Rome, the date of which is always given as 1460, and here is the Roman Order indeed! Here is the complete reproduction of that most singular system of design according to which the engaged column, known to be a mere ornament or with a constructional utility limited to this slight thickening of the pier at that point, is made to look like the chief supporting member; while the arch which really does the work is treated as a subordinate filling of the panel between. This curious device, invented when the Romans of the Empire wished to build freely and yet to design as the Greeks designed, brought up again by their imitators in the fifteenth century and never abandoned since, has so passed into our modern life that we neither know nor see its inconsistency. A designer who might have a strong sense for the constructional in his work would find it impossible to reproduce this motive: on the other hand, those many designers who are sincerely enamored of the traditions of the schools accept it as one of the necessary features of great and dignified classical architecture. It is curious to compare with the examples just given that shown in Plate XLVII, in which the ground story arcade is classical Roman, except that a very shallow pilaster is substituted for the engaged column and in this way becomes a confessed ornament, while there is no definite archivolt furnished the arches between, so that the pilaster remains the single decoration of this story; while above, the most realistic method possible has been followed. Except for that odd little doubling of the consoles above the larger piers, this upper story is as logical and obvious as if it had been built in France in the thirteenth century. The lintel-course, resting alternately upon these larger piers with their pilaster-like treatment, and upon the small and slender columns of completely Renaissance design, carries in its turn the roof timbers and the gutter in front of them, and that is all. There is absolutely no pretense about it; no affectation of being that which it is not; and the combination of the two stories has

resulted in one of the loveliest pieces of composition in Italy. The date of this charming design, the cloister of S. Maria della Pace, may be set as the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fashions change even in neo-classic architecture, and when the Palazzo Borghese was under consideration in the last years of that same great century, the coupled column was in use as a favorite device. Long afterwards it appeared in Paris, adorning the famous eastern front of the Louvre; but here, as early as the days when Queen Elizabeth and her nobles were resisting the Spanish Armada, the coupling of the columns, almost unknown in antiquity, and never a device of the Rinascimento, finds itself in complete favor in that which we call the Classicismo.[47] Indeed this portico and loggia, Plate XLIX, has little real classical feeling about it, except the care with which the simpler Order, Tuscan or modified Doric, is kept in the ground story, and the Ionic Order above—the proportions of those columns being also carefully observed. The reader will hardly ignore the coldness of the design, the absence of flavor and freshness which marks it: the designer is so very sure of his methods and so fixed in advance as to his intentions that there is no longer any trace of the Rebirth left. If we cross the Alps, we shall find in buildings of this time the Renaissance in its full glory, but the Renaissance in France is nearly a century behind the Rinascimento in Italy.

CHAPTER VII

LATER REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

IN this chapter we must consider an epoch of transition for northern Europe. Chapter VI dealt with the time of change in Italy; but there was only a brief era of transition there, so rapid and direct was the change. The Italians were ready to accept an imitation of classical architecture, in the hope that the real classical architecture would follow. No matter how poor the imitation, how inadequate the study had been, to the Italians it was so natural that architects should study that which they, the Italians, had always considered the best architecture, that they were willing to forgive mistakes. In the North things were as different as possible. The mighty Gothic school was as vigorous and full of energy as it had been at any time since the middle of the thirteenth century, that is to say, since the day of its first brilliant culmination: and every one, every mason, every carpenter, every bishop or abbot, every noble or great officer, knew what a building or a detail ought to be without asking the opinion of any student of the Roman past. The North, generally, was as reluctant to admit the importance of any such studies as the South was ready to insist upon them. So it was that only the bodily transportation of the court for many months from France to central Italy, and this at a time when the Risorgimento in architecture was at its most glorious height, could suffice to turn the nobles of the court to care for the stately methods of design introduced by the modern students of antiquity. It was in 1494 that Charles VIII started for Rome: for five years from that time the nobles of his court saw much more of Italy than they did of their own country. They came back little by little, after the accession of Louis XII, full of the glories that they had seen. To them it was evident that the Italian palace with its grandiose staircase, its stately ordonnance of windows on the front, its dignity, its rather cold reserve, was more worthy of a prince than the more homely and natural buildings they had left behind them in France—buildings which were of the same style and spirit as the village churches, and of the houses even of the less wealthy citizens.

