The Stones of Venice, Volume 1 (of 3)
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Title: The Stones of Venice, Volume 1 (of 3)
Author: John Ruskin
Release date: December 27, 2009 [eBook #30754]
Language: English
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The Complete Works of John Ruskin
Volume VII
STONES OF VENICE
VOLUME I
[Illustration: VENICE.
FROM A PAINTING BY
J. M. W. TURNER.]
Library Edition
The Complete Works of John Ruskin
STONES OF VENICE
VOLUMES I-II
National Library Association
New York Chicago
THE
STONES OF VENICE
VOLUME I.
THE FOUNDATIONS
PREFACE.
In the course of arranging the following essay, I put many things aside
in my thoughts to be said in the Preface, things which I shall now put
aside altogether, and pass by; for when a book has been advertised a
year and a half, it seems best to present it with as little preface as
possible.
Thus much, however, it is necessary for the reader to know, that, when I
planned the work, I had materials by me, collected at different times of
sojourn in Venice during the last seventeen years, which it seemed to me
might be arranged with little difficulty, and which I believe to be of
value as illustrating the history of Southern Gothic. Requiring,
however, some clearer assurance respecting certain points of chronology,
I went to Venice finally in the autumn of 1849, not doubting but that
the dates of the principal edifices of the ancient city were either
ascertained, or ascertainable without extraordinary research. To my
consternation, I found that the Venetian antiquaries were not agreed
within a century as to the date of the building of the façades of the
Ducal Palace, and that nothing was known of any other civil edifice of
the early city, except that at some time or other it had been fitted up
for somebody's reception, and been thereupon fresh painted. Every date
in question was determinable only by internal evidence, and it became
necessary for me to examine not only every one of the older palaces,
stone by stone, but every fragment throughout the city which afforded
any clue to the formation of its styles. This I did as well as I could,
and I believe there will be found, in the following pages, the only
existing account of the details of early Venetian architecture on which
dependence can be placed, as far as it goes. I do not care to point out
the deficiencies of other works on this subject; the reader will find,
if he examines them, either that the buildings to which I shall
specially direct his attention have been hitherto undescribed, or else
that there are great discrepancies between previous descriptions and
mine: for which discrepancies I may be permitted to give this single and
sufficient reason, that my account of every building is based on
personal examination and measurement of it, and that my taking the pains
so to examine what I had to describe, was a subject of grave surprise to
my Italian friends. The work of the Marchese Selvatico is, however, to
be distinguished with respect; it is clear in arrangement, and full of
useful, though vague, information; and I have found cause to adopt, in
great measure, its views of the chronological succession of the edifices
of Venice. I shall have cause hereafter to quarrel with it on other
grounds, but not without expression of gratitude for the assistance it
has given me. Fontana's "Fabbriche di Venezia" is also historically
valuable, but does not attempt to give architectural detail. Cicognara,
as is now generally known, is so inaccurate as hardly to deserve
mention.
Indeed, it is not easy to be accurate in an account of anything, however
simple. Zoologists often disagree in their descriptions of the curve of
a shell, or the plumage of a bird, though they may lay their specimen on
the table, and examine it at their leisure; how much greater becomes the
likelihood of error in the description of things which must be in many
parts observed from a distance, or under unfavorable circumstances of
light and shade; and of which many of the distinctive features have been
worn away by time. I believe few people have any idea of the cost of
truth in these things; of the expenditure of time necessary to make sure
of the simplest facts, and of the strange way in which separate
observations will sometimes falsify each other, incapable of
reconcilement, owing to some imperceptible inadvertency. I am ashamed of
the number of times in which I have had to say, in the following pages,
"I am not sure," and I claim for them no authority, as if they were
thoroughly sifted from error, even in what they more confidently state.
Only, as far as my time, and strength, and mind served me, I have
endeavored down to the smallest matters, to ascertain and speak the
truth.
Nor was the subject without many and most discouraging difficulties,
peculiar to itself. As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a
building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not
sustained essential change in one or more of its most important
features. By far the greater number present examples of three or four
different styles, it may be successive, it may be accidentally
associated; and, in many instances, the restorations or additions have
gradually replaced the entire structure of the ancient fabric, of which
nothing but the name remains, together with a kind of identity,
exhibited in the anomalous association of the modernized portions: the
Will of the old building asserted through them all, stubbornly, though
vainly, expressive; superseded by codicils, and falsified by
misinterpretation; yet animating what would otherwise be a mere group of
fantastic masque, as embarrassing to the antiquary, as to the
mineralogist, the epigene crystal, formed by materials of one substance
modelled on the perished crystals of another. The church of St. Mark's
itself, harmonious as its structure may at first sight appear, is an
epitome of the changes of Venetian architecture from the tenth to the
nineteenth century. Its crypt, and the line of low arches which support
the screen, are apparently the earliest portions; the lower stories of
the main fabric are of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with later
Gothic interpolations; the pinnacles are of the earliest fully developed
Venetian Gothic (fourteenth century); but one of them, that on the
projection at the eastern extremity of the Piazzetta de Leoni, is of far
finer, and probably earlier workmanship than all the rest. The southern
range of pinnacles is again inferior to the northern and western, and
visibly of later date. Then the screen, which most writers have
described as part of the original fabric, bears its date inscribed on
its architrave, 1394, and with it are associated a multitude of small
screens, balustrades, decorations of the interior building, and probably
the rose window of the south transept. Then come the interpolated
traceries of the front and sides; then the crocketings of the upper
arches, extravagances of the incipient Renaissance: and, finally, the
figures which carry the waterspouts on the north side--utterly barbarous
seventeenth or eighteenth century work--connect the whole with the
plastered restorations of the year 1844 and 1845. Most of the palaces in
Venice have sustained interpolations hardly less numerous; and those of
the Ducal Palace are so intricate, that a year's labor would probably be
insufficient altogether to disentangle and define them. I therefore gave
up all thoughts of obtaining a perfectly clear chronological view of the
early architecture; but the dates necessary to the main purposes of the
book the reader will find well established; and of the evidence brought
forward for those of less importance, he is himself to judge. Doubtful
estimates are never made grounds of argument; and the accuracy of the
account of the buildings themselves, for which alone I pledge myself,
is of course entirely independent of them.
In like manner, as the statements briefly made in the chapters on
construction involve questions so difficult and so general, that I
cannot hope that every expression referring to them will be found free
from error: and as the conclusions to which I have endeavored to lead
the reader are thrown into a form the validity of which depends on that
of each successive step, it might be argued, if fallacy or weakness
could be detected in one of them, that all the subsequent reasonings
were valueless. The reader may be assured, however, that it is not so;
the method of proof used in the following essay being only one out of
many which were in my choice, adopted because it seemed to me the
shortest and simplest, not as being the strongest. In many cases, the
conclusions are those which men of quick feeling would arrive at
instinctively; and I then sought to discover the reasons of what so
strongly recommended itself as truth. Though these reasons could every
one of them, from the beginning to the end of the book, be proved
insufficient, the truth of its conclusions would remain the same. I
should only regret that I had dishonored them by an ill-grounded
defence; and endeavor to repair my error by a better one.
I have not, however, written carelessly; nor should I in any wise have
expressed doubt of the security of the following argument, but that it
is physically impossible for me, being engaged quite as much with
mountains, and clouds, and trees, and criticism of painting, as with
architecture, to verify, as I should desire, the expression of every
sentence bearing upon empirical and technical matters. Life is not long
enough; nor does a day pass by without causing me to feel more bitterly
the impossibility of carrying out to the extent which I should desire,
the separate studies which general criticism continually forces me to
undertake. I can only assure the reader, that he will find the certainty
of every statement I permit myself to make, increase with its
importance; and that, for the security of the final conclusions of the
following essay, as well as for the resolute veracity of its account of
whatever facts have come under my own immediate cognizance, I will
pledge myself to the uttermost.
It was necessary, to the accomplishment of the purpose of the work (of
which account is given in the First Chapter), that I should establish
some canons of judgment, which the general reader should thoroughly
understand, and, if it pleased him, accept, before we took cognizance,
together, of any architecture whatsoever. It has taken me more time and
trouble to do this than I expected; but, if I have succeeded, the thing
done will be of use for many other purposes than that to which it is now
put. The establishment of these canons, which I have called "the
Foundations," and some account of the connection of Venetian
architecture with that of the rest of Europe, have filled the present
volume. The second will, I hope, contain all I have to say about Venice
itself.
It was of course inexpedient to reduce drawings of crowded details to
the size of an octavo volume,--I do not say impossible, but inexpedient;
requiring infinite pains on the part of the engraver, with no result
except farther pains to the beholder. And as, on the other hand, folio
books are not easy reading, I determined to separate the text and the
unreducible plates. I have given, with the principal text, all the
illustrations absolutely necessary to the understanding of it, and, in
the detached work, such additional text as has special reference to the
larger illustrations.
A considerable number of these larger plates were at first intended to
be executed in tinted lithography; but, finding the result
unsatisfactory, I have determined to prepare the principal subjects for
mezzotinting,--a change of method requiring two new drawings to be made
of every subject; one a carefully penned outline for the etcher, and
then a finished drawing upon the etching. This work does not proceed
fast, while I am also occupied with the completion of the text; but the
numbers of it will appear as fast as I can prepare them.
For the illustrations of the body of the work itself, I have used any
kind of engraving which seemed suited to the subjects--line and
mezzotint, on steel, with mixed lithographs and woodcuts, at
considerable loss of uniformity in the appearance of the volume, but, I
hope, with advantage, in rendering the character of the architecture it
describes. And both in the plates and the text I have aimed chiefly at
clear intelligibility; that any one, however little versed in the
subject, might be able to take up the book, and understand what it meant
forthwith. I have utterly failed of my purpose, if I have not made all
the essential parts of the essay intelligible to the least learned, and
easy to the most desultory readers, who are likely to take interest in
the matter at all. There are few passages which even require so much as
an acquaintance with the elements of Euclid, and these may be missed,
without harm to the sense of the rest, by every reader to whom they may
appear mysterious; and the architectural terms necessarily employed
(which are very few) are explained as they occur, or in a note; so that,
though I may often be found trite or tedious, I trust that I shall not
be obscure. I am especially anxious to rid this essay of ambiguity,
because I want to gain the ear of all kinds of persons. Every man has,
at some time of his life, personal interest in architecture. He has
influence on the design of some public building; or he has to buy, or
build, or alter his own house. It signifies less whether the knowledge
of other arts be general or not; men may live without buying pictures or
statues: but, in architecture, all must in some way commit themselves;
they _must_ do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how
to turn it to account. Churches, and shops, and warehouses, and
cottages, and small row, and place, and terrace houses, must be built,
and lived in, however joyless or inconvenient. And it is assuredly
intended that all of us should have knowledge, and act upon our
knowledge, in matters with which we are daily concerned, and not to be
left to the caprice of architects or mercy of contractors. There is not,
indeed, anything in the following essay bearing on the special forms and
needs of modern buildings; but the principles it inculcates are
universal; and they are illustrated from the remains of a city which
should surely be interesting to the men of London, as affording the
richest existing examples of architecture raised by a mercantile
community, for civil uses, and domestic magnificence.
DENMARK HILL, _February_, 1851.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preface, iii
CHAPTER I.
The Quarry, 1
CHAPTER II.
The Virtues of Architecture, 36
CHAPTER III.
The Six Divisions of Architecture, 47
CHAPTER IV.
The Wall Base, 52
CHAPTER V.
The Wall Veil, 58
CHAPTER VI.
The Wall Cornice, 63
CHAPTER VII.
The Pier Base, 71
CHAPTER VIII.
The Shaft, 84
CHAPTER IX.
The Capital, 105
CHAPTER X.
The Arch Line, 122
CHAPTER XI.
The Arch Masonry, 132
CHAPTER XII.
The Arch Load, 144
CHAPTER XIII.
The Roof, 148
CHAPTER XIV.
The Roof Cornice, 155
CHAPTER XV.
The Buttress, 166
CHAPTER XVI.
Form of Aperture, 174
CHAPTER XVII.
Filling of Aperture, 183
CHAPTER XVIII.
Protection of Aperture, 195
CHAPTER XIX.
Superimposition, 200
CHAPTER XX.
The Material of Ornament, 211
CHAPTER XXI.
Treatment of Ornament, 236
CHAPTER XXII.
The Angle, 259
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Edge and Fillet, 267
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Roll and Recess, 276
CHAPTER XXV.
The Base, 281
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Wall Veil and Shaft, 294
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Cornice and Capital, 305
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Archivolt and Aperture, 333
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Roof, 343
CHAPTER XXX.
The Vestibule, 349
* * * * *
APPENDIX.
1. Foundation of Venice, 359
2. Power of the Doges, 360
3. Serrar del Consiglio, 360
4. S. Pietro di Castello, 361
5. Papal Power in Venice, 362
6. Renaissance Ornament, 369
7. Varieties of the Orders, 370
8. The Northern Energy, 371
9. Wooden Churches of the North, 381
10. Church of Alexandria, 381
11. Renaissance Landscape, 381
12. Romanist Modern Art, 384
13. Mr. Fergusson's System, 388
14. Divisions of Humanity, 394
15. Instinctive Judgments, 399
16. Strength of Shafts, 402
17. Answer to Mr. Garbett, 403
18. Early English Capitals, 411
19. Tombs near St. Anastasia, 412
20. Shafts of the Ducal Palace, 413
21. Ancient Representations of Water, 417
22. Arabian Ornamentation, 429
23. Varieties of Chamfer, 429
24. Renaissance Bases, 431
25. Romanist Decoration of Bases, 432
LIST OF PLATES.
Facing Page
Plate 1. Wall Veil Decoration, Ca' Trevisan and Ca' Dario, 13
" 2. Plans of Piers, 100
" 3. Arch Masonry, 134
" 4. Arch Masonry, 137
" 5. Arch Masonry, Bruletto of Como, 141
" 6. Types of Towers, 207
" 7. Abstracts Lines, 222
" 8. Decorations by Disks, Ca' Badoari, 241
" 9. Edge Decoration, 268
" 10. Profiles of Bases, 283
" 11. Plans of Bases, 288
" 12. Decorations of Bases, 289
" 13. Wall Veil Decorations, 295
" 14. Spandril Decorations, Ducal Palace, 298
" 15. Cornice Profiles, 306
" 16. Cornice Decorations, 311
" 17. Capitals--Concave, 323
" 18. Capitals--Convex, 327
" 19. Archivolt Decoration, Verona, 333
" 20. Wall Veil Decoration, Ca' Trevisan, 369
" 21. Wall Veil Decoration, San Michele, Lucca, 378
THE STONES OF VENICE.
CHAPTER I.
THE QUARRY.
§ I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three
thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the
thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers
only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which
inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through
prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.
The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets
of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a
lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for
the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we
forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and
the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."
Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in
endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final
period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so
quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt,
as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which
was the City, and which the Shadow.
I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like
passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.
§ II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which
might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange
and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless
chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred with
brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the
surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which
we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their
results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear
upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that
usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in
the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a
clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian
character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest which the
true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from
the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.
§ III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a
period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days
of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe
examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in
the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part,
to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.
The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from
the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the
Rialto,[1] to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of
Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this
period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six[2] years were passed in a nominal
subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an
agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been
entrusted to tribunes,[3] chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the
principal islands. For six hundred years,[4] during which the power of
Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective
monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much
independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority
gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its
prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable
magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a
king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the
fruits of her former energies, consumed them,--and expired.
§ IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian
state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred,
the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what
was called the "Serrar del Consiglio;" that is to say, the final and
absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the
establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of
the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the
doge on the other.
Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most
interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order
and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and
noblest man whom they could find among them,[5] called their Doge or
Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself
around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an
aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and
wealth of some among the families of the fugitives from the older
Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into
a separate body.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements,
and the circumstances which determined her character and position among
European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated,
we find the names of all her hero princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo
Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
§ V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most
eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418;[6] the _visible_ commencement from that of another
of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who
expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with
pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were
made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace,
significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at
Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first of
the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk: in the same
year was established the Inquisition of State,[7] and from this period
her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it
is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror
to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the league of Cambrai marks
the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the
Venetian power;[8] the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of
the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence
of the diminution of her internal strength.
§ VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the
establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the
diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question
at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or
determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple
question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of
individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the
Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy
itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national
enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of
Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction
of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a
people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long
disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live
nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for
three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their
call was heard.
§ VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at many
periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the
man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king,
sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her:
the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what
powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made
masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress,
impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from
the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into
prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to
sign covenant with Death.[9]
§ VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to be fixed
throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double interest to
every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the evidence
which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both
frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political prosperity
was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion.
