Val d'Arno
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Title: Val d'Arno
Author: John Ruskin
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAL D'ARNO ***
Produced by Tiffany Vergon, ckirschner and the Online
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VAL D'ARNO
BY
JOHN RUSKIN, M.A.
LECTURE I. NICHOLAS THE PISAN
LECTURE II. JOHN THE PISAN
LECTURE III. SHIELD AND APRON
LECTURE IV. PARTED PER PALE
LECTURE V. PAX VOBISCUM
LECTURE VI. MARBLE COUCHANT
LECTURE VII. MARBLE RAMPANT
LECTURE VIII. FRANCHISE LECTURE IX. THE TYRRHENE SEA
LECTURE X. FLEUR DE LYS
APPENDIX
LIST OF PLATES.
THE ANCIENT SHORES OF ARNO
I. THE PISAN LATONA
II. NICCOLA PISANO'S PULPIT
III. THE FOUNTAIN OF PERUGIA
IV. NORMAN IMAGERY
V. DOOR OF THE BAPTISTERY. PISA
VI. THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. ADVENT
VII. " " " " " DEPARTURE
VIII. "THE CHARGE TO ADAM" GIOVANNI PISANO
IX. " " " " MODERN ITALIAN
X. THE NATIVITY. GIOVANNI PISANO
XI. " " MODERN ITALIAN
XII. THE ANNUNCIATION AND VISITATION
VAL D'ARNO
TEN LECTURES
ON
THE TUSCAN ART DIRECTLY ANTECEDENT TO THE FLORENTINE
YEAR OF VICTORIES
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS
TERM, 1873
LECTURE I.
NICHOLAS THE PISAN.
1. On this day, of this month, the 20th of October, six hundred and
twenty-three years ago, the merchants and tradesmen of Florence met
before the church of Santa Croce; marched through the city to the palace
of their Podesta; deposed their Podesta; set over themselves, in his
place, a knight belonging to an inferior city; called him "Captain of
the People;" appointed under him a Signory of twelve Ancients chosen
from among themselves; hung a bell for him on the tower of the Lion,
that he might ring it at need, and gave him the flag of Florence to
bear, half white, and half red.
The first blow struck upon the bell in that tower of the Lion began
the tolling for the passing away of the feudal system, and began the
joy-peal, or carillon, for whatever deserves joy, in that of our modern
liberties, whether of action or of trade.
2. Within the space of our Oxford term from that day, namely, on the
13th of December in the same year, 1250, died, at Ferentino, in Apulia,
the second Frederick, Emperor of Germany; the second also of the two
great lights which in his lifetime, according to Dante's astronomy,
ruled the world,--whose light being quenched, "the land which was once
the residence of courtesy and valour, became the haunt of all men who
are ashamed to be near the good, or to speak to them."
"In sul paese chadice e po riga
solea valore e cortesia trovar si
prima che federigo Bavessi briga,
or puo sicuramente indi passarsi
per qualuuche lasciassi per vergogna
di ragionar co buoni, e appressarsi."
PURO., Cant. 16.
3. The "Paese che Adice e Po riga" is of course Lombardy; and might have
been enough distinguished by the name of its principal river. But Dante
has an especial reason for naming the Adige. It is always by the valley
of the Adige that the power of the German Caesars descends on Italy; and
that battlemented bridge, which doubtless many of you remember, thrown
over the Adige at Verona, was so built that the German riders might have
secure and constant access to the city. In which city they had their
first stronghold in Italy, aided therein by the great family of the
Montecchi, Montacutes, Mont-aigu-s, or Montagues; lords, so called, of
the mountain peaks; in feud with the family of the Cappelletti,--hatted,
or, more properly, scarlet-hatted, persons. And this accident of
nomenclature, assisted by your present familiar knowledge of the real
contests of the sharp mountains with the flat caps, or petasoi, of
cloud, (locally giving Mont Pilate its title, "Pileatus,") may in many
points curiously illustrate for you that contest of Frederick the Second
with Innocent the Fourth, which in the good of it and the evil alike,
represents to all time the war of the solid, rational, and earthly
authority of the King, and State, with the more or less spectral,
hooded, imaginative, and nubiform authority of the Pope, and Church.
4. It will be desirable also that you clearly learn the material
relations, governing spiritual ones,--as of the Alps to their clouds,
so of the plains to their rivers. And of these rivers, chiefly note the
relation to each other, first, of the Adige and Po; then of the Arno
and Tiber. For the Adige, representing among the rivers and fountains of
waters the channel of Imperial, as the Tiber of the Papal power, and the
strength of the Coronet being founded on the white peaks that look down
upon Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, as that of the Scarlet Cap in the marsh
of the Campagna, "quo tenuis in sicco aqua destituisset," the study of
the policies and arts of the cities founded in the two great valleys of
Lombardy and Tuscany, so far as they were affected by their bias to the
Emperor, or the Church, will arrange itself in your minds at once in
a symmetry as clear as it will be, in our future work, secure and
suggestive.
5. "Tenuis, in sicco." How literally the words apply, as to the native
streams, so to the early states or establishings of the great cities of
the world. And you will find that the policy of the Coronet, with its
tower-building; the policy of the Hood, with its dome-building; and
the policy of the bare brow, with its cot-building,--the three main
associations of human energy to which we owe the architecture of
our earth, (in contradistinction to the dens and caves of it,)--are
curiously and eternally governed by mental laws, corresponding to the
physical ones which are ordained for the rocks, the clouds, and the
streams.
The tower, which many of you so well remember the daily sight of, in
your youth, above the "winding shore" of Thames,--the tower upon
the hill of London; the dome which still rises above its foul and
terrestrial clouds; and the walls of this city itself, which has been
"alma," nourishing in gentleness, to the youth of England, because
defended from external hostility by the difficultly fordable streams of
its plain, may perhaps, in a few years more, be swept away as heaps of
useless stone; but the rocks, and clouds, and rivers of our country will
yet, one day, restore to it the glory of law, of religion, and of life.
6. I am about to ask you to read the hieroglyphs upon the architecture
of a dead nation, in character greatly resembling our own,--in laws
and in commerce greatly influencing our own;--in arts, still, from her
grave, tutress of the present world. I know that it will be expected of
me to explain the merits of her arts, without reference to the wisdom of
her laws; and to describe the results of both, without investigating the
feelings which regulated either. I cannot do this; but I will at once
end these necessarily vague, and perhaps premature, generalizations;
and only ask you to study some portions of the life and work of two men,
father and son, citizens of the city in which the energies of this great
people were at first concentrated; and to deduce from that study
the conclusions, or follow out the inquiries, which it may naturally
suggest.
7. It is the modern fashion to despise Vasari. He is indeed despicable,
whether as historian or critic,--not least in his admiration of Michael
Angelo; nevertheless, he records the traditions and opinions of his day;
and these you must accurately know, before you can wisely correct. I
will take leave, therefore, to begin to-day with a sentence from Vasari,
which many of you have often heard quoted, but of which, perhaps, few
have enough observed the value.
"Niccola Pisano finding himself under certain Greek sculptors who were
carving the figures and other intaglio ornaments of the cathedral of
Pisa, and of the temple of St. John, and there being, among many spoils
of marbles, brought by the Pisan fleet, [1] some ancient tombs, there
was one among the others most fair, on which was sculptured the hunting
of Meleager." [2]
[Footnote 1: "Armata." The proper word for a land army is "esercito."]
[Footnote 2: Vol. i., p. 60, of Mrs. Foster's English translation, to
which I shall always refer, in order that English students may compare
the context if they wish. But the pieces of English which I give are
my own direct translation, varying, it will be found, often, from Mrs.
Foster's, in minute, but not unimportant, particulars.]
Get the meaning and contents of this passage well into your minds. In
the gist of it, it is true, and very notable.
8. You are in mid thirteenth century; 1200-1300. The Greek nation has
been dead in heart upwards of a thousand years; its religion dead, for
six hundred. But through the wreck of its faith, and death in its heart,
the skill of its hands, and the cunning of its design, instinctively
linger. In the centuries of Christian power, the Christians are still
unable to build but under Greek masters, and by pillage of Greek
shrines; and their best workman is only an apprentice to the 'Graeculi
esurientes' who are carving the temple of St. John.
9. Think of it. Here has the New Testament been declared for 1200 years.
No spirit of wisdom, as yet, has been given to its workmen, except
that which has descended from the Mars Hill on which St. Paul stood
contemptuous in pity. No Bezaleel arises, to build new tabernacles,
unless he has been taught by Daedalus.
10. It is necessary, therefore, for you first to know precisely the
manner of these Greek masters in their decayed power; the manner
which Vasari calls, only a sentence before, "That old Greek manner,
blundering, disproportioned,"--Goffa, e sproporzionata.
"Goffa," the very word which Michael Angelo uses of Perugino. Behold,
the Christians despising the Dunce Greeks, as the Infidel modernists
despise the Dunce Christians. [1]
[Footnote 1: Compare "Ariadne Floreutina," § 46.]
11. I sketched for you, when I was last at Pisa, a few arches of the
apse of the duomo, and a small portion of the sculpture of the font of
the Temple of St. John. I have placed them in your rudimentary series,
as examples of "quella vecchia maniera Greca, goffa e sproporzionata."
My own judgment respecting them is,--and it is a judgment founded on
knowledge which you may, if you choose, share with me, after working
with me,--that no architecture on this grand scale, so delicately
skilful in execution, or so daintily disposed in proportion, exists
elsewhere in the world.
12. Is Vasari entirely wrong then?
No, only half wrong, but very fatally half wrong. There are Greeks, and
Greeks.
This head with the inlaid dark iris in its eyes, from the font of St.
John, is as pure as the sculpture of early Greece, a hundred years
before Phidias; and it is so delicate, that having drawn with equal care
this and the best work of the Lombardi at Venice (in the church of the
Miracoli), I found this to possess the more subtle qualities of design.
And yet, in the cloisters of St. John Lateran at Rome, you have Greek
work, if not contemporary with this at Pisa, yet occupying a parallel
place in the history of architecture, which is abortive, and monstrous
beyond the power of any words to describe. Vasari knew no difference
between these two kinds of Greek work. Nor do your modern architects.
To discern the difference between the sculpture of the font of Pisa, and
the spandrils of the Lateran cloister, requires thorough training of the
hand in the finest methods of draughtsmanship; and, secondly, trained
habit of reading the mythology and ethics of design. I simply assure you
of the fact at present; and if you work, you may have sight and sense of
it.
13. There are Greeks, and Greeks, then, in the twelfth century,
differing as much from each other as vice, in all ages, must differ from
virtue. But in Vasari's sight they are alike; in ours, they must be so,
as far as regards our present purpose. As men of a school, they are to
be summed under the general name of 'Byzantines;' their work all alike
showing specific characters of attenuate, rigid, and in many respects
offensively unbeautiful, design, to which Vasari's epithets of "goffa,
e sproporzionata" are naturally applied by all persons trained only in
modern principles. Under masters, then, of this Byzantine race, Niccola
is working at Pisa.
14. Among the spoils brought by her fleets from Greece, is a
sarcophagus, with Meleager's hunt on it, wrought "con bellissima
maniera," says Vasari.
You may see that sarcophagus--any of you who go to Pisa;--touch it, for
it is on a level with your hand; study it, as Niccola studied it, to
your mind's content. Within ten yards of it, stand equally accessible
pieces of Niccola's own work and of his son's. Within fifty yards of it,
stands the Byzantine font of the chapel of St. John. Spend but the good
hours of a single day quietly by these three pieces of marble, and you
may learn more than in general any of you bring home from an entire
tour in Italy. But how many of you ever yet went into that temple of St.
John, knowing what to look for; or spent as much time in the Campo Santo
of Pisa, as you do in Mr. Ryman's shop on a rainy day?
15. The sarcophagus is not, however, (with Vasari's pardon) in
'bellissima maniera' by any means. But it is in the classical Greek
manner instead of the Byzantine Greek manner. You have to learn the
difference between these.
Now I have explained to you sufficiently, in "Aratra Pentelici," what
the classical Greek manner is. The manner and matter of it being easily
summed--as those of natural and unaffected life;--nude life when nudity
is right and pure; not otherwise. To Niccola, the difference between
this natural Greek school, and the Byzantine, was as the difference
between the bull of Thurium and of Delhi, (see Plate 19 of "Aratra
Pentelici").
Instantly he followed the natural fact, and became the Father of
Sculpture to Italy.
16. Are we, then, also to be strong by following the natural fact?
Yes, assuredly. That is the beginning and end of all my teaching to you.
But the noble natural fact, not the ignoble. You are to study men; not
lice nor entozoa. And you are to study the souls of men in their bodies,
not their bodies only. Mulready's drawings from the nude are more
degraded and bestial than the worst grotesques of the Byzantine or even
the Indian image makers. And your modern mob of English and American
tourists, following a lamplighter through the Vatican to have pink light
thrown for them on the Apollo Belvidere, are farther from capacity of
understanding Greek art, than the parish charity boy, making a ghost out
of a turnip, with a candle inside.
17. Niccola followed the facts, then. He is the Master of Naturalism
in Italy. And I have drawn for you his lioness and cubs, to fix that in
your minds. And beside it, I put the Lion of St. Mark's, that you may
see exactly the kind of change he made. The Lion of St. Mark's (all
but his wings, which have been made and fastened on in the fifteenth
century), is in the central Byzantine manner; a fine decorative piece
of work, descending in true genealogy from the Lion of Nemea, and the
crested skin of him that clothes the head of the Heracles of Camarina.
It has all the richness of Greek Daedal work,--nay, it has fire and
life beyond much Greek Daedal work; but in so far as it is non-natural,
symbolic, decorative, and not like an actual lion, it would be felt
by Niccola Pisano to be imperfect. And instead of this decorative
evangelical preacher of a lion, with staring eyes, and its paw on
a gospel, he carves you a quite brutal and maternal lioness, with
affectionate eyes, and paw set on her cub.
18. Fix that in your minds, then. Niccola Pisano is the Master of
Naturalism in Italy,--therefore elsewhere; of Naturalism, and all that
follows. Generally of truth, common-sense, simplicity, vitality,--and of
all these, with consummate power. A man to be enquired about, is not
he? and will it not make a difference to you whether you look, when you
travel in Italy, in his rough early marbles for this fountain of life,
or only glance at them because your Murray's Guide tells you,--and think
them "odd old things"?
19. We must look for a moment more at one odd old thing--the sarcophagus
which was his tutor. Upon it is carved the hunting of Meleager; and it
was made, or by tradition received as, the tomb of the mother of the
Countess Matilda. I must not let you pass by it without noticing two
curious coincidences in these particulars. First, in the Greek subject
which is given Niccola to read.
The boar, remember, is Diana's enemy. It is sent upon the fields of
Calydon in punishment of the refusal of the Calydonians to sacrifice
to her. 'You have refused _me_,' she said; 'you will not have Artemis
Laphria, Forager Diana, to range in your fields. You shall have the
Forager Swine, instead.'
Meleager and Atalanta are Diana's servants,--servants of all order,
purity, due sequence of season, and time. The orbed architecture of
Tuscany, with its sculptures of the succession of the labouring months,
as compared with the rude vaults and monstrous imaginations of the past,
was again the victory of Meleager.
20. Secondly, take what value there is in the tradition that this
sarcophagus was made the tomb of the mother of the
[Illustration: PLATE I:--THE PISAN LATONA. Angle of Panel of the
Adoration, in Niccola's Pulpit.]
Countess Matilda. If you look to the fourteenth chapter of the third
volume of "Modern Painters," you will find the mythic character of the
Countess Matilda, as Dante employed it explained at some length. She is
the representative of Natural Science as opposed to Theological.
