Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice
by Edward A. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #40394 · 561,943 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice
Author: Edward A. Freeman
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_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
Historical and Architectural Sketches;
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BEING A
_Companion Volume to 'Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice.'_
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the information afforded by the essays themselves, we may gather much
which should heighten the enjoyment of visits to the inexhaustible
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"For these essays we have only words of unqualified praise; they are
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"Full of valuable teachings and suggestions to all who are ready to
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"Those who know Italy will retrace their steps with delight in Mr.
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interesting features of the volume are the illustrations, twenty-two
in number, from the author's own pencil."--_Examiner._
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SKETCHES
FROM THE
SUBJECT AND NEIGHBOUR LANDS
OF
VENICE.
[Illustration: PERISTYLE AND CATHEDRAL TOWER, SPALATO.]
SKETCHES
FROM THE
SUBJECT AND NEIGHBOUR LANDS
OF
VENICE.
BY
EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D.,
HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1881.
[_All Rights reserved._]
PREFACE.
This volume is designed as a companion and sequel to my former volume
called "Architectural and Historical Sketches, chiefly Italian." Its
general plan is the same. But more of the papers in the present volume
appear for the first time than was the case with the earlier one, and
most of those which are reprinted have been more largely changed in
reprinting than those which appeared in the former book. This could
hardly be otherwise with the pieces relating to the lands east of the
Hadriatic, where I have had to work in remarks made during later
journeys, and where great events have happened since I first saw those
lands.
The papers are chiefly the results of three journeys. The first, in
the autumn of 1875, took in Dalmatia and Istria, with Trieste and
Aquileia. At that time the revolt of Herzegovina had just begun, and
Ragusa was crowded with refugees. Some of the papers contained
references to the state of things at the moment, and those references
I saw no reason to alter. But I may as well say that the time of my
first visit to the South-Slavonic lands was not chosen with reference
to any political or military object. The journey was planned before
the revolt began; it was in fact the accomplishment of a thirty years'
yearning after the architectural wonders of Spalato, which till that
year I had been unable to gratify. If that visit taught me some things
with regard to our own times as well as to earlier times, it is not, I
think, either wonderful or blameworthy.
In 1877 I visited Dalmatia for the second time, and Greece for the
first. I should be well pleased some day to put together some out of
many papers on the more distant Greek lands. In this volume I have
brought in those on Corfu only, as that island forms an essential part
of my present subject.
In the present year 1881 I again visited Dalmatia and some parts of
Istria and Albania, as also a large part of Italy. This has enabled me
to add some papers on the Venetian possessions both in northern and
southern Italy, as also one on the Dalmatian island of Curzola, which
on former visits I had seen only in passing.
The papers headed "Treviso," "Gorizia," "Spalato revisited," "Trani,"
"Otranto," "Corfu to Durazzo," and "Antivari," are all due to this
last journey, and have never been in print before. That on "Curzola"
appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for September 1881. Those headed
"Udine and Cividale," "Aquileia," "Trieste to Spalato," "Spalato to
Cattaro," "A trudge to Trebinje," appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_
in 1875. The rest appeared in the _Saturday Review_ in 1875 and 1876.
But many of them have been so much altered that they can hardly be
called mere reprints; they are rather recastings, with large
additions, omissions, and changes, such as the light of second and
third visits seemed to call for.
I made none of these journeys alone, and I have much for which to
thank the companions with whom I made them. In 1877 I was with the
Earl of Morley and Mr. J. F. F. Horner. And I must not forget to
mention that it was Lord Morley who at once read and explained the
inscription in the basilica of Parenzo, when Mr. Horner and I had seen
that Mr. Neale's explanation was nonsense, but had not yet hit upon
anything better for ourselves. In a great part of my two later
journeys I had the companionship of Mr. Arthur Evans, my friend of
1877, my son-in-law of 1881. How much I owe to his knowledge of
South-Slavonic matters, words would fail me to tell. I had seen
Dalmatia for the first time, and I had begun to write about it, before
I knew him and, I believe, before he had published anything; otherwise
I should almost feel myself an intruder in a province which he has
made his own. One out of many points I may specially mention. It was
Mr. Evans who found and explained the two missing capitals from the
palace at Ragusa, which are at once so remarkable in themselves and
which throw so much light on the history of the building.
The illustrations to my former volume met with some severe criticism.
But I am bound to say that of that severe criticism I agreed to every
word. Only I thought that the critics would perhaps have been less
severe if they had seen my original drawings themselves. The
illustrations to the present volume have been made by a new process,
partly, as before, from my own sketches, but partly also from
photographs. I trust that they will be found less unsatisfactory than
those that went before them.
As there are in these papers a good many historical references, some
of them to rather out-of-the-way matters, but matters which could not
always be explained at length in the text, I have drawn up a
chronological table of the chief events in the history of the lands
and cities of which I have had to speak.
I need hardly say that this volume, though I hope it may be useful to
travellers on the spot, is not strictly a guide-book. But a good
guide-book to Istria and Dalmatia is much needed. I am not joking when
I say that the best guide to those parts is still the account written
by the Emperor Constantino Porphyrogenitus more than nine hundred
years back. But it is surely high time that there should be another.
The attempts made in one or two of Murray's Handbooks are very poor.
Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Dalmatia and Montenegro," published more than
thirty years ago, is an admirable book, and one to which I owe a very
deep debt of gratitude. It first taught me what there was to see in
the East-Hadriatic lands. But it is over-big for a guide-book. Mr.
Neale's book contains some information, and, even in its ecclesiastical
grotesqueness, it is sometimes instructive as well as amusing. But we
can hardly take as our guide one who leaves out the Ragusan palace and
who, when at Spalato, does not think of Diocletian. It would be in
itself well if Gsel-fels, the prince of guide-book-makers, would do
for Dalmatia as he has done for Sicily; but one would rather see it
done in our own tongue.
SOMERLEAZE, WELLS,
_September 20th, 1881_.
CONTENTS.
THE LOMBARD AUSTRIA:-- PAGE
TREVISO 3
UDINE AND CIVIDALE 24
GORIZIA 41
AQUILEIA 52
TRIESTE 70
TRIESTE TO SPALATO:--
TRIESTE TO SPALATO 85
PARENZO 97
POLA 109
ZARA 121
SPALATO AND ITS NEIGHBOURS:--
SPALATO 137
SPALATO REVISITED 149
SALONA 156
TRAÜ 175
SPALATO TO CATTARO:--
SPALATO TO CATTARO 189
CURZOLA 200
RAGUSA 218
RAGUSAN ARCHITECTURE 240
A TRUDGE TO TREBINJE 260
CATTARO 271
VENICE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE NORMANS:--
TRANI 287
OTRANTO 313
FIRST GLIMPSES OF HELLAS 332
CORFU AND ITS NAMES 343
CORFU AND ITS HISTORY 353
CORFU TO DURAZZO 365
ANTIVARI 381
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
PERISTYLE AND CATHEDRAL TOWER, SPALATO _Frontispiece_
PORTA GEMINA, POLA 113
TOWER OF SAINT MARY'S, ZARA 132
SAINT VITUS, ZARA, AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, CATTARO 133
THE TOWER, SPALATO 145
CATHEDRAL, TRAÜ 182
SAINT JOHN BAPTIST, TRAÜ 185
TOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA 242
PALACE, RAGUSA 245
DOGANA, RAGUSA 253
CABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA 255
CATHEDRAL, TRANI 299
CATHEDRAL, TRANI, INSIDE 305
CHURCHES AT CORFU 358
SAINT JASON AND SAINT SOSIPATROS, CORFU, INSIDE 363
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
B.C.
Foundation of Korkyra _c._ 734
Foundation of Epidamnos _c._ 627
War between Corinth and Korkyra about Epidamnos 435
Colonization of Pharos and Issa 385
Korkyra held by Agathoklês 300
Korkyra held by Pyrrhos 287
First Roman war with Illyria, time of Queen Teuta
and Demetrios of Pharos 229
Korkyra, Epidamnos, and Apollonia become allies of
Rome 229
Second Illyrian War 219
Foundation of Aquileia 181
First Roman Conquest of Illyria 168
First mention of Tragyrion (Traü) 158
First Dalmatian War 156
Salona the head of Dalmatia 117
Roman Conquest of Istria 107
Foundation of Forum Julii _c._ 45
Colony of Tergeste fortified by Augustus 32
Foundation of Pietas Julia _c._ 30
A.D.
Final conquest of Dalmatia 6
Martyrdom of Saint Caius 296?
Diocletian retires to Salona 305
Crispus put to death at Pola 326
First church of Aquileia built by Fortunatian _c._ 347
Gallus put to death at Pola 354
Aquileia destroyed by Attila 452
Dalmatia under Marcellian 454-468
Dalmatia under Odoacer _c._ 480
Dalmatia under Theodoric 488
The Emperor Glycerius Bishop of Salona 474
Nepos killed near Salona 480
Salona recovered to the Empire 535
Building of the church of Parenzo 535-543
Belisarius sails from Salona 544
Narses sails from Salona 552
Schism in the church of Aquileia 557
Beginning of the Patriarchate of Grado 606
Lombard conquest of Italy begins 568
Slavonic settlements under Heraclius _c._ 620
Salona destroyed by the Avars 639
Inland Dalmatia under Charles the Great; the
coast cities left to the Eastern Empire 806
The church of Pola built by Bishop Handegis 857
Cattaro taken by the Saracens 867
Saracen siege of Ragusa 867
First Venetian conquest of Dalmatia 997
Poppo Patriarch of Aquileia; rebuilding of the
church 1019-1042
First authentic mention of Gorizia 1051
Croatian kingdom of Dalmatia 1062
Foundation of Saint Nicolas at Traü 1064
Corfu conquered by Robert Wiscard 1081
Corfu recovered by the Empire 1085
Exploits of the English exiles at Durazzo 1086
Magyar kingdom of Dalmatia 1102
The tower of Saint Mary's at Zara built by Coloman
of Hungary 1105
Beginning of the Counts of Gorizia 1120
Corfu held by Roger of Sicily 1147-1150
Dalmatia restored to the Eastern Empire 1171
Corfu conquered by William the Good 1186
Corfu, Durazzo, etc., held by Margarito as a
kingdom dependent on Sicily 1186
Richard the First at Ragusa 1192
Taking of Zara by the Crusaders 1202
Venetian Counts at Ragusa 1204
Corfu and Durazzo first occupied by Venice 1206
Building of Traü cathedral 1215-1321
Corfu and Durazzo recovered by Michael of Epeiros 1216
Durazzo recovered by the Empire 1259
Corfu and Durazzo ceded to Manfred 1268
Consecration of Saint Anastasia at Zara 1285
Durazzo under Servia 1322
Durazzo restored to the Kings of Naples 1322
Pola submits to Venice 1331
Neapolitan duchy of Durazzo 1333-1360
Treviso first occupied by Venice 1338
Building of the Archbishop's castle at Salona 1347
Treviso besieged by Lewis of Hungary 1356
Dalmatia ceded to Lewis of Hungary 1358
Durazzo the capital of an Albanian kingdom 1358-1392
Complete independence of Ragusa 1359
Markquard, Patriarch of Aquileia; recasting
of the church 1365-1381
Gradual advance of Venice in Dalmatia 1378-1444
Treviso ceded to Leopold of Austria 1381
Trieste commends itself to Austria 1381
Final acquisition of Corfu by Venice 1386
Venetian occupation of Argos 1388
Treviso restored to Venice 1388
Second Venetian acquisition of Durazzo 1392
Building of the palace at Ragusa 1388-1435
Butrinto and Parga commend themselves to Venice 1407
Consecration of Saint Chrysogonos at Zara 1407
Sebenico annexed by Venice 1412
Building of the cathedral at Sebenico 1415-1555
Cattaro becomes Venetian 1419
Traü annexed by Venice 1420
Curzola finally submits to Venice 1420
Dominions of the Patriarch of Aquileia annexed
by Venice 1420
Udine annexed by Venice 1420
Lesina occupied by Venice 1424
The city of Aquileia left to the Patriarchs 1451
Argos ceded by Venice 1463
Fluctuations between Venice and the Turk in
Dalmatia 1465-1718
Date of the cloister at Badia 1477
Otranto taken by the Turks 1480
Otranto recovered by Alfonso 1481
Veglia annexed by Venice 1481
Monopoli stormed by the Venetians 1495
Trani, Otranto, and other cities pledged to Venice
by Ferdinand of Naples 1496
Durazzo and Butrinto lost by Venice 1500
Gorizia annexed to Austria by Maximilian 1500
Treviso besieged by Maximilian 1508
Trani, etc., recovered by Ferdinand of Aragon 1509
Building of the Dogana at Ragusa 1520
Trani, etc., recovered by Venice 1528
Trani, etc., restored to Charles the Fifth 1530
Aquileia annexed to Austria 1544
Mark Anthony de Dominis Archbishop of Spalato 1622
Building of the gate at Curzola 1643
The great earthquake at Ragusa 1667
Prevesa won and Butrinto recovered by Venice 1685-1699
The Emperor Leopold repairs the castle of Gorizia 1660
Athens taken by Morosini 1687
Abolition of the patriarchate of Aquileia; Udine
and Gorizia become metropolitan sees 1751
Peace of Campo Formio; fall of Venice: Venetia,
Istria, and Dalmatia, except Ragusa, occupied
by Austria 1797-8
The Ionian Islands and the Venetian outposts
ceded to France 1797
Septinsular Republic under Ottoman overlordship 1798
Prevesa stormed by Ali of Jôannina 1798
Venetia, Istria, Trieste, and Dalmatia ceded
to the French kingdom of Italy; Dalmatia partly
occupied 1805
The Republic of Ragusa suppressed by Buonaparte 1808
Various points occupied by England 1810-1814
Cattaro delivered from France by England and
Montenegro; Cattaro, capital of Montenegro 1813
Dalmatia recovered by Austria, Ragusa also
occupied by Austria for the first time 1814
Venetia, Istria, and Trieste recovered by Austria 1814
English occupation of Curzola 1813-1815
The Ionian Islands under British protection 1815
Surrender of Parga to the Turk 1819
Liberation of Venice and recovery by Austria 1848-9
The Ionian Islands added to free Greece 1864
Final liberation of Venetia 1866
Austrian attempt to infringe the liberties of the
Bocchesi; defeat of the Austrians 1869
Beginning of the war in Herzegovina 1875
Servian and Montenegrin war; recovery of Antivari,
Dulcigno, and Spizza by Montenegro 1876-7
Congress of Berlin; Dulcigno restored to the Turk;
Spizza taken by Austria; Antivari left to
Montenegro; the Turk "invited" to cede Epeiros
to free Greece 1878
The liberation of Epeiros decreed the second time 1880
Dulcigno recovered for Montenegro 1880
Liberation of Thessaly, but not of Epeiros 1881
THE LOMBARD AUSTRIA.
TREVISO.
1881.
The north-eastern corner of Italy is one of those parts of the world
which have gone through the most remarkable changes. That it has often
changed its political masters is only common to it with the rest of
Italy, and with many other lands as well. The physical changes too
which the soil and its waters have gone through are remarkable, but
they are not unparalleled. The Po may perhaps be reckoned as the
frontier stream of the region towards the south, and the many paths by
which the Po has found its way into the Hadriatic need not be dwelled
on. We are more concerned with rivers further to the north-east. The
Isonzo no longer represents the course of the ancient Sontius; the
Natisone no longer flows by fallen Aquileia. The changes of the
coast-line which have made what is left of Aquileia inland have their
counterparts at Pisa and at Ravenna. In the range of historical
geography, the most curious feature is the way in which certain
political names have kept on an abiding life in this region, though
with singular changes of meaning. The land has constantly been either
Venetian or Austrian; sometimes it has been Venetian and Austrian at
once. But it has been Venetian and Austrian in various meanings. It
was Venetian long before the name of Venice was heard of in its present
sense; it was Austrian long before the name of Austria was heard of in
its present sense. The land of the old Veneti bore the Venetian name
ages before the city of Venice was in being, and it keeps it now that
Venice has ceased to be a political power. Venetian then the land has
ever been in one sense, while a large part of it was for some centuries
Venetian in another sense, in the days when so many of its cities
bowed to Saint Mark and his commonwealth as its rulers. Austrian the
land was in the old geographical sense, when it formed the Lombard
_Austria_--the eastern half, the _Eastrice_--that form would, we
suspect, come nearer to Lombard speech than _Oesterreich_--of the
Lombard realm. But if the Lombard realm had its Austria and its
Neustria, so also had the Frankish realm. Wherever a land could be
easily divided into east and west, there was an _Austria_, and its
negative a _Neustria_. Lombardy then had its Austria, and its
_Austria_ was found in the old and the new Venetian land. No one
perhaps ever spoke of the Karlings as the House of Austria, or of
their Empire as the dominions of the House of Austria. And yet the
name would not have been out of place. Their dominion marked the
predominance of the eastern part of the Frankish realm--its
_Oesterreich_, its _Austrasia_, its _Austria_--over the Neustrian
power of the earlier dynasty. The Lombard Austria became part of the
dominions of those who were before all things lords of the Frankish
Austria. And in later times, when the Lombard and the Frankish Austria
were both forgotten, when the name clave only to a third Austria, the
more modern Austria of Germany--the Eastern mark called into being to
guard Germany from the Magyar--the Venetian land has more than once
become Austrian in another sense; some of it in that sense remains
Austrian still. Dukes of the most modern Austria--plain dukes who were
satisfied with being dukes--archdukes who were Emperors by lawful
election--archdukes who have had a strange fancy for calling
themselves Emperors of their archduchy--have all of them at various
times borne rule over the whole or part of the older Austria of
Lombardy. To-day the north-eastern corner of Italy, land of Venetia,
the once Lombard Austria, is parted asunder by an artificial boundary
between the dominions of the Italian King and the lord of the later
Austria. And, what a passing traveller might not easily find out, in
this old Venetian land, in both parts of it, alike under modern
Italian and under modern Austrian rule, besides the Latin speech which
everywhere meets the eye and the ear, the speech of Slavonic settlers
still lingers. Settlers they are in the Venetian land, no less than
its Roman or its German masters. It is hard to say who the old Veneti
were, perhaps nearer akin to the Albanians than to any other European
people. At all events there is no reason for thinking that they were
Slaves. The presence of a Slavonic speech in this region is a fruit of
the same migration which made the land beyond Hadria Slavonic. But to
hear the Slavonic and the Italian tongues side by side is so familiar
a phænomenon under modern Austrian rule, that its appearance at
Aquileia or Gorizia may with some minds seem to give the land a
specially Austrian character, and may help to shut out the remembrance
that at Aquileia and Gorizia we are within the ancient kingdom of
Italy. Nay it may be a new and strange thing to many to hear that,
even within the bounds of the modern kingdom of Italy, there are
districts where, though Italian is the cultivated tongue, yet Slave is
the common peasant speech.
But besides physical changes, changes of name, changes of inhabitants,
we are perhaps yet more deeply struck with the fluctuations in the
history of the cities of this region. In this matter, throughout the
Venetian land, the first do indeed become last and the last first. No
city in this region has kept on that enduring life through all changes
which has belonged to many cities in other parts of Europe. We do not
here find the Roman walls, or the walls yet earlier than Roman days,
fencing in dwelling-places of man which have been continuously
inhabited, which have sometimes been continuously flourishing, through
all times of which history has anything to tell us. We need not take
our examples from Rome or Athens or Argos or the Phoenician Gades.
It is enough to look to one or two of the capitals of modern Europe.
