Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

Nor was it to architecture alone that the arts of the period were devoted: we find the same art expended on stained glass, on metal-work of all sorts, on enamels of the most magnificent character, on the illumination of manuscripts, the painted decoration of the buildings, on jewellery, on ivory-carving, on embroidery, on woven fabrics, tapestry, seal-engraving—in fact, on every branch of decoration; every one of which arts were carried out with a degree of skill and instinctive taste truly amazing. All these branches should, however, be treated of separately.

In my enumeration of buildings I have limited myself to our own country; but we all know that in France the same great facts are, if possible, yet more wonderfully proved. The architecture of the thirteenth century, in France, is rendered illustrious by an endless category of buildings, the most glorious perhaps which the world has produced.

Germany, though her style is broken harshly by the cause I have before alluded to, nevertheless furnishes, whether in the native variety of the former or in the adopted one of the latter half of the century, a series of buildings of which any country might well be proud.

In Italy the style was certainly imported from the North; but was it an unnatural transplantation? I should say by no means so. Had not Italy her own Romanesque, which she had in some degree exported to Northern countries? and have I not shown that Pointed architecture was a natural and logical development from Romanesque? Why, then, should it be accounted foreign to the land from which Romanesque itself had sprung?—and if the growth of Pointed architecture was aided by ideas culled from Byzantium and the East, why should those ideas be less suited to Italy than to France or England, whose communications with the East were far less direct? Did not she take part in the same Crusades? nay, did not the Byzantine element in French art actually come there through the medium of Italy? Let us not, then, deny to her a fair participation in the architecture of the age. We had it before her, it is true, but let us not on that account say that it is none of hers.

The great fault in the Mediæval architecture of Italy lies in its details, such as its mouldings, etc., which evince too much of their antique original: its great value lies in its use of materials of varied colour, of inlaying, mosaic-work, and other decorative arts, inherited also from the past. These arts ally themselves well with our style, though the Classic mouldings do not so; and in our judgment of Italian work we should never lose sight of this; we may otherwise be led either to reject real merit from the offence which incongruous detail offers to our taste, or we may be led to accept what is bad and spurious, because gilded over, and its demerits concealed by beautiful art, which would appear to greater advantage if united with purer architecture.

Another cause, however, which gives great value to the Mediæval art of Italy, arises from the somewhat accidental circumstance that her internal position was such as to require town buildings very much of the kind which we want now. The consequence is that Italy was, even in those early days, the land of street palaces, and that we find yet remaining there numberless buildings of a class which we find but rarely in other countries, and those treated in a manner very parallel with what we often require at the present day. Not, let it be borne in mind, that they are treated in a manner essentially different from the coeval works in more Northern countries, but rather that there were more of them, that these were on a larger scale, and that more of them have remained to our own day.

It is a mistake to suppose that the secular architecture of Italian cities essentially differed from that of the same period elsewhere. If you will carefully look through any book showing specimens of the domestic architecture of France in the thirteenth century, you will find that it closely resembles that of Italy, except in having purer details. The same kind of window, for instance, which, from habit, people have got into the way of calling Italian or Venetian, prevailed in France and Germany, and is often found in England.

Fig. 123.—Palais des Podestats, Orvieto, Italy.

Fig. 124.—Torre di Santa, Ninfa, Palermo.