Historic buildings

by Unknown

A renaissance before the renaissance, a second and almost antique budding of an antique civilization, a spring-time after six centuries of snow,—such are the ideas and words that crowd into the mind. Everything is of marble, white marble, whose immaculate whiteness shines in the azure. On all sides are large solid forms, the cupola, the full wall, the balanced stories, the firmly-planted round or square mass; but over these forms, revived from the antique, like delicate foliage that clothes an old tree-trunk, there is spread an individual invention and a new decoration of the small columns surmounted by arcades, and the originality and grace of this architecture thus renewed cannot be described.

DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, BAPTISTERY AND CAMPO SANTO, ITALY

In 1083, to honour the Virgin who had given them the victory over the Saracens of Sardinia, the Pisans began to build their Duomo.

This is almost a Roman basilica, I should say a temple surmounted by another temple, or if you like better, a house having its gable for a façade, and this gable is cut off at the peak to support a still smaller house. Five stories of columns cover the entire façade with their superimposed porticoes. Two by two they are coupled together to support the little arcades; all these lovely columns of white marble under their black arcades make an aërial population that is most graceful and unexpected. In no place here do you perceive that sorrowful reverie of the Mediæval north; it is the holiday of a young nation that is awakening, and, in the joy of its newly acquired wealth, honours its gods. She has gathered from the distant shores to which her wars and trade led her, capitals, ornaments and entire columns and these fragments of antiquity fit into the work without any incongruity; for the work is instinctively cast into the ancient mould and is only developed with a grain of fantasy on the side of delicacy and charm. All the antique forms re-appear, but remodelled in the same spirit, by a new and original vivacity. The exterior columns of the Greek temple are reduced, multiplied and elevated into the air and are not only a support but have become an ornament. The Roman or Byzantine dome is elongated and its natural heaviness diminished beneath a crown of slender little columns with a mitre ornament which girds it in the centre with its delicate gallery. On the two sides of the great door two Corinthian columns are enveloped with the luxuriant leaves, buds and twining stems of the acanthus, and from the threshold we see the church with its rows of black, and white columns of nave and transept, with their multitude of slender and beautiful forms rising up like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sense of feeling; it is not excessive and confused as in the north, but, at the same time, it is not contented with merely the grave simplicity and the robust nudity of antique architecture. This spirit is the daughter of a pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more feminine than her mother.

She is not yet an adult, sure of her steps; she makes awkward mistakes. The lateral façades outside are monotonous. The cupola within is a reversed funnel, of a strange and disagreeable form. The union of the two arms of the cross is unpleasing, and a number of modernized chapels dispel the charm of the purity found in Sienna. At the second glance, however, all this is forgotten, and the effect of the whole is felt again. Four rows of Corinthian columns, surmounted by arcades, divide the church into five naves and form a forest. A second passage also as richly peopled with columns crosses the first one, and above the beautiful grove, rows of still smaller columns are carried along and intersect each other in order to uphold in the air the quadruple gallery, also prolonged and intersected. The ceiling is flat; the windows are little, and most of them without panes; they allow the walls to exhibit the grandeur and solidity of their mass, and down these long lines of straight and simple windows the untempered daylight makes these innumerable columns glow with the serenity of an ancient temple.

It is not, however, wholly an ancient temple, and there lies its peculiar charm: at the back of the choir the entire hollowed out apsis is occupied with a large Christ[11] in a golden robe, with the Virgin and another smaller saint. His face is gentle and sad: on this golden background in the dimness of the pale daylight he seems like a vision. Certainly, a number of pictures and constructions of the Middle Ages supply all the needs of ecstasy. Other fragments show the decadence and the deep barbarism from which they sprang. There remains one of those ancient bronze doors covered with formless and horrible bronze bas-reliefs.

Such is what the descendants of the sculptors preserved out of antiquity, such is what the human mind became in the chaos of the Tenth Century at the time of the Hungarian invasions, of Marozzia and Theodora: sad, mournful, anæmic, dislocated and mechanical figures, God the Father and six angels, three on one side and three on the other, all leaning at the same angle like a row of cards leaning against one another; the twelve apostles all in a row, six in front and six in the intervening spaces, like those round rings with holes for eyes and long lines for arms that children scribble in their exercise-books. On the other hand, the entrance doors, carved by John of Bologna,[12] are full of life: leaves of the rose, the grapevine, the medlar, the orange and the laurel with their berries, their fruits and their flowers, amongst which are birds and animals, twine about and make frames for animated figures and groups that are energetic and imposing. This wealth of truthful and vital forms is peculiar to the Sixteenth Century: it discovered nature and man at the same time. Five centuries lie between the work of these two doors.

There is nothing more to say about the Baptistery or the Leaning Tower; the same idea, the same taste and even the same style are seen in them. The one is a simple isolated dome; the other is a cylinder; each has its exterior decoration of columns. However, each has its own distinct and speaking physiognomy; but too much time would be occupied in either talking or writing about them and too many technical terms would be needed to distinguish the subtle differences. I will only mention the inclination of the Tower. It is supposed that when the Tower was half-finished, it leaned and that the architects kept on, and since they went on with it this inclination did not seem to have troubled them. At all events, there are other leaning towers in Italy,—at Bologna, for instance; voluntarily, or involuntarily, this fondness for oddity, this search for paradox and this yielding to fantasy, is one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages.

In the centre of the Baptistery is a superb eight-sided basin; each one of three sides is incrusted with a rich and complicated flower in full bloom, and each flower is different. There is a circle of large Corinthian columns around it, supporting round-arched arcades; most of them are ancient and are ornamented with antique bas-reliefs: Meleager with his barking dogs and the nude bodies of his companions is assisting at Christian mysteries. On the left, there is a pulpit similar to the one in Sienna, the first work of Nicholas of Pisa,[13] a simple marble coffer supported on marble columns and covered with carvings. The feeling of the strength and nudity of antiquity is exhibited here in a striking manner. The sculptor understood the postures and movements of the body. His figures, a little massive, are grand and simple; sometimes he reproduces the tunics and the folds of the Roman costume; one of his nude personages, a kind of Hercules carrying a lion on his shoulders, has that large chest and the strained muscles that the sculptors of the Sixteenth Century loved so much. What a difference to human civilization and what a hastening of it there would have been if these restorers of ancient beauty, these young Republics of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, these precocious creators of modern thought had been left to themselves like the ancient Greeks, if they had followed their natural bent, if mystical tradition had not intervened to limit and divert their effort, if secular genius had developed among them, as it formerly did in Greece, amongst free, rude and healthy institutions, and not, as it did, two centuries later, in the midst of the servitude and the corruptions of the decadence.