And yet there is a living proof of the difficulty which even at this late date the classical styles had to establish themselves in France. Plate L shows that wing of the château at Blois which was built about 1500 and which is called the wing of Louis XII. Plate LI shows the adjoining stretch of building, that which was built about 1525 and which is known by the name of François I. In the earlier wing shown in Plate L, although the Italian war had been going on for years before a stone of it was laid or cut, there are no signs of any study whatever of classical details. The building is what it would have been had there been no invasion of Italy by the preceding king—had no French nobleman dreamed of bringing home Italian workmen and Italian ideas. The pointed arch is pushed to one side and replaced by the three-centred arch and by the lintel, but altogether from reasons of convenience, and without the slightest thought of pleasing thereby the students of antiquity. The high and steeply pitched roof remains, the simple and obvious fenestration with openings put where they are needed, and only a secondary reference to delicacies of proportion; the uneven lengths of the quoins and chaînes[48] of the window jambs, the traceried parapet and sunken panels, and even the foliated sculpture, all is of the middle ages; nor is there anywhere a pilaster, a classical column, or the suggestion of an entablature.

So in the building of the next reign, that of Francis I, shown in part in Plate LI, the progress of study towards antiquity is visible. Here there are pilasters but such as a Roman of the empire would have thought very odd ones, and, in a way, there is an entablature between the second and third row of windows; and so the capitals have a little touch of the Ionic style, at least in the flat wall to the right of the great staircase. But in every respect, in the high roof, the huge and richly ornamented chimneys, the free treatment of the fenestration, the still more free and easy handling of the staircase, with its ramps and openings treated with an obvious eye to spirited effect, and with but little care for classical gravity of proportion, all is still mediæval. The reader will understand that the arches on the left of the staircase, with Roman engaged columns between them and the entablature which they carry, were an addition of the time of Gaston of Orleans, about 1640: all this has been swept away by the restoration under Duban: for the object of that restoration was mainly the putting of these two great divisions of the palace into the state they were in in the reign of Henry III, for instance, when the States General were held in one of its great halls, namely, the one of which a small part is seen on the left in Plate L.

The student, as he approaches either of these interesting buildings, has to remember that the style of the earlier one, Plate L, was compelled to make room for the newer style, as that in its turn was soon out of fashion and was replaced by the more severely classical buildings which are mentioned below. The evolution was not perfect, the growth was not merely natural and inevitable, the style did not ripen, growing slowly from point to point of development, from simpler to richer, from less to greater pitch of complication. It was the constant influx of fresh appeals from Italy and from Italianized travellers, sometimes nobles of the great court, like the Constable of Montmorency, sometimes princes of the church, like the two cardinals of Amboise, and sometimes scholars only, humble students of Greek and Latin,

like Rabelais and La Boétie. The next step was taken by that very Constable of Montmorency, who, being then at the height of his wealth and influence in the State, began the new château of Écouen, after 1540—an early date, but the work was put into the hands of an uncompromising classicist, Jean Bullant. Plate LII shows a part of this château, the flank on the right hand as one enters the great court by the chief gateway. Here the classical orders are more at home, and although the high roof, the monumental chimneys, and the huge and towering dormers are still of the French Renaissance proper, with but little direct Italianate influence, it is easy to see how everywhere in the mouldings, in the larger details, the classical feeling of the architect has had its way. Even his dormer windows, picturesque, and, in a way, mediæval as they are in design, have pilasters and a Doric frieze, all approximated in their proportion to the classical standard. As for the main wall, it only needs a glance at the portico of columns in the middle of it, to see how the proportions of those two orders have swayed the design from end to end. This front, except the two dormers in the middle, which are later, is very nearly of the same date as that building which is shown in Plate LI. But the transition to neo-classic art is much farther advanced. The student will see in these disciplined details, this systematic spacing and shaping, the beginning of that tranquil and rather slow evolution which is seen again in Chapter VIII.

