The Seven Lamps of Architecture
by John Ruskin · English · Gutenberg #35898 · 481,814 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Author: John Ruskin
Release date: April 18, 2011 [eBook #35898]
Language: English
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[Illustration: PLATE IX.--(_Frontispiece_--Vol. V.)
TRACERY FROM THE CAMPANILE OF GIOTTO AT FLORENCE.]
Illustrated Cabinet Edition
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Lectures on Architecture and Painting
The Study of Architecture
by John Ruskin
[Illustration]
Boston
Dana Estes & Company
Publishers
CONTENTS.
SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.
PAGE
PREFACE 5
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER I.
THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE 15
CHAPTER II.
THE LAMP OF TRUTH 34
CHAPTER III.
THE LAMP OF POWER 69
CHAPTER IV.
THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 100
CHAPTER V.
THE LAMP OF LIFE 142
CHAPTER VI.
THE LAMP OF MEMORY 167
CHAPTER VII.
THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE 188
NOTES 203
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING
PREFACE 213
LECTURE I. 217
LECTURE II. 248
ADDENDA to Lectures I. and II. 270
LECTURE III. Turner and his Works 287
LECTURE IV. Pre-Raphaelitism 311
ADDENDA to Lecture IV. 334
THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE.
AN INQUIRY INTO THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
PLATE PAGE
I. ORNAMENTS FROM ROUEN, ST. LO, AND VENICE 33
II. PART OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. LO, NORMANDY 55
III. TRACERIES FROM CAEN, BAYEUX, ROUEN AND BEAVAIS 60
IV. INTERSECTIONAL MOULDINGS 66
V. CAPITAL FROM THE LOWER ARCADE OF THE DOGE'S PALACE, VENICE 88
VI. ARCH FROM THE FACADE OF THE CHURCH OF SAN MICHELE AT LUCCA 90
VII. PIERCED ORNAMENTS FROM LISIEUX, BAYEUX, VERONA, AND PADUA 93
VIII. WINDOW FROM THE CA' FOSCARI, VENICE 95
IX. TRACERY FROM THE CAMPANILE OF GIOTTO,
AT FLORENCE. _Frontispiece._
X. TRACERIES AND MOULDINGS FROM ROUEN AND SALISBURY 122
XI. BALCONY IN THE CAMPO, ST. BENEDETTO, VENICE 131
XII. FRAGMENTS FROM ABBEVILLE, LUCCA, VENICE AND PISA 149
XIII. PORTIONS OF AN ARCADE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE
CATHEDRAL OF FERRARA 161
XIV. SCULPTURES FROM THE CATHEDRAL OF ROUEN 165
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING
Plate I. FIGS. 1, 3 AND 5. ILLUSTRATIVE DIAGRAMS 219
" II. " 2. WINDOW IN OAKHAM CASTLE 221
" III. " 4 AND 6. SPRAY OF ASH-TREE, AND IMPROVEMENT
OF THE SAME ON GREEK PRINCIPLES 226
" IV. " 7. WINDOW IN DUMBLANE CATHEDRAL 231
" V. " 8. MEDIAEVAL TURRET 235
" VI. " 9 AND 10. LOMBARDIC TOWERS 238
" VII. " 11 AND 12. SPIRES AT CONTANCES AND ROUEN 240
" VIII. " 13 AND 14. ILLUSTRATIVE DIAGRAMS 253
" IX. " 15. SCULPTURE AT LYONS 254
" X. " 16. NICHE AT AMIENS 255
" XI. " 17 AND 18. TigER'S HEAD, AND IMPROVEMENT OF
THE SAME ON GREEK PRINCIPLES 258
" XII. " 19. GARRET WINDOW IN HOTEL DE BOURGTHEROUDE 265
" XIII. " 20 AND 21. TREES, AS DRAWN IN THE THIRTEENTH
CENTURY 294
" XIV. " 22. ROCKS, AS DRAWN BY THE SCHOOL OF LEONARDO
DA VINCI 296
" XV. " 23. BOUGHS OF TREES, AFTER TITIAN 298
THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
PREFACE.
The memoranda which form the basis of the following Essay have been
thrown together during the preparation of one of the sections of the
third volume of "Modern Painters."[A] I once thought of giving them a
more expanded form; but their utility, such as it may be, would probably
be diminished by farther delay in their publication, more than it would
be increased by greater care in their arrangement. Obtained in every
case by personal observation, there may be among them some details
valuable even to the experienced architect; but with respect to the
opinions founded upon them I must be prepared to bear the charge of
impertinence which can hardly but attach to the writer who assumes a
dogmatical tone in speaking of an art he has never practised. There are,
however, cases in which men feel too keenly to be silent, and perhaps
too strongly to be wrong; I have been forced into this impertinence; and
have suffered too much from the destruction or neglect of the
architecture I best loved, and from the erection of that which I cannot
love, to reason cautiously respecting the modesty of my opposition to
the principles which have induced the scorn of the one, or directed the
design of the other. And I have been the less careful to modify the
confidence of my statements of principles, because in the midst of the
opposition and uncertainty of our architectural systems, it seems to me
that there is something grateful in any _positive_ opinion, though in
many points wrong, as even weeds are useful that grow on a bank of sand.
[A] The inordinate delay in the appearance of that supplementary
volume has, indeed, been chiefly owing to the necessity under which
the writer felt himself, of obtaining as many memoranda as possible
of mediaeval buildings in Italy and Normandy, now in process of
destruction, before that destruction should be consummated by the
Restorer or Revolutionist. His whole time has been lately occupied
in taking drawings from one side of buildings, of which masons were
knocking down the other; nor can he yet pledge himself to any time
for the publication of the conclusion of "Modern Painters;" he can
only promise that its delay shall not be owing to any indolence on
his part.
Every apology is, however, due to the reader, for the hasty and
imperfect execution of the plates. Having much more serious work in
hand, and desiring merely to render them illustrative of my meaning, I
have sometimes very completely failed even of that humble aim; and the
text, being generally written before the illustration was completed,
sometimes naively describes as sublime or beautiful, features which the
plate represents by a blot. I shall be grateful if the reader will in
such cases refer the expressions of praise to the Architecture, and not
to the illustration.
So far, however, as their coarseness and rudeness admit, the plates are
valuable; being either copies of memoranda made upon the spot, or
(Plates IX. and XI.) enlarged and adapted from Daguerreotypes, taken
under my own superintendence. Unfortunately, the great distance from the
ground of the window which is the subject of Plate IX. renders even the
Daguerreotype indistinct; and I cannot answer for the accuracy of any of
the mosaic details, more especially of those which surround the window,
and which I rather imagine, in the original, to be sculptured in relief.
The general proportions are, however, studiously preserved; the spirals
of the shafts are counted, and the effect of the whole is as near that
of the thing itself, as is necessary for the purposes of illustration
for which the plate is given. For the accuracy of the rest I can answer,
even to the cracks in the stones, and the number of them; and though the
looseness of the drawing, and the picturesque character which is
necessarily given by an endeavor to draw old buildings as they actually
appear, may perhaps diminish their credit for architectural veracity,
they will do so unjustly.
The system of lettering adopted in the few instances in which sections
have been given, appears somewhat obscure in the references, but it is
convenient upon the whole. The line which marks the direction of any
section is noted, if the section be symmetrical, by a single letter; and
the section itself by the same letter with a line over it, a.--[=a]. But
if the section be unsymmetrical, its direction is noted by two letters,
a. a. a_2 at its extremities; and the actual section by the same letters
with lines over them, [=a]. [=a]. [=a]_2, at the corresponding
extremities.
The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small number of buildings to
which reference has been made. But it is to be remembered that the
following chapters pretend only to be a statement of principles,
illustrated each by one or two examples, not an essay on European
architecture; and those examples I have generally taken either from the
buildings which I love best, or from the schools of architecture which,
it appeared to me, have been less carefully described than they
deserved. I could as fully, though not with the accuracy and certainty
derived from personal observation, have illustrated the principles
subsequently advanced, from the architecture of Egypt, India, or Spain,
as from that to which the reader will find his attention chiefly
directed, the Italian Romanesque and Gothic. But my affections, as well
as my experience, led me to that line of richly varied and magnificently
intellectual schools, which reaches, like a high watershed of Christian
architecture, from the Adriatic to the Northumbrian seas, bordered by
the impure schools of Spain on the one hand, and of Germany on the
other: and as culminating points and centres of this chain, I have
considered, first, the cities of the Val d'Arno, as representing the
Italian Romanesque and pure Italian Gothic; Venice and Verona as
representing the Italian Gothic colored by Byzantine elements; and
Rouen, with the associated Norman cities, Caen, Bayeux, and Coutances,
as representing the entire range of Northern architecture from the
Romanesque to Flamboyant.
I could have wished to have given more examples from our early English
Gothic; but I have always found it impossible to work in the cold
interiors of our cathedrals, while the daily services, lamps, and
fumigation of those upon the Continent, render them perfectly safe.
In the course of last summer I undertook a pilgrimage to the English
Shrines, and began with Salisbury, where the consequence of a few days'
work was a state of weakened health, which I may be permitted to name
among the causes of the slightness and imperfection of the present
Essay.
INTRODUCTORY.
Some years ago, in conversation with an artist whose works, perhaps,
alone, in the present day, unite perfection of drawing with resplendence
of color, the writer made some inquiry respecting the general means by
which this latter quality was most easily to be attained. The reply was
as concise as it was comprehensive--"Know what you have to do, and do
it"--comprehensive, not only as regarded the branch of art to which it
temporarily applied, but as expressing the great principle of success in
every direction of human effort; for I believe that failure is less
frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience
of labor, than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be
done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and
sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any
kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be
impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error
to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception,
or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and
perfection in themselves. And this is the more cautiously to be
remembered; because, while a man's sense and conscience, aided by
Revelation, are always enough, if earnestly directed, to enable him to
discover what is right, neither his sense, nor conscience, nor feeling,
are ever enough, because they are not intended, to determine for him
what is possible. He knows neither his own strength nor that of his
fellows, neither the exact dependence to be placed on his allies nor
resistance to be expected from his opponents. These are questions
respecting which passion may warp his conclusions, and ignorance must
limit them; but it is his own fault if either interfere with the
apprehension of duty, or the acknowledgment of right. And, as far as I
have taken cognizance of the causes of the many failures to which the
efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters
political, they seem to me more largely to spring from this single error
than from all others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some
sort inexplicable, relations of capability, chance, resistance, and
inconvenience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether
supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just.
Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our
powers should reconcile us too easily to our shortcomings, and even lead
us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural utmost is in
itself well, or, in other words, that the necessity of offences renders
them inoffensive.
What is true of human polity seems to me not less so of the
distinctively political art of Architecture. I have long felt convinced
of the necessity, in order to its progress, of some determined effort to
extricate from the confused mass of partial traditions and dogmata with
which it has become encumbered during imperfect or restricted practice,
those large principles of right which are applicable to every stage and
style of it. Uniting the technical and imaginative elements as
essentially as humanity does soul and body, it shows the same infirmly
balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher,
to the interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity
of the reflective, element. This tendency, like every other form of
materialism, is increasing with the advance of the age; and the only
laws which resist it, based upon partial precedents, and already
regarded with disrespect as decrepit, if not with defiance as
tyrannical, are evidently inapplicable to the new forms and functions of
the art, which the necessities of the day demand. How many these
necessities may become, cannot be conjectured; they rise, strange and
impatient, out of every modern shadow of change. How far it may be
possible to meet them without a sacrifice of the essential characters of
architectural art, cannot be determined by specific calculation or
observance. There is no law, no principle, based on past practice,
which may not be overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new
condition, or the invention of a new material; and the most rational, if
not the only, mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all
that is systematic and consistent in our practice, or of ancient
authority in our judgment, is to cease for a little while, our endeavors
to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses, restraints, or
requirements; and endeavor to determine, as the guides of every effort,
some constant, general, and irrefragable laws of right--laws, which
based upon man's nature, not upon his knowledge, may possess so far the
unchangeableness of the one, as that neither the increase nor
imperfection of the other may be able to assault or invalidate them.
There are, perhaps, no such laws peculiar to any one art. Their range
necessarily includes the entire horizon of man's action. But they have
modified forms and operations belonging to each of his pursuits, and the
extent of their authority cannot surely be considered as a diminution of
its weight. Those peculiar aspects of them which belong to the first of
the arts, I have endeavored to trace in the following pages; and since,
if truly stated, they must necessarily be, not only safeguards against
every form of error, but sources of every measure of success, I do not
think that I claim too much for them in calling them the Lamps of
Architecture, nor that it is indolence, in endeavoring to ascertain the
true nature and nobility of their fire, to refuse to enter into any
curious or special questioning of the innumerable hindrances by which
their light has been too often distorted or overpowered.
Had this farther examination been attempted, the work would have become
certainly more invidious, and perhaps less useful, as liable to errors
which are avoided by the present simplicity of its plan. Simple though
it be, its extent is too great to admit of any adequate accomplishment,
unless by a devotion of time which the writer did not feel justified in
withdrawing from branches of inquiry in which the prosecution of works
already undertaken has engaged him. Both arrangements and nomenclature
are those of convenience rather than of system; the one is arbitrary and
the other illogical: nor is it pretended that all, or even the greater
number of, the principles necessary to the well-being of the art, are
included in the inquiry. Many, however, of considerable importance will
be found to develope themselves incidentally from those more specially
brought forward.
Graver apology is necessary for an apparently graver fault. It has been
just said, that there is no branch of human work whose constant laws
have not close analogy with those which govern every other mode of man's
exertion. But, more than this, exactly as we reduce to greater
simplicity and surety any one group of these practical laws, we shall
find them passing the mere condition of connection or analogy, and
becoming the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the
mighty laws which govern the moral world. However mean or inconsiderable
the act, there is something in the well doing of it, which has
fellowship with the noblest forms of manly virtue; and the truth,
decision, and temperance, which we reverently regard as honorable
conditions of the spiritual being, have a representative or derivative
influence over the works of the hand, the movements of the frame, and
the action of the intellect.
And as thus every action, down even to the drawing of a line or
utterance of a syllable, is capable of a peculiar dignity in the manner
of it, which we sometimes express by saying it is truly done (as a line
or tone is true), so also it is capable of dignity still higher in the
motive of it. For there is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may
be done to a great purpose, and ennobled therefore; nor is any purpose
so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to
help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing
of God. Hence George Herbert--
"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine."
Therefore, in the pressing or recommending of any act or manner of
acting, we have choice of two separate lines of argument: one based on
representation of the expediency or inherent value of the work, which is
often small, and always disputable; the other based on proofs of its
relations to the higher orders of human virtue, and of its
acceptableness, so far as it goes, to Him who is the origin of virtue.
The former is commonly the more persuasive method, the latter assuredly
the more conclusive; only it is liable to give offence, as if there were
irreverence in adducing considerations so weighty in treating subjects
of small temporal importance. I believe, however, that no error is more
thoughtless than this. We treat God with irreverence by banishing Him
from our thoughts, not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His
is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot be troubled
with small things. There is nothing so small but that we may honor God
by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own
hands; and what is true of the Deity is equally true of His Revelation.
We use it most reverently when most habitually: our insolence is in ever
acting without reference to it, our true honoring of it is in its
universal application. I have been blamed for the familiar introduction
of its sacred words. I am grieved to have given pain by so doing; but my
excuse must be my wish that those words were made the ground of every
argument and the test of every action. We have them not often enough on
our lips, nor deeply enough in our memories, nor loyally enough in our
lives. The snow, the vapor, and the stormy wind fulfil His word. Are our
acts and thoughts lighter and wilder than these--that we should forget
it?
I have therefore ventured, at the risk of giving to some passages the
appearance of irreverence, to take the higher line of argument wherever
it appeared clearly traceable: and this, I would ask the reader
especially to observe, not merely because I think it the best mode of
reaching ultimate truth, still less because I think the subject of more
importance than many others; but because every subject should surely, at
a period like the present, be taken up in this spirit, or not at all.
The aspect of the years that approach us is as solemn as it is full of
mystery; and the weight of evil against which we have to contend, is
increasing like the letting out of water. It is no time for the idleness
of metaphysics, or the entertainment of the arts. The blasphemies of the
earth are sounding louder, and its miseries heaped heavier every day;
and if, in the midst of the exertion which every good man is called upon
to put forth for their repression or relief, it is lawful to ask for a
thought, for a moment, for a lifting of the finger, in any direction but
that of the immediate and overwhelming need, it is at least incumbent
upon us to approach the questions in which we would engage him, in the
spirit which has become the habit of his mind, and in the hope that
neither his zeal nor his usefulness may be checked by the withdrawal of
an hour which has shown him how even those things which seemed
mechanical, indifferent, or contemptible, depend for their perfection
upon the acknowledgment of the sacred principles of faith, truth, and
obedience, for which it has become the occupation of his life to
contend.
THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.
I. Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices
raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to
his mental health, power and pleasure.
It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distinguish
carefully between Architecture and Building.
To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put
together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a
considerable size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship
building, and coach building. That one edifice stands, another floats,
and another is suspended on iron springs, makes no difference in the
nature of the art, if so it may be called, of building or edification.
The persons who profess that art, are severally builders,
ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their work may justify;
but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of
what it erects; and it is no more architecture which raises a church, or
which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a required number of
persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is architecture
which makes a carriage commodious or a ship swift. I do not, of course,
mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately,
applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture); but in that
sense architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is
therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the
confusion which would arise, and has often arisen, from extending
principles which belong altogether to building, into the sphere of
architecture proper.
Let us, therefore, at once confine the name to that art which, taking up
and admitting, as conditions of its working, the necessities and common
uses of the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable
or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary. Thus, I suppose, no one would
call the laws architectural which determine the height of a breastwork
or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing of that bastion
be added an unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, _that_ is
Architecture. It would be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or
machicolations architectural features, so long as they consist only of
an advanced gallery supported on projecting masses, with open intervals
beneath for offence. But if these projecting masses be carved beneath
into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the
intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, _that_ is
Architecture. It may not be always easy to draw the line so sharply and
simply, because there are few buildings which have not some pretence or
color of being architectural; neither can there be any architecture
which is not based on building, nor any good architecture which is not
based on good building; but it is perfectly easy and very necessary to
keep the ideas distinct, and to understand fully that Architecture
concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above
and beyond its common use. I say common; because a building raised to
the honor of God, or in memory of men, has surely a use to which its
architectural adornment fits it; but not a use which limits, by any
inevitable necessities, its plan or details.
II. Architecture proper, then, naturally arranges itself under five
heads:--
Devotional; including all buildings raised for God's service or honor.
Memorial; including both monuments and tombs.
