Ravenna.
Ravenna possesses several circular buildings, almost as interesting as those of the capital; the first being the baptistery of St. John belonging to the original basilica, and consequently one of the oldest Christian buildings of the place. Externally it is a plain octagonal building, 40 ft. in diameter. Internally it still retains its mosaic and other internal features added in the 5th century, which are singularly elegant and pleasing. Its design is somewhat like that of the temple at Spalato, but with arcades substituted everywhere for horizontal architraves; the century that elapsed between these two epochs having sufficed to complete the transition between the two styles.
429. Plan of St. Vitale, Ravenna. (From Isabelle.) Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.
Far more interesting than this is the great church of St. Vitale, the most complicated, and at the same time, perhaps, the most beautiful, of the circular churches of that age. In design it is nearly identical with the church of St. Sergius at Constantinople (see Woodcut No. [311]), from which it was undoubtedly copied, and probably by Greek artists from that town. It was built in the reign of Justinian by St. Ecclesius, archbishop of the see, and was consecrated in 547, eight years after the taking of Ravenna by Justinian’s generals. The principal difference of the plan lies in its being enclosed within an octagon instead of a square, as in St. Sergius, probably to mask the irregularity of the main entrance from a street which did not run in the direction of any of the cardinal points. The recesses are loftier in proportion than those of St. Sergius, and in the lower storey arcades take the place of beams. The aisles being covered with timber roofs, it was necessary to raise the walls of the octagon higher than those of St. Sergius, and small arches take the place of the usual pendentives: the springing of the dome, which is 50 ft. in diameter, is on the level of the sill of the windows the arches of which therefore form penetrations into the dome.
430. Section of St. Vitale, Ravenna. (From Isabelle.) Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.
The church is built in bricks with thick mortar joints, the dome being constructed in an ingenious manner with hollow pots fitted the end of one into the mouth of the other; the lightness of this vault has enabled the builders to dispense with the immense arches and buttresses found in St. Sergius and in Sta. Sophia. Similar construction with pots had been employed in the East for domes and roofs,[[291]] and they form as permanent a method as stone itself, in addition to the stability, facility of construction, and lightness which such an expedient affords.
431. Capital in St. Vitale, Ravenna.
Internally a good deal has been done in modern times to destroy the simplicity of the original effect of the building; but still there is a pleasing result produced by alternating the piers with circular columns, and a lightness and elegance about the whole design that render it unrivalled in the western world among churches of its class. This seems to have been admitted by its contemporaries as much as it is in modern times. Charlemagne at all events copied it for his own tomb at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the architects of many other circular buildings of that age appear to have derived their inspiration from this one.
431a. Capital in St. Vitale, Ravenna.
The church of San Lorenzo at Milan, had it not been so much altered in modern times, would take precedence of San Vitale in almost every respect. The date of its erection is not known, though it certainly must be as early as, if not earlier than, the time of Justinian. Down to the 8th century it was the cathedral of the city. It was burnt to the ground in 1071, and restored in 1119; the dome then erected fell in 1571, on which it underwent its last transformation from the hands of Martino Bassi and Pellegrini, who so disfigured its ancient details as to lead many modern inquirers to doubt whether it was really so old as it was said to be.
Its plan, however, seems to have remained unchanged, and shows a further progress towards what afterwards became the Byzantine style than is to be found either in St. Sergius or in San Vitale. It is in fact the earliest attempt to amalgamate the circular church with one of a square shape; and except that the four lateral colonnades are flat segments of circles, and that there is a little clumsiness in the angles (due possibly to the additions made in 1119 and 1571, when the plan of the dome was changed to an octagon, the original dome being probably circular, and carried on four spherical pendentives), it is one of the most successful designs handed down from that early age.
The dome as it now stands is octagonal, which the first dome certainly could not have been. Its diameter is 70 ft., nearly equal to that of the Minerva Medica, and the whole diameter of the building is internally 142 ft.
432. Plan of S. Lorenzo at Milan. (From Quast, ‘Altchristlichen,’ &c.) Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.