At the beginning of the fifth century, London and Paris, not yet
indeed capitals of kingdoms, were already in being, and had been in
being for some centuries. But far above either ranked the great city
of north-eastern Italy, then one of the foremost cities of the world,
the ancient colony of Aquileia, keeper of one of the great lines of
approach towards Italy and Rome. No one city had then taken the name
of the Venetian land; no wanderers from the mainland had as yet
settled down like sea-fowl, as Cassiodorus puts it, on the islands of
the lagoons. By the end of the fifth century both London and Paris had
passed from Roman rule to the rule of Teutonic conquerors. London, we
may conceive, was still inhabited; at all events its walls stood
ready to receive a fresh colony before long. Paris had received one of
those momentary lifts of which she went through several before her
final exaltation; the city which had been favoured by Roman Julian was
favoured also by Frankish Chlodwig. But Aquileia had felt the full
fury of invaders who came, not to occupy or to settle, but simply to
destroy. As a city, as a bulwark of Italy, she had passed away for
ever. But out of her fall several cities had, in the course of that
century, risen to increased greatness, and the greatest of all had
come into being. The city was born which, simply as a city, as a city
bearing rule over distant lands, must rank as the one historic peer of
Rome. Not yet Queen of the Hadriatic, not yet the chosen sanctuary of
Saint Mark, not yet enthroned on her own Rialto, the settlement which
was to grow into Venice had already made its small beginnings.
But the fall of Aquileia, the rise of Venice, are only the greatest
examples of a general law. A nearer neighbour of Aquileia at once
profited by her overthrow; Grado, on her own coast, almost at her own
gates, sprang up as her rival; but the greatness of Grado has passed
away only less thoroughly than the greatness of Aquileia. So the
Venetian Forum Julii gave way to its more modern neighbour Udine. It
lost the name which it had given to the land around it. Its shortened
form _Friuli_ lived on as one of the names of the surrounding
district, but Forum Julii itself was forgotten under the vaguer
description of _Cividale_. Gorizia has been for ages the head of a
principality; in later times it has been the head of an ecclesiastical
province. But Gorizia is absolutely unknown till the beginning of the
eleventh century, and it does not seem even to have supplanted any
earlier city. It is thus a marked peculiarity of this district that
the chief towns, with Venice itself at their head, have not lived on
continuously as chief towns from Roman or earlier times. West of
Venice the rule does not apply. Padua and Verona are old enough for
the warmest lover of antiquity, and Vicenza, going back at least to
the second century B.C., must be allowed to be of a respectable age.
That the chief cities of a district should date from early mediæval,
and not from Roman times, is a feature which at once suggests
analogies with our own island. Both in Venetia and in Britain we are
struck with the prevalence of places which arose after the fall of the
elder Roman power, in opposition to most parts of Italy and Gaul,
where nearly every town can trace back to Roman days or earlier. But
the likeness cannot be carried out in detail. In the district which we
have just marked out it is absolutely the greatest cities--one of them
so great as to be put out of all comparison with the others--which
are of this comparatively recent date. In England, though the great
mass of the local centres are places of English foundation and bearing
English names, yet the greatest and most historic cities still carry
the marks of Roman origin about them. Some Roman cities in Britain
passed utterly away; others lived on, or soon came to life again, in
the forms of York, London, and Winchester. But in Venetia it is the
cities which answer to York and London which have lost their
greatness, though they have not utterly passed away. This last fact is
one of the characteristics of the district; the fallen cities have
simply fallen from their greatness; they have not ceased to be
dwelling-places of man. Aquileia and Forum Julii have ceased for ages
to be what Aquileia and Forum Julii once were, but they have not
become as Silchester, or even as Salona. Of the position of all these
places there is no manner of doubt. They are there to speak for
themselves; even Julium Carnacum, whose site has had to be looked for,
still abides, though those who have reached it describe it as a small
village. Aquileia under its old name, Forum Julii under its new name,
are still inhabited, they still hold the rank of towns; but while they
still abide, the rule that the first should become last and the last
first is carried out among them. As ancient Aquileia was far greater
than ancient Forum Julii, so modern Aquileia, though it keeps its
name, is now far less than modern Cividale, from which the name of
Forum Julii has passed away.
Aquileia then, once the greatest city of all, is the city that has
come nearest to being altogether wiped out of being. Venice,
afterwards the greatest of all, is the city which may most truly be
said to have been called out of nothing in after-times. Among the
other cities the change has been rather a change of relation and
proportion, than a case of absolute birth and death. Cividale is still
there, though it is but a poor representative of Forum Julii. Udine
has taken its place. But Udine, though its importance belongs wholly
to mediæval times, was not strictly a mediæval creation. It is just
possible to prove the existence of _Vedinum_ in Roman days, though it
is only its existence which can be proved; it plays no part whatever
in early history. The case is slightly different with another
neighbouring city, the Roman Tarvisium, whose name gradually changed
to _Treviso_. Tarvisium was of more account than Vedinum, but it first
comes into notice in the wars of Belisarius, and its position as an
important city playing a part in Italian history dates only from the
days of the Lombard League. And its general history is one in which
the shifting nomenclature of the district may be read with almost
grotesque accuracy. It has not only been, like its neighbours,
Venetian and Austrian in two widely different senses--it has not only
been Venetian in the old geographical sense, and Venetian in the sense
of being subject to the commonwealth of Venice--it has not only been
Austrian in the old Lombard sense, and Austrian in the sense of being
subject to the Dukes of the German Austria--but it has also shifted
backwards and forwards between the rule of the Serene Republic and the
rule of the Austrian Dukes, in a way to which it would not be easy to
find a parallel even among the old revolutions of its neighbours.
* * * * *
Treviso and its district, the march which bears its name, was the
first possession of Venice on the true mainland of Italy, as
distinguished from that mere fringe of coast along the lagoons which
may be more truly counted as part of her dominion by sea. That Treviso
lay near to Venice was a truth which came home to Venetian minds at a
very early stage of Venetian history. Even in the eleventh century,
the earliest authentic chronicler of Venice, that John whose work will
be found in the seventh volume of Pertz, speaks with some
significance, even when recording events of the time of Charles the
Great, of "quædam civitas non procul a Venetia, nomine Tarvisium."
When strictly Italian history begins, Treviso runs through the
ordinary course of a Lombard city; it takes its share in resistance to
the imperial power, it falls into the hands of tyrants of the house of
Romano and of the house of Scala. Along with Padua, it is the city
which is fullest of memories of the terrible Eccelinò. Won by the
Republic in 1338 from its lord Mastino della Scala, the special
strangeness of its fortunes begins. The modern House of Austria was
already in being; but its Dukes had not yet grown into Emperors, one
only had grown into an acknowledged King. They had not won for
themselves the crowns of Bohemia or Hungary, though, by the opposite
process, one Bohemian king, the mighty Ottocar, had counted Austria in
the long list of his conquered lands. But presently Treviso becomes
the centre of events in which Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and the
Empire, all play their parts. It is perhaps not wonderful when the
maritime republic, mistress of the Trevisan march, vainly seeks to
obtain the confirmation of her right from the overlord of Treviso
though not of Venice, Charles of Bohemia, King of the Romans and
future Emperor. But the old times when Huns, Avars, Magyars,
barbarians of every kind, poured into this devoted corner of Italy,
seem to have come back, when in 1356 we find Treviso besieged by a
Hungarian king. But the Hungarian king is no longer an outside
barbarian; he is a prince of the house of Anjou and Paris. If Lewis
the Great besieged Treviso, it was not in the character of a new
Attila or Arpad; he attacked the now Venetian city as part of the war
which he so successfully waged against the Republic in her Dalmatian
lands. Not thirty years later we find the Doge Andrew Contarini, with
more wisdom perhaps than the more famous Foscari of the next age,
considering that to Venice the sea was greater than the land, and
therefore commending her new conquest on the mainland to Duke Leopold
of Austria. The words of the chronicler Andrew Dandolo are worth
remembering. They express the truest policy of the Republic, from
which she ought never to have gone astray.
"Ducalis excellentia prudentissima, meditatione considerans
proprium Venetorum esse mare colere, terramque postergare;
hinc enim divitiis et honoribus abundat, inde sæpe sibi
proveniunt scandala et errores."
But Leopold, he who fell at Sempach, had not the same passion for
dominion south of the Alps as some of his successors. He wisely sold
Treviso to the lord of Padua, Francesco Carrara, from whom, after a
moment of doubt whether the prize would not pass to the tyrant of
Milan, the Republic won it back after eight years' separation.
Henceforward Treviso shared the fate of the other Venetian possessions
which gradually gathered on each side of her. Having had for a moment
its share of Austrian dominion in the fourteenth century, Treviso was
able, in the wars of the sixteenth century, to withstand the same
power in a new shape, the power of Maximilian, Austrian Archduke and
Roman King. In later times nothing distinguishes the city from the
common course by which Treviso and her neighbours became Austrian,
French, and Austrian again, till, by the happiest change of all, they
became members of a free and united Italy.
* * * * *
In the aspect of the city itself, the Roman Tarvisium has left but
small signs of its former being. All that we see is the Treviso of
mediæval and later times. The walls, the bell-towers, the slenderer
tower of the municipal palace, the arcaded streets, the houses too,
though they are not rich in the more elaborate forms of Italian
domestic art, have all the genuine character of a mediæval Italian
town. Not placed in any striking position, not a hill-city, not in any
strictness a river-city, but a city of the plain looking towards the
distant mountains--not adorned by any building of conspicuous
splendour--Treviso is still far from being void of objects which
deserve study. As we look on the city, either from the lofty walk into
which so large a part of its walls have been turned, or else from the
neighbourhood of its railway station, its aspect, without rivalling
that of the great cities of Italy, is far from unsatisfactory. But
the character of the city differs widely in the two views. From the
station the ecclesiastical element prevails. The main object in the
view from this side is the Dominican church of Saint Nicolas, one of
those vast brick friars' churches so characteristic of Italy, and to
which the praise of a certain stateliness cannot be denied. Saint
Nicolas, with its great bell-tower, groups well with the smaller
church and smaller tower of a neighbouring Benedictine house. In
short, the towers of Treviso form its leading feature, and that,
though several of the greatest, above all the huge campanile designed
for the cathedral church, have never been finished. In the view from
the railway Saint Nicolas' tower is dominant; the tall slender tower
of the municipal palace, loftier, we suspect, in positive height,
fails to balance it. In the other view, from the wall on the other
side, the municipal tower is the leading object, which it certainly
would not have been if the bell-tower of the _duomo_ had ever been
carried up. There is a great friars' church on this side too, the
desecrated church of Saint Francis; but, though a large building with
marked outline, it does not stand out at all so conspicuously as its
Dominican rival on the other side. The _duomo_ itself, with its
eccentric cupolas, goes for less in the general view than either. On
the whole, the aspect of Treviso is very characteristically Italian;
it would be yet more so if it sent up its one great campanile to mark
its site from afar. Still, even as it is, this city of the Lombard
Austria proclaims itself as one of the same group as those cities
further to the west which we look down on side by side from the
castle-hill of Brescia.
Treviso, so near a neighbour of Venice, the earliest of her subject
cities of the mainland, does not fail to proclaim the relation between
the subject and the ruling commonwealth in the usual fashion. The
winged lion, the ensign which we are to follow along so many shores,
appears on not a few points of her defences. Over the gate of Saint
Thomas the badge of the Evangelist appears in special size and
majesty, accompanied, it would seem, by several younger members of his
family whose wings have not yet had time to grow. And Treviso too in
some sort calls up the memory of its mistress in the abundance of
streams, canals, and bridges. It has at least more right than some of
the towns to which the guide-books give the name, to be called a
little Venice. But the contrast is indeed great between the still
waters of the lagoons and the rushing torrents which pass under the
walls and turn the mills of Treviso. Venice, in short, though her name
has been rather freely scattered about hither and thither, remains
without likeness or miniature among either subjects, rivals, or
strangers.
The heart of an Italian city is to be looked for in its town-house and
the open space before it. It is characteristic of the mistress of
Treviso that her palace, the palace of her rulers, not of her people,
stands somewhat aside from the great centre of Venetian life. The
church of the patron saint who had become identified with the
commonwealth takes in some sort the place which in more democratic
states belongs to the home of the commonwealth itself. Technically
indeed Saint Mark's is itself part of the palace; it answers to Saint
Stephen's at Westminster, not to Saint Peter's; but nowhere else among
commonwealths does the chapel of the palace in this sort surpass or
rival the palace itself. The less famous Saint Liberalis, patron of
the city and diocese of Tarvisium, does not venture, after the manner
of the Evangelist, thus to supplant Tarvisium itself. The commonwealth
fully proclaims its being in the group of municipal buildings which
surround the irregular space which forms the municipal centre of the
city. One alone of these, at once in some sort the oldest and the
newest, calls for special notice. The former _palazzo della Signoria_,
now the palace, the centre, in the new arrangement of things, not only
of the city of Treviso but of the whole province of which it is the
head, has been clearly renewed, perhaps rebuilt. But it keeps the true
character of a Lombard building of the kind, the simpler and truer
forms which were in vogue before the Venetian Gothic set in. It marks
the true position of that style that, though we cannot help admiring
many of its buildings when we look at them, we find it a relief when
we come to something earlier and more real. The buildings of which
Venice set the type are very rich, very elegant; but we feel that,
after all, England, France, Germany, could all do better in the way of
windows, and that Italy left to herself could do better in the way of
columns and arches. Old or new, rebuilt or simply repaired, there is
nothing very wonderful in the municipal palace of Treviso; but in
either case it is pleasing as an example of the genuine native style
of Italy. It has arcades below, groups of round-headed windows above,
and the tower looks over the palace with the more effect, because it
is not parallel to it. The arcades of the palace, continued in the
form of the arcades of the streets, are a feature of Treviso, as of
all other southern cities that were built by rational men in rational
times, and were designed, unlike Venice and Curzola, for the passage
of carriages and horses. At Treviso we have arcades of all kinds, all
shapes, all dates, some rude enough, some really elegant, but all of
them better than the portentous folly which has offered up modern Rome
and modern Athens as helpless victims to whatever powers may be
conceived to preside over heat, dust, and their consequences. Treviso
is not a first-class Italian city; it is hardly one of the second
class; but it is pleasant to thread one's way through the arcades, to
try to spell out the geography of the streams that are crossed by many
bridges; it is pleasant to mount here and there on the wall, to look
down on the broad foss below, and across it on the rich plain with its
wall of mountains in the distance.
In the ecclesiastical department what there is of any value above
ground belongs mainly to the friars. The interest of the _duomo_, as a
building, lies wholly in its crypt, a grand and spacious one,
certainly not later than the twelfth century. It may be that some of
the smaller marble shafts which support its vault had already done
duty in some earlier building, and there is no doubt as to the
classical date of a fragment of a large fluted column which in this
same crypt serves the purpose of a well. The church above has been
mercilessly Jesuited; yet, as it keeps more than one cupola, those
cupolas give it a certain dignity; the stamp of Constantinople and
Venice, of Périgueux and Angoulême, is hard wholly to wipe out.
Otherwise a few tombs and a fine piece of mediæval gilded wood-carving
are about all that the church of Treviso has to show. The great
Dominican church has been more lucky. The guide-book of Gsel-fels,
commonly the best of guide-books, but which cuts Treviso a little
short, rather sets one against it by saying that it has been wholly
modernized within. Repaired and freshened up it certainly has been;
but it can hardly be said to have been modernized; the old lines seem
not to have been tampered with. And there is something far from
lacking in dignity in the effect of its vast interior, even though its
style be the corrupt Gothic of Italy. One merit is that the arches
which spring from the huge pillars, though wide, are not
sprawling--not like those which those who do not dare to think for
themselves are called on to admire in the nave of the Florentine
_duomo_. Unlike the work of Arnolfo, the Dominican church of Treviso
does not look one inch shorter or lower than it is. It has too the
interest of much contemporary painting and other ornamental work. The
smaller Benedictine church hard by, whose bell-tower groups so well
with Saint Nicolas, employs in that bell-tower a trefoil arch, a
strange form to spring from mid-wall shafts. Within there is not much
to look at, beyond a tablet setting forth the glories of the
Benedictine order, how many emperors, empresses, kings, queens, popes,
cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and so forth, belonged to it. Dukes,
marquesses, counts, and knights, were unnumbered. It is a strange
thought that to that countless band Bec added the full manhood and
long monastic life of Herlwin, that Saint Peter of Shrewsbury and
Saint Werburh of Chester had severally the privilege of enrolling Earl
Roger and Earl Hugh, each for a few days only, as members of the
brotherhood of Benedict and Anselm.
The other friars' church, that of Saint Francis, has been less lucky
than its Dominican rival. Desecrated and partitioned, its inside is
now inaccessible; the outside promises well for a church of its own
type. Yet how feeble after all are the very best of these Italian
buildings which forsook their own native forms for a hopeless attempt
to reproduce the forms of other lands. We are always told that Italian
Gothic cannot be Northern Gothic, because Italy is not like Northern
lands. True enough; but what that argument proves is that Italy should
have kept to her own natural Romanesque, the true fruit of her own
soil, and should never have meddled with forms which could not be
transplanted in their purity. The great fact of Italian architectural
history is that the native style never was thoroughly driven out, but
that, alongside of the sham Gothic, true Romanesque lived on to lose
itself in the earlier and better kind of _Renaissance_. The open
arcades of streets and houses, and the bell-towers of the churches,
largely remain really Romanesque in style at all dates. For the
working out of the same law in greater buildings we must make our way
south-eastward. The chronicler of the eleventh century hinted that
Treviso was near to Venice, and the men of the fourteenth century
acted on the hint. But the wise Doge, who a generation later told his
people to stick to the sea and leave the land behind, knew better
where the true subject and neighbour lands of Venice lay. We cannot
fully obey him as yet, as we have still points on the Italian mainland
to visit. But we may still keep the true goal of our pilgrimage before
our eyes, and we may remember that the lands which were most truly
near to Venice were those lands, subject and hostile, to which the
path lay by her own element. The lessons of which we begin to get a
glimpse at Treviso we shall not learn in their fulness till we have
reached the other side of Hadria.
UDINE AND CIVIDALE.
1875--1881.
Ought the antiquarian traveller who has taken up his quarters at Udine
and has thence made an expedition to Cividale to counsel his
fellow-inquirers to follow his example in so doing or not? The answer
to this question may be well made largely to depend on the state of
the weather. It would be dangerous to say, from an experience of two
visits only, that at Udine and Cividale it always either rains or has
very lately rained; but those are the only two conditions in which we
can speak of those places from personal knowledge. Now it is wonderful
how a heavy rain damps the zeal of the most inquiring spirit,
especially if he be carrying on his inquiries by himself. If he has
companions, a good deal of wet may be shaken off by the process of
talking and laughing at the common bad luck. If he be alone, every
drop sticks; he has nothing to do but to grumble, and he has nobody to
listen to his grumblings but himself. The land may be beautiful, but
its beauties are half hid; the buildings may have the most taking
outlines, but it is impossible to make a drawing of them. Even
interiors lose their cheerfulness; the general gloom makes half their
details invisible; and his own depression of spirit makes the inquirer
less able than usual to understand and appreciate what he can see.
Udine and Cividale on a fine day are something quite unlike Udine and
Cividale in the rain. But even in this more cheerful state of things,
when the rain has to be spoken of in the past tense, it may happen
that the past puts serious difficulties in the way of the enjoyment of
the present. Cividale is undoubtedly more pleasant and more profitable
to see when the rain is past than when the rain is actually falling.
