it is known to have been executed between 1508 and 1520. A very few years later were wrought the splendid sculptures in stone of the outer choir screen—the massive wall which encloses this graceful work in carved oak: but these must be referred to Chapter V. The great iron gates, beautiful of their kind, belong to the eighteenth century: they replace a noble jubé or rood screen which once separated the choir from the crossing, where nave and transepts meet.
Now it is clear enough what we have to admire and enjoy when we stand within such a church as this. The least attentive beholder is struck by the great height of the church; and the roof, one hundred and forty feet above the head, is not invisible nor lost in darkness, but shows its elaborate structure of elastic ribs carrying thin vaults which bear upon the ribs and thrust in every direction, so that the general character of the construction is readily grasped. The height is made manifest—it is in a manner explained—by its division into three stories, each of which again seems to be subdivided by the sculptured capitals which mark the springing of the arches. The cruciform plan leading the eye away into halls and passages, not perceived at first, adds to the ultimate effect of grandeur dependent upon space, however much it may delay the fullness of that impression. The abundant detail in mouldings and in floral sculpture as well as in constructional elements probably increases the effect of size by means of the constant repetition of its similar groups: and it is in itself capable of giving the greatest pleasure to the student who finds in it, as it were, a museum of decorative sculpture arranged not in meaningless succession as when fragments are arranged upon a shelf, but in highly significant order and in sequences both horizontal and vertical. There is still for the student of such matters the constantly growing respect for the logical acumen of the builders, who insert nothing for mere ornamentation but who make their constructional members tell as decorative features. Here are no slabs of precious marble nor any bas-reliefs delicately wrought in stucco, as in the buildings of imperial Rome, nor, at present, any chromatic effects whatever, except those of the great windows; for whatever traces of painting were left from the Middle Ages have been destroyed long ago. The building can never have affected surface decoration, in the Roman sense: a decoration covering all parts of its interior and concealing or ignoring the structure; the effective paintings that there were we know to have been local in their character, near the eye, and having a definite message of ecclesiastical import. The decorative instinct of the Gothic builders was not there but in the treatment of the actual building. Let us consider another great cathedral, that of Reims in the department of the Marne. Plate XXVIII gives two views in the interior, both near the east end. In the one, you look westward far down the north aisle, about four hundred and twenty feet from where we stand, to the open door seen in the west front. In the other, we look across the choir proper, that is the liturgical enclosure, from southwest to northeast, seeing the beginnings of the curve of the chevet or rounded apse. In these interior views are seen in a more intimate way the characteristics of a great Gothic church. The vastness, the height, the soaring grandeur of the interior are for the moment ignored, and we see the lower vaults and the clustered pillars which support them and the higher vaults of the nave, as well as the delicate sculpture of the capitals. The interior, however, though certainly the thing of primary importance, is not all that we have to study.
The outside of the Gothic Church is as closely related to the structure as is the inside and forms one with it. Plate XXIX gives the exterior of Amiens cathedral. The highest windows are those of the clearstory, which is the upper part of the central nave, in this case the nave of the choir. Below these is the roof of the inner aisle hidden here by the pyramidal roofs of the
chapels, built much later. Now as to the forest of flying buttresses, those sloping bars of stone carried on stone arches, which surround the clearstory, the only purpose of these is to receive and neutralize the thrust of the vaults within. The high vault above the clearstory pushes against the uppermost flying buttresses. The vault of the inner aisle has its much less formidable thrust taken up by the vaults of the outer aisle as far as the lines of the plan are straight, east and west, and by those of the chapels as soon as the curve of the chevet[42] begins. By means of the double set of flying buttresses, those within and higher and the outer and lower ones, the thrust of the high vaults is carried across the whole space occupied by the two aisles, and finally turned over to the upright piers which themselves serve also as buttresses for the outer aisle. Or, to approach the same set of counteracting forces from without, we have as we walk along either flank of the church, or around the curve of the chevet, a row of heavy and solidly built stone piers with much their greatest horizontal dimension in a direction across the axis of the church; that is to say, each one of them is perhaps twenty feet in and out by three feet or three and a half or four feet in width, measured east and west. Each one of these piers is built in with the low wall outside the outer aisle, or of the chapel, as seen in Plate XXIX, and the lower part of this wall helps to resist the thrust of the roof-vaulting of that same aisle or chapel. As the pier goes up, it is soon left clear of all walls and roofs, and the flying buttresses from the vaults butt against it.