Civil; including every edifice raised by nations or societies, for
purposes of common business or pleasure.
Military; including all private and public architecture of defence.
Domestic; including every rank and kind of dwelling-place.
Now, of the principles which I would endeavor to develope, while all
must be, as I have said, applicable to every stage and style of the art,
some, and especially those which are exciting rather than directing,
have necessarily fuller reference to one kind of building than another;
and among these I would place first that spirit which, having influence
in all, has nevertheless such especial reference to devotional and
memorial architecture--the spirit which offers for such work precious
things simply because they are precious; not as being necessary to the
building, but as an offering, surrendering, and sacrifice of what is to
ourselves desirable. It seems to me, not only that this feeling is in
most cases wholly wanting in those who forward the devotional buildings
of the present day; but that it would even be regarded as an ignorant,
dangerous, or perhaps criminal principle by many among us. I have not
space to enter into dispute of all the various objections which may be
urged against it--they are many and spacious; but I may, perhaps, ask
the reader's patience while I set down those simple reasons which cause
me to believe it a good and just feeling, and as well-pleasing to God
and honorable in men, as it is beyond all dispute necessary to the
production of any great work in the kind with which we are at present
concerned.
III. Now, first, to define this Lamp, or Spirit of Sacrifice, clearly. I
have said that it prompts us to the offering of precious things merely
because they are precious, not because they are useful or necessary. It
is a spirit, for instance, which of two marbles, equally beautiful,
applicable and durable, would choose the more costly because it was so,
and of two kinds of decoration, equally effective, would choose the more
elaborate because it was so, in order that it might in the same compass
present more cost and more thought. It is therefore most unreasoning and
enthusiastic, and perhaps best negatively defined, as the opposite of
the prevalent feeling of modern times, which desires to produce the
largest results at the least cost.
Of this feeling, then, there are two distinct forms: the first, the wish
to exercise self-denial for the sake of self-discipline merely, a wish
acted upon in the abandonment of things loved or desired, there being no
direct call or purpose to be answered by so doing; and the second, the
desire to honor or please some one else by the costliness of the
sacrifice. The practice is, in the first case, either private or public;
but most frequently, and perhaps most properly, private; while, in the
latter case, the act is commonly, and with greatest advantage, public.
Now, it cannot but at first appear futile to assert the expediency of
self-denial for its own sake, when, for so many sakes, it is every day
necessary to a far greater degree than any of us practise it. But I
believe it is just because we do not enough acknowledge or contemplate
it as a good in itself, that we are apt to fail in its duties when they
become imperative, and to calculate, with some partiality, whether the
good proposed to others measures or warrants the amount of grievance to
ourselves, instead of accepting with gladness the opportunity of
sacrifice as a personal advantage. Be this as it may, it is not
necessary to insist upon the matter here; since there are always higher
and more useful channels of self-sacrifice, for those who choose to
practise it, than any connected with the arts.
While in its second branch, that which is especially concerned with the
arts, the justice of the feeling is still more doubtful; it depends on
our answer to the broad question, Can the Deity be indeed honored by the
presentation to Him of any material objects of value, or by any
direction of zeal or wisdom which is not immediately beneficial to men?
For, observe, it is not now the question whether the fairness and
majesty of a building may or may not answer any moral purpose; it is not
the _result_ of labor in any sort of which we are speaking, but the bare
and mere costliness--the substance and labor and time themselves: are
these, we ask, independently of their result, acceptable offerings to
God, and considered by Him as doing Him honor? So long as we refer this
question to the decision of feeling, or of conscience, or of reason
merely, it will be contradictorily or imperfectly answered; it admits of
entire answer only when we have met another and a far different
question, whether the Bible be indeed one book or two, and whether the
character of God revealed in the Old Testament be other than His
character revealed in the New.
IV. Now, it is a most secure truth, that, although the particular
ordinances divinely appointed for special purposes at any given period
of man's history, may be by the same divine authority abrogated at
another, it is impossible that any character of God, appealed to or
described in any ordinance past or present, can ever be changed, or
understood as changed, by the abrogation of that ordinance. God is one
and the same, and is pleased or displeased by the same things for ever,
although one part of His pleasure may be expressed at one time rather
than another, and although the mode in which His pleasure is to be
consulted may be by Him graciously modified to the circumstances of men.
Thus, for instance, it was necessary that, in order to the understanding
by man of the scheme of Redemption, that scheme should be foreshown from
the beginning by the type of bloody sacrifice. But God had no more
pleasure in such sacrifice in the time of Moses than He has now; He
never accepted as a propitiation for sin any sacrifice but the single
one in prospective; and that we may not entertain any shadow of doubt on
this subject, the worthlessness of all other sacrifice than this is
proclaimed at the very time when typical sacrifice was most imperatively
demanded. God was a spirit, and could be worshipped only in spirit and
in truth, as singly and exclusively when every day brought its claim of
typical and material service or offering, as now when He asks for none
but that of the heart.
So, therefore, it is a most safe and sure principle that, if in the
manner of performing any rite at any time, circumstances can be traced
which we are either told, or may legitimately conclude, _pleased_ God at
that time, those same circumstances will please Him at all times, in the
performance of all rites or offices to which they may be attached in
like manner; unless it has been afterwards revealed that, for some
special purpose, it is now His will that such circumstances should be
withdrawn. And this argument will have all the more force if it can be
shown that such conditions were not essential to the completeness of
the rite in its human uses and bearings, and only were added to it as
being in _themselves_ pleasing to God.
V. Now, was it necessary to the completeness, as a type, of the
Levitical sacrifice, or to its utility as an explanation of divine
purposes, that it should cost anything to the person in whose behalf it
was offered? On the contrary, the sacrifice which it foreshowed was to
be God's free gift; and the cost of, or difficulty of obtaining, the
sacrificial type, could only render that type in a measure obscure, and
less expressive of the offering which God would in the end provide for
all men. Yet this costliness was _generally_ a condition of the
acceptableness of the sacrifice. "Neither will I offer unto the Lord my
God of that which doth cost me nothing."[B] That costliness, therefore,
must be an acceptable condition in all human offerings at all times; for
if it was pleasing to God once, it must please Him always, unless
directly forbidden by Him afterwards, which it has never been.
[B] 2 Sam. xxiv. 24. Deut. xvi. 16, 17.
Again, was it necessary to the typical perfection of the Levitical
offering, that it should be the best of the flock? Doubtless the
spotlessness of the sacrifice renders it more expressive to the
Christian mind; but was it because so expressive that it was actually,
and in so many words, demanded by God? Not at all. It was demanded by
Him expressly on the same grounds on which an earthly governor would
demand it, as a testimony of respect. "Offer it now unto thy
governor."[C] And the less valuable offering was rejected, not because
it did not image Christ, nor fulfil the purposes of sacrifice, but
because it indicated a feeling that would grudge the best of its
possessions to Him who gave them; and because it was a bold dishonoring
of God in the sight of man. Whence it may be infallibly concluded, that
in whatever offerings we may now see reason to present unto God (I say
not what these may be), a condition of their acceptableness will be now,
as it was then, that they should be the best of their kind.
[C] Mal. i. 8.
VI. But farther, was it necessary to the carrying out of the Mosaical
system, that there should be either art or splendor in the form or
services of the tabernacle or temple? Was it necessary to the
perfection of any one of their typical offices, that there should be
that hanging of blue, and purple, and scarlet? those taches of brass and
sockets of silver? that working in cedar and overlaying with gold? One
thing at least is evident: there was a deep and awful danger in it; a
danger that the God whom they so worshipped, might be associated in the
minds of the serfs of Egypt with the gods to whom they had seen similar
gifts offered and similar honors paid. The probability, in our times, of
fellowship with the feelings of the idolatrous Romanist is absolutely as
nothing compared with the danger to the Israelite of a sympathy with the
idolatrous Egyptian;[1] no speculative, no unproved danger; but proved
fatally by their fall during a month's abandonment to their own will; a
fall into the most servile idolatry; yet marked by such offerings to
their idol as their leader was, in the close sequel, instructed to bid
them offer to God. This danger was imminent, perpetual, and of the most
awful kind: it was the one against which God made provision, not only by
commandments, by threatenings, by promises, the most urgent, repeated,
and impressive; but by temporary ordinances of a severity so terrible as
almost to dim for a time, in the eyes of His people, His attribute of
mercy. The principal object of every instituted law of that Theocracy,
of every judgment sent forth in its vindication, was to mark to the
people His hatred of idolatry; a hatred written under their advancing
steps, in the blood of the Canaanite, and more sternly still in the
darkness of their own desolation, when the children and the sucklings
swooned in the streets of Jerusalem, and the lion tracked his prey in
the dust of Samaria.[D] Yet against this mortal danger provision was not
made in one way (to man's thoughts the simplest, the most natural, the
most effective), by withdrawing from the worship of the Divine Being
whatever could delight the sense, or shape the imagination, or limit the
idea of Deity to place. This one way God refused, demanding for Himself
such honors, and accepting for Himself such local dwelling, as had been
paid and dedicated to idol gods by heathen worshippers; and for what
reason? Was the glory of the tabernacle necessary to set forth or image
His divine glory to the minds of His people? What! purple or scarlet
necessary to the people who had seen the great river of Egypt run
scarlet to the sea, under His condemnation? What! golden lamp and cherub
necessary for those who had seen the fires of heaven falling like a
mantle on Mount Sinai, and its golden courts opened to receive their
mortal lawgiver? What! silver clasp and fillet necessary when they had
seen the silver waves of the Red Sea clasp in their arched hollows the
corpses of the horse and his rider? Nay--not so. There was but one
reason, and that an eternal one; that as the covenant that He made with
men was accompanied with some external sign of its continuance, and of
His remembrance of it, so the acceptance of that covenant might be
marked and signified by use, in some external sign of their love and
obedience, and surrender of themselves and theirs to His will; and that
their gratitude to Him, and continual remembrance of Him, might have at
once their expression and their enduring testimony in the presentation
to Him, not only of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not only of the
fruits of the earth and the tithe of time, but of all treasures of
wisdom and beauty; of the thought that invents, and the hand that
labors; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone; of the strength of iron,
and of the light of gold.
[D] Lam. ii. 11. 2 Kings xvii. 25.
And let us not now lose sight of this broad and unabrogated principle--I
might say, incapable of being abrogated, so long as men shall receive
earthly gifts from God. Of all that they have His tithe must be rendered
to Him, or in so far and in so much He is forgotten: of the skill and of
the treasure, of the strength and of the mind, of the time and of the
toil, offering must be made reverently; and if there be any difference
between the Levitical and the Christian offering, it is that the latter
may be just so much the wider in its range as it is less typical in its
meaning, as it is thankful instead of sacrificial. There can be no
excuse accepted because the Deity does not now visibly dwell in His
temple; if He is invisible it is only through our failing faith: nor any
excuse because other calls are more immediate or more sacred; this
ought to be done, and not the other left undone. Yet this objection, as
frequent as feeble, must be more specifically answered.
VII. It has been said--it ought always to be said, for it is true--that
a better and more honorable offering is made to our Master in ministry
to the poor, in extending the knowledge of His name, in the practice of
the virtues by which that name is hallowed, than in material presents to
His temple. Assuredly it is so: woe to all who think that any other kind
or manner of offering may in any wise take the place of these! Do the
people need place to pray, and calls to hear His word? Then it is no
time for smoothing pillars or carving pulpits; let us have enough first
of walls and roofs. Do the people need teaching from house to house, and
bread from day to day? Then they are deacons and ministers we want, not
architects. I insist on this, I plead for this; but let us examine
ourselves, and see if this be indeed the reason for our backwardness in
the lesser work. The question is not between God's house and His poor:
it is not between God's house and His Gospel. It is between God's house
and ours. Have we no tesselated colors on our floors? no frescoed
fancies on our roofs? no niched statuary in our corridors? no gilded
furniture in our chambers? no costly stones in our cabinets? Has even
the tithe of these been offered? They are, or they ought to be, the
signs that enough has been devoted to the great purposes of human
stewardship, and that there remains to us what we can spend in luxury;
but there is a greater and prouder luxury than this selfish one--that of
bringing a portion of such things as these into sacred service, and
presenting them for a memorial[E] that our pleasure as well as our toil
has been hallowed by the remembrance of Him who gave both the strength
and the reward. And until this has been done, I do not see how such
possessions can be retained in happiness. I do not understand the
feeling which would arch our own gates and pave our own thresholds, and
leave the church with its narrow door and foot-worn sill; the feeling
which enriches our own chambers with all manner of costliness, and
endures the bare wall and mean compass of the temple. There is seldom
even so severe a choice to be made, seldom so much self-denial to be
exercised. There are isolated cases, in which men's happiness and mental
activity depend upon a certain degree of luxury in their houses; but
then this is true luxury, felt and tasted, and profited by. In the
plurality of instances nothing of the kind is attempted, nor can be
enjoyed; men's average resources cannot reach it; and that which they
_can_ reach, gives them no pleasure, and might be spared. It will be
seen, in the course of the following chapters, that I am no advocate for
meanness of private habitation. I would fain introduce into it all
magnificence, care, and beauty, where they are possible; but I would not
have that useless expense in unnoticed fineries or formalities;
cornicings of ceilings and graining of doors, and fringing of curtains,
and thousands such; things which have become foolishly and apathetically
habitual--things on whose common appliance hang whole trades, to which
there never yet belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real
pleasure, or becoming of the remotest or most contemptible use--things
which cause half the expense of life, and destroy more than half its
comfort, manliness, respectability, freshness, and facility. I speak
from experience: I know what it is to live in a cottage with a deal
floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate; and I know it to be in many
respects healthier and happier than living between a Turkey carpet and
gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender. I do not say
that such things have not their place and propriety; but I say this,
emphatically, that the tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in
domestic vanities, if not absolutely and meaninglessly lost in domestic
discomforts, and incumbrances, would, if collectively offered and wisely
employed, build a marble church for every town in England; such a church
as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways
and walks, and as it would bring the light into the eyes to see from
afar, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs.
[E] Num. xxxi. 54. Psa. lxxvi. 11.
VIII. I have said for every town: I do not want a marble church for
every village; nay, I do not want marble churches at all for their own
sake, but for the sake of the spirit that would build them. The church
has no need of any visible splendors; her power is independent of them,
her purity is in some degree opposed to them. The simplicity of a
pastoral sanctuary is lovelier than the majesty of an urban temple; and
it may be more than questioned whether, to the people, such majesty has
ever been the source of any increase of effective piety; but to the
builders it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church we want,
but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of
adoration: not the gift, but the giving.[2] And see how much more
charity the full understanding of this might admit, among classes of men
of naturally opposite feelings; and how much more nobleness in the work.
There is no need to offend by importunate, self-proclaiming splendor.
Your gift may be given in an unpresuming way. Cut one or two shafts out
of a porphyry whose preciousness those only would know who would desire
it to be so used; add another month's labor to the undercutting of a few
capitals, whose delicacy will not be seen nor loved by one beholder of
ten thousand; see that the simplest masonry of the edifice be perfect
and substantial; and to those who regard such things, their witness will
be clear and impressive; to those who regard them not, all will at least
be inoffensive. But do not think the feeling itself a folly, or the act
itself useless. Of what use was that dearly-bought water of the well of
Bethlehem with which the King of Israel slaked the dust of Adullam?--yet
was not thus better than if he had drunk it? Of what use was that
passionate act of Christian sacrifice, against which, first uttered by
the false tongue, the very objection we would now conquer took a sullen
tone for ever?[F] So also let us not ask of what use our offering is to
the church: it is at least better for _us_ than if it had been retained
for ourselves. It may be better for others also: there is, at any rate,
a chance of this; though we must always fearfully and widely shun the
thought that the magnificence of the temple can materially add to the
efficiency of the worship or to the power of the ministry. Whatever we
do, or whatever we offer, let it not interfere with the simplicity of
the one, or abate, as if replacing, the zeal of the other. That is the
abuse and fallacy of Romanism, by which the true spirit of Christian
offering is directly contradicted. The treatment of the Papists' temple
is eminently exhibitory; it is surface work throughout; and the danger
and evil of their church decoration lie, not in its reality--not in the
true wealth and art of it, of which the lower people are never
cognizant--but in its tinsel and glitter, in the gilding of the shrine
and painting of the image, in embroidery of dingy robes and crowding of
imitated gems; all this being frequently thrust forward to the
concealment of what is really good or great in their buildings.[3] Of an
offering of gratitude which is neither to be exhibited nor rewarded,
which is neither to win praise nor purchase salvation, the Romanist (as
such) has no conception.
[F] John xii. 5.
IX. While, however, I would especially deprecate the imputation of any
other acceptableness or usefulness to the gift itself than that which it
receives from the spirit of its presentation, it may be well to observe,
that there is a lower advantage which never fails to accompany a dutiful
observance of any right abstract principle. While the first fruits of
his possessions were required from the Israelite as a testimony of
fidelity, the payment of those first fruits was nevertheless rewarded,
and that connectedly and specifically, by the increase of those
possessions. Wealth, and length of days, and peace, were the promised
and experienced rewards of his offering, though they were not to be the
objects of it. The tithe paid into the storehouse was the expressed
condition of the blessing which there should not be room enough to
receive. And it will be thus always: God never forgets any work or labor
of love; and whatever it may be of which the first and best proportions
or powers have been presented to Him, he will multiply and increase
sevenfold. Therefore, though it may not be necessarily the interest of
religion to admit the service of the arts, the arts will never flourish
until they have been primarily devoted to that service--devoted, both by
architect and employer; by the one in scrupulous, earnest, affectionate
design; by the other in expenditure at least more frank, at least less
calculating, than that which he would admit in the indulgence of his own
private feelings. Let this principle be but once fairly acknowledged
among us; and however it may be chilled and repressed in practice,
however feeble may be its real influence, however the sacredness of it
may be diminished by counter-workings of vanity and self-interest, yet
its mere acknowledgment would bring a reward; and with our present
accumulation of means and of intellect, there would be such an impulse
and vitality given to art as it has not felt since the thirteenth
century. And I do not assert this as other than a national consequence:
I should, indeed, expect a larger measure of every great and spiritual
faculty to be always given where those faculties had been wisely and
religiously employed; but the impulse to which I refer, would be,
humanly speaking, certain; and would naturally result from obedience to
the two great conditions enforced by the Spirit of Sacrifice, first,
that we should in everything do our best; and, secondly, that we should
consider increase of apparent labor as an increase of beauty in the
building. A few practical deductions from these two conditions, and I
have done.