But then, to judge from our two experiences, Cividale is easier to get
at while the rain is actually falling than when it has ceased to fall.
What in the one state of things is the half-dry _ghiara_ of an Alpine
stream becomes a flood covering the road for no small distance, and
suggesting, to all but the most zealous, the thought of turning back.
It is only those for whom the attractions of the spot which once was
the Forum Julii are strong indeed, who will pluck up heart to go on
when their carriage has sometimes to be helped on by men who are used
to wade through the flood, or else is forced to leave what should have
been the high road for a narrow and difficult path across the fields.
It is well to record these things, that those who stay at home may be
put in mind that, even in perfectly civilized lands, topographical
knowledge is not always to be got without going to some little trouble
in the search after it. We have seen Udine and Cividale wet, and we
have seen them dry, but then it was when they had been wet only a very
short time before. We are tempted to think that we might understand
them better at some time when the rainfall was neither of the present
nor of the very recent past.
One thing however is certain, that, wet or dry, not many Englishmen
make the experiment of trying to find out what this corner of Italy
may have to show. Not an English name, save that of one specially
famous and adventurous traveller, was to be seen in the visitors'
book, either in Albergo dell' Italia at Udine or in the Museum at
Cividale. The true traveller is always in a doubtful state of mind
when he finds a place of interest neglected by his own countrymen. On
the one hand he is personally relieved, as being set free from the
gabble of English tourists at _tables d'hôte_ and the like. But how
far ought he to proclaim to the world the merits of the place which he
has found out for himself? How can he draw the line, so as to lead
travellers to come, without holding out the least inducement to mere
tourists? But perhaps the danger is not great; tourists will go only
where it is the fashion to go, and the historical traveller must not
think of himself more highly than he ought to think or fancy that it
is for such as he to create a fashion.
* * * * *
We will suppose then that our traveller has started from Treviso, and
has reached the frontier town of Italy in the modern sense of the
name. We have seen that the existence of the place in Roman times
under the name of Vedinum can be proved and no more. The importance
and history of Udine, _Utinum_, are wholly mediæval. It takes the
place of Forum Julii as the capital of Friuli the district which keeps
the name which has passed away from the city. It is one of the
eccentricities of nomenclature that the other Forum Julii in southern
Gaul has kept its name, but in the still more corrupted shape of
_Fréjus_. The new head of the Venetian borderland--Venetia in the
older sense--went through the usual course of the neighbouring cities
with one feature peculiar to itself. Not a patriarchal see, Udine was
a patriarchal capital, the capital of the patriarchs of Aquileia in
that temporal character which for a long while made the bishops of the
forsaken city the chief princes of that corner of Italy.
Like Treviso, but somewhat later, Udine had to undergo a Hungarian
siege, when the Magyar crown had passed by marriage from the house of
Anjou to the house of Luxemburg. But we may mark how the different
powers which had something to do with the lands with which we are
concerned are already beginning to gather from the same hands. Lewis,
the enemy of Treviso in 1356, purely western in origin, was purely
eastern in power--King of Hungary and of the lands round about
Hungary, King of Poland by a personal union. Siegmund, the enemy of
Udine in 1411, was already King of Hungary, Margrave of Brandenburg
also, in days when, as Hungary had nothing to do with Austria, so
Brandenburg had nothing to do with Prussia. He was already chosen but
not crowned King of the Romans; he was to be, before he had done, King
of Bohemia, reformer of the Church, and Emperor, last crowned Emperor
not of the Austrian house. Presently the city passed away from the
rule of the patriarchs, but it could hardly be said to pass from a
spiritual to a temporal lord when it came under the direct superiority
of the Evangelist and his Lion. In the war of the League of Cambray it
passed for a moment into the hands of an Austrian Archduke, but one
who wore the crown of Aachen, and bore the titles of Rome without her
crown. The first momentary master saw from the German Austria that
Udine was Maximilian, King of Germany and Emperor-elect. In the
eighteenth century the patriarchs of Aquileia had become harmless
indeed, so harmless that their dignity could be altogether swept away,
and their immediate province divided between the two new
archbishoprics of Udine and Gorizia. Thus Udine, having once been the
temporal seat of an ecclesiastical prince of the highest rank, came,
as a subject city, to hold the highest ecclesiastical rank short of
that which was swept away to make room for its elevation.
* * * * *
Udine is one of those places which keep fortifications of what we may
call the intermediate period, what, in this part of the world, is
specially the Venetian period. Such walls stand removed alike from
those which, even when not Roman in date, closely follow the Roman
type of defences, and from fortifications of the purely modern kind.
The walls of Udine are well preserved and defended with ditches, and,
as they fence in a large space and as there is comparatively little
suburb, they form a prominent feature in the aspect of the town.
Within the town, towering over every other object, is the castle or
citadel, as unpicturesque a military structure as can be conceived,
but perched on a huge mound, like so many of the castles of our own
land. Here is work for Mr. Clark. Is the mound natural or artificial?
Tradition says that it was thrown up by Attila, that he might stand on
it and see the burning of Aquileia. Legendary as such a tale is on the
face of it, it may perhaps be taken as some traditional witness to the
artificial nature of the mound. It would be dangerous to say anything
more positively without minute knowledge both of the geology and of
the præ-historic antiquities of Venetia; but analogy always suggests
that such mounds are artificial, or at least largely improved by art.
Anyhow there the mound is, an earthwork which, if artificial it be,
the Lady of the Mercians herself need not have been ashamed of.
Some of the guide-books call Udine "a miniature Venice;" it is not
easy to see why. There are some canals and bridges in Udine, but so
there are in Milan, Amiens, and countless other towns. There is even a
Rialto; but one hardly sees how it came by its name. The true "piccola
Venezia" is far away in Dalmatia, floating on its islands in the bay
of Salona. The point of likeness to Venice is probably found in the
civic palace and the two neighbouring columns. But these last are only
the usual badges of Venetian rule, and the palace, though it may
suggest the dwelling of the Doges, has no more likeness to it than is
shared by many other buildings of the same kind in Italy. But, like or
unlike to Venice, there is no doubt, even on a rainy day, that the
palace of Udine is a building of no small merit; on a fine day it
might perhaps make us say that it was worth going to Udine to see it.
It is, of course, far smaller than the Doges' palace; and if it lacks
the wonderful intermediate story of the Venetian building, it also
lacks the ugly story above it. The point of likeness, if any, lies in
the arcades, with their columns of true Italian type, slenderer than
those at Venice, and using the pointed arch in the outer and the round
arch in the inner range. But the columns at Udine are not a mere range
like those at Venice. They stand row behind row, almost like the
columns of a crypt, and they supply a profitable study in their
floriated capitals. The pillared space forms the market-place of the
city, and a busy place it is at the times of buying and selling,
filled with the characteristic merchandise of the district, the golden
balls of silk, for whose presence the Venetian land may thank the
adventurous monks of Justinian's day. Some of the columns, and a large
part of the rest of the building, had been renewed between 1875 and
1881. Between those years the palace had been nearly destroyed by
fire. Here was a case of necessary restoration. No rational person
could have been better pleased, either if the palace had been left in
ruins or if it had been repaired in some incongruous fashion. In such
a case as this, the new work is as much in its place as the old, and
the new work at Udine is as worthy as any new work is ever likely to
be to stand side by side with the old. At Udine again, as in many
other places, the thought cannot fail to strike us how thoroughly
these grand public palaces of Italy do but set before us, on a grand
scale and in a more ornamented style, a kind of building of which a
humble variety is familiar enough among ourselves. Many an English
market-town has an open market-house with arches, with a room above
for the administration of justice or any other public purpose. Enlarge
and enrich a building of this kind, and we come by easy steps to the
palace of Udine and to the palace of Venice.
The civic palace is the only building of any great architectural value
in Udine. The metropolitan church contains little that is attractive
for antiquity or for beauty of the higher kind. But the interior,
though of mixed and corrupt style, is not without a certain
stateliness, and its huge octagonal tower would have been a grand
object if its upper stages had been carried up in a manner worthy of
its basement. The streets are largely arcaded; and if the arcades of
Udine supply less detail than those of some other Italian cities, any
arcade is better than none. Udine can at least hold its head higher
than modern Bari, modern Athens, modern Rome. Still at best Udine in
itself holds but a secondary place among Italian cities, and its main
historic interest consists in the way in which the utterly obscure
_Vedinum_ contrived to supplant both Aquileia and Forum Julii. As
things now are, Forum Julii, dwindled to Cividale, has become a kind
of appendage to Udine, and we must make our way thither from what is
now the greater city.
* * * * *
Let us here put on record the memories of an actual journey, as
strengthened and corrected by a later one made under more favourable
circumstances. The accounts in the common guide-books are so meagre,
and it is so impossible to get any topographical books in Udine, that
our inquirer sets out, it must be confessed, with the vaguest notions
of what he is going to see. Gsel-fels was not in those days, and, now
that he has come into being, he has treated the lands at the head of
the Hadriatic a good deal less fully than he has done most other parts
of Italy. The traveller then is promised a store of Roman remains by
one guide-book, and an early Romanesque church by another. He knows
that the greatness of Forum Julii has gone elsewhere, and he is
perhaps led to the belief that he is going to see a fallen city,
perhaps another Aquileia, perhaps even another Salona. One thing is
clear, even in the rain--namely, that the natural surroundings of
Forum Julii are of the noblest kind. The grand position of the place
itself he will not find out till later; but the mist half hides, half
brings out, the fact that Udine lies near, and Cividale lies nearer,
to the great range of the Julian Alps. Here and there their outlines
can be made out; here and there a snowy peak shows itself for a moment
in the further distance. A fertile plain with a mountain barrier, with
broad and rushing rivers to water it--it was clearly a goodly land in
which the old Veneti had fixed themselves, and in which Rome fixed the
Forum of Julius as a colony and garrison to keep their land in
obedience.
A long and flat road, but with the mountains ever in front, leads on
by several villages with their bell-towers, over what, according to
the accidents of weather, may be either a half-dry _ghiara_ or a deep
flood, till the traveller reaches the place which was Forum Julii, and
which is Cividale. Here he finds himself--a little to his
amazement--in a living town, with walls and gates and towers, with
streets and houses and churches, none of them certainly of the Julian
æra. The town is not very large; it is not a local capital like Udine;
still it is a town, not a village among ruins and fragments like
Aquileia and Salona. But it is plain that Cividale has not forgotten
what she once was; the traveller is set down at the _Grande Albergo al
Friuli_, and the _albergo_ stands in the _Piazza Giulio Cesare_. He
remembers the like name at Rimini, and he begins to cherish hopes that
the treasures of Rimini may have their like at Cividale. In utter
ignorance of what the place may really contain, he seeks for a
bookseller's shop, hoping that some guide-book or plan of some kind
may still be found. The bookseller is soon found, but his shop
contains nothing of the least profit to an inquirer into the remains
of Forum Julii. But the traveller hears that there is a museum; that
promises something: besides the treasures which the museum itself may
contain, such a place commonly implies an intelligent keeper, who
sometimes proves to be a scholar of a high order. But he takes a wrong
turn; no great harm however, as he thereby learns sooner than he
otherwise would have learned the noble natural site of Cividale,
planted on the rocky banks of the rushing stream of the Natisone. He
sees two or three unpromising churches, and looks into the chief of
them, a building of strange and mixed style, but not without a certain
stateliness of general effect. He sees the _Via Cornelio Gallo_, which
promises something, and the _Via del Tempio_, which promises more.
Visions of Nîmes, Vienne, and Pola rise before him; he follows the
track, but he finds nothing in the least savouring of Jupiter or
Diana, and he learns afterwards that the _Tempio_ from which the
street is called is the great church, known, it seems, in a special
way, as _Templum Maximum_. Still the museum is not reached; but a
second inquiry, a second journey to quite another end of the town,
leads to it. The museum is examined; it contains a considerable stock
of objects of the usual kind, fragments of architecture and sculpture,
which witness to the former greatness of Forum Julii. More remarkable
are the specimens of Lombard workmanship, in various forms of armour
and ornament, to say nothing of the actual tomb of the Lombard Duke
Gisulf. At the museum he is put under the friendly guidance of a
kindly priest, by whose care many matters are cleared up. Roman
remains, strictly so called, there are none to see. There have been
diggings, and the walls have been traced out, but all has been covered
up again; outside the museum there is nothing in the pagan line left.
But of Romanesque work the remains, though neither large nor many, are
of high interest. Buried in an Ursuline nunnery, of which the good
father opens the door, is a small Romanesque church of most singular
design, built, so he tells us, in 764, but which, if so, must have
received some further enrichment in the twelfth century. The
sculptures in the western wall are surely of the later date; but the
shell, parts of which in their coupled Corinthian columns strongly
call to mind some of the ancient churches of Rome, may well be of the
earlier date, of the last days of the Lombard kingdom.
Here at last something of no small value has been lighted on. As a
matter of architecture, this church is by far the best thing in
Cividale. Indeed, as a matter of architecture strictly so called, it
is the only thing of any importance. But let the other churches be
gone through again, perhaps only with that relief of the mind which
follows the discovery of an intelligible clue, yet more when old
memories are revived and strengthened by a second visit, and, though
they are of no great value as buildings, they are found to be of no
small interest in other ways. The _Templum Maximum_ indeed, late and
corrupt as is its style, is not without a certain grandeur of internal
effect, and it contains more than one object which calls up historic
memories. There is the chair which cannot in strictness be called
patriarchal, but which was doubtless used by patriarchs when the
spiritual shepherds of Aquileia fled from their wasted home to the
safer shelter of Forum Julii, and ruled its chief church as provosts.
There too on the altar we may see the silver image work of the twelfth
century, the gift of one of the two patriarchs who bore the name of
Peregrinus. And there too is a wonderful object, the indoor
baptistery--for it is more than a font--repaired two years after
Charles the Great had added the style of King of the Lombards to his
Frankish kingship and his Roman patriciate. We may then believe that,
in the columns and round arches of its octagon, we see work of the
date when the land of Forum Julii was still the Austria of an
independent Lombard realm. Other objects of early days are to be found
in even the less promising churches, specially an altar, rich with the
goldsmith's craft, which suggests, though it does not rival, the altar
of Saint Ambrose at Milan. But first among the treasures of Cividale
must rank the precious volume which is still guarded in the treasury
of the great church. This is an ancient book of the gospels, now of
three gospels only, for some zealous Venetian, eager for the honour of
Saint Mark, deemed that the pages which contained his writings were
out of place anywhere except in the Evangelist's own city. The highest
historical value of the book consists in the crowds of signatures
scattered through its margin, signatures of persons great and small,
known and unknown, from the days of the Lombard princes to the
Empress-Queen of the last age and the Bourbon pretender of the
present. When we have grasped the fact that the popular speech of the
surrounding district is Slavonic, we are less surprised than we
otherwise might be to find that a large proportion of the signatures
come from eastern Europe. Among them are a crowd of signatures from
Bulgaria, headed by Michael their king. It is for palæographers to
judge of the date by the writing. And palæographers say that, of the
ancient names, none are earlier than the end of the eighth century or
later than the end of the tenth. Otherwise we might have been driven
to see in this Michael nothing greater than a fourteenth century king
of an already divided Bulgaria. But the great Simeon of an earlier day
left a son Michael, a monk, who left his monastery to strive vainly
for his father's crown. Yet, if the witness of wise men as to the
dates of the writing may be trusted, it must be either the signature
of this Michael or else an utter forgery. But the unenlightened in
such matters asks how the signatures of men of so many lands and ages
got there. Did those whose names were written--for of course few, if
any, would write them themselves--come to the book, or did the book go
to them? The earlier signatures at least are said to be the names of
reconciled enemies who took the holy book to witness that their
enmities were laid aside. This we can neither affirm nor deny, but it
surely cannot apply to all the signatures in the book. The treasury
contains other ancient books, and other objects which are well worth
notice, but this strange and precious relic is the chiefest of them
all.
Altogether then there turns out to be a good deal to see on the site
which once was Forum Julii. What is to be seen is perhaps not exactly
of the kind which the traveller may have fancied in his dreams. He can
hardly have come expecting to find a stately mediæval or modern city.
He may have come expecting to find the walls of a Roman city
sheltering here and there either Roman fragments or modern cottages.
He will find neither of these; but he will find a town whose natural
position is far more striking than could have been looked for in the
approach from Udine, and whose chief merit is that it shelters here
and there, in corners where they have to be sought for, several
objects, neither Roman nor mediæval, but of the darker, and therefore
most instructive, period which lies between the two.
GORIZIA.
1881.
At Udine and at Cividale we are still in Italy in every sense which
that name has borne since the days of Augustus Cæsar. But the fact
which may have startled us at the last stage of our course, the fact
that a Slavonic tongue is to be heard within the borders of both the
old and the new Italian kingdom, may suggest the thought that we are
drawing near to parts of the world which are in some respects
different from Treviso and the lands to the west of it. We are about
to pass from the subject lands of Venice to the neighbour lands. We
shall presently reach the borders which modern diplomacy has decreed
for the Italian kingdom, seemingly because they were the borders of
the territory of the Venetian commonwealth on the mainland. Venice, as
Venice, has passed away, but it is strange to see how one of the most
artificial of her boundaries survives. The present arrangements of the
European map seem to lay down as the rule on this frontier that
nothing that was not Venetian can be Italian. The rule is purely
negative; no weight at all is given to the converse doctrine that
whatever was Venetian should be Italian. Nor is it necessary to plead
for any such doctrine, a doctrine which nationality and geography, as
well as practical possibility, would all decline to support. Still it
is hard to see why the negative doctrine should be so strictly
pressed, and why Italian lands should be forced to remain under a
foreign dominion, simply because they never came under the dominion of
Venice. If any argument grounded in this way on facts which have long
since ceased to have a meaning were urged on the Italian side, it
would be at once scouted as pedantic and antiquarian. But it would
seem that even pedantry and antiquarianism are welcomed when they tell
on behalf of the other side. For surely it is the height of pedantry
and antiquarianism to argue that, because a land was never numbered
among the subject provinces of Venice, it therefore may not be
numbered among the equal members of a free Italian kingdom. It is
certainly hard to find any other reason, except that the advance of
Venice stopped at a certain point, to account for the fact that the
dominions of a foreign prince come so awkwardly near to Verona, for
the fact that Trent and Roveredo look to Vienna and not to Rome. Such
are our thoughts on one line of journey; on our present course the
same question suggests itself again. We pass a frontier where it is
not at first sight easy to see why any frontier should be there. We
journey from Udine to Gorizia, still keeping within the old Lombard
Austria, but between Udine and Gorizia lies Cormons, and after Cormons
we find ourselves in a new Austria. We speak with geographical
accuracy. We might not say, as some would, that we were in Austria if
we were at Cattaro or at Tzernovitz, but in the land which we have now
entered, we are, not indeed in the archduchy of Austria, but within
the circle of Austria according to the arrangements of Maximilian. And
in truth we do soon mark a change. We soon come to feel more
distinctly than before that we are in a land where more tongues than
one are spoken. We may have found out that round about Cividale all is
not Italian in speech; but the Slavonic tongue of those parts is
modest and retiring. It does not thrust itself into print or show
itself flauntingly on doors or windows. But when we pass the border,
when we are in the land which is Austrian both in the oldest and the
newest sense, the presence of a twofold, even of a three-fold, speech
makes itself very clear. At Cividale, if Slavonic was to be heard, it
was at least not to be seen. In the city which we next reach, Italian
and Slavonic are both to be seen openly, and a third tongue is to be
seen alongside of them. Are we to seek here for the justification of
the frontier which struck us as artificial and needless? Is the fact
that the Slavonic tongue is spoken in or close by the city which we
next reach a proof that that city ought to remain outside the Italian
kingdom? If so, the argument might be thought to prove too much; it
might be thought to prove that Cividale ought not to be counted to
Italy any more than its neighbour. But any one who took up this line
of argument would hardly be led by it to approval of things as they
are. The Panslavist who should go the length of arguing that neither
Gorizia nor Cividale ought to look to Rome as its head would hardly
argue that either of them ought to look to Vienna.
