There is a church at Ferrara famous for its echoes. The nave seems to have been intended to present a series of cupolas, as the side aisles actually do on a smaller scale, but in its present state, at the point where the square is reduced to a circle, a flat ceiling is introduced instead of a cupola. Standing under any one of these, the slightest foot-step is repeated a great many times, but so rapidly, that it is difficult to count the reverberations. I reckoned sixteen, but the effect is rather a continued clatter than a succession of distinct sounds. From Ferrara I returned to my old quarters at Bologna, and spent a few days in endeavouring to understand the construction of modern Greek, with the help of Mezzofanti; after which I set off on my return by way of Ancona and Loreto to Rome.
I left Bologna at midnight on the 2d of August. My companions were an Italian gentleman and his lady, inhabitants of Urbino, who were returning home after a visit to Florence. They complained that they could not understand a word of Bolognese. We reached Imola at about six in the morning, where we stayed about an hour, and I visited the cathedral, but I have nothing worth telling you about it. Our next stopping place was Faenza, which has given the French name to earthenware. The piazza here is surrounded by arches on columns, and over this a wide colonnade supporting a slight roof. The upper columns are on detached pedestals, with balustrades between them; a continued pedestal would have been better, but an arrangement of this sort round a large opening has an architectural effect. The church has its nave divided into squares, and in each large arch are two smaller ones opening into the side aisles. This change of design never succeeds. I left my companions at Faenza, whence a sediola, a sort of one-horse chair, conveyed me to Ravenna.
My driver amused me with a story about Raphael. This artist, according to the tale, stayed five or six days somewhere at an inn, and paid for nothing, as indeed he had no money, and the account becoming rather high, the landlord was alarmed, and urged payment. Raphael demanded the account, and when he had received it, painted the requisite number of sequins upon the table, and something over. He then called for the landlord, and meeting him at the door, pointed to the table, saying, “There is your account,” and passed on. The landlord, seeing, as he thought, the gold, and not doubting that he was generously paid, attended his guest to the gate of the inn, and having seen him depart, returned to take his money, but was very much surprised on attempting to sweep it off into his hand, to find that nothing moved; he repeated the action with no better success. He then called in the waiters and his neighbours; but though every body saw the money there, nobody could lay hold of it. At last, an Englishman passed that way, (in relating these stories to an Englishman, they never fail to introduce one of his countrymen) who told them it was a most valuable painting, worth a thousand crowns. The landlord, however, was contented to sell his table for a hundred sequins, (about 50l.). What the uneducated mind admires in a painting is deception, and that alone, and if Raphael was a great painter, he must, according to their notions, have possessed that power in a high degree. You hear his name, and those of the other great painters of Italy, frequently in the mouths of the common people, but this is the way in which they think of them.
You want me to say something of manufacturing and agricultural industry, but you apply to a very incompetent person, as my attention is too strongly directed to other inquiries, to allow me time to enter into the details of these subjects. Yet, of the first, if I say little, I might plead that there is little to be said. I saw, indeed, at Milan, some very beautiful cloth. There was a public exhibition for premiums; but these hot-bed productions, fostered by the government more for shew than utility, are no criterion by which to judge of the productions of the country. The political revolutions to which Italy has lately been subject must have had an adverse influence, and an arbitrary and changing system of taxation must prevent the employment of any considerable capital. As to the agriculture, it seems very generally extended, though not perhaps very perfect. The proprietor is in a sort of partnership with the cultivator, finding the necessary capital, while the latter finds labour, and there is commonly an agent employed by the large proprietors, to see that the countryman performs his part of the bargain, without secreting any of the profits. With the exception of the Campagna, even the Roman states are generally in cultivation, and in that there are considerable difficulties in the way, though the accounts of mal aria may be exaggerated. The mountains are often better cultivated than the plains, where the slope is not too steep to admit of it. In our climate, when we arrive at the height of twelve or fifteen hundred feet, the cold and wet will hardly permit any profit to the agriculturist; but in Italy, corn will ripen well in elevations of between three and four thousand, and deciduous trees flourish. This gives to Italian mountain scenery a character extremely different from that of our own country. There are no dreary moors, no wide bogs, and even no heathy commons. The sandy shores, steep, crumbling banks of clay or sand, and soil of naked rock, are necessarily abandoned, but elsewhere the land is employed, and seems in general fertile. This year has been remarkably dry, and they say that the crops of Indian corn are suffering on that account. The wheat harvest has been good, and the grapes are very abundant; the market at Bologna exhibited a profusion of fruit. Peaches were in immense abundance; more than you will see of apples and pears in any London market. The best were sold to me as a stranger, at three bajocs the pound, containing about four full sized peaches. Figs two bajocs. Of melons there is also a prodigious number. A good sized one costs four or five bajocs; the water-melons cost more, because they are larger. There are plenty of pears, but not very good; few apples. Grapes are just coming in; they are hardly in fact yet ripe, but the Italians give a decided preference to unripe fruit.