I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I
wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all
Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its
deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or
fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to
last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial
interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or
enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,
but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her
conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten;
and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be
reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her
princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in
which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its
devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from
its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement
of her own private interests, at once broke her faith[10] and betrayed
her religion.
§ IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall be
struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual
feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they
could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit
of assigning to religion a direct influence over all _his own_ actions,
and all the affairs of _his own_ daily life, is remarkable in every
great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are
instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches
the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course
where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely
trust that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to
trace any more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of
Alexander III. against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by
the character of their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked
by the insolence of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only
in her hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency
whenever she has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or
when they are sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the
entire subjection of private piety to national policy is not only
remarkable throughout the almost endless series of treacheries and
tyrannies by which her empire was enlarged and maintained, but
symbolised by a very singular circumstance in the building of the city
itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in which its cathedral was
not the principal feature. But the principal church in Venice was the
chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and called the "Chiesa
Ducale." The patriarchal church,[11] inconsiderable in size and mean in
decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its
name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of
travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of
remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal
chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to
the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast
organization of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and
countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the
most wise, of all the princes of Venice,[12] who now rests beneath the
roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by
the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his
tomb.
§ X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we
have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual
religion characterising the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct
even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a
simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which
a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that
religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his
conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy
serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and
a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate
motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this
spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with
its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which
it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to
demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry
presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping
short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence
national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with
several characteristics of the temper of our present English
legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious
interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of
my present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment
of which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be
able to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.
§ XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the policy
of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a Romanist
would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the
magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the
temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid
survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama
to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in
the portico of St. Mark's,[13] the central expression in most men's
thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is
true that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of
her prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service
thus rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years
more than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement
V., which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to
Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the
great tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the
doge or the ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo
blotted out the shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of
ecclesiastics from all share in the councils of Venice became an
enduring mark of her knowledge of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and
of her defiance of it.
To this exclusion of Papal influence from her councils, the Romanist
will attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success.[14]
The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy
of the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects
that the English legislature sacrificed their principles to expose
themselves to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed
theirs to avoid.
§ XII. One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the Venetian
government, the singular unity of the families composing it,--unity far
from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when contrasted with the
fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the restless successions of
families and parties in power, which fill the annals of the other states
of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be ended by the dagger, or
enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of law, could not but be
anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was subjected to so severe a
restraint: it is much that jealousy appears usually unmingled with
illegitimate ambition, and that, for every instance in which private
passion sought its gratification through public danger, there are a
thousand in which it was sacrificed to the public advantage. Venice may
well call upon us to note with reverence, that of all the towers which
are still seen rising like a branchless forest from her islands, there
is but one whose office was other than that of summoning to prayer, and
that one was a watch-tower only: from first to last, while the palaces
of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of
rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the
bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and
her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes
suspended on the leaves of lilies.[15]
§ XIII. These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief general
interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I would next
endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which the
testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the
arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true connexion
with the history of the state.
1st. Receive the witness of Painting.
It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice
as far back as 1418.
Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini,
and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the
sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith
animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of
Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or
sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His
larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial
rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made
subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the
Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connexion
between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who
surround her.
Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and
Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the
school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their
artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own
natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up
in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the
vital religion of Venice had expired.
§ XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward observance
was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted, in
almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St.
Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the
Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the ducal
palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a
curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of
Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye
is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice
was in her wars, not in her worship.
The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of
Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects
which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the
principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute
subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or
portraiture.
The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of
Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century
had taken away the religious heart of Venice.
§ XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of Architecture
will be our task through many a page to come; but I must here give a
general idea of its heads.
Philippe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, says,--
"Chascun me feit seoir au meillieu de ces deux ambassadeurs qui est
l'honneur d'Italie que d'estre au meillieu; et me menerent au long de la
grant rue, qu'ilz appellent le Canal Grant, et est bien large. Les
gallees y passent à travers et y ay ven navire de quatre cens tonneaux
ou plus pres des maisons: et est la plus belle rue que je croy qui soit
en tout le monde, et la mieulx maisonnee, et va le long de la ville. Les
maisons sont fort grandes et haultes, et de bonne pierre, et les
anciennes toutes painctes; les aultres faictes depuis cent ans: toutes
ont le devant de marbre blanc, qui leur vient d'Istrie, à cent mils de
là, et encores maincte grant piece de porphire et de sarpentine sur le
devant.... C'est la plus triumphante cité que j'aye jamais vene et qui
plus faict d'honneur à ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus
saigement se gouverne, et où le service de Dieu est le plus
sollempnellement faict: et encores qu'il y peust bien avoir d'aultres
faultes, si je croy que Dieu les a en ayde pour la reverence qu'ilz
portent au service de l'Eglise."[16]
[Illustration: Plate I. Wall-Veil-Decoration.
CA'TREVISAN
CA'DARIO.]
§ XVI. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons. Observe,
first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of Venice: of
which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with some
glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real life
had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression
instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder
palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have
their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away,
and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their
fronts."
On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces
which so struck the French ambassador.[17] He was right in his notice of
the distinction. There had indeed come a change over Venetian
architecture in the fifteenth century; and a change of some importance
to us moderns: we English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe
in general owes to it the utter degradation or destruction of her
schools of architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may
understand this, it is necessary that he should have some general idea
of the connexion of the architecture of Venice with that of the rest of
Europe, from its origin forwards.
§ XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is derived
from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the East. The
history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the various modes
and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once for all: if you
hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of
successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric
and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque,
massy-capitaled buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you
can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English,
French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the
shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch. The
shaft and arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture, are from
the race of Japheth: the spirituality and sanctity of it from Ismael,
Abraham, and Shem.
§ XVIII. There is high probability that the Greek received his shaft
system from Egypt; but I do not care to keep this earlier derivation in
the mind of the reader. It is only necessary that he should be able to
refer to a fixed point of origin, when the form of the shaft was first
perfected. But it may be incidentally observed, that if the Greeks did
indeed receive their Doric from Egypt, then the three families of the
earth have each contributed their part to its noblest architecture: and
Ham, the servant of the others, furnishes the sustaining or bearing
member, the shaft; Japheth the arch; Shem the spiritualisation of both.
§ XIX. I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the
roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five
orders; but there are only two real orders, and there never can be any
more until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex:
those are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the
other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,
Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional
form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the centre or root of
both. All other orders are varieties of those, or phantasms and
grotesques altogether indefinite in number and species.[18]
§ XX. This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was clumsily
copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they
begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized
upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it; invented a
new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the
Roman empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest at hand,
to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman Christian
architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of the time,
very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many respects
ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of imagination,
which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores of the
Bosphorus and the Ægean and the Adriatic Sea, and then gradually, as the
people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes Corpse-light. The
architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange, gilded, and embalmed
repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so would have remained
for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has been undisturbed.[19]
But rough wakening was ordained for it.
§ XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into two
great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other at
Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque, properly
so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative perfection by
Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But I wish the
reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art together in
his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the same; that is to
say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of the art of old Rome
itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the fountain-head, and
entrusted always to the best workmen who could be found--Latins in Italy
and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may be ranged under the
general term of Christian Romanesque, an architecture which had lost the
refinement of Pagan art in the degradation of the empire, but which was
elevated by Christianity to higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek
workmen endowed with brighter forms. And this art the reader may
conceive as extending in its various branches over all the central
provinces of the empire, taking aspects more or less refined, according
to its proximity to the seats of government; dependent for all its power
on the vigor and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as
that vigor and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking
into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed and
incapable of advance or change.
§ XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in
Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by
inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of
this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;
and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art
was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and
borrowed art was organising itself into strength and consistency. The
reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as
broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately
languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the
imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early
organisation, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely
nominal extent.
§ XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible
of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the
Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated
Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they mingle,
without materially affecting its intellectual character. But others,
both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back to the
beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice creeks of the
North Sea on the other. On the north and west the influence was of the
Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations, pre-eminent
above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind on either
side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected light
gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had done
their work, and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a
glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons, and the
fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over its golden
paralysis.
§ XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the
enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was
to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The
Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.[20] The Arab
banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and
proclaimed from their minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they
came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava
stream: they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and
the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead
water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the
Roman wreck, is VENICE.
The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of
the world.
§ XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between
the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.
§ XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to mark
the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures were
developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the
distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian
Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and
well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;
mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered
with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of
sacred symbols.
The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the
Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly
introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts
and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and
writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,
and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace
it: this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates
it on features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines
of color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the
dome, and adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.
§ XXVII. The changes effected by the Lombard are more curious still, for
they are in the anatomy of the building, more than its decoration. The
Lombard architecture represents, as I said, the whole of that of the
northern barbaric nations. And this I believe was, at first, an
imitation in wood of the Christian Roman churches or basilicas. Without
staying to examine the whole structure of a basilica, the reader will
easily understand thus much of it: that it had a nave and two aisles,
the nave much higher than the aisles; that the nave was separated from
the aisles by rows of shafts, which supported, above, large spaces of
flat or dead wall, rising above the aisles, and forming the upper part
of the nave, now called the clerestory, which had a gabled wooden roof.
These high dead walls were, in Roman work, built of stone; but in the
wooden work of the North, they must necessarily have been made of
horizontal boards or timbers attached to uprights on the top of the nave
pillars, which were themselves also of wood.[21] Now, these uprights
were necessarily thicker than the rest of the timbers, and formed
vertical square pilasters above the nave piers. As Christianity extended
and civilisation increased, these wooden structures were changed into
stone; but they were literally petrified, retaining the form which had
been made necessary by their being of wood. The upright pilaster above
the nave pier remains in the stone edifice, and is the first form of the
great distinctive feature of Northern architecture--the vaulting shaft.
In that form the Lombards brought it into Italy, in the seventh century,
and it remains to this day in St. Ambrogio of Milan, and St. Michele of
Pavia.
§ XXVIII. When the vaulting shaft was introduced in the clerestory
walls, additional members were added for its support to the nave piers.
Perhaps two or three pine trunks, used for a single pillar, gave the
first idea of the grouped shaft. Be that as it may, the arrangement of
the nave pier in the form of a cross accompanies the superimposition of
the vaulting shaft; together with corresponding grouping of minor shafts
in doorways and apertures of windows. Thus, the whole body of the
Northern architecture, represented by that of the Lombards, may be
described as rough but majestic work, round-arched, with grouped shafts,
added vaulting shafts, and endless imagery of active life and fantastic
superstitions.
§ XXIX. The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one of the
Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but
without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of
their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it
ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of
Gothic architecture is the history of the refinement and
spiritualisation of Northern work under its influence. The noblest
buildings of the world, the Pisan-Romanesque, Tuscan (Giottesque)
Gothic, and Veronese Gothic, are those of the Lombard schools
themselves, under its close and direct influence; the various Gothics of
the North are the original forms of the architecture which the Lombards
brought into Italy, changing under the less direct influence of the
Arab.
§ XXX. Understanding thus much of the formation of the great European
styles, we shall have no difficulty in tracing the succession of
architectures in Venice herself. From what I said of the central
character of Venetian art, the reader is not, of course, to conclude
that the Roman, Northern, and Arabian elements met together and
contended for the mastery at the same period. The earliest element was
the pure Christian Roman; but few, if any, remains of this art exist at
Venice; for the present city was in the earliest times only one of many
settlements formed on the chain of marshy islands which extend from the
mouths of the Isonzo to those of the Adige, and it was not until the
beginning of the ninth century that it became the seat of government;
while the cathedral of Torcello, though Christian Roman in general form,
was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and shows evidence of Byzantine
workmanship in many of its details. This cathedral, however, with the
church of Santa Fosca at Torcello, San Giacomo di Rialto at Venice, and
the crypt of St. Mark's, forms a distinct group of buildings, in which
the Byzantine influence is exceedingly slight; and which is probably
very sufficiently representative of the earliest architecture on the
islands.
§ XXXI. The Ducal residence was removed to Venice in 809, and the body
of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria twenty years later. The first
church of St. Mark's was, doubtless, built in imitation of that
destroyed at Alexandria, and from which the relics of the saint had been
obtained. During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the
architecture of Venice seems to have been formed on the same model, and
is almost identical with that of Cairo under the caliphs,[22] it being
quite immaterial whether the reader chooses to call both Byzantine or
both Arabic; the workmen being certainly Byzantine, but forced to the
invention of new forms by their Arabian masters, and bringing these
forms into use in whatever other parts of the world they were employed.
To this first manner of Venetian architecture, together with vestiges as
remain of the Christian Roman, I shall devote the first division of the
following inquiry. The examples remaining of it consist of three noble
churches (those of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part of St.
Mark's), and about ten or twelve fragments of palaces.
§ XXXII. To this style succeeds a transitional one, of a character much
more distinctly Arabian: the shafts become more slender, and the arches
consistently pointed, instead of round; certain other changes, not to be
enumerated in a sentence, taking place in the capitals and mouldings.
This style is almost exclusively secular. It was natural for the
Venetians to imitate the beautiful details of the Arabian
dwelling-house, while they would with reluctance adopt those of the
mosque for Christian churches.
I have not succeeded in fixing limiting dates for this style. It appears
in part contemporary with the Byzantine manner, but outlives it. Its
position is, however, fixed by the central date, 1180, that of the
elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, whose capitals are the
two most important pieces of detail in this transitional style in
Venice. Examples of its application to domestic buildings exist in
almost every street of the city, and will form the subject of the second
division of the following essay.
§ XXXIII. The Venetians were always ready to receive lessons in art from
their enemies (else had there been no Arab work in Venice). But their
especial dread and hatred of the Lombards appears to have long prevented
them from receiving the influence of the art which that people had
introduced on the mainland of Italy. Nevertheless, during the practice
of the two styles above distinguished, a peculiar and very primitive
condition of pointed Gothic had arisen in ecclesiastical architecture.
It appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab forms, which
were attaining perfection upon the continent, and would probably, if
left to itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab school, with
which it had from the first so close a fellowship, that it will be found
difficult to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those which seem to
have been built under this early Gothic influence. The churches of San
Giacopo dell'Orio, San Giovanni in Bragora, the Carmine, and one or two
more, furnish the only important examples of it. But, in the thirteenth
century, the Franciscans and Dominicans introduced from the continent
their morality and their architecture, already a distinct Gothic,
curiously developed from Lombardic and Northern (German?) forms; and the
influence of the principles exhibited in the vast churches of St. Paul
and the Frari began rapidly to affect the Venetian-Arab school. Still
the two systems never became united; the Venetian policy repressed the
power of the church, and the Venetian artists resisted its example; and
thenceforward the architecture of the city becomes divided into
ecclesiastical and civil: the one an ungraceful yet powerful form of the
Western Gothic, common to the whole peninsula, and only showing Venetian
sympathies in the adoption of certain characteristic mouldings; the
other a rich, luxuriant, and entirely original Gothic, formed from the
Venetian-Arab by the influence of the Dominican and Franciscan
architecture, and especially by the engrafting upon the Arab forms of
the most novel feature of the Franciscan work, its traceries. These
various forms of Gothic, the _distinctive_ architecture of Venice,
chiefly represented by the churches of St. John and Paul, the Frari, and
San Stefano, on the ecclesiastical side, and by the Ducal palace, and
the other principal Gothic palaces, on the secular side, will be the
subject of the third division of the essay.
§ XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic) style of
the Venetian work is centralised by the date 1180, and is transformed
gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from the middle
of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century; that is to
say, over the precise period which I have described as the central epoch
of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year 1418; Foscari
became doge five years later, and in his reign the first marked signs
appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe de Commynes
notices as above, the change to which London owes St. Paul's, Rome St.
Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be their
noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of every art she has
since practised.
§ XXXV. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality in
existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps," chap.
ii.) All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted
at once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of
extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a
strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the
mainland into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and
the Cathedral of Como (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian
Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della
Carta and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all
architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked
the state of religion over all Europe,--the peculiar degradation of the
Romanist superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which
brought about the Reformation.
§ XXXVI. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of
adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France
and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its
destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the
heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he
injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one
of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. It
may be a serious question how far the Pausing of the Reformation has
been a consequence of this error.
The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This
rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a
return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for
Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In
Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in
Architecture by Sansovino and Palladio.
