How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

PLAN OF THE ESCORIÁL

Imitating the Gridiron on Which S. Lawrence Was Martyred. [P. 403]

CHAPTER V
RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS, AND SPAIN

Notwithstanding the close commercial relations that cities such as Augsburg and Nüremburg maintained with Northern Italy, especially with Venice, the Renaissance influences did not make much impression on German architecture until about the middle of the sixteenth century. It had, however, appeared in the paintings and engravings of Dürer and Burkmair and in the sculpture of Peter Vischer—as in his Tomb of S. Sebald in Nüremburg. But even in architecture there had been symptoms of the spread of Italian taste, Italian architects being employed on castle-building, as in the case already mentioned, of the Venetian, Scamozzi, in Prague. These, however, were only sporadic instances; for two reasons conspired to defer a general movement: the deep-rooted Gothic feeling and the political conditions.

Architecture depends largely upon conditions of social stability, making for wealth and ease, and these had been disturbed by Charles V’s long struggle to crush the nobility that upheld the Protestant faith. It was, therefore, not until security had been established by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, that a widespread activity of architecture was resumed. It lasted until the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. This covers the period of the Early and Later German Renaissance; the remainder of the seventeenth century being marked by a gradual decline into the extravagance of Rococo.

Characteristics.—Moreover, the German architects, after borrowing the Gothic style, had so fitted it, especially in the way of decorative details, to their own taste, that when at length they borrowed from the Renaissance, they preserved, except in rare instances, much of the Gothic feeling. The new style was employed chiefly in castles, domestic buildings, city halls, gild and corporation houses. In these the German love of irregularity, profusion, fantasticalness, and general picturesqueness still prevailed. It was displayed in the continued partiality for towers and turrets (octagonal, not circular, as in France), often containing spiral staircases; high-pitched roofs and decorated gables, carried up in steps; dormer windows, prolonged through several stories up to the height of the roof and emulating the effect of gables; oriel windows, curved or polygonal, projecting from the face of the façade or from the angles upon corbel-supports.

The German taste also showed itself in the character and distribution of the ornament. While this was apt to be spread freely over the façades and was used profusely in the decoration of the windows and doors, it was lavished especially on the gables and dormer gables, so that they are the distinctive feature of the design. To some extent the details of Italian ornament were introduced, but more generally the German carver followed his own taste for bold and deeply cut designs, showing a preference for rusticated masonry, including rusticated pilasters, and drawing on his fancy for grotesques, caryatids and the half-length figures, terminating in a pedestal, known as gaines. And the wood carver vied with the sculptor, especially in the interior decoration of ceilings and wall panelling, while the exteriors as well as the interiors afforded scope for the fancy of the painter.

The ornamental tendency increased until the purpose seemed to be to cover every available space with decoration; while as the latter grew less and less organic, it became less original. The carver ceased to invent his designs and was satisfied to copy them with tedious repetitions from the pattern books which, compiled apparently in the Netherlands—one of them by Cornelius de Vriendt—circulated through Germany and, as we shall see, found their way to England. They comprised a heterogeneous assortment of motives, for title pages and frontispieces of books as well as for doorheads and other architectural details, and introduced a variety of designs in bands and straps, borrowed from the work of locksmiths and leather-workers. The degradation reached its climax in the Rococo ornament of the early eighteenth century, especially in the Zwinger Palace, Dresden, “the most terrible Rococo work ever conceived, if we except some of the Churrigueresque work in Spain.”

In the neighbourhood of the Hartz Mountains, where forests abounded, timber was used with handsome effect in the design of the structure; beams, doors and window frames, corbels, and so forth being richly carved and often coloured. In the alluvial plain of the North, bounded roughly by a line drawn east and west through Berlin, the absence of stone and the abundance of clay encouraged the use of brick both for the structure and its decoration, and developed a skill in the handling of this material that could scarcely be surpassed. Elsewhere stone was plentiful and the main walls were constructed either of masonry or rubble covered with stucco.