The generally chronological view which we are taking of all these changing styles, is a good help to memory, and through this, to swift and almost instinctive comparison. It helps the student also in his search for causes. In this way it becomes curious to note what the English were doing at the time that the classical Renaissance was thus safely begun in France; with Spain in the lead, Flanders (influenced by Spain) alongside, Germany only a little behind. The English were building the Tudor and Elizabethan country houses. Those built of timber with filling of masonry between the timbers belong to an old system of construction once as common in the northwestern parts of the Continent as in England: but those of more pretension have generally some slight invasion of forms derived from Italy mingled with the Tudor or semi-Gothic design. Thus Wollaton Hall, of which the principal front is shown in Plate LII, dates from a time later than Écouen, but it is a long way from the classic feeling shown in that stately edifice. We are not to compare it with any classical standard; we have to consider it abstractly, to note its merits as an exterior, expressing the use of the building and its character as a residence, and a certain abstract charm, as of propriety, which invests it. The huge windows are a mark of the time; they express the joy which all the more intelligent classes were feeling at the new cheapness and accessibility of glass: and it is noticeable how well the difficulty is met, how much more useful are the pilasters here than when we found them in Florence. (See Chapter VI.) The great building is not left a mere lantern: the opening up of the walls is almost as successful as we found it in the Gothic churches. (See Chapter IV.)

As noted above, the English cared less for vaulted roofs than did the people of the Continent. They developed a splendid system of decorative timbered construction, of which the finest mediæval example is the roof of Westminster Hall. Nearly two hundred years later than that splendid roof is the almost equally fine piece of timber work which covers Middle-Temple Hall, Plate LIII. This Hall shows us also the finest possible screen of Jacobean architecture. These screens were used when the plans of buildings were simple, when the great Hall of a country-house or a college or the building of a company of merchants filled the whole of the pavilion devoted to it, occupying all the space under its roof and within its four walls. To make a vestibule of entrance for protection against the cold and against undue publicity, the screens were built athwart one end of the interior space: and their

upper stories formed galleries of communication between the smaller buildings to left and right. We are to consider this room then as the meeting-room and dining-room of a great number of companions and associates whose semi-privacy would not be invaded too seriously by the coming and going behind the screen. So much for the fitness of the building for its purposes: as to other considerations, the vigor of design, both in constructive and purely decorative members, hardly needs demonstration.

In Italy, the changes between 1550 and the close of the seventeenth century are to be found generally in the way of increasing formality and a declining sense of the beautiful and the fit. And yet throughout this decline, there is seen the Italian feeling for composition. The Italians, though never a great building people—never originators in building—have always, since antiquity, known how to make fine designs—how to work with but little detail, how to handle that little with good effect, how to avoid solecism.

In this connection it will be well to study the Frontispiece. The great church of San Pietro in Vaticano was begun very early in the sixteenth century, to replace a very early basilica. Bramante (Donato d’Agnolo: called also Donato Lazzari; d. 1514) one of the most renowned of architects, made designs for it. He worked out the plan again and again in many forms; and achieved so much actual success that the great piers intended to carry the cupola and the pendentives above them were nearly completed, and the principal apse—that of the western end (for in this church the orientation is reversed)—was vaulted during his lifetime. After that time there were seemingly endless delays, unceasing controversy, never-ending changes; but the model of the cupola was completed by Michelangelo Buonarroti, and the cupola itself carried up as far as the top of the great drum below the rounded shell before the death of that great artist in 1564. Michelangelo, then, must have seen the church, in his imagination, almost exactly as it is shown in the Frontispiece. To any one who approaches the church from the city, crossing the bridge of Sant’ Angelo and walking up the Borgo to the Piazza San Pietro, the aspect of the building is altogether different; for the late additions, the unfortunate entrance-front, and the still more unfortunate long nave, mar the effect; the first by its absolute inferiority as a design, the second by its concealment of the cupola which, on that side, can only be seen when you are at least a mile and a half distant and halfway up the slopes of the Pincian Hill.

