Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 2

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

Different, however, as is the general aspect of a Byzantine and Romanesque building,—especially when the former assumes its crowning feature, the dome,—it cannot be denied that they are, nevertheless, the same style in two phases; and that there is no such contradiction between them as to forbid their amalgamation to any extent. In proof of this, we have the not incongruous character of the Crusaders’ buildings in the East, in which the dome was not forbidden; the similarity to Romanesque of such of the Byzantine buildings as do not happen to have domes; the introduction into France of the domed architecture by a colony of Greeks; the admission of much that is Byzantine into the Romanesque buildings of Germany; and finally, the very extensive use of purely Byzantine foliage and other forms of ornamentation into the buildings of Western Europe in the twelfth century. This last-named circumstance I have dwelt upon at length in one of my former lectures, and I shall, no doubt, have frequent occasions again to allude to it. The fact is, that the ornamentation of the later examples of the Romanesque style is for the most part rather Byzantine than Roman in its origin: even the acanthus-leaves in the capitals and cornices more resembling those of the monument of Lysicrates than those of any Roman building; while the surface ornaments—so profusely used—are often traceable to the patterns of the various manufactures of the East, so largely imported into Western Europe.

Much light has recently been thrown upon the Byzantine style, especially in respect of its secular productions, through the discovery by the Count de Vogüé of a vast number of ruined towns in the mountains of Central Syria, which have remained almost untouched (except by time and earthquakes) just as they were deserted in the seventh century on the approach of the first Mahometan invaders. These remarkable remains give us the connecting link between Classic and Mediæval art, though greatly influenced by the traditional mode of building belonging to Syria. It is a subject which would need a separate lecture to deal with it as it deserves, and I only mention it here for the sake of saying that the carved ornamentation of these remarkable buildings is Greek in its feeling,[1] and not Roman, and that it is evidently allied to that imported at a much later period into Western Europe; and which especially characterises the buildings of the twelfth century in France, and (though less constantly) in England; all tending to establish the essential unity of the round-arched architecture of the early Middle Ages, and the fact that the East and the West were much more united in artistic affinity than has generally been admitted.

My main object at the present time is to trace the history, and investigate the character of those branches of this great round-arched style which have developed themselves in our own country: and my purpose in the foregoing remarks has been to lead you to view our own architecture, not as an essentially separate style, but as a part of that which pervaded Christian Europe, and extended till the Mahometan invasion, far both into Asia and Africa, which was the nucleus even of the Mahometan styles, and which in Sicily (as in the Holy Land and in Spain) again met and coalesced with its infidel offshoot, and produced by this reunion the noble architecture of Palermo, and other cities of Northern Sicily.

Among all the races of Northern Europe, who were either conquered by Rome, or aided in the overthrow of her empire, I do not know that any has left a vestige of what may be viewed as indicating, in any intelligible manner, the previous existence among them of a distinctive style of architecture. Stonehenge and the cromlechs can hardly be viewed as exceptions; and, when the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain, they found, so far as we know, no architecture but the Roman, nor brought with them any of their own; while, to make matters worse, they seem to have devoted themselves to the destruction of what they found.

What was the character of their buildings while they continued Pagan, we have no means of judging. We have proofs that timber was their most customary material, though it would be unreasonable to suppose that they were unable to build in stone. It is likely enough that their houses were generally of wood, for such was the case throughout the Middle Ages, and continues to be so to this day, where timber is abundant. Many of the churches afterwards were of the same material; but such also has at all periods been the case when dictated by local circumstances, and is still frequent in our colonies, so that it is insufficient to disprove the contemporary use of stone.

There is a curious parallelism in this respect between the buildings of ancient Greece, of Etruria, and of England. In Greece we find clear proofs of the architectural style having been founded on timber construction, though the Cyclopean walls, etc., of the primæval cities (whether the works of the same or a different race) forbid the thought that the use of stone was ever unknown. In Etruria we find no less gigantic walls, though we learn from Vitruvius that timber entered largely even into the construction of their temples, and suggested the peculiarities of the Tuscan order. If, then, in Saxon England we find the words “to build” to be derived from timber;—if we learn from early writers that the majority of their buildings were of wood; and if we find in their stone buildings indications of their imitating the construction of timber framing, we need no more conclude that our forefathers were ignorant of stone building, where it was needful, than that the early Greeks or Etrurians used timber from ignorance of the use of stone.

They were colonists, though conquerors. They were, no doubt, but very partially civilised; and, settling down as strangers in a country from which they had driven out the old inhabitants, and whose towns they had in great measure destroyed, they were likely (as colonists do in our own day) to make the largest use of the material most ready to their hand, and to defer to more settled times the use of a more permanent manner of building.

The paucity of remains of buildings of the period between the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West and the eleventh century, is by no means peculiar to our own country. Throughout Northern Europe the same fact prevails. The earlier waves of northern invaders were absorbed in the old civilisation, but each successive wave made a deeper and a deeper inroad into the remaining arts of the old world. It was natural then, that, on the return of art and civilisation, the works of this dark period should be deemed unworthy of preservation, and were replaced by new erections. In our own country the Romans had not been overcome, but had simply withdrawn, so that the dissolution of art was a more rapid work than in most other parts of the old empire, while the early efforts of the Saxons were over and over again destroyed by the yet uncivilised and unchristianised Scandinavians, from the last of whose devastations there was hardly time to recover before the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was overthrown by the Normans. No wonder, then, that the conquerors, though but then become adepts in architecture themselves, should disdainfully reconstruct nearly all the churches and greater edifices of their predecessors in that new manner of building in which they had been so recently instructed, and for the carrying out of which their conquest had supplied them with such ample means.

It would be a curious and interesting investigation to trace out the history of what may be styled the Primitive Romanesque architecture of Northern Europe; or, in other words, to examine into the style of building which prevailed during the long interval between the overthrow of the Roman power in the fifth century and the final establishment of that family of nations which for the last eight or nine centuries has been the embodied representative of Europe.

The thousandth year of our era seems as if it were the beginning of a new state of things: as if what succeeded it were in the open daylight, while the six preceding centuries could only be viewed by the glimmer of twilight. This is especially the case as regards our own art. How little do we know of the architecture of Western Europe, north of the Alps, during that long interval! Only here and there a building equally obscure in character and date,—a dull ray of light only just sufficing to render the darkness visible. No doubt a careful investigation would increase the number of known examples on the Continent. At present they are but few, such as the Basse-œuvre at Beauvais; the Church of St. Jean at Poictiers; that of Quenqueville in Normandy; the church at Lorsch, on the Rhine, and the older parts of St. Pantaleon at Cologne; all of which possess a character so distinct from that which prevails among the buildings of succeeding times as quite to sever from all which followed the architecture of these primitive ages,—this gulf which divides the ancient from the modern world.[2] Our business, however, at present, is not with the Continent, but with the sister islands of Britain.