Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

Fig. 100.—Console of pulpit in Santa Croce.

The arrangements, as well as the treatment, of the details drawn from plant life that are associated with this style of design are often most artificial and inorganic, as in the pulpit of Santa Croce before mentioned, where on the side of a console (Fig. [100]) fruit and leafage issue from a nondescript receptacle of ungraceful shape, having a clumsy fluted stalk bound with a fluttering ribbon ending in a tassel. Such unnaturally composed details are unknown in the pure Gothic art which the men of the Renaissance thought so barbaric. The introduction of objects like the singular cornucopia and the ribbon of this design is common in Renaissance ornamentation. Without affirming that artificial objects may never enter into an ornamental composition, I think it may be said that such objects, if used as conspicuous features, ought to have some beauty of form,[113] and certainly every group of objects, of whatever kind, should be composed so as to produce an effect of organic unity. Each detail ought to have a place and a posture which should make it a part of some system of related ornamental lines. This is, of course, elementary, and the principle is usually carried out in the ornamentation of the Renaissance, though in a highly artificial way. But in the design on the triangular panel of this console there is no fine system of related lines. The fruit and leafage have a disjointed arrangement, and the wriggled ribbon has no beauty of line or surface.

Fig. 101.—Leafage from the Ghiberti gates.

Instances of such disordered composition are conspicuous in the borders of the famous Ghiberti gates of the Florentine Baptistery, where the bosses of leafage set at regular intervals are composed in the same inorganic way (Fig. [101]), and the bunches are bound with spiral fluted fillets. It is noticeable that the details are here elaborated with a minute naturalistic completeness that is incompatible with architectural effectiveness. The possibilities of the bronze material in which the design is wrought are developed to the utmost in the rendering of leaf veinings, serrations, and surface textures. This tendency to combine excessive naturalism with extremely artificial composition is a curious characteristic of both Roman and Renaissance art.

We find in the ornamental carving of the Renaissance not only a formal, and often a disjointed, scheme of composition, with artificial objects of no beauty or meaning introduced among elements derived from natural forms, but numerous instances occur where the design is made up entirely of such objects, as in a pilaster in the National Museum of Florence (Fig. [102]). Such value as this design has lies wholly in its childish symmetry of arrangement of the ugly elements about an axis. It contains nothing else on which the eye can rest with pleasure. I think it may be taken as a true principle that architectural ornament cannot be good unless it be an expression of the kind of beauty that we find in organic nature. I do not say that the elements of such ornament must be directly, or consciously, drawn from nature; but every quality of line and surface that, in a healthy state of mind, we feel to be beautiful is exemplified in organic nature, so that however abstract or conventional a piece of good carving may be, its forms will have a correspondence with those of natural objects.

Fig. 102.—Pilaster in the National Museum, Florence.

The finest forms that occur in the carvings of the Renaissance are those of foliation such as we have already noticed (p. [170]). But even these are rarely of real excellence. An appreciation of the vital beauty of leafage has in general not been manifested by the Italians, whether ancient or modern. The leafage of Roman art is as inferior to Greek leafage as that of the Renaissance is to the foliation of the French Gothic carvers. Take, for instance, the crisp acanthus leaves of the capital from Epidaurus (_A_, Fig. 103) in the National Museum of Athens, with their strong nervous life notwithstanding their severely conventional treatment; or the leaf _B_ in the same figure, from another Greek capital in the same museum, with its spiky cusps and its exquisite systems of radiating lines—at once true to nature and effective as ornament; and compare with these any examples of Roman, or Græco-Roman, leafage, as _A_ and _B_ (Fig. [104]). Observe in _A_, from a composite capital in the Naples Museum, the excessive convolution of the leaf ends, the obtuse rounded cusps, the lack of radial relationship in the lines of depression, and the unmodelled flatness of the surfaces between the furrows. And notice in _B_, from a Corinthian capital supposed to have belonged to the so-called Temple of Jupiter Stator, the immoderate and artificial undulations of line and surface.