§ XXXVII. Instant degradation followed in every direction,--a flood of
folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted
into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of
Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of
men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity,
nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups
upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets
with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused
intellect; the base school of landscape[23] gradually usurps the place
of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,--the
Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of
Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps,
and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation
of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus Christianity and
morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together into
one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in
France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism
from severer penalty) in the time of George II.
§ XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything
towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape
painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is
as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi,
and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no
serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their
works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very
slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor
mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.
Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the
magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by
men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino,
Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its
influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons
are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number
regard it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with
architecture, and have at some time of their lives serious business with
it. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three
hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a
nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous
building. Nor is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which
we have to regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in
it partly the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of
modern times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one
destroying the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our
schools and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass
through them.
Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most
corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre
of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline
the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of
the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in
the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation,
and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude
than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the
grave.
§ XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that effectual
blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy
its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else.
This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay. I
shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader with
successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of the
earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features with
those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and pause, in
the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as I have
made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon two
distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by
particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the
builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be
bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite
in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of
the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may
be immediately useful in fixing in the readers mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.
§ XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above attached
to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The tomb of
that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of the same
general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the period, and it
is one of the last which retains it. The classical element enters
largely into its details, but the feeling of the whole is as yet
unaffected. Like all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is a
sarcophagus with a recumbent figure above, and this figure is a faithful
but tender portrait, wrought as far as it can be without painfulness, of
the doge as he lay in death. He wears his ducal robe and bonnet--his
head is laid slightly aside upon his pillow--his hands are simply
crossed as they fall. The face is emaciated, the features large, but so
pure and lordly in their natural chiselling, that they must have looked
like marble even in their animation. They are deeply worn away by
thought and death; the veins on the temples branched and starting; the
skin gathered in sharp folds; the brow high-arched and shaggy; the
eye-ball magnificently large; the curve of the lips just veiled by the
light mustache at the side; the beard short, double, and sharp-pointed:
all noble and quiet; the white sepulchral dust marking like light the
stern angles of the cheek and brow.
This tomb was sculptured in 1424, and is thus described by one of the
most intelligent of the recent writers who represent the popular feeling
respecting Venetian art.
"Of the Italian school is also the rich but ugly (ricco ma non bel)
sarcophagus in which repose the ashes of Tomaso Mocenigo. It may be
called one of the last links which connect the declining art of the
Middle Ages with that of the Renaissance, which was in its rise. We
will not stay to particularise the defects of each of the seven
figures of the front and sides, which represent the cardinal and
theological virtues; nor will we make any remarks upon those which
stand in the niches above the pavilion, because we consider them
unworthy both of the age and reputation of the Florentine school,
which was then with reason considered the most notable in Italy."[24]
It is well, indeed, not to pause over these defects; but it might have
been better to have paused a moment beside that noble image of a king's
mortality.
§ XLI. In the choir of the same church, St. Giov. and Paolo, is another
tomb, that of the Doge Andrea Vendramin. This doge died in 1478, after a
short reign of two years, the most disastrous in the annals of Venice.
He died of a pestilence which followed the ravage of the Turks, carried
to the shores of the lagoons. He died, leaving Venice disgraced by sea
and land, with the smoke of hostile devastation rising in the blue
distances of Friuli; and there was raised to him the most costly tomb
ever bestowed on her monarchs.
§ XLII. If the writer above quoted was cold beside the statue of one of
the fathers of his country, he atones for it by his eloquence beside the
tomb of the Vendramin. I must not spoil the force of Italian superlative
by translation.
"Quando si guarda a quella corretta eleganza di profili e di
proporzioni, a quella squisitezza d'ornamenti, a quel certo sapore
antico che senza ombra d'imitazione traspare da tutta l'opera"--&c.
"Sopra ornatissimo zoccolo fornito di squisiti intagli s'alza uno
stylobate"--&c. "Sotto le colonne, il predetto stilobate si muta
leggiadramente in piedistallo, poi con bella novità di pensiero e di
effetto va coronato da un fregio il più gentile che veder si
possa"--&c. "Non puossi lasciar senza un cenno l'_arca dove_ sta
chiuso il doge; capo lavoro di pensiero e di esecuzione," &c.
There are two pages and a half of closely printed praise, of which the
above specimens may suffice; but there is not a word of the statue of the
dead from beginning to end. I am myself in the habit of considering this
rather an important part of a tomb, and I was especially interested in it
here, because Selvatico only echoes the praise of thousands. It is
unanimously declared the chef d'oeuvre of Renaissance sepulchral work,
and pronounced by Cicognara (also quoted by Selvatico)
"Il vertice a cui l'arti Veneziane si spinsero col ministero del
scalpello,"--"The very culminating point to which the Venetian arts
attained by ministry of the chisel."
To this culminating point, therefore, covered with dust and cobwebs, I
attained, as I did to every tomb of importance in Venice, by the
ministry of such ancient ladders as were to be found in the sacristan's
keeping. I was struck at first by the excessive awkwardness and want of
feeling in the fall of the hand towards the spectator, for it is thrown
off the middle of the body in order to show its fine cutting. Now the
Mocenigo hand, severe and even stiff in its articulations, has its veins
finely drawn, its sculptor having justly felt that the delicacy of the
veining expresses alike dignity and age and birth. The Vendramin hand is
far more laboriously cut, but its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes
us feel that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for
it has been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the
joints. Such as the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought
it had been broken off, but, on clearing away the dust, I saw the
wretched effigy had only _one_ hand, and was a mere block on the inner
side. The face, heavy and disagreeable in its features, is made
monstrous by its semi-sculpture. One side of the forehead is wrinkled
elaborately, the other left smooth; one side only of the doge's cap is
chased; one cheek only is finished, and the other blocked out and
distorted besides; finally, the ermine robe, which is elaborately
imitated to its utmost lock of hair and of ground hair on the one side,
is blocked out only on the other: it having been supposed throughout the
work that the effigy was only to be seen from below, and from one side.
§ XLIII. It was indeed to be so seen by nearly every one; and I do not
blame--I should, on the contrary, have praised--the sculptor for
regulating his treatment of it by its position; if that treatment had
not involved, first, dishonesty, in giving only half a face, a
monstrous mask, when we demanded true portraiture of the dead; and,
secondly, such utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an
extreme of intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his
breast, could have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old
man's countenance--unmajestic once, indeed, but at least sanctified by
the solemnities of death--could have stayed his hand, as he reached the
bend of the grey forehead, and measured out the last veins of it at so
much the zecchin?
I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much
talent should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this
base and senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation
of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a
pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called
chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling
on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea
by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.
But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This
lying monument to a dishonored doge, this culminating pride of the
Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in
its testimony to the character of its sculptor. _He was banished from
Venice for forgery_ in 1487.[25]
§ XLIV. I have more to say about this convict's work hereafter; but I
pass at present, to the second, slighter, but yet more interesting piece
of evidence, which I promised.
The ducal palace has two principal façades; one towards the sea, the
other towards the Piazzetta. The seaward side, and, as far as the
seventh main arch inclusive, the Piazzetta side, is work of the early
part of the fourteenth century, some of it perhaps even earlier; while
the rest of the Piazzetta side is of the fifteenth. The difference in
age has been gravely disputed by the Venetian antiquaries, who have
examined many documents on the subject, and quoted some which they never
examined. I have myself collated most of the written documents, and one
document more, to which the Venetian antiquaries never thought of
referring,--the masonry of the palace itself.
§ XLV. That masonry changes at the centre of the eighth arch from the
sea angle on the Piazzetta side. It has been of comparatively small
stones up to that point; the fifteenth century work instantly begins
with larger stones, "brought from Istria, a hundred miles away."[26] The
ninth shaft from the sea in the lower arcade, and the seventeenth, which
is above it, in the upper arcade, commence the series of fifteenth
century shafts. These two are somewhat thicker than the others, and
carry the party-wall of the Sala del Scrutinio. Now observe, reader. The
face of the palace, from this point to the Porta della Carta, was built
at the instance of that noble Doge Mocenigo beside whose tomb you have
been standing; at his instance, and in the beginning of the reign of his
successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This is not disputed; it
is only disputed that the sea façade is earlier; of which, however, the
proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the
masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that
in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the
costumes of the figures introduced in the sea façade being purely
Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena Chapel at
Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is Renaissance-Classic:
and the lions' heads between the arches change at the same point. And
there are a multitude of other evidences in the statues of the angels,
with which I shall not at present trouble the reader.
§ XLVI. Now, the architect who built under Foscari, in 1424 (remember my
date for the decline of Venice, 1418), was obliged to follow the
principal forms of the older palace. But he had not the wit to invent
new capitals in the same style; he therefore clumsily copied the old
ones. The palace has seventeen main arches on the sea façade, eighteen
on the Piazzetta side, which in all are of course carried by thirty-six
pillars; and these pillars I shall always number from right to left,
from the angle of the palace at the Ponte della Paglia to that next the
Porta della Carta. I number them in this succession, because I thus have
the earliest shafts first numbered. So counted, the 1st, the 18th, and
the 36th, are the great supports of the angles of the palace; and the
first of the fifteenth century series, being, as above stated, the 9th
from the sea on the Piazzetta side, is the 26th of the entire series,
and will always in future be so numbered, so that all numbers above
twenty-six indicate fifteenth century work, and all below it, fourteenth
century, with some exceptional cases of restoration.
Then the copied capitals are: the 28th, copied from the 7th; the 29th,
from the 9th; the 30th, from the 10th; the 31st, from the 8th; the 33rd,
from the 12th; and the 34th, from the 11th; the others being dull
inventions of the 15th century, except the 36th, which is very nobly
designed.
§ XLVII. The capitals thus selected from the earlier portion of the
palace for imitation, together with the rest, will be accurately
described hereafter; the point I have here to notice is in the copy of
the ninth capital, which was decorated (being, like the rest, octagonal)
with figures of the eight Virtues:--Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice,
Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it
Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are
somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain
every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples
(perhaps loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his
arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears
open a lion's jaws; Faith lays her hand on her breast, as she beholds
the Cross; and Hope is praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging
from sunbeams--the hand of God (according to that of Revelations, "The
Lord God giveth them light"); and the inscription above is, "Spes optima
in Deo."
§ XLVIII. This design, then, is, rudely and with imperfect chiselling,
imitated by the fifteenth century workmen: the Virtues have lost their
hard features and living expression; they have now all got Roman noses,
and have had their hair curled. Their actions and emblems are, however,
preserved until we come to Hope: she is still praying, but she is
praying to the sun only: _The hand of God is gone._
Is not this a curious and striking type of the spirit which had then
become dominant in the world, forgetting to see God's hand in the light
He gave; so that in the issue, when that light opened into the
Reformation, on the one side, and into full knowledge of ancient
literature on the other, the one was arrested and the other perverted?
§ XLIX. Such is the nature of the accidental evidence on which I shall
depend for the proof of the inferiority of character in the Renaissance
workmen. But the proof of the inferiority of the work itself is not so
easy, for in this I have to appeal to judgments which the Renaissance
work has itself distorted. I felt this difficulty very forcibly as I
read a slight review of my former work, "The Seven Lamps," in "The
Architect:" the writer noticed my constant praise of St. Mark's: "Mr.
Ruskin thinks it a very beautiful building! We," said the Architect,
"think it a very ugly building." I was not surprised at the difference
of opinion, but at the thing being considered so completely a subject of
opinion. My opponents in matters of painting always assume that there
_is_ such a thing as a law of right, and that I do not understand it:
but my architectural adversaries appeal to no law, they simply set their
opinion against mine; and indeed there is no law at present to which
either they or I can appeal. No man can speak with rational decision of
the merits or demerits of buildings: he may with obstinacy; he may with
resolved adherence to previous prejudices; but never as if the matter
could be otherwise decided than by a majority of votes, or pertinacity
of partizanship. I had always, however, a clear conviction that there
_was_ a law in this matter: that good architecture might be indisputably
discerned and divided from the bad; that the opposition in their very
nature and essence was clearly visible; and that we were all of us just
as unwise in disputing about the matter without reference to principle,
as we should be for debating about the genuineness of a coin, without
ringing it. I felt also assured that this law must be universal if it
were conclusive; that it must enable us to reject all foolish and base
work, and to accept all noble and wise work, without reference to style
or national feeling; that it must sanction the design of all truly great
nations and times, Gothic or Greek or Arab; that it must cast off and
reprobate the design of all foolish nations and times, Chinese or
Mexican, or modern European: and that it must be easily applicable to
all possible architectural inventions of human mind. I set myself,
therefore, to establish such a law, in full belief that men are
intended, without excessive difficulty, and by use of their general
common sense, to know good things from bad; and that it is only because
they will not be at the pains required for the discernment, that the
world is so widely encumbered with forgeries and basenesses. I found the
work simpler than I had hoped; the reasonable things ranged themselves
in the order I required, and the foolish things fell aside, and took
themselves away so soon as they were looked in the face. I had then,
with respect to Venetian architecture, the choice, either to establish
each division of law in a separate form, as I came to the features with
which it was concerned, or else to ask the reader's patience, while I
followed out the general inquiry first, and determined with him a code
of right and wrong, to which we might together make retrospective
appeal. I thought this the best, though perhaps the dullest way; and in
these first following pages I have therefore endeavored to arrange those
foundations of criticism, on which I shall rest in my account of
Venetian architecture, in a form clear and simple enough to be
intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture before. To
those who have, much of what is stated in them will be well known or
self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a simplicity on which
the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From that which appears a
mere truism when first stated, they will find very singular consequences
sometimes following,--consequences altogether unexpected, and of
considerable importance; I will not pause here to dwell on their
importance, nor on that of the thing itself to be done; for I believe
most readers will at once admit the value of a criterion of right and
wrong in so practical and costly an art as architecture, and will be apt
rather to doubt the possibility of its attainment than dispute its
usefulness if attained. I invite them, therefore, to a fair trial, being
certain that even if I should fail in my main purpose, and be unable to
induce in my reader the confidence of judgment I desire, I shall at
least receive his thanks for the suggestion of consistent reasons, which
may determine hesitating choice, or justify involuntary preference. And
if I should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of Venice
touchstones, and detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more
subtle than ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal; and if thus
I am enabled to show the baseness of the schools of architecture and
nearly every other art, which have for three centuries been predominant
in Europe, I believe the result of the inquiry may be serviceable for
proof of a more vital truth than any at which I have hitherto hinted.
For observe: I said the Protestant had despised the arts, and the
Rationalist corrupted them. But what has the Romanist done meanwhile? He
boasts that it was the papacy which raised the arts; why could it not
support them when it was left to its own strength? How came it to yield
to Classicalism which was based on infidelity, and to oppose no barrier
to innovations, which have reduced the once faithfully conceived imagery
of its worship to stage decoration? Shall we not rather find that
Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown
itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of
Protestantism from its side?[27] So long as, corrupt though it might be,
no clear witness had been borne against it, so that it still included in
its ranks a vast number of faithful Christians, so long its arts were
noble. But the witness was borne--the error made apparent; and Rome,
refusing to hear the testimony or forsake the falsehood, has been struck
from that instant with an intellectual palsy, which has not only
incapacitated her from any further use of the arts which once were her
ministers, but has made her worship the shame of its own shrines, and
her worshippers their destroyers. Come, then, if truths such as these
are worth our thoughts; come, and let us know, before we enter the
streets of the Sea city, whether we are indeed to submit ourselves to
their undistinguished enchantment, and to look upon the last changes
which were wrought on the lifted forms of her palaces, as we should on
the capricious towering of summer clouds in the sunset, ere they sank
into the deep of night; or whether, rather, we shall not behold in the
brightness of their accumulated marble, pages on which the sentence of
her luxury was to be written until the waves should efface it, as they
fulfilled--"God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Appendix 1, "Foundation of Venice."
[2] Appendix 2, "Power of the Doges."
[3] Sismondi, Hist. des Rép. Ital., vol. i. ch. v.
[4] Appendix 3, "Serrar del Consiglio."
[5] "Ha saputo trovar modo che non uno, non pochi, non molti,
signoreggiano, ma molti buoni, pochi migliori, e insiememente, _un
ottimo solo_." (_Sansovino._) Ah, well done, Venice! Wisdom this,
indeed.
[6] Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.
[7] Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the discovery
of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.
[8] Ominously signified by their humiliation to the Papal power (as
before to the Turkish) in 1509, and their abandonment of their right
of appointing the clergy of their territories.
[9] The senate voted the abdication of their authority by a majority
of 512 to 14. (Alison, ch. xxiii.)
[10] By directing the arms of the Crusaders against a Christian
prince. (Daru, liv. iv. ch. iv. viii.)
[11] Appendix 4, "San Pietro di Castello."
