In A.D. 1500 Maestro Jacopo Dagurro da Bissone, who was a most able engineer, constructed a splendid viaduct, forty-eight metres long, over the Natisone, among the rocks and beetling cliffs of Civitale in Friuli.
BOOK IV
ITALIAN-GOTHIC, AND RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTS
CHAPTER I
THE SECESSION OF THE PAINTERS
Painting is not generally supposed to be connected in any great degree with architecture: indeed it has now become a distinctly independent art. In the Middle Ages I believe the case was different. The great primitive Comacine Guild seems to have embraced all the decorative arts, though especially sculpture, as integral branches of architecture. There are indisputable proofs of the many-sided nature of the training in a Comacine laborerium. There were Magistri insigneriorum, or Master architects; Magistri lapidum, or sculptors, and Magistri lignorum, or master carpenters. These latter seem in old times to have been the designers of scaffoldings and makers of beams for roofing; wood-carvers and inlayers were called Maestri d'intaglio. Then there were certainly ironworkers and masters in metal, and fresco-painters, who also attained to the rank of Master. But no one branch was entirely separate from the others, until the fourteenth century, when the painters' companies were founded. We find the same man building, designing, sculpturing, painting, and even working in gold or iron, and seeming equally good in all styles, so that the training of the laborerium must have been especially comprehensive.
The reason appears to be that all the fine arts—painting, sculpture and metal-working—were considered by the Comacines as indispensable handmaids to architecture, and no builder was in their eyes fit to be a Master till he could not only erect his edifice, but adorn it. Their symbolic church was to them a kind of Bible, figuring all the points of creeds, but the building itself was but the paper and binding of the Bible; the sculptor put the frontispiece which explained its inner meaning, and the mosaicist and fresco-painter added as it were the letter-press and illustrations. The churches of Ravenna show how full and rich was this inner illustration, how Christ and the Apostles, angels and prophets, saints and martyrs, have shone on those walls, a beautiful Bible picture-book for ages. That this was the light in which the early Christians regarded their churches is plain from many passages in the early Fathers. St. Basil (A.D. 379) in preaching, says—"Rise up, now, I pray you, ye celebrated painters of the good deeds of this army. Make glorious by your art the mutilated images of their leader. With colours laid on by your cunning, make illustrious the crowned martyr, by me too feebly pictured. I retire vanquished before you in your painting of the excellences of the martyr, etc. etc."[199]
Eighth-century wall decoration in subterranean Church of S. Clemente, Rome.