21. Chance coincidences merely, these; but full of teaching for us,
looking back upon the past. To Niccola, the piece of marble was,
primarily, and perhaps exclusively, an example of free chiselling, and
humanity of treatment. What else it was to him,--what the spirits
of Atalanta and Matilda could bestow on him, depended on what he was
himself. Of which Vasari tells you nothing. Not whether he was gentleman
or clown--rich or poor--soldier or sailor. Was he never, then, in those
fleets that brought the marbles back from the ravaged Isles of Greece?
was he at first only a labourer's boy among the scaffoldings of the
Pisan apse,--his apron loaded with dust--and no man praising him for his
speech? Rough he was, assuredly; probably poor; fierce and energetic,
beyond even the strain of Pisa,--just and kind, beyond the custom of his
age, knowing the Judgment and Love of God: and a workman, with all his
soul and strength, all his days.
22. You hear the fame of him as of a sculptor only. It is right that you
should; for every great architect must be a sculptor, and be renowned,
as such, more than by his building. But Niccola Pisano had even more
influence on Italy as a builder than as a carver.
For Italy, at this moment, wanted builders more than carvers; and a
change was passing through her life, of which external edifice was a
necessary sign. I complained of you just now that you never looked at
the Byzantine font in the temple of St. John. The sacristan generally
will not let you. He takes you to a particular spot on the floor, and
sings a musical chord. The chord returns in prolonged echo from the
chapel roof, as if the building were all one sonorous marble bell.
Which indeed it is; and travellers are always greatly amused at being
allowed to ring this bell; but it never occurs to them to ask how it
came to be ringable:--how that tintinnabulate roof differs from the dome
of the Pantheon, expands into the dome of Florence, or declines into the
whispering gallery of St. Paul's.
23. When you have had full satisfaction of the tintinnabulate roof, you
are led by the sacristan and Murray to Niccola Pisano's pulpit; which,
if you have spare time to examine it, you find to have six sides, to be
decorated with tablets of sculpture, like the sides of the sarcophagus,
and to be sustained on seven pillars, three of which are themselves
carried on the backs of as many animals.
All this arrangement had been contrived before Niccola's time, and
executed again and again. But behold! between the capitals of the
pillars and the sculptured tablets there are interposed five cusped
arches, the hollow beneath the pulpit showing dark through their foils.
You have seen such cusped arches before, you think?
Yes, gentlemen, _you_ have; but the Pisans had _not_. And that
intermediate layer of the pulpit means--the change, in a word, for all
Europe, from the Parthenon to Amiens Cathedral. For Italy it means the
rise of her Gothic dynasty; it means the duomo of Milan instead of the
temple of Paestum.
24. I say the duomo of Milan, only to put the change well before your
eyes, because you all know that building so well. The duomo of Milan is
of entirely bad and barbarous Gothic, but the passion of pinnacle and
fret is in it, visibly to you, more than in other buildings. It will
therefore serve to show best what fulness of change this pulpit of
Niccola Pisano signifies.
In it there is no passion of pinnacle nor of fret. You see the edges of
it, instead of being bossed, or knopped, or crocketed, are mouldings
of severest line. No vaulting, no clustered shafts, no traceries, no
fantasies, no perpendicular flights of aspiration. Steady pillars, each
of one polished block; useful capitals, one trefoiled arch between them;
your panel above it; thereon your story of the founder of Christianity.
The whole standing upon beasts, they being indeed the foundation of us,
(which Niccola knew far better than Mr. Darwin); Eagle to carry your
Gospel message--Dove you think it ought to be?
[Illustration: PLATE II.--NICCOLA PISANO'S PULPIT.]
Eagle, says Niccola, and not as symbol of St. John Evangelist only, but
behold! with prey between its claws. For the Gospel, it is Niccola's
opinion, is not altogether a message that you may do whatever you like,
and go straight to heaven. Finally, a slab of marble, cut hollow
a little to bear your book; space enough for you to speak from at
ease,--and here is your first architecture of Gothic Christianity!
25. Indignant thunder of dissent from German doctors,--clamour from
French savants. 'What! and our Treves, and our Strasburg, and our
Poictiers, and our Chartres! And you call _this_ thing the first
architecture of Christianity!' Yes, my French and German friends, very
fine the buildings you have mentioned are; and I am bold to say I love
them far better than you do, for you will run a railroad through any of
them any day that you can turn a penny by it. I thank you also, Germans,
in the name of our Lady of Strasburg, for your bullets and fire; and
I thank you, Frenchmen, in the name of our Lady of Rouen, for your new
haberdashers' shops in the Gothic town;--meanwhile have patience with me
a little, and let me go on.
26. No passion of fretwork, or pinnacle whatever, I said, is in this
Pisan pulpit. The trefoiled arch itself, pleasant as it is, seems
forced a little; out of perfect harmony with the rest (see Plate II.).
Unnatural, perhaps, to Niccola?
Altogether unnatural to him, it is; such a thing never would have come
into his head, unless some one had shown it him. Once got into his head,
he puts it to good use; perhaps even he will let this somebody else put
pinnacles and crockets into his head, or at least, into his son's, in
a little while. Pinnacles,--crockets,--it may be, even traceries. The
ground-tier of the baptistery is round-arched, and has no pinnacles;
but look at its first story. The clerestory of the Duomo of Pisa has no
traceries, but look at the cloister of its Campo Santo.
27. I pause at the words;--for they introduce a new group of thoughts,
which presently we must trace farther.
The Holy Field;--field of burial. The "cave of Machpelah which is before
Mamre," of the Pisans. "There they buried Abraham, and Sarah his wife;
there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah."
How do you think such a field becomes holy,--how separated, as the
resting-place of loving kindred, from that other field of blood, bought
to bury strangers in?
When you have finally succeeded, by your gospel of mammon, in making
all the men of your own nation not only strangers to each other, but
enemies; and when your every churchyard becomes therefore a field of the
stranger, the kneeling hamlet will vainly drink the chalice of God
in the midst of them. The field will be unholy. No cloisters of noble
history can ever be built round such an one.
28. But the very earth of this at Pisa was holy, as you know. That
"armata" of the Tuscan city brought home not only marble and ivory, for
treasure; but earth,--a fleet's burden,--from the place where there was
healing of soul's leprosy: and their field became a place of holy tombs,
prepared for its office with earth from the land made holy by one tomb;
which all the knighthood of Christendom had been pouring out its life to
win.
29. I told you just now that this sculpture of Niccola's was the
beginning of Christian architecture. How do you judge that Christian
architecture in the deepest meaning of it to differ from all other?
All other noble architecture is for the glory of living gods and men;
but this is for the glory of death, in God and man. Cathedral, cloister,
or tomb,--shrine for the body of Christ, or for the bodies of the
saints. All alike signifying death to this world;--life, other than of
this world.
Observe, I am not saying how far this feeling, be it faith, or be it
imagination, is true or false;--I only desire you to note that the power
of all Christian work begins in the niche of the catacomb and depth
of the sarcophagus, and is to the end definable as architecture of the
tomb.
30. Not altogether, and under every condition, sanctioned in doing
such honour to the dead by the Master of it. Not every grave is by His
command to be worshipped. Graves there may be--too little guarded, yet
dishonourable;--"ye are as graves that appear not, and the men that
walk over them are not aware of them." And graves too much guarded, yet
dishonourable, "which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within
full of all uncleanness." Or graves, themselves honourable, yet which
it may be, in us, a crime to adorn. "For they indeed killed them, and ye
build their sepulchres."
Questions, these, collateral; or to be examined in due time; for the
present it is enough for us to know that all Christian architecture, as
such, has been hitherto essentially of tombs.
It has been thought, gentlemen, that there is a fine Gothic revival in
your streets of Oxford, because you have a Gothic door to your County
Bank:
Remember, at all events, it was other kind of buried treasure, and
bearing other interest, which Niccola Pisano's Gothic was set to guard.
LECTURE II.
JOHN THE PISAN.
31. I closed my last lecture with the statement, on which I desired to
give you time for reflection, that Christian architecture was, in its
chief energy, the adornment of tombs,--having the passionate function of
doing honour to the dead.
But there is an ethic, or simply didactic and instructive architecture,
the decoration of which you will find to be normally representative of
the virtues which are common alike to Christian and Greek. And there
is a natural tendency to adopt such decoration, and the modes of design
fitted for it, in civil buildings. [1]
[Footnote: "These several rooms were indicated by symbol and device:
Victory for the soldier, Hope for the exile, the Muses for the poets,
Mercury for the artists, Paradise for the preacher."--(Sagacius Gazata,
of the Palace of Can Grande. I translate only Sismondi's quotation.)]
32. _Civil_, or _civic_, I say, as opposed to military. But again
observe, there are two kinds of military building. One, the robber's
castle, or stronghold, out of which he issues to pillage; the other, the
honest man's castle, or stronghold, into which he retreats from pillage.
They are much like each other in external forms;--but Injustice,
or Unrighteousness, sits in the gate of the one, veiled with forest
branches, (see Giotto's painting of him); and Justice or Righteousness
_enters_ by the gate of the other, over strewn forest branches. Now, for
example of this second kind of military architecture, look at Carlyle's
account of Henry the Fowler, [1] and of his building military towns, or
burgs, to protect his peasantry. In such function you have the first and
proper idea of a walled town,--a place into which the pacific country
people can retire for safety, as the Athenians in the Spartan war.
Your fortress of this kind is a religious and civil fortress, or burg,
defended by burgers, trained to defensive war. Keep always this idea of
the proper nature of a fortified city:--Its walls mean protection,--its
gates hospitality and triumph. In the language familiar to you, spoken
of the chief of cities: "Its walls are to be Salvation, and its gates to
be Praise." And recollect always the inscription over the north gate of
Siena: "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit."--"More than her gates, Siena opens
her heart to you."
[Footnote 1: "Frederick," vol. i.]
33. When next you enter London by any of the great lines, I should like
you to consider, as you approach the city, what the feelings of the
heart of London are likely to be on your approach, and at what part of
the railroad station an inscription, explaining such state of her heart,
might be most fitly inscribed. Or you would still better understand
the difference between ancient and modern principles of architecture by
taking a cab to the Elephant and Castle, and thence walking to London
Bridge by what is in fact the great southern entrance of London. The
only gate receiving you is, however, the arch thrown over the road to
carry the South-Eastern Railway itself; and the only exhibition either
of Salvation or Praise is in the cheap clothes' shops on each side; and
especially in one colossal haberdasher's shop, over which you may see
the British flag waving (in imitation of Windsor Castle) when the master
of the shop is at home. 34. Next to protection from external hostility,
the two necessities in a city are of food and water supply;--the latter
essentially constant. You can store food and forage, but water must flow
freely. Hence the Fountain and the Mercato become the centres of civil
architecture.
Premising thus much, I will ask you to look once more at this cloister
of the Campo Santo of Pisa.
35. On first entering the place, its quiet, its solemnity, the
perspective of its aisles, and the conspicuous grace and precision of
its traceries, combine to give you the sensation of having entered a
true Gothic cloister. And if you walk round it hastily, and, glancing
only at a fresco or two, and the confused tombs erected against them,
return to the uncloistered sunlight of the piazza, you may quite easily
carry away with you, and ever afterwards retain, the notion that
the Campo Santo of Pisa is the same kind of thing as the cloister of
Westminster Abbey.
36. I will beg you to look at the building, thus photographed, more
attentively. The "long-drawn aisle" is here, indeed,--but where is the
"fretted vault"?
A timber roof, simple as that of a country barn, and of which only the
horizontal beams catch the eye, connects an entirely plain outside wall
with an interior one, pierced by round-headed openings; in which are
inserted pieces of complex tracery, as foreign in conception to the rest
of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to
Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of
the windows of some church in an advanced stage of fantastic design at
Nuremberg or Frankfort.
37. If you begin to question, hereupon, who was the Italian robber,
whether of marble or thought, and look to your Vasari, you find the
building attributed to John the Pisan; [1]--and you suppose the son to
have been so pleased by his father's adoption of Gothic forms that he
must needs borrow them, in this manner, ready made, from the Germans,
and thrust them into his round arches, or wherever else they would go.
[Footnote 1: The present traceries are of fifteenth century work,
founded on Giovanni's design.]
We will look at something more of his work, however, before drawing such
conclusion.
38. In the centres of the great squares of Siena and Perugia, rose,
obedient to engineers' art, two perennial fountains Without engineers'
art, the glens which cleave the sand-rock of Siena flow with living
water; and still, if there be a hell for the forger in Italy, he
remembers therein the sweet grotto and green wave of Fonte Branda.
But on the very summit of the two hills, crested by their great civic
fortresses, and in the centres of their circuit of walls, rose the two
guided wells; each in basin of goodly marble, sculptured--at Perugia, by
John of Pisa, at Siena, by James of Quercia.
39. It is one of the bitterest regrets of my life (and I have many which
some men would find difficult to bear,) that I never saw, except when I
was a youth, and then with sealed eyes, Jacopo della Quercia's fountain.
[1] The Sienese, a little while since, tore it down, and put up a model
of it by a modern carver. In like manner, perhaps, you will some day
knock the Elgin marbles to pieces, and commission an Academician to put
up new ones,--the Sienese doing worse than that (as if the Athenians
were _themselves_ to break their Phidias' work).
[Footnote 1: I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune denied to
me. "The market-place, or great Piazza, is a large square, with a great
broken-nosed fountain in it." ("Pictures from Italy.")]
But the fountain of John of Pisa, though much injured, and glued
together with asphalt, is still in its place.
40. I will now read to you what Vasari first says of him, and it. (I.
67.) "Nicholas had, among other sons, one called John, who, because he
always followed his father, and, under his discipline, intended (bent
himself to, with a will,) sculpture and architecture, in a few years
became not only equal to his father, but in some things superior to him;
wherefore Nicholas, being now old, retired himself into Pisa, and
living quietly there, left the government of everything to his son.
Accordingly, when Pope Urban IV. died in Perugia, sending was made for
John, who, going there, made the tomb of that Pope of marble, the which,
together with that of Pope Martin IV., was afterwards thrown down, when
the Perugians
[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE FOUNTAIN OF PERUGIA.]
enlarged their vescovado; so that only a few relics are seen sprinkled
about the church. And the Perugians, having at the same time brought
from the mountain of Pacciano, two miles distant from the city, through
canals of lead, a most abundant water, by means of the invention and
industry of a friar of the order of St. Silvester, it was given to John
the Pisan to make all the ornaments of this fountain, as well of bronze
as of marble. On which he set hand to it, and made there three orders
of vases, two of marble and one of bronze. The first is put upon twelve
degrees of twelve-faced steps; the second is upon some columns which
put it upon a level with the first one;" (that is, in the middle of it,)
"and the third, which is of bronze, rests upon three figures which have
in the middle of them some griffins, of bronze too, which pour water out
on every side."
41. Many things we have to note in this passage, but first I will show
you the best picture I can of the thing itself.
The best I can; the thing itself being half destroyed, and what remains
so beautiful that no one can now quite rightly draw it; but Mr. Arthur
Severn, (the son of Keats's Mr. Severn,) was with me, looking reverently
at those remains, last summer, and has made, with help from the sun,
this sketch for you (Plate III.); entirely true and effective as far as
his time allowed.
Half destroyed, or more, I said it was,--Time doing grievous work on it,
and men worse. You heard Vasari saying of it, that it stood on twelve
degrees of twelve-faced steps. These--worn, doubtless, into little
more than a rugged slope--have been replaced by the moderns with four
circular steps, and an iron railing; [1] the bas-reliefs have been
carried off from the panels of the second vase, and its fair marble lips
choked with asphalt:--of what remains, you have here a rough but true
image.
[Footnote 1: In Mr. Severn's sketch, the form of the original foundation
is approximately restored.]
In which you see there is not a trace of Gothic feeling or design of any
sort. No crockets, no pinnacles, no foils, no vaultings, no grotesques
in sculpture. Panels between pillars, panels carried on pillars,
sculptures in those panels like the Metopes of the Parthenon; a Greek
vase in the middle, and griffins in the middle of that. Here is your
font, not at all of Saint John, but of profane and civil-engineering
John. This is _his_ manner of baptism of the town of Perugia.
42. Thus early, it seems, the antagonism of profane Greek to
ecclesiastical Gothic declares itself. It seems as if in Perugia, as in
London, you had the fountains in Trafalgar Square against Queen Elinor's
Cross; or the viaduct and railway station contending with the Gothic
chapel, which the master of the large manufactory close by has erected,
because he thinks pinnacles and crockets have a pious influence; and
will prevent his workmen from asking for shorter hours, or more wages.