We have written the name _Gorizia_; but we have written it with fear
and trembling. For we have now reached a city where we have three
names to choose from. Shall we say _Görz_, _Gorizia_, or _Gorici_? All
three names will be found carefully displayed side by side in public
notices. One is tempted, by the analogy of a crowd of Slavonic names
in other places, to suggest _Goritaz_ instead of any of them. But
_Gorici_ is the Slavonic form as by law established, and to that rule
both natives and visitors may do well to bow. In any case there is
little doubt that on this spot of many names we have reached a place
which, though Italian in geography, though for ages German in
allegiance, was in truth Slavonic in origin. A charter of Otto the
Third speaks of "una villa quæ Sclavonica lingua vocatur Gorizia."
This is the earliest certain mention of the place. There is indeed a
document which tells us how in the year 949 Bishop John of Trieste was
borne down by many troubles, and how one source of his troubles was a
heavy debt to David the Jew of Gorizia. But wise men reject the
document which asserts this piece of episcopal mismanagement. And the
way in which the place is spoken of in the eleventh century does not
sound as if it could have been a spot whose wealth could have drawn
Jews thither in the tenth. In any case the Slavonic _villa_ grew into
a town and a county of the Empire, and late in the fifteenth century
the Counts of Gorizia became the same persons as the Archdukes of
Austria. But long after the beginning of that union, the distinction
between Austria and Gorizia was still strongly drawn. How much Gorizia
still thought of itself, how much its prince still thought of himself
in his local character, is made plain by the most prominent feature of
the chief building of the place. Over the gateway of the castle is an
inscription recording repairs done in the year 1660 by the reigning
Count Leopold. That Count bore higher titles, and he does not fail to
record them on the stone; but they are recorded in an almost
incidental way. Letters boldly cut, letters which catch the eye at
some distance, proclaim that the work was done by LEOPOLDUS COMES
GORITIÆ. Go near, and you may literally read between the lines, in
smaller letters and abbreviated words, that this Count Leopold
happened to be also Emperor of the Romans, King of Germany, Hungary,
and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, and--in his own eyes at least--Duke
of Burgundy. But here at Gorizia he reigned and built directly as
Count of Gorizia, and he proclaimed himself primarily by his local
title. In an inscription such things could be done; heraldry hardly
admitted of any such ingenious devices. The bird of Cæsar must bear
the hereditary shield of the prince who has been chosen to the
imperial office, and on that hereditary shield the bearings of the
Gorizian county cannot displace those of duchies and kingdoms. While
therefore the legend proclaims the doer of the repairs of 1660 as
before all things a hereditary local count, the shield proclaims him
as before all things a Roman Emperor-elect. Yet one may believe that
most of those who pass under the imperial bird over the gateway deem
him all one with his bastard likeness over the tobacco-shops. Some may
even fail to see that, among the many hereditary bearings of the
elective Cæsar, the lion of the Austrian duchy keeps his proper place.
That lion is so apt to pass out of sight, men are so ready to cry
"Austria" when they see the eagle of Rome, so little ready to cry
"Austria" when they see Austria's own bearing, that it may be kind to
point out one place where his form and his occasional destiny may best
be studied. The true Austrian beast is plainly to be seen on the walls
of the _Schlachtkapelle_ near Sempach, and his presence there is
explained by the legend, thrilling to the federal and democratic mind,
"Das Panier von Oestreich ist gefangen, und ist nach Uri gekommen."
The eagle of Rome over the gateway, in a place where in these regions
we look almost mechanically for the lion of Saint Mark, reminds us yet
again that we have passed from the subject into the neighbour lands of
Venice. And various inscriptions, public and private, bring no less
clearly home to our minds that we are in a land of more than one
tongue. Of the three names of the town, that by which we have hitherto
spoken of it, that which it bears in the earliest trustworthy charter,
that which differs by one letter only from its more ordinary Latin
shape as seen over the gate, is also the name which the traveller will
most frequently hear in its streets and will see universally written
over its shops. As far as one can see at a glance, German is at _Görz_
the tongue of hôtels, _cafés_, public departments of all kinds.
Italian is the tongue of the citizens of _Gorizia_ whose shops are
sheltered by its street arcades. Slavonic, we conceive, will some day
be the tongue of the little children who, in all the joy of a state of
nature, as naked as any other mammals, creep, as merrily though more
slowly than the lizards, over the grass and stones of the castle-hill
of _Gorici_. Anyhow Gorizia is, like Palermo of old, the city of the
threefold tongue. But the place itself is, considering its history, a
little disappointing. Nothing indeed is lacking in the way of
position. Mountains on all sides, except where the rich plain of the
swift Isonzo stretches away to the sea, fence in the city, without
hemming it close in as in a prison. One hill is crowned by the castle,
whence we look out on another crowned by the long white line of the
Franciscan convent, suggesting memories of the banished king who was
the last to receive the consecrating oil of Rheims. Houses, churches,
villages, are thickly scattered over the plain and the hill sides. The
vines and the mulberry-trees, the food of the silkworm whose endless
cocoons choke up the market-place, witness to the richness of the
land. But there is a strange lack of buildings of any importance in
this capital of an ancient county, this resort which boasts itself as
the "Nizza Austriaca," the "Oesterreichische Nizza"--in such formulæ
the third tongue of the spot is not called into play. A Nizza without
any Mediterranean may seem as strange as the Rialto which we saw at
Udine without any Grand Canal. But Gorizia as a modern town is not
striking. Its best features are the old arcades in some of its streets
and markets. Such arcades must be bad indeed to be wholly
unsatisfactory, and some of those at Gorizia are very fairly done. But
there is no grand church, no grand municipal palace; the castle itself
is not what on such a site it ought to be. The castle is the kernel of
the whole place. Gorizia is not a hill-town, nor can we call it a
river-town. There is the castle on the hill, and the town seems to
have gathered at its foot. The castle soars so commandingly over the
country round that we wish here, as at Udine, that there was something
better to soar than the ugly barrack which forms its uppermost stage.
There are indeed better things within Count Leopold's gateway. The
outer court is laid out in streets, and contains several houses with
architectural features. One, bearing date 1475, with respectable
columns and round arches below, and with windows of the Venetian type
above, might pass for a very humble following, not of the palaces of
Venice or Udine, but of the far nobler pile which is in store for us
at Ragusa. A small church too strikes us, with its windows projecting
like oriels, one of them indeed rising from the ground. This last,
when we enter, proves to be the smallest of side-chapels set on this
fashion. In some cities such a small eccentricity would hardly deserve
any notice; but at Gorizia we learn to become thankful for rather
small mercies.
In the lower town what little interest there is gathers round the
pieces of street arcades; the churches go for next to nothing. Yet
Gorizia ranks as an ecclesiastical metropolis, and it has its
metropolitan church no less than Canterbury or Lyons. Nor is this
merely one of those arrangements of the present century which have
stripped Mainz and Trier of their immemorial dignity, and which have
given us archbishops of such unexpected places as Munich and
Freiburg-im-Breisgau. The style of Archbishop of Gorizia is at least
several generations older than the style of Emperor of Austria. The
church of Gorizia rose to metropolitan rank, at the same time as the
church of Udine, when the patriarchate of Aquileia came to an end, and
its province was divided between the two new metropolitans thus called
into being. But the seat of the modern primacy is hardly worthy of a
simple bishopric. There is nothing in the building of any antiquity
but a choir, German rather than Italian, and of no great antiquity
either. The rest of the church is of a gaudy _Renaissance_; yet it
deserves some notice from the boldness of its construction. It is
designed, within and without, of two stories: that is, the upper
gallery is an essential part of the building. The principle is the
same as in Saint Agnes and Saint Laurence at Rome, and as in German
churches like the Great Minster at Zürich; but the feeling is quite
different. Still, if a church is to be built in a _Renaissance_ style
and to receive two sets of worshippers, one over the heads of the
other, it must be allowed that the object is thoroughly attained in
the metropolitan church of Gorizia, and its architect is entitled to
the credit of having successfully grappled with the problem
immediately set before him.
Gorizia then can hardly claim, on the ground either of its history or
its buildings, to rank among cities of the first, or even of the
second class. Its natural position far surpasses all that has been
done in it, and all that has been built in it. But there is no spot on
which men have lived for eight or nine hundred years which does not
teach us something, and Gorizia has its lessons as well as other
places. It would hardly be worth making a journey thither from any
distant point to see Gorizia only; but the place should be seen by any
one whose course takes him through the lands at the head of the
Hadriatic. Udine, Cividale, and Gorizia are places which have in some
sort partitioned among them the position of fallen Aquileia. From the
children, we might perhaps say the rebellious children, we must go on
to the ancient mother.
AQUILEIA.
1875--1881.
We have already, in our course through the lands at the head of the
Hadriatic, had need constantly to refer to the fallen city which once
was the acknowledged head of those lands, the city whose fame began as
a great Roman colony, the bulwark of Italy at her north-eastern
corner, and which lived on, after the fall of its first greatness, in
the character of the nominal head alike of a considerable temporal
power and of an ecclesiastical power whose position and history were
altogether unique. We have noticed that, while the cities of this
region rise and fall, still even those which fall are not wholly swept
away. Aquileia has always lived, though, since the days of Attila, the
life of the actual city of Aquileia has been a very feeble one indeed.
But though Aquileia, as a city, practically perished in the fifth
century, yet it continued till the eighteenth to give its name to a
power of some kind. Its temporal position passed to Forum Julii, and
Udine succeeded to the position alike of Forum Julii and of Aquileia.
But the patriarchs grew into temporal princes, and their style
continued to be taken from Aquileia, and not from Forum Julii or
Udine. On the ecclesiastical side, the patriarchal title itself arose
out of a theological and a local schism. And, while the bishops of
Aquileia thus rose to the same nominal rank as those of Constantinople
and Alexandria, they had, as the result of the same chain of events,
to see--at least, if they had gone on living at Aquileia they would
have seen--a rival power of the same rank spring up, at their own
gates, in the form of the patriarchs of Grado. This last was surely
the greatest anomaly in all ecclesiastical geography. He who is not
familiar with the Italian ecclesiastical map may be surprised to find
Fiesole a separate bishopric from Florence. Even he who is familiar
with such matters may still be surprised to find Monreale a separate
archbishopric from Palermo. But even this last real anomaly seems a
small matter, compared with the arrangement which placed one patriarch
at Aquileia itself, and another almost within a stone's throw at
Aquileia's port of Grado. At every step we have lighted on something
to suggest the thought of the ancient capital of the Venetian
borderland; we have now to look at what is left of the fallen city
itself. Setting aside the actual seats of Imperial power, Rome Old and
New, Milan, Trier, and Ravenna, few cities stand out more
conspicuously than Aquileia both in general and in ecclesiastical
history. The stronghold by which Rome first secured her power over the
borderland of Illyria and Cisalpine Gaul--the city which grew under
the fostering hand of Augustus into one of the great cities of the
Empire--the city whose overthrow by Attila was one of the causes of
the birth of Venice--might have claimed for itself no mean place in
history, even if it had never become one of the special seats of
ecclesiastical rule and ecclesiastical controversy. To see such a city
sunk to a mean village, to trace out the remains of its ancient
greatness and splendour, is indeed a worthy work for the historical
traveller.
But how shall the traveller find his way to Aquileia? Let us confess
to a certain degree of pious fraud in our notices of Treviso, Udine,
and Gorizia. We have, for the general purposes of the series,
conceived the traveller as starting from Venice, while in truth those
notices contained the impressions of journeys made the other way, with
Trieste as their starting-point. The mask must be thrown off, if only
because the journey to Aquileia always calls up the memory of an
earlier visit to Aquileia when it was also from Trieste that another
traveller set forth. We have before us a record of travel from Trieste
to Aquileia, in which the pilgrim, finding himself on the road "in a
capital barouche behind two excellent horses," tells us that "the
idea of thus visiting a church city, which seemed a mere existence of
the past, had something so singular and inappropriate as to seem an
ecclesiastical joke. When at the octroi," he continues, "our driver
gave out his destination, the whole arrangement produced the same
effect in my mind as if Saint Augustine had asked me to have a bottle
of soda-water, or Saint Jerome to procure for him a third-class
ticket." Without professing altogether to throw ourselves into
enthusiasm of this kind, the ecclesiastical history of the city, its
long line of patriarchs, schismatical and orthodox, is of itself
enough to give Aquileia a high place among the cities of the earth.
But why Aquileia should be called "a church city" as if it were Wells
or Lichfield or Saint David's, cities to which that name would very
well apply--why going thither should seem an "ecclesiastical
joke"--why Saint Augustine, if he were still on earth, should be
debarred from the use of soda-water--why Saint Jerome should be
condemned to a third-class ticket, while his modern admirer goes in a
capital barouche behind two excellent horses--all these are mysteries
into which it would not do for the profane to peer too narrowly. But
the traveller from whom we quote was one in whose mind the first sight
of Spalato called up no memory of Diocletian, but who wandered off
from the organizer of the Roman power to an ecclesiastical squabble
in which the British Solomon was a chief actor. We quote his own
words. As he first saw the mighty bell-tower, he asks, "What were our
thoughts? What but of poor Mark Antony de Dominis?"
Our ecclesiastical traveller who went straight from Trieste to
Aquileia in the barouche with the excellent horses made his pilgrimage
before the railway was opened. As it is, the more modern inquirer is
more likely to take the train to Monfalcone--perhaps humbly, like
Saint Jerome, by the third class, perhaps otherwise, according to
circumstances. He will pass through a land of specially stony hills
coming down near to the sea, but leaving ever and anon, in the most
utter contrast, green marshy places between the stones and the water.
Some may find an interest in passing by Miramar, the dwelling of the
Maximilian who perished in Mexico; some may prefer to speculate about
Antenor, and to wonder where he found the nine mouths of Timavus. But
it is still possible to go by the same path as our predecessor, and
that antiquated course has something to be said for it. The road from
Trieste to Aquileia is, for some while at least, not rich in specially
striking objects, but it passes over lofty ground whence the traveller
will better understand the geography of the Hadriatic, and will come
in for some glimpses of the inland parts of this region of many
tongues. For here it is not quite enough to say that native Italian
and Slave and official German all meet side by side. We are not far
off from the march-land of two forms of the Slavonic speech; the
tongue of Rome too is represented at no great distance by another of
its children, distinct from the more classic speech of Italy. We
remember that the Vlach, the Rouman, the Latin-speaking remnant of the
East, has settled or has lingered at not very distant points. We are
tempted to fancy--wrongly, it may be--that some of them must almost
come within the distant landscape. One thing is certain; bearers far
more strange of the Roman name, though no speakers of the Roman
tongue, are there in special abundance. Those whom sixteenth century
Acts of Parliament spoke of as "outlandish persons calling themselves
Egyptians," though they certainly now at least no more call themselves
Egyptians than Englishmen ever called themselves Saxons, are there as
a distinct element in the land. The traveller who comes on the right
day may come in for a gipsy fair at Duino; he may hear philologers
whose studies have lain that way talking to them in their own branch
of the common Aryan tongue. He himself meanwhile, driven to look at
their outsides only, perhaps thinks that after all gipsies do not look
so very different from other ragged people. Certainly if he chances
to be making his way, as it is possible that he may be, from Dalmatia
and Montenegro, he will miss, both among the gipsies and the other
inhabitants of the land, the picturesque costumes to which he has
become used further south. Duino itself, a very small haven, but which
once believed that it could rival Trieste, will, to the antiquary at
least, be more interesting than its gipsy visitors. A castle on rocks,
overhanging the sea--a castle, so to speak, in two parts, one of which
contains a tower which claims a Roman date, while the other is said to
have sheltered Dante--will reward the traveller who still keeps to the
barouche and the horses on his journey to the "church city," instead
of making use of the swifter means which modern skill has provided for
him.
* * * * *
At last, by whichever road he goes, the traveller finds himself at the
little town of Monfalcone, and there he who comes by the railway must
now look for the capital barouche and the excellent horses, or such
substitutes for them as Monfalcone can supply. A small castle frowns
on the hill above the station, but the town contains nothing but an
utterly worthless _duomo_ and some street arcades, to remind us once
more that, if we are under the political rule of the Apostolic King,
we are on soil which is Italian in history and in architecture. After
a railway journey which has mainly skirted the sea, perhaps even after
a journey over the hills during a great part of which we have looked
down on the sea, we are a little surprised at finding that the road
which leads us to what once was a great haven takes us wholly inland.
We pass through a flat and richly cultivated country, broken here and
there by a village with its campanile, till two Corinthian columns
catch the eye in front of a modern building, which otherwise might be
passed by without notice. Those two columns, standing forsaken, away
from their fellows, mark that we have reached Monastero; in the days
before Attila we should have reached Aquileia. We are now within the
circuit of the ancient colony. But mediæval Aquileia was shut up
within far narrower limits; modern Aquileia is shut up within narrower
limits still. Within the courtyard of the building which is fronted by
the two columns, we find a large collection, a kind of outdoor museum,
of scraps of architecture and sculpture, the fragments of the great
city that once was. We go on, and gradually our approach to the centre
is marked by further fragments of columns lying here and there, as at
Rome or Ravenna. A little farther, and we are in modern Aquileia,
"città Aquileia," as it still proudly calls itself in the official
description, which, as usual, proclaims to the traveller the name of
the place where he is, and in what administrative division of the
"Imperial and Royal" dominions he finds himself.
