IDEAL ARCHITECTURE; AN IDEAL PALACE.
[See § 35, An Ideal Palace, ante, p. [96].]
The construction—in words—of an imaginary mansion of the type suited to the ideas of the Renaissance was a favourite exercise among both professional and amateur writers, and Vasari might have made a greater effort than he has done to rise to the height of his subject. The theme had some significance. The intent of those who dealt with it was to provide the man of the Renaissance with a fit setting for his life, and the spacious and lordly palace corresponded to the amplitude of the personality developed by the humanistic culture of the age. The representative man of the Renaissance may have missed certain of the higher ethical qualities, but he was many-sided, in mind and person a finely developed creature, self-reliant, instinct with vigour and set on mastery. Such a being demanded space and opulence with an air of greatness in his habitation, and fitly to house him was a task calling forth all the powers of the architects of the period. An imposing façade with heraldic achievements should proclaim his worth, wide gateways and roomy courts and loggie give an impression of lordly ease, broad staircases and ample halls suggest the coming and going of companies of guests. He would need a garden, where marble seats in ilex shades or in grottoes beside cool fountains should await him in hours when reflection or reading, music or conversation, called him awhile from keen conflict of wit or policy with his peers in the world outside. He would exact moreover that over all the place Art should breathe a spell to soothe the senses and to flatter pride; art sumptuous in materials, accomplished in technique, pagan in form and spirit, should people the galleries with sculptured shapes, cover walls and roof with graceful imagery, and set here and there on cabinet or console some jewel of carved ivory or gilded wood or chiselled bronze.
All the great architects of the Renaissance were at work on these palaces first at Florence and then in every rich Italian town, but the actual achievement that circumstances allowed fell far short of the ideal perfection, the effort after which was the best spiritual product of the Renaissance. Hence it became the fashion to draw out visionary schemes of princely dwellings, and even of whole city quarters for the setting of these, and ideal architecture furnishes matter for a chapter in the art history of the times. Filarete’s Trattato dell’ Architettura is full of matter of the kind. In his eighth Book he describes a palace for a prince, in Book eleven an ideal mansion for a nobleman; and his proposed arrangements are all on a grandiose scale. Ammanati, who built the Ponte della Trinità at Florence, left a whole collection of drawings for a ‘Città Ideale,’ and Leonardo da Vinci’s codices are fertile in similar suggestions. In France, where this phase of the artistic activity of the Renaissance was as much in evidence as in Italy, the actual palaces of king or noble were far outdone in splendour and in symmetry by the schemes of Palissy or De l’Orme, of which Baron de Geymüller has given an interesting notice in his Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich, published in the Handbuch der Architectur.
Nor was it only the professed artists who occupied themselves in this fashion. It was a literary exercise to scheme out in vague and general outlines the ideal habitation for prince or for community, and Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme, with its nine thousand three hundred and thirty two rooms, its libraries, theatres, and recreation halls, is the most famous example of its kind. In our own literature too there must not be forgotten Francis Bacon’s Essay on Building, in which he draws out the general configuration of what he calls a ‘perfect palace,’ where the façade is in two wings ‘uniform without, though severally partitioned within,’ and these are to be ‘on both sides of a great and stately tower, in the midst of the front; that as it were joineth them together on either hand.’ Symmetry is of course the characteristic of all these ideal structures, as it was long ago of the visionary temple described by Ezechiel, and Vasari’s palace is no exception to the rule. Vasari’s description does not convey a very clear idea of what he conceived the ideal palace would be, and he might have done better for the theme had he not hampered himself at the outset with the otiose comparison of the house to a human body. This he may have derived from Filarete, who also employs the conceit.
OF SCULPTURE
CHAPTER I. (VIII.)
What Sculpture is; how good works of Sculpture are made, and what qualities they must possess to be esteemed perfect.
§ 36. The Nature of Sculpture.
Sculpture is an art which by removing all that is superfluous from the material under treatment reduces it to that form designed in the artist’s mind.[[152]]