Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

We have seen that Christian architecture sprang from the ruins of paganism, and attained the loftiest growth. The mutual dependence of every thing on earth, whether in the primary creations of God, or the secondary creations of man, is strikingly exemplified in this art. Roman architecture was the offspring of Greece, and the parent of the Byzantine, Lombard, and Norman styles; from which again sprung that most magnificent proof of man's power over dull matter, the Pointed system of decorated construction. From first to last there is no gap nor pause in the progress of improvement. Even when fearful signs were seen in the heavens, and Rome, the former centre of civilization, had become a nest of robbers, art was still fostered under the auspices of Charlemagne. Other calamities impended, in the midst of which that mighty monarch passed away, and in the crypt of his famous church at Aix-la-Chapelle, royally robed and crowned, sceptred and enthroned, his good sword Joyeuse by his side, and the Bible on his knees, he was set to await, with the dull stare of a waxen image, the approaching advent of the Judgment Day. Still new principles took root, and the mighty tide of improvement swept onward. As the Tiber more and more murmured the sepulchral sentiment of romance, the Rhine teemed with the thrilling power of its living energy. Hence the thousand echoes of those castellated hills, and sacred associations around secluded vales, which form the diapason of a sublime antiquity. The beacon towers, melodious belfreys, festal halls, and moss-covered shrines, the desolate cloisters, the dungeons, and the very sepulchres repeat to each other, and to the susceptible visitant, the reiterated glories of king and kayser. Architecture is far more expressive of both public and private life than any other art can be. The sight of its dilapidated records reminds us of the God's Truces, of the Crusades, of Feudalism, and of Chivalry, the virtues, crimes, joys, and calamities of long lapsed centuries. Nor can we explore these hoary fabrics without remembering how their vaults resounded long ago with the psalmody and groans of our ancestors, who, during that tremendous struggle, came to the foot of the altar, begging of God to give them strength to suffer and to hope.

Saracenic art is a highly enriched and magnificent variety of Romanesque, yet fantastic and incongruous, a sort of dead Gothic, presenting the pointed arch and other characteristics of that style, but without one spark of its pervading spirit. These lifeless forms were adopted by the Teutonic architects, and by them endued with life and power. They were the first to grasp the great law that construction and decoration must proceed from the same source, and in a masterly way they exemplified the fundamental principle which they had the sagacity to comprehend.

The Chapel of St. Nazario and St. Celso, erected at Ravenna in the fifth century, contains the only tombs which remain in their places of the whole line of Cæsars, whether oriental or occidental. Thenceforth dates a new monumental art, equally separate from the old world. Out of the arch came the vault, and out of the vault the cupola, that majestic ornament to which every other feature is subordinate, and which is the very life and soul of Byzantine architecture. The inspiration of the Cross produced nobler forms of outline than Ictinus or Callicrates could bestow on their most sumptuous works, when its spreading arms reared aloft the mighty lantern of St. Sophia, preparatory to the still brighter day when above shaft, and architrave, and pediment, should soar the matchless dome of Florence, and the heaven-bound spires of Strasbourg and Salisbury. But another element was requisite to this result, and was contributed by the genius of Lombardy. The campanile, bell-tower, or steeple, owes its origin entirely to Christianity amid western barbarians; as such a member was never attached to an idol-temple, and is forbidden still to the proudest mosques of the false prophet. Moreover, unlike the Saracens who never admitted animal forms into decorative construction, the Lombards copiously used it after every type and form. Saints, founders of churches, and legendary heroes were strangely intermixed with all the strange animals of the natural creation, carved in bas-reliefs on walls, capitals, and wherever, within the edifice or without, a void space was found to receive them. When the soaring nave of the Gothic minster supervened upon preceding art, and absorbed it all, then was superadded all the beautiful varieties of vegetable life. In the clustered and banded stalks of its lofty pillars, the crisp leaves of its capitals and corbeled cornices, the interlacing arches of its fretted and embossed vaults, and the interminable complexities of its flowing tracery, were seen traits which comported well with the hues that sparkled from roof and chapter, walls and windows, and which recalled no work of man indeed, no rustic hut or savage cavern, but the sublimest temple of natural religion; the aspiring height of the slender pine, the spreading arms of the giant oak, rich with the varied tints of leaf and blossom, soothing as the rustle of balmy breezes, and melodious with the choral songs of ten thousand birds.