X. For the first: it is alone enough to secure success, and it is for
want of observing it that we continually fail. We are none of us so good
architects as to be able to work habitually beneath our strength; and
yet there is not a building that I know of, lately raised, wherein it is
not sufficiently evident that neither architect nor builder has done his
best. It is the especial characteristic of modern work. All old work
nearly has been hard work. It may be the hard work of children, of
barbarians, of rustics; but it is always their utmost. Ours has as
constantly the look of money's worth, of a stopping short wherever and
whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions; never of a
fair putting forth of our strength. Let us have done with this kind of
work at once: cast off every temptation to it: do not let us degrade
ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over our short comings;
let us confess our poverty or our parsimony, but not belie our human
intellect. It is not even a question of how _much_ we are to do, but of
how it is to be done; it is not a question of doing more, but of doing
better. Do not let us boss our roofs with wretched, half-worked,
blunt-edged rosettes; do not let us flank our gates with rigid
imitations of mediaeval statuary. Such things are mere insults to common
sense, and only unfit us for feeling the nobility of their prototypes.
We have so much, suppose, to be spent in decoration; let us go to the
Flaxman of his time, whoever he may be, and bid him carve for us a
single statue, frieze or capital, or as many as we can afford,
compelling upon him the one condition, that they shall be the best he
can do; place them where they will be of the most value, and be content.
Our other capitals may be mere blocks, and our other niches empty. No
matter: better our work unfinished than all bad. It may be that we do
not desire ornament of so high an order; choose, then, a less developed
style, also, if you will, rougher material; the law which we are
enforcing requires only that what we pretend to do and to give, shall
both be the best of their kind; choose, therefore, the Norman hatchet
work, instead of the Flaxman frieze and statue, but let it be the best
hatchet work; and if you cannot afford marble, use Caen stone, but from
the best bed; and if not stone, brick, but the best brick; preferring
always what is good of a lower order of work or material, to what is bad
of a higher; for this is not only the way to improve every kind of work,
and to put every kind of material to better use; but it is more honest
and unpretending, and is in harmony with other just, upright, and manly
principles, whose range we shall have presently to take into
consideration.
XI. The other condition which we had to notice, was the value of the
appearance of labor upon architecture. I have spoken of this before;[G]
and it is, indeed, one of the most frequent sources of pleasure which
belong to the art, always, however, within certain somewhat remarkable
limits. For it does not at first appear easily to be explained why
labor, as represented by materials of value, should, without sense of
wrong or error, bear being wasted; while the waste of actual
workmanship is always painful, so soon as it is apparent. But so it is,
that, while precious materials may, with a certain profusion and
negligence, be employed for the magnificence of what is seldom seen, the
work of man cannot be carelessly and idly bestowed, without an immediate
sense of wrong; as if the strength of the living creature were never
intended by its Maker to be sacrificed in vain, though it is well for us
sometimes to part with what we esteem precious of substance, as showing
that in such a service it becomes but dross and dust. And in the nice
balance between the straitening of effort or enthusiasm on the one hand,
and vainly casting it away upon the other, there are more questions than
can be met by any but very just and watchful feeling. In general it is
less the mere loss of labor that offends us, than the lack of judgment
implied by such loss; so that if men confessedly work for work's sake,
and it does not appear that they are ignorant where or how to make their
labor tell, we shall not be grossly offended. On the contrary, we shall
be pleased if the work be lost in carrying out a principle, or in
avoiding a deception. It, indeed, is a law properly belonging to another
part of our subject, but it may be allowably stated here, that,
whenever, by the construction of a building, some parts of it are hidden
from the eye which are the continuation of others bearing some
consistent ornament, it is not well that the ornament should cease in
the parts concealed; credit is given for it, and it should not be
deceptively withdrawn: as, for instance, in the sculpture of the backs
of the statues of a temple pediment; never, perhaps, to be seen, but yet
not lawfully to be left unfinished. And so in the working out of
ornaments in dark concealed places, in which it is best to err on the
side of completion; and in the carrying round of string courses, and
other such continuous work; not but that they may stop sometimes, on the
point of going into some palpably impenetrable recess, but then let them
stop boldly and markedly, on some distinct terminal ornament, and never
be supposed to exist where they do not. The arches of the towers which
flank the transepts of Rouen Cathedral have rosette ornaments on their
spandrils, on the three visible sides; none on the side towards the
roof. The right of this is rather a nice point for question.
[G] Mod. Painters, Part I. Sec. 1, Chap. 3.
XII. Visibility, however, we must remember, depends, not only on
situation, but on distance; and there is no way in which work is more
painfully and unwisely lost than in its over delicacy on parts distant
from the eye. Here, again, the principle of honesty must govern our
treatment: we must not work any kind of ornament which is, perhaps, to
cover the whole building (or at least to occur on all parts of it)
delicately where it is near the eye, and rudely where it is removed from
it. That is trickery and dishonesty. Consider, first, what kinds of
ornaments will tell in the distance and what near, and so distribute
them, keeping such as by their nature are delicate, down near the eye,
and throwing the bold and rough kinds of work to the top; and if there
be any kind which is to be both near and far off, take care that it be
as boldly and rudely wrought where it is well seen as where it is
distant, so that the spectator may know exactly what it is, and what it
is worth. Thus chequered patterns, and in general such ornaments as
common workmen can execute, may extend over the whole building; but
bas-reliefs, and fine niches and capitals, should be kept down, and the
common sense of this will always give a building dignity, even though
there be some abruptness or awkwardness, in the resulting arrangements.
Thus at San Zeno at Verona, the bas-reliefs, full of incident and
interest are confined to a parallelogram of the front, reaching to the
height of the capitals of the columns of the porch. Above these, we find
a simple though most lovely, little arcade; and above that, only blank
wall, with square face shafts. The whole effect is tenfold grander and
better than if the entire facade had been covered with bad work, and may
serve for an example of the way to place little where we cannot afford
much. So, again, the transept gates of Rouen[H] are covered with
delicate bas-reliefs (of which I shall speak at greater length
presently) up to about once and a half a man's height; and above that
come the usual and more visible statues and niches. So in the campanile
at Florence, the circuit of bas-reliefs is on its lowest story; above
that come its statues; and above them all its pattern mosaic, and
twisted columns, exquisitely finished, like all Italian work of the
time, but still, in the eye of the Florentine, rough and commonplace by
comparison with the bas-reliefs. So generally the most delicate niche
work and best mouldings of the French Gothic are in gates and low
windows well within sight; although, it being the very spirit of that
style to trust to its exuberance for effect, there is occasionally a
burst upwards and blossoming unrestrainably to the sky, as in the
pediment of the west front of Rouen, and in the recess of the rose
window behind it, where there are some most elaborate flower-mouldings,
all but invisible from below, and only adding a general enrichment to
the deep shadows that relieve the shafts of the advanced pediment. It is
observable, however, that this very work is bad flamboyant, and has
corrupt renaissance characters in its detail as well as use; while in
the earlier and grander north and south gates, there is a very noble
proportioning of the work to the distance, the niches and statues which
crown the northern one, at a height of about one hundred feet from the
ground, being alike colossal and simple; visibly so from below, so as to
induce no deception, and yet honestly and well-finished above, and all
that they are expected to be; the features very beautiful, full of
expression, and as delicately wrought as any work of the period.
[H] Henceforward, for the sake of convenience, when I name any
cathedral town in this manner, let me be understood to speak of its
cathedral church.
XIII. It is to be remembered, however, that while the ornaments in every
fine ancient building, without exception so far as I am aware, are most
delicate at the base, they are often in greater effective _quantity_ on
the upper parts. In high towers this is perfectly natural and right, the
solidity of the foundation being as necessary as the division and
penetration of the superstructure; hence the lighter work and richly
pierced crowns of late Gothic towers. The campanile of Giotto at
Florence, already alluded to, is an exquisite instance of the union of
the two principles, delicate bas-reliefs adorning its massy foundation,
while the open tracery of the upper windows attracts the eye by its
slender intricacy, and a rich cornice crowns the whole. In such truly
fine cases of this disposition the upper work is effective by its
quantity and intricacy only, as the lower portions by delicacy; so also
in the Tour de Beurre at Rouen, where, however, the detail is massy
throughout, subdividing into rich meshes as it ascends. In the bodies of
buildings the principle is less safe, but its discussion is not
connected with our present subject.
XIV. Finally, work may be wasted by being too good for its material, or
too fine to bear exposure; and this, generally a characteristic of late,
especially of renaissance, work, is perhaps the worst fault of all. I do
not know anything more painful or pitiful than the kind of ivory carving
with which the Certosa of Pavia, and part of the Colleone sepulchral
chapel at Bergamo, and other such buildings, are incrusted, of which it
is not possible so much as to think without exhaustion; and a heavy
sense of the misery it would be, to be forced to look at it at all. And
this is not from the quantity of it, nor because it is bad work--much of
it is inventive and able; but because it looks as if it were only fit to
be put in inlaid cabinets and velveted caskets, and as if it could not
bear one drifting shower or gnawing frost. We are afraid for it, anxious
about it, and tormented by it; and we feel that a massy shaft and a bold
shadow would be worth it all. Nevertheless, even in cases like these,
much depends on the accomplishment of the great ends of decoration. If
the ornament does its duty--if it _is_ ornament, and its points of shade
and light tell in the general effect, we shall not be offended by
finding that the sculptor in his fulness of fancy has chosen to give
much more than these mere points of light, and has composed them of
groups of figures. But if the ornament does not answer its purpose, if
it have no distant, no truly decorative power; if generally seen it be a
mere incrustation and meaningless roughness, we shall only be chagrined
by finding when we look close, that the incrustation has cost years of
labor and has millions of figures and histories in it and would be
the better of being seen through a Stanhope lens. Hence the greatness of
the northern Gothic as contrasted with the latest Italian. It reaches
nearly the same extreme of detail; but it never loses sight of its
architectural purpose, never fails in its decorative power; not a
leaflet in it but speaks, and speaks far off, too; and so long as this
be the case, there is no limit to the luxuriance in which such work may
legitimately and nobly be bestowed.
[Illustration: PLATE I.--(Page 33--Vol. V)
ORNAMENTS FROM ROUEN, ST. LO, AND VENICE.]
XV. No limit: it is one of the affectations of architects to speak of
overcharged ornament. Ornament cannot be overcharged if it be good, and
is always overcharged when it is bad. I have given, on the opposite page
(fig. 1), one of the smallest niches of the central gate of Rouen. That
gate I suppose to be the most exquisite piece of pure flamboyant work
existing; for though I have spoken of the upper portions, especially the
receding window, as degenerate, the gate itself is of a purer period,
and has hardly any renaissance taint. There are four strings of these
niches (each with two figures beneath it) round the porch, from the
ground to the top of the arch, with three intermediate rows of larger
niches, far more elaborate; besides the six principal canopies of each
outer pier. The total number of the subordinate niches alone, each
worked like that in the plate, and each with a different pattern of
traceries in each compartment, is one hundred and seventy-six.[4] Yet in
all this ornament there is not one cusp, one finial that is useless--not
a stroke of the chisel is in vain; the grace and luxuriance of it all
are visible--sensible rather--even to the uninquiring eye; and all its
minuteness does not diminish the majesty, while it increases the
mystery, of the noble and unbroken vault. It is not less the boast of
some styles that they can bear ornament, than of others that they can do
without it; but we do not often enough reflect that those very styles,
of so haughty simplicity, owe part of their pleasurableness to contrast,
and would be wearisome if universal. They are but the rests and
monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation
that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild
fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with
close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry
light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower;
the only witnesses, perhaps that remain to us of the faith and fear of
nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed, has passed
away--all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know
not for what they labored, and we see no evidence of their reward.
Victory, wealth, authority, happiness--all have departed, though bought
by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life, and their toil
upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray
heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
their powers, their honors, and their errors; but they have left us
their adoration.
CHAPTER II.
THE LAMP OF TRUTH.
I. There is a marked likeness between the virtues of man and the
enlightenment of the globe he inhabits--the same diminishing gradation
in vigor up to the limits of their domains, the same essential
separation from their contraries--the same twilight at the meeting of
the two: a something wider belt than the line where the world rolls into
night, that strange twilight of the virtues; that dusky debateable land,
wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temperance becomes severity, and
justice becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each and all vanish
into gloom.
Nevertheless, with the greater number of them, though their dimness
increases gradually, we may mark the moment of their sunset; and,
happily, may turn the shadow back by the way by which it had gone down:
but for one, the line of the horizon is irregular and undefined; and
this, too, the very equator and girdle of them all--Truth; that only one
of which there are no degrees, but breaks and rents continually; that
pillar of the earth, yet a cloudy pillar; that golden and narrow line,
which the very powers and virtues that lean upon it bend, which policy
and prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy modify, which courage
overshadows with his shield, imagination covers with her wings, and
charity dims with her tears. How difficult must the maintenance of that
authority be, which, while it has to restrain the hostility of all the
worst principles of man, has also to restrain the disorders of his
best--which is continually assaulted by the one, and betrayed by the
other, and which regards with the same severity the lightest and the
boldest violations of its law! There are some faults slight in the sight
of love, some errors slight in the estimate of wisdom; but truth
forgives no insult, and endures no stain.
We do not enough consider this; nor enough dread the slight and
continual occasions of offence against her. We are too much in the habit
of looking at falsehood in its darkest associations, and through the
color of its worst purposes. That indignation which we profess to feel
at deceit absolute, is indeed only at deceit malicious. We resent
calumny, hypocrisy and treachery, because they harm us, not because they
are untrue. Take the detraction and the mischief from the untruth, and
we are little offended by it; turn it into praise, and we may be pleased
with it. And yet it is not calumny nor treachery that does the largest
sum of mischief in the world; they are continually crushed, and are felt
only in being conquered. But it is the glistening and softly spoken lie;
the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident
lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partizan, the merciful lie
of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast
that black mystery over humanity, through which any man who pierces, we
thank as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert; happy in that
the thirst for truth still remains with us, even when we have wilfully
left the fountains of it.
It would be well if moralists less frequently confused the greatness of
a sin with its unpardonableness. The two characters are altogether
distinct. The greatness of a fault depends partly on the nature of the
person against whom it is committed, partly upon the extent of its
consequences. Its pardonableness depends, humanly speaking, on the
degree of temptation to it. One class of circumstances determines the
weight of the attaching punishment; the other, the claim to remission of
punishment: and since it is not easy for men to estimate the relative
weight, nor possible for them to know the relative consequences, of
crime, it is usually wise in them to quit the care of such nice
measurements, and to look to the other and clearer condition of
culpability; esteeming those faults worst which are committed under
least temptation. I do not mean to diminish the blame of the injurious
and malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity; yet it seems
to me, that the shortest way to check the darker forms of deceit is to
set watch more scrupulous against those which have mingled, unregarded
and unchastised, with the current of our life. Do not let us lie at all.
Do not think of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and
another as unintended. Cast them all aside: they may be light and
accidental; but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, for all
that; and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them,
without over care as to which is largest or blackest. Speaking truth is
like writing fair, and comes only by practice; it is less a matter of
will than of habit, and I doubt if any occasion can be trivial which
permits the practice and formation of such a habit. To speak and act
truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps
as meritorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty; and it is
a strange thought how many men there are, as I trust, who would hold to
it at the cost of fortune or life, for one who would hold to it at the
cost of a little daily trouble. And seeing that of all sin there is,
perhaps, no one more flatly opposite to the Almighty, no one more
"wanting the good of virtue and of being," than this of lying, it is
surely a strange insolence to fall into the foulness of it on light or
on no temptation, and surely becoming an honorable man to resolve that,
whatever semblances or fallacies the necessary course of his life may
compel him to bear or to believe, none shall disturb the serenity of his
voluntary actions, nor diminish the reality of his chosen delights.
II. If this be just and wise for truth's sake, much more is it necessary
for the sake of the delights over which she has influence. For, as I
advocated the expression of the Spirit of Sacrifice in the acts and
pleasures of men, not as if thereby those acts could further the cause
of religion, but because most assuredly they might therein be infinitely
ennobled themselves, so I would have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth clear
in the hearts of our artists and handicraftsmen, not as if the truthful
practice of handicrafts could far advance the cause of truth, but
because I would fain see the handicrafts themselves urged by the spurs
of chivalry: and it is, indeed, marvellous to see what power and
universality there is in this single principle, and how in the
consulting or forgetting of it lies half the dignity or decline of every
art and act of man. I have before endeavored to show its range and power
in painting; and I believe a volume, instead of a chapter, might be
written on its authority over all that is great in architecture. But I
must be content with the force of instances few and familiar, believing
that the occasions of its manifestation may be more easily discovered by
a desire to be true, than embraced by an analysis of truth.
Only it is very necessary in the outset to mark clearly wherein consists
the essence of fallacy as distinguished from supposition.
III. For it might be at first thought that the whole kingdom of
imagination was one of deception also. Not so: the action of the
imagination is a voluntary summoning of the conceptions of things absent
or impossible; and the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly
consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them as such, i.e. in the
knowledge of their actual absence or impossibility at the moment of
their apparent presence or reality. When the imagination deceives it
becomes madness. It is a noble faculty so long as it confesses its own
ideality; when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All the
difference lies in the fact of the confession, in there being _no_
deception. It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we
should be able to invent and to behold what is not; and to our rank as
moral creatures that we should know and confess at the same time that
it is not.
IV. Again, it might be thought, and has been thought, that the whole art
of painting is nothing else than an endeavor to deceive. Not so: it is,
on the contrary, a statement of certain facts, in the clearest possible
way. For instance: I desire to give an account of a mountain or of a
rock; I begin by telling its shape. But words will not do this
distinctly, and I draw its shape, and say, "This was its shape." Next: I
would fain represent its color; but words will not do this either, and I
dye the paper, and say, "This was its color." Such a process may be
carried on until the scene appears to exist, and a high pleasure may be
taken in its apparent existence. This is a communicated act of
imagination, but no lie. The lie can consist only in an _assertion_ of
its existence (which is never for one instant made, implied, or
believed), or else in false statements of forms and colors (which are,
indeed, made and believed to our great loss, continually). And observe,
also, that so degrading a thing is deception in even the approach and
appearance of it, that all painting which even reaches the mark of
apparent realization, is degraded in so doing. I have enough insisted on
this point in another place.