[12] Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, § V.
[13] "In that temple porch,
(The brass is gone, the porphyry remains,)
Did BARBAROSSA fling his mantle off,
And kneeling, on his neck receive the foot
Of the proud Pontiff--thus at last consoled
For flight, disguise, and many an aguish shake
On his stone pillow."
I need hardly say whence the lines are taken: Rogers' "Italy" has, I
believe, now a place in the best beloved compartment of all
libraries, and will never be removed from it. There is more true
expression of the spirit of Venice in the passages devoted to her in
that poem, than in all else that has been written of her.
[14] At least, such success as they had. Vide Appendix 5, "The Papal
Power in Venice."
[15] The inconsiderable fortifications of the arsenal are no
exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city itself.
They are little more than a semblance of precaution against the
attack of a foreign enemy.
[16] Mémoires de Commynes, liv. vii. ch. xviii.
[17] Appendix 6, "Renaissance Ornaments."
[18] Appendix 7, "Varieties of the Orders."
[19] The reader will find the _weak_ points of Byzantine
architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the
opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever
opened,--Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."
[20] Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."
[21] Appendix 9, "Wooden Churches of the North."
[22] Appendix 10, "Church of Alexandria."
[23] Appendix 11, "Renaissance Landscape."
[24] Selvatico, "Architettura di Venezia," p. 147.
[25] Selvatico, p. 221.
[26] The older work is of Istrian stone also, but of different
quality.
[27] Appendix 12, "Romanist Modern Art."
CHAPTER II.
THE VIRTUES OF ARCHITECTURE.
§ I. We address ourselves, then, first to the task of determining some
law of right which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and
of all time; and by help of which, and judgment according to which, we
may easily pronounce whether a building is good or noble, as, by
applying a plumb-line, whether it be perpendicular.
The first question will of course be: What are the possible Virtues of
architecture?
In the main, we require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of
goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be
graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of
duty.
Then the practical duty divides itself into two branches,--acting and
talking:--acting, as to defend us from weather or violence; talking, as
the duty of monuments or tombs, to record facts and express feelings; or
of churches, temples, public edifices, treated as books of history, to
tell such history clearly and forcibly.
We have thus, altogether, three great branches of architectural virtue,
and we require of any building,--
1. That it act well, and do the things it was intended to do in the best
way.
2. That it speak well, and say the things it was intended to say in the
best words.
3. That it look well, and please us by its presence, whatever it has to
do or say.[28]
§ II. Now, as regards the second of these virtues, it is evident that
we can establish no general laws. First, because it is not a virtue
required in all buildings; there are some which are only for covert or
defence, and from which we ask no conversation. Secondly, because there
are countless methods of expression, some conventional, some natural:
each conventional mode has its own alphabet, which evidently can be no
subject of general laws. Every natural mode is instinctively employed
and instinctively understood, wherever there is true feeling; and this
instinct is above law. The choice of conventional methods depends on
circumstances out of calculation, and that of natural methods on
sensations out of control; so that we can only say that the choice is
right, when we feel that the means are effective; and we cannot always
say that it is wrong when they are not so.
A building which recorded the Bible history by means of a series of
sculptural pictures, would be perfectly useless to a person unacquainted
with the Bible beforehand; on the other hand, the text of the Old and
New Testaments might be written on its walls, and yet the building be a
very inconvenient kind of book, not so useful as if it had been adorned
with intelligible and vivid sculpture. So, again, the power of exciting
emotion must vary or vanish, as the spectator becomes thoughtless or
cold; and the building may be often blamed for what is the fault of its
critic, or endowed with a charm which is of its spectator's creation. It
is not, therefore, possible to make expressional character any fair
criterion of excellence in buildings, until we can fully place ourselves
in the position of those to whom their expression was originally
addressed, and until we are certain that we understand every symbol, and
are capable of being touched by every association which its builders
employed as letters of their language. I shall continually endeavor to
put the reader into such sympathetic temper, when I ask for his judgment
of a building; and in every work I may bring before him I shall point
out, as far as I am able, whatever is peculiar in its expression; nay, I
must even depend on such peculiarities for much of my best evidence
respecting the character of the builders. But I cannot legalize the
judgment for which I plead, nor insist upon it if it be refused. I can
neither force the reader to feel this architectural rhetoric, nor compel
him to confess that the rhetoric is powerful, if it have produced no
impression on his own mind.
§ III. I leave, therefore, the expression of buildings for incidental
notice only. But their other two virtues are proper subjects of
law,--their performance of their common and necessary work, and their
conformity with universal and divine canons of loveliness: respecting
these there can be no doubt, no ambiguity. I would have the reader
discern them so quickly that, as he passes along a street, he may, by a
glance of the eye, distinguish the noble from the ignoble work. He can
do this, if he permit free play to his natural instincts; and all that I
have to do for him is to remove from those instincts the artificial
restraints which prevent their action, and to encourage them to an
unaffected and unbiassed choice between right and wrong.
§ IV. We have, then, two qualities of buildings for subjects of separate
inquiry: their action, and aspect, and the sources of virtue in both;
that is to say, Strength and Beauty, both of these being less admired in
themselves, than as testifying the intelligence or imagination of the
builder.
For we have a worthier way of looking at human than at divine
architecture: much of the value both of construction and decoration, in
the edifices of men, depends upon our being led by the thing produced or
adorned, to some contemplation of the powers of mind concerned in its
creation or adornment. We are not so led by divine work, but are content
to rest in the contemplation of the thing created. I wish the reader to
note this especially: we take pleasure, or _should_ take pleasure, in
architectural construction altogether as the manifestation of an
admirable human intelligence; it is not the strength, not the size, not
the finish of the work which we are to venerate: rocks are always
stronger, mountains always larger, all natural objects more finished;
but it is the intelligence and resolution of man in overcoming physical
difficulty which are to be the source of our pleasure and subject of our
praise. And again, in decoration or beauty, it is less the actual
loveliness of the thing produced, than the choice and invention
concerned in the production, which are to delight us; the love and the
thoughts of the workman more than his work: his work must always be
imperfect, but his thoughts and affections may be true and deep.
§ V. This origin of our pleasure in architecture I must insist upon at
somewhat greater length, for I would fain do away with some of the
ungrateful coldness which we show towards the good builders of old time.
In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work,
and our admiration of the workman's mind, than in architecture, and yet
we rarely ask for a builder's name. The patron at whose cost, the monk
through whose dreaming, the foundation was laid, we remember
occasionally; never the man who verily did the work. Did the reader ever
hear of William of Sens as having had anything to do with Canterbury
Cathedral? or of Pietro Basegio as in anywise connected with the Ducal
Palace of Venice? There is much ingratitude and injustice in this; and
therefore I desire my reader to observe carefully how much of his
pleasure in building is derived, or should be derived, from admiration
of the intellect of men whose names he knows not.
§ VI. The two virtues of architecture which we can justly weigh, are, we
said, its strength or good construction, and its beauty or good
decoration. Consider first, therefore, what you mean when you say a
building is well constructed or well built; you do not merely mean that
it answers its purpose,--this is much, and many modern buildings fail of
this much; but if it be verily well built, it must answer this purpose
in the simplest way, and with no over-expenditure of means. We require
of a light-house, for instance, that it shall stand firm and carry a
light; if it do not this, assuredly it has been ill built; but it may do
it to the end of time, and yet not be well built. It may have hundreds
of tons of stone in it more than were needed, and have cost thousands
of pounds more than it ought. To pronounce it well or ill built, we must
know the utmost forces it can have to resist, and the best arrangements
of stone for encountering them, and the quickest ways of effecting such
arrangements: then only, so far as such arrangements have been chosen,
and such methods used, is it well built. Then the knowledge of all
difficulties to be met, and of all means of meeting them, and the quick
and true fancy or invention of the modes of applying the means to the
end, are what we have to admire in the builder, even as he is seen
through this first or inferior part of his work. Mental power, observe:
not muscular nor mechanical, nor technical, nor empirical,--pure,
precious, majestic, massy intellect; not to be had at vulgar price, nor
received without thanks, and without asking from whom.
§ VII. Suppose, for instance, we are present at the building of a
bridge: the bricklayers or masons have had their centring erected for
them, and that centring was put together by a carpenter, who had the
line of its curve traced for him by the architect: the masons are
dexterously handling and fitting their bricks, or, by the help of
machinery, carefully adjusting stones which are numbered for their
places. There is probably in their quickness of eye and readiness of
hand something admirable; but this is not what I ask the reader to
admire: not the carpentering, nor the bricklaying, nor anything that he
can presently see and understand, but the choice of the curve, and the
shaping of the numbered stones, and the appointment of that number;
there were many things to be known and thought upon before these were
decided. The man who chose the curve and numbered the stones, had to
know the times and tides of the river, and the strength of its floods,
and the height and flow of them, and the soil of the banks, and the
endurance of it, and the weight of the stones he had to build with, and
the kind of traffic that day by day would be carried on over his
bridge,--all this specially, and all the great general laws of force and
weight, and their working; and in the choice of the curve and numbering
of stones are expressed not only his knowledge of these, but such
ingenuity and firmness as he had, in applying special means to overcome
the special difficulties about his bridge. There is no saying how much
wit, how much depth of thought, how much fancy, presence of mind,
courage, and fixed resolution there may have gone to the placing of a
single stone of it. This is what we have to admire,--this grand power
and heart of man in the thing; not his technical or empirical way of
holding the trowel and laying mortar.
§ VIII. Now there is in everything properly called art this concernment
of the intellect, even in the province of the art which seems merely
practical. For observe: in this bridge-building I suppose no reference
to architectural principles; all that I suppose we want is to get safely
over the river; the man who has taken us over is still a mere
bridge-builder,--a _builder_, not an architect: he may be a rough,
artless, feelingless man, incapable of doing any one truly fine thing
all his days. I shall call upon you to despise him presently in a sort,
but not as if he were a mere smoother of mortar; perhaps a great man,
infinite in memory, indefatigable in labor, exhaustless in expedient,
unsurpassable in quickness of thought. Take good heed you understand him
before you despise him.
§ IX. But why is he to be in anywise despised? By no means despise him,
unless he happen to be without a soul,[29] or at least to show no signs
of it; which possibly he may not in merely carrying you across the
river. He may be merely what Mr. Carlyle rightly calls a human beaver
after all; and there may be nothing in all that ingenuity of his greater
than a complication of animal faculties, an intricate bestiality,--nest
or hive building in its highest development. You need something more
than this, or the man is despicable; you need that virtue of building
through which he may show his affections and delights; you need its
beauty or decoration.
§ X. Not that, in reality, one division of the man is more human than
another. Theologists fall into this error very fatally and continually;
and a man from whom I have learned much, Lord Lindsay, has hurt his
noble book by it, speaking as if the spirit of the man only were
immortal, and were opposed to his intellect, and the latter to the
senses; whereas all the divisions of humanity are noble or brutal,
immortal or mortal, according to the degree of their sanctification; and
there is no part of the man which is not immortal and divine when it is
once given to God, and no part of him which is not mortal by the second
death, and brutal before the first, when it is withdrawn from God. For
to what shall we trust for our distinction from the beasts that perish?
To our higher intellect?--yet are we not bidden to be wise as the
serpent, and to consider the ways of the ant?--or to our affections?
nay; these are more shared by the lower animals than our intelligence.
Hamlet leaps into the grave of his beloved, and leaves it,--a dog had
stayed. Humanity and immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love;
not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the
thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it,--but in the dedication of
them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.
§ XI. It is not, therefore, that the signs of his affections, which man
leaves upon his work, are indeed more ennobling than the signs of his
intelligence; but it is the balance of both whose expression we need,
and the signs of the government of them all by Conscience; and
Discretion, the daughter of Conscience. So, then, the intelligent part
of man being eminently, if not chiefly, displayed in the structure of
his work, his affectionate part is to be shown in its decoration; and,
that decoration may be indeed lovely, two things are needed: first, that
the affections be vivid, and honestly shown; secondly, that they be
fixed on the right things.
§ XII. You think, perhaps, I have put the requirements in wrong order.
Logically I have; practically I have not: for it is necessary first to
teach men to speak out, and say what they like, truly; and, in the
second place, to teach them which of their likings are ill set, and
which justly. If a man is cold in his likings and dislikings, or if he
will not tell you what he likes, you can make nothing of him. Only get
him to feel quickly and to speak plainly, and you may set him right. And
the fact is, that the great evil of all recent architectural effort has
not been that men liked wrong things: but that they either cared nothing
about any, or pretended to like what they did not. Do you suppose that
any modern architect likes what he builds, or enjoys it? Not in the
least. He builds it because he has been told that such and such things
are fine, and that he _should_ like them. He pretends to like them, and
gives them a false relish of vanity. Do you seriously imagine, reader,
that any living soul in London likes triglyphs?[30]--or gets any hearty
enjoyment out of pediments?[31] You are much mistaken. Greeks did:
English people never did,--never will. Do you fancy that the architect
of old Burlington Mews, in Regent Street, had any particular
satisfaction in putting the blank triangle over the archway, instead of
a useful garret window? By no manner of means. He had been told it was
right to do so, and thought he should be admired for doing it. Very few
faults of architecture are mistakes of honest choice: they are almost
always hypocrisies.
§ XIII. So, then, the first thing we have to ask of the decoration is
that it should indicate strong liking, and that honestly. It matters not
so much what the thing is, as that the builder should really love it and
enjoy it, and say so plainly. The architect of Bourges Cathedral liked
hawthorns; so he has covered his porch with hawthorn,--it is a perfect
Niobe of May. Never was such hawthorn; you would try to gather it
forthwith, but for fear of being pricked. The old Lombard architects
liked hunting; so they covered their work with horses and hounds, and
men blowing trumpets two yards long. The base Renaissance architects of
Venice liked masquing and fiddling; so they covered their work with
comic masks and musical instruments. Even that was better than our
English way of liking nothing, and professing to like triglyphs.
§ XIV. But the second requirement in decoration, is a sign of our liking
the right thing. And the right thing to be liked is God's work, which He
made for our delight and contentment in this world. And all noble
ornamentation is the expression of man's delight in God's work.
§ XV. So, then, these are the two virtues of building: first, the signs
of man's own good work; secondly, the expression of man's delight in
better work than his own. And these are the two virtues of which I
desire my reader to be able quickly to judge, at least in some measure;
to have a definite opinion up to a certain point. Beyond a certain point
he cannot form one. When the science of the building is great, great
science is of course required to comprehend it; and, therefore, of
difficult bridges, and light-houses, and harbor walls, and river dykes,
and railway tunnels, no judgment may be rapidly formed. But of common
buildings, built in common circumstances, it is very possible for every
man, or woman, or child, to form judgment both rational and rapid. Their
necessary, or even possible, features are but few; the laws of their
construction are as simple as they are interesting. The labor of a few
hours is enough to render the reader master of their main points; and
from that moment he will find in himself a power of judgment which can
neither be escaped nor deceived, and discover subjects of interest where
everything before had appeared barren. For though the laws are few and
simple, the modes of obedience to them are not so. Every building
presents its own requirements and difficulties; and every good building
has peculiar appliances or contrivances to meet them. Understand the
laws of structure, and you will feel the special difficulty in every new
building which you approach; and you will know also, or feel
instinctively,[32] whether it has been wisely met or otherwise. And an
enormous number of buildings, and of styles of buildings, you will be
able to cast aside at once, as at variance with these constant laws of
structure, and therefore unnatural and monstrous.
§ XVI. Then, as regards decoration, I want you only to consult your own
natural choice and liking. There is a right and wrong in it; but you
will assuredly like the right if you suffer your natural instinct to
lead you. Half the evil in this world comes from people not knowing what
they do like, not deliberately setting themselves to find out what they
really enjoy. All people enjoy giving away money, for instance: they
don't know _that_,--they rather think they like keeping it; and they
_do_ keep it under this false impression, often to their great
discomfort. Every body likes to do good; but not one in a hundred finds
_this_ out. Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever
really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.
So in this lesser matter of ornament. It needs some little care to try
experiments upon yourself: it needs deliberate question and upright
answer. But there is no difficulty to be overcome, no abstruse reasoning
to be gone into; only a little watchfulness needed, and thoughtfulness,
and so much honesty as will enable you to confess to yourself and to all
men, that you enjoy things, though great authorities say you should not.