43. It _seems_ only; the antagonism is quite of another kind,--or,
rather, of many other kinds. But note at once how complete it is--how
utterly this Greek fountain of Perugia, and the round arches of Pisa,
are opposed to the school of design which gave the trefoils to Niccola's
pulpit, and the traceries to Giovanni's Campo Santo.
The antagonism, I say, is of another kind than ours; but deep and wide;
and to explain it, I must pass for a time to apparently irrelevant
topics.
You were surprised, I hope, (if you were attentive enough to catch the
points in what I just now read from Vasari,) at my venturing to bring
before you, just after I had been using violent language against the
Sienese for breaking up the work of Quercia, that incidental sentence
giving account of the much more disrespectful destruction, by the
Perugians, of the tombs of Pope Urban IV., and Martin IV.
Sending was made for John, you see, first, when Pope Urban IV. died in
Perugia--whose tomb was to be carved by John; the Greek fountain being a
secondary business. But the tomb was so well destroyed, afterwards, that
only a few relics remained scattered here and there.
The tomb, I have not the least doubt, was Gothic;--and the breaking of
it to pieces was not in order to restore it afterwards, that a living
architect might get the job of restoration. Here is a stone out of one
of Giovanni Pisano's loveliest Gothic buildings, which I myself saw with
my own eyes dashed out, that a modern builder might be paid for putting
in another. But Pope Urban's tomb was not destroyed to such end. There
was no qualm of the belly, driving the hammer,--qualm of the conscience
probably; at all events, a deeper or loftier antagonism than one on
points of taste, or economy.
44. You observed that I described this Greek profane manner of design
as properly belonging to _civil_ buildings, as opposed not only
to ecclesiastical buildings, but to military ones. Justice, or
Righteousness, and Veracity, are the characters of Greek art. These
_may_ be opposed to religion, when religion becomes fantastic; but they
_must_ be opposed to war, when war becomes unjust. And if, perchance,
fantastic religion and unjust war happen to go hand in hand, your Greek
artist is likely to use his hammer against them spitefully enough.
45. His hammer, or his Greek fire. Hear now this example of the
engineering ingenuities of our Pisan papa, in his younger days.
"The Florentines having begun, in Niccola's time, to throw down many
towers, which had been built in a barbarous manner through the whole
city; either that the people might be less hurt, by their means, in the
fights that often took place between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or
else that there might be greater security for the State, it appeared
to them that it would be very difficult to ruin the Tower of the
Death-watch, which was in the place of St. John, because it had its
walls built with such a grip in them that the stones could not be
stirred with the pickaxe, and also because it was of the loftiest;
whereupon Nicholas, causing the tower to be cut, at the foot of it, all
the length of one of its sides; and closing up the cut, as he made it,
with short (wooden) under-props, about a yard long, and setting fire
to them, when the props were burned, the tower fell, and broke itself
nearly all to pieces: which was held a thing so ingenious and so useful
for such affairs, that it has since passed into a custom, so that when
it is needful, in this easiest manner, any edifice may be thrown down."
46. 'When it is needful.' Yes; but when is that? If instead of the
towers of the Death-watch in the city, one could ruin the towers of the
Death-watch of evil pride and evil treasure in men's hearts, there would
be need enough for such work both in Florence and London. But the walls
of those spiritual towers have still stronger 'grip' in them, and are
fireproof with a vengeance.
"Le mure me parean die ferro fosse,
. . . e el mi dixe, il fuoco eterno
Chentro laffoca, le dimostra rosse."
But the towers in Florence, shattered to fragments by this ingenious
engineer, and the tombs in Perugia, which his son will carve, only
that they also may be so well destroyed that only a few relics remain,
scattered up and down the church,--are these, also, only the iron
towers, and the red-hot tombs, of the city of Dis?
Let us see.
47. In order to understand the relation of the tradesmen and working
men, including eminently the artist, to the general life of the
thirteenth century, I must lay before you the clearest elementary charts
I can of the course which the fates of Italy were now appointing for
her.
My first chart must be geographical. I want you to have a clearly
dissected and closely fitted notion of the natural boundaries of her
states, and their relations to surrounding ones. Lay hold first, firmly,
of your conception of the valleys of the Po and the Arno, running
counter to each other--opening east and opening west,--Venice at the end
of the one, Pisa at the end of the other.
48. These two valleys--the hearts of Lombardy and Etruria--virtually
contain the life of Italy. They are entirely different in character:
Lombardy, essentially luxurious and worldly, at this time rude in art,
but active; Etruria, religious, intensely imaginative, and inheriting
refined forms of art from before the days of Porsenna.
49. South of these, in mid-Italy, you have Romagna,--the valley of
the Tiber. In that valley, decayed Rome, with her lust of empire
inextinguishable;--no inheritance of imaginative art, nor power of it;
dragging her own ruins hourly into more fantastic ruin, and defiling her
faith hourly with more fantastic guilt.
South of Romagna, you have the kingdoms of Calabria and Sicily,---Magna
Graecia, and Syracuse, in decay;----strange spiritual fire from the
Saracenic east still lighting the volcanic land, itself laid all in
ashes.
50. Conceive Italy then always in these four masses: Lombardy, Etruria,
Romagna, Calabria.
Now she has three great external powers to deal with: the western,
France--the northern, Germany--the eastern, Arabia. On her right the
Frank; on her left the Saracen; above her, the Teuton. And roughly, the
French are a religious chivalry; the Germans a profane chivalry; the
Saracens an infidel chivalry. What is best of each is benefiting Italy;
what is worst, afflicting her. And in the time we are occupied with, all
are afflicting her.
What Charlemagne, Barbarossa, or Saladin did to teach her, you can trace
only by carefullest thought. But in this thirteenth century all these
three powers are adverse to her, as to each other. Map the methods of
their adversity thus:---
51. Germany, (profane chivalry,) is vitally adverse to the Popes;
endeavouring to establish imperial and knightly power against theirs. It
is fiercely, but frankly, covetous of Italian territory, seizes all it
can of Lombardy and Calabria, and with any help procurable either from
robber Christians or robber Saracens, strives, in an awkward manner, and
by open force, to make itself master of Rome, and all Italy.
52. France, all surge and foam of pious chivalry, lifts herself in
fitful rage of devotion, of avarice, and of pride. She is the natural
ally of the church; makes her own monks the proudest of the Popes;
raises Avignon into another Rome; prays and pillages insatiably; pipes
pastoral songs of innocence, and invents grotesque variations of crime;
gives grace to the rudeness of England, and venom to the cunning of
Italy. She is a chimera among nations, and one knows not whether to
admire most the valour of Guiscard, the virtue of St. Louis or the
villany of his brother.
53. The Eastern powers--Greek, Israelite, Saracen--are at once the
enemies of the Western, their prey, and their tutors.
They bring them methods of ornament and of merchandise, and stimulate in
them the worst conditions of pugnacity, bigotry, and rapine. That is
the broad geographical and political relation of races. Next, you must
consider the conditions of their time.
54. I told you, in my second lecture on Engraving, that before the
twelfth century the nations were too savage to be Christian, and after
the fifteenth too carnal to be Christian.
The delicacy of sensation and refinements of imagination necessary to
understand Christianity belong to the mid period when men risen from a
life of brutal hardship are not yet fallen to one of brutal luxury. You
can neither comprehend the character of Christ while you are chopping
flints for tools, and gnawing raw bones for food; nor when you have
ceased to do anything with either tools or hands, and dine on gilded
capons. In Dante's lines, beginning
"I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad
In leathern girdle, with a clasp of bone,"
you have the expression of his sense of the increasing luxury of the
age, already sapping its faith. But when Bellincion Berti walked abroad
in skins not yet made into leather, and with the bones of his dinner in
a heap at his door, instead of being cut into girdle clasps, he was just
as far from capacity of being a Christian.
55. The following passage, from Carlyle's "Chartism," expresses better
than any one else has done, or is likely to do it, the nature of this
Christian era, (extending from the twelfth to the sixteenth century,) in
England,--the like being entirely true of it elsewhere:--
"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes, much had
been going on. Not only had red deer in the New and other forests been
got preserved and shot; and treacheries [1] of Simon de Montfort, wars
of Red and White Roses, battles of Crecy, battles of Bosworth, and many
other battles, been got transacted and adjusted; but England wholly,
not without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires and
the millions of sons of eighteen generations, had been got drained and
tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beautiful and rich in possessions.
The mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters had become steepled, tile-roofed,
compact towns. Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield
whittles. Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same
into stockings or breeches for men. England had property valuable to the
auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing, commercial, economic
skill which lay impalpably warehoused in English hands and heads, what
auctioneer could estimate?
[Footnote 1: Perhaps not altogether so, any more than Oliver's dear
papa Carlyle. We may have to read _him_ also, otherwise than the British
populace have yet read, some day.]
"Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do something; some
cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's head with battle-axes.
The seven incorporated trades, with their million guild-brethren, with
their hammers, their shuttles, and tools, what an army,--fit to conquer
that land of England, as we say, and hold it conquered! Nay, strangest
of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of
thinking,--even of believing; individual conscience had unfolded itself
among them;--Conscience, and Intelligence its handmaid. [1] Ideas
of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one
Shakspeare, a wool-comber, poacher or whatever else, at Stratford, in
Warwickshire, who happened to write books!--the finest human figure,
as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely
Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt, or Sarmat, I find no human soul
so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;--our supreme modern
European man. Him England had contrived to realize: were there not
ideas?
[Footnote 1: Observe Carlyle's order of sequence. Perceptive Reason is
the Handmaid of Conscience, not Conscience hers. If you resolve to do
right, you will soon do wisely; but resolve only to do wisely, and you
will never do right.]
"Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, that had to seek utterance in the
notablest way! England had got her Shakspeare, but was now about to get
her Milton and Oliver Cromwell. This, too, we will call a new expansion,
hard as it might be to articulate and adjust; this, that a man could
actually have a conscience for his own behoof, and not for his priest's
only; that his priest, be he who he might, would henceforth have to take
that fact along with him."
56. You observe, in this passage, account is given you of two
things--(A) of the development of a powerful class of tradesmen and
artists; and, (B) of the development of an individual conscience.
In the savage times you had simply the hunter, digger, and robber; now
you have also the manufacturer and salesman. The ideas of ingenuity
with the hand, of fairness in exchange, have occurred to us. We can do
something now with our fingers, as well as with our fists; and if we
want our neighbours' goods, we will not simply carry them off, as of
old, but offer him some of ours in exchange.
57. Again; whereas before we were content to let our priests do for us
all they could, by gesticulating, dressing, sacrificing, or beating of
drums and blowing of trumpets; and also direct our steps in the way of
life, without any doubt on our part of their own perfect acquaintance
with it,--we have now got to do something for ourselves--to think
something for ourselves; and thus have arrived in straits of conscience
which, so long as we endeavour to steer through them honestly, will be
to us indeed a quite secure way of life, and of all living wisdom.
58. Now the centre of this new freedom of thought is in Germany; and the
power of it is shown first, as I told you in my opening lecture, in the
great struggle of Frederick II. with Rome. And German freedom of thought
had certainly made some progress, when it had managed to reduce the Pope
to disguise himself as a soldier, ride out of Rome by moonlight, and
gallop his thirty-four miles to the seaside before
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--NORMAN IMAGERY.]
summer dawn. Here, clearly, is quite a new state of things for the Holy
Father of Christendom to consider, during such wholesome horse-exercise.
59. Again; the refinements of new art are represented by
France--centrally by St. Louis with his Sainte Chapelle. Happily, I am
able to lay on your table to-day--having placed it three years ago in
your educational series--a leaf of a Psalter, executed for St. Louis
himself. He and his artists are scarcely out of their savage life yet,
and have no notion of adorning the Psalms better than by pictures of
long-necked cranes, long-eared rabbits, long-tailed lions, and red and
white goblins putting their tongues out. [1] But in refinement of touch,
in beauty of colour, in the human faculties of order and grace, they are
long since, evidently, past the flint and bone stage,--refined enough,
now,--subtle enough, now, to learn anything that is pretty and fine,
whether in theology or any other matter.
[Footnote 1: I cannot go to the expense of engraving this most subtle
example; but Plate IV. shows the average conditions of temper and
imagination in religious ornamental work of the time.]
60. Lastly, the new principle of Exchange is represented by Lombardy and
Venice, to such purpose that your Merchant and Jew of Venice, and your
Lombard of Lombard Street, retain some considerable influence on your
minds, even to this day.
And in the exact midst of all such transition, behold, Etruria with her
Pisans--her Florentines,--receiving, resisting, and reigning over all:
pillaging the Saracens of their marbles--binding the French bishops
in silver chains;--shattering the towers of German tyranny into
small pieces,--building with strange jewellery the belfry tower for
newly-conceived Christianity;--and, in sacred picture, and sacred song,
reaching the height, among nations, most passionate, and most pure.
I must close my lecture without indulging myself yet, by addition
of detail; requesting you, before we next meet, to fix these general
outlines in your minds, so that, without disturbing their distinctness,
I may trace in the sequel the relations of Italian Art to these
political and religious powers; and determine with what force of
passionate sympathy, or fidelity of resigned obedience, the Pisan
artists, father and son, executed the indignation of Florence and
fulfilled the piety of Orvieto.
LECTURE III.
SHIELD AND APRON.
61. I laid before you, in my last lecture, first lines of the chart of
Italian history in the thirteenth century, which I hope gradually to
fill with colour, and enrich, to such degree as may be sufficient for
all comfortable use. But I indicated, as the more special subject of our
immediate study, the nascent power of liberal thought, and liberal art,
over dead tradition and rude workmanship.
To-day I must ask you to examine in greater detail the exact relation of
this liberal art to the illiberal elements which surrounded it.
62. You do not often hear me use that word "Liberal" in any favourable
sense. I do so now, because I use it also in a very narrow and exact
sense. I mean that the thirteenth century is, in Italy's year of life,
her 17th of March. In the light of it, she assumes her toga virilis; and
it is sacred to her god Liber.
63. To her god _Liber_,--observe: not Dionusos, still less Bacchus, but
her own ancient and simple deity. And if you have read with some care
the statement I gave you, with Carlyle's help, of the moment and
manner of her change from savageness to dexterity, and from rudeness to
refinement of life, you will hear, familiar as the lines are to you, the
invocation in the first Georgic with a new sense of its meaning:--
"Vos, O clarissima mundi
Lumina, labentem coelo quae ducitis annum,
Liber, et alma Ceres; vestro si munere tellus
Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista,
Poculaqu' inventis Acheloia miscuit uvis,
Munera vestra cano."
These gifts, innocent, rich, full of life, exquisitely beautiful in
order and grace of growth, I have thought best to symbolize to you,
in the series of types of the power of the Greek gods, placed in your
educational series, by the blossom of the wild strawberry; which in
rising from its trine cluster of trine leaves,--itself as beautiful as
a white rose, and always single on its stalk, like an ear of corn, yet
with a succeeding blossom at its side, and bearing a fruit which is as
distinctly a group of seeds as an ear of corn itself, and yet is the
pleasantest to taste of all the pleasant things prepared by nature
for the food of men, [1]--may accurately symbolize, and help you to
remember, the conditions of this liberal and delightful, yet entirely
modest and orderly, art, and thought.
[Footnote 1: I am sorry to pack my sentences together in this confused
way. But I have much to say; and cannot always stop to polish or adjust
it as I used to do.]
64. You will find in the fourth of my inaugural lectures, at the 98th
paragraph, this statement,--much denied by modern artists and authors,
but nevertheless quite unexceptionally true,--that the entire vitality
of art depends upon its having for object either to _state a true
thing_, or _adorn a serviceable one_. The two functions of art in Italy,
in this entirely liberal and virescent phase of it,--virgin art, we
may call it, retaining the most literal sense of the words virga and
virgo,--are to manifest the doctrines of a religion which now, for the
first time, men had soul enough to understand; and to adorn edifices
or dress, with which the completed politeness of daily life might be
invested, its convenience completed, and its decorous and honourable
pride satisfied.
