troubles which distracted Europe in the later part of that century, and which led to the devastating wars and revolutions of the earlier part of the following one, completed the debasement of art-workmanship. Louis XIV. had the glory, such as it was, of its resuscitation; but his taste was merely that of an over-wealthy display, which not unfrequently lapses into positive vulgarisms. The style known distinctively by the name of this monarch—with all its heterogeneous elements, its scrolls of the most obtrusive form, fixed to ornament having no proper cohesion, and overlaid with festoons of flowers and fruit—is more remarkable for the oppressive ostentation which was the characteristic of the monarch and his age, than for good taste or real elegance. What a very little exaggeration could make of this style may be seen in the productions of the era of his successor, and which the Italians stigmatised by the term rococo.
Fig. 40. | Fig. 41. |
The examples of Renaissance given in our pages exhibit a fair average of its applicability. The pendent ornament ([Fig. 40]) includes details adopted by jewellers. The shield, with the sacred monogram ([Fig. 41]), is such as appeared in wood-panelling. The handle ([Fig. 42]) exhibits as much freedom of design as the style could admit; it is quaint and peculiar, but not without elegance in the mode of bringing the classic dolphin within the scope of the composition.
The distinctive features of the style may be more readily comprehended by contrasting it with a few specimens of the so-called “Gothic style,” a style which possesses the strongest original features, and one which will yield to none in peculiar beauty and applicability. We give two examples—the one German, the other French; they are both wood panel, filled with tracery which bears the distinctive characteristics of the two schools. The German ([Fig. 43]) is remarkable for the sudden termination of its flowing lines, which occasionally gives to the carving of the epoch an appearance of having been suddenly broken, or chopped off, in parts. At Nuremberg this peculiarity is very observable; our specimen is selected from the church at Rottweil, in the Black Forest, which bears the date of 1340. The French ([Fig. 44]) is a favourable example of the Flamboyant style, which gave freedom to the mediæval rigidity of the Gothic, and paved the way for the ready adoption of the style of Francis I., which was based on that of the Italians.
Fig. 43. | Fig. 44. |
Figs. [45] and [47] display one peculiarity in this northern adaptation—the introduction of busts, in high relief, in central medallions. It is sometimes introduced so unscrupulously in the carved panelling of Elizabethan mansions, that it has almost the effect of a row of wooden dolls peeping through shutters. The latter of the two examples may be received as one of the best of its kind, exhibiting the utmost enrichment of which the style was generally capable, and as few heterogeneous features, though here they are not entirely absent. By way of useful contrast, we give in [Fig. 48], a very pure specimen of a panel in Italian workmanship, from a tomb of the sixteenth century, in the church of the Ara Cœli, at Rome. The flow of line here is exceedingly graceful; the whole of the details are characterised by a delicacy unknown to the artists of Germany and Flanders; the torches and volutes point unmistakably to the classic origin of the whole.
Fig. 45. | Fig. 46. |
Fig. 47. | Fig. 48. |
It was not natural to the Roman people ever to forget their great art-works of antiquity; the influence of the “departed spirits” still “ruled them from their urns,” as Byron truthfully expresses it. The artists of Greece and Rome based their compositions on the unvarying truth of nature; and though the barbaric mind might bear sway for awhile, it could not triumph but through ignorance. Rome is now the great art-teacher only because it is the conservator of its ancient relics; and they have had their influence undiminished from the days of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. There are many pleasing bits of design in the antique city, that show the classic source of inspiration from which their inventors obtained them. The boy and dolphins, forming the pleasing domestic fountain we engrave in [Fig. 51], is an evident instance of the influence of antique taste. The abundant supply of water was the grand feature of the Rome of the Cæsars, as it still is of the Rome of the Popes; and the liberality with which every house is served has frequently induced the owners of large mansions to decorate one corner of their external walls with a fountain, at which all wayfarers may be supplied. In a recess of the lowermost story of one of the great palazzi which line the principal street of Rome, “the Corso,” our second specimen ([Fig. 52]) is placed. It represents a wine-merchant liberally pouring from the bung-hole of his barrel its inexhaustible contents. On great festas in the olden time it was not unusual to make public fountains run with wine for an hour or two, and this may have occurred with the one engraved; it is a work of the latter part of the sixteenth century, when luxury reigned in Rome. As a design it is exceedingly simple and appropriate, reminding, by its quaintness, of German rather than Italian design. The old Teutonic cities present very many striking inventions of the kind: and the promoters and designers of our drinking fountains may obtain good and useful hints from that quarter.
Fig. 51. | Fig. 52. |
Our street architecture has shown recently a greater freedom of design, and range of study, than was ever exhibited before. We may owe this, in some degree, to the excellent works on the domestic and palatial edifices of the Low Countries, which have issued from the press, and have vindicated the true character of the great mediæval builders. Germany—taking the term for the nation in its widest sense—can show in its antique cities a vast variety of fancy in architecture and its ornamental details. Each city may be made a profitable residence for the study of a young architect; and the superior knowledge of the leading principles of mediæval art, now exhibited in their adaptation of the style to home events, is a clear proof that the fact has been felt and acted on. The “infinite variety” of the old decorator is everywhere apparent, and the play he gave to his invention. We give in [Fig. 53], as one instance, the ornamental mouldings of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, in the Cathedral of Aix; in this instance the rigidity of the rule which enforces geometric form to the whole is softened by the introduction of the cable moulding to a portion thereof, with singularly good effect. It is a work executed under the rule of Armand de Hesse, Archbishop of Cologne, and Provost of Aix, probably about 1480.