It has seemed worth while to insert this little bit of history, because such considerations of chance and change or such balancing of the qualities of different succeeding designs and their makers are inevitably part of every great and costly building; such a building as strains the resources of a nation or a church—such as takes, and must take, years in its completion. St. Peter’s cannot be judged in a morning nor qualified in a paragraph. There is in it the work of the masters of the Risorgimento in its very highest flight, and there is, more visible, the work of the artists of the Decadenza—of the better and the worse men, of the greater and the more ignoble epochs. A building so vast and of such prodigious variety can only be judged as a landscape might be judged; its details taking shape only after hours of patient looking, and that with a practiced eye.

It will generally be admitted that the church as seen in the Frontispiece is far more attractive than it is when seen from the East; also that the great Order of pilasters, 112 feet high, resting upon a basement of eighteen feet, is too colossal even for the “colossal Order”—the separate pilasters showing too much like towers of masonry and requiring a different architectural treatment from that which they received as mere subordinate details; that the design suffers from the absence of the complete group of minor cupolas, of which only two out of the four have been erected; that the great attic is too heavy even for the lower architectural story made up of the colossal order, and this very largely because of the dwarfing of that lower architectural story by the windows of the actual stories within giving the lie to the chief ordonnance, and cutting up that vast and mountainous exterior. All this will be granted generally by most students of European architecture as a whole rather than of one school or one epoch; and those students will also be of one mind as to the dignity of the whole group and as to the beauty of the cupola, drum and shell together, effective without and extremely beautiful when seen from within. Those who regard with an especial love the delicate architectural sculpture of the fifteenth century will find the huge church hard and cold. Those who care for reason and for intelligent growth of design out of building will care for it, while admitting its lack of charm, for it is of thoroughgoing masonry throughout, and what it appears outwardly to be that it really is. As we get to know it we find that the colossal order and the rest of the clumsy adornment within and without are mere excrescences, hardly affecting the massive pile. The cupola is one of the very few in Europe which have no wooden building-out to a metal outer shell: like the Pantheon and Florence cathedral and the smaller dome at Constantinople, it is of solid masonry within and without.

CHAPTER VIII

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN

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

may be grouped in other ways with a nearer and a more distant placing, especially when they are “engaged” or partly built into the solid wall behind them. But however placed and however grouped, they, the columns, are the one decorative feature, the entablature acting in reality as their restraining limit, the needed link between them and the necessary structure. This building is of 1777. Ten years later the clock of the centuries marked that moment of time when architectural out-of-door growth was to stop and architectural transplanting and forcing were to begin. By that time in Paris, the centre of the architectural world for the eighteenth century, they had accumulated a number of very worthy buildings. The famous École Militaire, south of the Champs de Mars, was built about 1760, and the most accessible front of its principal mass has no artistic charm except that obtainable from the even succession of large windows, the well drilled, the exact, the highly organized lay out of a large front. The two admirable buildings on the north side of the Place de la Concorde were built in 1765-70 and these contain the whole style, for they have the great free colonnades of the centre, the engaged columns of the wings, the high basement without any adornment beyond that feeble breaking-up of the surface which we call Rustication, and they have for all external sculpture the feeblest and most insufficient little carved frames of what look like round mirrors hung here and there. These are the two typical buildings of the time and they are typical too of the whole tendency of neo-classic architecture throughout the decadence, a tendency away from variety, away from movement and charm, towards gravity and dignity, but also towards cold uniformity, with nothing to break it except the semi-Roman Order, more or less well understood, more or less graceful in itself but having no real mission to fulfill and therefore not forming part of the organized and perfect whole which we call style in architecture. It has one fitness, however, for a hurried headlong modern civilization, a civilization too busy with its physical development to spend much thought or much energy on the working of pure intelligence. This advantage is that it is so easy to manage. It is very easy to handle for those who can handle it at all. There is needed to make it sightly that good taste which controls the fancy and the memory, and prevents the designer from even recalling those well-known details and architectural effects which will not suit his purpose. Given such good taste, and a certain moderate acquaintance with the books, and designs as good as the best can be made with great speed and with perfect satisfaction to all concerned: nor does the designer need to go beyond the walls of his draughting-room to decide upon all things which are of first-rate importance to his conception.