The Gothic builders had other thoughts over and above their logical desire to show everywhere the true structure. They had also the taste for upward-pointing lines: a taste which seems to have grown with the development of the style. It was not this taste which in the first place made their buildings high as compared with their width: that was a mere matter of convenience and of obtaining very large windows above the aisle roofs. But the pointed arch itself, and the steep roof needed to protect the stone vaults from rain in a rainy climate, led these builders constantly towards the steeper pitch, the sharper point, the more lofty and soaring design.
Plate XXX shows the cathedral of Chartres seen over the houses of the town, from the southeast. The two great towers on the left of the picture are those which flank the west front: one of them, the simpler one, seen on the extreme left and flanking the west front on the south is the most famous tower in France and the most important single piece of work in the history of Gothic tower-building, because it shows in a faultless way the transition from Romanesque to Gothic in those forms which are immediately caused by the necessity of vaulting the interiors. These secondary parts (for the vaulted interior alone can be called a primary and essential part of the Gothic church) sympathize with that vaulted interior in the soaring character of the design, as has been said above. The other tower was rebuilt at a much later period and typifies perfectly the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century. We are to imagine, then, two towers at the west end, each very like the earlier one: and, as the picture shows, two others flanked the south transept. In the Plate, one of them is covered by scaffolding, some repairs being in progress. Two similar towers were intended to flank the north transept: and a tower, undoubtedly planned for a larger and higher mass than any one of the flanking towers just described, was to have risen from that part of the church where the transept crosses the great nave—the “crossing” as it is commonly called. Looking at this view of Chartres cathedral, we are to imagine it then as not having that high-shouldered look caused by the level line of the ridge of the church, because that roof would not be seen except in small patches, the seven great spires rising high above it and the seven square towers which support them concealing the roof except here and there as the spectator moves about the church. Now it is an unquestioned reproach to the Gothic style that no one of these great churches was ever completed. Certain towers there were which have been so shattered by the burning of the roofs that they have been taken down. Spires have existed which have now disappeared, but the greater part of the magnificent towers conceived by the builders of the early years of the thirteenth century have remained incomplete, and the churches which were to have had them are only to be judged by an effort of the mind akin to that effort we have to make in considering the buildings of classical antiquity. We are better off with Gothic art than with Greek art, because we have the details: and also because we have that which no Greek building can be said to have had, the splendid and impressive interiors: but nowhere is there a great Gothic church complete in its intended exterior effect. The nearest approach to completion is undoubtedly to be found in England, and, for a choice, in the lovely cathedral of Salisbury. The architecture is not nearly as splendid as on the Continent; it is more tranquil, more unpretending; it is less extraordinary in scale, surpassing in a less formidable fashion the buildings of residence and of government: and partly as a result of this it has been easier to build and easier to maintain these buildings in their intended completion. Plate XXXI shows this cathedral amid the trees of its close and well explains that peculiarity of position in which some English cathedrals are so much differentiated from those of the Continent. In spite of the trees, however, the great peculiarity is seen of two transepts—one crossing the nave at the point where the tower rises, as was the intention in the Chartres cathedral, Plate XXX: the other, to the eastward of that, and flanking the choir in a curious way, without example on the Continent.