Romanesque architecture is the memento of that stage in progressive civilization when the church was yet subordinate to the state; when the civil and spiritual powers came into open collision, the dispute on investitures roused Europe to its very centre, and the battle-cry of Cæsar was lost in the crash of Pontifical thunder. But the aspiring lancets and pinnacles of the thirteenth century commemorate a wider culture and loftier aims. It was not simply a spirit which with one hand poured an unction on the brow of the ruler, and decked both crown and sceptre with the lily and the cross, and with the other girt the bishop and the abbot with ensigns of earthly power, and placed them foremost in the chief councils of the land. But the architecture of that day proclaims the progress of popular education, and is the artistic embodying of the northern spirit, the soul of chivalry and romance, the age of faith, and love, and valor. It is redolent of the lordly prelate and the consecrated knight; of Tancred and Richard grappling with the infidel; of Bayard dying with his eye fixed on his cross-hilted sword; of Wykeham every way a peer beside the throne of Edward, England's mighty king. Then the massy tower was surmounted with lofty turrets, from the midst of which shot up the tapering beauty of the airy spire, bearing the once despised Cross triumphant over every earthly power; while beneath lay the tombs of the great and noble, not with memorials of a fleeting world and signs of hopeless grief, but with the symbols of faith and charity, the hands still clasped in prayer, the eyes still fixed on the altar of God.

But the baneful hour came when a foreign influence and heathen taste obliterated many of these suggestive charms. The same infection which filled literature with the pedantry of a mythology whose beauty its imitators did not understand, defiled Christian churches with heathen idols, and for the cross, the lily, the holy legend, substituted the ox-scull, naked cupids, and the garland of a pagan sacrifice. Another spirit ruled in the realms of art, and had enthroned the eagle of Jove in the place of the Holy Dove. In Spain, the Netherlands, and in Scotland, there had been executed much clever building, but when the blow fell which destroyed further progress in this department, all excellence existed in English architecture alone. It is significant that not one four-centred arch was produced even so near as Scotland, while the last bloom of monumental art unfolded to perish forever in the frigid extravagance of Tudor Gothic. The budding forth of living architecture was cotemporaneous with one of the grandest augmentations of religious sentiment the world has ever known, and was signalized by the crusades and the organization of the great monastic orders. The first germination of this creative energy appeared about 1050, and chiefly among the Normans of France and England, where it swelled forth with extraordinary power and vividness. While this inspiration lasted, monumental art continued constantly to improve, and reached its highest excellence in the remotest West. After passing from a Herculean infancy to a graceful youth, and through a ripe maturity, a superannuated old age was reached, and it became extinct before the year 1550: so completely dead, that, since then, no architect in Europe has invented a new feature or composed a new beauty in that medium. The finest monuments, and the final goal of Gothic architecture are together illumined at sunset in western England, nearest to that wonder, Stonehenge, which was an antique, probably, long before Pericles ruled or Christ was born.