§ XVII. This looks somewhat like pride; but it is true humility, a trust
that you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you, and a
willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is the
child's spirit, which we are then most happy when we most recover; only
wiser than children in that we are ready to think it subject of
thankfulness that we can still be pleased with a fair color or a dancing
light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures
reasonable, nor to connect the delight which you take in ornament with
that which you take in construction or usefulness. They have no
connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the
other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensations
altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world
was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to
be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to
other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things
in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance; at
least I suppose this quill I hold in my hand writes better than a
peacock's would, and the peasants of Vevay, whose fields in spring time
are as white with lilies as the Dent du Midi is with its snow, told me
the hay was none the better for them.
§ XVIII. Our task therefore divides itself into two branches, and these
I shall follow in succession. I shall first consider the construction of
buildings, dividing them into their really necessary members or
features; and I shall endeavor so to lead the reader forward from the
foundation upwards, as that he may find out for himself the best way of
doing everything, and having so discovered it, never forget it. I shall
give him stones, and bricks, and straw, chisels, and trowels, and the
ground, and then ask him to build; only helping him, as I can, if I find
him puzzled. And when he has built his house or church, I shall ask him
to ornament it, and leave it to him to choose the ornaments as I did to
find out the construction: I shall use no influence with him whatever,
except to counteract previous prejudices, and leave him, as far as may
be, free. And when he has thus found out how to build, and chosen his
forms of decoration, I shall do what I can to confirm his confidence in
what he has done. I shall assure him that no one in the world could, so
far, have done better, and require him to condemn, as futile or
fallacious, whatever has no resemblance to his own performances.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Appendix 13, "Mr. Fergusson's System."
[29] Appendix 14, "Divisions of Humanity."
[30] Triglyph. Literally, "Three Cut." The awkward upright ornament
with two notches in it, and a cut at each side, to be seen
everywhere at the tops of Doric colonnades, ancient and modern.
[31] Pediment. The triangular space above Greek porticoes, as on the
Mansion House or Royal Exchange.
[32] Appendix 15: "Instinctive Judgments."
CHAPTER III.
THE SIX DIVISIONS OF ARCHITECTURE.
§ I. The practical duties of buildings are twofold.
They have either (1), to hold and protect something; or (2), to place or
carry something.
1. Architecture of Protection. This is architecture intended to
protect men or their possessions from violence of any kind, whether
of men or of the elements. It will include all churches, houses, and
treasuries; fortresses, fences, and ramparts; the architecture of the
hut and sheepfold; of the palace and the citadel: of the dyke,
breakwater, and sea-wall. And the protection, when of living
creatures, is to be understood as including commodiousness and
comfort of habitation, wherever these are possible under the given
circumstances.
2. Architecture of Position. This is architecture intended to carry
men or things to some certain places, or to hold them there. This
will include all bridges, aqueducts, and road architecture;
light-houses, which have to hold light in appointed places; chimneys
to carry smoke or direct currents of air; staircases; towers, which
are to be watched from or cried from, as in mosques, or to hold
bells, or to place men in positions of offence, as ancient moveable
attacking towers, and most fortress towers.
§ II. Protective architecture has to do one or all of three things: to
wall a space, to roof it, and to give access to it, of persons, light,
and air; and it is therefore to be considered under the three divisions
of walls, roofs, and apertures.
We will take, first, a short, general view of the connection of these
members, and then examine them in detail: endeavoring always to keep the
simplicity of our first arrangement in view; for protective architecture
has indeed no other members than these, unless flooring and paving be
considered architecture, which it is only when the flooring is also a
roof; the laying of the stones or timbers for footing being pavior's or
carpenter's work, rather than architect's; and, at all events, work
respecting the well or ill doing of which we shall hardly find much
difference of opinion, except in points of æsthetics. We shall therefore
concern ourselves only with the construction of walls, roofs, and
apertures.
§ III. 1. _Walls._--A wall is an even and united fence, whether of wood,
earth, stone, or metal. When meant for purposes of mere partition or
enclosure, it remains a wall proper: but it has generally also to
sustain a certain vertical or lateral pressure, for which its strength
is at first increased by some general addition to its thickness; but if
the pressure becomes very great, it is gathered up into _piers_ to
resist vertical pressure, and supported by _buttresses_ to resist
lateral pressure.
If its functions of partition or enclosure are continued, together with
that of resisting vertical pressure, it remains as a wall veil between
the piers into which it has been partly gathered; but if it is required
only to resist the vertical or roof pressure, it is gathered up into
piers altogether, loses its wall character, and becomes a group or line
of piers.
On the other hand, if the lateral pressure be slight, it may retain its
character of a wall, being supported against the pressure by buttresses
at intervals; but if the lateral pressure be very great, it is supported
against such pressure by a continuous buttress, loses its wall
character, and becomes a dyke or rampart.
§ IV. We shall have therefore (A) first to get a general idea of a wall,
and of right construction of walls; then (B) to see how this wall is
gathered into piers; and to get a general idea of piers and the right
construction of piers; then (C) to see how a wall is supported by
buttresses, and to get a general idea of buttresses and the right
construction of buttresses. This is surely very simple, and it is all we
shall have to do with walls and their divisions.
[Illustration: Fig. I.]
§ V. 2. _Roofs._--A roof is the covering of a space, narrow or wide. It
will be most conveniently studied by first considering the forms in
which it may be carried over a narrow space, and then expanding these on
a wide plan; only there is some difficulty here in the nomenclature, for
an arched roof over a narrow space has (I believe) no name, except that
which belongs properly to the piece of stone or wood composing such a
roof, namely, lintel. But the reader will have no difficulty in
understanding that he is first to consider roofs on the section only,
thinking how best to construct a narrow bar or slice of them, of
whatever form; as, for instance, _x_, _y_, or _z_, over the plan or area
_a_, Fig. I. Having done this, let him imagine these several divisions,
first moved along (or set side by side) over a rectangle, _b_, Fig. I.,
and then revolved round a point (or crossed at it) over a polygon, _c_,
or circle, _d_, and he will have every form of simple roof: the arched
section giving successively the vaulted roof and dome, and the gabled
section giving the gabled roof and spire.
As we go farther into the subject, we shall only have to add one or two
forms to the sections here given, in order to embrace all the
_uncombined_ roofs in existence; and we shall not trouble the reader
with many questions respecting cross-vaulting, and other modes of their
combination.
§ VI. Now, it also happens, from its place in buildings, that the
sectional roof over a narrow space will need to be considered before we
come to the expanded roof over a broad one. For when a wall has been
gathered, as above explained, into piers, that it may better bear
vertical pressure, it is generally necessary that it should be expanded
again at the top into a continuous wall before it carries the true roof.
Arches or lintels are, therefore, thrown from pier to pier, and a level
preparation for carrying the real roof is made above them. After we have
examined the structure of piers, therefore, we shall have to see how
lintels or arches are thrown from pier to pier, and the whole prepared
for the superincumbent roof; this arrangement being universal in all
good architecture prepared for vertical pressures: and we shall then
examine the condition of the great roof itself. And because the
structure of the roof very often introduces certain lateral pressures
which have much to do with the placing of buttresses, it will be well to
do all this before we examine the nature of buttresses, and, therefore,
between parts (B) and (C) of the above plan, § IV. So now we shall have
to study: (A) the construction of walls; (B) that of piers; (C) that of
lintels or arches prepared for roofing; (D) that of roofs proper; and
(E) that of buttresses.
§ VII. 3. _Apertures._--There must either be intervals between the
piers, of which intervals the character will be determined by that of
the piers themselves, or else doors or windows in the walls proper. And,
respecting doors or windows, we have to determine three things: first,
the proper shape of the entire aperture; secondly, the way in which it
is to be filled with valves or glass; and thirdly, the modes of
protecting it on the outside, and fitting appliances of convenience to
it, as porches or balconies. And this will be our division F; and if the
reader will have the patience to go through these six heads, which
include every possible feature of protective architecture, and to
consider the simple necessities and fitnesses of each, I will answer for
it, he shall never confound good architecture with bad any more. For, as
to architecture of position, a great part of it involves necessities of
construction with which the spectator cannot become generally
acquainted, and of the compliance with which he is therefore never
expected to judge,--as in chimneys, light-houses, &c.: and the other
forms of it are so closely connected with those of protective
architecture, that a few words in Chap. XIX. respecting staircases and
towers, will contain all with which the reader need be troubled on the
subject.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WALL BASE.
§ I. Our first business, then, is with Wall, and to find out wherein
lies the true excellence of the "Wittiest Partition." For it is rather
strange that, often as we speak of a "dead" wall, and that with
considerable disgust, we have not often, since Snout's time, heard of a
living one. But the common epithet of opprobrium is justly bestowed, and
marks a right feeling. A wall has no business to be dead. It ought to
have members in its make, and purposes in its existence, like an
organized creature, and to answer its ends in a living and energetic
way; and it is only when we do not choose to put any strength nor
organization into it, that it offends us by its deadness. Every wall
ought to be a "sweet and lovely wall." I do not care about its having
ears; but, for instruction and exhortation, I would often have it to
"hold up its fingers." What its necessary members and excellences are,
it is our present business to discover.
§ II. A wall has been defined to be an even and united fence of wood,
earth, stone, or metal. Metal fences, however, seldom, if ever, take the
form of walls, but of railings; and, like all other metal constructions,
must be left out of our present investigation; as may be also walls
composed merely of light planks or laths for purposes of partition or
inclosure. Substantial walls, whether of wood or earth (I use the word
earth as including clay, baked or unbaked, and stone), have, in their
perfect form, three distinct members;--the Foundation, Body or Veil, and
Cornice.
§ III. The foundation is to the wall what the paw is to an animal. It
is a long foot, wider than the wall, on which the wall is to stand, and
which keeps it from settling into the ground. It is most necessary that
this great element of security should be visible to the eye, and
therefore made a part of the structure above ground. Sometimes, indeed,
it becomes incorporated with the entire foundation of the building, a
vast table on which walls or piers are alike set: but even then, the
eye, taught by the reason, requires some additional preparation or foot
for the wall, and the building is felt to be imperfect without it. This
foundation we shall call the Base of the wall.
§ IV. The body of the wall is of course the principal mass of it, formed
of mud or clay, of bricks or stones, of logs or hewn timber; the
condition of structure being, that it is of equal thickness everywhere,
below and above. It may be half a foot thick, or six feet thick, or
fifty feet thick; but if of equal thickness everywhere, it is still a
wall proper: if to its fifty feet of proper thickness there be added so
much as an inch of thickness in particular parts, that added thickness
is to be considered as some form of buttress or pier, or other
appliance.[33]
In perfect architecture, however, the walls are generally kept of
moderate thickness, and strengthened by piers or buttresses; and the
part of the wall between these, being generally intended only to secure
privacy, or keep out the slighter forces of weather, may be properly
called a Wall Veil. I shall always use this word "Veil" to signify the
even portion of a wall, it being more expressive than the term Body.
§ V. When the materials with which this veil is built are very loose, or
of shapes which do not fit well together, it sometimes becomes
necessary, or at least adds to security, to introduce courses of more
solid material. Thus, bricks alternate with rolled pebbles in the old
walls of Verona, and hewn stones with brick in its Lombard churches. A
banded structure, almost a stratification of the wall, is thus produced;
and the courses of more solid material are sometimes decorated with
carving. Even when the wall is not thus banded through its whole height,
it frequently becomes expedient to lay a course of stone, or at least of
more carefully chosen materials, at regular heights; and such belts or
bands we may call String courses. These are a kind of epochs in the
wall's existence; something like periods of rest and reflection in human
life, before entering on a new career. Or else, in the building, they
correspond to the divisions of its stories within, express its internal
structure, and mark off some portion of the ends of its existence
already attained.
§ VI. Finally, on the top of the wall some protection from the weather
is necessary, or some preparation for the reception of superincumbent
weight, called a coping, or Cornice. I shall use the word Cornice for
both; for, in fact, a coping is a roof to the wall itself, and is
carried by a small cornice as the roof of the building by a large one.
In either case, the cornice, small or large, is the termination of the
wall's existence, the accomplishment of its work. When it is meant to
carry some superincumbent weight, the cornice may be considered as its
hand, opened to carry something above its head; as the base was
considered its foot: and the three parts should grow out of each other
and form one whole, like the root, stalk, and bell of a flower.
These three parts we shall examine in succession; and, first, the Base.
§ VII. It may be sometimes in our power, and it is always expedient, to
prepare for the whole building some settled foundation, level and firm,
out of sight. But this has not been done in some of the noblest
buildings in existence. It cannot always be done perfectly, except at
enormous expense; and, in reasoning upon the superstructure, we shall
never suppose it to be done. The mind of the spectator does not
conceive it; and he estimates the merits of the edifice on the
supposition of its being built upon the ground. Even if there be a vast
table land of foundation elevated for the whole of it, accessible by
steps all round, as at Pisa, the surface of this table is always
conceived as capable of yielding somewhat to superincumbent weight, and
generally is so; and we shall base all our arguments on the widest
possible supposition, that is to say, that the building stands on a
surface either of earth, or, at all events, capable of yielding in some
degree to its weight.
[Illustration: Fig. II.]
§ VIII. Now, let the reader simply ask himself how, on such a surface,
he would set about building a substantial wall, that should be able to
bear weight and to stand for ages. He would assuredly look about for the
largest stones he had at his disposal, and, rudely levelling the ground,
he would lay these well together over a considerably larger width than
he required the wall to be (suppose as at _a_, Fig. II.), in order to
equalise the pressure of the wall over a large surface, and form its
foot. On the top of these he would perhaps lay a second tier of large
stones, _b_, or even the third, _c_, making the breadth somewhat less
each time, so as to prepare for the pressure of the wall on the centre,
and, naturally or necessarily, using somewhat smaller stones above than
below (since we supposed him to look about for the largest first), and
cutting them more neatly. His third tier, if not his second, will
probably appear a sufficiently secure foundation for finer work; for if
the earth yield at all, it will probably yield pretty equally under the
great mass of masonry now knit together over it. So he will prepare for
the wall itself at once by sloping off the next tier of stones to the
right diameter, as at _d_. If there be any joints in this tier within
the wall, he may perhaps, for further security, lay a binding stone
across them, _e_, and then begin the work of the wall veil itself,
whether in bricks or stones.
§ IX. I have supposed the preparation here to be for a large wall,
because such a preparation will give us the best general type. But it is
evident that the essential features of the arrangement are only two,
that is to say, one tier of massy work for foundation, suppose _c_,
missing the first two; and the receding tier or real foot of the wall,
_d_. The reader will find these members, though only of brick, in most
of the considerable and independent walls in the suburbs of London.
§ X. It is evident, however, that the general type, Fig. II., will be
subject to many different modifications in different circumstances.
Sometimes the ledges of the tiers _a_ and _b_ may be of greater width;
and when the building is in a secure place, and of finished masonry,
these may be sloped off also like the main foot _d_. In Venetian
buildings these lower ledges are exposed to the sea, and therefore left
rough hewn; but in fine work and in important positions the lower ledges
may be bevelled and decorated like the upper, or another added above
_d_; and all these parts may be in different proportions, according to
the disposition of the building above them. But we have nothing to do
with any of these variations at present, they being all more or less
dependent upon decorative considerations, except only one of very great
importance, that is to say, the widening of the lower ledge into a stone
seat, which may be often done in buildings of great size with most
beautiful effect: it looks kind and hospitable, and preserves the work
above from violence. In St. Mark's at Venice, which is a small and low
church, and needing no great foundation for the wall veils of it, we
find only the three members, _b_, _c_, and _d_. Of these the first rises
about a foot above the pavement of St. Mark's Place, and forms an
elevated dais in some of the recesses of the porches, chequered red and
white; _c_ forms a seat which follows the line of the walls, while its
basic character is marked by its also carrying certain shafts with
which we have here no concern; _d_ is of white marble; and all are
enriched and decorated in the simplest and most perfect manner possible,
as we shall see in Chap. XXV. And thus much may serve to fix the type of
wall bases, a type oftener followed in real practice than any other we
shall hereafter be enabled to determine: for wall bases of necessity
must be solidly built, and the architect is therefore driven into the
adoption of the right form; or if he deviate from it, it is generally in
meeting some necessity of peculiar circumstances, as in obtaining
cellars and underground room, or in preparing for some grand features or
particular parts of the wall, or in some mistaken idea of
decoration,--into which errors we had better not pursue him until we
understand something more of the rest of the building: let us therefore
proceed to consider the wall veil.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] Many walls are slightly sloped or curved towards their tops,
and have buttresses added to them (that of the Queen's Bench Prison
is a curious instance of the vertical buttress and inclined wall);
but in all such instances the slope of the wall is properly to be
considered a condition of incorporated buttress.
CHAPTER V.
THE WALL VEIL.