Now in judging such building, and such artistic intention as this, it is evident that we cannot use the maxims which are convenient to observe in the case of a Greek or a Greco-Roman monument. Lightness takes the place of evident stability: that is the first thing to notice. It is not so much that the walls are thin, as that they have disappeared: there are no walls—only a series of piers dividing windows, the opening filled with glass being much greater, if measured along a horizontal line running through the windows, than is the extent of the solid masonry. You see at once wherein there is an excuse for the saying “a wall of glass with a roof of stone.” But there is more than this: the primary object of the designer has been to treat his construction as the main inspiration of his design. Inside and out everything is shown as it really is, the exact duty done by every stone in the structure is clearly visible to even an uncareful observer. This may be thought true of early Greek work as well: but then the structure of the Greek temple is the simplest conceivable, a mere carrying of stone beams upon stone posts—no arches to thrust, no windows to open in the wall, most of all, no attempt to roof anything with masonry except in so far as a stone beam is strong enough to span a small open space between two strong pillars. Moreover, the Greek temple was so covered up with painting, and where the paint did not conceal the whole surface that surface was already so carefully smoothed and unified, that it was hard to distinguish stone from stone even in the marble-built temples of Athens—whereas those of the soft stone regions, coated with stucco, were in architectural effect absolutely monoliths. As for the Roman structure, built with unexampled massiveness, and wonderfully imposing in its mass and in the great size and noble proportions of its interiors, it was concealed from view by the entirely contradictory pretense at trabeated construction in the modified Greek orders of columns and pilasters: and where these were not in use the walls were very commonly concealed by marble in great sheets, by tiling of glass, or by moulded stucco. The Gothic building also was painted: nor was there any hesitation on any one’s part in putting up surfaces of stucco to paint upon where an elaborate picture was wanted: but this concealed nothing except the joints of a few courses of stone. The essential facts of the structure remained visible outdoors and in, and it was by a judicious proportioning of the parts of these structures, each to all the others, that the chief architectural effect was obtained.
Another class of fourteenth century buildings must be named, the Italian Gothic churches. Plate XXXII gives the most perfect piece of work among them, the tower known as Giotto’s Campanile. Its exterior face is entirely sheathed in marble, thin slabs for the most part, white which has grown yellow, red which has grown a warm brown, and black or nearly black; and to the larger members of the elaborate composition is added the minute mosaic of one band after another all the way up, and the still more delicate play of light and shade caused by slight and well modelled reliefs of ornamental character. Down below, unseen in the photograph, is a row of statues in niches, and two horizontal bands of bas-reliefs of sacred and legendary subject. The tower is exceptional in its perfect building: but there is nothing in the scheme of construction: it is almost as simple as a Greek temple. And this is where the great cathedral by its side is similar in character. Not Gothic in proportion, nor in any system of buttresses, nor in the disappearing of walls in constructional piers, nor in the disposition of the sculpture; it is Gothic only in its having pointed arches, and ribbed vaults, though these are so stayed up by massive masonry that the thing is no more elastic than the halls of Roman thermæ.[43] But it is beautiful in detail, encrusted and embossed, and most imposing in mass without, however ill-proportioned in the nave, within; and even within it is a grandiose nave up which you walk towards the culmination of the whole in the sanctuary under the great cupola.
IN Chapter IV we have seen how strongly the artistic effect of the Gothic churches depends upon their structure. Everything in the structure depends upon and leads up to the vaulting; everything in decorative treatment depends upon the structure. That is true except in so far as the universally felt need of ornament founded on the study of nature and of abstract form modifies design. Thus the carving in conventionalized leafage of a band, straight or seemingly bent around a pier, and the choice of colors in a decorative window or a painted panel of wall beneath a window, are indeed independent of the structure. Moreover, the Gothic sculptors were as exceptionally energetic and forcible as the Gothic builders, and worked with them in the production of great schemes of associated sculpture which were in harmony with the work of these very bold and skillful builders. Now, when, after the final expulsion of the English king and his armies from France, the suppression of the domestic feuds between hostile parties, and the pacification of the country under Charles VII, there was a sudden recrudescence of building and of decorative art, the half ruined churches were repaired, those destroyed were replaced. Between 1455 and 1515 there was a revival of architectural art comparable to that of the close of the twelfth century. There were not as many great churches undertaken, because nearly every diocese had its cathedral, and because the exclusively ecclesiastical point of view was no longer held by the people of the towns or by the nobility: but this was made good by the great increase in the number and splendor of civic and private buildings.
