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

by George Edmund Street

Thus, the ground-plans of Italian Gothic buildings were simply a natural development from those of earlier date, and adhering, as they always did, very closely to the older plan and arrangements, afford us scarcely an example of those later developments of prolonged choirs, of which our English cathedrals and abbeys afford perhaps the most magnificent examples, or of the splendid French chevet with its surrounding aisle and chapels. The traces of Classic influence on the plan are indeed so many and so clear, that it is hardly speaking too strongly to say that Gothic planning was never developed by Italian architects, so shackled were they by the ever-present influence of buildings in another style. Hence, the more we study their peculiarities, the more we see how curious a mixture there is in them of the character of Classic and Gothic buildings, and how essentially clumsy all their planning is when compared with the scientific work of the more thoroughly Gothic architects of the North. If we compare an ordinary Italian groined church with a French or English example, we shall find one very marked difference in them. In the former each bay of the nave is square, and hence each bay of the narrower side aisles is oblong, with the greatest width towards the nave; in the latter, on the contrary, the aisle compartment is square, and that of the nave oblong, with its narrowest side towards the aisle. Hence, in the former, the points of support are farther apart, and the plan loses much of its intricacy, and at the same time, no doubt, the whole building loses much of its apparent scale. The enormous church of San Petronio at Bologna, for instance, has but six bays in the length of its vast nave, and the eye refuses to be convinced by the practical measurement of the foot of the real dimensions of the building. The object of the Italian architect always was to obtain as few points of support as possible in a given area; but there is little if any real gain in this. The points of support in the Italian churches were larger, and the cost in the end was probably much greater than in the apparently more intricate and complex plans of the French and English architects. The science displayed in their planning was therefore of a superficial and mistaken description, and not really equal to that which marks the work of their Northern competitors.[81]

The same absence of subdivision is seen in the elevation of each bay of an Italian church, where in place of the triple division in height of our great Northern churches, with their well-accentuated proportions and beautiful variety of detail, we have a singularly meagre design perpetually repeated, and consisting generally of simple broad arches, with a small circular clerestory window above them, and no other kind of decoration, save where the painter has come with his ever-ready art to the rescue of the apparently incompetent architect.

How this plainness and severity was corrected we have already seen in the interior of Sta. Anastasia, at Verona—a church which, though it is simple and unadorned in its construction almost beyond any large church with which I am acquainted, has been made remarkable, owing to the skill of its decorator, for being more than usually ornate and magnificent.

The invariable simplicity of Italian groining has been often noticed in these pages, and need only be referred to here as illustrating the love of simplicity upon which I have dwelt. No one feature gains so much by it as this, and I can fancy the horror with which an Italian, or indeed any other architect, in the thirteenth century, would have viewed such fine works in their way, as our own examples of complicated fan-traceried groinings. The painting of this simple groining at Verona, at Lodi, and still more at Assisi, proves how it ought always to be treated; and happily in England we have still more than one example of the same kind, as, for instance, two chapels in the Cathedral at Winchester.

So far for the plan. When we look at single features of the building we shall find another peculiarity meeting us at every turn, and of the good effect of which it is impossible to speak too warmly. This is the constant use of the detached shaft or column. This is the one great and lasting beauty which was derived from Classic examples. The Italians, finding it used with luxurious profusion in their Classic and Byzantine buildings, persevered in its use throughout the whole Gothic period. It is true that, as time wore on, there was a somewhat less free use of it than at first, but it was never altogether ignored. We cannot say as much for our own ancestors: so long as the influence of Lombard and Romanesque art is visible in French, German, and English Gothic, so long the detached shaft was used, and just in proportion as in course of time that influence decreased, so did the frequency of its use decrease. Our fourteenth and fifteenth century buildings present nothing in its place but combinations of mouldings, in themselves very beautiful, but by no means so beautiful as to reconcile us to the loss of that which they so entirely supplanted. One consequence of their introduction, to the exclusion of the detached shaft, was, that the art of sculpture deteriorated just in proportion as the art of moulding was developed. There is no place in which architectural sculpture can be more fittingly displayed than in the capital of a column. It is the most convenient, and at the same time the most conspicuous, position for it. It is, too, the most important feature in every design in which the detached column is used. The gathering together of all the arch mouldings into one above the capital, in order that their forces may be collected before being transmitted to the ground, leads naturally to the laying of a special emphasis on this point above all others; and it is one of the strongest among the many reasons in favour of earliest Gothic, and against the later varieties of the style, that in the former the use of shafts involved the use of forcible and elaborately-cut capitals, so that this point might be most distinctly marked, whilst in the latter, by the disuse of the shaft and the constant practice of carrying the mouldings of the arch down to the ground without any interruption, it was made as little of as was possible.

