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

by George Edmund Street

of the Ducal Palace at Venice, with marble arranged in a diaper.

The slender and lofty tower of brick which rises at one end of the building, the two Venetian columns (Vicenza became subject to Venice in 1404), and the Palazzo itself, in spite of its small architectural merit, combine to make a charming picture, rendered more beautiful when I saw it, by the animated crowd of peasants who filled the Piazza. The streets here are very picturesque, rather in spite of Palladio and Scamozzi than in consequence of what they did. Some of them are arcaded, and the Gothic houses are still very numerous. They are all, however, of late date—at least I saw none earlier than about 1350. They are of the same design as some of the well-known Venetian palaces, only here they rise out of narrow streets, instead of as they do there from the water. The usual arrangement is to have on the ground floor a single doorway, not necessarily central, and on the piano nobile a fine traceried window with balconies in the centre, single windows also with balconies near the angles, and intermediate windows of the same design but without balconies. These are always treated in the same way with small shafts, and with animals seated on their angles, and are supported on bold corbels. All the carving that I saw was weak and confused in outline, and poor in detail, and the capitals are generally too large for the arch mouldings which rest on them—a common fault in Italian Gothic work.

I give a view in the Contrada Porto which illustrates two of the best of these houses. Almost the whole of this street happens to consist of houses of the same age, and one of them has on one side of its internal courtyard open arcades on each story, the upper one having its balustrades remaining between the columns, similar in design to those in window-balconies.

In their original state most of these houses seem to have been left in red brick, the windows being of stone, with thin white marble slabs fitted into the spandrels above the arches. Projecting balls of marble are often fixed in front of this marble lining. Some houses seem, however, to have been plastered almost from the first with a view to painting, and I can hardly say a word against such a plan, with the recollection of the glowing—in spite of their being faded—tints which one still sees at Brescia, Genoa, and elsewhere in Italy. But where the house has architectural features, which are at all good of their kind, the painter is very apt to ignore them entirely in his work, so that what was meant to be a good piece of architectural work, becomes in the end a badly cut-up ground for a painting. Where there is no architectural detail to be spoilt, any amount of painting may be lavished on an external wall; and I know few examples which better show with how much good effect it may be done than the great house of the Fugger family in Augsburg, which many Italian tourists now-a-days may see and admire on their way to or from Italy. The other objection to external painting is its evanescent character; but good colour is beautiful even in its decay, and I suppose the best artist will paint what will do most good to his own generation, and trust to his successors for doing as much for their own times!

One of the most fanciful houses in Vicenza is the Casa Rigafetta, below the Palazzo Pubblico. The ornaments are not pure, and there is too much straining to make the most of an opportunity by putting everything possible into a small space, but still the whole is decidedly pretty. The balconies here are in plan half a quatrefoil. Near this house is one with carved angle-shafts, a feature which I do not remember to have seen in Venice.

Palladio’s works are supposed now to be the glory of Vicenza. I cannot forgive the artist who did not care to give solidity to his work, and the power of executing a vast amount of enrichment in the cheapest way, and with the commonest materials, is about the greatest snare into which an architect can allow himself to fall. I am well aware that Palladio was not the inventor of trumpery modes of construction. His admirers might quote the architects of Pompeii fifteen hundred years before him, as offenders in the same way, and the curious preservation of their works as the justification of their offence; but Palladio followed after men of his own kind and craft who for centuries had studiously endeavoured to do their work honestly, and he deserves, therefore, all the hostile criticism of those who object to a revival of bad practices which in our own day and country have done more real damage to architecture than anything else that can be named.

One only of Palladio’s works interested me, and this rather as a curious experiment than as a work of art. This is the Teatro Olimpico, a famous open-air theatre. There is first of all a semi-circular auditorium open to the sky, and only remarkable for a mean arrangement of pilasters at the back. The great object of interest is the stage, on which a permanent scene has been constructed by Palladio. In order to make this look much larger than it really is, the streets, palaces, and temples which are represented are built in perspective. To accomplish this the stage rises very rapidly, the buildings are squeezed up, and built in sharp perspective, so that in the end a triumphal arch, which is really forty feet from the front, looks as if it were four hundred. Should an actor by any chance so far forget himself as to walk into what looks like a practicable street, in a minute he would find himself able to shake hands with the statue on the top of the arch, the illusion would be entirely destroyed, and the scenery would all look like a collection of dolls’ houses. As an ingenious deception from one point of view, and under certain conditions, the scheme is successful, and probably this is as much as Palladio himself would have claimed for it.

We had now seen all that we cared to see in Vicenza, and gladly found ourselves again en route. There was nothing to see on the road, and we were not sorry when our engine gave token by its whistle of our approach to Padua. The omnibus discharged us in a few minutes at the hospitable doors of the Stella d’Oro, and we were soon out again with the view of making the most of our time.

Padua, when I first saw it, seemed to me to be a most melancholy city; grass grew in the streets, the footways were all formed under dark and dismal arcades, and not only the externals of the half-occupied palaces, but those even of all the houses, looked squalid, dirty, and miserable; nor was there any relief when one got into the more open spaces, for the large piazze on either side of the Palazzo della Ragione, or townhall, looked as squalid and uncared-for, as dirty and unprepossessing, as they well could; nor was this universal squalor rendered at all less remarkable by the fact that Padua rejoices in a caffè, which is said to surpass any other even in Italy, for its smartness; and the array of well-dressed gentlemen who frequented it, certainly made the neighbourhood look more wretched by contrast than it otherwise would.

The Caffè Pedrocchi was however soon passed, and our first object was the Palazzo della Ragione, whose vast and singular hall, about two hundred and fifty feet long by ninety feet wide, is one of the greatest architectural curiosities in the city. Its exterior has been modernized, so that now it is only remarkable for its long expanse of roof, but the interior is still in its original state. The access to the Hall, which in this and other respects much resembles that at Vicenza, is from external arcades on the first floor, to which four staircases lead from below. The walls are low, and covered with paintings arranged in arcaded panels; some of these are said to be by Giotto, and the whole of them, I believe, were at any rate painted in his time, but have probably been repaired and retouched extensively long since. The windows are small, low down in the walls, and admit scarcely more than sufficient light for the lower part of the hall. The roof shews in section a vast pointed arch of timber, boarded and divided into panels by a succession of heavy vertical ribs scarcely at all moulded. The construction is obviously so weak as, from the very first, to have made the iron ties which hold it all together absolutely necessary. A curious feature in the design is, that instead of having gable walls the roof is hipped, and shews therefore at the end just the same section as at the sides. What little light finds its way into the dark obscurity of the roof is admitted through some small dormers high up in its framework. The effect of the hall is gloomy, and, compared to our own great halls, certainly shows some lack of knowledge of construction on the part of its architect, and its bald heaviness makes it absurd to compare it to our own noble Westminster hall, though their very similar dimensions might naturally tempt us to do so. It dates from about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the story runs that it was designed by a certain Frate Giovanni, who, travelling in India, saw the roof of a great palace the construction of which so pleased him that he brought back drawings of it with him, and erected its fellow here in Padua. How much truth there is in this tradition I cannot say, but this much seems clear, that in some way Padua has, if not a very beautiful, at any rate a very remarkable Sala, and one which is quite unlike any other room in Europe, with the single exception of the corresponding room at Vicenza, which no doubt copied from it.