65. That pride was, among the men who gave its character to the century,
in honourableness of private conduct, and useful magnificence of public
art. Not of private or domestic art: observe this very particularly.
"Such was the simplicity of private manners,"--(I am now quoting
Sismondi, but with the fullest ratification that my knowledge enables
me to give,)--"and the economy of the richest citizens, that if a city
enjoyed repose only for a few years, it doubled its revenues, and found
itself, in a sort, encumbered with its riches. The Pisans knew neither
of the luxury of the table, nor that of furniture, nor that of a number
of servants; yet they were sovereigns of the whole of Sardinia, Corsica,
and Elba, had colonies at St. Jean d'Acre and Constantinople, and their
merchants in those cities carried on the most extended commerce with the
Saracens and Greeks." [1]
[Footnote 1: Sismondi; French translation, Brussels, 1838; vol. ii., p.
275.]
66. "And in that time," (I now give you my own translation of Giovanni
Villani,) "the citizens of Florence lived sober, and on coarse meats,
and at little cost; and had many customs and playfulnesses which were
blunt and rude; and they dressed themselves and their wives with coarse
cloth; many wore merely skins, with no lining, and _all_ had only
leathern buskins; [1] and the Florentine ladies, plain shoes and
stockings with no ornaments; and the best of them were content with
a close gown of coarse scarlet of Cyprus, or camlet girded with an
old-fashioned clasp-girdle; and a mantle over all, lined with vaire,
with a hood above; and that, they threw over their heads. The women of
lower rank were dressed in the same manner, with coarse green Cambray
cloth; fifty pounds was the ordinary bride's dowry, and a hundred or
a hundred and fifty would in those times have been held brilliant,
('isfolgorata,' dazzling, with sense of dissipation or extravagance;)
and most maidens were twenty or more before they married. Of such gross
customs were then the Florentines; but of good faith, and loyal among
themselves and in their state; and in their coarse life, and poverty,
did more and braver things than are done in our days with more
refinement and riches."
[Footnote 1: I find this note for expansion on the margin of my lecture,
but had no time to work it out:--'This lower class should be either
barefoot, or have strong shoes--wooden clogs good. Pretty Boulogne
sabot with purple stockings. Waterloo Road--little girl with her hair
in curlpapers,--a coral necklace round her neck--the neck bare--and her
boots of thin stuff, worn out, with her toes coming through, and rags
hanging from her heels,--a profoundly accurate type of English national
and political life. Your hair in curlpapers--borrowing tongs from every
foreign nation, to pinch you into manners. The rich ostentatiously
wearing coral about the bare neck; and the poor--cold as the stones and
indecent.']
67. I detain you a moment at the words "scarlet of Cyprus, or camlet."
Observe that camelot (camelet) from _kamaelotae_, camel's skin, is a
stuff made of silk and camel's hair originally, afterwards of silk and
wool. At Florence, the camel's hair would always have reference to the
Baptist, who, as you know, in Lippi's picture, wears the camel's
skin itself, made into a Florentine dress, such as Villani has just
described, "col tassello sopra," with the hood above. Do you see how
important the word "Capulet" is becoming to us, in its main idea?
68. Not in private nor domestic art, therefore, I repeat to you, but
in useful magnificence of public art, these citizens expressed their
pride:--and that public art divided itself into two branches--civil,
occupied upon ethic subjects of sculpture and painting; and religious,
occupied upon scriptural or traditional histories, in treatment of
which, nevertheless, the nascent power and liberality of thought were
apparent, not only in continual amplification and illustration of
scriptural story by the artist's own invention, but in the acceptance
of profane mythology, as part of the Scripture, or tradition, given by
Divine inspiration.
69. Nevertheless, for the provision of things necessary in domestic
life, there developed itself, together with the group of inventive
artists exercising these nobler functions, a vast body of craftsmen,
and, literally, _man_ufacturers, workers by hand, who associated
themselves, as chance, tradition, or the accessibility of material
directed, in towns which thenceforward occupied a leading position in
commerce, as producers of a staple of excellent, or perhaps inimitable,
quality; and the linen or cambric of Cambray, the lace of Mechlin,
the wool of Worstead, and the steel of Milan, implied the tranquil and
hereditary skill of multitudes, living in wealthy industry, and humble
honour.
70. Among these artisans, the weaver, the ironsmith, the goldsmith, the
carpenter, and the mason necessarily took the principal rank, and on
their occupations the more refined arts were wholesomely based, so that
the five businesses may be more completely expressed thus:
The weaver and embroiderer,
The ironsmith and armourer,
The goldsmith and jeweller,
The carpenter and engineer,
The stonecutter and painter.
You have only once to turn over the leaves of Lionardo's sketch book,
in the Ambrosian Library, to see how carpentry is connected with
engineering,--the architect was always a stonecutter, and the
stonecutter not often practically separate, as yet, from the painter,
and never so in general conception of function. You recollect, at a much
later period, Kent's description of Cornwall's steward:
"KENT. You cowardly rascal!--nature disclaims in thee, a tailor made
thee!
CORNWALL. Thou art a strange fellow--a tailor make a man?
KENT. Ay, sir; a stonecutter, or a painter, could not have made him so
ill; though they had been but two hours at the trade."
71. You may consider then this group of artizans with the merchants, as
now forming in each town an important Tiers Etat, or Third State of
the people, occupied in service, first, of the ecclesiastics, who
in monastic bodies inhabited the cloisters round each church; and,
secondly, of the knights, who, with their retainers, occupied, each
family their own fort, in allied defence of their appertaining streets.
72. A Third Estate, indeed; but adverse alike to both the others, to
Montague as to Capulet, when they become disturbers of the public peace;
and having a pride of its own,--hereditary still, but consisting in
the inheritance of skill and knowledge rather than of blood,--which
expressed the sense of such inheritance by taking its name habitually
from the master rather than the sire; and which, in its natural
antagonism to dignities won only by violence, or recorded only by
heraldry, you may think of generally as the race whose bearing is the
Apron, instead of the shield.
73. When, however, these two, or in perfect subdivision three, bodies
of men, lived in harmony,--the knights remaining true to the State, the
clergy to their faith, and the workmen to their craft,--conditions of
national force were arrived at, under which all the great art of the
middle ages was accomplished. The pride of the knights, the avarice of
the priests, and the gradual abasement of character in the craftsman,
changing him from a citizen able to wield either tools in peace or
weapons in war, to a dull tradesman, forced to pay mercenary troops to
defend his shop door, are the direct causes of common ruin towards the
close of the sixteenth century.
74. But the deep underlying cause of the decline in national character
itself, was the exhaustion of the Christian faith. None of its practical
claims were avouched either by reason or experience; and the imagination
grew weary of sustaining them in despite of both. Men could not, as
their powers of reflection became developed, steadily conceive that the
sins of a life might be done away with, by finishing it with Mary's name
on the lips; nor could tradition of miracle for ever resist the personal
discovery, made by each rude disciple by himself, that he might pray to
all the saints for a twelvemonth together, and yet not get what he asked
for.
75. The Reformation succeeded in proclaiming that existing Christianity
was a lie; but substituted no theory of it which could be more
rationally or credibly sustained; and ever since, the religion of
educated persons throughout Europe has been dishonest or ineffectual;
it is only among the labouring peasantry that the grace of a pure
Catholicism, and the patient simplicities of the Puritan, maintain their
imaginative dignity, or assert their practical use.
76. The existence of the nobler arts, however, involves the
harmonious life and vital faith of the three classes whom we have
just distinguished; and that condition exists, more or less disturbed,
indeed, by the vices inherent in each class, yet, on the whole,
energetically and productively, during the twelfth, thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. But our present subject being
Architecture only, I will limit your attention altogether to the state
of society in the great age of architecture, the thirteenth century.
A great age in all ways; but most notably so in the correspondence
it presented, up to a just and honourable point, with the utilitarian
energy of our own days.
77. The increase of wealth, the safety of industry, and the conception
of more convenient furniture of life, to which we must attribute the
rise of the entire artist class, were accompanied, in that century, by
much enlargement in the conception of useful public works: and--not by
_private_ enterprise,--that idle persons might get dividends out of the
public pocket,--but by _public_ enterprise,--each citizen paying down
at once his share of what was necessary to accomplish the benefit to the
State,--great architectural and engineering efforts were made for
the common service. Common, observe; but not, in our present sense,
republican. One of the most ludicrous sentences ever written in the
blindness of party spirit is that of Sismondi, in which he declares,
thinking of these public works only, that 'the architecture of the
thirteenth century is entirely republican.' The architecture of
the thirteenth century is, in the mass of it, simply baronial or
ecclesiastical; it is of castles, palaces, or churches; but it is true
that splendid civic works were also accomplished by the vigour of the
newly risen popular power.
"The canal named Naviglio Graude, which brings the waters of the Ticino
to Milan, traversing a distance of thirty miles, was undertaken in 1179,
recommended in 1257, and, soon after, happily terminated; in it still
consists the wealth of a vast extent of Lombardy. At the same time the
town of Milan rebuilt its walls, which were three miles round, and
had sixteen marble gates, of magnificence which might have graced the
capital of all Italy. The Genovese, in 1276 and 1283, built their two
splendid docks, and the great wall of their quay; and in 1295 finished
the noble aqueduct which brings pure and abundant waters to their city
from a great distance among their mountains. There is not a single town
in Italy which at the same time did not undertake works of this kind;
and while these larger undertakings were in progress, stone bridges were
built across the rivers, the streets and piazzas were paved with
large slabs of stone, and every free government recognized the duty of
providing for the convenience of the citizens." [1]
[Footnote 1: Simondi, vol ii. chap. 10.]
78. The necessary consequence of this enthusiasm in useful building, was
the formation of a vast body of craftsmen and architects; corresponding
in importance to that which the railway, with its associated industry,
has developed in modern times, but entirely different in personal
character, and relation to the body politic.
Their personal character was founded on the accurate knowledge of their
business in all respects; the ease and pleasure of unaffected invention;
and the true sense of power to do everything better than it had ever
been yet done, coupled with general contentment in life, and in its
vigour and skill.
It is impossible to overrate the difference between such a condition
of mind, and that of the modern artist, who either does not know his
business at all, or knows it only to recognize his own inferiority to
every former workman of distinction.
79. Again: the political relation of these artificers to the State was
that of a caste entirely separate from the noblesse; [1] paid for their
daily work what was just, and competing with each other to supply the
best article they could for the money. And it is, again, impossible to
overrate the difference between such a social condition, and that of the
artists of to-day, struggling to occupy a position of equality in wealth
with the noblesse,--paid irregular and monstrous prices by an entirely
ignorant and selfish public; and competing with each other to supply the
worst article they can for the money.
[Footnote 1: The giving of knighthood to Jacopo della Quercia for his
lifelong service to Siena was not the elevation of a dexterous workman,
but grace to a faithful citizen.]
I never saw anything so impudent on the walls of any exhibition, in
any country, as last year in London. It was a daub professing to be a
"harmony in pink and white" (or some such nonsense;) absolute rubbish,
and which had taken about a quarter of an hour to scrawl or daub--it
had no pretence to be called painting. The price asked for it was two
hundred and fifty guineas.
80. In order to complete your broad view of the elements of social
power in the thirteenth century, you have now farther to understand the
position of the country people, who maintained by their labour these
three classes, whose action you can discern, and whose history you can
read; while, of those who maintained them, there is no history,
except of the annual ravage of their fields by contending cities or
nobles;--and, finally, that of the higher body of merchants, whose
influence was already beginning to counterpoise the prestige of noblesse
in Florence, and who themselves constituted no small portion of the
noblesse of Venice.
The food-producing country was for the most part still possessed by
the nobles; some by the ecclesiastics; but a portion, I do not know how
large, was in the hands of peasant proprietors, of whom Sismondi gives
this, to my mind, completely pleasant and satisfactory, though, to his,
very painful, account:--
"They took no interest in public affairs; they had assemblies of their
commune at the village in which the church of their parish was situated,
and to which they retreated to defend themselves in case of war; they
had also magistrates of their own choice; but all their interests
appeared to them enclosed in the circle of their own commonality; they
did not meddle with general politics, and held it for their point of
honour to remain faithful, through all revolutions, to the State of
which they formed a part, obeying, without hesitation, its chiefs,
whoever they were, and by whatever title they occupied their places."
81. Of the inferior agricultural labourers, employed on the farms of the
nobles and richer ecclesiastics, I find nowhere due notice, nor does any
historian seriously examine their manner of life. Liable to every form
of robbery and oppression, I yet regard their state as not only morally
but physically happier than that of riotous soldiery, or the lower class
of artizans, and as the safeguard of every civilized nation, through
all its worst vicissitudes of folly and crime. Nature has mercifully
appointed that seed must be sown, and sheep folded, whatever lances
break, or religions fail; and at this hour, while the streets of
Florence and Verona are full of idle politicians, loud of tongue,
useless of hand and treacherous of heart, there still may be seen in
their market-places, standing, each by his heap of pulse or maize, the
grey-haired labourers, silent, serviceable, honourable, keeping faith,
untouched by change, to their country and to Heaven. [1]
[Footnote 1: Compare "Sesame and Lilies," sec. 38, p. 58. (P. 86 of the
small edition of 1882.)]
82. It is extremely difficult to determine in what degree the feelings
or intelligence of this class influenced the architectural design of the
thirteenth century;--how far afield the cathedral tower was intended
to give delight, and to what simplicity of rustic conception Quercia or
Ghiberti appealed by the fascination of their Scripture history. You may
at least conceive, at this date, a healthy animation in all men's minds,
and the children of the vineyard and sheepcote crowding the city on its
festa days, and receiving impulse to busier, if not nobler, education,
in its splendour. [1]
[Footnote 1: Of detached abbeys, see note on Education of Joan of Arc,
"Sesame and Lilies," sec. 82, p. 106. (P. 158 of the small edition of
1882.)]
83. The great class of the merchants is more difficult to define; but
you may regard them generally as the examples of whatever modes of life
might be consistent with peace and justice, in the economy of transfer,
as opposed to the military license of pillage.
They represent the gradual ascendancy of foresight, prudence, and order
in society, and the first ideas of advantageous national intercourse.
Their body is therefore composed of the most intelligent and temperate
natures of the time,--uniting themselves, not directly for the purpose
of making money, but to obtain stability for equal institutions,
security of property, and pacific relations with neighbouring states.
Their guilds form the only representatives of true national
council, unaffected, as the landed proprietors were, by merely local
circumstances and accidents.
84. The strength of this order, when its own conduct was upright, and
its opposition to the military body was not in avaricious cowardice,
but in the resolve to compel justice and to secure peace, can only
be understood by you after an examination of the great changes in the
government of Florence during the thirteenth century, which, among other
minor achievements interesting to us, led to that destruction of the
Tower of the Death-watch, so ingeniously accomplished by Niccola Pisano.
This change, and its results, will be the subject of my next lecture.
I must to-day sum, and in some farther degree make clear, the facts
already laid before you.
85. We have seen that the inhabitants of every great Italian state may
be divided, and that very stringently, into the five classes of knights,
priests, merchants, artists, and peasants. No distinction exists between
artist and artizan, except that of higher genius or better conduct; the
best artist is assuredly also the best artizan; and the simplest workman
uses his invention and emotion as well as his fingers. The entire body
of artists is under the orders (as shopmen are under the orders of their
customers), of the knights, priests, and merchants,--the knights for the
most part demanding only fine goldsmiths' work, stout armour, and rude
architecture; the priests commanding both the finest architecture
and painting, and the richest kinds of decorative dress and
jewellery,--while the merchants directed works of public use, and were
the best judges of artistic skill. The competition for the Baptistery
gates of Florence is before the guild of merchants; nor is their award
disputed, even in thought, by any of the candidates.