V. The violations of truth, which dishonor poetry and painting, are thus
for the most part confined to the treatment of their subjects. But in
architecture another and a less subtle, more contemptible, violation of
truth is possible; a direct falsity of assertion respecting the nature
of material, or the quantity of labor. And this is, in the full sense of
the word, wrong; it is as truly deserving of reprobation as any other
moral delinquency; it is unworthy alike of architects and of nations;
and it has been a sign, wherever it has widely and with toleration
existed, of a singular debasement of the arts; that it is not a sign of
worse than this, of a general want of severe probity, can be accounted
for only by our knowledge of the strange separation which has for some
centuries existed between the arts and all other subjects of human
intellect, as matters of conscience. This withdrawal of
conscientiousness from among the faculties concerned with art, while it
has destroyed the arts themselves, has also rendered in a measure
nugatory the evidence which otherwise they might have presented
respecting the character of the respective nations among whom they have
been cultivated; otherwise, it might appear more than strange that a
nation so distinguished for its general uprightness and faith as the
English, should admit in their architecture more of pretence,
concealment, and deceit, than any other of this or of past time.
They are admitted in thoughtlessness, but with fatal effect upon the art
in which they are practised. If there were no other causes for the
failures which of late have marked every great occasion for
architectural exertion, these petty dishonesties would be enough to
account for all. It is the first step and not the least, towards
greatness to do away with these; the first, because so evidently and
easily in our power. We may not be able to command good, or beautiful,
or inventive architecture; but we _can_ command an honest architecture:
the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility
respected; but what is there but scorn for the meanness of deception?
VI. Architectural Deceits are broadly to be considered under three
heads:--
1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other than the
true one; as in pendants of late Gothic roofs.
2d. The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that
of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood), or the
deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them.
3d. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind.
Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture will be noble exactly
in the degree in which all these false expedients are avoided.
Nevertheless, there are certain degrees of them, which, owing to their
frequent usage, or to other causes, have so far lost the nature of
deceit as to be admissible; as, for instance, gilding, which is in
architecture no deceit, because it is therein not understood for gold;
while in jewellery it is a deceit, because it is so understood, and
therefore altogether to be reprehended. So that there arise, in the
application of the strict rules of right, many exceptions and niceties
of conscience; which let us as briefly as possible examine.
VII. 1st. Structural Deceits. I have limited these to the determined and
purposed suggestion of a mode of support other than the true one. The
architect is not _bound_ to exhibit structure; nor are we to complain of
him for concealing it, any more than we should regret that the outer
surfaces of the human frame conceal much of its anatomy; nevertheless,
that building will generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye
discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does,
although from a careless observer they may be concealed. In the vaulting
of a Gothic roof it is no deceit to throw the strength into the ribs of
it, and make the intermediate vault a mere shell. Such a structure would
be presumed by an intelligent observer, the first time he saw such a
roof; and the beauty of its traceries would be enhanced to him if they
confessed and followed the lines of its main strength. If, however, the
intermediate shell were made of wood instead of stone, and whitewashed
to look like the rest,--this would, of course, be direct deceit, and
altogether unpardonable.
There is, however, a certain deception necessarily occurring in Gothic
architecture, which relates, not to the points, but to the manner, of
support. The resemblance in its shafts and ribs to the external
relations of stems and branches, which has been the ground of so much
foolish speculation, necessarily induces in the mind of the spectator a
sense or belief of a correspondent internal structure; that is to say,
of a fibrous and continuous strength from the root into the limbs, and
an elasticity communicated _upwards,_ sufficient for the support of the
ramified portions. The idea of the real conditions, of a great weight of
ceiling thrown upon certain narrow, jointed lines, which have a tendency
partly to be crushed, and partly to separate and be pushed outwards, is
with difficulty received; and the more so when the pillars would be, if
unassisted, too slight for the weight, and are supported by external
flying buttresses, as in the apse of Beauvais, and other such
achievements of the bolder Gothic. Now, there is a nice question of
conscience in this, which we shall hardly settle but by considering
that, when the mind is informed beyond the possibility of mistake as to
the true nature of things, the affecting it with a contrary impression,
however distinct, is no dishonesty, but on the contrary, a legitimate
appeal to the imagination. For instance, the greater part of the
happiness which we have in contemplating clouds, results from the
impression of their having massive, luminous, warm, and mountain-like
surfaces; and our delight in the sky frequently depends upon our
considering it as a blue vault. But we know the contrary, in both
instances; we know the cloud to be a damp fog, or a drift of snow
flakes; and the sky to be a lightless abyss. There is, therefore, no
dishonesty, while there is much delight, in the irresistibly contrary
impression. In the same way, so long as we see the stones and joints,
and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of
architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dextrous artifices
which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in
its branches. Nor is even the concealment of the support of the external
buttress reprehensible, so long as the pillars are not sensibly
inadequate to their duty. For the weight of a roof is a circumstance of
which the spectator generally has no idea, and the provisions for it,
consequently, circumstances whose necessity or adaptation he could not
understand. It is no deceit, therefore, when the weight to be borne is
necessarily unknown, to conceal also the means of bearing it, leaving
only to be perceived so much of the support as is indeed adequate to the
weight supposed. For the shafts do, indeed, bear as much as they are
ever imagined to bear, and the system of added support is no more, as a
matter of conscience, to be exhibited, than, in the human or any other
form, mechanical provisions for those functions which are themselves
unperceived.
But the moment that the conditions of weight are comprehended, both
truth and feeling require that the conditions of support should be also
comprehended. Nothing can be worse, either as judged by the taste or the
conscience, than affectedly inadequate supports--suspensions in air,
and other such tricks and vanities. Mr. Hope wisely reprehends, for this
reason, the arrangement of the main piers of St. Sophia at
Constantinople. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is a piece of
architectural juggling, if possible still more to be condemned, because
less sublime.
VIII. With deceptive concealments of structure are to be classed, though
still more blameable, deceptive assumptions of it--the introduction of
members which should have, or profess to have, a duty, and have none.
One of the most general instances of this will be found in the form of
the flying buttress in late Gothic. The use of that member is, of
course, to convey support from one pier to another when the plan of the
building renders it necessary or desirable that the supporting masses
should be divided into groups, the most frequent necessity of this kind
arising from the intermediate range of chapels or aisles between the
nave or choir walls and their supporting piers. The natural, healthy,
and beautiful arrangement is that of a steeply sloping bar of stone,
sustained by an arch with its spandril carried farthest down on the
lowest side, and dying into the vertical of the outer pier; that pier
being, of course, not square, but rather a piece of wall set at right
angles to the supported walls, and, if need be, crowned by a pinnacle to
give it greater weight. The whole arrangement is exquisitely carried out
in the choir of Beauvais. In later Gothic the pinnacle became gradually
a decorative member, and was used in all places merely for the sake of
its beauty. There is no objection to this; it is just as lawful to build
a pinnacle for its beauty as a tower; but also the buttress became a
decorative member; and was used, first, where it was not wanted, and,
secondly, in forms in which it could be of no use, becoming a mere tie,
not between the pier and wall, but between the wall and the top of the
decorative pinnacle, thus attaching itself to the very point where its
thrust, if it made any, could not be resisted. The most flagrant
instance of this barbarism that I remember (though it prevails partially
in all the spires of the Netherlands), is the lantern of St. Ouen at
Rouen, where the pierced buttress, having an ogee curve, looks about as
much calculated to bear a thrust as a switch of willow; and the
pinnacles, huge and richly decorated, have evidently no work to do
whatsoever, but stand round the central tower, like four idle servants,
as they are--heraldic supporters, that central tower being merely a
hollow crown, which needs no more buttressing than a basket does. In
fact, I do not know anything more strange or unwise than the praise
lavished upon this lantern; it is one of the basest pieces of Gothic in
Europe; its flamboyant traceries of the last and most degraded forms;[5]
and its entire plan and decoration resembling, and deserving little more
credit than, the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery. There
are hardly any of the magnificent and serene constructions of the early
Gothic which have not, in the course of time, been gradually thinned and
pared away into these skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their
lines truly follow the structure of the original masses, have an
interest like that of the fibrous framework of leaves from which the
substance has been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as well as
emaciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things
that were; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the
armed and living frame; and the very winds that whistle through the
threads of them, are to the diapasoned echoes of the ancient walls, as
to the voice of the man was the pining of the spectre.[6]
IX. Perhaps the most fruitful source of these kinds of corruption which
we have to guard against in recent times, is one which, nevertheless,
comes in a "questionable shape," and of which it is not easy to
determine the proper laws and limits; I mean the use of iron. The
definition of the art of architecture, given in the first chapter, is
independent of its materials: nevertheless, that art having been, up to
the beginning of the present century, practised for the most part in
clay, stone, or wood, it has resulted that the sense of proportion and
the laws of structure have been based, the one altogether, the other in
great part, on the necessities consequent on the employment of those
materials; and that the entire or principal employment of metallic
framework would, therefore, be generally felt as a departure from the
first principles of the art. Abstractedly there appears no reason why
iron should not be used as well as wood; and the time is probably near
when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted
entirely to metallic construction. But I believe that the tendency of
all present sympathy and association is to limit the idea of
architecture to non-metallic work; and that not without reason. For
architecture being in its perfection the earliest, as in its elements it
is necessarily the first, of arts, will always precede, in any barbarous
nation, the possession of the science necessary either for the obtaining
or the management of iron. Its first existence and its earliest laws
must, therefore, depend upon the use of materials accessible in
quantity, and on the surface of the earth; that is to say, clay, wood,
or stone: and as I think it cannot but be generally felt that one of the
chief dignities of architecture is its historical use; and since the
latter is partly dependent on consistency of style, it will be felt
right to retain as far as may be, even in periods of more advanced
science, the materials and principles of earlier ages.
X. But whether this be granted me or not, the fact is, that every idea
respecting size, proportion, decoration, or construction, on which we
are at present in the habit of acting or judging, depends on
presupposition of such materials: and as I both feel myself unable to
escape the influence of these prejudices, and believe that my readers
will be equally so, it may be perhaps permitted to me to assume that
true architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material,[7] and
that such works as the cast-iron central spire of Rouen Cathedral, or
the iron roofs and pillars of our railway stations, and of some of our
churches, are not architecture at all. Yet it is evident that metals
may, and sometimes must, enter into the construction to a certain
extent, as nails in wooden architecture, and therefore as legitimately
rivets and solderings in stone; neither can we well deny to the Gothic
architect the power of supporting statues, pinnacles, or traceries by
iron bars; and if we grant this I do not see how we can help allowing
Brunelleschi his iron chain around the dome of Florence, or the builders
of Salisbury their elaborate iron binding of the central tower.[8] If,
however, we would not fall into the old sophistry of the grains of corn
and the heap, we must find a rule which may enable us to stop somewhere.
This rule is, I think, that metals may be used as a _cement_ but not as
a _support_. For as cements of other kinds are often so strong that the
stones may easier be broken than separated, and the wall becomes a solid
mass without for that reason losing the character of architecture, there
is no reason why, when a nation has obtained the knowledge and practice
of iron work, metal rods or rivets should not be used in the place of
cement, and establish the same or a greater strength and adherence,
without in any wise inducing departure from the types and system of
architecture before established; nor does it make any difference except
as to sightliness, whether the metal bands or rods so employed, be in
the body of the wall or on its exterior, or set as stays and
cross-bands; so only that the use of them be always and distinctly one
which might be superseded by mere strength of cement; as for instance if
a pinnacle or mullion be propped or tied by an iron band, it is evident
that the iron only prevents the separation of the stones by lateral
force, which the cement would have done, had it been strong enough. But
the moment that the iron in the least degree takes the place of the
stone, and acts by its resistance to crushing, and bears superincumbent
weight, or if it acts by its own weight as a counterpoise, and so
supersedes the use of pinnacles or buttresses in resisting a lateral
thrust, or if, in the form of a rod or girder, it is used to do what
wooden beams would have done as well, that instant the building ceases,
so far as such applications of metal extend, to be true architecture.
XI. The limit, however, thus determined, is an ultimate one, and it is
well in all things to be cautious how we approach the utmost limit of
lawfulness; so that, although the employment of metal within this limit
cannot be considered as destroying the very being and nature of
architecture, it will, if, extravagant and frequent, derogate from the
dignity of the work, as well as (which is especially to our present
point) from its honesty. For although the spectator is not informed as
to the quantity or strength of the cement employed, he will generally
conceive the stones of the building to be separable and his estimate of
the skill of the architect will be based in a great measure on his
supposition of this condition, and of the difficulties attendant upon
it: so that it is always more honorable, and it has a tendency to render
the style of architecture both more masculine and more scientific, to
employ stone and mortar simply as such, and to do as much as possible
with the weight of the one and the strength of the other, and rather
sometimes to forego a grace, or to confess a weakness, than attain the
one, or conceal the other, by means verging upon dishonesty.
Nevertheless, where the design is of such delicacy and slightness as, in
some parts of very fair and finished edifices, it is desirable that it
should be; and where both its completion and security are in a measure
dependent on the use of metal, let not such use be reprehended; so only
that as much is done as may be, by good mortar and good masonry; and no
slovenly workmanship admitted through confidence in the iron helps; for
it is in this license as in that of wine, a man may use it for his
infirmities, but not for his nourishment.
XII. And, in order to avoid an over use of this liberty, it would be
well to consider what application may be conveniently made of the
dovetailing and various adjusting of stones; for when any artifice is
necessary to help the mortar, certainly this ought to come before the
use of metal, for it is both safer and more honest. I cannot see that
any objection can be made to the fitting of the stones in any shapes the
architect pleases: for although it would not be desirable to see
buildings put together like Chinese puzzles, there must always be a
check upon such an abuse of the practice in its difficulty; nor is it
necessary that it should be always exhibited, so that it be understood
by the spectator as an admitted help, and that no principal stones are
introduced in positions apparently impossible for them to retain,
although a riddle here and there, in unimportant features, may sometimes
serve to draw the eye to the masonry, and make it interesting, as well
as to give a delightful sense of a kind of necromantic power in the
architect. There is a pretty one in the lintel of the lateral door of
the cathedral of Prato (Plate IV. fig. 4.); where the maintenance of
the visibly separate stones, alternate marble and serpentine, cannot be
understood until their cross-cutting is seen below. Each block is, of
course, of the form given in fig. 5.
XIII. Lastly, before leaving the subject of structural deceits, I would
remind the architect who thinks that I am unnecessarily and narrowly
limiting his resources or his art, that the highest greatness and the
highest wisdom are shown, the first by a noble submission to, the second
by a thoughtful providence for, certain voluntarily admitted restraints.
Nothing is more evident than this, in that supreme government which is
the example, as it is the centre, of all others. The Divine Wisdom is,
and can be, shown to us only in its meeting and contending with the
difficulties which are voluntarily, and _for the sake of that contest_,
admitted by the Divine Omnipotence: and these difficulties, observe,
occur in the form of natural laws or ordinances, which might, at many
times and in countless ways, be infringed with apparent advantage, but
which are never infringed, whatever costly arrangements or adaptations
their observance may necessitate for the accomplishment of given
purposes. The example most apposite to our present subject is the
structure of the bones of animals. No reason can be given, I believe,
why the system of the higher animals should not have been made capable,
as that of the _Infusoria_ is, of secreting flint, instead of phosphate
of lime, or more naturally still, carbon; so framing the bones of
adamant at once. The elephant or rhinoceros, had the earthy part of
their bones been made of diamond, might have been as agile and light as
grasshoppers, and other animals might have been framed far more
magnificently colossal than any that walk the earth. In other worlds we
may, perhaps, see such creations; a creation for every element, and
elements infinite. But the architecture of animals _here_, is appointed
by God to be a marble architecture, not a flint nor adamant
architecture; and all manner of expedients are adopted to attain the
utmost degree of strength and size possible under that great limitation.
The jaw of the ichthyosaurus is pieced and riveted, the leg of the
megatherium is a foot thick, and the head of the myodon has a double
skull; we, in our wisdom, should, doubtless, have given the lizard a
steel jaw, and the myodon a cast-iron headpiece, and forgotten the great
principle to which all creation bears witness, that order and system are
nobler things than power. But God shows us in Himself, strange as it may
seem, not only authoritative perfection, but even the perfection of
Obedience--an obedience to His own laws: and in the cumbrous movement of
those unwieldiest of His creatures we are reminded, even in His divine
essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human creature "that
sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not."
XIV. 2d. Surface Deceits. These may be generally defined as the inducing
the supposition of some form or material which does not actually exist;
as commonly in the painting of wood to represent marble, or in the
painting of ornaments in deceptive relief, &c. But we must be careful to
observe, that the evil of them consists always in definitely attempted
_deception_, and that it is a matter of some nicety to mark the point
where deception begins or ends.
Thus, for instance, the roof of Milan Cathedral is seemingly covered
with elaborate fan tracery, forcibly enough painted to enable it, in its
dark and removed position, to deceive a careless observer. This is, of
course, gross degradation; it destroys much of the dignity even of the
rest of the building, and is in the very strongest terms to be
reprehended.
The roof of the Sistine Chapel has much architectural design in
grissaille mingled with the figures of its frescoes; and the effect is
increase of dignity.
In what lies the distinctive character?
In two points, principally:--First. That the architecture is so closely
associated with the figures, and has so grand fellowship with them in
its forms and cast shadows, that both are at once felt to be of a piece;
and as the figures must necessarily be painted, the architecture is
known to be so too. There is thus no deception.
Second. That so great a painter as Michael Angelo would always stop
short in such minor parts of his design, of the degree of vulgar force
which would be necessary to induce the supposition of their reality;
and, strangely as it may sound, would never paint badly enough to
deceive.
But though right and wrong are thus found broadly opposed in works
severally so mean and so mighty as the roof of Milan and that of the
Sistine, there are works neither so great nor so mean, in which the
limits of right are vaguely defined, and will need some care to
determine; care only, however, to apply accurately the broad principle
with which we set out, that no form nor material is to be _deceptively_
represented.
XV. Evidently, then, painting, confessedly such, is no deception: it
does not assert any material whatever. Whether it be on wood or on
stone, or, as will naturally be supposed, on plaster, does not matter.
Whatever the material, good painting makes it more precious; nor can it
ever be said to deceive respecting the ground of which it gives us no
information. To cover brick with plaster, and this plaster with fresco,
is, therefore, perfectly legitimate; and as desirable a mode of
decoration as it is constant in the great periods. Verona and Venice are
now seen deprived of more than half their former splendor; it depended
far more on their frescoes than their marbles. The plaster, in this
case, is to be considered as the gesso ground on panel or canvas. But to
cover brick with cement, and to divide this cement with joints that it
may look like stone, is to tell a falsehood; and is just as contemptible
a procedure as the other is noble.
It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint everything? So long
as the painting is confessed--yes; but if, even in the slightest degree,
the sense of it be lost, and the thing painted be supposed real--no. Let
us take a few instances. In the Campo Santo at Pisa, each fresco is
surrounded with a border composed of flat colored patterns of great
elegance--no part of it in attempted relief. The certainty of flat
surface being thus secured, the figures, though the size of life, do not
deceive, and the artist thenceforward is at liberty to put forth his
whole power, and to lead us through fields and groves, and depths of
pleasant landscape, and to soothe us with the sweet clearness of far off
sky, and yet never lose the severity of his primal purpose of
architectural decoration.