§ I. The summer of the year 1849 was spent by the writer in researches
little bearing upon his present subject, and connected chiefly with
proposed illustrations of the mountain forms in the works of J. M. W.
Turner. But there are sometimes more valuable lessons to be learned in
the school of nature than in that of Vitruvius, and a fragment of
building among the Alps is singularly illustrative of the chief feature
which I have at present to develope as necessary to the perfection of
the wall veil.
It is a fragment of some size; a group of broken walls, one of them
overhanging; crowned with a cornice, nodding some hundred and fifty feet
over its massy flank, three thousand above its glacier base, and
fourteen thousand above the sea,--a wall truly of some majesty, at once
the most precipitous and the strongest mass in the whole chain of the
Alps, the Mont Cervin.
§ II. It has been falsely represented as a peak or tower. It is a vast
ridged promontory, connected at its western root with the Dent d'Erin,
and lifting itself like a rearing horse with its face to the east. All
the way along the flank of it, for half a day's journey on the Zmutt
glacier, the grim black terraces of its foundations range almost without
a break; and the clouds, when their day's work is done, and they are
weary, lay themselves down on those foundation steps, and rest till
dawn, each with his leagues of grey mantle stretched along the grisly
ledge, and the cornice of the mighty wall gleaming in the moonlight,
three thousand feet above.
§ III. The eastern face of the promontory is hewn down, as if by the
single sweep of a sword, from the crest of it to the base; hewn concave
and smooth, like the hollow of a wave: on each flank of it there is set
a buttress, both of about equal height, their heads sloped out from the
main wall about seven hundred feet below its summit. That on the north
is the most important; it is as sharp as the frontal angle of a bastion,
and sloped sheer away to the north-east, throwing out spur beyond spur,
until it terminates in a long low curve of russet precipice, at whose
foot a great bay of the glacier of the Col de Cervin lies as level as a
lake. This spur is one of the few points from which the mass of the Mont
Cervin is in anywise approachable. It is a continuation of the masonry
of the mountain itself, and affords us the means of examining the
character of its materials.
§ IV. Few architects would like to build with them. The slope of the
rocks to the north-west is covered two feet deep with their ruins, a
mass of loose and slaty shale, of a dull brick-red color, which yields
beneath the foot like ashes, so that, in running down, you step one
yard, and slide three. The rock is indeed hard beneath, but still
disposed in thin courses of these cloven shales, so finely laid that
they look in places more like a heap of crushed autumn leaves than a
rock; and the first sensation is one of unmitigated surprise, as if the
mountain were upheld by miracle; but surprise becomes more intelligent
reverence for the great builder, when we find, in the middle of the mass
of these dead leaves, a course of living rock, of quartz as white as the
snow that encircles it, and harder than a bed of steel.
§ V. It is one only of a thousand iron bands that knit the strength of
the mighty mountain. Through the buttress and the wall alike, the
courses of its varied masonry are seen in their successive order, smooth
and true as if laid by line and plummet,[34] but of thickness and
strength continually varying, and with silver cornices glittering along
the edge of each, laid by the snowy winds and carved by the
sunshine,--stainless ornaments of the eternal temple, by which "neither
the hammer nor the axe, nor any tool, was heard while it was in
building."
§ VI. I do not, however, bring this forward as an instance of any
universal law of natural building; there are solid as well as coursed
masses of precipice, but it is somewhat curious that the most noble
cliff in Europe, which this eastern front of the Cervin is, I believe,
without dispute, should be to us an example of the utmost possible
stability of precipitousness attained with materials of imperfect and
variable character; and, what is more, there are very few cliffs which
do not display alternations between compact and friable conditions of
their material, marked in their contours by bevelled slopes when the
bricks are soft, and vertical steps when they are harder. And, although
we are not hence to conclude that it is well to introduce courses of bad
materials when we can get perfect material, I believe we may conclude
with great certainty that it is better and easier to strengthen a wall
necessarily of imperfect substance, as of brick, by introducing
carefully laid courses of stone, than by adding to its thickness; and
the first impression we receive from the unbroken aspect of a wall veil,
unless it be of hewn stone throughout, is that it must be both thicker
and weaker than it would have been, had it been properly coursed. The
decorative reasons for adopting the coursed arrangement, which we shall
notice hereafter, are so weighty, that they would alone be almost
sufficient to enforce it; and the constructive ones will apply
universally, except in the rare cases in which the choice of perfect or
imperfect material is entirely open to us, or where the general system
of the decoration of the building requires absolute unity in its
surface.
[Illustration: Fig. III.]
§ VII. As regards the arrangement of the intermediate parts themselves,
it is regulated by certain conditions of bonding and fitting the stones
or bricks, which the reader need hardly be troubled to consider, and
which I wish that bricklayers themselves were always honest enough to
observe. But I hardly know whether to note under the head of æsthetic
or constructive law, this important principle, that masonry is always
bad which appears to have arrested the attention of the architect more
than absolute conditions of strength require. Nothing is more
contemptible in any work than an appearance of the slightest desire on
the part of the builder to _direct attention_ to the way its stones are
put together, or of any trouble taken either to show or to conceal it
more than was rigidly necessary: it may sometimes, on the one hand, be
necessary to conceal it as far as may be, by delicate and close fitting,
when the joints would interfere with lines of sculpture or of mouldings;
and it may often, on the other hand, be delightful to show it, as it is
delightful in places to show the anatomy even of the most delicate human
frame: but _studiously_ to conceal it is the error of vulgar painters,
who are afraid to show that their figures have bones; and studiously to
display it is the error of the base pupils of Michael Angelo, who turned
heroes' limbs into surgeons' diagrams,--but with less excuse than
theirs, for there is less interest in the anatomy displayed. Exhibited
masonry is in most cases the expedient of architects who do not know how
to fill up blank spaces, and many a building, which would have been
decent enough if let alone, has been scrawled over with straight lines,
as in Fig. III., on exactly the same principles, and with just the same
amount of intelligence as a boy's in scrawling his copy-book when he
cannot write. The device was thought ingenious at one period of
architectural history; St. Paul's and Whitehall are covered with it, and
it is in this I imagine that some of our modern architects suppose the
great merit of those buildings to consist. There is, however, no excuse
for errors in disposition of masonry, for there is but one law upon the
subject, and that easily complied with, to avoid all affectation and
all unnecessary expense, either in showing or concealing. Every one
knows a building is built of separate stones; nobody will ever object to
seeing that it is so, but nobody wants to count them. The divisions of a
church are much like the divisions of a sermon; they are always right so
long as they are necessary to edification, and always wrong when they
are thrust upon the attention as divisions only. There may be neatness
in carving when there is richness in feasting; but I have heard many a
discourse, and seen many a church wall, in which it was all carving and
no meat.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] On the eastern side: violently contorted on the northern and
western.
CHAPTER VI.
THE WALL CORNICE.
§ I. We have lastly to consider the close of the wall's existence, or
its cornice. It was above stated, that a cornice has one of two offices:
if the wall have nothing to carry, the cornice is its roof, and defends
it from the weather; if there is weight to be carried above the wall,
the cornice is its hand, and is expanded to carry the said weight.
There are several ways of roofing or protecting independent walls,
according to the means nearest at hand: sometimes the wall has a true
roof all to itself; sometimes it terminates in a small gabled ridge,
made of bricks set slanting, as constantly in the suburbs of London; or
of hewn stone, in stronger work; or in a single sloping face, inclined
to the outside. We need not trouble ourselves at present about these
small roofings, which are merely the diminutions of large ones; but we
must examine the important and constant member of the wall structure,
which prepares it either for these small roofs or for weights above, and
is its true cornice.
§ II. The reader will, perhaps, as heretofore, be kind enough to think
for himself, how, having carried up his wall veil as high as it may be
needed, he will set about protecting it from weather, or preparing it
for weight. Let him imagine the top of the unfinished wall, as it would
be seen from above with all the joints, perhaps uncemented, or
imperfectly filled up with cement, open to the sky; and small broken
materials filling gaps between large ones, and leaving cavities ready
for the rain to soak into, and loosen and dissolve the cement, and
split, as it froze, the whole to pieces. I am much mistaken if his
first impulse would not be to take a great flat stone and lay it on the
top; or rather a series of such, side by side, projecting well over the
edge of the wall veil. If, also, he proposed to lay a weight (as, for
instance, the end of a beam) on the wall, he would feel at once that the
pressure of this beam on, or rather among, the small stones of the wall
veil, might very possibly dislodge or disarrange some of them; and the
first impulse would be, in this case, also to lay a large flat stone on
the top of all to receive the beam, or any other weight, and distribute
it equally among the small stones below, as at _a_, Fig. IV.
[Illustration: Fig. IV.]
§ III. We must therefore have our flat stone in either case; and let
_b_, Fig. IV., be the section or side of it, as it is set across the
wall. Now, evidently, if by any chance this weight happen to be thrown
more on the edges of this stone than the centre, there will be a chance
of these edges breaking off. Had we not better, therefore, put another
stone, sloped off to the wall, beneath the projecting one, as at _c_.
But now our cornice looks somewhat too heavy for the wall; and as the
upper stone is evidently of needless thickness, we will thin it
somewhat, and we have the form _d_. Now observe: the lower or bevelled
stone here at _d_ corresponds to _d_ in the base (Fig. II., page 59).
That was the foot of the wall; this is its hand. And the top stone here,
which is a constant member of cornices, corresponds to the under stone
_c_, in Fig. II., which is a constant member of bases. The reader has no
idea at present of the enormous importance of these members; but as we
shall have to refer to them perpetually, I must ask him to compare them,
and fix their relations well in his mind: and, for convenience, I shall
call the bevelled or sloping stone, X, and the upright edged stone, Y.
The reader may remember easily which is which; for X is an intersection
of two slopes, and may therefore properly mean either of the two sloping
stones; and Y is a figure with a perpendicular line and two slopes, and
may therefore fitly stand for the upright stone in relation to each of
the sloping ones; and as we shall have to say much more about cornices
than about bases, let X and Y stand for the stones of the cornice, and
Xb and Yb for those of the base, when distinction is needed.
[Illustration: Fig. V.]
§ IV. Now the form at _d_, Fig. IV., is the great root and primal type
of all cornices whatsoever. In order to see what forms may be developed
from it, let us take its profile a little larger--_a_, Fig. V., with X
and Y duly marked. Now this form, being the root of all cornices, may
either have to finish the wall and so keep off rain; or, as so often
stated, to carry weight. If the former, it is evident that, in its
present profile, the rain will run back down the slope of X; and if the
latter, that the sharp angle or edge of X, at _k_, may be a little too
weak for its work, and run a chance of giving way. To avoid the evil in
the first case, suppose we hollow the slope of X inwards, as at _b_; and
to avoid it in the second case, suppose we strengthen X by letting it
bulge outwards, as at c.
§ V. These (_b_ and _c_) are the profiles of two vast families of
cornices, springing from the same root, which, with a third arising
from their combination (owing its origin to æsthetic considerations, and
inclining sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other), have been
employed, each on its third part of the architecture of the whole world
throughout all ages, and must continue to be so employed through such
time as is yet to come. We do not at present speak of the third or
combined group; but the relation of the two main branches to each other,
and to the line of origin, is given at _e_, Fig. V.; where the dotted
lines are the representatives of the two families, and the straight line
of the root. The slope of this right line, as well as the nature of the
curves, here drawn as segments of circles, we leave undetermined: the
slope, as well as the proportion of the depths of X and Y to each other,
vary according to the weight to be carried, the strength of the stone,
the size of the cornice, and a thousand other accidents; and the nature
of the curves according to æsthetic laws. It is in these infinite fields
that the invention of the architect is permitted to expatiate, but not
in the alteration of primitive forms.
§ VI. But to proceed. It will doubtless appear to the reader, that, even
allowing for some of these permissible variations in the curve or slope
of X, neither the form at _b_, nor any approximation to that form, would
be sufficiently undercut to keep the rain from running back upon it.
This is true; but we have to consider that the cornice, as the close of
the wall's life, is of all its features that which is best fitted for
honor and ornament. It has been esteemed so by almost all builders, and
has been lavishly decorated in modes hereafter to be considered. But it
is evident that, as it is high above the eye, the fittest place to
receive the decoration is the slope of X, which is inclined towards the
spectator; and if we cut away or hollow out this slope more than we have
done at _b_, all decoration will be hid in the shadow. If, therefore,
the climate be fine, and rain of long continuance not to be dreaded, we
shall not hollow the stone X further, adopting the curve at _b_ merely
as the most protective in our power. But if the climate be one in which
rain is frequent and dangerous, as in alternations with frost, we may be
compelled to consider the cornice in a character distinctly protective,
and to hollow out X farther, so as to enable it thoroughly to accomplish
its purpose. A cornice thus treated loses its character as the crown or
honor of the wall, takes the office of its protector, and is called a
DRIPSTONE. The dripstone is naturally the attribute of Northern
buildings, and therefore especially of Gothic architecture; the true
cornice is the attribute of Southern buildings, and therefore of Greek
and Italian architecture; and it is one of their peculiar beauties, and
eminent features of superiority.
§ VII. Before passing to the dripstone, however, let us examine a little
farther into the nature of the true cornice. We cannot, indeed, render
either of the forms _b_ or _c_, Fig. V., perfectly protective from rain,
but we can help them a little in their duty by a slight advance of their
upper ledge. This, with the form _b_, we can best manage by cutting off
the sharp upper point of its curve, which is evidently weak and useless;
and we shall have the form _f_. By a slight advance of the upper stone
_c_, we shall have the parallel form _g_.
These two cornices, _f_ and _g_, are characteristic of early Byzantine
work, and are found on all the most lovely examples of it in Venice. The
type _a_ is rarer, but occurs pure in the most exquisite piece of
composition in Venice--the northern portico of St. Mark's; and will be
given in due time.
§ VIII. Now the reader has doubtless noticed that these forms of cornice
result, from considerations of fitness and necessity, far more neatly
and decisively than the forms of the base, which we left only very
generally determined. The reason is, that there are many ways of
building foundations, and many _good_ ways, dependent upon the peculiar
accidents of the ground and nature of accessible materials. There is
also room to spare in width, and a chance of a part of the arrangement
being concealed by the ground, so as to modify height. But we have no
room to spare in width on the top of a wall, and all that we do must be
thoroughly visible; and we can but have to deal with bricks, or stones
of a certain degree of fineness, and not with mere gravel, or sand, or
clay,--so that as the conditions are limited, the forms become
determined; and our steps will be more clear and certain the farther we
advance. The sources of a river are usually half lost among moss and
pebbles, and its first movements doubtful in direction; but, as the
current gathers force, its banks are determined, and its branches are
numbered.
§ IX. So far of the true cornice: we have still to determine the form of
the dripstone.
[Illustration: Fig. VI.]
We go back to our primal type or root of cornice, _a_ of Fig. V. We take
this at _a_ in Fig. VI., and we are to consider it entirely as a
protection against rain. Now the only way in which the rain can be kept
from running back on the slope of X is by a bold hollowing out of it
upwards, _b_. But clearly, by thus doing, we shall so weaken the
projecting part of it that the least shock would break it at the neck,
_c_; we must therefore cut the whole out of one stone, which will give
us the form _d_. That the water may not lodge on the upper ledge of
this, we had better round it off; and it will better protect the joint
at the bottom of the slope if we let the stone project over it in a
roll, cutting the recess deeper above. These two changes are made in
_e_: _e_ is the type of dripstones; the projecting part being, however,
more or less rounded into an approximation to the shape of a falcon's
beak, and often reaching it completely. But the essential part of the
arrangement is the up and under cutting of the curve. Wherever we find
this, we are sure that the climate is wet, or that the builders have
been _bred_ in a wet country, and that the rest of the building will be
prepared for rough weather. The up cutting of the curve is sometimes all
the distinction between the mouldings of far-distant countries and
utterly strange nations.
[Illustration: Fig. VII.]
Fig. VII. representing a moulding with an outer and inner curve, the
latter undercut. Take the outer line, and this moulding is one constant
in Venice, in architecture traceable to Arabian types, and chiefly to
the early mosques of Cairo. But take the inner line; it is a dripstone
at Salisbury. In that narrow interval between the curves there is, when
we read it rightly, an expression of another and mightier curve,--the
orbed sweep of the earth and sea, between the desert of the Pyramids,
and the green and level fields through which the clear streams of Sarum
wind so slowly.
[Illustration: Fig. VIII.]
