Undoubtedly the three most noted bell-towers in Italy are those of Venice, Pisa, and Florence. The great Campanile of St. Mark at Venice, first begun in 874, carried higher in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and finally completed in the sixteenth century with the marble belvedere and wooden spire so familiar in pictures of Venice, was formerly the highest of all church campaniles in Italy, measuring approximately 325 feet to the summit. But this superb historic monument, weakened by causes not yet at this writing fully understood, fell in sudden ruin on the 14th of July, 1902, to the great loss not only of Venice, but of the world of art, though fortunately without injuring the neighboring buildings on the Piazza and Piazzetta of St. Mark. Since then the campanile of S. Stefano, in the same city, has been demolished to forestall another like disaster. The Leaning Tower of Pisa (see p. 160, [Fig. 92]) dates from 1174, and is unique in its plan and its exterior treatment with superposed arcades. Begun apparently as a leaning tower, it seems to have increased this lean to a dangerous point, by the settling of its foundations during construction, as its upper stages were made to deviate slightly towards the vertical from the inclination of the lower portion. It has always served rather as a watch-tower and belvedere than as a bell-tower. The Campanile adjoining the Duomo at Florence is described on [p. 263] and illustrated in [Fig. 154], and does not require further notice here. The black-and-white banded towers of Sienna, Lucca, and Pistoia, and the octagonal lanterns crowning those of Verona and Mantua, also referred to in the text on [p. 264], need here only be mentioned again as illustrating the variety of treatment of these Italian towers.
The Renaissance architects developed new types of campanile, and in such variety that they can only be briefly referred to. Some, like a brick tower at Perugia, are simple square towers with pilasters; more often engaged columns and entablatures mark the several stories, and the upper portion is treated either with an octagonal lantern or with diminishing stages, and sometimes with a spire. Of the latter class the best example is that of S. Biagio, at Montepulciano,—one of the two designed to flank the façade of Ant. da S. Gallo’s beautiful church of that name. One or two good late examples are to be found at Naples. Of the more massive square type there are examples in the towers of S. Michele, Venice; of the cathedral at Ferrara, Sta. Chiara at Naples, and Sta. Maria dell’ Anima—one of the earliest—at Rome. The most complete and perfect of these square belfries of the Renaissance is that of the Campidoglio at Rome, by Martino Lunghi, dating from the end of the sixteenth century, which groups so admirably with the palaces of the Capitol.
[C.] BRAMANTE’S WORKS.—A more or less animated controversy has arisen regarding the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Bramante, and the tendency has of late been to deny him any part whatever in several of the most important of these works. The first of these to be given a changed assignment was the church of the Consolazione at Todi ([p. 293]), now believed to be by Cola di Caprarola; and it is now denied by many investigators that either the Cancelleria or the Giraud palace ([p. 290]) is his work, or any one of two or three smaller houses in Rome showing a somewhat similar architectural treatment. The evidence adduced in support of this denial is rather speculative and critical than documentary, but is not without weight. The date 1495 carved on a doorway of the Cancelleria palace is thought to forbid its attribution to Bramante, who is not known to have come to Rome till 1503; and there is a lack of positive evidence of his authorship of the Giraud palace and the other houses which seem to be by the same hand as the Cancelleria. To the advocates of this view there is not enough resemblance in style between this group of buildings and his acknowledged work either in Milan or in the Vatican to warrant their being attributed to him.
It must, however, be remarked, that this notable group of works, stamped with the marks and even the mannerisms of a strong personality, reveal in their unknown author gifts amounting to genius, and heretofore deemed not unworthy of Bramante. It is almost inconceivable that they should have been designed by a mere beginner previously utterly unknown and forgotten soon after. It is incumbent upon those who deny the attribution to Bramante to find another name, if possible, on which to fasten the credit of these works. Accordingly, they have been variously attributed to Alberti (who died in 1472) or his followers; to Bernardo di Lorenzo, and to other later fifteenth-century artists. The difficulty here is to discover any name that fits the conditions even as well as Bramante’s; for the supposed author must have been in Rome between 1495 and 1505, and his other works must be at least as much like these as were Bramante’s. No name has thus far been found satisfactory to careful critics; and the alternative theory, that there existed in Rome, before Bramante’s coming, a group of architects unknown to later fame, working in a common style and capable of such a masterpiece as the Cancelleria, does not harmonize with the generally accepted facts of Renaissance art history. Moreover, the comparison of these works with Bramante’s Milanese work on the one hand and his great Court of the Belvedere in the Vatican on the other, yields, to some critics, conclusions quite opposed to those of the advocates of another authorship than Bramante’s.
The controversy must be considered for the present as still open. There are manifest difficulties with either of the two opposed views, and these can hardly be eliminated, except by the discovery of documents not now known to exist, whose testimony will be recognized as unimpeachable.