LETTER XL.
RAVENNA.
Rome, August, 1817.
There are several churches at Ravenna of the fifth and sixth centuries, a period, whose architectural productions are very rare. At the beginning of the fifth century this city became the capital of the western empire, and as it was also the seat of government of the Ostrogoths, and afterwards of the Exarchs, it must have enjoyed a pretty long period of comparative prosperity, when every thing else was in ruin. Yet we have by no means a long series of dates in these remains. The Empress Galla Placidia, sister of Honorius and Arcadius, seems to have built a good deal between 425 and 450, the year of her death. Afterwards, Theodoric, who reigned here from 492 to 526, embellished the city with the best edifices the times were capable of producing; and the impulse given to architecture seems to have lasted about twenty years after his death. You are indeed shewn a church, San Vittore, which pretends to be of the early part of the fourth century, but what remains of it, even if its history were true, is a mere barn, without character. The interval which elapsed between the first and last of the churches of this period, which still remain tolerably perfect, was not accompanied with any change of style: the ancient basilican form, consisting of three naves, divided by two ranges of columns supporting arches, prevailed in most of them. Above the arches is a high wall with narrow windows, fewer in number than the arches below, and rarely corresponding with them in position: the roof was of timber, and not concealed from view; and the middle nave terminates in a semicircular recess covered with mosaics, forming the apsis. They are much like St. Paul’s at Rome, but on a reduced scale, and with only one range of columns on each side, or perhaps they are rather more like some of the smaller of the ancient churches in that city. Such is the church of the Spirito Santo, built probably early in the sixth century, which owes its name to a tradition, that on this spot, the eleven immediate successors of St. Apollinaris, first bishop of Ravenna, were chosen by the visible agency of the Holy Ghost, which descended on them successively in the form of a dove. The columns here are of beautiful materials, but of bad workmanship. I think not however, worse than those of Constantine’s time. Architecture seems to have lost more in the twenty years between Dioclesian and Constantine, than in the two hundred between the latter emperor and Theodoric; but perhaps I should find, had I the means of a closer investigation, that I had been deceived in attributing to the earliest of these three periods, columns and ornaments which had once formed part of some earlier edifice. If however, we do not observe in the workmanship, any very distinct marks of difference between the productions of the fourth and sixth centuries, we do in the design of the ornamental parts; the capitals and mouldings in the latter being much more fanciful. In the time of Constantine the architects seem to have copied the antique, though very badly. Under Theodoric they abandoned it wantonly, and we find frequent indications of the whimsical style of capital which afterwards prevailed in the Gothic. In the same building, however, each capital is alike, or at least intended to be so. A block from which the arch springs is uniformly placed over the capital; it is in the shape of the inverted frustum of a pyramid, but not perfectly regular, as it generally slopes more on the front and back than on the sides. In the early Saxon architecture, (I use this incorrect term for want of a better) a block is sometimes found above the capital, to support the springing of the arch, but it is in the shape of a thickened abacus, and has sometimes dentils or mouldings, which show it to be a degradation of the whole entablature; at St. Mark’s, at Venice, and at Ravenna, it is evidently a stone block, without any relation to the parts of the ancient order.
The arrangement of this church, or I may say generally of these churches, is far from displeasing; they are light, and in some degree elegant; and they would be much more so if the details were better; and if they were not injured by modern chapels and restorations of a very different taste. The plan leads the eye to the high altar, and to the large niche enriched with mosaics and gilding, in front of which it stands.
The earliest remaining church of this style at Ravenna, if we may believe Beltrami, (Il forestiere instruito delle cose notabili della città di Ravenna) is that of Santa Agata Maggiore, which was completed about the year 417. Here again, are columns of granite and rich marbles, with the same general design, and the same mode of finishing. The columns are of unequal heights, and the impost blocks are also unequal, but not so as to reduce the springing of the arches to one level. Indeed, even these blocks seem to be the spoils of an earlier building. The height of the nave is about equal to its width, which is hardly as much as it ought to be. There seems at one time to have been a fashion at Ravenna, to introduce monograms among the ornaments of the blocks over the capitals. We have in this church the earliest example, and the latest in San Vitale, which was built in 534. What names they were intended to commemorate is very uncertain, as each writer on the subject forms a new conjecture of his own. The following is at Santa Agata,