86. This is surely a fact to be taken much to heart by our present
communities of Liverpool and Manchester. They probably suppose, in their
modesty, that lords and clergymen are the proper judges of art, and
merchants can only, in the modern phrase, 'know what they like,' or
follow humbly the guidance of their golden-crested or flat-capped
superiors. But in the great ages of art, neither knight nor pope shows
signs of true power of criticism. The artists crouch before them, or
quarrel with them, according to their own tempers. To the merchants they
submit silently, as to just and capable judges. And look what men these
are, who submit. Donatello, Ghiberti, Quercia, Luca! If men like these
submit to the merchant, who shall rebel?
87. But the still franker, and surer, judgment of innocent pleasure was
awarded them by all classes alike: and the interest of the public was
the _final _rule of right,--that public being always eager to see, and
earnest to learn. For the stories told by their artists formed, they
fully believed, a Book of Life; and every man of real genius took up his
function of illustrating the scheme of human morality and salvation,
as naturally, and faithfully, as an English mother of to-day giving her
children their first lessons in the Bible. In this endeavour to teach
they almost unawares taught themselves; the question "How shall I
represent this most clearly?" became to themselves, presently, "How was
this most likely to have happened?" and habits of fresh and accurate
thought thus quickly enlivened the formalities of the Greek pictorial
theology; formalities themselves beneficent, because restraining by
their severity and mystery the wantonness of the newer life. Foolish
modern critics have seen nothing in the Byzantine school but a
barbarism to be conquered and forgotten. But that school brought to the
art-scholars of the thirteenth century, laws which had been serviceable
to Phidias, and symbols which had been beautiful to Homer: and methods
and habits of pictorial scholarship which gave a refinement of manner
to the work of the simplest craftsman, and became an education to
the higher artists which no discipline of literature can now bestow,
developed themselves in the effort to decipher, and the impulse to
re-interpret, the Eleusinian divinity of Byzantine tradition.
88. The words I have just used, "pictorial scholarship," and "pictorial
theology," remind me how strange it must appear to you that in this
sketch of the intellectual state of Italy in the thirteenth century I
have taken no note of literature itself, nor of the fine art of Music
with which it was associated in minstrelsy. The corruption of the
meaning of the word "clerk," from "a chosen person" to "a learned one,"
partly indicates the position of literature in the war between the
golden crest and scarlet cap; but in the higher ranks, literature and
music became the grace of the noble's life, or the occupation of the
monk's, without forming any separate class, or exercising any
materially visible political power. Masons or butchers might establish
a government,--but never troubadours: and though a good knight held his
education to be imperfect unless he could write a sonnet and sing it,
he did not esteem his castle to be at the mercy of the "editor" of a
manuscript. He might indeed owe his life to the fidelity of a minstrel,
or be guided in his policy by the wit of a clown; but he was not the
slave of sensual music, or vulgar literature, and never allowed his
Saturday reviewer to appear at table without the cock's comb.
89. On the other hand, what was noblest in thought or saying was in
those times as little attended to as it is now. I do not feel sure that,
even in after times, the poem of Dante has had any political effect
on Italy; but at all events, in his life, even at Verona, where he was
treated most kindly, he had not half so much influence with Can Grande
as the rough Count of Castelbarco, not one of whose words was ever
written, or now remains; and whose portrait, by no means that of a man
of literary genius, almost disfigures, by its plainness, the otherwise
grave and perfect beauty of his tomb.
LECTURE IV.
PARTED PER PALE.
90. The chart of Italian intellect and policy which I have endeavoured
to put into form in the last three lectures, may, I hope, have given you
a clear idea of the subordinate, yet partly antagonistic, position
which the artist, or merchant,--whom in my present lecture I shall class
together,--occupied, with respect to the noble and priest. As an honest
labourer, he was opposed to the violence of pillage, and to the folly
of pride: as an honest thinker, he was likely to discover any
latent absurdity in the stories he had to represent in their nearest
likelihood; and to be himself moved strongly by the true meaning of
events which he was striving to make ocularly manifest. The painter
terrified himself with his own fiends, and reproved or comforted himself
by the lips of his own saints, far more profoundly than any verbal
preacher; and thus, whether as craftsman or inventor, was likely to
be foremost in defending the laws of his city, or directing its
reformation.
91. The contest of the craftsman with the pillaging soldier is typically
represented by the war of the Lombard League with Frederick II.; and
that of the craftsman with the hypocritical priest, by the war of the
Pisans with Gregory IX. (1241). But in the present lecture I wish only
to fix your attention on the revolutions in Florence, which indicated,
thus early, the already established ascendancy of the moral forces which
were to put an end to open robber-soldiership; and at least to compel
the assertion of some higher principle in war, if not, as in some
distant day may be possible, the cessation of war itself.
The most important of these revolutions was virtually that of which I
before spoke to you, taking place in mid-thirteenth century, in the
year l250,--a very memorable one for Christendom, and the very crisis of
vital change in its methods of economy, and conceptions of art.
92. Observe, first, the exact relations at that time of Christian and
Profane Chivalry. St. Louis, in the winter of 1248-9, lay in the isle
of Cyprus, with his crusading army. He had trusted to Providence for
provisions; and his army was starving. The profane German emperor,
Frederick II., was at war with Venice, but gave a safe-conduct to the
Venetian ships, which enabled them to carry food to Cyprus, and to
save St. Louis and his crusaders. Frederick had been for half his life
excommunicate,--and the Pope (Innocent IV.) at deadly spiritual and
temporal war with him;--spiritually, because he had brought Saracens
into Apulia; temporally, because the Pope wanted Apulia for himself.
St. Louis and his mother both wrote to Innocent, praying him to be
reconciled to the kind heretic who had saved the whole crusading army.
But the Pope remained implacably thundrous; and Frederick, weary of
quarrel, stayed quiet in one of his Apulian castles for a year.
The repose of infidelity is seldom cheerful, unless it be criminal.
Frederick had much to repent of, much to regret, nothing to hope,
and nothing to do. At the end of his year's quiet he was attacked by
dysentery, and so made his final peace with the Pope, and heaven,--aged
fifty-six.
93. Meantime St. Louis had gone on into Egypt, had got his army
defeated, his brother killed, and himself carried captive. You may be
interested in seeing, in the leaf of his psalter which I have laid on
the table, the death of that brother set down in golden letters, between
the common letters of ultramarine, on the eighth of February.
94. Providence, defied by Frederick, and trusted in by St. Louis, made
such arrangements for them both; Providence not in anywise regarding the
opinions of either king, but very much regarding the facts, that the one
had no business in Egypt, nor the other in Apulia.
No two kings, in the history of the world, could have been happier, or
more useful, than these two might have been, if they only had had the
sense to stay in their own capitals, and attend to their own affairs.
But they seem only to have been born to show what grievous results,
under the power of discontented imagination, a Christian could achieve
by faith, and a philosopher by reason. [1]
[Footnote 1: It must not be thought that this is said in disregard of
the nobleness of either of these two glorious Kings. Among the many
designs of past years, one of my favorites was to write a life of
Frederick II. But I hope that both his, and that of Henry II. of
England, will soon be written now, by a man who loves them as well as I
do, and knows them far better.]
95. The death of Frederick II. virtually ended the soldier power
in Florence; and the mercantile power assumed the authority it
thenceforward held, until, in the hands of the Medici, it destroyed the
city.
We will now trace the course and effects of the three revolutions which
closed the reign of War, and crowned the power of Peace.
96. In the year 1248, while St. Louis was in Cyprus, I told you
Frederick was at war with Venice. He was so because she stood, if not
as the leader, at least as the most important ally, of the great Lombard
mercantile league against the German military power.
That league consisted essentially of Venice, Milan, Bologna, and Genoa,
in alliance with the Pope; the Imperial or Ghibelline towns were, Padua
and Verona under Ezzelin; Mantua, Pisa, and Siena. I do not name the
minor towns of north Italy which associated themselves with each party:
get only the main localities of the contest well into your minds. It
was all concentrated in the furious hostility of Genoa and Pisa; Genoa
fighting really very piously for the Pope, as well as for herself; Pisa
for her own hand, and for the Emperor as much as suited her. The mad
little sea falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing,
but she must hawk at it; and as an ally of the Emperor, balanced Venice
and Genoa with her single strength. And so it came to pass that the
victory of either the Guelph or Ghibelline party depended on the final
action of Florence.
97. Florence meanwhile was fighting with herself, for her own amusement.
She was nominally at the head of the Guelphic League in Tuscany; but
this only meant that she hated Siena and Pisa, her southern and western
neighbours. She had never declared openly against the Emperor. On the
contrary, she always recognized his authority, in an imaginative manner,
as representing that of the Caesars. She spent her own energy chiefly in
street-fighting,--the death of Buondelmonti in 1215 having been the root
of a series of quarrels among her nobles which gradually took the form
of contests of honour; and were a kind of accidental tournaments, fought
to the death, because they could not be exciting or dignified enough on
any other condition. And thus the manner of life came to be customary,
which you have accurately, with its consequences, pictured by
Shakspeare. Samson bites his thumb at Abraham, and presently the streets
are impassable in battle. The quarrel in the Canongate between the
Leslies and Seytons, in Scott's 'Abbot,' represents the same temper; and
marks also, what Shakspeare did not so distinctly, because it would have
interfered with the domestic character of his play, the connection of
these private quarrels with political divisions which paralyzed the
entire body of the State.--Yet these political schisms, in the earlier
days of Italy, never reached the bitterness of Scottish feud, [1]
because they were never so sincere. Protestant and Catholic Scotsmen
faithfully believed each other to be servants of the devil; but the
Guelph and Ghibelline of Florence each respected, in the other, the
fidelity to the Emperor, or piety towards the Pope, which he found it
convenient, for the time, to dispense with in his own person. The street
fighting was therefore more general, more chivalric, more good-humoured;
a word of offence set all the noblesse of the town on fire; every one
rallied to his post; fighting began at once in half a dozen places of
recognized convenience, but ended in the evening; and, on the following
day, the leaders determined in contended truce who had fought best,
buried their dead triumphantly, and better fortified any weak points,
which the events of the previous day had exposed at their palace
corners. Florentine dispute was apt to centre itself about the gate of
St. Peter, [2] the tower of the cathedral, or the fortress-palace of the
Uberti, (the family of Dante's Bellincion Berti and of Farinata), which
occupied the site of the present Palazzo Vecchio. But the streets of
Siena seem to have afforded better barricade practice. They are as steep
as they are narrow--extremely both; and the projecting stones on their
palace fronts, which were left, in building, to sustain, on occasion,
the barricade beams across the streets, are to this day important
features in their architecture.
[Footnote 1: Distinguish always the personal from the religious feud;
personal feud is more treacherous and violent in Italy than in Scotland;
but not the political or religious feud, unless involved with vast
material interests.]
[Footnote 2: Sismondi, vol. ii., chap. ii.; G. Villani, vi., 33.]
98. Such being the general state of matters in Florence, in this year
1248, Frederick writes to the Uberti, who headed the Ghibellines,
to engage them in serious effort to bring the city distinctly to
the Imperial side. He was besieging Parma; and sent his natural son,
Frederick, king of Antioch, with sixteen hundred German knights, to give
the Ghibellines assured preponderance in the next quarrel.
The Uberti took arms before their arrival; rallied all their Ghibelline
friends into a united body, and so attacked and carried the Guelph
barricades, one by one, till their antagonists, driven together by local
defeat, stood in consistency as complete as their own, by the gate
of St. Peter, 'Scheraggio.' Young Frederick, with his German riders,
arrived at this crisis; the Ghibellines opening the gates to him; the
Guelphs, nevertheless, fought at their outmost barricade for four days
more; but at last, tired, withdrew from the city, in a body, on the
night of Candlemas, 2nd February, 1248; leaving the Ghibellines and
their German friends to work their pleasure,--who immediately
set themselves to throw down the Guelph palaces, and destroyed
six-and-thirty of them, towers and all, with the good help of Niccola
Pisano,--for this is the occasion of that beautiful piece of new
engineering of his.
99. It is the first interference of the Germans in Florentine affairs
which belongs to the real cycle of modern history. Six hundred years
later, a troop of German riders entered Florence again, to restore its
Grand Duke; and our warmhearted and loving English poetess, looking on
from Casa Guidi windows, gives the said Germans many hard words, and
thinks her darling Florentines entirely innocent in the matter. But if
she had had clear eyes, (yeux de lin [1] the Romance of the Rose calls
them,) she would have seen that white-coated cavalry with its heavy guns
to be nothing more than the rear-guard of young Frederick of Antioch;
and that Florence's own Ghibellines had opened her gates to them.
Destiny little regards cost of time; she does her justice at that
telescopic distance just as easily and accurately as close at hand.
[Footnote 1: Lynx.]
100. "Frederick of _Antioch_." Note the titular coincidence. The
disciples were called Christians first in Antioch; here we have our
lieutenant of Antichrist also named from that town. The anti-Christian
Germans got into Florence upon Sunday morning; the Guelphs fought on
till Wednesday, which was Candlemas;--the Tower of the Death-watch was
thrown down next day. It was so called because it stood on the Piazza of
St John; and all dying people in Florence called on St. John for help;
and looked, if it might be, to the top of this highest and best-built of
towers. The wicked anti-Christian Ghibellines, Nicholas of Pisa helping,
cut the side of it "so that the tower might fall on the Baptistery. But
as it pleased God, for better reverencing of the blessed St. John, the
tower, which was a hundred and eighty feet high, as it was coming down,
plainly appeared to eschew the holy church, and turned aside, and fell
right across the square; at which all the Florentines marvelled, (pious
or impious,) and the _people_ (anti-Ghibelline) were greatly delighted."
101. I have no doubt that this story is apocryphal, not only in its
attribution of these religious scruples to the falling tower; but in
its accusation of the Ghibellines as having definitely intended the
destruction of the Baptistery. It is only modern reformers who feel the
absolute need of enforcing their religious opinions in so practical a
manner. Such a piece of sacrilege would have been revolting to Farinata;
how much more to the group of Florentines whose temper is centrally
represented by Dante's, to all of whom their "bel San Giovanni" was
dear, at least for its beauty, if not for its sanctity. And Niccola
himself was too good a workman to become the instrument of the
destruction of so noble a work,--not to insist on the extreme
probability that he was also too good an engineer to have had his
purpose, if once fixed, thwarted by any tenderness in the conscience of
the collapsing tower. The tradition itself probably arose after the
rage of the exiled Ghibellines had half consented to the destruction,
on political grounds, of Florence itself; but the form it took is of
extreme historical value, indicating thus early at least the suspected
existence of passions like those of the Cromwellian or Garibaldian
soldiery in the Florentine noble; and the distinct character of the
Ghibelline party as not only anti-Papal, but profane.
102. Upon the castles, and the persons of their antagonists, however,
the pride, or fear, of the Ghibellines had little mercy; and in their
day of triumph they provoked against themselves nearly every rational as
well as religious person in the commonwealth. They despised too much the
force of the newly-risen popular power, founded on economy, sobriety,
and common sense; and, alike by impertinence and pillage, increased the
irritation of the civil body; until, as aforesaid, on the 20th October,
1250, all the rich burgesses of Florence took arms; met in the square
before the church of Santa Croce, ("where," says Sismondi, "the republic
of the dead is still assembled today,") thence traversed the city to the
palace of the Ghibelline podesta; forced him to resign; named Uberto of
Lucca in his place, under the title of Captain of the People; divided
themselves into twenty companies, each, in its own district of the city,
having its captain [1] and standard; and elected a council of twelve
ancients, constituting a seniory or signoria, to deliberate on and
direct public affairs.
[Footnote 1: 'Corporal,' literally'.]
103. What a perfectly beautiful republican movement! thinks Sismondi,
seeing, in all this, nothing but the energy of a multitude; and entirely
ignoring the peculiar capacity of this Florentine mob,--capacity of two
virtues, much forgotten by modern republicanism,--order, namely; and
obedience; together with the peculiar instinct of this Florentine
multitude, which not only felt itself to need captains, but knew where
to find them.
104. Hubert of Lucca--How came they, think you, to choose _him _out of
a stranger city, and that a poorer one than their own? Was there no
Florentine then, of all this rich and eager crowd, who was fit to govern
Florence?
