Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy

by George Edmund Street

They ignored, as much as possible, the clear exhibition of the pointed arch, and, even when they did use it, not unfrequently introduced it in such a way as to shew their contempt for it as a feature of construction; employing it often only for ornament, and never hesitating to construct it in so faulty a manner that it required to be held together with iron rods from the very first day of its erection. This fault they often found it absolutely necessary to commit, because they scarcely ever brought themselves to allow the use of the buttress; and this reluctance was a remarkable proof of their Classic sympathies. Classic architecture was as distinctly symbolic of rest as Gothic was of life; the column and lintel of the one were as still and symbolical of perfect repose, as the arch of the other, sustained by the strong arm of the flying buttress, was of life, vigour, and motion. Italian Gothic architects then, in never resorting to the buttress, avowed their feeling that a state of perfect rest was the only allowable state for a perfect building, and they preferred almost always to use the arch for its beauty only, and avowedly not for its constructional value, which they evidenced by tying it together with iron bars at its base, which there was no intention of disguising, and therefore no shamefacedness in the use of. From this, I believe, at least one beauty arose. It is obvious that the pointed arch, descending upon the capital of a shaft without any visible stay or buttress to retain it in its place, would look weak and thin; and it was soon perceived that, in order to overcome this difficulty, the only course was to add to its substance by cusping it on the under side. Thence came the trefoiled arches so frequent in Italy, and always so very lovely. As so much depended upon them, no pains were spared in bringing their outline into the very purest form. To this we owe the absolute perfection which characterizes some of the trefoiled arches in early Italian work; of this we have an example (to take one instance among many) in the tombs of the Scaligers, at Verona, in which the mass of the trefoil descending from the arch conveys to the eye the impression of a firmness which, in part, it certainly gives, but which would nevertheless be insufficient in reality for the stability of the work, without the aid of the connecting rod of iron below.

In northern Gothic architecture, arches invariably tell their own story, and do their own work, avowedly and without any disguise; in Italy this is the exception, not the rule, and the commonest exception is seen in the arcades dividing the aisles from the naves of churches, and in the large open arches forming the arcades upon which public and private buildings so often stand, though even these are sometimes (as in the second stage of the Ducal Palace at Venice) formed of continuous traceries in place of arches, and are dependent for their stability, like the single arches of tombs and monuments, upon the assistance of iron ties.

Another proof of the reverence for ancient tradition in art is furnished by the extent to which, throughout the time of the prevalence of pointed architecture in Italy, the round arch was also used. Examples of this are very frequent, and of the most capricious kind. At Cremona, e.g., the south transept has semicircular arches throughout, and the north transept pointed arches; the date of both being, however, as nearly as possible the same. At Verona, in the old house given in plate 14, some of the bearing arches are pointed, some round; and again, in some buildings the main arches are round, and the ornamental pointed. Again, one of the most common cornices in all the mediæval brickwork of Italy is a continuous arcade of round arches intersecting one another, and forming at their intersections pointed arches; and in the Ca’ d’Oro, one of the most elaborately ornate late Gothic buildings in Venice, some of the entrance arches are pointed and some round. It needs not, however, that examples should be multiplied, for almost every building exhibits some trace of this kind of confusion.

The Venetian love for the ogee arch, which spread thence to Verona, Vicenza, and Ferrara, has been already mentioned; no doubt we must look to the East for the very early introduction of this feature in Venice, and I only incidentally refer to it here as proving, from the way in which it was perpetually used, that its adopters had no peculiar love for the form of the pure pointed arch, of which it is certainly a most vitiated perversion.

With this, by way of preface, let us now go on to look at the features of these Italian works in detail. We shall find that we have two influences brought out, even more strongly than in most mediæval works, in Italian buildings. These are, first, local, and next, personal influences. The Venetian, the Bolognese, and the Veronese, for instance, are all distinctly local styles, in which early traditions were preserved, to some extent, from first to last; and to these might be added the Florentine, the Genoese, and the Pisan. On the other hand it is impossible not to notice the very great personal influence exercized over their descendants, as well as over their contemporaries, by some of the greater Italian architects, of whom I may adduce Nicola Pisano as the most eminent example.

There is a third influence which must not be overlooked—that of foreign architects. Milan Cathedral, designed by a German, is very unlike any other Italian building in style; San Francesco at Assisi was also the work of a foreigner; and the western front of Genoa Cathedral owes much of its peculiar and extremely beautiful character to contact with, and knowledge of, French art; whilst Vercelli is another instance, as far as its interior is concerned, which may be included in this list. Generally speaking, however, the influence of the foreigner seems to have been confined pretty much to the particular church designed by him.