In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at Parma, the trellises of
vine shadow the walls, as if with an actual arbor; and the troops of
children, peeping through the oval openings, luscious in color and faint
in light, may well be expected every instant to break through, or hide
behind the covert. The grace of their attitudes, and the evident
greatness of the whole work, mark that it is painting, and barely redeem
it from the charge of falsehood; but even so saved, it is utterly
unworthy to take a place among noble or legitimate architectural
decoration.
In the cupola of the duomo of Parma the same painter has represented the
Assumption with so much deceptive power, that he has made a dome of some
thirty feet diameter look like a cloud-wrapt opening in the seventh
heaven, crowded with a rushing sea of angels. Is this wrong? Not so: for
the subject at once precludes the possibility of deception. We might
have taken the vines for a veritable pergoda, and the children for its
haunting ragazzi; but we know the stayed clouds and moveless angels must
be man's work; let him put his utmost strength to it and welcome, he can
enchant us, but cannot betray.
We may thus apply the rule to the highest, as well as the art of daily
occurrence, always remembering that more is to be forgiven to the great
painter than to the mere decorative workman; and this especially,
because the former, even in deceptive portions, will not trick us so
grossly; as we have just seen in Correggio, where a worse painter would
have made the thing look like life at once. There is, however, in room,
villa, or garden decoration, some fitting admission of trickeries of
this kind, as of pictured landscapes at the extremities of alleys and
arcades, and ceilings like skies, or painted with prolongations upwards
of the architecture of the walls, which things have sometimes a certain
luxury and pleasureableness in places meant for idleness, and are
innocent enough as long as they are regarded as mere toys.
XVI. Touching the false representation of material, the question is
infinitely more simple, and the law more sweeping; all such imitations
are utterly base and inadmissible. It is melancholy to think of the time
and expense lost in marbling the shop fronts of London alone, and of the
waste of our resources in absolute vanities, in things about which no
mortal cares, by which no eye is ever arrested, unless painfully, and
which do not add one whit to comfort or cleanliness, or even to that
great object of commercial art--conspicuousness. But in architecture of
a higher rank, how much more is it to be condemned? I have made it a
rule in the present work not to blame specifically; but I may, perhaps,
be permitted, while I express my sincere admiration of the very noble
entrance and general architecture of the British Museum, to express also
my regret that the noble granite foundation of the staircase should be
mocked at its landing by an imitation, the more blameable because
tolerably successful. The only effect of it is to cast a suspicion upon
the true stones below, and upon every bit of granite afterwards
encountered. One feels a doubt, after it, of the honesty of Memnon
himself. But even this, however derogatory to the noble architecture
around it, is less painful than the want of feeling with which, in our
cheap modern churches, we suffer the wall decorator to erect about the
altar frameworks and pediments daubed with mottled color, and to dye in
the same fashions such skeletons or caricatures of columns as may emerge
above the pews; this is not merely bad taste; it is no unimportant or
excusable error which brings even these shadows of vanity and falsehood
into the house of prayer. The first condition which just feeling
requires in church furniture is, that it should be simple and
unaffected, not fictitious nor tawdry. It may be in our power to make it
beautiful, but let it at least be pure; and if we cannot permit much to
the architect, do not let us permit anything to the upholsterer; if we
keep to solid stone and solid wood, whitewashed, if we like, for
cleanliness' sake (for whitewash has so often been used as the dress of
noble things that it has thence received a kind of nobility itself), it
must be a bad design indeed which is grossly offensive. I recollect no
instance of a want of sacred character, or of any marked and painful
ugliness, in the simplest or the most awkwardly built village church,
where stone and wood were roughly and nakedly used, and the windows
latticed with white glass. But the smoothly stuccoed walls, the flat
roofs with ventilator ornaments, the barred windows with jaundiced
borders and dead ground square panes, the gilded or bronzed wood, the
painted iron, the wretched upholstery of curtains and cushions, and pew
heads and altar railings, and Birmingham metal candlesticks, and, above
all, the green and yellow sickness of the false marble--disguises all,
observe; falsehoods all--who are they who like these things? who defend
them? who do them? I have never spoken to any one who _did_ like them,
though to many who thought them matters of no consequence. Perhaps not
to religion (though I cannot but believe that there are many to whom, as
to myself, such things are serious obstacles to the repose of mind and
temper which should precede devotional exercises); but to the general
tone of our judgment and feeling--yes; for assuredly we shall regard,
with tolerance, if not with affection, whatever forms of material things
we have been in the habit of associating with our worship, and be little
prepared to detect or blame hypocrisy, meanness, and disguise in other
kinds of decoration when we suffer objects belonging to the most solemn
of all services to be tricked out in a fashion so fictitious and
unseemly.
XVII. Painting, however, is not the only mode in which material may be
concealed, or rather simulated; for merely to conceal is, as we have
seen, no wrong. Whitewash, for instance, though often (by no means
always) to be regretted as a concealment, is not to be blamed as a
falsity. It shows itself for what it is, and asserts nothing of what is
beneath it. Gilding has become, from its frequent use, equally innocent.
It is understood for what it is, a film merely, and is, therefore,
allowable to any extent. I do not say expedient: it is one of the most
abused means of magnificence we possess, and I much doubt whether any
use we ever make of it, balances that loss of pleasure, which, from the
frequent sight and perpetual suspicion of it, we suffer in the
contemplation of anything that is verily of gold. I think gold was
meant to be seldom seen and to be admired as a precious thing; and I
sometimes wish that truth should so far literally prevail as that all
should be gold that glittered, or rather that nothing should glitter
that was not gold. Nevertheless, nature herself does not dispense with
such semblance, but uses light for it; and I have too great a love for
old and saintly art to part with its burnished field, or radiant nimbus;
only it should be used with respect, and to express magnificence, or
sacredness, and not in lavish vanity, or in sign painting. Of its
expedience, however, any more than of that of color, it is not here the
place to speak; we are endeavoring to determine what is lawful, not what
is desirable. Of other and less common modes of disguising surface, as
of powder of lapis lazuli, or mosaic imitations of colored stones, I
need hardly speak. The rule will apply to all alike, that whatever is
pretended, is wrong; commonly enforced also by the exceeding ugliness
and insufficient appearance of such methods, as lately in the style of
renovation by which half the houses in Venice have been defaced, the
brick covered first with stucco, and this painted with zigzag veins in
imitation of alabaster. But there is one more form of architectural
fiction, which is so constant in the great periods that it needs
respectful judgment. I mean the facing of brick with precious stone.
XVIII. It is well known, that what is meant by a church's being built of
marble is, in nearly all cases, only that a veneering of marble has been
fastened on the rough brick wall, built with certain projections to
receive it; and that what appear to be massy stones, are nothing more
than external slabs.
Now, it is evident, that, in this case, the question of right is on the
same ground as in that of gilding. If it be clearly understood that a
marble facing does not pretend or imply a marble wall, there is no harm
in it; and as it is also evident that, when very precious stones are
used, as jaspers and serpentines, it must become, not only an
extravagant and vain increase of expense, but sometimes an actual
impossibility, to obtain mass of them enough to build with, there is no
resource but this of veneering; nor is there anything to be alleged
against it on the head of durability, such work having been by
experience found to last as long, and in as perfect condition, as any
kind of masonry. It is, therefore, to be considered as simply an art of
mosaic on a large scale, the ground being of brick, or any other
material; and when lovely stones are to be obtained, it is a manner
which should be thoroughly understood, and often practised.
Nevertheless, as we esteem the shaft of a column more highly for its
being of a single block, and as we do not regret the loss of substance
and value which there is in things of solid gold, silver, agate, or
ivory; so I think the walls themselves may be regarded with a more just
complacency if they are known to be all of noble substance; and that
rightly weighing the demands of the two principles of which we have
hitherto spoken--Sacrifice and Truth, we should sometimes rather spare
external ornament than diminish the unseen value and consistency of what
we do; and I believe that a better manner of design, and a more careful
and studious, if less abundant decoration would follow, upon the
consciousness of thoroughness in the substance. And, indeed, this is to
be remembered, with respect to all the points we have examined; that
while we have traced the limits of license, we have not fixed those of
that high rectitude which refuses license. It is thus true that there is
no falsity, and much beauty in the use of external color, and that it is
lawful to paint either pictures or patterns on whatever surfaces may
seem to need enrichment. But it is not less true, that such practices
are essentially unarchitectural; and while we cannot say that there is
actual danger in an over use of them, seeing that they have been
_always_ used most lavishly in the times of most noble art, yet they
divide the work into two parts and kinds, one of less durability than
the other, which dies away from it in process of ages, and leaves it,
unless it have noble qualities of its own, naked and bare. That enduring
noblesse I should, therefore, call truly architectural; and it is not
until this has been secured that the accessory power of painting may be
called in, for the delight of the immediate time; nor this, as I think,
until every resource of a more stable kind has been exhausted. The true
colors of architecture are those of natural stone, and I would fain
see these taken advantage of to the full. Every variety of hue, from
pale yellow to purple, passing through orange, red, and brown, is
entirely at our command; nearly every kind of green and gray is also
attainable: and with these, and pure white, what harmonies might we not
achieve? Of stained and variegated stone, the quantity is unlimited, the
kinds innumerable; where brighter colors are required, let glass, and
gold protected by glass, be used in mosaic--a kind of work as durable as
the solid stone, and incapable of losing its lustre by time--and let the
painter's work be reserved for the shadowed _loggia_ and inner chamber.
This is the true and faithful way of building; where this cannot be, the
device of external coloring may, indeed, be employed without dishonor;
but it must be with the warning reflection, that a time will come when
such aids must pass away, and when the building will be judged in its
lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin. Better the less bright,
more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato, and the
mosaics of St. Mark's, are more warmly filled, and more brightly
touched, by every return of morning and evening rays; while the hues of
our cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud; and the temples
whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontories, stand
in their faded whiteness, like snows which the sunset has left cold.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--(Page 55--Vol. V.)
PART OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. LO, NORMANDY.]
XIX. The last form of fallacy which it will be remembered we had to
deprecate, was the substitution of cast or machine work for that of the
hand, generally expressible as Operative Deceit.
There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice; one, that
all cast and machine work is bad, as work; the other, that it is
dishonest. Of its badness, I shall speak in another place, that being
evidently no efficient reason against its use when other cannot be had.
Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is of the grossest kind, is,
I think, a sufficient reason to determine absolute and unconditional
rejection of it.
Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two entirely distinct
sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its
forms, which, for the present, we will suppose to be the same whether
they come from the hand or the machine; the other, the sense of human
labor and care spent upon it. How great this latter influence we may
perhaps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds
growing in any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respects
_nearly_ equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most
elaborate sculpture of its stones: and that all our interest in the
carved work, our sense of its richness, though it is tenfold less rich
than the knots of grass beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a
thousand fold less delicate; of its admirableness, though a millionfold
less admirable; results from our consciousness of its being the work of
poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends on our
discovering in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and
heart-breakings--of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success: all this
_can_ be traced by a practised eye; but, granting it even obscure, it is
presumed or understood; and in that is the worth of the thing, just as
much as the worth of anything else we call precious. The worth of a
diamond is simply the understanding of the time it must take to look for
it before it can be cut. It has an intrinsic value besides, which the
diamond has not (for a diamond has no more real beauty than a piece of
glass); but I do not speak of that at present; I place the two on the
same ground; and I suppose that hand-wrought ornament can no more be
generally known from machine work, than a diamond can be known from
paste; nay, that the latter may deceive, for a moment, the mason's, as
the other the jeweller's eye; and that it can be detected only by the
closest examination. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear
false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments. The
using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use that
which pretends to a worth which it has not; which pretends to have cost,
and to be, what it did not, and is not; it is an imposition, a
vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to the ground, grind
it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall, rather; you have not
paid for it, you have no business with it, you do not want it. Nobody
wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity. All the
fair devices that ever were fancied, are not worth a lie. Leave your
walls as bare as a planed board, or build them of baked mud and chopped
straw, if need be; but do not rough-cast them with falsehood.
This, then, being our general law, and I hold it for a more imperative
one than any other I have asserted; and this kind of dishonesty the
meanest, as the least necessary; for ornament is an extravagant and
inessential thing; and, therefore, if fallacious, utterly base--this, I
say, being our general law, there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions
respecting particular substances and their uses.
XX. Thus in the use of brick; since that is known to be originally
moulded, there is no reason why it should not be moulded into diverse
forms. It will never be supposed to have been cut, and therefore, will
cause no deception; it will have only the credit it deserves. In flat
countries, far from any quarry of stone, cast brick may be legitimately,
and most successfully, used in decoration, and that elaborate, and even
refined. The brick mouldings of the Palazzo Pepoli at Bologna, and those
which run round the market-place of Vercelli, are among the richest in
Italy. So also, tile and porcelain work, of which the former is
grotesquely, but successfully, employed in the domestic architecture of
France, colored tiles being inserted in the diamond spaces between the
crossing timbers; and the latter admirably in Tuscany, in external
bas-reliefs, by the Robbia family, in which works, while we cannot but
sometimes regret the useless and ill-arranged colors, we would by no
means blame the employment of a material which, whatever its defects,
excels every other in permanence, and, perhaps, requires even greater
skill in its management than marble. For it is not the material, but the
absence of the human labor, which makes the thing worthless; and a piece
of terra cotta, or of plaster of Paris, which has been wrought by human
hand, is worth all the stone in Carrara, cut by machinery. It is,
indeed, possible, and even usual, for men to sink into machines
themselves, so that even hand-work has all the characters of mechanism;
of the difference between living and dead hand-work I shall speak
presently; all that I ask at present is, what it is always in our power
to secure--the confession of what we have done, and what we have given;
so that when we use stone at all, since all stone is naturally supposed
to be carved by hand, we must not carve it by machinery; neither must we
use any artificial stone cast into shape, nor any stucco ornaments of
the color of stone, or which might in anywise be mistaken for it, as the
stucco mouldings in the cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence,
which cast a shame and suspicion over every part of the building. But
for ductile and fusible materials, as clay, iron, and bronze, since
these will usually be supposed to have been cast or stamped, it is at
our pleasure to employ them as we will; remembering that they become
precious, or otherwise, just in proportion to the hand-work upon them,
or to the clearness of their reception of the hand-work of their mould.
But I believe no cause to have been more active in the degradation of
our natural feeling for beauty, than the constant use of cast iron
ornaments. The common iron work of the middle ages was as simple as it
was effective, composed of leafage cut flat out of sheet iron, and
twisted at the workman's will. No ornaments, on the contrary, are so
cold, clumsy, and vulgar, so essentially incapable of a fine line, or
shadow, as those of cast iron; and while, on the score of truth, we can
hardly allege anything against them, since they are always
distinguishable, at a glance, from wrought and hammered work, and stand
only for what they are, yet I feel very strongly that there is no hope
of the progress of the arts of any nation which indulges in these vulgar
and cheap substitutes for real decoration. Their inefficiency and
paltriness I shall endeavor to show more conclusively in another place,
enforcing only, at present, the general conclusion that, if even honest
or allowable, they are things in which we can never take just pride or
pleasure, and must never be employed in any place wherein they might
either themselves obtain the credit of being other and better than they
are, or be associated with the downright work to which it would be a
disgrace to be found in their company.
Such are, I believe, the three principal kinds of fallacy by which
architecture is liable to be corrupted; there are, however, other and
more subtle forms of it, against which it is less easy to guard by
definite law, than by the watchfulness of a manly and unaffected spirit.
For, as it has been above noticed, there are certain kinds of deception
which extend to impressions and ideas only; of which some are, indeed,
of a noble use, as that above referred to, the arborescent look of lofty
Gothic aisles; but of which the most part have so much of legerdemain
and trickery about them, that they will lower any style in which they
considerably prevail; and they are likely to prevail when once they are
admitted, being apt to catch the fancy alike of uninventive architects
and feelingless spectators; just as mean and shallow minds are, in other
matters, delighted with the sense of over-reaching, or tickled with the
conceit of detecting the intention to over-reach; and when subtleties of
this kind are accompanied by the display of such dextrous stone-cutting,
or architectural sleight of hand, as may become, even by itself, a
subject of admiration, it is a great chance if the pursuit of them do
not gradually draw us away from all regard and care for the nobler
character of the art, and end in its total paralysis or extinction. And
against this there is no guarding, but by stern disdain of all display
of dexterity and ingenious device, and by putting the whole force of our
fancy into the arrangement of masses and forms, caring no more how these
masses and forms are wrought out, than a great painter cares which way
his pencil strikes. It would be easy to give many instances of the
danger of these tricks and vanities; but I shall confine myself to the
examination of one which has, as I think, been the cause of the fall of
Gothic architecture throughout Europe. I mean the system of
intersectional mouldings, which, on account of its great importance, and
for the sake of the general reader, I may, perhaps, be pardoned for
explaining elementarily.
XXI. I must, in the first place, however, refer to Professor Willis's
account of the origin of tracery, given in the sixth chapter of his
Architecture of the Middle Ages; since the publication of which I have
been not a little amazed to hear of any attempts made to resuscitate the
inexcusably absurd theory of its derivation from imitated vegetable
form--inexcusably, I say, because the smallest acquaintance with early
Gothic architecture would have informed the supporters of that theory of
the simple fact, that, exactly in proportion to the antiquity of the
work, the imitation of such organic forms is less, and in the earliest
examples does not exist at all. There cannot be the shadow of a
question, in the mind of a person familiarised with any single series of
consecutive examples, that tracery arose from the gradual enlargement of
the penetrations of the shield of stone which, usually supported by a
central pillar, occupied the head of early windows. Professor Willis,
perhaps, confines his observations somewhat too absolutely to the double
sub-arch. I have given, in Plate VII. fig. 2, an interesting case of
rude penetration of a high and simply trefoiled shield, from the church
of the Eremitani at Padua. But the more frequent and typical form is
that of the double sub-arch, decorated with various piercings of the
space between it and the superior arch; with a simple trefoil under a
round arch, in the Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen[9] (Plate III. fig. 1); with
a very beautifully proportioned quatrefoil, in the triforium of Eu, and
that of the choir of Lisieux; with quatrefoils, sixfoils, and septfoils,
in the transept towers of Rouen (Plate III. fig. 2); with a trefoil
awkwardly, and very small quatrefoil above, at Coutances, (Plate III.
fig. 3); then, with multiplications of the same figures, pointed or
round, giving very clumsy shapes of the intermediate stone (fig. 4, from
one of the nave chapels of Rouen, fig. 5, from one of the nave chapels
of Bayeaux), and finally, by thinning out the stony ribs, reaching
conditions like that of the glorious typical form of the clerestory of
the apse of Beauvais (fig. 6).
