230. Rib of the Roof of the Minerva Medica at Rome.
This, too, is, I believe, the first building in which buttresses are applied so as to give strength to the walls exactly at the point where it is most wanted. By this arrangement the architect was enabled to dispense with nearly one-half the quantity of material that was thought necessary when the dome of the Pantheon was constructed, and which he must have employed had he copied that building. Besides this, the dome was ribbed with tiles, as shown in Woodcut No. [230], and the space between the ribs filled in with inferior, perhaps lighter masonry, bonded together at certain heights by horizontal courses of tiles where necessary.
231. Tomb at St. Rémi. (From Laborde’s ‘Monumens de la France.’)
Besides the lightness and variety which the base of this building derives from the niches, it is 10 ft. higher than its diameter, which gives to it that proportion of height to width, the want of which is the principal defect of the Pantheon. It is not known what the side erections are which are usually shown in the ground-plans, nor even whether they are coeval with the main central edifice. I suspect they have never been very correctly laid down.
Taking it altogether, the building is certainly, both as concerns construction and proportion, by far the most scientific of all those in ancient Rome, and in these respects as far superior to the Pantheon as it is inferior to that temple in size. Indeed there are few inventions of the Middle Ages that are not attempted here or in the Temple of Peace—but more in this than in the latter; so much so, indeed, that I cannot help believing that it is much more modern than is generally supposed.
As might be expected from our knowledge of the race that inhabited the European provinces of the Roman Empire, there are very few specimens of tombs of any importance to be found in them. One very beautiful example exists at St. Rémi, represented in the annexed woodcut (No. [231]). It can hardly, however, be correctly called a tomb, but is rather a cenotaph or a monument, erected as the inscription on it tells us, by Sextus and Marcus, of the family of the Julii, to their parents, whose statues appear under the dome of the upper storey. There is nothing funereal either in the inscription or the form, nor anything to lead us to suppose that the bodies of the parents repose beneath its foundation.
The lower portion of this monument is the square basement which the Romans always added to the Etruscan form of tomb. Upon this stands a storey pierced with an archway in each face, with a three-quarter pillar of the Corinthian order at every angle. The highest part is a circular colonnade, a miniature copy of that which we know to have once encircled Hadrian’s Mole.
The open arrangement of the arches and colonnade, while it takes off considerably from the tomb-like simplicity appropriate to such buildings, adds very much to the lightness and elegance of the whole. Altogether the building has much more of the aspiring character of Christian art than of the more solid and horizontal forms which were characteristic of the style then dying out.
Another monument of very singular and exceptional form is found at Igel, near Trèves, in Germany. It is so unlike anything found in Italy, or indeed anything of the Roman age, that were its date not perfectly known from the inscription upon it, one might rather be inclined to ascribe it to the age of Francis I. than to the latter days of the Roman Empire.