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

by George Edmund Street

Two fine palaces[55] are now turned into hotels, and that at which I stopped was full of remains of pointed windows; indeed traces of pointed work are singularly plentiful, and I might go on to an interminable length were I to attempt to describe them all. The Arsenal is old, I believe, but has been modernized. It may be visited now for the sake of the grand and quaint old lions which sit before its entrance.

Of the interiors of these houses I cannot say very much. They usually have a great hall in the centre of each floor, into which the various rooms open; and the windows of these halls are generally the most important in the elevation. The frames of the windows were of wood, placed behind the traceries, and the original ceilings were the moulded beams of the floors. I have only seen one good Gothic staircase in Venice. This is in the Casa Goldoni, and has for its balustrade a series of shafts with piers at intervals. Its detail in short is that of the balcony, but sloped up to suit the rise of the steps. Pointed arches of brick carry the steps. This house may well be visited by other than architectural pilgrims, and will be found near the Ponte San Tomà. A fine early Renaissance staircase remains in the Palazzo Minelli, near San Paterniano. This is circular, with continuous open arcades following the rise of the steps, the usual shafted balustrade filling the lower part of the openings between the columns. The chimneys of these palaces are very singular. Not many old examples remain, but they are still copied, and that some of them are really old is proved by the extent to which they are shown in early Venetian paintings, as e.g. in the works of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. In my illustration the examples Figs. 2 and 3 are copied from paintings, and Fig. 1 is from a palace near the Ponte Bernardo.

And now that we have so far passed in review a series of the finest remains of mediæval architecture in Venice, it is time to inquire how much is to be learnt by what we have seen, and in what degree it differs from the developments of pointed architecture with which we are familiar in Northern Europe.

I think the very first point to be observed is that in Venice architecture was never essentially constructional in the sense in which it was in our own land. The pointed arch is rarely used except in churches, and in its place traceries, increased in size and scale to do their work, are made to carry the entire weight of walling above them, as is the case, to take the foremost example, in the second stage of the Ducal Palace. And it is remarkable that, when the arch was used, from a very early date it was the ogee arch, and not the arch formed by two simple curves; indeed it may almost be said that the pure pointed arch was never used, save where it would have been quite impossible with any other contrivance to bridge the necessary gap, or provide sufficiently for the weight to be supported. How striking a contrast this is to the way in which in England men worked with and exhibited the pointed arch, evidently as if, and because, they loved it!—using it not only as a sturdy servant to do heavy work, but as the friend of whose friendship they were ever the most anxious to boast. I do not complain of the flatness and lack of breaks or recesses in the masses of the great Venetian buildings, because this no doubt arose in part from the value of every foot of ground so hardly gathered from the sea, and the difficulty of throwing out buttresses into the narrow depths of the canals out of which they rise. And the same conditions which enforced this flatness are grateful because they involved the charming balconies which are so peculiarly Venetian, and gave a breadth and simplicity to the outline which has its own artistic charm.

In the science of moulding I cannot but think that it is quite useless to compare works executed for the sunny skies of Venice with those fitted for the gloomy sunlessness of a northern climate. The one kind are as properly soft, gentle in their alternations of light and shade, and delicate, as the other are piquant and sharp, rejoicing in the dark shade of deep hollows and endless intricacy of outline and arrangement. But I feel no doubt whatever that, unfair as it may be to compare one school with the other, seeing that each worked for its own wants, it is yet most clear that the Northern architects were developing a much deeper art, and working with much more consummate skill, than were the Venetian. The endless variety of the arrangement of; capitals, and the necessary grouping of mouldings to fit, their varying outlines, was carried to the extreme point of perfection by the one school, whilst in the other not only was there much less depth and relief, but also very much less variety. The abacus of the Italian capital was almost always square in plan, and, as an almost necessary consequence of this, mouldings retained very much the same arrangement and shape for the whole period of the prevalence of the pointed style, and generally rather leaned to the side of heaviness than of delicacy. Venetian mouldings are composed of the constant combination of a three-quarter bead and a shallow hollow, divided by small fillets, and so invariably arranged in almost exactly the same order, that it requires very great care to decide upon the date of buildings by their mouldings with any sort of approach to certainty.

In addition to simple mouldings, there are also the ever-recurring ornamented mouldings which are so peculiarly characteristic of Venetian works of all dates. These consist generally of sections which in England we should consider Romanesque, but which in Venice appear to be much more common in the latest works than in the earliest; chevrons, cable-mouldings, billets, and the like, are seen everywhere, and suggest the question whether this class of ornamented mouldings, so largely used in the early days of architecture in England and so little afterwards, might not with some advantage be rescued from the contempt into which it has fallen with modern builders. They have the advantage of being within the power of any ordinary workman to execute, and do not, therefore, require the handiwork, which is so rare and so precious, of thoroughly good carvers. Add to this, that some features originally invented for use in the way of holding together marble incrustations, were afterwards used universally for their own sakes as ornamental mouldings, for which office they were in no way fitted, and I think nearly as much has been said as can be of Venetian mouldings in stone. Those in brick are even less satisfactory; but they occur mainly about the churches, and, as I do not recognize anything at all distinctively Venetian in their design or arrangement, it will be better to say more about them after we have seen the brickwork in other cities in the North of Italy, compared with which that at Venice is not of the first order.