[Illustration: PLATE III.--(Page 60--Vol. V.)
TRACERIES FROM CAEN, BAYEUX, ROUEN, AND BEAVAIS.]
XXII. Now, it will be noticed that, during the whole of this process,
the attention is kept fixed on the forms of the penetrations, that is to
say, of the lights as seen from the interior, not of the intermediate
stone. All the grace of the window is in the outline of its light;
and I have drawn all these traceries as seen from within, in order to
show the effect of the light thus treated, at first in far off and
separate stars, and then gradually enlarging, approaching, until they
come and stand over us, as it were, filling the whole space with their
effulgence. And it is in this pause of the star, that we have the great,
pure, and perfect form of French Gothic; it was at the instant when the
rudeness of the intermediate space had been finally conquered, when the
light had expanded to its fullest, and yet had not lost its radiant
unity, principality, and visible first causing of the whole, that we
have the most exquisite feeling and most faultless judgments in the
management alike of the tracery and decorations. I have given, in Plate
X., an exquisite example of it, from a panel decoration of the
buttresses of the north door of Rouen; and in order that the reader may
understand what truly fine Gothic work is, and how nobly it unites
fantasy and law, as well as for our immediate purpose, it will be well
that he should examine its sections and mouldings in detail (they are
described in the fourth Chapter, Sec. xxvii.), and that the more carefully,
because this design belongs to a period in which the most important
change took place in the spirit of Gothic architecture, which, perhaps,
ever resulted from the natural progress of any art. That tracery marks a
pause between the laying aside of one great ruling principle, and the
taking up of another; a pause as marked, as clear, as conspicuous to the
distant view of after times, as to the distant glance of the traveller
is the culminating ridge of the mountain chain over which he has passed.
It was the great watershed of Gothic art. Before it, all had been
ascent; after it, all was decline; both, indeed, by winding paths and
varied slopes; both interrupted, like the gradual rise and fall of the
passes of the Alps, by great mountain outliers, isolated or branching
from the central chain, and by retrograde or parallel directions of the
valleys of access. But the track of the human mind is traceable up to
that glorious ridge, in a continuous line, and thence downwards. Like a
silver zone--
"Flung about carelessly, it shines afar,
Catching the eye in many a broken link,
In many a turn and traverse, as it glides.
And oft above, and oft below, appears--
* * * * to him who journeys up
As though it were another."
And at that point, and that instant, reaching the place that was nearest
heaven, the builders looked back, for the last time, to the way by which
they had come, and the scenes through which their early course had
passed. They turned away from them and their morning light, and
descended towards a new horizon, for a time in the warmth of western
sun, but plunging with every forward step into more cold and melancholy
shade.
XXIII. The change of which I speak, is inexpressible in few words, but
one more important, more radically influential, could not be. It was the
substitution of the _line_ for the _mass_, as the element of decoration.
We have seen the mode in which the openings or penetration of the window
expanded, until what were, at first, awkward forms of intermediate
stone, became delicate lines of tracery: and I have been careful in
pointing out the peculiar attention bestowed on the proportion and
decoration of the mouldings of the window at Rouen, in Plate X., as
compared with earlier mouldings, because that beauty and care are
singularly significant. They mark that the traceries had _caught the
eye_ of the architect. Up to that time, up to the very last instant in
which the reduction and thinning of the intervening stone was
consummated, his eye had been on the openings only, on the stars of
light. He did not care about the stone, a rude border of moulding was
all he needed, it was the penetrating shape which he was watching. But
when that shape had received its last possible expansion, and when the
stone-work became an arrangement of graceful and parallel lines, that
arrangement, like some form in a picture, unseen and accidentally
developed, struck suddenly, inevitably, on the sight. It had literally
not been seen before. It flashed out in an instant as an independent
form. It became a feature of the work. The architect took it under his
care, thought over it, and distributed its members as we see.
Now, the great pause was at the moment when the space and the dividing
stone-work were both equally considered. It did not last fifty years.
The forms of the tracery were seized with a childish delight in the
novel source of beauty; and the intervening space was cast aside, as an
element of decoration, for ever. I have confined myself, in following
this change, to the window, as the feature in which it is clearest. But
the transition is the same in every member of architecture; and its
importance can hardly be understood, unless we take the pains to trace
it in the universality, of which illustrations, irrelevant to our
present purpose, will be found in the third Chapter. I pursue here the
question of truth, relating to the treatment of the mouldings.
XXIV. The reader will observe that, up to the last expansion of the
penetrations, the stone-work was necessarily considered, as it actually
is, _stiff_, and unyielding. It was so, also, during the pause of which
I have spoken, when the forms of the tracery were still severe and pure;
delicate indeed, but perfectly firm.
At the close of the period of pause, the first sign of serious change
was like a low breeze, passing through the emaciated tracery, and making
it tremble. It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted by
the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. Reduced to the
slenderness of threads, it began to be considered as possessing also
their flexibility. The architect was pleased with this his new fancy,
and set himself to carry it out; and in a little time, the bars of
tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they had been woven
together like a net. This was a change which sacrificed a great
principle of truth; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities of the
material; and, however delightful its results in their first
developments, it was ultimately ruinous.
For, observe the difference between the supposition of ductility, and
that of elastic structure noticed above in the resemblance to tree form.
That resemblance was not sought, but necessary; it resulted from the
natural conditions of strength in the pier or trunk, and slenderness in
the ribs or branches, while many of the other suggested conditions of
resemblance were perfectly true. A tree branch, though in a certain
sense flexible, is not ductile; it is as firm in its own form as the rib
of stone; both of them will yield up to certain limits, both of them
breaking when those limits are exceeded; while the tree trunk will bend
no more than the stone pillar. But when the tracery is assumed to be as
yielding as a silken cord; when the whole fragility, elasticity, and
weight of the material are to the eye, if not in terms, denied; when all
the art of the architect is applied to disprove the first conditions of
his working, and the first attributes of his materials; _this_ is a
deliberate treachery, only redeemed from the charge of direct falsehood
by the visibility of the stone surface, and degrading all the traceries
it affects exactly in the degree of its presence.
XXV. But the declining and morbid taste of the later architects, was not
satisfied with thus much deception. They were delighted with the subtle
charm they had created, and thought only of increasing its power. The
next step was to consider and represent the tracery, as not only
ductile, but penetrable; and when two mouldings met each other, to
manage their intersection, so that one should appear to pass through the
other, retaining its independence; or when two ran parallel to each
other, to represent the one as partly contained within the other, and
partly apparent above it. This form of falsity was that which crushed
the art. The flexible traceries were often beautiful, though they were
ignoble; but the penetrated traceries, rendered, as they finally were,
merely the means of exhibiting the dexterity of the stone-cutter,
annihilated both the beauty and dignity of the Gothic types. A system so
momentous in its consequences deserves some detailed examination.
XXVI. In the drawing of the shafts of the door at Lisieux, under the
spandril, in Plate VII., the reader will see the mode of managing the
intersection of similar mouldings, which was universal in the great
periods. They melted into each other, and became one at the point of
crossing, or of contact; and even the suggestion of so sharp
intersection as this of Lisieux is usually avoided (this design being,
of course, only a pointed form of the earlier Norman arcade, in which
the arches are interlaced, and lie each over the preceding, and under
the following, one, as in Anselm's tower at Canterbury), since, in the
plurality of designs, when mouldings meet each other, they coincide
through some considerable portion of their curves, meeting by contact,
rather than by intersection; and at the point of coincidence the section
of each separate moulding becomes common to the two thus melted into
each other. Thus, in the junction of the circles of the window of the
Palazzo Foscari, Plate VIII., given accurately in fig. 8, Plate IV., the
section across the line _s_, is exactly the same as that across any
break of the separated moulding above, as [=s]. It sometimes, however,
happens, that two different mouldings meet each other. This was seldom
permitted in the great periods, and, when it took place, was most
awkwardly managed. Fig. 1, Plate IV. gives the junction of the mouldings
of the gable and vertical, in the window of the _spire_ of Salisbury.
That of the gable is composed of a single, and that of the vertical of a
double cavetto, decorated with ball-flowers; and the larger single
moulding swallows up one of the double ones, and pushes forward among
the smaller balls with the most blundering and clumsy simplicity. In
comparing the sections it is to be observed that, in the upper one, the
line _a b_ represents an actual vertical in the plane of the window;
while, in the lower one, the line _c d_ represents the horizontal, in
the plane of the window, indicated by the perspective line _d e_.
XXVII. The very awkwardness with which such occurrences of difficulty
are met by the earlier builder, marks his dislike of the system, and
unwillingness to attract the eye to such arrangements. There is another
very clumsy one, in the junction of the upper and sub-arches of the
triforium of Salisbury; but it is kept in the shade, and all the
prominent junctions are of mouldings like each other, and managed with
perfect simplicity. But so soon as the attention of the builders became,
as we have just seen, fixed upon the lines of mouldings instead of the
enclosed spaces, those lines began to preserve an independent existence
wherever they met; and different mouldings were studiously associated,
in order to obtain variety of intersectional line. We must, however, do
the late builders the justice to note that, in one case, the habit grew
out of a feeling of proportion, more refined than that of earlier
workmen. It shows itself first in the bases of divided pillars, or arch
mouldings, whose smaller shafts had originally bases formed by the
continued base of the central, or other larger, columns with which they
were grouped; but it being felt, when the eye of the architect became
fastidious, that the dimension of moulding which was right for the base
of a large shaft, was wrong for that of a small one, each shaft had an
independent base; at first, those of the smaller died simply down on
that of the larger; but when the vertical sections of both became
complicated, the bases of the smaller shafts were considered to exist
within those of the larger, and the places of their emergence, on this
supposition, were calculated with the utmost nicety, and cut with
singular precision; so that an elaborate late base of a divided column,
as, for instance, of those in the nave of Abbeville, looks exactly as if
its smaller shafts had all been finished to the ground first, each with
its complete and intricate base, and then the comprehending base of the
central pier had been moulded over them in clay, leaving their points
and angles sticking out here and there, like the edges of sharp crystals
out of a nodule of earth. The exhibition of technical dexterity in work
of this kind is often marvellous, the strangest possible shapes of
sections being calculated to a hair's-breadth, and the occurrence of the
under and emergent forms being rendered, even in places where they are
so slight that they can hardly be detected but by the touch. It is
impossible to render a very elaborate example of this kind intelligible,
without some fifty measured sections; but fig. 6, Plate IV. is a very
interesting and simple one, from the west gate of Rouen. It is part of
the base of one of the narrow piers between its principal niches. The
square column _k_, having a base with the profile _p r_, is supposed to
contain within itself another similar one, set diagonally, and lifted so
far above the inclosing one, as that the recessed part of its profile
[=p] r shall fall behind the projecting part of the outer one. The angle
of its upper portion exactly meets the plane of the side of the upper
inclosing shaft 4, and would, therefore, not be seen, unless two
vertical cuts were made to exhibit it, which form two dark lines the
whole way up the shaft. Two small pilasters are run, like fastening
stitches, through the junction on the front of the shafts. The sections
[=k] [=n] taken respectively at the levels _k_, _n_, will explain the
hypothetical construction of the whole. Fig. 7 is a base, or joint
rather (for passages of this form occur again and again, on the shafts
of flamboyant work), of one of the smallest piers of the pedestals which
support the lost statues of the porch; its section below would be the
same as [=n], and its construction, after what has been said of the
other base, will be at once perceived.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--(Page 66--Vol. V.)
INTERSECTIONAL MOULDINGS.]
XXVIII. There was, however, in this kind of involution, much to be
admired as well as reprehended, the proportions of quantities were
always as beautiful as they were intricate; and, though the lines of
intersection were harsh, they were exquisitely opposed to the
flower-work of the interposing mouldings. But the fancy did not stop
here; it rose from the bases into the arches; and there, not finding
room enough for its exhibition, it withdrew the capitals from the heads
even of cylindrical shafts, (we cannot but admire, while we regret, the
boldness of the men who could defy the authority and custom of all the
nations of the earth for a space of some three thousand years,) in order
that the arch mouldings might appear to emerge from the pillar, as at
its base they had been lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of
the capital; then they ran the mouldings across and through each other,
at the point of the arch; and finally, not finding their natural
directions enough to furnish as many occasions of intersection as they
wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off their ends short, when
they had passed the point of intersection. Fig. 2, Plate IV. is part of
a flying buttress from the apse of St. Gervais at Falaise, in which the
moulding whose section is rudely given above at [=f], (taken vertically
through the point _f_,) is carried thrice through itself, in the
cross-bar and two arches; and the flat fillet is cut off sharp at the
end of the cross-bar, for the mere pleasure of the truncation. Fig. 3
is half of the head of a door in the Stadthaus of Sursee, in which the
shaded part of the section of the joint _g g_, is that of the
arch-moulding, which is three times reduplicated, and six times
intersected by itself, the ends being cut off when they become
unmanageable. This style is, indeed, earlier exaggerated in Switzerland
and Germany, owing to the imitation in stone of the dovetailing of wood,
particularly of the intersecting of beams at the angles of chalets; but
it only furnishes the more plain instance of the danger of the
fallacious system which, from the beginning, repressed the German, and,
in the end, ruined the French Gothic. It would be too painful a task to
follow further the caricatures of form, and eccentricities of treatment,
which grow out of this singular abuse--the flattened arch, the shrunken
pillar, the lifeless ornament, the liny moulding, the distorted and
extravagant foliation, until the time came when, over these wrecks and
remnants, deprived of all unity and principle, rose the foul torrent of
the renaissance, and swept them all away. So fell the great dynasty of
mediaeval architecture. It was because it had lost its own strength, and
disobeyed its own laws--because its order, and consistency, and
organization, had been broken through--that it could oppose no
resistance to the rush of overwhelming innovation. And this, observe,
all because it had sacrificed a single truth. From that one surrender of
its integrity, from that one endeavor to assume the semblance of what it
was not, arose the multitudinous forms of disease and decrepitude, which
rotted away the pillars of its supremacy. It was not because its time
was come; it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist,
or dreaded by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear it might
have survived, and lived; it would have stood forth in stern comparison
with the enervated sensuality of the renaissance; it would have risen in
renewed and purified honor, and with a new soul, from the ashes into
which it sank, giving up its glory, as it had received it, for the honor
of God--but its own truth was gone, and it sank forever. There was no
wisdom nor strength left in it, to raise it from the dust; and the error
of zeal, and the softness of luxury smote it down and dissolved it
away. It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare
ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scattered stones. Those
rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea-winds moan and
murmur, strewing them joint by joint, and bone by bone, along the bleak
promontories on which the Pharos lights came once from houses of
prayer--those grey arches and quiet isles under which the sheep of our
valleys feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars--those
shapeless heaps, that are not of the Earth, which lift our fields into
strange and sudden banks of flowers, and stay our mountain streams with
stones that are not their own, have other thoughts to ask from us than
those of mourning for the rage that despoiled, or the fear that forsook
them. It was not the robber, not the fanatic, not the blasphemer, who
sealed the destruction that they had wrought; the war, the wrath, the
terror, might have worked their worst, and the strong walls would have
risen, and the slight pillars would have started again, from under the
hand of the destroyer. But they could not rise out of the ruins of their
own violated truth.
CHAPTER III.
THE LAMP OF POWER.
I. In recalling the impressions we have received from the works of man,
after a lapse of time long enough to involve in obscurity all but the
most vivid, it often happens that we find a strange pre-eminence and
durability in many upon whose strength we had little calculated, and
that points of character which had escaped the detection of the
judgment, become developed under the waste of memory; as veins of harder
rock, whose places could not at first have been discovered by the eye,
are left salient under the action of frosts and streams. The traveller
who desires to correct the errors of his judgment, necessitated by
inequalities of temper, infelicities of circumstance, and accidents of
association, has no other resource than to wait for the calm verdict of
interposing years; and to watch for the new arrangements of eminence and
shape in the images which remain latest in his memory; as in the ebbing
of a mountain lake, he would watch the varying outlines of its
successive shore, and trace, in the form of its departing waters, the
true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the currents which had
excavated, the deepest recesses of its primal bed.
In thus reverting to the memories of those works of architecture by
which we have been most pleasurably impressed, it will generally happen
that they fall into two broad classes: the one characterized by an
exceeding preciousness and delicacy, to which we recur with a sense of
affectionate admiration; and the other by a severe, and, in many cases,
mysterious, majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like
that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power.
From about these two groups, more or less harmonised by intermediate
examples, but always distinctively marked by features of beauty or of
power, there will be swept away, in multitudes, the memories of
buildings, perhaps, in their first address to our minds, of no inferior
pretension, but owing their impressiveness to characters of less
enduring nobility--to value of material, accumulation of ornament, or
ingenuity of mechanical construction. Especial interest may, indeed,
have been awakened by such circumstances, and the memory may have been,
consequently, rendered tenacious of particular parts or effects of the
structure; but it will recall even these only by an active effort, and
then without emotion; while in passive moments, and with thrilling
influence, the image of purer beauty, and of more spiritual power, will
return in a fair and solemn company; and while the pride of many a
stately palace, and the wealth of many a jewelled shrine, perish from
our thoughts in a dust of gold, there will rise, through their dimness,
the white image of some secluded marble chapel, by river or forest side,
with the fretted flower-work shrinking under its arches, as if under
vaults of late-fallen snow; or the vast weariness of some shadowy wall
whose separate stones are like mountain foundations, and yet numberless.
II. Now, the difference between these two orders of build-ing is not
merely that which there is in nature between things beautiful and
sublime. It is, also, the difference between what is derivative and
original in man's work; for whatever is in architecture fair or
beautiful, is imitated from natural forms; and what is not so derived,
but depends for its dignity upon arrangement and government received
from human mind, becomes the expression of the power of that mind, and
receives a sublimity high in proportion to the power expressed. All
building, therefore, shows man either as gathering or governing: and the
secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rule.
These are the two great intellectual Lamps of Architecture; the one
consisting in a just and humble veneration for the works of God upon the
earth, and the other in an understanding of the dominion over those
works which has been vested in man.
