CHAPTER VIII
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN
IN rather less than a century from the beginning of the Risorgimento all play of fancy or vivacity had gone out of the designs of the Italians. As early as 1510 there is little left except reserve and a dignified rejection of all exterior ornament which could be spared.
A very similar result is seen in the North as well; and here also it comes within less than a century of the complete establishment of the classical Renaissance in France, Germany or the Low Countries. It began in the North, this classical renascence, about 1510, and was well established by 1525. Accordingly, as early as 1600, the independent and vigorous life has gone out and it becomes an architecture of the decadence. Now, it is not to be assumed that decadence is the same thing as decay. Decadence in fine art is a term applied to the slow, and often very interesting, decline from the highest pitch of enthusiastic work and of combined energy and good taste. Defined in this way, there was a decadence of Roman imperial art from the reign of Trajan; or, as some would have it, from the reign of Vespasian. And yet what noble things were built even more than two hundred years after the later of those two dates! So there was a decadence in Gothic art dating from the middle of the thirteenth century; for everywhere there was a replacing of the energy of the new style by formality, by regularity, by the constant repetition of closely similar parts: and the pride of the skillful builder carried it over the refined taste of the artist. And still we have to remember with admiration and amazement such wonderful conceptions as the church of Saint Urbain at Troyes (begun after 1265), such masterly combinations as those of Saint Ouen at Rouen (begun 1320), and all the finer buildings of the florid Gothic in France—of the perpendicular architecture with fan vaulting in England. All these are works of the decadence, and what is needed is the substitution for the term we are using of another term which shall not sound so much like our English word, “decay.”
In like manner, there is decadence in the South from 1510, or thereabout,—in the North from a point of time eighty-five years later, and this decadence continued until the whole ancient world of traditional art was destroyed in the stormy time of the French Revolution. Since then, there has been neither decadence nor growth, but a bewildering series of experiments, none of which have as yet brought the world into a state of wholesome and natural progress in the arts of decorative design, that is to say, of design based upon structure and utility. Decadence in the South, then, lasted for two centuries and three quarters: in the North it lasted nearly two centuries. It stands to reason that during such long spaces of time there were ups and downs, periods of more rapid decline, periods of attempted restoration, of almost a new birth. Thus, there are fantastical and baroque designs as early as 1620 in the North, and much earlier in the South: whereas, in either case, fine, pure, stately buildings were erected at a much later period; still, the general tendency is from the more simple and more reasonable to the more extravagant; and this from the natural desire of the designers to try something new and not to be fettered too closely by the traditions of neo-classic design. There was, of course, a reaction from that greater freedom, and the boldness of the men of 1720 and thereabout was offensive to their successors who established the latest neo-classic with its Roman colonnades and a general absence of other details of interest.
Some part of this twofold tendency—of this revolution and counter-revolution—this drag towards an unseemly lack of dignity and quietness, with the inevitable pull backward to a more tranquil method of design—is to be seen in the church of the Theatiner monks, at Munich. The local authorities, which seem to be trustworthy, say that this church, which is dedicated to Saint Cajetan, was built in 1675, except the front and the towers, which are later—the date usually given being a century after the completion of the church, though this can only apply to the upper stories. As long as the low buildings, the three-story houses with not very lofty roofs, remained unaltered, the view of this church from the Ludwigstrasse (as in Plate LIV) or from the Square in front of the theatre, looking over the houses between, is one of the most impressive to be had anywhere when a single building is under consideration. The proportion between the dome and the two towers, and secondarily, between the towers and the front of the clearstory raised high between them, and between this, with its long nave roof, and the cupola, again, is uniformly beautiful. In our American cities we can only secure such a result by building at great, and generally impossible, cost, on a free open plot of ground: but for a town or a neighborhood in which the height of the houses could be guaranteed for a term of years, no better type of metropolitan church can be imagined. You cannot get away from its towering masses; from far and from near they are alike impressive. Whatever reluctance there has been to admit and insist upon the beauty of this church is caused by the inferiority of its details. Let us, therefore, consider those details. In the first place, for the cupola itself and the drum which supports it there would be a general acceptance of it as sufficiently of the graver style to which it belongs, that which the Germans call the Hoch-Renaissance, except for some part of the copper lantern at the top which smacks of a less pure style. But when the towers are considered, then there would be a general rejection of that treatment of the pilasters which causes them to appear as members, only, of a continuous group of vertical mouldings, emphasizing the corners, but also out of keeping as parts of a recognized neo-classic style.