[D.] L’ART NOUVEAU.—Since 1896, and particularly since the Paris Exposition of 1900, a movement has manifested itself in France and Belgium, and spread to Germany and Austria and even measurably to England, looking towards a more personal and original style of decorative and architectural design, in which the traditions and historic styles of the past shall be ignored. This movement has received from its adherents and the public the name of “L’Art Nouveau,” or, according to some, “L’Art Moderne”; but this name must not be held to connote either a really new style or a fundamentally new principle in art. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any clearly-defined body of principles whatever underlies the movement, or would be acknowledged equally by all its adherents. It appears to be a reaction against a too slavish adherence to traditional forms and methods of design (see pp. [370], [375]), a striving to ignore or forget the past rather than a reaching out after any well-understood, positive end; as such, it possesses the negative strength of protest rather than the affirmative strength of a vital principle. Its lack of cohesion is seen in the division of its adherents into groups, some looking to nature for inspiration, while others decry this as a mistaken quest; some seeking to emphasize structural lines, and others to ignore them altogether. All, however, are united in the avoidance of commonplace forms and historic styles, and this preoccupation has developed an amazing amount of originality and individualism of style, frequently reaching the extreme of eccentricity. The results have therefore been, as might be expected, extremely varied in merit, ranging from the most refined and reserved in style to the most harshly bizarre and extravagant. As a rule, they have been most successful in small and semi-decorative objects—jewelry, silverware, vases, and small furniture; and one most desirable feature of the movement has been the stimulus it has given (especially in France and England), to the organization and activity of “arts-and-crafts” societies which occupy themselves with the encouragement of the decorative and industrial arts and the diffusion of an improved taste. In the field of the larger objects of design, in which the dominance of traditional form and of structural considerations is proportionally more imperious, the struggle to evade these restrictions becomes more difficult, and results usually in more obvious and disagreeable eccentricities, which the greater size and permanence of the object tend further to exaggerate. The least successful achievements of the movement have accordingly been in architecture. The buildings designed by its most fervent disciples (e.g. the Pavillon Bleu at the Exposition of 1900, the Castel Béranger, Paris, by H. Guimard, the houses of the artist colony at Darmstadt, and others) are for the most part characterized by extreme stiffness, eccentricity, or ugliness. The requirements of construction and of human habitation cannot easily be met without sometimes using the forms which past experience has developed for the same ends; and the negation of precedent is not the surest path to beauty or even reasonableness of design. It is interesting to notice that in the intermediate field of furniture-design some of the best French productions recall the style of Louis XV., modified by Japanese ideas and spirit. This singular but not unpleasing combination is less surprising when we reflect that the style of Louis XV. was itself a protest against the formalism of the heavy classic architecture of preceding reigns, and achieved its highest successes in the domain of furniture and interior decoration.
It may be fair to credit the new movement with one positive characteristic in its prevalent regard for line, especially for the effect of long and swaying lines, whether in the contours or ornamentation of an object. This is especially noticeable in the Belgian work, and in that of the Viennese “Secessionists,” who have, however, carried eccentricity to a further point of extravagance than any others.
Whether “L’Art Nouveau” will ever produce permanent results time alone can show. Its present vogue is probably evanescent and it cannot claim to have produced a style; but it seems likely to exert on European architecture an influence, direct and indirect, not unlike that of the Néo-Grec movement of 1830 in France ([p. 364]), but even more lasting and beneficial. It has already begun to break the hold of rigid classical tradition in design; and recent buildings, especially in Germany and Austria, like the works of the brilliant Otto Wagner in Vienna, show a pleasing freedom of personal touch without undue striving after eccentric novelty. Doubtless in French and other European architecture the same result will in time manifest itself.
The search for novelty and the desire to dispense wholly with historic forms of design which are the chief marks of the Art Nouveau, were emphatically displayed in many of the remarkable buildings of the Paris Exhibition of 1900, in which a striking fertility and facility of design in the decorative details made more conspicuous the failure to improve upon the established precedents of architectural style in the matters of proportion, scale, general composition, and contour. As usual the metallic construction of these buildings was almost without exception admirable, and the decorative details, taken by themselves, extremely clever and often beautiful, but the combined result was not satisfactory.
In the United States the movement has not found a firm foothold because there has been no dominant, enslaving tradition to protest against. Not a few of the ideas, not a little of the spirit of the movement may be recognized in the work of individual architects and decorative artists in the United States, executed years before the movement took recognizable form in Europe: and American decorative design has generally been, at least since 1880 or 1885, sufficiently free, individual and personal, to render unnecessary and impossible any concerted movement of artistic revolt against slavery to precedent.