There is, then, a new and very magnificent Gothic art beginning about the time of the conquest of Bordeaux and Gascony, when the English armies were finally driven out of France, and ending only with the complete establishment of the classical revival under Francis I. Contemporaneous with this, or nearly so, was the very splendid art of Spain, that curious and fantastic earliest Renaissance marked for us by such monuments as the Casa Lonja of Valencia, the portal of the University at Salamanca and that of the church of St. Paul at Valladolid: and in Belgium, the epoch of the great town halls, that of Louvain being of about 1460: that of Audenarde at the close of the epoch now under consideration. In Germany, too, there was the beginning of a most attractive civic architecture: and in England, although the civil war of the Yorkists and Lancastrians postponed anything like peaceful growth in art until near the close of the fifteenth century, there was established, beginning with the accession of Henry VII, in 1485, the so-called Tudor architecture which was really a continuation and development of the curious Perpendicular Gothic art with the added feature of fan-vaulting—the most original and perhaps also the most splendid artistic achievement of the British Isles. Now in all this highly organized and florid art there was a general abandonment of the constructional principle which had been the root of the earlier Gothic, and there was no new constructional device or system invented to take its place. The new art is an art of convenience and splendor, but it has no especial root in the necessities of building. The new Gothic builders were very skillful and learned, they knew rib-vaulting by heart, and also they understood vaulting in the solid shell: they could do anything,—but there was no special task to which they had set themselves and therefore they played with their buildings. Nor was there to be introduced, during the centuries that were to follow, any new principle of building.
In Greek building, in Roman building, in Romanesque building, and especially in its culmination in the Gothic system, we are to look to the way in which the buildings have been carried out. Plan, that is to say the arrangement of parts for utility or internal effect, has much to do with our appreciation of a building: but the structure, the actual putting together of materials, is of still greater importance. You do not pretend to judge of a Greek temple without being able almost to count the stones of which it is composed or without appreciating fully the relative part which they play. In Gothic architecture, assuredly no person would dream of finding any enjoyment in a church without having first secured a good working knowledge of how it came to be what it is—how the stone roof is kept in place in the wonderful way that we see it and what part is played by pier and flying buttress. But this interest in the life of the structure becomes faint as we consider the buildings of the four centuries beginning with the year 1400. We have to consider some splendid works of art produced between that year and the outbreak of the French Revolution, but in none of them is there any special call for studying the theory or practice of the builders. They may build well or they may build carelessly: that is comparatively indifferent under the new régime, for designs are made and carried out for their own sake; nor is the master of construction any longer the master of design.
The reader will understand that in such general statements as these in matters of fine art there are always many drawbacks and qualifications. The fifteenth century had still a deal of Gothic vigor, in all the north of Europe. There were great builders after, as before, the pivotal year 1400. This discussion will even include the names of men especially praised as being great constructors: the point is that their system of construction had little to do with their design. Jacopo Sansovino and Sir Christopher Wren were great builders, but their designs were not in any special way the better for that. Their work is marked everywhere with the modern characteristic of being designed abstractly, and as if intended to be carved out of a single block, and afterwards put into terms of mortar-masonry and cut stone, because that was the only way in which the builders of the time could proceed.
Let us consider the fan-vaulting of England. Its earliest appearance is in the cloisters of Gloucester cathedral, built after 1375. Plate XXXIII shows the eastern ambulatory of these cloisters. At the first glance this vault seems to be built with ribs like that of Amiens or that of Reims, as shown in the plates of Chapter IV; but the network of projecting ribs in the Gloucester vault is a simulacrum only. The vault is a solid stone shell, homogeneous, and built of large pieces. Plate XXXIV shows the vault of the choir-aisle of Peterborough cathedral seen as looked at from below. The joints of the stones can be made out: they have no relation to the system of mouldings and panels. In England, however, where the Gothic vaulting system had never been as important a factor in art as it was on the Continent, this new and unique system of vaulting was introduced as soon as the Wars of the Roses were over. The three great monuments
of this “fan-vaulting” are St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the Chapel of Henry VII, attached to Westminster Abbey in London, and chief and noblest of all, Kings College Chapel at Cambridge. This last may well be thought the finest interior in England; and the other examples mentioned are inferior in charm: and yet, since the Cambridge Chapel has been shown in photography very often, it has seemed better to consider here less-known examples. The vault is a perfectly safe building, especially on a small scale, but it is not rib-vaulting. When, however, the great vault of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey was undertaken, about 1515, a different system had to be followed. The span or clear width of the nave is not very great and yet the task of supporting the astonishing stone roof, seen in Plate XXXV, was one worthy of the shrewdest and most daring builder of the time. The stone ribs which spring directly from the uprights with but the slightest pretense at vaulting shafts in little round mouldings with slightly marked capitals, are really the arches which carry the whole stone structure of the roof. The great pendants into which these ribs disappear, and which themselves form the basis of the fan-vaulting system, are of course without constructional value. The roof is to be taken as an elaborate piece of geometrical carving, ingeniously arranged in the semblance of a constructional work; its real construction (sound enough, intelligent enough, or the roof would not stand) masked by the extraordinary composition in radiating lines, as if the cloister of Gloucester Cathedral had lent its roof to be raised high into the air, and completed on the side towards the windows by the continuing of each circular cone in that direction. Plate XXXVI gives the admirable drawing made by Robert Willis of the construction of this vault and it is easy to see that while the mechanical skill shown in the work is great and peculiar, there is nothing whatever left of the system of Gothic vaulting, nor any dependence placed
upon the numerous radiating ribs which seem to be the very framework of the structure. They are decorative mouldings worked upon the surface of a solid stone vault, built in a single shell which extends from one to another of the great transverse arches which span the nave.