Such pilasters as these do not come into any Order which you can reproduce from the pages of Vignola; nor would the curious entablatures forming three horizontal string-courses on each tower, and two on the church front, proper, be accepted as forming part of any systematized and intelligible order of architecture. The liking and disliking of such details is very largely a matter of fashion; and the difficulty is with all such questions concerning the mere adornment of architecture without regard to its structural essence—that when a style, a detail, a method of adornment, is out of fashion, it often seems offensive to those who are working in the fashion; even as the most elegant coat or the most elegant ball-dress of 1840 is a monster of ugliness to-day and would be thought to disfigure the elegant man or woman who might endue it. There is a large building in New York, the butt of endless ridicule, which is nevertheless extremely sensible in its dispositions, well arranged, well lighted, well imagined for its purposes. But the unlucky adoption of a style of design not unlike this of the Theatiner towers has prevented it from receiving even a moment’s serious consideration. By 1920 it may be respected, and even admired as the premature attempt to introduce a style then popular. The view to take of such a design is, then, that which we would take of a work of art whose epoch we did not pretend to know. It is a good rule for collectors of expensive works of art of the portable kind, objêts de la haute curiosité, not to worry about dates or makers unless the things belong to a well-known and much studied class. If it concerns prints from engravings by Aldegrever and Paul Potter, or signed enamels by the sixteenth century masters, or by Petitot, it may be worth while to be sure of your authenticity; but it is also delightful to decide to buy the Chinese porcelain, the unsigned fifteenth century drawing, the Italian peasant pottery of the eighteenth century, and before, without other voucher than the beauty of the piece. He is the safest in his collecting who holds firmly to his own sense of what is lovely and intelligent in decorative art, recognizing this mark of authenticity as at least equal to signatures and perfectly ascertained dates of fabrication. So to a certain extent with works of architecture. It will never do to dismiss an attractive, and perhaps even an impressive, building with the judgment easy to be gathered from the guidebooks, that this is of a late date, or a corrupt style, or was designed by a master of the baroque in art. That very word baroque means originally an irregular pearl, a pearl so remote in shape from the perfect sphere that no respectable jeweller would set it in an earring or pierce it for the necklace of a millionaire’s wife; but the artistic jewellers of the old times would take those irregular pearls and put heads and tails of gold with touches of enamel to them, producing abnormal birds or indescribable monsters, most admirable for decorative jewelry. If there were an opportunity in this brief inquiry to consider interior decoration, we should find that the domestic buildings going up in France, even while these towers were in the way of completion in southern Germany, were admirably designed within. The beginnings of the Rocaille[49] are of this time; and the Rocaille system of design is as attractive in its best examples, in the delicate goldsmith’s work, ivory work, and varnish painting, of 1750, as any courtly and magnificent system of adornment ever used among peoples of European descent. Of course the European designer has a heavy touch if you compare him to a Japanese artist of an equivalent rank: of course an uninterrupted development in a certain line of decoration at last leads to bad taste and violence. The point is the simple one that even those styles which are considered fair game for ridicule and are hardly treated with grave consideration are charming in their more perfect monuments. It is only the rational styles based on structure, which in architecture have any uniform greatness. It is only a real style like the Egyptian of 3000 B. C., or the Grecian-Doric, or, so far as we can judge, the Roman of Augustus, or the Gothic of Central France, or any derived and self-conscious styles of the neo-classic Renaissance, such as are based upon a new system of planning like that of the sixteenth century chateaux, or a new system of roof building like the fan vaulted interiors of England (three or four of them only); it is these alone which are always fine and great; all other styles have not only their ups and downs, their rise and fall, they have also their normal and, therefore, respectable, but moreover their abnormal and fantastic compositions.
Plate LV shows the front of a well-known building in Turin, and here architectural detail has been so handled that it is indeed a disfigurement. If the reader will look past the astonishing window casings and the really hideous filling of panels like those in the pilasters of the basement, he will see a well understood front. There is a high architectural basement, containing the basement story proper and a mezzanine; a grand story with the order, containing three stories of the interior, the pilasters well proportioned and well placed; and above this, a high entablature planned for the whole front with a story of rooms in it, and another story of rooms showing in little dormer windows above the cornice. Here are six “flats” of rooms, all abundantly lighted, and yet the front has been laid out in such a way that it has all the elements of a very imposing and stately structure. Even the singular soft rounding, with a plan made up of several curves, of the projecting central mass which includes the porch of entrance, is capable of perfectly dignified, and even stately, treatment. The appearance above of the great rotunda which holds the staircase, completes the composition of this central mass, and leaves one regretting that it might not be given to some modern designer of good taste, and a hard hand on the vagaries of his assistants, to work out the problem of this curious central mass, so manifold and so capable of unity. But, now, if one leaves for a moment that abstract way of regarding the whole front and allows those window casings to secure his attention, why then all is lost, of course: one cannot be expected to stand very long in front of such a building; it is a monster, but it is that merely because of the exceptionally ugly and wholly unreasonable gimcracks that are stuck all over it. If you should take the Hermes of Olympia and dress him like those “fantasticals” at an old-fashioned Paris masked ball, you would no doubt produce a very unsightly object and it would take the eye of an expert in human form, a sculptor, namely, to discover the beauty of the figure within.
That Turin building is of about 1690; see now what the reaction brought forth and what gravity of design was possible to the artists of thirty years later in the same city! There seems no doubt that this front of the Palazzo Madama (see Plate LV) was built by Filippo Juvara about 1715. To look at it is a rest indeed after the enormities of the Palazzo Carignano: and yet even here one finds himself wishing that the wretched device of carved trophies of arms, as the single motive of the exterior sculpture, were absent here. Sculptured ornament was beyond the strength of the eighteenth century: when they tried to introduce it, then the result was a failure. It is with relief that one looks at the front, [Plate LIV,] of the Ducal Palace at Genoa, which front seems to have been built by Cantoni, a well-known reformer in architectural style. The tendency has been through the whole century away from variety, away from the unexpected and the surprising, away from all external ornamentation, whether in color or in sculpture: the wheel has come full circle and there is nothing now entertaining or attractive in the details of the front, except only the neo-classic column with its accompanying entablature. The columns may be arranged in a continuous row or they may be coupled, as in the case before us, or they