George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

A railway journey from Pisa of an hour brought us to Lucca. The railway cuts some fine hills, and passes by the ruins of a large castle close to the station before Lucca.

Lucca is entirely enclosed within elaborate brick fortifications, there being, I think, no vestige of suburbs on any side. The ramparts are well planted with trees, and the view of them from below, giving an impression of the tall walls covered with trees and these surmounted by the tall towers of the town, is fine. The view of the surrounding mountains is, too, very exquisite.

Of course our first object was the cathedral. Its west front need hardly be described. Its detail is very rich and beautiful and there is a great deal of very good inlaid work. In the upper part subjects from field sports are introduced, whilst lower down they are mainly geometrical patterns. Some of the shafts are inlaid. The three great arches which stretch across this front give a dignity to it in which S. Michele, Lucca, Pisa cathedral, and the other imitations, are quite wanting. They are remarkable for the way in which their arches are treated; these are semicircular and the width of the voussures is two or three times as great at the crown as at the springing—the effect is good. An image is cut in the right-hand upper end of this front.

All the walls and arches are partially striped with black, the black courses being very thin with a considerable space between them. The north and south walls of the nave and transepts are cased in much later work than the west front and are good specimens of Italian pointed of the thirteenth century. The carving of foliage in this work is very bad and what little moulding there is hardly looks like the work of Gothic men. There is a good inlaid string-course under the windows. A fine campanile stands a little in advance of the south-west angle of the cathedral. It is of Romanesque date and built of brownish rough stone below and of white stone (or marble) above; it is of very considerable height and effect. The interior is certainly grand but disappointing—almost all the arches are semicircular but (as the groining bays are not square) the wall ribs of the groining bays are pointed, and this gives in some way a general effect of pointed to the whole work. The main arches are round, but they were so covered with red hangings that it was impossible to see much of them. The triforium is of great height and consists in each bay of two round-head windows, filled in with slight tracery—the whole is of poor character and badly proportioned. Above these two windows is a small circular window which serves for clerestory. The groining of the nave is painted richly. It has broad borders next the ribs and the wall is painted blue, and figures in the centre of each painted in a circle. The borders have a good many white lines, but there is no gold in any part of the work.

The planning of the transepts is very singular. They are divided by an arcade down the centre, and as the nave arcades and triforia are continued across them some singular combinations are produced. The pavements have small compartments of Italian fifteenth century geometrical patterns in mosaic, surrounded by square arrangements of plain black and white.

Close to the cathedral is S. Giovanni, which, though not otherwise remarkable, has an immense baptistery built on against its north transept; it is a square of about fifty-seven feet internally and covered with a square vault of a domical form. The old font has been removed.

Near the south end of the cathedral is the little chapel of S. Maria della Rosa. It is a small low building of about the proportions of the Spina chapel, and mainly remarkable for the window tracery in its side wall. This is, like all other tracery hereabouts, unpalatable to me. The windows are shafted and I suppose therefore that they must have had their glass put in frames inside. This seemed to have been the case in the Spina chapel. There are dates of 1309 and 1333 on the building, the latter on part of a door which in England I should venture to call Renaissance. We could not get inside but saw through a window that the interior had been completely modernized....

When we reached Siena we found the station elaborately decorated with wreaths and flowers in pots, banners, and every possible kind of railway utensil (even portions of engines), and all in honor of the Pope who had left that morning for Città della Pieve on his way home after a tour through various parts of Italy. He seemed to have been greatly fêted at Siena.

Siena is situated on the irregular summit of a considerable hill. All streets are up and down and in some places very precipitous. A sort of natural amphitheatre in the centre of the city—the Piazza del Campo—is the chief point round which the rest is built, containing the Palazzo Pubblico, a grand Gothic building, out of the end of which soars the finest campanile, after that at Verona, that I have seen. On the circle of the Campo opposite the Palazzo Pubblico are some old houses but not any of special interest. The Palazzo Pubblico is of the usual type of brick buildings here and very regular.... The campanile is brick without break or ornament of any kind for a great height, and then is boldly corbelled forward on all sides; the whole of the work is in stone. The arches of the machicoulis, the bands round them, and some older parts, are rendered much more distinct by the introduction of lines of black marble. Seen by a bright moonlight this campanile possesses such an exquisite contour that nothing can be much more beautiful. The contrasts of colours too are most admirably arranged, and the exceeding simplicity of the lower part cannot be too much praised.

A considerable ascent leads from the Campo to the east end of the cathedral. This has a central door and on entering you find a small chapel under the altar of the cathedral gained out of the slope of the ground. The detail of this chapel and of the east end of the cathedral above it is by far the best example of Gothic work in the city. There are all kinds of things which, to an eye used to the exceptional skill and care in fitting one part to another usual among northern architects, are very unscientific-looking, but nevertheless this work is original in its character and certainly beautiful in its effect. It is of white marble striped sparingly with black. A flight of steps leads up from the east end to a north doorway in the east wall of the immense unfinished work which, though in the position of a south transept, would really have been rather larger than the existing nave of the cathedral.