§ IV. I need hardly give any perspective drawing of an arrangement which must be perfectly familiar to the reader, as occurring under nearly every column of the too numerous classical buildings all over Europe. But I may name the base of the Bank of England as furnishing a very simple instance of the group, with a square instead of a rounded hollow, both forming the base of the wall, and gathering into that of the shafts as they occur; while the bases of the pillars of the façade of the British Museum are as good examples as the reader can study on a larger scale.
| X. |
| PROFILES OF BASES. |
§ V. I believe this group of mouldings was first invented by the Greeks, and it has never been materially improved, as far as its peculiar purpose is concerned;[78] the classical attempts at its variation being the ugliest: one, the using a single roll of larger size, as may be seen in the Duke of York’s column, which therefore looks as if it stood on a large sausage (the Monument has the same base, but more concealed by pedestal decoration): another, the using two rolls without the intermediate cavetto,—a condition hardly less awkward, and which may be studied to advantage in the wall and shaftbases of the Athenæum Club-house: and another, the introduction of what are called fillets between the rolls, as may be seen in the pillars of Hanover Chapel, Regent Street, which look, in consequence, as if they were standing upon a pile of pewter collection plates. But the only successful changes have been mediæval; and their nature will be at once understood by a glance at the varieties given on the opposite page. It will be well first to give the buildings in which they occur, in order.
§ VI. Eighteen out of the twenty eight varieties are Venetian, being bases to which I shall have need of future reference; but the interspersed examples, 8, 9, 12, and 19, from Milan, Pavia, Vienne (France), and Verona, show the exactly correspondent conditions of the Romanesque base at the period, throughout the centre of Europe. The last five examples show the changes effected by the French Gothic architects: the Salisbury base (22) I have only introduced to show its dulness and vulgarity beside them; and 23, from Torcello, for a special reason, in that place.
§ VII. The reader will observe that the two bases, 8 and 9, from the two most important Lombardic churches of Italy, St. Ambrogio of Milan and St. Michele of Pavia, mark the character of the barbaric base founded on pure Roman models, sometimes approximating to such models very closely; and the varieties 10, 11, 13, 16 are Byzantine types, also founded on Roman models. But in the bases 1 to 7 inclusive, and, still more characteristically, in 23 below, there is evidently an original element, a tendency to use the fillet and hollow instead of the roll, which is eminently Gothic; which in the base 3 reminds one even of Flamboyant conditions, and is excessively remarkable as occurring in Italian work certainly not later than the tenth century, taking even the date of the last rebuilding of the Duomo of Torcello, though I am strongly inclined to consider these bases portions of the original church. And I have therefore put the base 23 among the Gothic group to which it has so strong relationship, though, on the last supposition, five centuries older than the earliest of the five terminal examples; and it is still more remarkable because it reverses the usual treatment of the lower roll, which is in general a tolerably accurate test of the age of a base, in the degree of its projection. Thus, in the examples 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, the lower roll is hardly rounded at all, and diametrically opposed to the late Gothic conditions, 24 to 28, in which it advances gradually, like a wave preparing to break, and at last is actually seen curling over with the long-backed rush of surf upon the shore. Yet the Torcello base resembles these Gothic ones both in expansion beneath and in depth of cavetto above.
§ VIII. There can be no question of the ineffable superiority of these Gothic bases, in grace of profile, to any ever invented by the ancients. But they have all two great faults: They seem, in the first place, to have been designed without sufficient reference to the necessity of their being usually seen from above; their grace of profile cannot be estimated when so seen, and their excessive expansion gives them an appearance of flatness and separation from the shaft, as if they had splashed out under its pressure: in the second place their cavetto is so deeply cut that it has the appearance of a black fissure between the members of the base; and in the Lyons and Bourges shafts, 24 and 26, it is impossible to conquer the idea suggested by it, that the two stones above and below have been intended to join close, but that some pebbles have got in and kept them from fitting; one is always expecting the pebbles to be crushed, and the shaft to settle into its place with a thunder-clap.
§ IX. For these reasons, I said that the profile of the pure classic base had hardly been materially improved; but the various conditions of it are beautiful or commonplace, in proportion to the variety of proportion among their lines and the delicacy of their curvatures; that is to say, the expression of characters like those of the abstract lines in [Plate VII.]
The five best profiles in [Plate X.] are 10, 17, 19, 20, 21; 10 is peculiarly beautiful in the opposition between the bold projection of its upper roll, and the delicate leafy curvature of its lower; and this and 21 may be taken as nearly perfect types, the one of the steep, the other of the expansive basic profiles. The characters of all, however, are so dependent upon their place and expression, that it is unfair to judge them thus separately; and the precision of curvature is a matter of so small consequence in general effect, that we need not here pursue the subject farther.
| Fig. LIX |