I cannot find any account of this Hubert, Bright mind, of Ducca; Villani
says simply of him, "Fu il primo capitano di Firenze."
They hung a bell for him in the Campanile of the Lion, and gave him
the flag of Florence to bear; and before the day was over, that 20th
of October, he had given every one of the twenty companies their flags
also. And the bearings of the said gonfalons were these. I will give you
this heraldry as far as I can make it out from Villani; it will be very
useful to us afterwards; I leave the Italian when I cannot translate
it:--
105. A. Sesto, (sixth part of the city,) of the other side of Arno.
Gonfalon 1. Gules; a ladder, argent.
2. Argent; a scourge, sable.
3. Azure; (una piazza bianca con
nicchi vermigli).
4. Gules; a dragon, vert.
B. Sesto of St. Peter Scheraggio.
1. Azure; a chariot, or.
2. Or; a bull, sable.
3. Argent; a lion rampant, sable.
4. (A lively piece, "pezza gagliarda")
Barry of (how many?) pieces,
argent and sable.
You may as well note at once of this kind of bearing, called 'gagliarda'
by Villani, that these groups of piles, pales, bends, and bars, were
called in English heraldry 'Restrial bearings,' "in respect of their
strength and solid substance, which is able to abide the stresse and
force of any triall they shall be put unto." [1] And also that, the
number of bars being uncertain, I assume the bearing to be 'barry,' that
is, having an even number of bars; had it been odd, as of seven bars, it
should have been blazoned, argent; three bars, sable; or, if so divided,
sable, three bars argent.
[Footnote 1: Guillim, sect. ii., chap. 3.]
This lively bearing was St. Pulinari's.
C. Sesto of Borgo.
1. Or; a viper, vert.
2. Argent; a needle, (?) (aguglia)
sable.
3. Vert; a horse unbridled;
draped, argent, a cross,
gules.
D. Sesto of St. Brancazio.
1. Vert; a lion rampant, proper.
2. Argent; a lion rampant, gules.
3. Azure; a lion rampant, argent.
E. Sesto of the Cathedral gates.
1. Azure; a lion (passant?) or.
2. Or; a dragon, vert.
3. Argent; a lion rampant,
azure, crowned, or.
F. Sesto of St. Peter's gates.
1. Or; two keys, gules.
2. An Italian (or more definitely
a Greek and Etruscan bearing;
I do not know how to
blazon it;) concentric bands,
argent and sable. This is
one of the remains of the
Greek expressions of storm;
hail, or the Trinacrian limbs,
being put on the giant's
shields also. It is connected
besides with the Cretan
labyrinth, and the circles of
the Inferno.
3. Parted per fesse, gules and
vai (I don't know if vai
means grey--not a proper
heraldic colour--or vaire).
106. Of course Hubert of Lucca did not determine these bearings, but
took them as he found them, and appointed them for standards; [1] he did
the same for all the country parishes, and ordered them to come into
the city at need. "And in this manner the old people of Florence ordered
itself; and for more strength of the people, they ordered and began to
build the palace which is behind the Badia,--that is to say, the one
which is of dressed stone, with the tower; for before there was no
palace of the commune in Florence, but the signory abode sometimes in
one part of the town, sometimes in another.
[Footnote 1: We will examine afterwards the heraldry of the trades,
chap, xi., Villani.]
107. "And as the people had now taken state and signory on themselves,
they ordered, for greater strength of the people, that all the towers of
Florence--and there were many 180 feet high [1]--should be cut down to
75 feet, and no more; and so it was done, and with the stones of them
they walled the city on the other side Arno."
[Footnote: 120 braccia.]
108. That last sentence is a significant one. Here is the central
expression of the true burgess or townsman temper,--resolute maintenance
of fortified peace. These are the walls which modern republicanism
throws down, to make boulevards over their ruins.
109. Such new order being taken, Florence remained quiet for full two
months. On the 13th of December, in the same year, died the Emperor
Frederick II.; news of his death did not reach Florence till the 7th
January, 1251. It had chanced, according to Villani, that on the actual
day of his death, his Florentine vice-regent, Rinieri of Montemerlo, was
killed by a piece of the vaulting [1] of his room falling on him as he
slept. And when the people heard of the Emperor's death, "which was most
useful and needful for Holy Church, and for our commune," they took
the fall of the roof on his lieutenant as an omen of the extinction
of Imperial authority, and resolved to bring home all their Guelphic
exiles, and that the Ghibellines should be forced to make peace with
them. Which was done, and the peace really lasted for full six months;
when, a quarrel chancing with Ghibelline Pistoja, the Florentines, under
a Milanese podesta, fought their first properly communal and commercial
battle, with great slaughter of Pistojese. Naturally enough, but very
unwisely, the Florentine Ghibellines declined to take part in this
battle; whereupon the people, returning flushed with victory, drove them
all out, and established pure Guelph government in Florence, changing at
the same time the flag of the city from gules, a lily argent, to argent,
a lily gules; but the most ancient bearing of all, simply parted
per pale, argent and gules, remained always on their carroccio of
battle,--"Non si muto mai."
[Footnote 1: "Una volta ch' era sopra la camera."]
110. "Non si muto mai." Villani did not know how true his words were.
That old shield of Florence, parted per pale, argent and gules, (or
our own Saxon Oswald's, parted per pale, or and purpure,) are heraldry
changeless in sign; declaring the necessary balance, in ruling men, of
the Rational and Imaginative powers; pure Alp, and glowing cloud.
Church and State--Pope and Emperor--Clergy and Laity,--all these are
partial, accidental--too often, criminal--oppositions; but the bodily
and spiritual elements, seemingly adverse, remain in everlasting
harmony,
Not less the new bearing of the shield, the red fleur-de-lys, has
another meaning. It is red, not as ecclesiastical, but as free. Not of
Guelph against Ghibelline, but of Labourer against Knight. No more his
serf, but his minister. His duty no more 'servitium,' but 'ministerium,'
'mestier.' We learn the power of word after word, as of sign after sign,
as we follow the traces of this nascent art. I have sketched for you
this lily from the base of the tower of Giotto. You may judge by the
subjects of the sculpture beside it that it was built just in this fit
of commercial triumph; for all the outer bas-reliefs are of trades.
111. Draw that red lily then, and fix it in your minds as the sign
of the great change in the temper of Florence, and in her laws, in
mid-thirteenth century; and remember also, when you go to Florence and
see that mighty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio (noble still, in spite of
the calamitous and accursed restorations which have smoothed its
rugged outline, and effaced with modern vulgarisms its lovely
sculpture)--terminating the shadowy perspectives of the Uffizii, or
dominant over the city seen from Fésole or Bellosguardo,--that, as the
tower of Giotto is the notablest monument in the world of the Religion
of Europe, so, on this tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, first shook
itself to the winds the Lily standard of her liberal,--because
honest,--commerce.
LECTURE V.
PAX VOBISCUM.
112. My last lecture ended with a sentence which I thought, myself,
rather pretty, and quite fit for a popular newspaper, about the 'lily
standard of liberal commerce.' But it might occur, and I hope did occur,
to some of you, that it would have been more appropriate if the lily had
changed colour the other way, from red to white, (instead of white to
red,) as a sign of a pacific constitution and kindly national purpose.
113. I believe otherwise, however; and although the change itself was
for the sake of change merely, you may see in it, I think, one of the
historical coincidences which contain true instruction for us.
Quite one of the chiefest art-mistakes and stupidities of men has been
their tendency to dress soldiers in red clothes, and monks, or pacific
persons, in black, white, or grey ones. At least half of that mental
bias of young people, which sustains the wickedness of war among us
at this day, is owing to the prettiness of uniforms. Make all Hussars
black, all Guards black, all troops of the line black; dress officers
and men, alike, as you would public executioners; and the number of
candidates for commissions will be greatly diminished. Habitually, on
the contrary, you dress these destructive rustics and their officers in
scarlet and gold, but give your productive rustics no costume of honour
or beauty; you give your peaceful student a costume which he tucks up
to his waist, because he is ashamed of it; and dress your pious rectors,
and your sisters of charity, in black, as if it were _their_ trade
instead of the soldier's to send people to hell, and their own destiny
to arrive there.
114. But the investiture of the lily of Florence with scarlet is a
symbol,--unintentional, observe, but not the less notable,--of the
recovery of human sense and intelligence in this matter. The reign of
war was past; this was the sign of it;--the red glow, not now of the
Towers of Dis, but of the Carita, "che appena fora dentro al fuoco
nota." And a day is coming, be assured, when the kings of Europe will
dress their peaceful troops beautifully; will clothe their peasant girls
"in scarlet, with other delights," and "put on ornaments of gold upon
_their_ apparel;" when the crocus and the lily will not be the only
living things dressed daintily in our land, and the glory of the wisest
monarchs be indeed, in that their people, like themselves, shall be, at
least in some dim likeness, "arrayed like one of these."
115. But as for the immediate behaviour of Florence herself, with her
new standard, its colour was quite sufficiently significant in that old
symbolism, when the first restrial bearing was drawn by dying fingers
dipped in blood. The Guelphic revolution had put her into definite
political opposition with her nearest, and therefore,--according to
the custom and Christianity of the time,--her hatefullest,
neighbours,--Pistoja, Pisa, Siena, and Volterra. What glory might not
be acquired, what kind purposes answered, by making pacific mercantile
states also of those benighted towns! Besides, the death of the Emperor
had thrown his party everywhere into discouragement; and what was the
use of a flag which flew no farther than over the new palazzo?
116. Accordingly, in the next year, the pacific Florentines began
by ravaging the territory of Pistoja; then attacked the Pisans at
Pontadera, and took 3000 prisoners; and finished by traversing, and
eating up all that could be ate in, the country of Siena; besides
beating the Sienese under the castle of Montalcino. Returning in triumph
after these benevolent operations, they resolved to strike a new piece
of money in memory of them,--the golden Florin!
117. This coin I have placed in your room of study, to be the first
of the series of coins which I hope to arrange for you, not
chronologically, but for the various interest, whether as regards art or
history, which they should possess in your general studies. "The Florin
of Florence," (says Sismondi), "through all the monetary revolutions
of all neighbouring countries, and while the bad faith of governments
adulterated their coin from one end of Europe to the other, has always
remained the same; it is, to-day," (I don't know when, exactly, he wrote
this,--but it doesn't matter), "of the same weight, and bears the same
name and the same stamp, which it did when it was struck in 1252."
It was gold of the purest title (24 carats), weighed the eighth of
an ounce, and carried, as you see, on one side the image of St. John
Baptist, on the other the Fleur-de-lys. It is the coin which Chaucer
takes for the best representation of beautiful money in the Pardoner's
Tale: this, in his judgment, is the fairest mask of Death. Villani's
relation of its moral and commercial effect at Tunis is worth
translating, being in the substance of it, I doubt not, true.
118. "And these new florins beginning to scatter through the world,
some of them got to Tunis, in Barbary; and the King of Tunis, who was
a worthy and wise lord, was greatly pleased with them, and had them
tested; and finding them of fine gold, he praised them much, and had
the legend on them interpreted to him,--to wit, on one side 'St. John
Baptist,' on the other 'Florentia.' So seeing they were pieces of
Christian money, he sent for the Pisan merchants, who were free of his
port, and much before the King (and also the Florentines traded in Tunis
through Pisan agents),--[see these hot little Pisans, how they are first
everywhere,]--and asked of them what city it was among the Christians
which made the said florins. And the Pisans answered in spite and envy,
'They are our land Arabs.' The King answered wisely, "It does not appear
to me Arab's money; you Pisans, what golden money have _you_ got?" Then
they were confused, and knew not what to answer. So he asked if there
was any Florentine among them. And there was found a merchant from the
other-side-Arno, by name Peter Balducci, discreet and wise. The King
asked him of the state and being of Florence, of which the Pisans
made their Arabs,--who answered him wisely, showing the power and
magnificence of Florence; and how Pisa, in comparison, was not, either
in land or people, the half of Florence; and that they had no golden
money; and that the gold of which those florins had been made was gained
by the Florentines above and beyond them, by many victories. Wherefore
the said Pisans were put to shame, and the King, both by reason of the
florin, and for the words of our wise citizen, made the Florentines
free, and appointed for them their own Fondaco, and church, in Tunis,
and gave them privileges like the Pisans. And this we know for a truth
from the same Peter, having been in company with him at the office of
the Priors."
119. I cannot tell you what the value of the piece was at this time:
the sentence with which Sismondi concludes his account of it being only
useful as an example of the total ignorance of the laws of currency in
which many even of the best educated persons at the present day remain.
"Its value," he says always the same, "answers to eleven francs forty
centimes of France."
But all that can be scientifically said of any piece of money is that
it contains a given weight of a given metal. Its value in other coins,
other metals, or other general produce, varies not only from day to day,
but from instant to instant.
120. With this coin of Florence ought in justice to be ranked the
Venetian zecchin; [1] but of it I can only thus give you account in
another place,--for I must at once go on now to tell you the first use I
find recorded, as being made by the Florentines of their new money.
[Footnote 1: In connection with the Pisans' insulting intention by their
term of Arabs, remember that the Venetian 'zecca,' (mint) came from the
Arabic 'sehk,' the steel die used in coinage.]
They pursued in the years 1253 and 1254 their energetic promulgation of
peace. They ravaged the lands of Pistoja so often, that the Pistojese
submitted themselves, on condition of receiving back their Guelph
exiles, and admitting a Florentine garrison into Pistoja. Next they
attacked Monte Reggione, the March-fortress of the Sienese; and pressed
it so vigorously that Siena was fain to make peace too, on condition
of ceasing her alliance with the Ghibellines. Next they ravaged the
territory of Volterra: the townspeople, confident in the strength of
their rock fortress, came out to give battle; the Florentines beat them
up the hill, and entered the town gates with the fugitives.
121. And, for note to this sentence, in my long-since-read volume of
Sismondi, I find a cross-fleury at the bottom of the page, with the
date 1254 underneath it; meaning that I was to remember that year as
the beginning of Christian warfare. For little as you may think it, and
grotesquely opposed as this ravaging of their neighbours' territories
may seem to their pacific mission, this Florentine army is fighting
in absolute good faith. Partly self-deceived, indeed, by their own
ambition, and by their fiery natures, rejoicing in the excitement of
battle, they have nevertheless, in this their "year of victories,"--so
they ever afterwards called it,--no occult or malignant purpose. At
least, whatever is occult or malignant is also unconscious; not now in
cruel, but in kindly jealousy of their neighbours, and in a true desire
to communicate and extend to them the privileges of their own new
artizan government, the Trades of Florence have taken arms. They are
justly proud of themselves; rightly assured of the wisdom of the change
they have made; true to each other for the time, and confident in the
future. No army ever fought in better cause, or with more united heart.
And accordingly they meet with no check, and commit no error; from
tower to tower of the field fortresses,--from gate to gate of the great
cities,--they march in one continuous and daily more splendid triumph,
yet in gentle and perfect discipline; and now, when they have entered
Volterra with her fugitives, after stress of battle, not a drop of blood
is shed, nor a single house pillaged, nor is any other condition
of peace required than the exile of the Ghibelline nobles. You may
remember, as a symbol of the influence of Christianity in this result,
that the Bishop of Volterra, with his clergy, came out in procession to
meet them as they began to run [1] the streets, and obtained this mercy;
else the old habits of pillage would have prevailed.
[Footnote 1: Corsona la citta senza contesto niuno."--_Villani._]
122. And from Volterra, the Florentine army entered on the territory
of Pisa; and now with so high prestige, that the Pisans at once sent
ambassadors to them with keys in their hands, in token of submission.
And the Florentines made peace with them, on condition that the
Pisans should let the Florentine merchandize pass in and out without
tax;--should use the same weights as Florence,--the same cloth
measure,--and the same alloy of money.
123. You see that Mr. Adam Smith was not altogether the originator
of the idea of free trade; and six hundred years have passed without
bringing Europe generally to the degree of mercantile intelligence, as
to weights and currency, which Florence had in her year of victories.