Of the village into which the ancient colony has shrunk up we must
allow that the main existing interest is ecclesiastical. So far as
Aquileia is a city at all, it is now a "church city." The patriarchal
church, with its tall but certainly not beautiful campanile, soars
above all. But, if it soars above all, it still is not all. Here and
there a fragment of a column, or an inscription built into the wall,
reminds us of what Aquileia once was. One ingenious man has even built
himself an outhouse wholly out of such scraps, here a capital, there a
bit of sculpture, there inscriptions of various dates, with letters of
the best and of the worst kinds of Roman lettering. Queer and confused
as the collection is, the bits out of which it is put together are at
least safe, which they would not be if they were left lying about in
the streets. Another more regularly assorted collection will be found
in the local museum, which has the advantage of containing several
plans, showing the extent of the city in earlier times. At last we
approach the church, now, and doubtless for many ages past, the one
great object in Aquileia. In front of it a single shattered column
marks the place of the ancient forum. To climb the tower is the best
way of studying the geography of Aquileia, just as to climb the tower
of Saint Apollinaris is the best way of studying the geography of
Ravenna. In both cases the first feeling that comes upon the mind is
that the sea has become a distant object. Now the eye ranges over a
wide flat, and the sea, which once brought greatness to Aquileia, is
far away. A map of Aquileia in the fifteenth century is to be had, and
it is wise to take it to the top of the tower. There we may trace out
the churches, gates, and other buildings, which have perished since
the date of the map, remembering always that the Aquileia of the
fifteenth century was the merest fragment of the vast city of earlier
times. A good deal of the town wall of the mediæval date may still be
traced. It runs near to the east end of the church, acting, as at
Exeter and Chichester, as the wall at once of the town and of the
ecclesiastical precinct. The church itself, the patriarchal basilica
of Aquileia, is a study indeed, though the first feeling on seeing it
either within or without is likely to be one of disappointment. We do
not expect outline, strictly so called, in an Italian church; when we
come in for any grouping of towers, such as we see at Saint Abbondio
at Como and at more wonderful Vercelli, we accept with thankfulness
the boon which we had not looked for. So we do not complain that the
basilica of Aquileia, with its vast length and its lofty tower, is
still, as judged by a northern eye, somewhat shapeless. But in such a
place we might have expected to find a front such as those which form
the glory of Pisa and Lucca, such a tower as may be found at Pisa and
Lucca and at a crowd of places of less renown. We enter the church,
and we find ourselves in a vast and stately basilica; but one feature
in its architecture at once amazes us. There are the long rows of
columns with which we have become familiar at Pisa and Lucca, at Rome
and Ravenna; but all the main arches are pointed. And the pointed
arches are not, as at Palermo and indeed at Pisa also, trophies of the
vanquished Saracen; their details at once show that they are actual
mediæval work. We search the history, for which no great book-learning
is needed, as inscriptions on the walls and floor supply the most
important facts. The church was twice recast, once early in the
eleventh century, and again in the fourteenth. The pointed work in the
main building is of course due to this last change; the crypt, with
its heavy columns and rude capitals, looks like work of the eleventh
century, though it has been assigned to the fifth, and though
doubtless materials of that date have been used up again. And in the
upper church also, the columns of the elder building have, as so often
happens, lived through all repairs. Their capitals for the most part
are mediæval imitations of classical forms rather than actual relics
of the days before Attila. But two among them, one in each transept,
still keep shattered Corinthian capitals of the very finest work.
The fittings of the church are largely of _Renaissance_ date, but the
patriarchal throne remains, and there are one or two fragments of
columns and the like put to new uses. On the north side of the nave is
a singular building, known as the _sacrario_, of which it is not easy
to guess the original purpose. It is a round building supporting a
miniature colonnade with a conical roof above, so that it looks more
like a model of a baptistery than anything else. Those who see
Cividale before Aquileia may be reminded of the baptistery within the
_Templum Maximum_. But the Forojulian work is larger than the
Aquileian, and we can hardly fancy that this last was really designed
to be used for baptism; at all events there is a notable baptistery
elsewhere.
In the basilica of Aquileia we have three marked dates, but we may
call it on the whole a church of the eleventh century, keeping
portions of a church of the fourth, and itself largely recast in the
fourteenth. Thus, setting aside later changes, the existing church
shows portions of work a thousand years apart, and spans nearly the
whole of Aquileian history. When the rich capitals of the transepts
were carved, the days of persecution were still of recent memory;
when pointed arches were set on the ancient columns, the temporal
power of the patriarchate was within a century of its fall. The first
church of Aquileia is assigned to the bishop Fortunatian, who
succeeded in 347, the last prelate who held Aquileia as a simple
bishopric without metropolitan rank. The builder and consecrator of
the present church--for present we may call it, though it shows less
detail of his work than of either earlier or later times--was Poppo or
Wolfgang, patriarch from 1019 to 1042, a man famous in local history
as the chief founder of the temporal power of the patriarchate. His
influence was great with the Emperors Henry the Second and Conrad the
Second; he accompanied the latter prince to his Roman coronation, and
must therefore have stood face to face with our own Cnut. The name of
this magnificent prelate suggests his namesake, who at the very same
moment filled the metropolitan throne of Trier, and was engaged in the
same work of transforming a great church of an older day. If we
compare Trier and Aquileia, we see how men's minds are worked on by
local circumstances and local associations. Poppo of Aquileia and
Poppo of Trier were alike German prelates, but one was working in
Germany and the other in Italy. The northern Poppo therefore gave the
remodelled church of Trier a German character, while the remodelled
church of Aquileia remained, under the hands of the southern Poppo, a
church thoroughly Italian. We may even say that the essential
character of the building was not changed, even by the still later
remodelling which brought in the pointed arches; these were the work
of Markquard of Randeck, who was translated from Augsburg to the
patriarchal see in 1365, and who held it till 1381. He brought in the
received constructive form of his day, but he did not by bringing in
pointed arches turn the building into Italian Gothic. The church of
Markquard remained within and without a true basilica, keeping the
general effect of the church of Poppo, perhaps even of the church of
Fortunatian. The walls of the church moreover show inscriptions of
much later date, recording work done in the church of Aquileia in the
days of Apostolic sovereigns of our own time. The newest of all, which
was not there in 1875, but which was there in 1881, bears the name of
the prince who has ceased to be lord of Forum Julii, but who still
remains lord of Aquileia.
But the basilica itself is not all. A succession of buildings join on
to the west: first a _loggia_, then a plain vaulted building, called,
but without much likelihood, an older church, which leads to the
ruined baptistery. The old map shows this last with a high roof or
cupola, and then the range from the western baptistery to the great
eastern apse must have been striking indeed. Fragments of every kind,
columns, capitals, bits of entablature, lie around; and to the south
of the church stand up two great pillars, the object of which it is
for some local antiquary to explain. The old map shows that they stood
just within the court of the patriarchal palace, which was then a
ruin, and which has now utterly vanished. They are not of classical
work; they are not columns in the strict sense; they are simply built
up of stones, like the pillars of Gloucester or Tewkesbury. Standing
side by side, they remind us of the columns which in towns which were
subject to Venice commonly bear the badges of the dominion of Saint
Mark. But can we look for such badges at Aquileia? The lands of the
patriarchate, in by far the greater part of their extent, did indeed
pass from the patriarch to the Evangelist. But had the Evangelist ever
such a settled possession of the city itself as to make it likely that
columns should be set up at Aquileia as well as at Udine? The treaty
which confirmed Venice in the possession of the patriarchal state left
the patriarchal city to its own bishop and prince. Was the winged lion
ever set up, and then taken down again? The old map which represents
Aquileia in the fifteenth century shows that, as the pillars carry
nothing now, so they carried nothing then. Again, would Venetian taste
have allowed such clumsy substitutes for columns as these? And, if
they had been meant as badges of dominion, would they not have stood
in the forum rather than in the court of the Patriarch's palace?
We are far from having exhausted even the existing antiquities of
Aquileia, further still from exhausted its long and varied history.
Within the bounds of the fallen city pleasant walks may be taken,
which here and there bring us among memories of the past. Here is a
fine street pavement brought to light, here a fragment of a theatre.
But men do not dig at Aquileia with the same vigour with which they
dig at Silchester and at Solunto. The difference between the diggings
at the beginning and the end of a term of six years is less than it
should be. But we have perhaps done enough to point out the claims of
so wonderful a spot on those who look on travelling as something more
than a way either of killing time or of conforming to fashion.
Aquileia has a character of its own; it is not a ruined or buried
city; nor is it altogether like Trier or Ravenna, which, though fallen
from their ancient greatness, are cities still. In the general feeling
of the spot it has more in common with such a place as Saint David's
in our own island, that thorough "church city," where a great minster
and its ecclesiastical establishment still live on amid surrounding
desolation. But there is no reason to believe that Saint David's, as
a town, was ever greater than it is now. Still Saint David's keeps its
bishopric, it keeps its chapter; at Aquileia the patriarch with his
fifty canons are altogether things of the past. We must seek for their
surviving fragments at Udine and Gorizia. Aquileia then, as regards
its present state, has really fallen lower than Saint David's. But
then at Aquileia we see at every step, what could never at any time
have been seen at Saint David's, the signs of the days when it ranked
among the great cities of the earth. Aquileia, in short, is unique. We
turn away from it with the feeling that we have seen one of the most
remarkable spots that Europe can show us. It may be that our horses,
excellent or otherwise, take us back to Monfalcone, and that from
Monfalcone the train takes us back to Trieste. In theory, it must be
remembered, we have not been at Trieste at all; we are going thither
from Venice, by way of Treviso, Udine, Gorizia, and Aquileia. In going
thither, we shall outstrip the strict boundary of the Lombard Austria,
though we shall keep within the Italy of Augustus and the Italy of
Charles the Great. On the other hand, in matter of fact it may be
that, as we have come by the older mode of going from Trieste to
Aquileia, we go on to make our way by the same mode from Aquileia to
Gorizia. In favourable states of the astronomical world, we may even
be lighted on our way by a newly-risen comet. We follow the precedent
of our forefathers: "Isti mirant stellam." Such a phænomenon must,
according to all ancient belief, imply the coming of some great
shaking among the powers of the world. In such a frame of mind, the
gazer may be excused if he dreams that the portent may be sent to show
that the boundary which parts Aquileia and Gorizia from Udine and
Treviso need not be eternal.
TRIESTE.
1875--1877--1881.
We have already learned, at Gorizia and at Aquileia, that, whether in
real travel or on the map, the subject lands of Venice cannot be kept
apart from those neighbour lands which were not her subjects. The
Queen of the Hadriatic could at no time boast of the possession of the
whole Hadriatic coast; could she now be called up again to her old
life, to her old dominion, she would feel very sensibly that she had
only a divided rule over her own sea. She would find her peer in a
city, a haven, all claim to dominion over which she had formally
resigned more than four hundred years before her fall. Facing her from
the other side of her own watery kingdom, she would see a city too far
off to be an eyesore, but quite near enough to be a rival. She is
fronted by a city which hardly comes within the old Venetian land,
though it comes within the bounds of the old Italian kingdom, a city
which for five hundred years has been parted from Venetian or Italian
rule, emphatically a city of the present, which has swallowed up no
small share of the wealth and prosperity of the city of the past.
_Tergeste_, Trieste, stands forth as a rival of Venice, which has, in
a low practical view of things, outstripped her. Italian zeal
naturally cries for the recovery of a great city, once part of the old
Italian kingdom, and whose speech is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian
to this day. But, cry of _Italia Irredenta_, however far it may go, he
must not go so far as this. Trieste, a cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic
shore, cannot be called Italian in the same sense as the lands and
towns so near Verona which yearn to be as Verona is. Let Trieste be
the rival, even the eyesore, of Venice, still Southern Germany must
have a mouth. We might indeed be better pleased to see Trieste a free
city, the southern fellow of Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg; but it must
not be forgotten that the Archduke of Austria and Lord of Trieste
reigns at Trieste by a far better right than that by which he reigns
at Cattaro and Spizza. The present people of Trieste did not choose
him, but the people of Trieste five hundred years back did choose the
forefather of his great-grandmother. Compared with the grounds on
which kingdoms, duchies, counties, and lordships, are commonly held in
that neighbourhood, such a claim as this must be allowed to be
respectable indeed.
The great haven of Trieste may almost at pleasure be quoted as either
confirming or contradicting the rule that it is not in the great
commercial cities of Europe that we are to look for the choicest or
the most plentiful remains of antiquity. Sometimes the cities
themselves are of modern foundation; in other cases the cities
themselves, as habitations of men and seats of commerce, are of the
hoariest antiquity, but the remains of their early days have perished
through their very prosperity. Massalia, with her long history, with
her double wreath of freedom, the city which withstood Cæsar and which
withstood Charles of Anjou, is bare of monuments of her early days.
She has been the victim of her abiding good fortune. We can look down
from the height on the Phôkaian harbour; but for actual memorials of
the men who fled from the Persian, of the men who defied the Roman and
the Angevin, we might look as well at Liverpool or at Havre. Genoa,
Venice herself, are hardly real exceptions; they were indeed
commercial cities, but they were ruling cities also, and, as ruling
cities, they reared monuments which could hardly pass away. What are
we to say to the modern rival of Venice, the upstart rebel, one is
tempted to say, against the supremacy of the Hadriatic Queen? Trieste,
at the head of her gulf, with the hills looking down to her haven,
with the snowy mountains which seem to guard the approach from the
other side of her inland sea, with her harbour full of the ships of
every nation, her streets echoing with every tongue, is she to be
reckoned as an example of the rule or an exception to it?
No city at first sight seems more thoroughly modern; old town and new,
wide streets and narrow, we search them in vain for any of those
vestiges of past times which in some cities meet us at every step.
Compare Trieste with Ancona; we miss the arch of Trajan on the haven;
we miss the cupola of Saint Cyriacus soaring in triumph above the
triumphal monument of the heathen. We pass through the stately streets
of the newer town, we thread the steep ascents which lead us to the
older town above, and we nowhere light on any of those little scraps
of ornamental architecture, a window, a doorway, a column, which meet
us at every step in so many of the cities of Italy. Yet the monumental
wealth of Trieste is all but equal to the monumental wealth of Ancona.
At Ancona we have the cathedral church and the triumphal arch; so we
have at Trieste; though at Trieste we have nothing to set against the
grand front of the lower and smaller church of Ancona. But at Ancona
arch and _duomo_ both stand out before all eyes; at Trieste both have
to be looked for. The church of Saint Justus at Trieste crowns the
hill as well as the church of Saint Cyriacus at Ancona; but it does
not in the same way proclaim its presence. The castle, with its ugly
modern fortifications, rises again above the church; and the _duomo_
of Trieste, with its shapeless outline and its low, heavy, unsightly
campanile, does not catch the eyes like the Greek cross and cupola of
Ancona. Again at Trieste the arch could never, in its best days, have
been a rival to the arch at Ancona; and now either we have to hunt it
out by an effort, or else it comes upon us suddenly, standing, as it
does, at the head of a mean street on the ascent to the upper town. Of
a truth it cannot compete with Ancona or with Rimini, with Orange or
with Aosta. But the _duomo_, utterly unsightly as it is in a general
view, puts on quite a new character when we first see the remains of
pagan times imprisoned in the lower stage of the heavy campanile,
still more so when we take our first glance of its wonderful interior.
At the first glimpse we see that here there is a mystery to be
unravelled; and as we gradually find the clue to the marvellous
changes which it has undergone, we feel that outside show is not
everything, and that, in point both of antiquity and of interest,
though not of actual beauty, the double basilica of Trieste may claim
no mean place among buildings of its own type. Even after the glories
of Rome and Ravenna, the Tergestine church may be studied with no
small pleasure and profit, as an example of a kind of transformation
of which neither Rome nor Ravenna can supply another example.
* * * * *
Whatever was the first origin of Tergeste, whoever, among the varied
and perplexing inhabitants of this corner of the Hadriatic coast, were
the first to pitch on the spot for a dwelling-place of man, it is
plain that it ranks among the cities which have grown up out of
hill-forts. Trieste in this affords a marked contrast to Marseilles,
as it supplies a marked analogy to Cumæ and Ancona. The site of the
Phôkaian settlement marks a distinct advance in civilization. The
_castellieri_, the primitive forts, in the neighbouring land of
Istria, were, according to Captain Burton, often made into places of
Roman occupation, and something of the same kind may have been the
case with Tergeste itself. The position of the cathedral church,
occupying the site of the capitol of the Roman colony, shows of itself
that Tergeste was thoroughly a hill-city. It has spread itself
downwards, like so many others, though this time, not into the plain,
but towards the sea. Standing on the border-land of Italy and Illyria,
its destiny has been in some things the same as that of its
neighbours, in others peculiar to itself. It must not be forgotten
that, setting aside the coast cities, the land in which Trieste stands
has for ages been a Slavonic land, except so far as it is also partly
a Rouman land. How far the Italian and the Rouman elements may have
been originally the same, is a puzzling question on which it would be
dangerous to enter here. But one thing is certain, that, if the
present inhabitants of the Tergestine city had obeyed the call of
Garibaldi, "Men of Trieste, to your mountains," they would have found
Slavonic possessors claiming those mountains by the strongest of all
titles. For we have now distinctly passed the national border. We have
come to the lands where the body is Slavonic, where the Italian
element, greater or smaller, is at most only a fringe along the coast.
Tergeste with the neighbouring lands formed part of the dominion of
Theodoric and of the recovered Empire of Justinian; but it never came
under the rule of the Lombard. Its allegiance to the lords of
Constantinople and Ravenna, lords whose abiding power in this region
is shown in the foundation of the Istrian Justinopolis, lasted
unshaken till the Frank conquest, when Tergeste became part of the
Italian kingdom of the Karlings. From that time to the fourteenth
century, its history is the common history of an Italian city. It is
sometimes a free commonwealth, sometimes subject to, or claimed by,
the Patriarch of Aquileia or to the Serene Republic itself. By the
treaty of Turin in 1381, the independence of the commonwealth of
Trieste was formally acknowledged by all the contending powers. The
next year the liberated city took the seemingly strange step of
submitting itself to the lordship of a foreign prince. Leopold, Duke
of Austria, he who died at Sempach, he to whom Venice resigned
Treviso, was received by a solemn act as Lord of Trieste, and that
lordship passed on to the Dukes, Archdukes, Kings, and Emperors of his
house, and from them to their Lotharingian successors. Thus, unlike
Treviso and Udine, Trieste has been Austrian in one sense only. Never
forming a part of the Austria of Lombardy, it has had a far more
abiding connexion with the Austria of Germany. The lordship which
Trieste acknowledged was of course at first only an overlordship, and
the Council and Commons of the city still continued to act as a
separate commonwealth. But an union of this kind is one of those fatal
partnerships between the stronger and the weaker which can lead only
to bondage. Trieste has ever since remained Austrian in allegiance,
save during the chaos of the days of the elder Buonaparte. Those days
are commemorated by an inscription on the _duomo_, which tells of the
expulsion of the French from the castle by an allied force, whose name
of "Austro-Angli" might almost suggest some unrecorded tribe in our
own island.
* * * * *
It is certainly hard to conceive a building more uninviting without
than the cathedral church of Saint Justus. But Sokratês was not to be
judged by his outside, neither is the _duomo_ of Trieste. A broad and
almost shapeless west front is flanked by a low, heavy tower, not
standing detached as a campanile, as it should stand in Italy, not
worked into the church as it would be worked in England or Germany,
but standing forward in a kind of Scotch fashion, like Dunkeld. The
only architectural feature seems to be a large wheel window, which it
would be unfair to compare to that of Saint Zeno. But the next moment
will show, built in at the angle of the church and the tower, a noble
fluted column with its half-defaced Corinthian capital, which is
enough to show what has been. We are carried back to Rome, to Saint
Mary _in Cosmedin_ and Saint Nicolas _in Carcere_, as we trace out in
the lower stage of the tower the remains of the temple of Jupiter
which has given way to the church of Justus. Imbedded in its walls are
pilasters, columns, and their basement, showing that Jupiter of
Tergeste must have lifted his pillared portico above the sea as
proudly as Aphroditê of the Doric Ankón. Fragments of entablatures,
trophies, sepulchral monuments, are built up in the wall. The western
doorway of the church is made out of a huge tomb of the Barbii--a
_gens_ which we do not elsewhere remember--deliberately cut in two,
and set up the wrong way. The building or rebuilding of the tower in
1337 is commemorated by an inscription in letters of that
date--"Gothic" letters, as some call them--out of a mutilated part of
which the earlier Tergestine antiquaries spelled out that the tower
was rebuilt, in 556, after a destruction by the Goths. As the letters
..LVM.. were enough to create the new saint Philumena, the letters
..OT... could easily be filled up into "a Gothis eversa"--quite
evidence enough to lead a zealous Italian to lay the destroying deeds
of his own forefathers on the Gothic preservers of the works of the
elder day.