This design marks the culmination in England of that florid Gothic in which early principles have a subordinate part, while newly required elaboration and tricks of deceptive brilliancy of workmanship come to the front and absorb the interest of the beholder. No one can remain indifferent to the fantastic and yet enduring charm of such a roof. The roof of Kings College Chapel has already been mentioned as of extraordinary beauty and as forming with the vertical members which support it and the windows between them a Gothic interior as splendid as anything out of France: but its beauty is of a style which had already lost its reason for being, and its appearance of constructional dignity is in a way deceptive. The admiration we bring to such a monument is then very different from that which we give to the interiors of the great Gothic churches shown in the plates of Chapter IV, or to the many other beautiful naves and choirs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England, France, Spain, and Germany. At Ely and Salisbury, Bourges and Laon, Burgos and Gerona, Cologne and Vienna, the student enters a great church, whose vault was completed at any time between 1200 and 1400, with perfect certainty that the structure is as sincere and obvious as it is impressive; nor does any doubt enter his mind as to the utility of the members of the structure around him. It is only with the beginning of the florid Gothic that this wholesome frame of mind can no longer be retained.
Let us consider the church of Brou, standing close to the town of Bourg-en-Bresse, in southern Burgundy. It was not begun until about 1510: that is to say, its construction is contemporaneous with the earlier years of Henry VIII in England,
and the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; and, in architectural history, it is contemporaneous with so much of the building of the present St. Peter’s in Rome as fixed the architectural style of that great church. Plate XXXVII is a view of the church of Brou, looking westward to the great front whose large windows fill the nave with dazzling daylight and make that west wall itself invisible. The Gothic structure here is complete—as logical and exact as in the palmy days of the thirteenth century; but the decorative treatment is different indeed! On the right is the tomb of the Duchess Margaret of Austria, who completed the church and set up her own and her husband’s tomb with those of earlier princes of the line. This tomb is a structure wholly in keeping with the church, as it was really the cause of its being. There is nothing more interesting in such work than the completely realized naturalistic character of the statuary. Nowhere has the art of the sculptor been left so free as in these flamboyant Gothic buildings—so free to develop itself while still it remains in strict accordance with the requirements of the architectural design. The splendid church of S. Wulfran at Abbeville, in the far north of France, helps us to see still more plainly, this extraordinary development of architectural sculpture because the scale is larger and the artistic power manifested immeasurably more fit to cope with great undertakings. Plate XXXVIII giving part of the west portals of that surprising church will show how completely the sculptor’s art has changed since the portals of Reims and of Chartres were undertaken. As for the architectural treatment it is still like that of the church of Brou, Gothic with modifications. The hold which the Gothic system of vaulting, and of building to support the vaults, had over the French builders is visible in this return to earlier principles as soon as the dissensions of the country allowed.