The Pisans broke this peace two years afterwards, to help the Emperor
Manfred; whereupon the Florentines attacked them instantly again;
defeated them on the Serchio, near Lucca; entered the Pisan territory
by the Val di Serchio; and there, cutting down a great pine tree, struck
their florins on the stump of it, putting, for memory, under the feet of
the St. John, a trefoil "in guise of a little tree." And note here the
difference between artistic and mechanical coinage. The Florentines,
using pure gold, and thin, can strike their coin anywhere, with only a
wooden anvil, and their engraver is ready on the instant to make such
change in the stamp as may record any new triumph. Consider the vigour,
popularity, pleasantness of an art of coinage thus ductile to events,
and easy in manipulution.
124. It is to be observed also that a thin gold coinage like that of the
English angel, and these Italian zecchins, is both more convenient and
prettier than the massive gold of the Greeks, often so small that it
drops through the fingers, and, if of any size, inconveniently large in
value.
125. It was in the following year, 1255, that the Florentines made
the noblest use of their newly struck florins, so far as I know, ever
recorded in any history; and a Florentine citizen made as noble refusal
of them. You will find the two stories in Giovanni Villani, Book 6th,
chapters 61, 62. One or two important facts are added by Sismondi, but
without references. I take his statement as on the whole trustworthy,
using Villani's authority wherever it reaches; one or two points I have
farther to explain to you myself as I go on.
126. The first tale shows very curiously the mercenary and independent
character of warfare, as it now was carried on by the great chiefs,
whether Guelph or Ghibelline. The Florentines wanted to send a troop
of five hundred horse to assist Orvieto, a Guelph town, isolated on its
rock, and at present harrassed upon it. They gave command of this troop
to the Knight Guido Guerra de' Conti Guidi, and he and his riders set
out for Orvieto by the Umbrian road, through Arezzo, which was at peace
with Florence, though a Ghibelline town. The Guelph party within the
town asked help from the passing Florentine battalion; and Guido Guerra,
without any authority for such action, used the troop of which he was
in command in their favour, and drove out the Ghibellines. Sismondi does
not notice what is quite one of the main points in the matter, that
this troop of horse must have been mainly composed of Count Guido's own
retainers, and not of Florentine citizens, who would not have cared to
leave their business on such a far-off quest as this help to Orvieto.
However, Arezzo is thus brought over to the Florentine interest; and
any other Italian state would have been sure, while it disclaimed
the Count's independent action, to keep the advantage of it. Not so
Florence. She is entirely resolved, in these years of victory, to do
justice to all men so far she understands it; and in this case it will
give her some trouble to do it, and worse,--cost her some of her fine
new florins. For her counter-mandate is quite powerless with Guido
Guerra. He has taken Arezzo mainly with his own men, and means to stay
there, thinking that the Florentines, if even they do not abet him, will
take no practical steps against him. But he does not know this newly
risen clan of military merchants, who quite clearly understand what
honesty means, and will put themselves out of their way to keep their
faith. Florence calls out her trades instantly, and with gules, a dragon
vert, and or, a bull sable, they march, themselves, angrily up the Val
d'Arno, replace the adverse Ghibellines in Arezzo, and send Master Guido
de' Conti Guido about his business. But the prettiest and most curious
part of the whole story is their equity even to him, after he had given
them all this trouble. They entirely recognize the need he is under of
getting meat, somehow, for the mouths of these five hundred riders of
his; also they hold him still their friend, though an unmanageable
one; and admit with praise what of more or less patriotic and Guelphic
principle may be at the root of his disobedience. So when he claims
twelve thousand lire,--roughly, some two thousand pounds of money at
present value,--from the Guelphs of Arezzo for his service, and
the Guelphs, having got no good of it, owing to this Florentine
interference, object to paying him, the Florentines themselves lend them
the money,--and are never paid a farthing of it back.
127. There is a beautiful "investment of capital" for your modern
merchant to study! No interest thought of, and little hope of ever
getting back the principal. And yet you will find that there were no
mercantile "panics," in Florence in those days, nor failing bankers,
[1] nor "clearings out of this establishment--any reasonable offer
accepted."
[Footnote: Some account of the state of modern British business in this
kind will be given, I hope, in some number of "Fors Clavigera" for this
year, 1874.]
128. But the second story, of a private Florentine citizen, is better
still.
In that campaign against Pisa in which the florins were struck on the
root of pine, the conditions of peace had been ratified by the surrender
to Florence of the Pisan fortress of Mutrona, which commanded a tract
of seaboard below Pisa, of great importance for the Tuscan trade. The
Florentines had stipulated for the right not only of holding, but of
destroying it, if they chose; and in their Council of Ancients, after
long debate, it was determined to raze it, the cost of its garrison
being troublesome, and the freedom of seaboard all that the city wanted.
But the Pisans feeling the power that the fortress had against them in
case of future war, and doubtful of the issue of council at Florence,
sent a private negotiator to the member of the Council of Ancients who
was known to have most influence, though one of the poorest of them,
Aldobrandino Ottobuoni; and offered him four thousand golden florins if
he would get the vote passed to raze Mutrona. The vote _had_ passed the
evening before. Aldobrandino dismissed the Pisan ambassador in silence,
returned instantly into the council, and without saying anything of the
offer that had been made to him, got them to reconsider their vote, and
showed them such reason for keeping Mutrona in its strength, that the
vote for its destruction was rescinded. "And note thou, oh reader,"
says Villani, "the virtue of such a citizen, who, not being rich in
substance, had yet such continence and loyalty for his state."
129. You might, perhaps, once, have thought me detaining you needlessly
with these historical details, little bearing, it is commonly supposed,
on the subject of art. But you are, I trust, now in some degree
persuaded that no art, Florentine or any other, can be understood
without knowing these sculptures and mouldings of the national soul. You
remember I first begun this large digression when it became a question
with us why some of Giovanni Pisano's sepulchral work had been destroyed
at Perugia. And now we shall get our first gleam of light on the matter,
finding similar operations carried on in Florence. For a little while
after this speech in the Council of Ancients, Aldobrandino died, and
the people, at public cost, built him a tomb of marble, "higher than any
other" in the church of Santa Reparata, engraving on it these verses,
which I leave you to construe, for I cannot:--
Fons est supremus Aldobrandino amoenus.
Ottoboni natus, a bono civita datus.
Only I suppose the pretty word 'amoenus' may be taken as marking the
delightfulness and sweetness of character which had won all men's love,
more, even, than their gratitude.
130. It failed of its effect, however, on the Tuscan aristocratic mind.
For, when, after the battle of the Arbia, the Ghibellines had again
their own way in Florence, though Ottobuoni had been then dead three
years, they beat down his tomb, pulled the dead body out of it, dragged
it--by such tenure as it might still possess--through the city, and
threw the fragments of it into ditches. It is a memorable parallel to
the treatment of the body of Cromwell by our own Cavaliers; and indeed
it seems to me one of the highest forms of laudatory epitaph upon a man,
that his body should be thus torn from its rest. For he can hardly have
spent his life better than in drawing on himself the kind of enmity
which can so be gratified; and for the most loving of lawgivers, as of
princes, the most enviable and honourable epitaph has always been
[Greek: "_oide plitai anton emisoun anton_."
131. Not but that pacific Florence, in her pride of victory, was
beginning to show unamiableness of temper also, on her so equitable
side. It is perhaps worth noticing, for the sake of the name of
Correggio, that in 1257, when Matthew Correggio, of Parma, was the
Podesta of Florence, the Florentines determined to destroy the castle
and walls of Poggibonzi, suspected of Ghibelline tendency, though the
Poggibonzi people came with "coregge in collo," leathern straps
round their necks, to ask that their cattle might be spared. And the
heartburnings between the two parties went on, smouldering hotter
and hotter, till July, 1258, when the people having discovered secret
dealings between the Uberti and the Emperor Manfred, and the Uberti
refusing to obey citation to the popular tribunals, the trades ran to
arms, attacked the Uberti palace, killed a number of their people, took
prisoner, Uberto of the Uberti, Hubert of the Huberts, or Bright-mind
of the Bright-minds, with 'Mangia degl' Infangati, ('Gobbler [1] of
the dirty ones' this knight's name sounds like,)--and after they had
confessed their guilt, beheaded them in St. Michael's corn-market; and
all the rest of the Uberti and Ghibelline families were driven out of
Florence, and their palaces pulled down, and the walls towards Siena
built with the stones of them; and two months afterwards, the people
suspecting the Abbot of Vallombrosa of treating with the Ghibellines,
took him, and tortured him; and he confessing under torture, "at the cry
of the people, they beheaded him in the square of St. Apollinare."
For which unexpected piece of clangorous impiety the Florentines were
excommunicated, besides drawing upon themselves the steady enmity of
Pavia, the Abbot's native town; "and indeed people say the Abbot was
innocent, though he belonged to a great Ghibelline house. And for this
sin, and for many others done by the wicked people, many wise persons
say that God, for Divine judgment, permitted upon the said people the
revenge and slaughter of Monteaperti."
[Footnote: At least, the compound 'Mangia-pane,' 'munch-bread,' stands
still for a good-for-nothing fellow.]
132. The sentence which I have last read introduces, as you must at once
have felt, a new condition of things. Generally, I have spoken of
the Ghibellines as infidel, or impious; and for the most part they
represent, indeed, the resistance of kingly to priestly power. But, in
this action of Florence, we have the rise of another force against
the Church, in the end to be much more fatal to it, that of popular
intelligence and popular passion. I must for the present, however,
return to our immediate business; and ask you to take note of the
effect, on actually existing Florentine architecture, of the political
movements of the ten years we have been studying.
133. In the revolution of Candlemas, 1248, the successful Ghibellines
throw down thirty-six of the Guelph palaces.
And in the revolution of July, 1258, the successful Guelphs throw down
_all_ the Ghibelline palaces.
Meantime the trades, as against the Knights Castellans, have thrown down
the tops of all the towers above seventy-five feet high.
And we shall presently have a proposal, after the battle of the Arbia,
to throw down Florence altogether.
134. You think at first that this is remarkably like the course
of republican reformations in the present day? But there is a wide
difference. In the first place, the palaces and towers are not
thrown down in mere spite or desire of ruin, but after quite definite
experience of their danger to the State, and positive dejection of
boiling lead and wooden logs from their machicolations upon the heads
below. In the second place, nothing is thrown down without complete
certainty on the part of the overthrowers that they are able, and
willing, to build as good or better things instead; which, if any
like conviction exist in the minds of modern republicans, is a wofully
ill-founded one: and lastly, these abolitions of private wealth were
coincident with a widely spreading disposition to undertake, as I have
above noticed, works of public utility, _from which no dividends were to
be received by any of the shareholders_; and for the execution of which
the _builders received no commission on the cost_, but payment at the
rate of so much a day, carefully adjusted to the exertion of real power
and intelligence.
135. We must not, therefore, without qualification blame, though we may
profoundly regret, the destructive passions of the thirteenth century.
The architecture of the palaces thus destroyed in Florence contained
examples of the most beautiful round-arched work that had been developed
by the Norman schools; and was in some cases adorned with a barbaric
splendour, and fitted into a majesty of strength which, so far as I can
conjecture the effect of it from the few now existing traces, must have
presented some of the most impressive aspects of street edifice ever
existent among civil societies.
136. It may be a temporary relief for you from the confusion of
following the giddy successions of Florentine temper, if I interrupt, in
this place, my history of the city by some inquiry into technical points
relating to the architecture of these destroyed palaces. Their style
is familiar to us, indeed, in a building of which it is difficult to
believe the early date,--the leaning tower of Pisa. The lower stories of
it are of the twelfth century, and the open arcades of the cathedrals of
Pisa and Lucca, as well as the lighter construction of the spire of St.
Niccol, at Pisa, (though this was built in continuation of the older
style by Niccola himself,) all represent to you, though in enriched
condition, the general manner of buidling in palaces of the Norman
period in Val d'Arno. That of the Tosinghi, above the old market in
Florence, is especially mentioned by Villani, as more than a hundred
feet in height, entirely built with little pillars, (colonnelli,) of
marble. On their splendid masonry was founded the exquisiteness of that
which immediately succeeded them, of which the date is fixed by definite
examples both in Verona and Florence, and which still exists in noble
masses in the retired streets and courts of either city; too soon
superseded, in the great thoroughfares, by the effeminate and monotonous
luxury of Venetian renaissance, or by the heaps of quarried stone
which rise into the ruggedness of their native cliffs, in the Pitti and
Strozzi palaces.
LECTURE VI.
MARBLE COUCHANT.
137. I told you in my last lecture that the exquisiteness of Florentine
thirteenth century masonry was founded on the strength and splendour of
that which preceded it.
I use the word 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While
the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the
war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to
lift higher the walls of their churches. For the most part, the Early
Norman or Basilican forms were too low to please them in their present
enthusiasm. Their pride, as well as their piety, desired that these
stones of their temples might be goodly; and all kinds of junctions,
insertions, refittings, and elevations were undertaken; which, the
genius of the people being always for mosaic, are so perfectly executed,
and mix up twelfth and thirteenth century work in such intricate
harlequinade, that it is enough to drive a poor antiquary wild.
138. I have here in my hand, however, a photograph of a small church,
which shows you the change at a glance, and attests it in a notable
manner.
You know Hubert of Lucca was the first captain of the Florentine people,
and the march in which they struck their florin on the pine trunk was
through Lucca, on Pisa.
Now here is a little church in Lucca, of which the lower half of the
façade is of the twelfth century, and the top, built by the Florentines,
in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur-de-lys, let
into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is
in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts. But the most
palpable difference is in the Cyclopean simplicity of irregular bedding
in the lower story; and the delicate bands of alternate serpentine and
marble, which follow the horizontal or couchant placing of the stones
above.
139. Those of you who, interested in English Gothic, have visited
Tuscany, are, I think, always offended at first, if not in permanence,
by these horizontal stripes of her marble walls. Twenty-two years ago
I quoted, in vol. i. of the "Stones of Venice," Professor Willis's
statement that "a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur
could hardly be conceived;" and I defended my favourite buildings
against that judgement, first by actual comparison in the plate opposite
the page, of a piece of them with an example of our modern grandeur;
secondly, (vol. i., chap. v.,) by a comparison of their aspect with
that of the building of the grandest piece of wall in the Alps,--that
Matterhorn in which you all have now learned to take some gymnastic
interest; and thirdly, (vol. i., chap. xxvi.,) by reference to the
use of barred colours, with delight, by Giotto and all subsequent
colourists.
140. But it did not then occur to me to ask, much as I always disliked
the English Perpendicular, what would have been the effect on the
spectator's mind, had the buildings been striped vertically instead of
horizontally; nor did I then know, or in the least imagine, how much
_practical_ need there was for reference from the structure of the
edifice to that of the cliff; and how much the permanence, as well as
propriety, of structure depended on the stones being _couchant_ in the
wall, as they had been in the quarry: to which subject I wish to-day to
direct your attention.
141. You will find stated with as much clearness as I am able, in
the first and fifth lectures in "Aratra Pentelíci," the principles of
architectural design to which, in all my future teaching, I shall have
constantly to appeal; namely, that architecture consists distinctively
in the adaptation of form to resist force;--that, practically, it may be
always thought of as doing this by the ingenious adjustment of various
pieces of solid material; that the perception of this ingenious
adjustment, or structure, is to be always joined with our admiration
of the superadded ornament; and that all delightful ornament is the
honouring of such useful structures; but that the beauty of the ornament
itself is independent of the structure, and arrived at by powers of mind
of a very different class from those which are necessary to give skill
in architecture proper.