Florence is the only city of the old world that is said to be destitute of ruins. She is the fair metropolis of modern art; the home of science, rather, which came to displace the old artistic types, and create all things new. Such was her influence in the culminating power of the Renaissance under her great son, Leo X., whose pontificate was cotemporaneous with the radical overthrow of mediæval architecture. The Tuscan capital will best illustrate the approach and consummation of that result. The church of St. Maria Novella, projected in the year 1280, is a Latin cross, with nave and aisles. Simple and majestic, solid and light, it embraces an ensemble of beauties that makes it the fairest in Florence; and, according to Rica and Fineschi, the most graceful in Italy. This is the edifice which Michael Angelo termed his "gentle spouse," and was, doubtless, the precursor of Brunellesco's architecture. When beheld arrayed in its pomp on festal days, draped in silk and gold, with its altars lighted; or, better still, when contemplated in its severe simplicity, toward evening, when the grand shadows of the pillars cross each other, falling on the opposite walls, and the richly tinted rays stream through its storied windows, coloring every object around, the spectator feels himself exhilarated and ennobled with a thousand celestial thoughts. And be it remembered to the honor of the two Dominican architects, Fra Sisto and Fra Ristaro, that they went not to the outer world for models of such beauty as this; for it was not till 1294 that Arnolfo laid the foundation of St. Croce, and St. Maria del Fiore was not begun till 1298. But the latter building, the cathedral of Florence, is the masterpiece of Italian Gothic, one of the largest and finest churches produced in the middle ages. The nave and smaller domes of the choir were probably completed as they now stand, in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The great octagon remained uncovered till Brunelleschi commenced the present dome in the year 1420, and finished it before his death, in 1444. The building may, therefore, be considered as essentially cotemporary with the cathedral of Cologne, and is very nearly of the same size. What a contrast in both spirit and form! Perhaps the most typical example of Italian art in its best period, is the tower erected close to the Duomo just referred to, from designs by Giotto, commenced in 1324, and probably finished at the time of his death, two years afterward. It is certainly a very beautiful structure, and worthy of the enthusiastic praise which it has received. The openings are happily graduated, and being covered with ornament from the base to the summit, it has not that naked look so repulsive in many others. The convent of St. Mark, whose history is identified with that of literature, arts, politics, and religion, was founded toward the close of the thirteenth century. Little did the magnificent Cosimo imagine that he was there preparing an asylum for that terrible Savonarola, who was destined to dispute the dominion of Florence with his posterity. It was in the midst of these buildings that those great minds moved, the regenerators of Europe, "who first broke the universal gloom, sons of the morning."

If the Florentine monuments indicate the revival of science and the consequent debasement of art, the most impressive proof relative to this point is presented in the famous church of St. Peter at Rome. Nothing more pagan in form was ever erected on the seven hills where roamed the primitive she-wolf. Not as the mausoleum of a Christian martyr, but as the stupendous temple of some classic deity, it is doubtless full of surpassing attractions. Nothing was ever done for Leonidas or Camillus, for Regulus or for Julius Cæsar, in comparison with this monument to a humble fisherman. But what stranger to the purpose of its erection would ever think of him in the presence of this gorgeous shrine? Of the magnificent inscriptions raised to the wise and mighty of time, the sublimest must yield to that which encircles the sky-suspended vault of St. Peters. A conqueror of the habitable world once wept at having reached the limits of his sway; for, vast as was his ambition, it conceived of no such trophy as is written around that golden horizon, consigning the keys of heaven to one who ruled the empire of earth. But before that huge inscription had been raised to its pride of place, the last great transition of human society in the age of Leo X. transpired, the most sudden and complete of all revolutions, the change from the middle age to the modern, from the world without printed books to the world with them. St. Peters was coeval with the invention of printing, and the universal revival of science. Before the sacristy was finished, the splendid endeavors of Watt had been crowned with success; and in the interval had occurred the discovery of America and the Reformation. The fall of Catholic domination and Gothic art was coeval with the ending of that mighty cycle of mutation wherein the web of society had been unraveled and rewoven for a yet more auspicious use.

Sculpture was little practiced during the first mediæval centuries, but the church soon gave that art her patronage, and produced innumerable works. Plastic and pictorial art was from the earliest period employed in sacred places for the instruction of the people and the edification of the faithful. In 433, pope Sixtus dedicated to the "people of God" the Mosaics and sculptures in Santa Maria Maggiore, at Rome. St. John Damascenus, in the eighth century, reasoned earnestly in defense of statuary for religious purposes. "Images speak," exclaims the eloquent apologist; "they are neither mute nor lifeless blocks, like the idols of the pagans. Every figure that meets our gaze in a church relates, as if in words, the humiliation of Christ for his people, the miracles of the mother of God, the deeds and conflicts of the saints. Images open the heart and awake the intellect, and, in a marvelous and indescribable manner, engage us to imitate the persons they represent."