In front of the church, in the street, is a handsome colonnade of pillars, borrowed from some ancient temple—it is said from one dedicated to Hercules; this leads to a square atrium, now wholly deprived of its lateral arcades; and this again to a façade, which has been strangely altered in modern times. Opposite this, to the eastward of the church, is an octagonal building, apparently intended as a tomb-house; and on the north side a similar one, though smaller. On the south is the baptistery, about 45 ft. in diameter, approached by a vestibule in the same manner as that of Constantine at Rome, and as in the tomb of his daughter Constantia: all these, however, have been so painfully altered, that little remains besides the bare plan of the building; still there is enough to show that this is one of the oldest and most interesting of the Christian churches of Italy.
The building now known as the baptistery at Florence is an octagon, 108 ft. in diameter externally. Like the last-mentioned church, it was originally the cathedral of the city, and was erected to serve as such apparently in the time of Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards. If this was so, it certainly had not originally its present form, and most probably those columns which now stand ranged round the walls at that time stood in the centre, as in the Roman examples. If the original roof was of wood, it was probably in two storeys, like that of the baptistery of Constantine, or it may have been a dome of more solid materials, like that of the Sta. Costanza.
At the same time when the new cathedral was built, the older edifice appears to have been remodelled both internally and externally by Arnolpho da Lapo, and both its form and decoration so completely changed, that it must now be considered rather as a building of the 13th century than of the 6th, in which it seems originally to have been erected.[[292]]
433. Half Section, half Elevation, of the Baptistery at Novara. (From Osten.) No scale.
The baptistery of Novara, which may date from the time of Charlemagne, is interesting in that it contains the germ of those external galleries under the roof which form not only one of the most common but also one of the most beautiful features of the later Lombard and Rhenish churches. From the elevation (Woodcut No. [433]) it will easily be seen what was the motive and use of this arrangement, the first trace of which dates perhaps as far back as the baptistery of Nocera (Woodcut No. [428]); for wherever a wooden roof was placed over a circular vault, it is evident that the external walls must be carried up higher than the springing of the arch. But it was by no means necessary that this additional wall should be so solid as that below it, and it was necessary to introduce light and air into the space between the stone and the wooden roofs. Add to this the incongruity of effect in placing a light tiled wooden roof on a massive solid wall, and it will be evident that not only did the exigencies of the building, but the true principles of taste, demand that this part should be made as light as possible. Such openings as those found in the baptistery at Novara suggested an expedient which provided for these objects. This was afterwards carried to a much greater extent. At first, however, it seems only to have been used under the roofs of the domes with which the Italians almost universally crowned the intervention of naves and transepts, and round the semidomes of the apses; but so enamoured did they afterwards become of this feature, that it is frequently carried along the sides of the churches under the roof of the nave and of the aisles, and also—where it is of more questionable taste—under the sloping naves of the roof of the principal façade.
There is nothing in the Lombardian and Rhenish styles so common or so beautiful as these galleries, the arcades of which have all the shadow given by a cornice without its inconvenient projection, while the little shafts with their elegant capitals and light archivolts have a sparkle and brilliancy which no cornice ever possessed. Indeed so beautiful are they, that we are not surprised to find them universally adopted; and their discontinuance on the introduction of the pointed style was one of the greatest losses sustained by architectural art in those days. It is true they would have been quite incompatible with the thin walls and light piers of pointed architecture, but it may be safely asserted that no feature which these new styles introduced was equally beautiful with those galleries which they superseded.
434. Tomb of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. (From Quast.) No scale.
There can be little doubt that many other similar buildings belonging to this age still exist in various parts of Italy; for it is more than probable that, at a time when the city was not of sufficient importance, or the congregation so numerous as to require the more extended accommodation of the basilica, almost all the earlier churches were circular. They either, however, have perished from lapse of time, or have been so altered as to be nearly unrecognisable. We here, in consequence, come again to a break in the chain of our sequence; and when we again meet with any circular buildings in Italy, their features are so distinctly Gothic or Byzantine, that they must be classed with one or other of these modifications. The true Romano-Byzantine style had nearly come to an end when Alboin the Lombard had made himself master of the greater part of Italy about the year 575.