As soon as we pass the doorway with the heads of the Barbii on either
side, we forget the wrongs alike of Jupiter and of the Goths. The
wonderful interior of the double basilica opens upon us. The first
feeling is simply puzzledom. A nave of vast width seems to be flanked
by two ranges of columns on either side, columns varying even more
than is usual in their height and in the width of the arches which
they support. When we look within the two lateral ranges, we are not
surprised to find each ending in an apse with a noble mosaic; we are
surprised to find the southern range interrupted by a cupola. This
last phænomenon will help us to the explanation of the whole mystery.
The church is in fact two churches thrown into one. When they were
distinct, they must have stood even nearer than the old and new
minsters at Winchester; indeed a plan in a local work shows, with
every probability, their walls as actually touching in one point. The
northern church was a basilica of the ordinary type, made up of
columns--some of them of very fine marble--put together, as usual,
without much regard to uniformity. All bear Corinthian capitals of
different varieties, and all carry the Ravenna stilt in a rude form
without the cross. The wall rose high above the arcade, and was
pierced with a range of narrow clerestory windows, but with nothing
else to relieve its blankness. This church the Tergestine antiquaries
attribute, but, as far as we can see, without any direct evidence, to
the reign of Theodosius. The southern church is, in its original
parts, the same in style as the northern, but it is much smaller and,
in its plan at least, thoroughly Byzantine. It was a small cross
church, with a central cupola, and its north transept seems to have
touched the south aisle of its northern neighbour. It is perhaps on
the strength of the plan that the church is assigned to the reign of
Justinian. But there is nothing Byzantine in the details; where the
original capitals remain, they are of the same somewhat rude
Corinthian character as those in the northern church; they have the
same stilt, and under the cupola there is even a bit or two of
entablature built up again. But the building went through much greater
changes than the northern church did in the work of throwing the two
into one whole. The date of this change seems to be fixed by a
consecration recorded in the local annals in 1262. The south aisle of
the northern church, the north aisle and north transept of the
southern one, were pulled down, and the space which they had covered
was roofed in to form the nave of the united building, while the two
earlier basilicas sank into the position of its aisles. In the
northern church this involved no change beyond the disappearance of
the south aisle and the blocking of its clerestory; the smaller church
to the south had to suffer far more. It had to be raised and
lengthened; a quadrangular pier on the south side marks the original
length, and the increase of height of course destroys the proper
effect of the cupola. Then, as the cupola of course rested on columns
with wider arches, its northern arch was filled up with two smaller
arches and an inserted column, so as to make something like a
continuous range. Still, late in the thirteenth century, they again
used up the old marble columns; but they now used a flat capital, by
which the additions of this time may be distinguished from the genuine
basilican work.
Probably no church anywhere has undergone a more singular change than
this. It is puzzling indeed at first sight; but, when the key is once
caught, the signs of each alteration are so easily seen. The other
ancient relic at Trieste is the small triumphal arch. On one side it
keeps its Corinthian pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in a
house. The arch is in a certain sense double; but the two are close
together and touch in the keystone. The Roman date of this arch cannot
be doubted; but legends connect it both with Charles the Great and
with Richard of Poitou and of England, a prince about whom Tergestine
fancy has been very busy. The popular name of the arch is _Arco
Riccardo_.
Such, beside some fragments in the museum, are all the remains that
the antiquary will find in Trieste; not much in point of number, but,
in the case of the _duomo_ at least, of surpassing interest in their
own way. But the true merit of Trieste is not in anything that it has
in itself, its church, its arch, its noble site. Placed there at the
head of the gulf, on the borders of two great portions of the Empire,
it leads to the land which produced that line of famous Illyrian
Emperors who for a while checked the advance of our own race in the
world's history, and it leads specially to the chosen home of the
greatest among them. The chief glory of Trieste, after all, is that it
is the way to Spalato.
TRIESTE TO SPALATO.
TRIESTE TO SPALATO.
1875.
Given such weather as suits fair-weather sailors, there can hardly be
any enjoyment more thoroughly unmixed than a sail along the coast of
Dalmatia. First of all, there is a freshness about everything. Here is
a portion of land which is thoroughly unhackneyed; the coasts, the
islands, the channels, of Dalmatia are as yet uninvaded by the British
tourist. No Cook's ticket can be taken for Spalato; no hotel coupon
would be of the slightest use at Sebenico. The land is whatever its
long and strange history, old and new, has made it. It has gone
through many changes and it has put on many shapes, but it has escaped
the fate of being changed into a "playground of Europe."
The narrow strip of land on the eastern side of the Hadriatic on which
the name of Dalmatia has settled down has a history which is
strikingly analogous to its scenery. A coast for the most part barren
and rocky, but with its barrenness and rockiness diversified by a
series of noble havens, is fenced off by a range of mountains from a
boundless inland region. Each of these havens, with the cities which
from early days have sprung up on each, has always been an isolated
centre of civilization in a backward land. As a rule, broken only
during a few centuries of the universal sway of Rome, the coast and
the inland country have been the possession, by no means always of
different nations, but most commonly of different governments. On the
coast the rule of the Venetian has been succeeded by the rule of the
Austrian, while in the inland region the rule of native Slavonic
princes has been succeeded by the rule of the Turk. Yet the Slave,
though an earlier settler than the Turk or the Venetian, was himself
only a settler in comparatively recent times. Native Illyrians, Greek
colonists, Roman colonists, the rule of the Goth from Ravenna, the
rule of the Eastern Roman from Constantinople, had all to take their
turn before the land put on its present character of a more or less
Italianized fringe on a Slavonic body, of a narrow rim of Christendom
hemming in the north-eastern conquests of the once advancing and now
receding Mussulman.
So it is with Dalmatian history. As the cultivation and civilization
of the land lies in patches, as harbours and cities alternate with
barren hills, so Dalmatia has played a part in history only by fits
and starts. This fitful kind of history goes on from the days of Greek
colonies and Illyrian piracy to the last war between Italy and
Austria. But of continuous history, steadily influencing the course of
the world's progress, Dalmatia has none to show. Salona plays its part
in the wars both of Cæsar and of Belisarius; Zara reminds us of the
fourth crusade; the whole history of Ragusa claims a high place among
the histories of independent and isolated cities; Lissa recalls the
memory of two times of warfare within our own century. But if there
was any time when Dalmatia really influenced the history of the world,
it was when Dalmatia had no national being, when it was merely a
province of an universal dominion along with Britain and Egypt. Of the
great Emperors of the third century, who called the Roman power into
new life and checked the ever-advancing wave of Teutonic invasion,
many came from the Illyrian lands, several came from the actual
Dalmatian coast. And the most famous among them--Docles, Diocletian,
Jovius--not only came forth from Dalmatia to rule the world, but went
back to Dalmatia to seek rest when weary of the toil of ruling it.
But in our immediate point of view we must never forget that our
course now lies wholly, not only by subject lands of Venice, but by
lands where Venice appears in her highest character as the bulwark of
Christendom against the misbeliever. The shores and cities by which we
pass, were subject to the Serene Republic, but subjection to the
Serene Republic was their only chance of escaping subjection to the
Ottoman Sultan. Every town, every fortress, almost every point of
ground along this whole coast, has been fought for, most of them have
been won and lost, over and over again, in the long crusade which
Venice waged, if for herself, yet for Europe also. Her rule was an
alien rule, but it was still European and Christian; it shut out the
rule of the barbarian. It was a rule better and worse in different
times and places, but it had always the merit of shutting out a worse
rule than itself, which was ever ready to take its place. Whenever we
see the winged lion keeping guard, the thought should rise that he
kept guard over spots which he alone kept for Christendom, which he
alone saved from barbarian bondage.
* * * * *
The visitor to Dalmatia may be conceived as setting forth from the
harbour of Trieste--from Trieste with its houses climbing up to the
church and castle on the hill, with the background of mountains
growing in the far distance into snowy Alps. From the Dalmatian coast
itself no snowy Alps are seen; but the whole land is only a mountain
slope, and the cities are cities on a smaller scale than Trieste, and
which seldom run so high as Trieste does up the hill-side. But we must
not forget that, even at Trieste, Dalmatia is still a distant land.
There is the Istrian peninsula to be skirted, the peninsula whose
coast was so long counted among the subject lands of Venice, while the
inland region, under the rule of counts of Gorizia and dukes of
Austria, counted only among the neighbours of the Republic. The
Istrian coast, largely flat, is marked here and there by small towns
standing well on high points over the sea, or seen more faintly in the
more distant inland region. But we know that inland Istria is a hilly
land, and, even from the sea, the mountain wall may still be seen
skirting the horizon. Darkness has come on by the time we reach the
harbour of Pola, once Pietas Julia, now the chief station of the
infant navy of Austria. But the darkness is not so great but that the
dim outline of the vast amphitheatre can be seen, and the arrangements
of the Austrian Lloyd's steamers allow time enough to go on shore and
take in the general effect both of the amphitheatre and the other
buildings of Pola. We here get our first impression of the Venetian
towns beyond the Hadriatic, all of which seem to attempt in some sort
to reproduce their mistress, so far as Venice can be reproduced where
there are no canals and therefore no gondolas. But all have the same
narrow, paved streets, the same little squares, and, if the passage
of horses and wheels is not so utterly unknown as it is at Venice,
their presence is, to say the least, rare. The lion of Saint Mark is
to be seen everywhere else; by daylight therefore he is to be seen at
Pola also. But the Lloyd's arrangements condemn Pola, in the early
part of October at least, to be seen only by dim glimpses, while Zara
has an ample measure of daylight. Let no one however blame a
time-table which will bring him into Spalato with the setting sun, and
will allow him to take his first glance of Diocletian's palace by the
rising moon.
In the night we pass by several islands, but none are of any historic
importance. Veglia lies out of our path, or we might muse on the evil
deeds of the last independent Count, at least as they were reported by
his Venetian enemies, who were eager to get possession of his island.
The tale will be found in Sir Gardner Wilkinson's "Dalmatia and
Montenegro," a book which no traveller in these lands should be
without. The next morning's light shows us genuine Dalmatia, its coast
at this stage marked by the barren hills coming down to the sea and
the range of higher mountains further inland. We skirt among endless
islands, most of which seem barren and uninhabited; we pass along the
channel of Zara, and come to anchor off the city itself, standing on
its peninsula crowned with its walls--Venetian and later--and with
the towers of its churches rising above them. Here a stay of several
hours allows a pretty full examination of our first Dalmatian city--a
city however more Italian and far less thoroughly Dalmatian than other
cities to which our further course will lead us. There is time to
visit the _duomo_ and the smaller churches--to mark the two surviving
Roman columns--to thread the narrow streets, with their occasional
scraps of Venetian architecture--to stroll by the harbour, under the
gateways marked by the lion of Saint Mark, one of which so oddly
proves to be really a Roman gate with a Venetian casing. We may even,
if we so think good, climb the mound which, though crowned by a not
attractive Chinese pagoda, nevertheless supplies the best view of Zara
and her two seas. The _Albergo al Cappello_--the sign of the
Hat--supplies food certainly not worse than an Italian town of the
same class would set before a passing traveller. The meal done, to sit
out of doors in a _café_ is nothing new to any one who has crossed the
straits, not of Zara but of Calais; but it is a new feeling to do so
in the narrow streets of a Dalmatian town, and to add the further
luxury of maraschino drunk in its native land.
Night is now passed on board, and Zara is left by sunrise. Islands and
hills again succeed on either side, till we enter a narrow strait and
find ourselves in a noble harbour with a town in front, lying, like
most Dalmatian towns except Zara, at the foot of the mountains. We are
in the haven of Sebenico, but the haven of Sebenico is by no means the
whole of the inlet, which runs much further inland in the shape of a
narrow creek. We land, and give such time as is allowed us to a sight
of the little hill-side city. Shall we give Sebenico the last place
among the cities which we stay and examine in detail, or the first
place among the lesser cities to which we give such time as we can in
passing by? We are driven to this last course, not forgetting, if we
are minded to turn away from history and art to look for a while on a
striking natural object, that it is from Sebenico that we may best
make our way to the great waterfall of Kerka. And, as far as those who
have made no special study of Alpine matters may speak, the falls of
Kerka, rushing down in a company of torrents side by side, look as if
they had a right to take a high place among the falls at least of the
old world. But Sebenico is not simply the way to Kerka; there is
something to see in Sebenico itself. It is a hill city, but it is
emphatically not a hill-top city, but a hill-side city. We climb up
through the inhabited town to the castle, and when we reach the
castle, we are far from having reached the hill top. And to those who
make Sebenico their second halting-place on the strictly Dalmatian
coast it will have a special interest. Much smaller than Zara, it is
far more thoroughly Dalmatian; costume is more marked, and its
position gives it that peculiar air of quaintness which is shared by
all places where narrow streets run up a steep hill. And those streets
moreover are rich with architectural features, graceful windows and
the like, which witness to the influence of the ruling city. And there
is something not a little taking in the small _piazza_ of
Sebenico--the arcaded _loggia_ on the one side, the cathedral on the
other, with its mixed but stately architecture, its waggon-roof of
stone standing out boldly without either buttress or external roof.
Mr. Neale, whom, as he does not rule Sebenico to be a "church city,"
we may now quote seriously, holds that the cathedral of Sebenico is
"in an exclusively architectural view the most interesting church in
Dalmatia." He adds that "in truth it is one of the noblest, most
striking, most simple, most Christian of churches." This is high
praise, especially when bestowed by Mr. Neale on a church which was
consecrated so lately as 1555. But there is no denying that, strangely
confused as is its style, the church of Sebenico is, both inside and
out, not only a most remarkable, but a thoroughly effective building.
The internal proportions are noble; the height is great; the columns,
though their arches are pointed, might have stood in any basilica at
Rome or Ravenna; the barrel vaulting carries us away to Saint Sernin
at Toulouse and to the Conqueror's Tower. The details are a strange
mixture of late Gothic and _Renaissance_, very rich and somehow very
effective. It is not exactly like that class of French churches of
which Saint Eustache at Paris is the grandest example, where a
thoroughly mediæval outline is carried out with _Renaissance_ detail.
At Sebenico we see side by side, a bit in one style and a bit in the
other, and yet the two contrive to harmonize. We go down again to the
haven; we mark a few classical capitals preserved, as we here preserve
ammonites and pieces of rock-work; we start again to make the second
portion of our second day's voyage, and to reach the most marked and
memorable spot in our whole course.
After Sebenico the coast is for a while almost free from islands.
Presently we pass along among a few small ones, and Lissa, famous for
piracies two thousand years back and for more regular warfare in our
own century and in our own day, shows itself in the distance. Our
course has by this time turned nearly due east. We pass by Bua, hardly
conscious that it is an island. We pass by the mouth of the bay which
Bua guards, hardly conscious of the depth of the inlet into which it
leads, or that two cities--Traü and fallen Salona--are washed by its
waters. For the child of Salona, the great object of a Dalmatian
voyage, is coming within sight far away. The mighty campanile of
Spalato rises, kindled with the last rays of sunlight; presently the
cupola of the metropolitan church, the long line of the palace wall,
the buildings of what is plainly no inconsiderable city, stand out
against their mountain background. The sun has gone down behind the
western headland, but we can get our first glimpse of the city, its
arcades and tower and temples, by that moonlight which is as good at
Spalato as at Melrose. We have been in the home of Diocletian, and we
go back to our ship, for the next day to bring us to the one city
along these shores which the might of Venice could never bring into
subjection.
* * * * *
In such a voyage as this many points necessarily escape notice, and
the great objects of study are well reserved for the return journey.
In all travelling for instruction's sake, it is a point specially to
be insisted on that every place should, whenever it is possible, be
seen twice. Nothing fixes a thing so well in the memory as going
through the process of recollection. And, in such a voyage as this, it
is no bad way to go at once to the furthest point, to see on the way
so much of the several points as the arrangements of the steamers
allow, and to stop a longer time at the important places coming back.
In this way a general notion of Dalmatia and its cities is gained
first of all--a notion which may be enlarged and corrected by more
minute examination of the chief places, and of course, foremost among
them, of Spalato itself. But Spalato, though the great object of a
Dalmatian voyage, is by no means its final object. When we have
reached Spalato, we have not yet gone through half our course. Before
we can come back to study its wonders more worthily, we have to spend
a day in the archipelago of larger islands, nearly each of which,
unlike their northern fellows, has some old historical memory. We have
for part of another day to sail along that still narrower strip of
Christendom which fences off Ragusa from the Mussulman, to thread our
way through the lovely Bocche of Cattaro, till we reach the furthest
of Dalmatian cities, with the path to unconquered Montenegro over our
heads.
PARENZO.
1875.
Parenzo, the ancient colony of Parentium, is likely to be, for many
travellers in Istria and Dalmatia, their first point of stoppage after
leaving Trieste. To such travellers it will be the beginning of the
dominion of Venice in spots lying wholly beyond the Hadriatic, the
first glimpse of the long series of lands and cities, from Istria to
Cyprus, which once "looked to the winged lion's marble piles," and
where the winged lion still abides in stone to keep up the memory of
his old dominion. The short voyage is a lovely one. Looking back,
there is Trieste on her hill-side, with her suburbs and detached
houses spreading far away in both directions, and backed by the vast
semicircle of the Julian Alps, with the snowy peaks of their higher
summits soaring above all. The northern part of the Istrian peninsula,
as we see it from the sea, has a strikingly rich and picturesque look,
which is lost as we follow the coast towards the south. The small
Istrian towns, each one of which has its civil and ecclesiastical
history, jut out, each one on its own smaller peninsula; and in this
part of the voyage the spaces between them are not lacking in signs of
human dwelling and cultivation. Capo d'Istria, once Justinopolis, lies
in its gulf to the left, to remind us that we have passed into the
dominions of the Cæsars of the East. Forwards, Pirano stands on its
headland, its _duomo_ rising above the water on arcades built up to
save it from the further effects of the stripping process which is so
clearly seen along the coast. The castle, with its many towers capped
with their Scala battlements, rises over town and church, with a
picturesqueness not common in Italian buildings. The church, on the
other hand, is as far from picturesque as most Italian churches are
without, and the detached campanile is simply, like many other Istrian
bell-towers, a miniature of the great tower of the ruling city. But
neither Capo d'Istria nor Pirano is so likely to cause the traveller
bound for Dalmatia to halt as the other and more famous peninsular
town of Parenzo. Long before Parenzo is reached, the Istrian shore has
lost its beauty, though the Istrian hills, now and then capped by a
hill-side town, and the higher mountains beyond them, tell us
something of the character of the inland scenery. At last the
Parentine headland is reached; the temples which crowned it are no
longer to be seen, but the campanile of the famous _duomo_, with its
Veronese spire, and one or two smaller towers, have taken their place
as the prominent objects of the little city. On the side which would
otherwise be open to the Hadriatic, the isle of Saint Nicolas shuts in
the haven guarded by a round Venetian tower. The other side of the
peninsula is washed by the mouth--here we must not say the estuary--of
a stream yellow as Tiber, which comes rushing down by a small
waterfall from the high ground where the Parentine peninsula joins the
mainland. On this peninsula stood the older _municipium_ of Parentium,
and the colony, some say the Julian Colony of Augustus, others the
Ulpian Colony of Trajan. The zeal of Dr. Kandler, the great master of
Istrian antiquities, made out the position of the forum, patrician and
plebeian, of the capitol, the theatre, and the temples. The traveller
will probably need a guide even to the temples, though one of them
keeps the greater part of its stylobate, and the other one has two
broken fluted columns left. A single inscribed stone in the ancient
forum he can hardly fail to see; but the truth is that the Roman
remains of Parentium are such as concern only immediate inquirers into
local Parentine history. At Pola it is otherwise; there the Roman
remains stand out as the great object, utterly overshadowing the
buildings of later times; but at Parenzo the main interest, as it is
not mediæval so neither is it pagan Roman. As at Ravenna, so at
Parenzo, the real charm is to be found in the traces which it keeps of
the great transitional ages when Roman and Teuton stood side by side.