In the Middle Ages the Italians led a life more akin to our own, at the present day, than other people. The country was populous, the cities numerous and rich, and the people full of emulation and individuality. This was precisely the condition of things that would lead, most certainly, to the employment of artists from a distance, and to the establishment of a professional practice of the art earlier than elsewhere. It led to the employment of the family of the Pisani, of the Campione clan, the sculptors of Como, the Cosmati in Rome, and many others. In England and in France it is much more difficult to point to any facts proving the employment of the same architects in various parts of the country, and there is, at first sight, therefore, less of what is obviously personal in their art in the Middle Ages.

The history of our old architects in England and France is very peculiar; they were, as a rule, each confined to a certain district, in which they wrought in what was in fact a merely local variety of their national style. In point of artistic talent, they were very equally matched, so that it is difficult to assign the pre-eminence to any one over the rest, though in England we may point to our Yorkshire abbeys, and in France to the buildings in the Isle de France as being on the whole the finest examples. We have had no Nicola Pisano here; our old architects’ work is singularly equal in its character in each period; and whether it was displayed in the little village church lying concealed on the banks of a rippling stream, or in the vast abbey of some sequestered valley, or in the cathedral church of the busy city, there seems to be matter for equal admiration in all. In Italy, on the other hand, we see a number of individual architects exercizing each his peculiar influence, varying very much in their skill and power, and having, moreover, the doubtful advantage of a constant recollection of the works of a different style of art, from whose traditions they never escaped. Placed, in short, very much in the position that we are at the present day, they never wrought with the same absolute and joyous freedom that marks their contemporaries’ work in France and England; and thus, though their architecture may be inferior, it is of very special value to us; for we may, perhaps, see better the cause of some of our own shortcomings, when we investigate theirs, and so we may hope to excel the works which they executed under conditions so similar to those under which we labour, even if we cannot quite rival the complete perfection of the greater mediæval architects of the North. And, seeing that all the faults of Italian Gothic artists arose from their incomplete devotion to the new art, and their lingering fondness for the old Classic forms, we shall be led probably to recognize the paramount importance of throwing ourselves heartily and entirely into the study and practice of the one great and national division of our art, and then, not venturing to attempt to design in some base imitation of Classic one day, or in a pretended Gothic the next, as is only too much the custom, we shall make our sense of art so completely a portion of our inmost selves, as never to do anything new in any but our own one special style. We shall, in short, recognize, as the greatest danger to the progress of real art, that eclectic spirit which the Italians never escaped from, and which, in our own day, leads men to design their work in the style which they or their clients fancy for the moment, and not in that which is the truest result of previous experience, and most fitted to the country in which it is to be executed.

In examining the features of any national school of architecture, it is worthy of notice how distinctly some of its peculiarities and prejudices are marked from the very first, even in the ground-plans of the buildings it produced. This is notably the case in the ecclesiastical edifices of France, England, and Germany. Each country, after the art had become settled and, so to speak, acclimatized, had its special arrangement of plan, which was seldom departed from and was handed on from age to age as a precious heirloom. And, going to Italy, we shall find that the same feature strikes us there in almost all the buildings of the pointed style, and that the buildings from which they were directly derived are the same as those from which we indirectly derived our own. Their plans are all derived from two ancient types, both of which are of venerable antiquity. It was from the basilica, converted into a church, with its nave and aisles terminated at the end, by an apsidal projection from a sort of transept, that all of one class of the Italian Gothic churches with transepts were copied. Indeed, if we look at the ground-plan of S. Paul without the walls, at Rome, and compare it with the fully developed church of Sta. Anastasia, at Verona, we shall see that absolutely the only difference is the addition of small chapels on the east side of the transept; so that in place of the one apse, which marks the former, we have the central apse and subsidiary chapels on each side of it. The church of San Clemente, at Rome, with its three aisles ended with parallel apses at the east end, is a variety of this type, followed in such churches as the Cathedral of Torcello, and indeed in all later Italian Gothic churches without transepts. And even when, as in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Italian architects endeavoured to secure an immensely wide unbroken area of nave, they still looked back fondly to these old precedents, and finished them at the east, with three parallel apsidal chapels.

The other model was the Byzantine plan of S. Mark’s at Venice, itself imported from the East, which was copied closely in the south-west of France, and produced no slight effect in modifying the simple Romanesque plan, until it assumed all the characteristics of the complete Lombard style, and from the North of Italy sent out vigorous off-shoots, of which the most important were those which we trace all along the valley of the Rhine, and throughout the centre of France.