The Gothic, therefore, of the best era, was by no means the stiff and monotonous style imagined by those who only know its details by the remains of our own ecclesiastical buildings; not that we infer them to be without much freedom and beauty occasionally, as in the Percy shrine at Beverley Minster, or the tomb of Aylmer de Valence, in Westminster Abbey. But we have fewer domestic buildings of a florid Gothic style than are to be found abroad, and the artists who designed for that style delighted in new ideas. It is even visible in the works of their painters and engravers: thus the tracery over the doorway in Durer’s print of “The Crucifixion,” one of his series of the life of the Virgin, while it conforms to the leading principle of architectural design, is composed of branches and leaves which flow with a freedom belonging more to the painter than the architect. Similar instances abound in old pictures.
The foliation of German work was generally crisp and full of convolutions in its minor features, though the leading lines were boldly conceived. We give an example from a panel carved in wood, in the Cathedral of Stuttgard, a work of the middle of the fifteenth century. It is almost a return to the old acanthus leaf, and so completes a cycle of fine art.
Brief as the review has necessarily been of the decorative arts adorning life throughout the centuries which have passed in rapid succession before us, they have taught two great facts—the beauty of art as an adjunct to the most ordinary demands of domesticity, and the value of the study of the varied arts of past ages as an addition to the requirements of our own. “Ever changing, ever new,” may be the lesson derived from the investigation of any epoch. How much then may be obtained from a general review of all! Seroux d’Agincourt deduced a history of art from its monuments;[41-*] and men of the present day have the advantage of all that the world has produced brought easily, by aid of the burin and the printing-press, to their own firesides. We are evidently less original in idea than our ancestors, from the association of their labours with our thought; but we may yet live in the hope of seeing some new and peculiar feature in the progress of modern decorative art obtained by retrospective glances at the past.
It is to the duty of thus learning from the past, we desire to direct the attention of our readers. Slavishly to copy, or systematically to imitate, are evils scarcely less reprehensible than to neglect them altogether; but frequent study of the great masters in any art is indispensable to those who would excel. It is to the absence of such study that we may trace most of the defects of the British artisan. Unhappily, he seldom either examines, reads, or thinks; generally he is content to work, like a horse in a mill, pursuing the same monotonous round, producing only that which has been produced before, without alteration, and without improvement. Until within the last few years, this defect could hardly have been urged against him as an offence. His employers did not require advancement, seldom encouraged intelligent workmen, and rather preferred the mere machine who was content to do no more than his fathers had done, and who looked upon new inventions as costly whims or expensive absurdities. There were exceptions—glorious exceptions; but the rule was, undoubtedly, as we have stated.
This deplorable disadvantage exists no longer; in nearly every town in the kingdom, of any size, there is some institution where knowledge may be obtained readily and cheaply. The societies in connection with the Department of Science and Art now abound with competent masters and teachers, and all the appliances of instruction.
The South Kensington Museum is alone a mine of wealth. Not only are the artisans enabled to resort to it freely, but every possible inducement is held out to them to do so; the superintendents there almost go into the highways to “compel them to come in.” There is no calling of any sort or kind that may not be educated here; the masters, as well as the workmen, of all trades may here receive the education, “free of charge,” which no sum of money could have procured for them twenty years ago. Ignorance, nowadays, is, therefore, totally without excuse.
No doubt the seed that has been so extensively and abundantly planted is growing rapidly up; in some places it has borne fruit. It is utterly impossible that the existing race of art-workmen, and their successors “rising up,” can be ignorant as were their predecessors. If they use their eyes merely, and permit their minds to remain blanks, they must improve. There is no street in London now that will not teach them something; every shop window contains a lesson; and it requires no very large observation to perceive advancement in every class of British art-manufacture—not, certainly, so marked as to produce content, but exhibiting ample proof that we are progressing in the right direction, and leading to the conclusion that at no very distant period we shall not have to incur the reproach that our artisans are worse educated than those of Germany, Belgium, and France. These remarks result from the brief insight we have given in these pages into the rich volumes which the past has filled for the use of the present. The books to which we have resorted, and the places in which we have sought for rarities, are open to most of those who desire to examine them, and who will find an expenditure of time and labour to any amount, be it large or small, produce an extent of remuneration of which the searcher will have no idea until he begins to gather in the profit he has made.
We had intended to supply a list of books, to be obtained either at the British Museum or the Museum at South Kensington, to which we desire to direct the attention of our art-producers and art-workmen; but thus to occupy space is needless. The requisite information can be easily procured: any of the superintendents, at either place, will gladly direct the searcher, on receiving information as to his wants. Moreover, it is permitted, under certain restrictions, to take sketches of engravings or drawings, and from objects exhibited; aids to do this readily present themselves.
Books, however, should be regarded only as auxiliaries; they will supply in abundance material for suggestion or adaptation; although, as we have already observed, “slavishly to copy, or systematically to imitate,” are evils to be avoided.
[15-*] “Biographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany.” London, 1821. 3 vols.
[41-*] “Histoire de l’Art par les Monumens, depuis sa Décadence au IVe. Siècle jusqu’à son Renouvellement au XVIe.”