Against the many objects of Ravenna Parenzo has only to set its one.
It has no palace, no kingly tomb--though the thought cannot fail to
suggest itself that it was from Istrian soil that the mighty stone was
brought which once covered the resting-place of Theodoric. Parenzo has
but a single church of moment, but that church is one which would hold
no mean place even among the glories of Ravenna. The capitol of
Parentium has given way to the episcopal precinct, and the temple of
the capitoline god has given way to the great basilica of Saint
Maurus, the building which now gives Parenzo its chief claim to the
study of those for whom the days of the struggle of Goth and Roman
have a special charm.
* * * * *
As to the date of the church of Parenzo there seems little doubt. It
is a basilica of the reign of Justinian, which has been preserved with
remarkably little change, and which will hardly find, out of Rome and
Ravenna, any building of its own class to surpass it. With the
buildings of Ravenna it stands in immediate connexion, being actually
contemporary with the work both at Saint Vital and at Saint
Apollinaris in Classe. Its foundation is a little later, as the
church of Parenzo seems to have been begun after the reconquest of
Italy and Istria by Belisarius, while both Saint Vital and Saint
Apollinaris, though finished under the rule of the Emperor, were begun
under the rule of the Goth. There are points at Parenzo which connect
it with both the contemporary churches of Ravenna. The pure basilican
form, the shape of the apse, hexagonal without, though round within,
are common to Parenzo and Classis; the capitals too have throughout
the Ravenna stilt above them; but of the capitals themselves many take
that specially Byzantine shape which at Ravenna is found only in Saint
Vital. That the founder was a Bishop Euphrasius is shown by his
monogram on many of the stilts, by the great mosaic of the apse, in
which he appears holding the church in his hand as founder, and by the
inscription on the disused tabernacle, which is engraved in Mr.
Neale's book on Dalmatia and Istria. At Parenzo, as at Sebenico, Mr.
Neale was in a serious mood; but, though he copied the inscription
rightly or nearly so, he misunderstood it in the strangest fashion,
and thereby led himself into much needless puzzledom. Euphrasius,
according to Dr. Kandler, having been before a decurion of the town,
became the first bishop in 524, when the Istrian bishoprics were
founded under Theodoric. The church would seem to have been built
between 535 and 543. The inscription runs thus:--
Famul[us] . D[e]i . Eufrasius . Antis[tes] . temporib[us] .
suis . ag[ens] an[num] . xi. hunc. loc[um] . fondamen[tis] .
D[e]o . jobant[e] . s[an]c[t]e . æc[c]l[esie] Catholec[e] .
cond[idit].
The church was therefore begun in the eleventh year of the episcopate
of Euphrasius; that is, in 535. Dr. Kandler prints, unluckily only in
an Italian translation, a document of 543, the sixteenth year of
Justinian, who appears with his usual titles, in which Euphrasius
makes regulations for the Chapter, and speaks of the church as
something already in being. Mr. Neale quotes from Coletti, the editor
of Ughelli's _Italia Sacra_, part of a document in Latin which is
obviously the same, but which is assigned to 796, the sixteenth year
of Constantine the Sixth. The difference is strange; but the date of
the document does not directly affect the date of the church, and,
whatever be the date of either, Mr. Neale needlessly perplexed himself
with the inscription. He says that the inscription commemorates a
certain Pope John, and wonders that Euphrasius, who took part in the
Aquileian schism about the Three Chapters--the Three Chapters which
readers of Gibbon will remember--should record the name of a Pope with
whom he was not in communion. But this difficulty is got rid of by the
simple fact that there is nothing about any Pope John in the
inscription. Mr. Neale strangely read the two words DO . IOBANT .--the
words are carefully marked off by stops--that is, in the barbarous
spelling of the inscription, DEO IVVANTE, into the four words "Domino
Johanne Beatissimo Antistite." We therefore need not, in fixing the
date of the church of Parenzo, trouble ourselves about any Popes.
There can be no doubt that it is the work of Euphrasius, and that
Euphrasius was one of those who opposed Rome about the Three Chapters.
In any case, the _duomo_ of Parenzo has the interest which attaches to
any church built while our own forefathers were still worshipping
Woden; and we may safely add that it has the further interest of being
built by a prelate who threw off all allegiance to the see of Rome.
The church is indeed a noble one, and its long arcades preserve to us
one of the most speaking examples of the forms of a great basilica.
Every arch deserves careful study, because at Parenzo the capitals
seem not to have been the spoil of earlier buildings, but to have been
made for the church itself. Some still cleave to the general
Corinthian type, though without any slavish copying of classical
models. Animal forms are freely introduced; bulls, swans, and other
creatures, are made to do duty as volutes; and when bulls and swans
are set on that work, we may be sure that the Imperial bird is not
left idle. Others altogether forsake the earlier types; it perhaps
became a church built in the dominions of Justinian while Saint Sophia
was actually rising, that some of its capitals should adopt the square
Byzantine form enwreathed with its basket-work of foliage. But all,
whatever may be their form in other ways, carry the Ravenna stilt,
marked, in some cases at least, with the monogram of the founder
Euphrasius. Happily the love of red rags which is so rampant on either
side of Parenzo, at Trieste and at Zara, seems not to have spread to
Parenzo itself, and the whole of this noble series of capitals may be
studied with ease. The upper part, including the arches, has been more
or less Jesuited within and without, but enough remains to make out
the original arrangements. The soffits on the north side are
ornamented like those in the basilica of Theodoric, a style of
ornament identical with that of so many Roman roofs; above was a
simple round-headed clerestory, and outside are the same slight
beginnings of ornamental arcades which are to be seen at Saint
Apollinaris in Classe. The apse, with its happily untouched windows
and its grand mosaic, also carries us across to Ravenna. Besides the
founder Euphrasius, we see the likeness of the Archdeacon Claudius and
his son, a younger Euphrasius, besides Saint Maurus the patron and
other saintly personages. Below is a rich ornament, but which surely
must be of somewhat later date, formed largely of the actual shells of
mother-of-pearl. The Bishop's throne is in its place; and, as at
Ravenna and in the great Roman basilicas, mass is celebrated by the
priest standing behind the altar with his face westward. Such was
doubtless the usage of the days of Euphrasius, and in such an
old-world place as Parenzo it still goes on.
But if, in this matter, Parenzo clings to a very ancient use, we may
doubt whether, at Parenzo or anywhere else, the men who made these
great apses and covered them with these splendid mosaics designed them
to be, as they so often are, half hidden by the _baldacchini_ which
cover the high altar. Even in Saint Ambrose at Milan, where the apse
is so high above the altar and where apse and _baldacchino_ are of the
same date, we feel that the view of the east end is in some measure
interfered with. Much more is this the case at Parenzo, where the apse
is lower and the _baldacchino_ more lofty. But the Parenzo
_baldacchino_, dating from 1277, is a noble work of its kind, and it
is wonderful how little change the course of seven hundred years has
made in some of its details as compared with those of the great
arcades. The pointed arch is used, and the Ravenna stilt is absent;
but the capitals, with their animal volutes, are almost the same as
some of those of Euphrasius. Between the date of Euphrasius and the
date of the _baldacchino_ we hear of more than one consecration, one
of which, in 961, is said to have followed a destroying Slavonic
inroad; but it is clear that any works done then must have been works
of mere repair, not of rebuilding. No one can doubt that the columns
and their capitals are the work of Euphrasius, and by diligently
peeping round among the mass of buildings by which the church is
encumbered, the original design may be seen outside as well as in.
But the church of Parenzo is not merely a basilica; it has all the
further accompaniments of an Italian episcopal church. West of the
church stands the atrium, with the windows of the west front and the
remains of mosaic enrichment rising above it. An arcade of three on
each side surrounds the court, a court certainly far smaller than that
of Saint Ambrose. Two columns with Byzantine capitals stand on each
side; the rest are ancient, but those of the west side are a repair of
the present king, or by whatever title it is that the King of Dalmatia
and Lord of Trieste reigns on the intermediate Istrian shore. To the
west of the atrium is the roofless baptistery, to the west of that the
not remarkable campanile. We have thus reached the extreme west of
this great pile of building, which, after all--such is the difference
of scale between the churches of northern and southern Europe--reaches
only the measure of one of our smallest minsters or greatest parish
churches. The basilica of Parenzo, with all its accompaniments,
measures, according to Mr. Neale's plan, only about 240 feet in
length. But, if we have traced out those accompaniments towards the
west, we have not yet done with those towards the east. A modern
quasi-transept has been thrown out on each side, of which the northern
one strangely forms the usual choir, much as in St. Peter's at Rome.
These additions have columns with Byzantine capitals, like those in
the atrium, copied from the old ones. But beyond this choir, and
connected with the original church, is a low vaulted building of the
plainest round-arched work, called, as usual, the "old church," the
"pagan temple," and what not, which leads again into two chapels, the
furthest having an eastern apse. Now these chapels have a mosaic
pavement, and it is most remarkable that, below the pavement of the
church, is a pavement some feet lower, which evidently belongs to some
earlier building, and which is on the same level as the pavement of
these chapels. It is therefore quite possible that we have here some
remains of a building, perhaps a church, earlier than the time of
Euphrasius. Between Constantine and Justinian there was time enough
for a church to be built at Parentium and for Euphrasius to think it
needful to rebuild it. Lastly, among the canonical buildings on the
south side of the church is one, said to have been a tithe barn, with
a grand range of Romanesque coupled windows, bearing date 1250. They
remind us somewhat of the so-called John of Gaunt's stables, the real
Saint Mary's Guild, at Lincoln. In short, so long as any traces are
left of the style once common to all Western Europe, England and Italy
are ever reminding us of one another.
Such is the church of Parenzo, and at Parenzo the church is the main
thing. As we pass away, and catch the last traces of the church of
Euphrasius rising above the little peninsular city, our thoughts fly
back to the other side of the Hadriatic, and it seems as if the men
who came to fetch the great stone from Istria to Ravenna had left one
of the noblest basilicas of their own city behind them on the Istrian
shore.
POLA.
1875--1881.
After Parenzo the most obvious stopping-place on the Istrian shore
will be Pola; and at Pola the main objects of interest for the
historical student will be classed in an order of merit exactly
opposite to those which he has seen at Parenzo. At Parenzo the main
attraction is the great basilica, none the less attractive as being a
monument of early opposition to the claims of the Roman see. Beside
this ecclesiastical treasure the remains of the Parentine colony are
felt to be quite secondary. At Pola things are the other way; the
monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica, though
not without a certain special interest, comes long after them. The
character of the place is fixed by the first sight of it; we see the
present and we see the more distant past; the Austrian navy is to be
seen, and the amphitheatre is to be seen. But intermediate times have
little to show; if the duomo strikes the eye at all, it strikes it
only by the extreme ugliness of its outside, nor is there anything
very taking, nothing like the picturesque castle of Pirano, in the
works which occupy the site of the colonial capitol. The _duomo_
should not be forgotten; even the church of Saint Francis is worth a
glance; but it is in the remains of the Roman colony, in the
amphitheatre, the arches, the temples, the fragments preserved in that
temple which serves, as at Nîmes, for a museum, that the real
antiquarian wealth of Pola lies.
There is no need to go into the mythical history of the place. Tales
about Thracians and Argonauts need not be seriously discussed at this
time of day. Nor can there be any need to show that the name Pola is
not a contraction of Pietas Julia. Save for the slight accidental
likeness of letters, so to say is about as reasonable as to say that
London is a corruption of Augusta, or Jerusalem of Ælia. In all these
cases the older, native, familiar, name outlived the later, foreign,
official, name. When we have thoroughly cleared up the origin of the
Illyrians and the old Veneti, we may know something of the earliest
inhabitants of Pola, and possibly of the origin of its name. But the
known history of Pola begins with the Roman conquest of Istria in 178
B.C. The town became a Roman colony and a flourishing seat of
commerce. Its action on the republican side in the civil war brought
on it the vengeance of the second Cæsar. But the destroyer became the
restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of its greatness, far
surpassed the extent either of the elder or the younger Pola. Like all
cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of
the Carolingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole
district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A
barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to
Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the
panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun
among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or
strengthened. But in the history of their dynasty the name of the city
chiefly stands out as the chosen place for the execution of princes
whom it was convenient to put out of the way. Here Crispus died at the
bidding of Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius.
Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the
Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its
inhabitants. In the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the
same character which has come back to it in our own times; it was
there that Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and
less prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy. But,
after the break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of mediæval
Pola is but a history of decline. It was, in the geography of Dante,
the furthest city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its
own neighbourhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante
sang. Tossed to and fro between the temporal and spiritual lords who
claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the dissensions of
aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens, Pola found
rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of Saint Mark
in 1331. Since then, till its new birth in our own times, Pola has
been a falling city. Like the other Istrian and Dalmatian towns,
modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to Austria, from
Austria to France, from France to Austria again. It is under its
newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh life, and
the haven whence Belisarius sailed forth has again become a haven in
more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united Austrian
and Hungarian realm.
[Illustration: PORTA GEMINA, POLA.]
That haven is indeed a noble one. Few sights are more striking than to
see the huge mass of the amphitheatre at Pola seeming to rise at once
out of the land-locked sea. As Pola is seen now, the amphitheatre is
the one monument of its older days which strikes the eye in the
general view, and which divides attention with signs that show how
heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its new career. But
in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which befitted its
rank as a colony of Rome. The amphitheatre of course stood without the
walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope of the hill
which was crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern
fortress rises above the Franciscan church. Parts of the Roman wall
still stand; one of its gates is left; another has left a neighbour
and a memory. At the north side of the capitol stands the _Porta
Gemina_, leading from it to the amphitheatre. The outer gateway
remains, a double gate-way, as its name implies, with three Corinthian
half-columns between and on each side of the two arches. But here
steps in a singular architectural peculiarity, one which reminds us
that we are on the road to Spalato, and which already points to the
arcades of Diocletian. The columns support an entablature with its
frieze and cornice, but the architrave is wanting. Does not this show
a lurking sign of what was coming, a lurking feeling that the arch
itself was the true architrave? Be this as it may, there it stands,
sinning, like so many other ancient works, against pedantic rules, but
perhaps thereby winning its place in the great series of architectural
strivings which the palace of Spalato shows us the crowning-point. The
other arch, which is commonly known as _Porta Aurea_ or _Porta
Aurata_, conforms more nearly to ordinary rules. Here we have the
arch with the coupled Corinthian columns on each side of it,
supporting, as usual, their bit of broken entablature, and leaving
room for a spandril filled in much the same fashion as in the arch of
Severus at Rome. Compared with other arches of the same kind, this
arch of Pola may certainly claim to rank amongst the most graceful of
its class. With Trajan's arch at Ancona it can hardly be compared.
That tallest and slenderest of monumental arches palpably stands on
the haven to be looked at; while the arch of Pola, like its fellows at
Rimini and Aosta, and like the arch of Drusus at Rome, is a real
thoroughfare, which the citizens of Pietas Julia must have been in the
daily habit of passing under. And, as compared with the arches of
Rimini and Aosta, its design is perhaps the most pleasing of the
three. Its proportions are better designed; the coupled columns on
each side are more graceful than either the single columns at Rimini
or the pair of columns which at Aosta are placed so much further
apart. The idolater of minute rules will not be offended, as at Aosta,
with Doric triglyphs placed over Corinthian capitals, and the lover of
consistent design will not regret the absence of the sham pediment of
Rimini. But it must be borne in mind that the arch of Pola did not
originally stand alone, and that its usual name of _Porta Aurea_ is a
misnomer. It was built close against the _golden gate_ of the city,
whose name it has usurped. But it is, in truth, the family arch of the
Sergii, raised in honour of one of that house by his wife Salvia
Postuma. As such, it has a special interest in the local history of
Pola. Ages afterwards, as late as the thirteenth century, Sergii
appear again at Pola, as one of the chief families by whose
dissensions the commonwealth was torn in pieces. If there is authentic
evidence to connect these latter Sergii with the Sergii of the arch,
and these again with the great Patrician _gens_ which played such a
part in the history of the Roman commonwealth, here would indeed be a
pedigree before which that of the house of Paris itself might stand
abashed.
A curious dialogue of the year 1600 is printed by Dr. Kandler in his
little book, _Cenni al Forrestiere che visita Pola_, which, with a
later little book, _Pola und seine nächste Umgebung_, by A. Gareis,
form together a very sufficient guide for the visitor to Pola. From
this evidence it is plain that, as late as the end of the sixteenth
century, the ancient buildings of Pola were in a far more perfect
state than they are now. Even late in the next century, in the days of
Spon and Wheler, a great deal was standing that is no longer there.
Wheler's view represents the city surrounded with walls, and with at
least one gate. The amphitheatre stands without the wall; the arch of
the Sergii stands within it; but the theatre must have utterly
vanished, because in the references to the plan its name is given to
the amphitheatre. And it must have been before this time that the
amphitheatre had begun to be mutilated in order to supply materials
for the fortress on the capitoline hill. Indeed it is even said that
there was at one time a scheme for carrying off the amphitheatre
bodily to Venice and setting it up on the Lido. This scheme, never
carried out, almost beats one which actually was carried out, when the
people of Jersey gave a _cromlech_ as a mark of respect to a popular
governor, by whom it was carried off and set up in his grounds in
England. Of the two temples in the forum, that which is said to have
been dedicated to Diana is utterly masked by the process which turned
it into the palace of the Venetian governor. A decent Venetian arcade
has supplanted its portico; but some of the original details can be
made out on the other sides. But the temple of Augustus, the restorer
of Pietas Julia, with its portico of unfluted Corinthian columns,
still fittingly remains almost untouched. Fragments and remains of all
dates are gathered together within and without the temple, and new
stores are constantly brought to light in digging the foundations for
the buildings of the growing town. But the chief wonder of Pola, after
all, is its amphitheatre. Travellers are sometimes apt to complain,
and that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheatres are very
like one another. At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as
the amphitheatre there has several marked peculiarities of its own. We
do not pretend to expound all its details scientifically; but this we
may say, that those who dispute--if the dispute still goes on--about
various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will do well to go and
look for some further lights in the amphitheatre of Pola. The outer
range, which is wonderfully perfect, while the inner arrangements are
fearfully ruined, consists, on the side towards the town, of two rows
of arches, with a third story with square-headed openings above them.
But the main peculiarity in the outside is to be found in four
tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and Nîmes, signs of Saracenic
occupation, but clearly parts of the original design. Many conjectures
have been made about them; they look as if they were means of approach
to the upper part of the building; but it is wisest not to be
positive. But the main peculiarity of this amphitheatre is that it
lies on the slope of a hill, which thus supplied a natural basement
for the seats on one side only. But this same position swallowed up
the lower arcade on this side, and it hindered the usual works
underneath the seats from being carried into this part of the
building. In the other part the traces of the underground arrangements
are very clear, especially those which seem to have been meant for
the _naumachiæ_. These we specially recommend to any disputants about
the underground works of the Flavian amphitheatre.