III. Besides this expression of living authority and power, there is,
however, a sympathy in the forms of noble building, with what is most
sublime in natural things; and it is the governing Power directed by
this sympathy, whose operation I shall at present endeavor to trace,
abandoning all inquiry into the more abstract fields of invention: for
this latter faculty, and the questions of proportion and arrangement
connected with its discussion, can only be rightly examined in a general
view of all arts; but its sympathy, in architecture, with the vast
controlling powers of Nature herself, is special, and may shortly be
considered; and that with the more advantage, that it has, of late, been
little felt or regarded by architects. I have seen, in recent efforts,
much contest between two schools, one affecting originality, and the
other legality--many attempts at beauty of design--many ingenious
adaptations of construction; but I have never seen any aim at the
expression of abstract power; never any appearance of a consciousness
that, in this primal art of man, there is room for the marking of his
relations with the mightiest, as well as the fairest, works of God; and
that those works themselves have been permitted, by their Master and
his, to receive an added glory from their association with earnest
efforts of human thought. In the edifices of Man there should be found
reverent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the
pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue--which gives
veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse
that agitates animal organization,--but of that also which reproves the
pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the
coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple
into the pale arch of the sky; for these, and other glories more than
these, refuse not to connect themselves, in his thoughts, with the work
of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds
us of some Cyclopean waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky
promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of
fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a
melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the
images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy
clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.
IV. Let us, then, see what is this power and majesty, which Nature
herself does not disdain to accept from the works of man; and what that
sublimity in the masses built up by his coralline-like energy, which is
honorable, even when transferred by association to the dateless hills,
which it needed earthquakes to lift, and deluges to mould.
And, first of mere size: It might not be thought possible to emulate the
sublimity of natural objects in this respect; nor would it be, if the
architect contended with them in pitched battle. It would not be well to
build pyramids in the valley of Chamouni; and St. Peter's, among its
many other errors, counts for not the least injurious its position on
the slope of an inconsiderable hill. But imagine it placed on the plain
of Marengo, or, like the Superga of Turin, or like La Salute at Venice!
The fact is, that the apprehension of the size of natural objects, as
well as of architecture, depends more on fortunate excitement of the
imagination than on measurements by the eye; and the architect has a
peculiar advantage in being able to press close upon the sight, such
magnitude as he can command. There are few rocks, even among the Alps,
that have a clear vertical fall as high as the choir of Beauvais; and
if we secure a good precipice of wall, or a sheer and unbroken flank of
tower, and place them where there are no enormous natural features to
oppose them, we shall feel in them no want of sublimity of size. And it
may be matter of encouragement in this respect, though one also of
regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than
nature crushes human power. It does not need much to humiliate a
mountain. A hut will sometimes do it; I never look up to the Col de
Balme from Chamouni, without a violent feeling of provocation against
its hospitable little cabin, whose bright white walls form a visibly
four-square spot on the green ridge, and entirely destroy all idea of
its elevation. A single villa will often mar a whole landscape, and
dethrone a dynasty of hills, and the Acropolis of Athens, Parthenon and
all, has, I believe, been dwarfed into a model by the palace lately
built beneath it. The fact is, that hills are not so high as we fancy
them, and, when to the actual impression of no mean comparative size, is
added the sense of the toil of manly hand and thought, a sublimity is
reached, which nothing but gross error in arrangement of its parts can
destroy.
V. While, therefore, it is not to be supposed that mere size will
ennoble a mean design, yet every increase of magnitude will bestow upon
it a certain degree of nobleness: so that it is well to determine at
first, whether the building is to be markedly beautiful or markedly
sublime; and if the latter, not to be withheld by respect to smaller
parts from reaching largeness of scale; provided only, that it be
evidently in the architect's power to reach at least that degree of
magnitude which is the lowest at which sublimity begins, rudely
definable as that which will make a living figure look less than life
beside it. It is the misfortune of most of our modern buildings that we
would fain have an universal excellence in them; and so part of the
funds must go in painting, part in gilding, part in fitting up, part in
painted windows, part in small steeples, part in ornaments here and
there; and neither the windows, nor the steeple, nor the ornaments, are
worth their materials. For there is a crust about the impressible part
of men's minds, which must be pierced through before they can be
touched to the quick; and though we may prick at it and scratch it in a
thousand separate places, we might as well have let it alone if we do
not come through somewhere with a deep thrust: and if we can give such a
thrust anywhere, there is no need of another; it need not be even so
"wide as a church door," so that it be _enough_. And mere weight will do
this; it is a clumsy way of doing it, but an effectual one, too; and the
apathy which cannot be pierced through by a small steeple, nor shone
through by a small window, can be broken through in a moment by the mere
weight of a great wall. Let, therefore, the architect who has not large
resources, choose his point of attack first, and, if he choose size, let
him abandon decoration; for, unless they are concentrated, and numerous
enough to make their concentration conspicuous, all his ornaments
together would not be worth one huge stone. And the choice must be a
decided one, without compromise. It must be no question whether his
capitals would not look better with a little carving--let him leave them
huge as blocks; or whether his arches should not have richer
architraves--let him throw them a foot higher, if he can; a yard more
across the nave will be worth more to him than a tesselated pavement;
and another fathom of outer wall, than an army of pinnacles. The
limitation of size must be only in the uses of the building, or in the
ground at his disposal.
VI. That limitation, however, being by such circumstances determined, by
what means, it is to be next asked, may the actual magnitude be best
displayed; since it is seldom, perhaps never, that a building of any
pretension to size looks so large as it is. The appearance of a figure
in any distant, more especially in any upper, parts of it will almost
always prove that we have under-estimated the magnitude of those parts.
It has often been observed that a building, in order to show its
magnitude, must be seen all at once. It would, perhaps, be better to
say, must be bounded as much as possible by continuous lines, and that
its extreme points should be seen all at once; or we may state, in
simpler terms still, that it must have one visible bounding line from
top to bottom, and from end to end. This bounding line from top to
bottom may either be inclined inwards, and the mass, therefore,
pyramidical; or vertical, and the mass form one grand cliff; or inclined
outwards, as in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, in a sort, in
the Greek temple, and in all buildings with heavy cornices or heads.
Now, in all these cases, if the bounding line be violently broken; if
the cornice project, or the upper portion of the pyramid recede, too
violently, majesty will be lost; not because the building cannot be seen
all at once,--for in the case of a heavy cornice no part of it is
necessarily concealed--but because the continuity of its terminal line
is broken, and the _length of that line_, therefore, cannot be
estimated. But the error is, of course, more fatal when much of the
building is also concealed; as in the well-known case of the recession
of the dome of St. Peter's, and, from the greater number of points of
view, in churches whose highest portions, whether dome or tower, are
over their cross. Thus there is only one point from which the size of
the Cathedral of Florence is felt; and that is from the corner of the
Via de' Balestrieri, opposite the south-east angle, where it happens
that the dome is seen rising instantly above the apse and transepts. In
all cases in which the tower is over the cross, the grandeur and height
of the tower itself are lost, because there is but one line down which
the eye can trace the whole height, and that is in the inner angle of
the cross, not easily discerned. Hence, while, in symmetry and feeling,
such designs may often have pre-eminence, yet, where the height of the
tower itself is to be made apparent, it must be at the west end, or
better still, detached as a campanile. Imagine the loss to the Lombard
churches if their campaniles were carried only to their present height
over their crosses; or to the Cathedral of Rouen, if the Tour de Beurre
were made central, in the place of its present debased spire!
VII. Whether, therefore, we have to do with tower or wall, there must be
one bounding line from base to coping; and I am much inclined, myself,
to love the true vertical, or the vertical, with a solemn frown of
projection (not a scowl), as in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. This
character is always given to rocks by the poets; with slight foundation
indeed real rocks being little given to overhanging--but with excellent
judgment; for the sense of threatening conveyed by this form is a nobler
character than that of mere size. And, in buildings, this threatening
should be somewhat carried down into their mass. A mere projecting shelf
is not enough, the whole wall must, Jupiter like, nod as well as frown.
Hence, I think the propped machicolations of the Palazzo Vecchio and
Duomo of Florence far grander headings than any form of Greek cornice.
Sometimes the projection may be thrown lower, as in the Doge's palace of
Venice, where the chief appearance of it is above the second arcade; or
it may become a grand swell from the ground, as the head of a ship of
the line rises from the sea. This is very nobly attained by the
projection of the niches in the third story of the Tour de Beurre at
Rouen.
VIII. What is needful in the setting forth of magnitude in height, is
right also in the marking it in area--let it be gathered well together.
It is especially to be noted with respect to the Palazzo Vecchio and
other mighty buildings of its order, how mistakenly it has been stated
that dimension, in order to become impressive, should be expanded either
in height or length, but not equally: whereas, rather it will be found
that those buildings seem on the whole the vastest which have been
gathered up into a mighty square, and which look as if they had been
measured by the angel's rod, "the length, and the breadth, and the
height of it are equal," and herein something is to be taken notice of,
which I believe not to be sufficiently, if at all, considered among our
architects.
Of the many broad divisions under which architecture may be considered,
none appear to me more significant than that into buildings whose
interest is in their walls, and those whose interest is in the lines
dividing their walls. In the Greek temple the wall is as nothing; the
entire interest is in the detached columns and the frieze they bear; in
French Flamboyant, and in our detestable Perpendicular, the object is to
get rid of the wall surface, and keep the eye altogether on tracery of
line; in Romanesque work and Egyptian, the wall is a confessed and
honored member, and the light is often allowed to fall on large areas of
it, variously decorated. Now, both these principles are admitted by
Nature, the one in her woods and thickets, the other in her plains, and
cliffs, and waters; but the latter is pre-eminently the principle of
power, and, in some sense, of beauty also. For, whatever infinity of
fair form there may be in the maze of the forest, there is a fairer, as
I think, in the surface of the quiet lake; and I hardly know that
association of shaft or tracery, for which I would exchange the warm
sleep of sunshine on some smooth, broad, human-like front of marble.
Nevertheless, if breadth is to be beautiful, its substance must in some
sort be beautiful; and we must not hastily condemn the exclusive resting
of the northern architects in divided lines, until at least we have
remembered the difference between a blank surface of Caen stone, and one
mixed from Genoa and Carrara, of serpentine with snow: but as regards
abstract power and awfulness, there is no question; without breadth of
surface it is in vain to seek them, and it matters little, so that the
surface be wide, bold and unbroken, whether it be of brick or of jasper;
the light of heaven upon it, and the weight of earth in it, are all we
need: for it is singular how forgetful the mind may become both of
material and workmanship, if only it have space enough over which to
range, and to remind it, however feebly, of the joy that it has in
contemplating the flatness and sweep of great plains and broad seas. And
it is a noble thing for men to do this with their cut stone or moulded
clay, and to make the face of a wall look infinite, and its edge against
the sky like an horizon: or even if less than this be reached, it is
still delightful to mark the play of passing light on its broad surface,
and to see by how many artifices and gradations of tinting and shadow,
time and storm will set their wild signatures upon it; and how in the
rising or declining of the day the unbroken twilight rests long and
luridly on its high lineless forehead, and fades away untraceably down
its tiers of confused and countless stone.
IX. This, then, being, as I think, one of the peculiar elements of
sublime architecture, it may be easily seen how necessarily consequent
upon the love of it will be the choice of a form approaching to the
square for the main outline.
For, in whatever direction the building is contracted, in that direction
the eye will be drawn to its terminal lines; and the sense of surface
will only be at its fullest when those lines are removed, in every
direction, as far as possible. Thus the square and circle are
pre-eminently the areas of power among those bounded by purely straight
or curved lines; and these, with their relative solids, the cube and
sphere, and relative solids of progression (as in the investigation of
the laws of proportion I shall call those masses which are generated by
the progression of an area of given form along a line in a given
direction), the square and cylindrical column, are the elements of
utmost power in all architectural arrangements. On the other hand, grace
and perfect proportion require an elongation in some one direction: and
a sense of power may be communicated to this form of magnitude by a
continuous series of any marked features, such as the eye may be unable
to number; while yet we feel, from their boldness, decision, and
simplicity, that it is indeed their multitude which has embarrassed us,
not any confusion or indistinctness of form. This expedient of continued
series forms the sublimity of arcades and aisles, of all ranges of
columns, and, on a smaller scale, of those Greek mouldings, of which,
repeated as they now are in all the meanest and most familiar forms of
our furniture, it is impossible altogether to weary. Now, it is evident
that the architect has choice of two types of form, each properly
associated with its own kind of interest or decoration: the square, or
greatest area, to be chosen especially when the _surface_ is to be the
subject of thought; and the elongated area, when the _divisions_ of the
surface are to be the subjects of thought. Both these orders of form, as
I think nearly every other source of power and beauty, are marvellously
united in that building which I fear to weary the reader by bringing
forward too frequently, as a model of all perfection--the Doge's palace
at Venice: its general arrangement, a hollow square; its principal
facade, an oblong, elongated to the eye by a range of thirty-four small
arches, and thirty-five columns, while it is separated by a
richly-canopied window in the centre, into two massive divisions, whose
height and length are nearly as four to five; the arcades which give it
length being confined to the lower stories, and the upper, between its
broad windows, left a mighty surface of smooth marble, chequered with
blocks of alternate rose-color and white. It would be impossible, I
believe, to invent a more magnificent arrangement of all that is in
building most dignified and most fair.
X. In the Lombard Romanesque, the two principles are more fused into
each other, as most characteristically in the Cathedral of Pisa: length
of proportion, exhibited by an arcade of twenty-one arches above, and
fifteen below, at the side of the nave; bold square proportion in the
front; that front divided into arcades, placed one above the other, the
lowest with its pillars engaged, of seven arches, the four uppermost
thrown out boldly from the receding wall, and casting deep shadows; the
first, above the basement, of nineteen arches; the second of twenty-one;
the third and fourth of eight each; sixty-three arches in all; all
_circular_ headed, all with cylindrical shafts, and the lowest with
_square_ panellings, set diagonally under their semicircles, an
universal ornament in this style (Plate XII., fig. 7); the apse, a
semicircle, with a semi-dome for its roof, and three ranges of circular
arches for its exterior ornament; in the interior of the nave, a range
of circular arches below a circular-arched triforium, and a vast flat
_surface_, observe, of wall decorated with striped marble above; the
whole arrangement (not a peculiar one, but characteristic of every
church of the period; and, to my feeling, the most majestic; not perhaps
the fairest, but the mightiest type of form which the mind of man has
ever conceived) based exclusively on associations of the circle and the
square.
I am now, however, trenching upon ground which I desire to reserve for
more careful examination, in connection with other aesthetic questions:
but I believe the examples I have given will justify my vindication of
the square form from the reprobation which has been lightly thrown upon
it; nor might this be done for it only as a ruling outline, but as
occurring constantly in the best mosaics, and in a thousand forms of
minor decoration, which I cannot now examine; my chief assertion of its
majesty being always as it is an exponent of space and surface, and
therefore to be chosen, either to rule in their outlines, or to adorn by
masses of light and shade those portions of buildings in which surface
is to be rendered precious or honorable.
XI. Thus far, then, of general forms, and of the modes in which the
scale of architecture is best to be exhibited. Let us next consider the
manifestations of power which belong to its details and lesser
divisions.
The first division we have to regard, is the inevitable one of masonry.
It is true that this division may, by great art, be concealed; but I
think it unwise (as well as dishonest) to do so; for this reason, that
there is a very noble character always to be obtained by the opposition
of large stones to divided masonry, as by shafts and columns of one
piece, or massy lintels and architraves, to wall work of bricks or
smaller stones; and there is a certain organization in the management of
such parts, like that of the continuous bones of the skeleton, opposed
to the vertebrae, which it is not well to surrender. I hold, therefore,
that, for this and other reasons, the masonry of a building is to be
shown: and also that, with certain rare exceptions (as in the cases of
chapels and shrines of most finished workmanship), the smaller the
building, the more necessary it is that its masonry should be bold, and
_vice versa_. For if a building be under the mark of average magnitude,
it is not in our power to increase its apparent size (too easily
measurable) by any proportionate diminution in the scale of its masonry.
But it may be often in our power to give it a certain nobility by
building it of massy stones, or, at all events, introducing such into
its make. Thus it is impossible that there should ever be majesty in a
cottage built of brick; but there is a marked element of sublimity in
the rude and irregular piling of the rocky walls of the mountain
cottages of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. Their size is not one whit
diminished, though four or five stones reach at their angles from the
ground to the eaves, or though a native rock happen to project
conveniently, and to be built into the framework of the wall. On the
other hand, after a building has once reached the mark of majestic size,
it matters, indeed, comparatively little whether its masonry be large or
small, but if it be altogether large, it will sometimes diminish the
magnitude for want of a measure; if altogether small, it will suggest
ideas of poverty in material, or deficiency in mechanical resource,
besides interfering in many cases with the lines of the design, and
delicacy of the workmanship. A very unhappy instance of such
interference exists in the facade of the church of St. Madeleine at
Paris, where the columns, being built of very small stones of nearly
equal size, with visible joints, look as if they were covered with a
close trellis. So, then, that masonry will be generally the most
magnificent which, without the use of materials systematically small or
large, accommodates itself, naturally and frankly, to the conditions and
structure of its work, and displays alike its power of dealing with the
vastest masses, and of accomplishing its purpose with the smallest,
sometimes heaping rock upon rock with Titanic commandment, and anon
binding the dusty remnants and edgy splinters into springing vaults and
swelling domes. And if the nobility of this confessed and natural
masonry were more commonly felt, we should not lose the dignity of it by
smoothing surfaces and fitting joints. The sums which we waste in
chiselling and polishing stones which would have been better left as
they came from the quarry would often raise a building a story higher.
Only in this there is to be a certain respect for material also: for if
we build in marble, or in any limestone, the known ease of the
workmanship will make its absence seem slovenly; it will be well to take
advantage of the stone's softness, and to make the design delicate and
dependent upon smoothness of chiselled surfaces: but if we build in
granite or lava, it is a folly, in most cases, to cast away the labor
necessary to smooth it; it is wiser to make the design granitic itself,
and to leave the blocks rudely squared. I do not deny a certain splendor
and sense of power in the smoothing of granite, and in the entire
subduing of its iron resistance to the human supremacy. But, in most
cases, I believe, the labor and time necessary to do this would be
better spent in another way; and that to raise a building to a height of
a hundred feet with rough blocks, is better than to raise it to seventy
with smooth ones. There is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage
of the stone to which the art must indeed be great that pretends to be
equivalent; and a stern expression of brotherhood with the mountain
heart from which it has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering
obedience to the rule and measure of men. His eye must be delicate
indeed, who would desire to see the Pitti palace polished.
XII. Next to those of the masonry, we have to consider the divisions of
the design itself. Those divisions are, necessarily, either into masses
of light and shade, or else by traced lines; which latter must be,
indeed, themselves produced by incisions or projections which, in some
lights, cast a certain breadth of shade, but which may, nevertheless, if
finely enough cut, be always true lines, in distant effect. I call, for
instance, such panelling as that of Henry the Seventh's chapel, pure
linear division.