CHAPTER IX

NINETEENTH CENTURY: IMITATIVE DESIGN

SO far as architectural history is known to us there has never been since the beginning of civilization a condition of art at all resembling that which surrounded the people of the nineteenth century. There have been epochs of deliberate revival, not only the famous one of the fifteenth century in Italy, and the sixteenth century in the North, which we call especially the New Birth (see definitions, Risorgimento, etc.), but also some as important as that one, to the people concerned. There will be always such attempts in every epoch of self-conscious civilization. Under Hadrian, in the second century, A. D., there was a deliberate attempt at reviving the Grecian purity of style. Egyptologists know that traces are plainly to be seen of similar movements 2000 and 3000 B. C. In Byzantine art there has been much conscious restoring of archaic forms and methods. In France, in the reign of Louis XVI, there was a deliberate recall of the world of art back from the too loose and irregular, too fantastical and violent style of the mid-eighteenth century, to a graver and, as it were, purified taste. One peculiarity, however, marks all of these reasoned-out and deliberate, rather than spontaneous, movements: they succeeded, and the ideas embodied in them soon dominated the situation. There have been some abortive attempts at reform: but those which we cite as rebirths succeeded altogether. All the tendencies of the day, good, and not so good, went out towards the revival, and the change was accepted by the whole world of designers. Nor is it hard to see sufficient reasons for this uniform tendency, for this simple development of a new style, however introduced: the designers of the time and their more instructed critics, the connoisseurs or dilettanti of the day, knew nothing very positive nor had even any special idea of any style of the past. There were no photographs and scarcely any books of historical record—no such books at all, indeed, if by historical record is meant an accurate account of the architecture of earlier times. Wealthy and influential men of the later years of Louis XV might have been divided into those who rather liked the fantastical style of the rococo and those who contemned it and would fain have had something more refined. The purists saw in the seventeenth century reproductions of Roman orders a finer taste than their own. That much help from the past they may have got, but the work they did in the course of their reformatory movements shows that they were pursuing a perfectly natural evolution of art with no more conscious guidance from their theories than that which led them towards more and more severe lines—more and more slender parts—more and more constructional methods of design. And as this movement was so natural and easy we never think of it as a rebirth: by that term we mean something much more radical.

When, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, men began to breathe free again in Europe, it became evident to those who observed the tendencies of their own time that there was no restraint of tradition left—at least no restraint which was recognized by more than a small group of men, while another group of men equally intelligent, perhaps, rejected those traditions and set up their own standard. King Ludwig of Bavaria (reigned 1825-48) had studied and travelled before his accession to the crown; he had purchased and brought to Munich the Greek sculptures from the temple at Ægina; he had seen the buildings of the Italian Renaissance and admired them; he was a comparatively unprejudiced dilettante with a liking for many styles, a sympathy for many forms of artistic thought. He and his architects started in his capital, Munich, the Ludwigskirche (Church of St. Louis) only a dozen years after Napoleon’s final dethronement, and the royal Library a few years later—each of these being in a kind of Southern Romanesque style without columned porticoes or other attempts at classicism. The Allerheiligenhofkirche (Court Church of All Saints) is of the same character of design with a somewhat more frank observance of Italian models. The Old Pinakothek was begun in 1826, contemporaneously with the Ludwigskirche, or nearly so, but this building is a careful study of the Italian Renaissance. The southern front of the Royal Palace, the Königsbau, is again of the same year as to its commencement, and this also is studied from Florentine fifteenth century palazzi. The north front of the Post Office, directly opposite the Königsbau, has a Florentine loggia of thirteen arches—fifteenth century style, not badly carried out. The Glyptothek is the earliest of all: it was begun before Ludwig’s accession, and almost immediately after the restoration of peace to Europe, and the outside of this was meant to be as Greek as it was possible for a modern designer to make a building. Within, it had indeed to resort to the non-Greek device of vaulting, to cover its large halls: but it was still of Grecian taste in its details. The Valhalla, by which term the King designated a Temple of Honor built on a noble hill by the Danube, above Ratisbon, is of the same epoch and of the same deliberately Hellenic character of design; a really fine exterior, studied closely from a Doric Temple of the best period. Another such temple of honor stands at the southeastern edge of the new town of Munich, the Ruhmeshalle (Hall of Fame), begun in 1843, and as completely Greek as the two others. The basilica of St. Boniface was begun in 1835 and is a most faithful study of the later basilicas of the pure Latin style, that is to say, a basilica of the sixth or the seventh century. To complete the circle of the styles from the fifth century B. C. to the sixteenth century A. D., and to cover all the important styles which mark the circuit of those two thousand years, there was built in the Au suburb a Gothic church as completely in the fourteenth century spirit as the intelligence of the builder would enable him to make it. Roman imperial art was not represented, for the scholars had hardly begun to differentiate it from the pure Greek: and for some such reason, probably because the Germans have always been inclined to use the term “Byzantine” for all round-arched mediæval work, the King’s advisers made no attempt at a piece of rugged northern Romanesque: but all the other epoch-making styles of Europe were included in the enlarged capital city.

All of these imitations are as careful as possible. If in any detail the style imitated has been abandoned, even for a moment, it has been with a feeling of “needs must”; no pains have been spared to keep close to the ancient spirit. The interior is what is fine in the basilica of St. Boniface and it is a favorable way of regarding this epoch of copying to take this building as our example, because the construction and the system of design are so very simple, so easy to grasp and to imitate, that nothing more than a delicate care for details and the power of reproducing them is needed. The mosaics and the paintings of the interior are indeed not equal to those of a great Roman basilica, either in its original state or as it has come down to us; the painters and designers of the time were not competent to reproduce those; a critical judge would say that the carving of the marble capitals lacked something of initiative—something of energy; the general effect of color of the interior, though far from unpleasing, though even agreeable to the visitor, may be thought much less noble than that of a fine Italian church. And yet this is one of the most attractive interiors in Europe, and one may visit it many times during a season and like it better all the time. It is to be heartily enjoyed, and yet when there is a question of its artistic merit as a design, the favorable comment is much less unreserved. For what have we to admire? Only sympathy in observing, and fidelity in reproducing, monuments of the past. Do we feel as we speak the word “only” that such sympathy and such fidelity are so rare that they deserve very hearty recognition? That may be, and yet the praise given to the architectural effort may be not great. It is not by sympathy and fidelity alone that great designs are made.

Let it be admitted that if the architects of all Europe had been so delighted by this, or by some similar undertaking, as to begin to work, altogether, in the Latin style—to build all their churches in that style and to study the problem of designing civic buildings, and dwellings also, to correspond—a new style and a worthy one might have originated. Let that be admitted: the failure of the nineteenth century has been in the absence of any such unanimity. No great body of architects has ever agreed on what was to be done. There has always been a competing school, a rival school, sometimes several of them, armed with reasoning and enthusiasm as strong as that of the school in question and prepared to beat down its feeble growth.