As Catholicism advanced it was subjected to opposing influences, and the faintest shadow that darkened, or the lightest breath that disturbed, the external prosperity or the internal harmony of the church, was immediately reflected by the pencil of the artist and the chisel of the sculptor. Almost every ancient edifice, therefore, becomes to the eye of careful observation a hieroglyphic record of the dogmas believed and the changes which transpired in the course of successive ages. During the centuries intervening between the ninth and seventeenth of our era, numerous cathedrals, parish churches, and private chapels, colleges, abbeys, and priories, teemed with an almost incredible profusion of figures, images, and sacred compositions, carved, sculptured, and engraved, as the medium of devout instruction. Time and violence have done much to deface or destroy these early works, but the western states of Europe, especially France and England, are even now immensely rich in statues and other sculptured works. The majority of the French cathedrals are illustrated with a vast variety of "Mirrors" in stone; but the most complete is that which adorns the masterpiece at Chartres, which has no less than eighteen hundred and fourteen statues on the exterior alone. The sculptures here open with the creation of the world, to illustrate which thirty-six tableaux and seventy-five statues are employed, beginning with the moment when God leaves his repose to create the heavens and the earth, and is continued to that in which Adam and Eve, having been guilty of disobedience, are driven from Paradise, to pass the remainder of their lives in tears and in labor. It is the genesis of organic and inorganic nature, of living creatures and reasoning beings; that in which the biblical cosmogony is developed, and which leads to that terrible event, the fearful malediction pronounced upon man by his God. From the Natural the sculptor passed to the Moral Mirror, and showed how that man has a heart to be softened, a mind to be enlightened, and a body to be preserved. Thence arise the four orders of virtues, the theological, political, domestic, and personal; all placed in opposition to their contrary vices, as light is to darkness. Theological and political virtues, the influence of which is external, and suitable for the public arena, are placed without; domestic and personal virtues, which affect the individual and his family, are made to retire within, where they find shelter in stillness and comparative obscurity. Man's career is then continued from the creation to the last judgment, just as the sun pursues his course from east to west, and the remaining statues are employed to exhibit the history of the world, from the period of Adam and Eve down to the end of time. The inspired sculptor has, indeed, by the aid of the Prophets and of the Apocalypse, divined the future fate of man, long after his earthly existence should have terminated. This is the fourth and last division, completing what was called in the language of the middle ages, the "Mirror of the Universe." The intellectual framework of this stone Encyclopædia contained an entire poem, in the first canto of which we see reflected the image of nature; in the second, that of science; that of the moral sense in the third; of man in the fourth; and in the aggregate, the entire world.

In those days, the state of society was such as to allow little vent to the innermost thoughts of the finely endowed, and the pent-up mind was glad to expend a vast amount of thought and labor upon works which mechanical skill eventually came to supersede. Before the press could do the same work more effectually, the sculptor used a building as a book on which to announce in powerful language his own peculiar disposition, hopes, sentiments, and experience. The apparently grotesque carvings sometimes met with in the better period of sculptural art, are indubitably intended to illustrate fables, legends, romances, as well as individual creeds. But in the sixteenth century, a moral and political revolution spread widely in all countries, and led to a marked change in sculpture as in every other intellectual pursuit. Manual dexterity became nearly perfect, and the capability of molding stone like wax, combined with the rapid unfolding of bold and novel ideas, induced a passionate love of fantastic ornament so peculiar to a vicious Renaissance style. Thus, while the figure sculpture of France and England still possessed a very peculiar and severe character, eminently ideal, in Italy, under the Pisani, plastic art grew to be dramatic and picturesque, the conventionalities of the antique were revived, and with the study of abstract beauty, came the loss of much freshness and individuality.