Now, it does not seem to me sufficiently recollected, that a wall
surface is to an architect simply what a white canvas is to a painter,
with this only difference, that the wall has already a sublimity in its
height, substance, and other characters already considered, on which it
is more dangerous to break than to touch with shade the canvas surface.
And, for my own part, I think a smooth, broad, freshly laid surface of
gesso a fairer thing than most pictures I see painted on it; much more,
a noble surface of stone than most architectural features which it is
caused to assume. But however this may be, the canvas and wall are
supposed to be given, and it is our craft to divide them.
And the principles on which this division is to be made, are as regards
relation of quantities, the same in architecture as in painting, or
indeed, in any other art whatsoever, only the painter is by his varied
subject partly permitted, partly compelled, to dispense with the
symmetry of architectural light and shade, and to adopt arrangements
apparently free and accidental. So that in modes of grouping there is
much difference (though no opposition) between the two arts; but in
rules of quantity, both are alike, so far forth as their commands of
means are alike. For the architect, not being able to secure always the
same depth or decision of shadow, nor to add to its sadness by color
(because even when color is employed, it cannot follow the moving
shade), is compelled to make many allowances, and avail himself of many
contrivances, which the painter needs neither consider nor employ.
XIII. Of these limitations the first consequence is, that positive shade
is a more necessary and more sublime thing in an architect's hands than
in a painter's. For the latter being able to temper his light with an
under-tone throughout, and to make it delightful with sweet color, or
awful with lurid color, and to represent distance, and air, and sun, by
the depth of it, and fill its whole space with expression, can deal with
an enormous, nay, almost with an universal extent of it, and the best
painters most delight in such extent; but as light, with the architect,
is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon
solid surface, his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are
definite shades. So that, after size and weight, the Power of
architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in
space or intenseness) of its shadow; and it seems to me, that the
reality of its works, and the use and influence they have in the daily
life of men (as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing
to do but in times of rest or of pleasure) require of it that it should
express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as great as
there is in human life: and that as the great poem and great fiction
generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses of shade, and
cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric
sprightliness, but must be serious often, and sometimes melancholy, else
they do not express the truth of this wild world of ours; so there must
be, in this magnificently human art of architecture, some equivalent
expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its
mystery: and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom, by
the frown upon its front, and the shadow of its recess. So that
Rembrandtism is a noble manner in architecture, though a false one in
painting; and I do not believe that ever any building was truly great,
unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with
its surface. And among the first habits that a young architect should
learn, is that of thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its
miserable liny skeleton; but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn
lights it, and the dusk leaves it; when its stones will be hot and its
crannies cool; when the lizards will bask on the one, and the birds
build in the other. Let him design with the sense of cold and heat upon
him; let him cut out the shadows, as men dig wells in unwatered plains;
and lead along the lights, as a founder does his hot metal; let him keep
the full command of both, and see that he knows how they fall, and where
they fade. His paper lines and proportions are of no value: all that he
has to do must be done by spaces of light and darkness; and his business
is to see that the one is broad and bold enough not to be swallowed up
by twilight, and the other deep enough not to be dried like a shallow
pool by a noon-day sun.
And that this may be, the first necessity is that the quantities of
shade or light, whatever they may be, shall be thrown into masses,
either of something like equal weight, or else large masses of the one
relieved with small of the other; but masses of one or other kind there
must be. No design that is divided at all, and is not divided into
masses, can ever be of the smallest value: this great law respecting
breadth, precisely the same in architecture and painting, is so
important, that the examination of its two principal applications will
include most of the conditions of majestic design on which I would at
present insist.
XIV. Painters are in the habit of speaking loosely of masses of light
and shade, meaning thereby any large spaces of either. Nevertheless, it
is convenient sometimes to restrict the term "mass" to the portions to
which proper form belongs, and to call the field on which such forms are
traced, interval. Thus, in foliage with projecting boughs or stems, we
have masses of light, with intervals of shade; and, in light skies with
dark clouds upon them, masses of shade with intervals of light.
This distinction is, in architecture, still more necessary; for there
are two marked styles dependent upon it: one in which the forms are
drawn with light upon darkness, as in Greek sculpture and pillars; the
other in which they are drawn with darkness upon light, as in early
Gothic foliation. Now, it is not in the designer's power determinately
to vary degrees and places of darkness, but it is altogether in his
power to vary in determined directions his degrees of light. Hence, the
use of the dark mass characterises, generally, a trenchant style of
design, in which the darks and lights are both flat, and terminated by
sharp edges; while the use of the light mass is in the same way
associated with a softened and full manner of design, in which the darks
are much warmed by reflected lights, and the lights are rounded and melt
into them. The term applied by Milton to Doric bas-relief--"bossy," is,
as is generally the case with Milton's epithets, the most comprehensive
and expressive of this manner, which the English language contains;
while the term which specifically describes the chief member of early
Gothic decoration, feuille, foil or leaf, is equally significative of a
flat space of shade.
XV. We shall shortly consider the actual modes in which these two kinds
of mass have been treated. And, first, of the light, or rounded, mass.
The modes in which relief was secured for the more projecting forms of
bas-relief, by the Greeks, have been too well described by Mr.
Eastlake[I] to need recapitulation: the conclusion which forces itself
upon us from the facts he has remarked, being one on which I shall have
occasion farther to insist presently, that the Greek workman cared for
shadow only as a dark field wherefrom his light figure or design might
be intelligibly detached: his attention was concentrated on the one aim
at readableness, and clearness of accent; and all composition, all
harmony, nay, the very vitality and energy of separate groups were, when
necessary, sacrificed to plain speaking. Nor was there any predilection
for one kind of form rather than another. Bounded forms were, in the
columns and principal decorative members, adopted, not for their own
sake, but as characteristic of the things represented. They were
beautifully rounded, because the Greek habitually did well what he had
to do, not because he loved roundness more than squareness; severely
rectilinear forms were associated with the curved ones in the cornice
and triglyph, and the mass of the pillar was divided by a fluting,
which, in distant effect, destroyed much of its breadth. What power of
light these primal arrangements left, was diminished in successive
refinements and additions of ornament; and continued to diminish through
Roman work, until the confirmation of the circular arch as a decorative
feature. Its lovely and simple line taught the eye to ask for a similar
boundary of solid form; the dome followed, and necessarily the
decorative masses were thenceforward managed with reference to, and in
sympathy with, the chief feature of the building. Hence arose, among the
Byzantine architects, a system of ornament, entirely restrained within
the superfices of curvilinear masses, on which the light fell with as
unbroken gradation as on a dome or column, while the illumined surface
was nevertheless cut into details of singular and most ingenious
intricacy. Something is, of course, to be allowed for the less dexterity
of the workmen; it being easier to cut down into a solid block, than to
arrange the projecting portions of leaf on the Greek capital: such leafy
capitals are nevertheless executed by the Byzantines with skill enough
to show that their preference of the massive form was by no means
compulsory, nor can I think it unwise. On the contrary, while the
arrangements of _line_ are far more artful in the Greek capital, the
Byzantine light and shade are as incontestably more grand and masculine,
based on that quality of pure gradation, which nearly all natural
objects possess, and the attainment of which is, in fact, the first and
most palpable purpose in natural arrangements of grand form. The rolling
heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multiplied by wreaths,
yet gathering them all into its broad, torrid, and towering zone, and
its midnight darkness opposite; the scarcely less majestic heave of the
mountain side, all torn and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of
rock, yet never losing the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy
decline; and the head of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf
and bough, yet terminated against the sky by a true line, and rounded by
a green horizon, which, multiplied in the distant forest, makes it look
bossy from above; all these mark, for a great and honored law, that
diffusion of light for which the Byzantine ornaments were designed; and
show us that those builders had truer sympathy with what God made
majestic, than the self-contemplating and self-contented Greek. I know
that they are barbaric in comparison; but there is a power in their
barbarism of sterner tone, a power not sophistic nor penetrative, but
embracing and mysterious; a power faithful more than thoughtful, which
conceived and felt more than it created; a power that neither
comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked and wandered as it listed,
like mountain streams and winds; and which could not rest in the
expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in
acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms
and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth
itself.
[I] Literature of the Fine Arts.--Essay on Bas-relief.
XVI. I have endeavored to give some idea of one of the hollow balls of
stone which, surrounded by flowing leafage, occur in varied succession
on the architrave of the central gate of St. Mark's at Venice, in Plate
I. fig. 2. It seems to me singularly beautiful in its unity of
lightness, and delicacy of detail, with breadth of light. It looks as if
its leaves had been sensitive, and had risen and shut themselves into a
bud at some sudden touch, and would presently fall back again into their
wild flow. The cornices of San Michele of Lucca, seen above and below
the arch, in Plate VI., show the effect of heavy leafage and thick stems
arranged on a surface whose curve is a simple quadrant, the light dying
from off them as it turns. It would be difficult, as I think, to invent
anything more noble; and I insist on the broad character of their
arrangement the more earnestly, because, afterwards modified by greater
skill in its management, it became characteristic of the richest pieces
of Gothic design. The capital, given in Plate V., is of the noblest
period of the Venetian Gothic; and it is interesting to see the play of
leafage so luxuriant, absolutely subordinated to the breadth of two
masses of light and shade. What is done by the Venetian architect, with
a power as irresistible as that of the waves of his surrounding sea, is
done by the masters of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a
manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less expressing their assent
to the same great law. The ice spiculae of the North, and its broken
sunshine, seem to have image in, and influence on the work; and the
leaves which, under the Italian's hand, roll, and flow, and bow down
over their black shadows, as in the weariness of noon-day heat, are, in
the North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the edges, and
sparkling as if with dew. But the rounding of the ruling form is not
less sought and felt. In the lower part of Plate I. is the finial of the
pediment given in Plate II., from the cathedral of St. Lo. It is exactly
similar in feeling to the Byzantine capital, being rounded under the
abacus by four branches of thistle leaves, whose stems, springing from
the angles, bend outwards and fall back to the head, throwing their
jaggy spines down upon the full light, forming two sharp quatre-foils. I
could not get near enough to this finial to see with what degree of
delicacy the spines were cut; but I have sketched a natural group of
thistle-leaves beside it, that the reader may compare the types, and see
with what mastery they are subjected to the broad form of the whole. The
small capital from Coutances, Plate XIII. fig. 4, which is of earlier
date, is of simpler elements, and exhibits the principle still more
clearly; but the St. Lo finial is only one of a thousand instances which
might be gathered even from the fully developed flamboyant, the feeling
of breadth being retained in minor ornaments long after it had been lost
in the main design, and sometimes capriciously renewing itself
throughout, as in the cylindrical niches and pedestals which enrich the
porches of Caudebec and Rouen. Fig. 1, Plate I. is the simplest of those
of Rouen; in the more elaborate there are four projecting sides, divided
by buttresses into eight rounded compartments of tracery; even the whole
bulk of the outer pier is treated with the same feeling; and though
composed partly of concave recesses, partly of square shafts, partly of
statues and tabernacle work, arranges itself as a whole into one richly
rounded tower.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--(Page 88--Vol. V.)
CAPITAL FROM THE LOWER ARCADE OF THE DOGE'S PALACE, VENICE.]
XVII. I cannot here enter into the curious questions connected with the
management of larger curved surfaces; into the causes of the difference
in proportion necessary to be observed between round and square towers;
nor into the reasons why a column or ball may be richly ornamented,
while surface decorations would be inexpedient on masses like the Castle
of St. Angelo, the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or the dome of St. Peter's.
But what has been above said of the desireableness of serenity in plane
surfaces, applies still more forcibly to those which are curved; and it
is to be remembered that we are, at present, considering how this
serenity and power may be carried into minor divisions, not how the
ornamental character of the lower form may, upon occasion, be permitted
to fret the calmness of the higher. Nor, though the instances we have
examined are of globular or cylindrical masses chiefly, is it to be
thought that breadth can only be secured by such alone: many of the
noblest forms are of subdued curvature, sometimes hardly visible; but
curvature of some degree there must be, in order to secure any measure
of grandeur in a small mass of light. One of the most marked
distinctions between one artist and another, in the point of skill, will
be found in their relative delicacy of perception of rounded surface;
the full power of expressing the perspective, foreshortening and various
undulation of such surface is, perhaps, the last and most difficult
attainment of the hand and eye. For instance: there is, perhaps, no tree
which has baffled the landscape painter more than the common black
spruce fir. It is rare that we see any representation of it other than
caricature. It is conceived as if it grew in one plane, or as a section
of a tree, with a set of boughs symmetrically dependent on opposite
sides. It is thought formal, unmanageable, and ugly. It would be so, if
it grew as it is drawn. But the power of the tree is not in that
chandelier-like section. It is in the dark, flat, solid tables of
leafage, which it holds out on its strong arms, curved slightly over
them like shields, and spreading towards the extremity like a hand. It
is vain to endeavor to paint the sharp, grassy, intricate leafage, until
this ruling form has been secured; and in the boughs that approach the
spectator, the foreshortening of it is like that of a wide hill
country, ridge just rising over ridge in successive distances; and the
finger-like extremities, foreshortened to absolute bluntness, require a
delicacy in the rendering of them like that of the drawing of the hand
of the Magdalene upon the vase in Mr. Rogers's Titian. Get but the back
of that foliage, and you have the tree; but I cannot name the artist who
has thoroughly felt it. So, in all drawing and sculpture, it is the
power of rounding, softly and perfectly, every inferior mass which
preserves the serenity, as it follows the truth, of Nature, and which
demands the highest knowledge and skill from the workman. A noble design
may always be told by the back of a single leaf, and it was the
sacrifice of this breadth and refinement of surface for sharp edges and
extravagant undercutting, which destroyed the Gothic mouldings, as the
substitution of the line for the light destroyed the Gothic tracery.
This change, however, we shall better comprehend after we have glanced
at the chief conditions of arrangement of the second kind of mass; that
which is flat, and of shadow only.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--(Page 90--Vol. V.)
ARCH FROM THE FACADE OF THE CHURCH OF SAN MICHELE AT LUCCA.]
XVIII. We have noted above how the wall surface, composed of rich
materials, and covered with costly work, in modes which we shall examine
in the next Chapter, became a subject of peculiar interest to the
Christian architects. Its broad flat lights could only be made valuable
by points or masses of energetic shadow, which were obtained by the
Romanesque architect by means of ranges of recessed arcade, in the
management of which, however, though all the effect depends upon the
shadow so obtained, the eye is still, as in classical architecture,
caused to dwell upon the projecting columns, capitals, and wall, as in
Plate VI. But with the enlargement of the window, which, in the Lombard
and Romanesque churches, is usually little more than an arched slit,
came the conception of the simpler mode of decoration, by penetrations
which, seen from within, are forms of light, and, from without, are
forms of shade. In Italian traceries the eye is exclusively fixed upon
the dark forms of the penetrations, and the whole proportion and power
of the design are caused to depend upon them. The intermediate spaces
are, indeed, in the most perfect early examples, filled with elaborate
ornament; but this ornament was so subdued as never to disturb the
simplicity and force of the dark masses; and in many instances is
entirely wanting. The composition of the whole depends on the
proportioning and shaping of the darks; and it is impossible that
anything can be more exquisite than their placing in the head window of
the Giotto campanile, Plate IX., or the church of Or San Michele. So
entirely does the effect depend upon them, that it is quite useless to
draw Italian tracery in outline; if with any intention of rendering its
effect, it is better to mark the black spots, and let the rest alone. Of
course, when it is desired to obtain an accurate rendering of the
design, its lines and mouldings are enough; but it often happens that
works on architecture are of little use, because they afford the reader
no means of judging of the effective intention of the arrangements which
they state. No person, looking at an architectural drawing of the richly
foliaged cusps and intervals of Or San Michele, would understand that
all this sculpture was extraneous, was a mere added grace, and had
nothing to do with the real anatomy of the work, and that by a few bold
cuttings through a slab of stone he might reach the main effect of it
all at once. I have, therefore, in the plate of the design of Giotto,
endeavored especially to mark these points of _purpose_; there, as in
every other instance, black shadows of a graceful form lying on the
white surface of the stone, like dark leaves laid upon snow. Hence, as
before observed, the universal name of foil applied to such ornaments.
XIX. In order to the obtaining their full effect, it is evident that
much caution is necessary in the management of the glass. In the finest
instances, the traceries are open lights, either in towers, as in this
design of Giotto's or in external arcades like that of the Campo Santo
at Pisa or the Doge's palace at Venice; and it is thus only that their
full beauty is shown. In domestic buildings, or in windows of churches
necessarily glazed, the glass was usually withdrawn entirely behind the
traceries. Those of the Cathedral of Florence stand quite clear of it,
casting their shadows in well detached lines, so as in most lights to
give the appearance of a double tracery. In those few instances in which
the glass was set in the tracery itself, as in Or San Michele, the
effect of the latter is half destroyed: perhaps the especial attention
paid by Orgagna to his surface ornament, was connected with the
intention of so glazing them. It is singular to see, in late
architecture, the glass, which tormented the older architects,
considered as a valuable means of making the lines of tracery more
slender; as in the smallest intervals of the windows of Merton College,
Oxford, where the glass is advanced about two inches from the centre of
the tracery bar (that in the larger spaces being in the middle, as
usual), in order to prevent the depth of shadow from farther diminishing
the apparent interval. Much of the lightness of the effect of the
traceries is owing to this seemingly unimportant arrangement. But,
generally speaking, glass spoils all traceries; and it is much to be
wished that it should be kept well within them, when it cannot be
dispensed with, and that the most careful and beautiful designs should
be reserved for situations where no glass would be needed.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--(Page 93--Vol. V.)
PIERCED ORNAMENTS FROM LISIEUX, BAYEUX, VERONA, AND PADUA.]
XX. The method of decoration by shadow was, as far as we have hitherto
traced it, common to the northern and southern Gothic. But in the
carrying out of the system they instantly diverged. Having marble at his
command, and classical decoration in his sight, the southern architect
was able to carve the intermediate spaces with exquisite leafage, or to
vary his wall surface with inlaid stones. The northern architect neither
knew the ancient work, nor possessed the delicate material; and he had
no resource but to cover his walls with holes, cut into foiled shapes
like those of the windows. This he did, often with great clumsiness, but
always with a vigorous sense of composition, and always, observe,
depending on the _shadows_ for effect. Where the wall was thick and
could not be cut through, and the foilings were large, those shadows
did not fill the entire space; but the form was, nevertheless, drawn on
the eye by means of them, and when it was possible, they were cut clear
through, as in raised screens of pediment, like those on the west front
of Bayeux; cut so deep in every case, as to secure, in all but a direct
low front light, great breadth of shadow.
The spandril, given at the top of Plate VII., is from the southwestern
entrance of the Cathedral of Lisieux; one of the most quaint and
interesting doors in Normandy, probably soon to be
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