Fig. 45. | Fig. 46. |
Fig. 47. | Fig. 48. |
It was not natural to the Roman people ever to forget their great art-works of antiquity; the influence of the “departed spirits” still “ruled them from their urns,” as Byron truthfully expresses it. The artists of Greece and Rome based their compositions on the unvarying truth of nature; and though the barbaric mind might bear sway for awhile, it could not triumph but through ignorance. Rome is now the great art-teacher only because it is the conservator of its ancient relics; and they have had their influence undiminished from the days of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. There are many pleasing bits of design in the antique city, that show the classic source of inspiration from which their inventors obtained them. The boy and dolphins, forming the pleasing domestic fountain we engrave in [Fig. 51], is an evident instance of the influence of antique taste. The abundant supply of water was the grand feature of the Rome of the Cæsars, as it still is of the Rome of the Popes; and the liberality with which every house is served has frequently induced the owners of large mansions to decorate one corner of their external walls with a fountain, at which all wayfarers may be supplied. In a recess of the lowermost story of one of the great palazzi which line the principal street of Rome, “the Corso,” our second specimen ([Fig. 52]) is placed. It represents a wine-merchant liberally pouring from the bung-hole of his barrel its inexhaustible contents. On great festas in the olden time it was not unusual to make public fountains run with wine for an hour or two, and this may have occurred with the one engraved; it is a work of the latter part of the sixteenth century, when luxury reigned in Rome. As a design it is exceedingly simple and appropriate, reminding, by its quaintness, of German rather than Italian design. The old Teutonic cities present very many striking inventions of the kind: and the promoters and designers of our drinking fountains may obtain good and useful hints from that quarter.
Fig. 51. | Fig. 52. |
Our street architecture has shown recently a greater freedom of design, and range of study, than was ever exhibited before. We may owe this, in some degree, to the excellent works on the domestic and palatial edifices of the Low Countries, which have issued from the press, and have vindicated the true character of the great mediæval builders. Germany—taking the term for the nation in its widest sense—can show in its antique cities a vast variety of fancy in architecture and its ornamental details. Each city may be made a profitable residence for the study of a young architect; and the superior knowledge of the leading principles of mediæval art, now exhibited in their adaptation of the style to home events, is a clear proof that the fact has been felt and acted on. The “infinite variety” of the old decorator is everywhere apparent, and the play he gave to his invention. We give in [Fig. 53], as one instance, the ornamental mouldings of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, in the Cathedral of Aix; in this instance the rigidity of the rule which enforces geometric form to the whole is softened by the introduction of the cable moulding to a portion thereof, with singularly good effect. It is a work executed under the rule of Armand de Hesse, Archbishop of Cologne, and Provost of Aix, probably about 1480.