Before leaving this branch of the subject there are two small buildings at Ravenna which it is impossible to pass over, though their direct bearing on the history of this subject is not so apparent as it is in the case of other buildings just described. The first and earliest is the tomb of Galla Placidia (Woodcut No. [302]), now known as the church of SS. Nazario and Celso, and must have been erected before the year 450. It is singular among all the tombs of that age from the abandonment in it of the circular for a cruciform plan. Such forms, it is true, are common in the chambers of tumuli and also among the catacombs, while the church which Constantine built in Constantinople and dedicated to the Apostles, meaning it however as a sepulchral church, was something also on this plan. Notwithstanding, however, these examples, this must be considered as an exceptional form, though its diminutiveness (it being only 35 ft. by 30 internally) might perhaps account for any caprice. Its great interest to us consists in its retaining not only its primitive architectural form (which is that of a dome carried on pendentives, and one of the few instances in which both dome and pendentives form part of one sphere), but its polychromatic decorations nearly in their original state of completeness (Woodcut [302]). The three arms of the cross forming the receptacles for the three sarcophagi is certainly a pleasing arrangement, but is only practicable on a small scale.
435. Capital of Pillars forming peristyle round Theodoric’s Tomb. (From Hubsch.)
436. Plan of Tomb of Theodoric. Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.
437. Elevation of Tomb of Theodoric, Ravenna. (From Isabelle, ‘Édifices Circulaires.’)
Far more interesting than this—architecturally at least—is the tomb of Theodoric, the Gothic king, now known as Santa Maria Rotunda. The lower storey is a decagon externally, enclosing a cruciform crypt. It is 45 ft. in diameter, each face being ornamented by a deep niche. These support a flat terrace, on which originally stood a range of small pillars supporting arches which surrounded the upper storey. These have all been removed, though their form can be restored from fragments found, and as shown in Woodcut No. [435]. On the face of the tomb itself are the sinkings for the architraves and vaults which they supported. The most singular part of the building is the roof, which is formed of one great slab hollowed out into the form of a flat dome—internally 30 ft. and externally 35 ft. in diameter—and which certainly forms one of the most unique and appropriate coverings for a tomb perhaps anywhere to be found. Near the edge are a series of projecting bosses, which evidently were originally used as handles, by means of which the immense mass was raised to its present position. In the centre of the dome is a small square pedestal, on which, it is said, once stood the urn which contained the ashes of its founder.
The model of this building seems probably to have been the Mole of Hadrian, which Theodoric saw, and must have admired, during his celebrated visit to Rome. The polygonal arrangements of the exterior, and the substitution of arcades for horizontal architraves, were only such changes as the lapse of time had rendered indispensable. But the building of the ancient world which it most resembles is the Tour Magne at Nîmes. In both cases we have the polygonal basement containing a great chamber, and above this externally the narrow ledge, approached by flying flights of steps. We cannot now tell what crowned the French example, though the fact of an urn crowning the tomb at Ravenna points to an identical origin, but we must obtain a greater number of examples before we can draw any positive conclusions as to the origin of such forms. Meanwhile, however, whether we consider the appropriateness of the forms, the solidity of its construction, or the simplicity of its ornaments and details, this tomb at Ravenna is not surpassed by any building of its class and age.
Though the investigation of the early history of these circular forms of churches is not so important as that of the rectangular basilicas, it is extremely interesting from the influence they had on the subsequent development of the style. In Italy it is probable that one-half of the early churches were circular in plan; and one such is still generally retained attached to each cathedral as a baptistery. Except for this purpose, however, the form has generally been superseded: the rectangular being much easier to construct, more capable of extension, and altogether more appropriate to the ritual of the Christian community. In France the circular form was early absorbed into the basilica, forming the Chevet or apse. In Germany its fate was much the same as in Italy, but its supersession was earlier and more complete. In England some half-dozen examples are known to exist, and in Spain they have yet to be discovered.
Had the Gothic architects applied themselves to the extension and elaboration of the circular form with the same zeal and skill as was displayed in that task by their Byzantine brethren, they might probably have produced something far more beautiful than even the best of our mediæval cathedrals; but when the Barbarians began to build, they found the square form with its straight lines simpler and easier to construct. It thus happened that, long before they became as civilised and expert as the Easterns were when they commenced the task, the Westerns had worked the rectangular form into one of considerable beauty, and had adapted it to their ritual, and their ritual to it. It thus became the sacred and appropriate form, and the circular or domical forms were consequently never allowed a fair trial in Western Europe.