George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

The women in Turin wear handkerchiefs on their heads. The streets are some of them arcaded, by arcades filled with stalls of all kinds of wares—but fruit is the staple commodity now. The effect is to make the place look rather shabby and rubbishy. There is not one church of any interest. The view of the city from the opposite bank of the Po is charming, owing to the immense chain of Alps spreading from right to left all behind the city, and the hills above the Po are very respectable, rising as they do about 2000 feet above the city to where they are crowned by the church called the Superga.

We left Turin at 5.30 and reached Genoa at 9.30. The views of the Alps by sunset very charming. At Asti we had a bottle of the effervescing vin d’Asti brought to our carriage, and could not resist indulging in the pleasant draught....

The notes on Genoa appear in the second edition of Brick and Marble.

August 29, Pisa.

My expectations were very high here and were a little disappointed. The Gothic work in the grand group is mainly confined to the Campo Santo and the baptistery, and in the former the traceries are, as Pisano’s always are, very unscientific and more like a confectioner’s work than an architect’s, whilst the latter has undergone such an amount of “restoration” that not one old crocket is left and barely one old piece of tracery. There is abundant evidence however in the Spina chapel and in the few portions of the original marble still left in the Baptistery that Pisano could do his work in a way very different from what we do, and I therefore prefer to think only of what his work once was and not of what it is. The external design is very striking and if the cone above the dome were properly finished with a circle of canopied traceries and figures I have no doubt its effect would be perfect. The traceries, carvings, etc., when looked into are very bad, and it should be seen therefore from a distance. The interior looks much older than the exterior and there can be no doubt that this must be the case, notwithstanding the inscription which says it was “ædificata de novo” in 1728. Unquestionably this must refer to the destruction of the exterior which left the interior all but untouched. The dome is in part covered with red tiles and in part with metal.

The Campo Santo is architecturally not pleasing. Its large traceries, unskilful and long, never at all fit on to the capitals of the shafts that support them—but its great length and size are very effective and the court with its greensward and some tall cypress trees at the centre, the mountains blazing in the sun and the deep blue sky above, combine to make a very charming picture. The great treasure here is the frescoes with which its walls are covered. Orcagna’s great fresco of the Last Judgement quite and more than came up to my hopes. It is a wonderful work and full of exquisitely natural treatment of figures in most delicate colours. The aureole round the figure of our Lord is too green, I think, otherwise the dignity of the figure is unmatched if not unapproachable.

The cathedral is not to my mind a pleasing structure. Like most of the great churches in this part of the world, it is raised on a basement of several steps extending in front of it on every side. It is Romanesque in character throughout, its nave of great height and the crossing covered with a low and ugly tiled dome. The columns between the nave and aisles (there are two aisles on each side) are either antique or closely copied from the antique and have nowhere any trace either in their proportions or sculpture of any really Romanesque character. The columns everywhere have the entasis distinctly developed. All the walls are arcaded externally and striped with black marble. All the Pisan and Luccan buildings are similarly striped and (unlike the architecture at Genoa) the black forms but a very small proportion of the whole wall. It is generally spaced regularly, and introduced at springings and sills of windows and under cornices, and there is no approach even to irregularity in its arrangement. The roof is one of a class of heavy panelled wooden roofs which were common here in the Renaissance period, similar in idea to the roof of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The aisles are pleasing, vaulted without ribs. In the old glass, of which some quantity remains, the colours are very rich, there is scarcely any white (if any) and the designs are almost entirely made of lead lines and not by painting. The pulpit has two figures and some lions under the columns which were preserved from an older pulpit said to be the work of Giovanni Pisano. The detail of all the ornamental mouldings is completely Roman, the egg and tongue being everywhere finely introduced....

Of domestic buildings Pisa retains very extensive remains, inasmuch as almost every house bears evidence of being mediaeval, but they have been so much cut about that there is little to be seen now at all perfect. There is an elaborate brick and terra cotta front to a house on the Lungarno but it is of very late date—almost Renaissance in much of its detail and very flat, regular, and ineffective.

On the opposite side of the Arno is another old house now used as the Custom House; this is of stone but its traceries and details are poor, very much like those of the Ptolomei palace at Siena. The windows are shafted, but the capitals of the shafts are generally too large for the arch mouldings which they have to support, and the mouldings, if they may be called so, do not unite properly and are singularly ineffective. Most of the old houses seem to have had a row of plain pointed arches rising some twenty feet from the ground line, but I could not make out whether they had been filled in with windows, or whether they belonged to the stage of stables and coach houses so universal in these Italian towns. The work is either brick or stone, but in no case did I see the two materials countercharged.

On the Sunday evening there was a grand procession of a figure of the B. V. M., with a vast number of attendants all with lighted candles, a military band, and a few cavalry to bring up the rear. The view from the lowest bridge looking up the Arno, with the picturesque outlines of the bold hills above Pisa behind the towers, is one of the most charming I remember.