In this respect, therefore, above all others, Italian Gothic artists—having given way to change less than their contemporaries—are worthy of our highest admiration. The love of variety, which is characteristic of all good Gothic art, is conspicuous in the Italian treatment of the shaft just as much as in the northern Gothic variation of mouldings. When they are plain cylinders, and not banded (and the band occurs but seldom in Italian work), they often taper slightly, and with very beautiful effect. This was distinctly a relic of the Classic entasis, and the examples given in a note will suffice to shew the extent to which the shaft is reduced in proportion to its height.[82] Wherever, however, the shaft is spiral or decorated with carving, or when the occurrence of a band destroys the idea of its continuity from base to capital, its monolithic character needs not to be marked, and the shaft is then always made of the same diameter throughout. The ornamentation is of various kinds. Circular shafts are inlaid, carved, diapered, or made of marbles selected for their beauty of colour. Lucca Cathedral affords, perhaps, the best examples of decoration by inlaying: there the shafts are of white marble inlaid with dark green; some have a diaper, others are girt with a succession of simple chevrons, others with spiral lines, others with crosses, flowers, fleurs-de-lis, or foliated circles; and one, at least, with a succession of imitations of arcades one over the other; but I remember no example of the same kind in the buildings described in these pages. At Lucca these inlaid shafts are frequently alternated with sculptured shafts, of which examples are common all over Italy. They are deeply cut with spiral lines of mouldings, occasionally adorned with sculpture of flowers, as in the doorways at Bergamo and Modena, and are often also inlaid richly with mosaic.

The best examples of the richer kinds of shafts are seen frequently in Italian Gothic buildings and monuments south of the Apennines. Such, for instance, as those which, with rich iron work between them, form the screen round the altar under the “crossing” of Sta. Chiara at Assisi, or in the monument of Pope Benedict X. at Perugia, where the shafts are of white marble, the spiral lines formed with a bead and fillets, and at the base and neck of the shaft the beads are all connected together with small arches, in the spandrels of which vine leaves are delicately carved; whilst to add to the extraordinary richness of the work, small figures are carved in the marble creeping round the shaft in the hollow formed by the spiral construction, and the spaces between the mouldings are filled in with glass mosaic patterns in red, green, and blue on a gold ground. The shafts of Orcagna’s shrine in Or’ San Michele, Florence, are of the same character, but these extraordinary decorations occur generally only in the best and richest internal work, executed under the direct influence of Florentine, Neapolitan, or Roman artists.[83]

The arrangement of spiral shafts was generally, but not always, symmetrical. In the Campanile of Florence, where they occur in pairs on each side of a window, they are always arranged with the spiral lines curving in opposite directions. In the porch of Sta. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, the three shafts in each jamb are all different: the first spiral and carved, but not moulded; the second moulded with chevrons; the third spiral and moulded only, and the central shaft is red whilst the others are all white. In the spirally designed string-courses of the Venetian palaces the spiral lines are always worked in opposite directions right and left of the centre.

Another bold variety is seen in the beautiful coupled shafts at the entrance to the crypt of San Zenone, Verona, where both the shafts are quatrefoil in section, but entirely different in character, one of them being quite straight, the other slightly, but yet conspicuously, spiral. In a monument in the south aisle of the same church, four shafts are cut out of one block of marble; and in order that this may be realized they are knotted together in the centre; and a similar example exists in the porch, of which I have given a view, at Trent, and in one of the windows of the Broletto at Como. The shafts round the lower basin of Nicola Pisano’s beautiful fountain at Perugia are in clusters of three, chevroned, spiral, and fluted in the greatest possible variety; and in later works, in which we find that the error of continuing arch mouldings to the ground, instead of stopping them on the capital, was occasionally committed—as, e.g., in the archway to the baptistery in the church of the Frari, at Venice—we see an instance of a moulded imitation of such a cluster of shafts as these of Nicola Pisano’s, chevroned and spiral, forming jamb and arch alike. In the later doorways, such as those of the western front of the cathedral of Como, and many of those at Monza, Pavia, and in most of the Venetian churches and buildings, the jambs and arches are identical in section; but even in these cases there is always a capital interposed, and I hardly remember an example of a continuous moulding without an impost, which at least marked—if often in an incomplete manner—the line of the springing of the arch.

I must not forget that which is, after all, the most charming of all arrangements of shafts, viz. the use of them in couples, set generally one behind the other, so that, in elevation, extreme delicacy is secured, whilst, in perspective, there is beautiful light and shade, and ample effect of strength. This is a favourite arrangement in cloisters and in belfries; and, wherever it occurs, one regrets, as one looks at it, that though in old days French, Spanish, German, and even Irish[84] architects gladly followed the Italian example, it was so seldom that an Englishman condescended to do the same.[85]