433. Half Section, half Elevation, of the Baptistery at Novara. (From Osten.) No scale.
The baptistery of Novara, which may date from the time of Charlemagne, is interesting in that it contains the germ of those external galleries under the roof which form not only one of the most common but also one of the most beautiful features of the later Lombard and Rhenish churches. From the elevation (Woodcut No. [433]) it will easily be seen what was the motive and use of this arrangement, the first trace of which dates perhaps as far back as the baptistery of Nocera (Woodcut No. [428]); for wherever a wooden roof was placed over a circular vault, it is evident that the external walls must be carried up higher than the springing of the arch. But it was by no means necessary that this additional wall should be so solid as that below it, and it was necessary to introduce light and air into the space between the stone and the wooden roofs. Add to this the incongruity of effect in placing a light tiled wooden roof on a massive solid wall, and it will be evident that not only did the exigencies of the building, but the true principles of taste, demand that this part should be made as light as possible. Such openings as those found in the baptistery at Novara suggested an expedient which provided for these objects. This was afterwards carried to a much greater extent. At first, however, it seems only to have been used under the roofs of the domes with which the Italians almost universally crowned the intervention of naves and transepts, and round the semidomes of the apses; but so enamoured did they afterwards become of this feature, that it is frequently carried along the sides of the churches under the roof of the nave and of the aisles, and also—where it is of more questionable taste—under the sloping naves of the roof of the principal façade.
There is nothing in the Lombardian and Rhenish styles so common or so beautiful as these galleries, the arcades of which have all the shadow given by a cornice without its inconvenient projection, while the little shafts with their elegant capitals and light archivolts have a sparkle and brilliancy which no cornice ever possessed. Indeed so beautiful are they, that we are not surprised to find them universally adopted; and their discontinuance on the introduction of the pointed style was one of the greatest losses sustained by architectural art in those days. It is true they would have been quite incompatible with the thin walls and light piers of pointed architecture, but it may be safely asserted that no feature which these new styles introduced was equally beautiful with those galleries which they superseded.
434. Tomb of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. (From Quast.) No scale.
There can be little doubt that many other similar buildings belonging to this age still exist in various parts of Italy; for it is more than probable that, at a time when the city was not of sufficient importance, or the congregation so numerous as to require the more extended accommodation of the basilica, almost all the earlier churches were circular. They either, however, have perished from lapse of time, or have been so altered as to be nearly unrecognisable. We here, in consequence, come again to a break in the chain of our sequence; and when we again meet with any circular buildings in Italy, their features are so distinctly Gothic or Byzantine, that they must be classed with one or other of these modifications. The true Romano-Byzantine style had nearly come to an end when Alboin the Lombard had made himself master of the greater part of Italy about the year 575.
Before leaving this branch of the subject there are two small buildings at Ravenna which it is impossible to pass over, though their direct bearing on the history of this subject is not so apparent as it is in the case of other buildings just described. The first and earliest is the tomb of Galla Placidia (Woodcut No. [302]), now known as the church of SS. Nazario and Celso, and must have been erected before the year 450. It is singular among all the tombs of that age from the abandonment in it of the circular for a cruciform plan. Such forms, it is true, are common in the chambers of tumuli and also among the catacombs, while the church which Constantine built in Constantinople and dedicated to the Apostles, meaning it however as a sepulchral church, was something also on this plan. Notwithstanding, however, these examples, this must be considered as an exceptional form, though its diminutiveness (it being only 35 ft. by 30 internally) might perhaps account for any caprice. Its great interest to us consists in its retaining not only its primitive architectural form (which is that of a dome carried on pendentives, and one of the few instances in which both dome and pendentives form part of one sphere), but its polychromatic decorations nearly in their original state of completeness (Woodcut [302]). The three arms of the cross forming the receptacles for the three sarcophagi is certainly a pleasing arrangement, but is only practicable on a small scale.
435. Capital of Pillars forming peristyle round Theodoric’s Tomb. (From Hubsch.)