The Roman antiquities of Pola are thus its chief attraction, and they
are enough to give Pietas Julia a high place among Roman colonies. But
the ecclesiastical side of the city must not be wholly forgotten. The
_duomo_, if a small matter after that of Parenzo, if absolutely
unsightly as seen from without, is not without its importance. It may
briefly be described as a church of the fifteenth century, built on
the lines of an ancient basilica, some parts of whose materials have
been used up again. There is, we believe, no kind of doubt as to the
date, and we do not see why Mr. Neale should have wondered at Murray's
Handbook for assigning the building to the time to which it really
belongs. No one could surely have placed a church with pointed arches,
and with capitals of the kind so common in Venetian buildings, more
than a century or two earlier. There is indeed an inscription built
into the south wall which has a special interest from another point of
view, but which, one would have thought, could hardly have led any one
to mistake the date of the existing church. It records the building of
the church by Bishop Handegis in 857, "Regnante Ludowico Imperatore
Augusto in Italia." The minute accuracy of the phrase--"the Emperor
Lewis being King in Italy"--is in itself something amazing; and this
inscription shares the interest which attaches to any memorial of that
gallant prince, the most truly Roman Emperor of his line. And it is
something to mark that the stonecutter doubted between "L_o_dowico"
and "L_u_dowico," and wrote both letters, one over the other. But the
inscription of course refers to a reconstruction some hundred years
earlier than the time when the church took its present shape. Yet
these basilican churches were so constantly reconstructed over and
over again, and largely out of the same materials, that the building
of the fifteenth century may very well reproduce the general effect,
both of the building of the eighth and of the far earlier church,
parts of which have lived on through both recastings.
The ten arches on each side of the Polan basilica are all pointed, but
the width of the arches differs. Some of them are only just pointed,
and it is only in the most eastern pair of arches that the pointed
form comes out at all prominently. For here the arches are the
narrowest of the series, and the columns the slightest, that on the
south side being banded. The arch of triumph, which is round, looks
very much as if it had been preserved from the earlier church; and
such is clearly the case with two columns and one capital, whose
classical Corinthian foliage stands in marked contrast with the
Venetian imitations on each side of it. The church, on the whole,
though not striking after such a marvel as Parenzo, is really one of
high interest, as an example of the way in which the general effect of
an early building was sometimes reproduced at a very late time. Still
at Pola, among such wealth of earlier remains, it is quite secondary,
and its beauties are, even more than is usual in churches of its type,
altogether confined to the inside. The campanile is modern and
worthless, and the outside of the church itself is disfigured, after
the usual fashion of Italian ugliness, with stable-windows and the
like. Yet even they are better than the red rags of Trieste and Zara
within.
Such is Pola, another step on the road to the birthplace of true grace
and harmony in the building art. Yet, among the straits and islands of
the Dalmatian coast, there is more than one spot at which the
traveller bound for Spalato must stop. The first and most famous one
is the city where Venetians and Crusaders once stopped with such
deadly effect on that voyage which was to have led them to Jerusalem,
but which did lead them only to New Rome. After the glimpses of Istria
taken at Parenzo and Pola, the first glimpse, not of Dalmatia itself,
but of the half-Italian cities which fringe its coast, may well be
taken at Zara.
ZARA.
1875--1877--1881.
The name of Zara is familiar to every one who has read the history of
the Fourth Crusade, and its fate in the Fourth Crusade is undoubtedly
the one point in its history which makes Zara stand out prominently
before the eyes of the world. Of all the possessions of Venice along
this coast, it is the one whose connexion with Venice is stamped for
ever on the pages of universal history. Those who know nothing else of
Zara, who perhaps know nothing at all of the other cities, at least
know that, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the possession
of Zara was claimed by Venice, and that the claim of Venice was made
good by the help of warriors of the Cross who thus turned aside from
their course, not for the last time, to wield their arms against a
Christian city. It is as Zara that the city is famous, because it is
as Zara that its name appears in the pages of the great English teller
of the tale. And perhaps those who may casually light on some mention
of the city by any of its earlier names may not at once recognize Zara
under the form either of _Jadera_ or of _Diadora_. One is curious to
know how a city which under the first Augustus became a Roman colony
by the name of _Jadera_ had, in the time of his orthodox successors in
the tenth century, changed its name into anything with such a
heathenish sound as _Diadora_. Yet such was its name in the days of
Constantine Porphyrogenitus; and the Imperial historian does not make
matters much clearer when he tells us that the true Roman name of the
city was "Jam erat," implying that the city so called was older than
Rome. Let us quote him in his own Greek, if only to show how oddly his
Latin words look in their Greek dress.
[Greek: To kastron tôn Diadôrôn kaleitai tê Rhômaiôn dialektô iam
erat, hoper hermêneuetai aparti êton; dêlonoti hote hê Rhômê ektisthê,
proektismenon ên to toiouton kastron. esti de to kastron mega; hê de
koinê synêtheia kalei auto Diadôra.]
Yet the name of the colony of Augustus lived on through these strange
changes and stranger etymologies, and even in the narrative of the
Crusade it appears as _Jadres_ in the text of Villehardouin.
The history of the city in the intermediate ages is the usual history
of the towns on the Dalmatian coast. They all for a while keep on
their formal allegiance to the Eastern Empire, sometimes being really
its subjects, sometimes being practically independent, sometimes
tributary to the neighbouring Slaves. Still, under all changes, they
clave to the character of Roman cities, just as they still remain
seats of Italian influence in a Slavonic land. Then came a second time
of confusion, in which Zara and her sister cities are tossed to and
fro between another set of contending disputants. The Eastern Empire
hardly keeps even a nominal claim to the Dalmatian towns; the Slavonic
settlements have grown into regular kingdoms; Hungary on one side,
Venice on the other, are claiming the dominion of the Dalmatian coast.
The history of Zara now consists of conquests and reconquests between
the Republic of Saint Mark and the Hungarian and Croatian kings. The
one moment when Zara stands out in general history is the famous time
when one of the Venetian reconquests was made by the combined arms of
the Republic and the Frank Crusaders. The tale is a strange episode in
a greater episode--the episode of the conquest of the New Rome by the
united powers which first tried their 'prentice hand on Zara. But the
siege, as described by the Marshal of Champagne and the many writers
who have followed him, is not easy to understand, except by those who
have either seen the place itself or have maps before them such as are
not easily to be had. Like so many other Istrian and Dalmatian towns,
Zara stands on a narrow peninsula, lying east and west. It has on its
north side an inlet of the sea, which forms its harbour; to the south
is the main sea, or, more strictly, the channel of Zara lying between
the Dalmatian coast and the barren islands which at this point lie off
it. Villehardouin describes the port as being guarded by a chain,
which was broken by the galleys of the Crusaders. They presently
landed on the opposite coast, so as to have the haven between them and
the town ("et descendirent à terre, si que di porz fu entr' aus et la
ville"). That is to say, they landed on the mainland north of the
haven. The Frank army then besieged the city by land--that is, from
the isthmus on the east, and perhaps also from the shore of the haven;
while the Venetians, though their ships anchored in the haven ("le
port ou les nés estoient"), made their assault on the side of the open
sea ("devers la mer"). On the spot, or in reading the narrative of
Villehardouin by the light of remembrance of the spot, the description
becomes perfectly clear.
Zara still keeps its peninsular site, and the traveller, as he draws
near, still marks the fortifications, old and new, the many towers, no
one of which so predominates over its fellows as to make itself the
chief object in the view. Either however the modern Venetian and
Austrian fortifications of Zara are less formidable, in appearance at
least, than those which the Crusaders found there, or else they seemed
more terrible to those who had actually to undertake the business of
attacking them. Villehardouin had never seen such high walls and
towers, nor, though he had just come from Venice, could he conceive a
city fairer or more rich. The pilgrims were amazed at the sight, and
wondered how they could ever become masters of such a place, unless
God specially put it into their hands. The modern traveller, as he
draws nearer, soon sees the signs of the success which the pilgrims so
little hoped for. He sees the badge of Venetian rule over the
water-gate, and most likely he little suspects that the outer arch, of
manifest Venetian date, masks a plain Roman arch which is to be seen
on the inner side. There is another large Venetian gate towards the
inlet; and the traveller who at Zara first lands on Dalmatian ground
will find on landing much to remind him that Dalmatian ground once was
Venetian ground. The streets are narrow and paved; they are not quite
as narrow as in Venice, nor is the passage of horses and all that
horses draw so absolutely unknown as it is in Venice. Still the
subject city comes near enough to its mistress to remind us under
whose dominion Zara stayed for so many ages. And the traveller who
begins his Dalmatian studies at Zara will perhaps think Dalmatia is
not so strange and out-of-the-way a land as he had fancied before
going thither. He may be tempted to look on Zara simply as an Italian
town, and to say that an Italian town east of the Hadriatic is not
very unlike an Italian town on the other side. This feeling, not
wholly true even at Zara, will become more and more untrue as the
traveller makes his way further along the coast. Each town, as he goes
on, will become less Italian and more Slavonic. In street architecture
Zara certainly stands behind some of the other Dalmatian towns. We see
fewer of those windows of Venetian and Veronese type which in some
places meet us in almost every house. The Roman remains are not very
extensive. We have said that Jadera still keeps a Roman arch under a
Venetian mask. That arch keeps its pilasters and its inscription, but
the statues which, according to that inscription, once crowned it,
have given way to another inscription of Venetian times. Besides the
_Porta Marina_, two other visible memorials of earlier days still
exist in the form of two ancient columns standing solitary, one near
the church of Saint Simeon, presently to be spoken of, the other in
the herb-market between the _duomo_ and the haven. But the main
interest of Zara, apart from its general and special history, and
apart from the feeling of freshness in treading a land so famous and
so little known, is undoubtedly to be found in its ecclesiastical
buildings.
The churches of Zara are certainly very much such churches as might be
looked for in any Italian city of the same size. But they specially
remind us of Lucca. The cathedral, now metropolitan, church of Saint
Anastasia, has had its west front engraved in more than one book, from
Sir Gardner Wilkinson downwards; it is a pity that local art has not
been stirred up to produce some better memorial of this and the other
buildings of Zara than the wretched little photographs which are all
that is to be had on the spot. But perhaps not much in the way of art
is to be looked for in a city where, as at Trieste and Ancona and Rome
herself, it seems to be looked on as adding beauty to the inside of a
church to swathe marble columns and Corinthian capitals in ugly
wrappings of red cloth. This at least seems to be an innovation since
the days of the Imperial topographer. Constantine speaks of the church
of Saint Anastasia as being of oblong, that is, basilican,
shape--[Greek: dromikos] is his Greek word--with columns of green and
white marble, enriched with much ancient woodwork, and having a
tesselated pavement, which the Emperor, or those from whom he drew his
report of Zara, looked on as wonderful. It is very likely that some of
the columns which in the tenth century were clearly allowed to stand
naked and to be seen have been used up again in the present church.
This was built in the thirteenth century, after the destruction
wrought in the Frank and Venetian capture, and it is said to have been
consecrated in 1285. It is, on the whole, a witness to the way in
which the Romanesque style so long stood its ground, though here and
there is a touch of the coming pseudo-Gothic, and, what is far more
interesting to note, here and there is a touch of the Romanesque forms
of the lands beyond the Alps. The church is, in its architectural
arrangements, a great and simple basilica; but, as might be expected
from its date, it shows somewhat of that more elaborate way of
treating exteriors which had grown up at Pisa and Lucca. The west
front has surface arcades broken in upon by two wheel windows, the
lower arcade with round, the upper with pointed, arches. Along the
north aisle runs an open gallery, which, oddly enough, is not carried
round the apse. The narrow windows below it are round in the eastern
part, trefoiled in the western, showing a change of design as the work
went on. Near the east end stands the unfinished campanile; a stage or
two of good Romanesque design is all that is finished. The one perfect
ancient tower in Zara is not that of the _duomo_.
On entering the church, we at once feel how much the building has
suffered from puzzling and disfiguring modern changes. But this is
not all; the general effect of the inside has been greatly altered by
a change which we cannot bring ourselves wholly to condemn. The choir
is lifted up above the crypt as at Saint Zeno and Saint Ambrose; the
stone chair still remains in the apse; but the object which chiefly
strikes the eye is one which is hardly in harmony with these. The
choir is fitted up with a range of splendid _cinque cento_
stalls--reminding one of King's College chapel or of Wimborne as it
once was--placed in the position usual in Western churches. This last
feature, grand in itself, takes away from the perfection of the
basilican design, and carries us away into Northern lands.
Of the church which preceded the Venetian rebuilding, the church
described by Constantine, little remains above ground, allowing of
course for the great likelihood that the columns were used up again.
There is nothing to which one is even tempted to give an early date,
except some small and plain buildings clinging on to the north side of
the choir, and containing the tomb of an early bishop. But in the
crypt, though it has unluckily lost two of its ranges of columns, two
rows, together with those of the apse, are left, columns with finished
bases but with capitals which are perfectly rude, but whose shape
would allow them to be carved into the most elaborate Byzantine
forms. The main arcades of the church form a range of ten bays or five
pair of arches, showing a most singular collection of shapes which are
not often seen together. Some are simple Corinthian; in others
Corinthian columns are clustered--after the example of Vespasian's
temple at Brescia; others have twisted fluting; one pair has a
section, differing in the two opposite columns, which might pass for
genuine Northern work; while--here in Dalmatia in the thirteenth
century--not a few shafts are crowned with our familiar Norman cushion
capital. Yet the effect of the whole range would be undoubtedly fine,
if we were only allowed to see it. The hideous red rags have covered
even the four columns of the _baldacchino_, columns fluted and
channelled in various ways and supporting pointed arches. They have
also diligently swathed the floriated cornice above the arcade; in
short, wherever there is any fine work, Jaderan taste seems at once to
hide it; but nothing hides the clerestory with its stable windows or
the flat plastered ceiling which crowns all. The triforium has an air
of Jesuitry; but it seems to be genuine, only more or less plastered;
six small arches, with channelled square piers, which would not look
out of place at Rome, at Autun, or at Deerhurst, stand over each pair
of arches. With all its original inconsistencies and its later
changes, the _duomo_ of Zara, if it were only stripped of its
swaddling-clothes, would be no contemptible specimen of its own style.
[Illustration: TOWER OF ST. MARY'S ZARA.]
But Saint Anastasia is not the only, it is hardly the most
interesting, church in Zara. Saint Chrysogonos, monk and martyr, was
held in reverence at Diadora in the days of Constantine, where his
tomb and his holy chain were to be seen. Perhaps they are to be seen
still; certainly his name is still preserved in an admirable church of
the same general Lucchese type as the _duomo_, but which surpasses it
in the exquisite grace of the three apses at its east end, after the
best models of the type common to Italy and Germany. Within, the
arrangement of the triapsidal basilica is perfect; the range of
columns is, as is so often found, interrupted by two pairs of more
massive piers, making groups of three, two, and two arches. It is
almost startling to find that the date of the consecration of this
exquisite Romanesque church is as late as 1407; but the fact is only
one example out of many of the way in which in some districts, in
Dalmatia above all, the true style of the land stood its ground. In
Dalmatia the Italian pseudo-Gothic, common in houses, is but little
seen in churches at any time. Another church, Saint Simeon, called
after the Prophet of _Nunc dimittis_, boasts of its gorgeous shrine
borne aloft behind the high altar, the gift of Elizabeth of Bosnia,
the wife of Lewis the Great. The church itself is of the same
basilican type as the other, but in less good preservation. Saint
Mary's, a church of nuns, is itself of a rather good kind of
_Renaissance_, but its chief merit is that it keeps the only finished
ancient tower in Zara, a noble campanile of the best Italian type,
thick with midwall shafts, which every Englishman will feel to be the
true kinsman of our own towers at Lincoln and Oxford. Its date is
known; it is the work of King Coloman of Hungary, in 1105. But, after
all, the most interesting architectural work in Zara is one which, as
far as we have seen, is not noticed in any English book, but which was
described by the Imperial pen in the tenth century, and which has in
our own days been more fully illustrated in the excellent work of
Eitelberger on the Dalmatian buildings. Close by Saint Anastasia there
stood in the days of Constantine, and there still stands, a round
church, lately desecrated, now simply disused, which was then called
by the name of the Trinity ([Greek: heteros naos plêsion autou
eilêmatikos, hê hagia Trias]), but which now bears that of Saint
Donatus. Its dome and the tower of Saint Mary's are the two objects
which first catch the eye in the general view of Zara. Tradition, as
usual, calls the building a pagan temple, in this case of Juno; but it
has in no way the look of a temple, nor does the Emperor who
describes it with some minuteness give any hint of its having been
such. Yet it is plain that, if it was not itself a pagan building, the
spoils of pagan buildings contributed to its materials. Formed of two
arcaded stages, the whole pile rises to a vast height, and the height
of the lower stage alone is very considerable. The arches of the round
rest on heavy rectangular piers of truly Roman strength, save only two
vast columns with splendid Composite capitals--which mark the approach
to the triapsidal east end. This building, lately cleared from the
disfigurements and partition of its profane use, forms one of the
noblest round churches to be found; the so-called house of Juno at
Zara is almost a rival of the so-called house of Jupiter at Spalato.
The upper stage is of the same general type as the lower, having again
two columns left free and uninjured, but not rivalling the splendour
of those which are in bondage below. Zara had lately another
desecrated church of extreme interest, but of quite another type from
Saint Donatus. This was the little church of Saint Vitus, a perfect
example of the genuine Byzantine arrangement on a very small scale.
The ground-plan was square; four arms, square-ended without,
quasi-apsidal within, bore up the cupola on perfectly plain
square-edged piers. Between our first and second visits to Zara,
between 1875 and 1877, this charming little piece of Byzantine work
was swept away to make a smart shop-front. It was a recompense no more
than was due to find on our third visit that the round church had been
cleared out.
[Illustration: SAINT VITUS, ZARA, AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, CATTARO.]
* * * * *
Such is Zara, a city in which, as at Parenzo, the ecclesiastical
element distinctly prevails, as contrasted with the mainly pagan
interest of Pola. Such is equally the case in our next Dalmatian city
also. But the main interest of Sebenico is of a different kind from
that of any of its fellows. We go there to study a church, but, as we
have seen, a church which has little in common with other churches in
Dalmatia or anywhere else. At Zara, at Spalato, at Ragusa, we study
buildings which all in some sort hang together. At Sebenico we stop
our course to study something which stands altogether aloof from all.
SPALATO AND ITS NEIGHBOURS.
SPALATO.
1875.
The main object and centre of all historical and architectural
inquiries on the Dalmatian coast is of course the home of Diocletian,
the still abiding palace of Spalato. From a local point of view, it is
the spot which the greatest of the long line of renowned Illyrian
Emperors chose as his resting-place from the toils of warfare and
government, and where he reared the vastest and noblest dwelling that
ever arose at the bidding of a single man. From an oecumenical point
of view, Spalato is yet more. If it does not rank with Rome, Old and
New, with Ravenna and with Trier, it is because it never was, like
them, an actual seat of empire. But it not the less marks a stage, and
one of the greatest stages, in the history of the Empire. On his own
Dalmatian soil, Docles of Salona, Diocletian of Rome, was the man who
had won fame for his own land, and who, on the throne of the world,
did not forget his provincial birthplace. In the sight of Rome and of
the world Jovius Augustus was more than this. Alike in the history of
politics and in the history of art, he has left his mark on all time
that has come after him, and it is on his own Spalato that his mark
has been most deeply stamped. The polity of Rome and the architecture
of Rome alike received a new life at his hands. In each alike he cast
away shams and pretences, and made the true construction of the fabric
stand out before men's eyes. Master of the Roman world, if not King,
yet more than King, he let the true nature of h
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