The famous Town Halls of the Netherlands have preserved for us the most perfect, because the most unmingled, traces
of flamboyant Gothic in civic buildings. The latest of all and the smallest one of importance is that at Audenarde in Belgium, built between 1525-30. It is represented in Plate XXXIX, lending itself well to pictorial reproduction on a small scale because it depends but little on the sculptured details. A single Madonna with the Child, above the loggia from which the town authorities would speak to the people in the days of municipal independence, is the only representative sculpture of importance in all this front, below the cornice. The fantastic Gothic tracery with conventional carving covers the blank wall spaces with a continuous veil of slight and not unpleasant roughening; and the wall spaces are so small that this formal kind of ornament is not disagreeable. Small statues should have been placed in the niches; but the building does not seem to suffer much from their absence. We can judge of it as being what it is, a most simple and practical City Hall, built with pointed arches, with a steep roof adorned by tower, dormer window and pinnacle, and the whole structure covered by this thin veil of moulded, cusped and traceried ornament, chiefly because the church architecture of previous years had led up to that kind of design by natural evolution, and because the spirit of the time knew of but one architectural treatment. Therefore, without vaulting, with five stories of rooms replacing the great hall of the church, with windows made to open and shut for the convenience of the inhabitants of small rooms, the building is yet closely in agreement with the church building of the time, and is to be judged as a part of the great and long supreme style out of which it has grown.
In the famous south porch of the cathedral at Albi, this florid Gothic has reached its culmination. Plate XL shows the outer porch; that which, when the cathedral was really a fortress of some importance, guarded the first approach to the long flight of stairs, the outer perron. Nothing is more attractive among the minor charms
of spirited old architecture than these mixtures of florid and even fantastical design with the grave solemnity of fortress towers and the harsh line of battlements intended for the service of war. Passing through this gateway which is pierced in a fortress-wall merely and leads directly to no covered apartment of any sort, the visitor mounts some twenty-five stone steps and reaches the porch shown in Plate XLI, but he does not enter it by the larger archway; that is the south archway to which there is meant to be access on the level of its own sill. On the right and partly hidden by the huge buttress-pier is the narrower eastern doorway, to which access by the steps is had, from the outer porch, Plate XL. The great inner porch (Plate XLI) dates from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and is one of the greatest triumphs as it is one of the very latest productions of that strange art which has abandoned the essential character and basis of Gothic architecture without losing its derived and secondary charm, which may be defined as the charm of picturesque variety and sharp contrast—the very reverse, or so it seems, of the calm harmony of Greek design.
ABOUT the year 1420 A. D. there was a great change in the architectural outlook in central Italy. The Risorgimento[44] was already in full vigor, and this had to do especially with the study of the literature of classical antiquity which had been going on for nearly a century. Latin authors were studied afresh, and, for the first time in Europe Greek authors were inquired for and discussed, though the time had not yet come for the serious study of the language. There was also a very marked change in the feelings, the aspirations, and the power of painters and sculptors. Giotto had done his work and had been dead nearly a century, and Simone Martini as long: Niccolò Pisano had been dead so long that his influence was felt chiefly in the work of his son Giovanni who also had died a century before our present enquiry begins: Orcagna, architect as well as painter and sculptor, had opposed in the spirit of Italian tradition the influence of the Northern school of Gothic art, and had left behind him when he died, about 1380, the admirable portico in Florence known as that of the Lancers. (See Plate XLII.) Each of these men had done what he could to lead the direction of artists’ thought away from the non-national Gothic style. As sculptor and as painter, each of these artists had much to aid him in the ruins of antiquity. Had there been only the sarcophagi and other portable relief-sculptures they would have had material enough to begin their work in the direction of a higher realism, a more perfect study of the human body, a more refined casting of drapery, a more severe style of composition, than previous centuries had allowed. The classical feeling had taken possession of the painters and the sculptors: Paolo Ucelli, Castagno, Gentile, Masolino, and most of all the great Masaccio, were at work: and as for sculpture, Lorenzo Ghiberti was forty years old and Donatello thirty-four, and the modern arts of form had taken shape. The sculptors and the painters had been encouraged in their ambitions by the works of Greco-Roman art about them: but monuments of ancient architecture were so much defaced, even in the fifteenth century, that it required a very different lesson before their significance could be learned, and this lesson, this