CHAPTER II--ARCHITECTURE
Architecture of Mediæval Italy—Milan, Genoa, Venice—The Despots as Builders—Diversity of Styles—Local Influences—Lombard, Tuscan, Romanesque, Gothic—Italian want of feeling for Gothic—Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto—Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages—Florence and Venice—Private Palaces—Public Halls—Palazzo della Signoria at Florence—Arnolfo di Cambio—S. Maria del Fiore—Brunelleschi's Dome—Classical Revival in Architecture—Roman Ruins—Three Periods in Renaissance Architecture—Their Characteristics—Brunelleschi —Alberti—Palace-building—Michellozzo—Decorative Work of the Revival—Bramante—Vitoni's Church of the Umiltà at Pistoja—Palazzo del Te—Villa Farnesina—Sansovino at Venice—Michael Angelo—The Building of S. Peter's—Palladio—The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—Lombard Architects—Theorists and Students of Vitruvius—Vignola and Scamozzi—European Influence of the Palladian Style—Comparison of Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.
Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.
It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in 1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.
Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican. They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle, the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian tyranny implied æsthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.
In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the period of Lombard ascendency.[[10]] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions; the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To their quarries of mandorlato the Veronese builders owed the peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into mediæval Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices of a later period.
Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the mosques of Alexandria, decking its façade with the horses of Lysippus, and panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics, interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile, at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made a castle of Cæcilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults swarmed a brood of mediæval bravi—like the wasps that hang their pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with Etruscan domes; covering the façade with bas-reliefs, the roof with statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins; flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in isolation on the open square—these wonderful buildings, the delight and joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all influences and to assimilate all nationalities.
Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy, three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. Chronologically the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic, coming from without, suspended their development. But chronology is of little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and salience of local type. What remained fixed through all changes in Italy was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of the whole nation.