Or let us take the Glyptothek, a composition as completely Greek as the feeling and the perception of the day enabled the architect to make it; are we to take the shafts without flutings, which seem to be called for, as so many violations of Greek verity? In all Grecian art, moreover, there are no round-headed niches, that is to say, niches covered by semi-domes, because there are no arches therein. There are no frontispieces made up of an entablature, a pediment and two pilasters, used for mere ornament and surrounding a round-topped opening. There are no entablatures constructed with flat arches which replace, or, as in this case, relieve a flat lintel composing the epistyle. None of those things are Greek: and yet it is clear that Klenze meant to be as Greek as Ictinos. Let us compare with that front the façade which immediately confronts it from the south side of the broad Königsplatz, the Exhibition building, finished about 1840. (See Plate LVI.) Here is a building which is more purely classic than the Glyptothek in almost every respect, Roman rather than Greek in its proportions, in the free use of the Corinthian column, very elaborately worked, in the free use of pilasters with sculptured capitals, in the employment of carved modillions: and yet it is more truly Greek in its mouldings, which are studied with extreme care, and in the absence from it of such violations of archæological accuracy as those already mentioned with regard to the Glyptothek. It would be thought by many to be a finer design, attracting less attention merely because not the home of a very important collection of classical sculpture, and a mere shelter for temporary exhibitions of modern art.

The Propylæa (see Plate LVI), also at Munich, is the most nearly Greek of all, for even its use of details not known to us in ancient work, is very careful and marked by perfect feeling for the style. It is, however, only a gateway of honor: and in that capacity it has been easy to treat. The designer, Klenze, deserves credit for not having copied some one of the ancient gateways more closely, so as to avoid responsibility.

It is impossible to escape from this method of criticism. You cannot judge of these nineteenth century buildings without asking whether they are or are not faithful copies of some structure of the sixth century, A. D., or the fifth century B. C., or of whatever epoch of the past. Those who deprecate the unfavorable character of the general criticism which is based upon regret for this ceaseless copying, tell us constantly that the artists of the great times copied also, that they were always studying the buildings already erected and trying to improve upon them. That is true; but the buildings they copied, with alterations, with improvements, with enlargements, with refinements, with natural striving for growth, were the buildings of their own time, called forth by the same necessity which controlled them, fitted for the same community, based upon the same well understood method of construction. The familiar comparison and lesson drawn from the modern art of the shipbuilder (for instance) illustrates this. The skilled shipbuilder whittles out his model with an eye on the past and on the present, and he proposes to modify the lines of his own latest partial success or of his rival’s endeavor in such a way as to give his new hull more speed, more carrying capacity, more stiffness—whatever may be his immediate object. He never goes back to the ships of the time of Queen Elizabeth with a deliberate intention of building an Elizabethan hull and sparring it and rigging it in an Elizabethan way. No matter now about the causes of this difference; the fact remains, and we are face to face with this curious condition of things, that whereas every important change in building, in the past, has been accompanied by a change in the methods of design, so that even in the times of avowed revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth century and in what we have seen of the twentieth century our great new systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and great springing arches outside of a structure of thin, light, scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal—the appearance of a solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.

The mediæval styles, that is to say, Romanesque in all its forms and Gothic of all epochs, have been copied in the nineteenth century with an accuracy even greater than that used for the classical and neo-classic styles. In all such reproductions the standard of criticism must be the same. Plate LVII shows the great church at Doncaster in Yorkshire, a building erected with singular care and forethought and at great expense, with the deliberate purpose of imitating what is often called the “decorated” style of English Gothic. The architect, and his principal adviser, a gentlemen who had given much thought and pains to the study of English Gothic, agreed that the perpendicular style, of the years from 1350 on, had been allowed too great an influence in the Gothic revival of the time (about 1860) and chose the work of the first half of the fourteenth century as their prototype. To this style they were faithful. It is nearly true to say that an imitation so close as to be deceptive would have been the greatest success, in the opinion of the designer and his employers. The main exception to this statement—the main difference avowedly preserved between the modern and an accurate transfer or cast of an ancient building is to be found in the sculpture of the capitals in which a modern realistic study of natural plant forms is evident; and in like manner the design of the font in the near foreground which is not like any old English font, but is an abstract design showing much study of old English metal work, silver altar vessels and the like. Plate LVII also shows the exterior of this interesting building which is very large for an English parish church, the tower being one hundred and seventy