And so delicate is the test, that though pure cornices are often found
in the north,--borrowed from classical models,--so surely as we find a
true dripstone moulding in the South, the influence of Northern builders
has been at work; and this will be one of the principal evidences which
I shall use in detecting Lombard influence on Arab work; for the true
Byzantine and Arab mouldings are all open to the sky and light, but the
Lombards brought with them from the North the fear of rain, and in all
the Lombardic Gothic we instantly recognize the shadowy dripstone: _a_,
Fig. VIII., is from a noble fragment at Milan, in the Piazza dei
Mercanti; _b_, from the Broletto of Como. Compare them with _c_ and
_d_; both from Salisbury; _e_ and _f_ from Lisieux, Normandy; _g_ and
_h_ from Wenlock Abbey, Shropshire.
§ X. The reader is now master of all that he need know about the
construction of the general wall cornice, fitted either to become a
crown of the wall, or to carry weight above. If, however, the weight
above become considerable, it may be necessary to support the cornice at
intervals with brackets; especially if it be required to project far, as
well as to carry weight; as, for instance, if there be a gallery on top
of the wall. This kind of bracket-cornice, deep or shallow, forms a
separate family, essentially connected with roofs and galleries; for if
there be no superincumbent weight, it is evidently absurd to put
brackets to a plain cornice or dripstone (though this is sometimes done
in carrying out a style); so that, as soon as we see a bracket put to a
cornice, it implies, or should imply, that there is a roof or gallery
above it. Hence this family of cornices I shall consider in connection
with roofing, calling them "roof cornices," while what we have hitherto
examined are proper "wall cornices." The roof cornice and wall cornice
are therefore treated in division D.
We are not, however, as yet nearly ready for our roof. We have only
obtained that which was to be the object of our first division (A); we
have got, that is to say, a general idea of a wall and of the three
essential parts of a wall; and we have next, it will be remembered, to
get an idea of a pier and the essential parts of a pier, which were to
be the subjects of our second division (B).
CHAPTER VII.
THE PIER BASE.
§ I. In § III. of Chap. III., it was stated that when a wall had to
sustain an addition of vertical pressure, it was first fitted to sustain
it by some addition to its own thickness; but if the pressure became
very great, by being gathered up into PIERS.
I must first make the reader understand what I mean by a wall's being
gathered up. Take a piece of tolerably thick drawing-paper, or thin
Bristol board, five or six inches square. Set it on its edge on the
table, and put a small octavo book on the edge or top of it, and it will
bend instantly. Tear it into four strips all across, and roll up each
strip tightly. Set these rolls on end on the table, and they will carry
the small octavo perfectly well. Now the thickness or substance of the
paper employed to carry the weight is exactly the same as it was before,
only it is differently arranged, that is to say, "gathered up."[35] If
therefore a wall be gathered up like the Bristol board, it will bear
greater weight than it would if it remained a wall veil. The sticks into
which you gather it are called _Piers_. A pier is a coagulated wall.
§ II. Now you cannot quite treat the wall as you did the Bristol board,
and twist it up at once; but let us see how you _can_ treat it. Let A,
Fig. IX., be the plan of a wall which you have made inconveniently and
expensively thick, and which still appears to be slightly too weak for
what it must carry: divide it, as at B, into equal spaces, _a_, _b_,
_a_, _b_, &c. Cut out a thin slice of it at every _a_ on each side, and
put the slices you cut out on at every _b_ on each side, and you will
have the plan at B, with exactly the same quantity of bricks. But your
wall is now so much concentrated, that, if it was only slightly too weak
before, it will be stronger now than it need be; so you may spare some
of your space as well as your bricks by cutting off the corners of the
thicker parts, as suppose _c_, _c_, _c_, _c_, at C: and you have now a
series of square piers connected by a wall veil, which, on less space
and with less materials, will do the work of the wall at A perfectly
well.
[Illustration: Fig. IX.]
§ III. I do not say _how much_ may be cut away in the corners _c_,
_c_,--that is a mathematical question with which we need not trouble
ourselves: all that we need know is, that out of every slice we take
from the "_b_'s" and put on at the "_a_'s," we may keep a certain
percentage of room and bricks, until, supposing that we do not want the
wall veil for its own sake, this latter is thinned entirely away, like
the girdle of the Lady of Avenel, and finally breaks, and we have
nothing but a row of square piers, D.
§ IV. But have we yet arrived at the form which will spare most room,
and use fewest materials. No; and to get farther we must apply the
general principle to our wall, which is equally true in morals and
mathematics, that the strength of materials, or of men, or of minds, is
always most available when it is applied as closely as possible to a
single point.
Let the point to which we wish the strength of our square piers to be
applied, be chosen. Then we shall of course put them directly under it,
and the point will be in their centre. But now some of their materials
are not so near or close to this point as others. Those at the corners
are farther off than the rest.
Now, if every particle of the pier be brought as near as possible to the
centre of it, the form it assumes is the circle.
The circle must be, therefore, the best possible form of plan for a
pier, from the beginning of time to the end of it. A circular pier is
called a pillar or column, and all good architecture adapted to vertical
support is made up of pillars, has always been so, and must ever be so,
as long as the laws of the universe hold.
The final condition is represented at E, in its relation to that at D.
It will be observed that though each circle projects a little beyond the
side of the square out of which it is formed, the space cut off at the
angles is greater than that added at the sides; for, having our
materials in a more concentrated arrangement, we can afford to part with
some of them in this last transformation, as in all the rest.
§ V. And now, what have the base and the cornice of the wall been doing
while we have been cutting the veil to pieces and gathering it together?
The base is also cut to pieces, gathered together, and becomes the base
of the column.
The cornice is cut to pieces, gathered together, and becomes the capital
of the column. Do not be alarmed at the new word, it does not mean a new
thing; a capital is only the cornice of a column, and you may, if you
like, call a cornice the capital of a wall.
We have now, therefore, to examine these three concentrated forms of the
base, veil, and cornice: first, the concentrated base, still called the
BASE of the column; then the concentrated veil, called the SHAFT of the
column; then the concentrated cornice, called the CAPITAL of the column.
And first the Base:--
[Illustration: Fig. X.]
§ VI. Look back to the main type, Fig. II., page 55, and apply its
profiles in due proportion to the feet of the pillars at E in Fig. IX.
p. 72: If each step in Fig. II. were gathered accurately, the projection
of the entire circular base would be less in proportion to its height
than it is in Fig. II.; but the approximation to the result in Fig. X.
is quite accurate enough for our purposes. (I pray the reader to observe
that I have not made the smallest change, except this necessary
expression of a reduction in diameter, in Fig. II. as it is applied in
Fig. X., only I have not drawn the joints of the stones because these
would confuse the outlines of the bases; and I have not represented the
rounding of the shafts, because it does not bear at present on the
argument.) Now it would hardly be convenient, if we had to pass between
the pillars, to have to squeeze ourselves through one of those angular
gaps or brêches de Roland in Fig. X. Our first impulse would be to cut
them open; but we cannot do this, or our piers are unsafe. We have but
one other resource, to fill them up until we have a floor wide enough to
let us pass easily: this we may perhaps obtain at the first ledge, we
are nearly sure to get it at the second, and we may then obtain access
to the raised interval, either by raising the earth over the lower
courses of foundation, or by steps round the entire building.
Fig. XI. is the arrangement of Fig. X. so treated.
[Illustration: Fig. XI.]
§ VII. But suppose the pillars are so vast that the lowest chink in Fig.
X. would be quite wide enough to let us pass through it. Is there then
any reason for filling it up? Yes. It will be remembered that in Chap.
IV. § VIII. the chief reason for the wide foundation of the wall was
stated to be "that it might equalise its pressure over a large surface;"
but when the foundation is cut to pieces as in Fig. X., the pressure is
thrown on a succession of narrowed and detached spaces of that surface.
If the ground is in some places more disposed to yield than in others,
the piers in those places will sink more than the rest, and this
distortion of the system will be probably of more importance in pillars
than in a wall, because the adjustment of the weight above is more
delicate; we thus actually want the _weight_ of the stones between the
pillars, in order that the whole foundation may be bonded into one, and
sink together if it sink at all: and the more massy the pillars, the
more we shall need to fill the intervals of their foundations. In the
best form of Greek architecture, the intervals are filled up to the root
of the shaft, and the columns have no independent base; they stand on
the even floor of their foundation.
§ VIII. Such a structure is not only admissible, but, when the column is
of great thickness in proportion to its height, and the sufficient
firmness, either of the ground or prepared floor, is evident, it is the
best of all, having a strange dignity in its excessive simplicity. It
is, or ought to be, connected in our minds with the deep meaning of
primeval memorial. "And Jacob took the stone that he had put for his
pillow, and set it up for a pillar." I do not fancy that he put a base
for it first. If you try to put a base to the rock-piers of Stonehenge,
you will hardly find them improved; and two of the most perfect
buildings in the world, the Parthenon and Ducal palace of Venice, have
no bases to their pillars: the latter has them, indeed, to its upper
arcade shafts; and had once, it is said, a continuous raised base for
its lower ones: but successive elevations of St. Mark's Place have
covered this base, and parts of the shafts themselves, with an
inundation of paving stones; and yet the building is, I doubt not, as
grand as ever. Finally, the two most noble pillars in Venice, those
brought from Acre, stand on the smooth marble surface of the Piazzetta,
with no independent bases whatever. They are rather broken away beneath,
so that you may look under parts of them, and stand (not quite erect,
but leaning somewhat) safe by their own massy weight. Nor could any
bases possibly be devised that would not spoil them.
§ IX. But it is otherwise if the pillar be so slender as to look
doubtfully balanced. It would indeed stand quite as safely without an
independent base as it would with one (at least, unless the base be in
the form of a socket). But it will not appear so safe to the eye. And
here for the first time, I have to express and apply a principle, which
I believe the reader will at once grant,--that features necessary to
express security to the imagination, are often as essential parts of
good architecture as those required for security itself. It was said
that the wall base was the foot or paw of the wall. Exactly in the same
way, and with clearer analogy, the pier base is the foot or paw of the
pier. Let us, then, take a hint from nature. A foot has two offices, to
bear up, and to hold firm. As far as it has to bear up, it is uncloven,
with slight projection,--look at an elephant's (the Doric base of
animality);[36] but as far as it has to hold firm, it is divided and
clawed, with wide projections,--look at an eagle's.
§ X. Now observe. In proportion to the massiness of the column, we
require its foot to express merely the power of bearing up; in fact, it
can do without a foot, like the Squire in Chevy Chase, if the ground
only be hard enough. But if the column be slender, and look as if it
might lose its balance, we require it to look as if it had hold of the
ground, or the ground hold of it, it does not matter which,--some
expression of claw, prop, or socket. Now let us go back to Fig. XI., and
take up one of the bases there, in the state in which we left it. We may
leave out the two lower steps (with which we have nothing more to do, as
they have become the united floor or foundation of the whole), and, for
the sake of greater clearness, I shall not draw the bricks in the shaft,
nor the flat stone which carries them, though the reader is to suppose
them remaining as drawn in Fig. XI.; but I shall only draw the shaft and
its two essential members of base, Xb and Yb, as explained at p. 65,
above: and now, expressing the rounding of these numbers on _a_ somewhat
larger scale, we have the profile _a_, Fig. XII.; _b_, the perspective
appearance of such a base seen from above; and _c_, the plan of it.
§ XI. Now I am quite sure the reader is not satisfied of the stability
of this form as it is seen at _b_; nor would he ever be so with the main
contour of a circular base. Observe, we have taken some trouble to
reduce the member Yb into this round form, and all that we have gained
by so doing, is this unsatisfactory and unstable look of the base; of
which the chief reason is, that a circle, unless enclosed by right
lines, has never an appearance of fixture, or definite place,[37]--we
suspect it of motion, like an orb of heaven; and the second is, that the
whole base, considered as the foot of the shaft, has no grasp nor hold:
it is a club-foot, and looks too blunt for the limb,--it wants at least
expansion, if not division.
[Illustration: Fig. XII.]
§ XII. Suppose, then, instead of taking so much trouble with the member
Yb, we save time and labor, and leave it a square block. Xb must,
however, evidently follow the pillar, as its condition is that it slope
to the very base of the wall veil, and of whatever the wall veil
becomes. So the corners of Yb will project beyond the circle of Xb, and
we shall have (Fig. XII.) the profile _d_, the perspective appearance
_e_, and the plan _f_. I am quite sure the reader likes _e_ much better
than he did _b_. The circle is now placed, and we are not afraid of its
rolling away. The foot has greater expansion, and we have saved labor
besides, with little loss of space, for the interval between the bases
is just as great as it was before,--we have only filled up the corners
of the squares.
But is it not possible to mend the form still further? There is surely
still an appearance of separation between Xb and Yb, as if the one might
slip off the other. The foot is expanded enough; but it needs some
expression of grasp as well. It has no toes. Suppose we were to put a
spur or prop to Xb at each corner, so as to hold it fast in the centre
of Yb. We will do this in the simplest possible form. We will have the
spur, or small buttress, sloping straight from the corner of Yb up to
the top of Xb, and as seen from above, of the shape of a triangle.
Applying such spurs in Fig. XII., we have the diagonal profile at _g_,
the perspective _h_, and the plan _i_.
§ XIII. I am quite sure the reader likes this last base the best, and
feels as if it were the firmest. But he must carefully distinguish
between this feeling or imagination of the eye, and the real stability
of the structure. That this real stability has been slightly increased
by the changes between _b_ and _h_, in Fig. XII., is true. There is in
the base _h_ somewhat less chance of accidental dislocation, and
somewhat greater solidity and weight. But this very slight gain of
security is of no importance whatever when compared with the general
requirements of the structure. The pillar must be _perfectly_ secure,
and more than secure, with the base _b_, or the building will be unsafe,
whatever other base you put to the pillar. The changes are made, not for
the sake of the almost inappreciable increase of security they involve,
but in order to convince the eye of the real security which the base _b_
_appears_ to compromise. This is especially the case with regard to the
props or spurs, which are absolutely useless in reality, but are of the
highest importance as an expression of safety. And this will farther
appear when we observe that they have been above quite arbitrarily
supposed to be of a triangular form. Why triangular? Why should not the
spur be made wider and stronger, so as to occupy the whole width of the
angle of the square, and to become a complete expansion of Xb to the
edge of the square? Simply because, whatever its width, it has, in
reality, no supporting power whatever; and the _expression_ of support
is greatest where it assumes a form approximating to that of the spur or
claw of an animal. We shall, however, find hereafter, that it ought
indeed to be much wider than it is in Fig. XII., where it is narrowed in
order to make its structure clearly intelligible.
§ XIV. If the reader chooses to consider this spur as an æsthetic
feature altogether, he is at liberty to do so, and to transfer what we
have here said of it to the beginning of Chap. XXV. I think that its
true place is here, as an _expression_ of safety, and not a means of
beauty; but I will assume only, as established, the form _e_ of Fig.
XII., which is absolutely, as a construction, easier, stronger, and more
perfect than _b_. A word or two now of its materials. The wall base, it
will be remembered, was built of stones more neatly cut as they were
higher in place; and the members, Y and X, of the pier base, were the
highest members of the wall base gathered. But, exactly in proportion to
this gathering or concentration in form, should, if possible, be the
gathering or concentration of substance. For as the whole weight of the
building is now to rest upon few and limited spaces, it is of the
greater importance that it should be there received by solid masonry. Xb
and Yb are therefore, if possible, to be each of a single stone; or,
when the shaft is small, both cut out of one block, and especially if
spurs are to be added to Xb. The reader must not be angry with me for
stating things so self-evident, for these are all necessary steps in the
chain of argument which I must not break. Even this change from detached
stones to a single block is not without significance; for it is part of
the real service and value of the member Yb to provide for the reception
of the shaft a surface free from joints; and the eye always conceives it
as a firm covering over all inequalities or fissures in the smaller
masonry of the floor.
§ XV. I have said nothing yet of the proportion of the height of Yb to
its width, nor of that of Yb and Xb to each other. Both depend much on
the height of shaft, and are besides variable within certain limits, at
the architect's discretion. But the limits of the height of Yb may be
thus generally stated. If it looks so thin as that the weight of the
column above might break it, it is too low; and if it is higher than its
own width, it is too high. The utmost admissible height is that of a
cubic block; for if it ever become higher than it is wide, it becomes
itself a part of a pier, and not the base of one.
§ XVI. I have also supposed Yb, when expanded from beneath Xb, as always
expanded into a square, and four spurs only to be added at the angles.
But Yb may be expanded into a pentagon, hexagon, or polygon; and Xb then
may have five, six, or many spurs. In proportion, however, as the sides
increase in number, the spurs become shorter and less energetic in their
effect, and the square is in most cases the best form.