strong teaching, was to be given through scholarship rather than through the observation of the artist. It was not until ancient literature had been well studied for half a century that an enthusiastic young builder, Fillipo Brunellesco, undertook to study the Roman ways of vaulting and went for that purpose to Rome as the place where the greater number of important classical buildings remained, or perhaps as the place where stood the always famous Pantheon. (See Chapter II.) It was 1430 before the first building was begun in which an attempt was made to use the classical orders in wholly new work. This was the Chapel of the Pazzi, attached to the church of Santa Croce, in Florence, and the exterior of this is shown in Plate XLIII as far as it is possible to obtain an intelligible photograph of its more important parts. It is a small thing; but assuredly it is marvellous to see, because of the boldness required on the part of its designer. If we try to imagine the habit of mind of a man who had never seen anything built in Greco-Roman orders in any form, or designed in the Greco-Roman spirit, who knew buildings of classical design only as fragmentary ruins and who himself had carried out many designs of his own in a spirit, not Gothic indeed, but assuredly not classic, and who then, at the age of fifty-five, in a time when life was shorter and began earlier than now, undertook and carried out such a composition as this, there will indeed seem cause for surprised admiration. There is a modern Italian feeling in the little rondels which
adorn the frieze above the columns: but these rondels are filled with cherubs and the whole composition may be set down to the Christian ecclesiastic feeling. Again the fifteenth century spirit is seen in the sculpture of the central arch, both on the archivolt[45] and the intrados:[46] but he had no antique example of a decorated arch and as an artist he felt the need of one. There is a mistaken use of ancient forms in the carved flutings of the uppermost frieze, the strigil ornament taken from some sarcophagus; but this also may be condoned in view of the fact that sculptor as he was he dared not undertake architectural carving of would-be classical intent. The coupled pilasters of the upper story are hardly classic; in fact the pilaster in any form is a rarity in external architecture, so far as we know the buildings of Imperial Rome; and this feature was destined to be altogether characteristic of the Neo-classic architecture: but in first introducing it here, Fillipo must have seemed to himself to be doing only what a Roman designer of the second century would have done had he undertaken so small and so refined a design. We are not to forget that it was huge monuments, the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the basilica of Constantine, which the Italian masters had to study when there was question of general dispositions. They had indeed something which we have not in the as yet unspoiled interiors of certain structures on the Palatine Hill and near the Forum: but they can hardly have had many examples of design on a small scale—of the best architectural treatment applied to buildings of very small size. This portico cannot exceed thirty-five feet in total height and its length is not much greater: there cannot have been many jewels of refinement like that left among the ancient ruins of Italy, even in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
So far, the revival in architecture was conducted along lines of common sense, and when the scholar and humanist, Leo Battista Alberti, came to the front as an independent designer of architectural compositions and created the front of the Rucellai Palace, (Plate XLIV) which was begun in 1451, he added the flat pilaster of slight relief to a well-known type of house front. The curious thing about this introduction of the pilasters is that no sooner was it seen than it was disliked, at least in the front of the palazzo, with its round-arched window-heads. The Palazzo Pitti had been begun by Brunellesco himself and without any pilasters at all; then came his rival’s Rucellai front, and thirty years later we are back again at the old standpoint, and the Strozzi Palace (see Plate XLV) and the Medici Palace (afterwards Riccardi) are buildings without these seemingly inappropriate additions. It is surprising to see how much common sense there was among these early lovers of the antique grandeur.
The use of the northern style, the pointed Gothic, with its ribbed vault and its picturesque treatment, ceased altogether in Italy with the first examples of revived classical architecture: but not on that account did the ancient Roman way of building come into favor, nor did the Roman methods of design succeed without a struggle. Plate XLVI shows the courtyard of the Cancellaria in Rome, which can hardly have been built before 1475; and contemporaneous with this are many exquisite porticoes of similar design, porticoes in which the vaulting springs from the capitals of the columns; and the outer ordonnance—the seemly ordering of parts which had become to the Italians of the fifteenth century as important, relatively, as it had been to their ancestors eleven centuries before, very unlike the ordonnance of those ancestors. Only on the rarest occasions did the Roman architects of the classic period build in this way, with the arches springing from the capitals directly. The complete Roman Order is indeed seen side by side with this modern type. Plate XLVIII shows the interior court of the Palazzo di Venezia in