§ XVII. We have hitherto conducted the argument entirely on the
supposition of the pillars being numerous, and in a range. Suppose,
however, that we require only a single pillar: as we have free space
round it, there is no need to fill up the first ranges of its
foundations; nor need we do so in order to equalise pressure, since the
pressure to be met is its own alone. Under such circumstances, it is
well to exhibit the lower tiers of the foundation as well as Yb and Xb.
The noble bases of the two granite pillars of the Piazzetta at Venice
are formed by the entire series of members given in Fig. X., the lower
courses expanding into steps, with a superb breadth of proportion to the
shaft. The member Xb is of course circular, having its proper decorative
mouldings, not here considered; Yb is octagonal, but filled up into a
square by certain curious groups of figures representing the trades of
Venice. The three courses below are octagonal, with their sides set
across the angles of the innermost octagon, Yb. The shafts are 15 feet
in circumference, and the lowest octagons of the base 56 (7 feet each
side).
§ XVIII. Detached buildings, like our own Monument, are not pillars, but
towers built in imitation of Pillars. As towers they are barbarous,
being dark, inconvenient, and unsafe, besides lying, and pretending to
be what they are not. As shafts they are barbarous, because they were
designed at a time when the Renaissance architects had introduced and
forced into acceptance, as _de rigueur_, a kind of columnar high-heeled
shoe,--a thing which they called a pedestal, and which is to a true base
exactly what a Greek actor's cothurnus was to a Greek gentleman's
sandal. But the Greek actor knew better, I believe, than to exhibit or
to decorate his cork sole; and, with shafts as with heroes, it is rather
better to put the sandal off than the cothurnus on. There are, indeed,
occasions on which a pedestal may be necessary; it may be better to
raise a shaft from a sudden depression of plinth to a level with others,
its companions, by means of a pedestal, than to introduce a higher
shaft; or it may be better to place a shaft of alabaster, if otherwise
too short for our purpose, on a pedestal, than to use a larger shaft of
coarser material; but the pedestal is in each case a make-shift, not an
additional perfection. It may, in the like manner, be sometimes
convenient for men to walk on stilts, but not to keep their stilts on as
ornamental parts of dress. The bases of the Nelson Column, the Monument,
and the column of the Place Vendôme, are to the shafts, exactly what
highly ornamented wooden legs would be to human beings.
§ XIX. So far of bases of detached shafts. As we do not yet know in what
manner shafts are likely to be grouped, we can say nothing of those of
grouped shafts until we know more of what they are to support.
Lastly; we have throughout our reasoning upon the base supposed the pier
to be circular. But circumstances may occur to prevent its being
reduced to this form, and it may remain square or rectangular; its base
will then be simply the wall base following its contour, and we have no
spurs at the angles. Thus much may serve respecting pier bases; we have
next to examine the concentration of the Wall Veil, or the Shaft.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] The experiment is not quite fair in this rude fashion; for the
small rolls owe their increase of strength much more to their
tubular form than their aggregation of material; but if the paper be
cut up into small strips, and tied together firmly in three or four
compact bundles, it will exhibit increase of strength enough to show
the principle. Vide, however, Appendix 16, "Strength of Shafts."
[36] Appendix 17, "Answer to Mr. Garbett."
[37] Yet more so than any other figure enclosed by a curved line:
for the circle, in its relations to its own centre, is the curve of
greatest stability. Compare § XX. of Chap. XX.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SHAFT.
§ I. We have seen in the last Chapter how, in converting the wall into
the square or cylindrical shaft, we parted at every change of form with
some quantity of material. In proportion to the quantity thus
surrendered, is the necessity that what we retain should be good of its
kind, and well set together, since everything now depends on it.
It is clear also that the best material, and the closest concentration,
is that of the natural crystalline rocks; and that, by having reduced
our wall into the shape of shafts, we may be enabled to avail ourselves
of this better material, and to exchange cemented bricks for
crystallised blocks of stone. Therefore, the general idea of a perfect
shaft is that of a single stone hewn into a form more or less elongated
and cylindrical. Under this form, or at least under the ruder one of a
long stone set upright, the conception of true shafts appears first to
have occurred to the human mind; for the reader must note this
carefully, once for all, it does not in the least follow that the order
of architectural features which is most reasonable in their arrangement,
is most probable in their invention. I have theoretically deduced shafts
from walls, but shafts were never so reasoned out in architectural
practice. The man who first propped a thatched roof with poles was the
discoverer of their principle; and he who first hewed a long stone into
a cylinder, the perfecter of their practice.
§ II. It is clearly necessary that shafts of this kind (we will call
them, for convenience, _block_ shafts) should be composed of stone not
liable to flaws or fissures; and therefore that we must no longer
continue our argument as if it were always possible to do what is to be
done in the best way; for the style of a national architecture may
evidently depend, in great measure, upon the nature of the rocks of the
country.
Our own English rocks, which supply excellent building stone from their
thin and easily divisible beds, are for the most part entirely incapable
of being worked into shafts of any size, except only the granites and
whinstones, whose hardness renders them intractable for ordinary
purposes;--and English architecture therefore supplies no instances of
the block shaft applied on an extensive scale; while the facility of
obtaining large masses of marble has in Greece and Italy been partly the
cause of the adoption of certain noble types of architectural form
peculiar to those countries, or, when occurring elsewhere, derived from
them.
We have not, however, in reducing our walls to shafts, calculated on the
probabilities of our obtaining better materials than those of which the
walls were built; and we shall therefore first consider the form of
shaft which will be best when we have the best materials; and then
consider how far we can imitate, or how far it will be wise to imitate,
this form with any materials we can obtain.
§ III. Now as I gave the reader the ground, and the stones, that he
might for himself find out how to build his wall, I shall give him the
block of marble, and the chisel, that he may himself find out how to
shape his column. Let him suppose the elongated mass, so given him,
rudely hewn to the thickness which he has calculated will be
proportioned to the weight it has to carry. The conditions of stability
will require that some allowance be made in finishing it for any chance
of slight disturbance or subsidence of the ground below, and that, as
everything must depend on the uprightness of the shaft, as little chance
should be left as possible of its being thrown off its balance. It will
therefore be prudent to leave it slightly thicker at the base than at
the top. This excess of diameter at the base being determined, the
reader is to ask himself how most easily and simply to smooth the
column from one extremity to the other. To cut it into a true
straight-sided cone would be a matter of much trouble and nicety, and
would incur the continual risk of chipping into it too deep. Why not
leave some room for a chance stroke, work it slightly, _very_ slightly
convex, and smooth the curve by the eye between the two extremities? you
will save much trouble and time, and the shaft will be all the stronger.
[Illustration: Fig. XIII.]
This is accordingly the natural form of a detached block shaft. It is
the best. No other will ever be so agreeable to the mind or eye. I do
not mean that it is not capable of more refined execution, or of the
application of some of the laws of æsthetic beauty, but that it is the
best recipient of execution and subject of law; better in either case
than if you had taken more pains, and cut it straight.
§ IV. You will observe, however, that the convexity is to be very
slight, and that the shaft is not to _bulge_ in the centre, but to taper
from the root in a curved line; the peculiar character of the curve you
will discern better by exaggerating, in a diagram, the conditions of its
sculpture.
Let _a_, _a_, _b_, _b_, at A, Fig. XIII., be the rough block of the
shaft, laid on the ground; and as thick as you can by any chance require
it to be; you will leave it of this full thickness at its base at A, but
at the other end you will mark off upon it the diameter _c_, _d_, which
you intend it to have at the summit; you will then take your mallet and
chisel, and working from _c_ and _d_ you will roughly knock off the
corners, shaded in the figure, so as to reduce the shaft to the figure
described by the inside lines in A and the outside lines in B; you then
proceed to smooth it, you chisel away the shaded parts in B, and leave
your finished shaft of the form of the _inside_ lines _e_, _g_, _f_,
_h_.
The result of this operation will be of course that the shaft tapers
faster towards the top than it does near the ground. Observe this
carefully; it is a point of great future importance.
§ V. So far of the shape of detached or block shafts. We can carry the
type no farther on merely structural considerations: let us pass to the
shaft of inferior materials.
Unfortunately, in practice, this step must be soon made. It is alike
difficult to obtain, transport, and raise, block shafts more than ten or
twelve feet long, except in remarkable positions, and as pieces of
singular magnificence. Large pillars are therefore always composed of
more than one block of stone. Such pillars are either jointed like
basalt columns, and composed of solid pieces of stone set one above
another; or they are filled up _towers_, built of small stones cemented
into a mass, with more or less of regularity: Keep this distinction
carefully in mind, it is of great importance; for the jointed column,
every stone composing which, however thin, is (so to speak) a complete
_slice_ of the shaft, is just as strong as the block pillar of one
stone, so long as no forces are brought into action upon it which would
have a tendency to cause horizontal dislocation. But the pillar which is
built as a filled-up tower is of course liable to fissure in any
direction, if its cement give way.
But, in either case, it is evident that all constructive reason of the
curved contour is at once destroyed. Far from being an easy or natural
procedure, the fitting of each portion of the curve to its fellow, in
the separate stones, would require painful care and considerable masonic
skill; while, in the case of the filled-up tower, the curve outwards
would be even unsafe; for its greatest strength (and that the more in
proportion to its careless building) lies in its bark, or shell of
outside stone; and this, if curved outwards, would at once burst
outwards, if heavily loaded above.
If, therefore, the curved outline be ever retained in such shafts, it
must be in obedience to æsthetic laws only.
§ VI. But farther. Not only the curvature, but even the tapering by
straight lines, would be somewhat difficult of execution in the pieced
column. Where, indeed, the entire shaft is composed of four or five
blocks set one upon another, the diameters may be easily determined at
the successive joints, and the stones chiselled to the same slope. But
this becomes sufficiently troublesome when the joints are numerous, so
that the pillar is like a pile of cheeses; or when it is to be built of
small and irregular stones. We should be naturally led, in the one case,
to cut all the cheeses to the same diameter; in the other to build by
the plumb-line; and in both to give up the tapering altogether.
§ VII. Farther. Since the chance, in the one case, of horizontal
dislocation, in the other, of irregular fissure, is much increased by
the composition of the shaft out of joints or small stones, a larger
bulk of shaft is required to carry the given weight; and, _cæteris
paribus_, jointed and cemented shafts must be thicker in proportion to
the weight they carry than those which are of one block.
We have here evidently natural causes of a very marked division in
schools of architecture: one group composed of buildings whose shafts
are either of a single stone or of few joints; the shafts, therefore,
being gracefully tapered, and reduced by successive experiments to the
narrowest possible diameter proportioned to the weight they carry: and
the other group embracing those buildings whose shafts are of many
joints or of small stones; shafts which are therefore not tapered, and
rather thick and ponderous in proportion to the weight they carry; the
latter school being evidently somewhat imperfect and inelegant as
compared with the former.
It may perhaps appear, also, that this arrangement of the materials in
cylindrical shafts at all would hardly have suggested itself to a people
who possessed no large blocks out of which to hew them; and that the
shaft built of many pieces is probably derived from, and imitative of
the shaft hewn from few or from one.
§ VIII. If, therefore, you take a good geological map of Europe, and lay
your finger upon the spots where volcanic influences supply either
travertin or marble in accessible and available masses, you will
probably mark the points where the types of the first school have been
originated and developed. If, in the next place, you will mark the
districts where broken and rugged basalt or whinstone, or slaty
sandstone, supply materials on easier terms indeed, but fragmentary and
unmanageable, you will probably distinguish some of the birthplaces of
the derivative and less graceful school. You will, in the first case,
lay your finger on Pæstum, Agrigentum, and Athens; in the second, on
Durham and Lindisfarne.
The shafts of the great primal school are, indeed, in their first form,
as massy as those of the other, and the tendency of both is to continual
diminution of their diameters: but in the first school it is a true
diminution in the thickness of the independent pier; in the last, it is
an apparent diminution, obtained by giving it the appearance of a group
of minor piers. The distinction, however, with which we are concerned is
not that of slenderness, but of vertical or curved contour; and we may
note generally that while throughout the whole range of Northern work,
the perpendicular shaft appears in continually clearer development,
throughout every group which has inherited the spirit of the Greek, the
shaft retains its curved or tapered form; and the occurrence of the
vertical detached shaft may at all times, in European architecture, be
regarded as one of the most important collateral evidences of Northern
influence.
§ IX. It is necessary to limit this observation to European
architecture, because the Egyptian shaft is often untapered, like the
Northern. It appears that the Central Southern, or Greek shaft, was
tapered or curved on æsthetic rather than constructive principles; and
the Egyptian which precedes, and the Northern which follows it, are both
vertical, the one because the best form had not been discovered, the
other because it could not be attained. Both are in a certain degree
barbaric; and both possess in combination and in their ornaments a power
altogether different from that of the Greek shaft, and at least as
impressive if not as admirable.
§ X. We have hitherto spoken of shafts as if their number were fixed,
and only their diameter variable according to the weight to be borne.
But this supposition is evidently gratuitous; for the same weight may be
carried either by many and slender, or by few and massy shafts. If the
reader will look back to Fig. IX., he will find the number of shafts
into which the wall was reduced to be dependent altogether upon the
length of the spaces _a_, _b_, _a_, _b_, &c., a length which was
arbitrarily fixed. We are at liberty to make these spaces of what length
we choose, and, in so doing, to increase the number and diminish the
diameter of the shafts, or _vice versâ_.
§ XI. Supposing the materials are in each case to be of the same kind,
the choice is in great part at the architect's discretion, only there is
a limit on the one hand to the multiplication of the slender shaft, in
the inconvenience of the narrowed interval, and on the other, to the
enlargement of the massy shaft, in the loss of breadth to the
building.[38] That will be commonly the best proportion which is a
natural mean between the two limits; leaning to the side of grace or of
grandeur according to the expressional intention of the work. I say,
_commonly_ the best, because, in some cases, this expressional invention
may prevail over all other considerations, and a column of unnecessary
bulk or fantastic slightness be adopted in order to strike the spectator
with awe or with surprise.[39] The architect is, however, rarely in
practice compelled to use one kind of material only; and his choice
lies frequently between the employment of a larger number of solid and
perfect small shafts, or a less number of pieced and cemented large
ones. It is often possible to obtain from quarries near at hand, blocks
which might be cut into shafts eight or twelve feet long and four or
five feet round, when larger shafts can only be obtained in distant
localities; and the question then is between the perfection of smaller
features and the imperfection of larger. We shall find numberless
instances in Italy in which the first choice has been boldly, and I
think most wisely made; and magnificent buildings have been composed of
systems of small but perfect shafts, multiplied and superimposed. So
long as the idea of the symmetry of a perfect shaft remained in the
builder's mind, his choice could hardly be directed otherwise, and the
adoption of the built and tower-like shaft appears to have been the
result of a loss of this sense of symmetry consequent on the employment
of intractable materials.
§ XII. But farther: we have up to this point spoken of shafts as always
set in ranges, and at equal intervals from each other. But there is no
necessity for this; and material differences may be made in their
diameters if two or more be grouped so as to do together the work of one
large one, and that within, or nearly within, the space which the larger
one would have occupied.
§ XIII. Let A, B, C, Fig. XIV., be three surfaces, of which B and C
contain equal areas, and each of them double that of A: then supposing
them all loaded to the same height, B or C would receive twice as much
weight as A; therefore, to carry B or C loaded, we should need a shaft
of twice the strength needed to carry A. Let S be the shaft required to
carry A, and S_2 the shaft required to carry B or C; then S_3 may be
divided into two shafts, or S_2 into four shafts, as at S_3, all
equal in area or solid contents;[40] and the mass A might be carried
safely by two of them, and the masses B and C, each by four of them.
[Illustration: Fig. XIV.]
Now if we put the single shafts each under the centre of the mass they
have to bear, as represented by the shaded circles at _a_, _a2_, _a3_,
the masses A and C are both of them very ill supported, and even B
insufficiently; but apply the four and the two shafts as at _b_, _b2_,
_b3_, and they are supported satisfactorily. Let the weight on each of
the masses be doubled, and the shafts doubled in area, then we shall
have such arrangements as those at _c_, _c2_, _c3_; and if again the
shafts and weight be doubled, we shall have _d_, _d2_, _d3_.
§ XIV. Now it will at once be observed that the arrangement of the
shafts in the series of B and C is always exactly the same in their
relations to each other; only the group of B is set evenly, and the
group of C is set obliquely,--the one carrying a square, the other a
cross.
[Illustration: Fig. XV.]
You have in these two series the primal representations of shaft
arrangement in the Southern and Northern schools; while the group _b_,
of which _b2_ is the double, set evenly, and _c2_ the double, set
obliquely, is common to both. The reader will be surprised to find h
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