142. During the course of this last summer I have been myself very
directly interested in some of the quite elementary processes of true
architecture. I have been building a little pier into Coniston Lake, and
various walls and terraces in a steeply sloping garden, all which had to
be constructed of such rough stones as lay nearest. Under the dextrous
hands of a neighbour farmer's son, the pier projected, and the walls
rose, as if enchanted; every stone taking its proper place, and the
loose dyke holding itself as firmly upright as if the gripping cement of
the Florentine towers had fastened it. My own better acquaintance with
the laws of gravity and of statics did not enable me, myself, to build
six inches of dyke that would stand; and all the decoration possible
under the circumstances consisted in turning the lichened sides of the
stones outwards. And yet the noblest conditions of building in the world
are nothing more than the gradual adornment, by play of the imagination,
of materials first arranged by this natural instinct of adjustment. You
must not lose sight of the instinct of building, but you must not think
the play of the imagination depends upon it. Intelligent laying of
stones is always delightful; but the fancy must not be limited to its
contemplation.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--DOOR OF THE BAPTISTERY. PISA.]
143. In the more elaborate architecture of my neighbourhood, I have
taken pleasure these many years; one of the first papers I ever wrote
on architecture was a study of the Westmoreland cottage;--properly,
observe, the cottage of West-mereland, of the land of western lakes.
Its principal feature is the projecting porch at its door, formed by two
rough slabs of Coniston slate, set in a blunt gable; supported, if far
projecting, by two larger masses for uprights. A disciple of Mr. Pugin
would delightedly observe that the porch of St. Zeno at Verona was
nothing more than the decoration of this construction; but you do not
suppose that the first idea of putting two stones together to keep off
rain was all on which the sculptor of St. Zeno wished to depend for your
entertainment.
144. Perhaps you may most clearly understand the real connection between
structure and decoration by considering all architecture as a kind of
book, which must be properly bound indeed, and in which the illumination
of the pages has distinct reference in all its forms to the breadth of
the margins and length of the sentences; but is itself free to follow
its own quite separate and higher objects of design.
145. Thus, for instance, in the architecture which Niccola was occupied
upon, when a boy, under his Byzantine master. Here is the door of the
Baptistery at Pisa, again by Mr. Severn delightfully enlarged for us
from a photograph. [1] The general idea of it is a square-headed opening
in a solid wall, faced by an arch carried on shafts. And the ornament
does indeed follow this construction so that the eye catches it
with ease,--but under what arbitrary conditions! In the square door,
certainly the side-posts of it are as important members as the lintel
they carry; but the lintel is carved elaborately, and the side-posts
left blank. Of the facing arch and shaft, it would be similarly
difficult to say whether the sustaining vertical, or sustained curve,
were the more important member of the construction; but the decorator
now reverses the distribution of his care, adorns the vertical member
with passionate elaboration, and runs a narrow band, of comparatively
uninteresting work, round the arch. Between this outer shaft and inner
door is a square pilaster, of which the architect carves one side, and
lets the other alone. It is followed by a smaller shaft and arch, in
which he reverses his treatment of the outer order by cutting the shaft
delicately and the arch deeply. Again, whereas in what is called the
decorated construction of English Gothic, the pillars would have
been left plain and the spandrils deep cut,--here, are we to call it
decoration of the construction, when the pillars are carved and the
spandrils left plain? Or when, finally, either these spandril spaces
on each side of the arch, or the corresponding slopes of the gable, are
loaded with recumbent figures by the sculptors of the renaissance, are
we to call, for instance, Michael Angelo's Dawn and Twilight, only the
decorations of the sloping plinths of a tomb, or trace to a geometrical
propriety the subsequent rule in Italy that no window could be properly
complete for living people to look out of, without having two stone
people sitting on the corners of it above? I have heard of charming
young ladies occasionally, at very crowded balls, sitting on the
stairs,--would you call them, in that case, only decorations of the
construction of the staircase?
[Footnote 1: Plate 5 is from the photograph itself; the enlarged drawing
showed the arrangement of parts more clearly, but necessarily omitted
detail which it is better here to retain.]
146. You will find, on consideration, the ultimate fact to be that to
which I have just referred you;--my statement in "Aratra," that the idea
of a construction originally useful is retained in good architecture,
through all the amusement of its ornamentation; as the idea of the
proper function of any piece of dress ought to be retained through its
changes in form or embroidery. A good spire or porch retains the first
idea of a roof usefully covering a space, as a Norman high cap or
elongated Quaker's bonnet retains the original idea of a simple covering
for the head; and any extravagance of subsequent fancy may be permitted,
so long as the notion of use is not altogether lost. A girl begins by
wearing a plain round hat to shade her from the sun; she ties it down
over her ears on a windy day; presently she decorates the edge of it, so
bent, with flowers in front, or the riband that ties it with a bouquet
at the side, and it becomes a bonnet. This decorated construction may be
discreetly changed, by endless fashion, so long as it does not become
a clearly useless riband round the middle of the head, or a clearly
useless saucer on the top of it.
147. Again, a Norman peasant may throw up the top of her cap into a
peak, or a Bernese one put gauze wings at the side of it, and still be
dressed with propriety, so long as her hair is modestly confined, and
her ears healthily protected, by the matronly safeguard of the real
construction. She ceases to be decorously dressed only when the material
becomes too flimsy to answer such essential purpose, and the flaunting
pendants or ribands can only answer the ends of coquetry or
ostentation. Similarly, an architect may deepen or enlarge, in fantastic
exaggeration, his original Westmoreland gable into Rouen porch, and his
original square roof into Coventry spire; but he must not put within his
splendid porch, a little door where two persons cannot together get
in, nor cut his spire away into hollow filigree, and mere ornamental
perviousness to wind and rain.
148. Returning to our door at Pisa, we shall find these general
questions as to the distribution of ornament much confused with others
as to its time and style. We are at once, for instance, brought to a
pause as to the degree in which the ornamentation was once carried out
in the doors themselves. Their surfaces were, however, I doubt not,
once recipients of the most elaborate ornament, as in the Baptistery of
Florence; and in later bronze, by John of Bologna, in the door of the
Pisan cathedral opposite this one. And when we examine the sculpture and
placing of the lintel, which at first appeared the most completely Greek
piece of construction of the whole, we find it so far advanced in many
Gothic characters, that I once thought it a later interpolation cutting
the inner pilasters underneath their capitals, while the three statues
set on it are certainly, by several tens of years, later still.
149. How much ten years did at this time, one is apt to forget; and
how irregularly the slower minds of the older men would surrender
themselves, sadly, or awkwardly, to the vivacities of their pupils. The
only wonder is that it should be usually so easy to assign conjectural
dates within twenty or thirty years; but, at Pisa, the currents of
tradition and invention run with such cross eddies, that I often find
myself utterly at fault. In this lintel, for instance, there are
two pieces separated by a narrower one, on which there has been an
inscription, of which in my enlarged plate you may trace, though, I
fear, not decipher, the few letters that remain. The uppermost of
these stones is nearly pure in its Byzantine style; the lower, already
semi-Gothic. Both are exquisite of their kind, and we will examine them
closely; but first note these points about the stones of them. We are
discussing work at latest of the thirteenth century. Our loss of the
inscription is evidently owing to the action of the iron rivets which
have been causelessly used at the two horizontal joints. There was
nothing whatever in the construction to make these essential, and,
but for this error, the entire piece of work, as delicate as an ivory
tablet, would be as intelligible to-day as when it was laid in its
place. [1]
[Footnote: Plates 6 and 7 give, in greater clearness, the sculpture of
this lintel, for notes on which see Appendix.]
150. _Laid_. I pause upon this word, for it is an important one. And
I must devote the rest of this lecture to consideration merely of what
follows from the difference between laying a stone and setting it up,
whether we regard sculpture or construction. The subject is so wide, I
scarcely know how to approach it. Perhaps it will be the pleasantest
way to begin if I read you a letter from one of yourselves to me. A
very favourite pupil, who travels third class always, for sake of better
company, wrote to me the other day: "One of my fellow-travellers, who
was a builder, or else a master mason, told me that the way in which red
sandstone buildings last depends entirely on the way in which the stone
is laid. It must lie as it does in the quarry; but he said that very few
workmen could always tell the difference between the joints of planes
of cleavage and the--something else which I couldn't catch,--by which he
meant, I suppose planes of stratification. He said too that some people,
though they were very particular
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. ADVENT.]
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. DEPARTURE.]
about having the stone laid well, allowed blocks to stand in the rain
the wrong way up, and that they never recovered one wetting. The
stone of the same quarry varies much, and he said that moss will grow
immediately on good stone, but not on bad. How curious,--nature helping
the best workman!" Thus far my favourite pupil.
151. 'Moss will grow on the best stone.' The first thing your modern
restorer would do is to scrape it off; and with it, whatever knitted
surface, half moss root, protects the interior stone. Have you ever
considered the infinite functions of protection to mountain form
exercised by the mosses and lichens? It will perhaps be refreshing to
you after our work among the Pisan marbles and legends, if we have a
lecture or two on moss. Meantime I need not tell you that it would not
be a satisfactory natural arrangement if moss grew on marble, and that
all fine workmanship in marble implies equal exquisiteness of surface
and edge.
152. You will observe also that the importance of laying the stone in
the building as it lay in its bed was from the first recognised by all
good northern architects, to such extent that to lay stones 'en delit,'
or in a position out of their bedding, is a recognized architectural
term in France, where all structural building takes its rise; and in
that form of 'delit' the word gets most curiously involved with the
Latin delictum and deliquium. It would occupy the time of a whole
lecture if I entered into the confused relations of the words derived
from lectus, liquidus, delinquo, diliquo, and deliquesco; and of
the still more confused, but beautifully confused, (and enriched by
confusion,) forms of idea, whether respecting morality or marble,
arising out of the meanings of these words: the notions of a bed
gathered or strewn for the rest, whether of rocks or men; of the various
states of solidity and liquidity connected with strength, or with
repose; and of the duty of staying quiet in a place, or under a law,
and the mischief of leaving it, being all fastened in the minds of early
builders, and of the generations of men for whom they built, by the
unescapable bearing of geological laws on their life; by the ease
or difficulty of splitting rocks, by the variable consistency of the
fragments split, by the innumerable questions occurring practically as
to bedding and cleavage in every kind of stone, from tufo to granite,
and by the unseemly, or beautiful, destructive, or protective, effects
of decomposition. [1] The same processes of time which cause your Oxford
oolite to flake away like the leaves of a mouldering book, only warm
with a glow of perpetually deepening gold the marbles of Athens and
Verona; and the same laws of chemical change which reduce the granites
of Dartmoor to porcelain clay, bind the sands of Coventry into stones
which can be built up halfway to the sky.
[Footnote 1: This passage cannot but seem to the reader loose and
fantastic. I have elaborate notes, and many an unwritten thought, on
these matters, but no time or strength to develop them. The passage is
not fantastic, but the rapid index of what I know to be true in all the
named particulars. But compare, for mere rough illustration of what I
mean, the moral ideas relating to the stone of Jacob's pillow, or the
tradition of it, with those to which French Flamboyant Gothic owes its
character.]
153. But now, as to the matter immediately before us, observe what a
double question arises about laying stones as they lie in the quarry.
First, how _do_ they lie in the quarry? Secondly, how can we lay them so
in every part of our building?
A. How do they lie in the quarry? Level, perhaps, at Stonesfield and
Coventry; but at an angle of 45° at Carrara; and for aught I know, of
90° in Paros or Pentelicus. Also, the _bedding_ is of prime importance
at Coventry, but the _cleavage_ at Coniston. [1]
[Footnote 1: There are at least four definite cleavages at Coniston,
besides joints. One of these cleavages furnishes the Coniston slate
of commerce; another forms the ranges of Wetherlam and Yewdale crag;
a third cuts these ranges to pieces, striking from north-west to
south-east; and a fourth into other pieces, from north-east to
south-west.]
B. And then, even if we know what the quarry bedding is, how are we
to keep it always in our building? You may lay the stones of a wall
carefully level, but how will you lay those of an arch? You think these,
perhaps, trivial, or merely curious questions. So far from it, the fact
that while the bedding in Normandy is level, that at Carrara is steep,
and that the forces which raised the beds of Carrara crystallized them
also, so that the cleavage which is all-important in the stones of my
garden wall is of none in the duomo of Pisa,--simply determined the
possibility of the existence of Pisan sculpture at all, and regulated
the whole life and genius of Nicholas the Pisan and of Christian art.
And, again, the fact that you can put stones in true bedding in a
wall, but cannot in an arch, determines the structural transition from
classical to Gothic architecture.
154. The _structural_ transition, observe; only a part, and that not
altogether a coincident part, of the _moral_ transition. Read carefully,
if you have time, the articles 'Pierre' and 'Meneau' in M. Violet le
Duc's Dictionary of Architecture, and you will know everything that
is of importance in the changes dependent on the mere qualities of
_matter_. I must, however, try to set in your view also the relative
acting qualities of _mind_.
You will find that M. Violet le Duc traces all the forms of Gothic
tracery to the geometrical and practically serviceable development of
the stone 'chassis,' chasing, or frame, for the glass. For instance, he
attributes the use of the cusp or 'redent' in its more complex forms, to
the necessity, or convenience, of diminishing the space of glass which
the tracery grasps; and he attributes the reductions of the mouldings in
the tracery bar under portions of one section, to the greater facility
thus obtained by the architect in directing his workmen. The plan of
a window once given, and the moulding-section,--all is said, thinks M.
Violet le Duc. Very convenient indeed, for modern architects who have
commission on the cost. But certainly not necessary, and perhaps even
inconvenient, to Niccola Pisano, who is himself his workman, and cuts
his own traceries, with his apron loaded with dust.
155. Again, the _re_dent--the 'tooth within tooth' of a French
tracery--may be necessary, to bite its glass. But the cusp, cuspis,
spiny or spearlike point of a thirteenth century illumination, is not in
the least necessary to transfix the parchment. Yet do you suppose that
the structural convenience of the redent entirely effaces from the mind
of the designer the aesthetic characters which he seeks in the cusp?
If you could for an instant imagine this, you would be undeceived by a
glance either at the early redents of Amiens, fringing hollow vaults,
or the late redents of Rouen, acting as crockets on the _outer_ edges
of pediments. 156. Again: if you think of the tracery in its _bars_, you
call the cusp a redent; but if you think of it in the _openings_, you
call the apertures of it foils. Do you suppose that the thirteenth
century builder thought only of the strength of the bars of his
enclosure, and never of the beauty of the form he enclosed? You will
find in my chapter on the Aperture, in the "Stones of Venice," full
development of the aesthetic laws relating to both these forms, while
you may see, in Professor Willis's 'Architecture of the Middle Ages,' a
beautiful analysis of the development of tracery from the juxtaposition
of aperture; and in the article 'Meneau,' just quoted of M. Violet le
Duc, an equally beautiful analysis of its development from the masonry
of the chassis. You may at first think that Professor Willis's
analysis is inconsistent with M. Violet le Duc's. But they are no more
inconsistent than the accounts of the growth of a human being would be,
if given by two anatomists, of whom one had examined only the skeleton
and the other only the respiratory system; and who, therefore,
supposed--the first, that the animal had been made only to leap, and the
other only to sing. I don't mean that either of the writers I name
are absolutely thus narrow in their own views, but that, so far as
inconsistency appears to exist between them, it is of that partial kind
only.
157. And for the understanding of our Pisan traceries we must introduce
a third element of similarly distinctive nature. We must, to press our
simile a little farther, examine the growth of the animal as if it
had been made neither to leap, nor to sing, but only to think. We must
observe the transitional states of its nerve power; that is to say, in
our window tracery we must consider not merely how its ribs are built,
(or how it stands,) nor merely how its openings are shaped, or how it
breathes; but also what its openings are made to light, or its shafts
to receive, of picture or image. As the limbs of the building, it may
be much; as the lungs of the building, more. As the _eyes_ [1] of the
building, what?
[Footnote 1: I am ashamed to italicize so many words; but these
passages, written for oral delivery, can only be understood if read with
oral emphasis. This is the first aeries of lectures which I have printed
as they were to be spoken; and it is a great mistake.]
158. Thus you probably have a distinct idea--those of you at least
who are interested in architecture--of the shape of the windows in
Westminster Abbey, in the Cathedral of Chartres, or in the Duomo of
Milan. Can any of you, I should like to know, make a guess at the shape
of the windows in the Sistine Chapel, the Stanze of the Vatican, the
Scuola di San Rocco, or the lower church of Assisi? The soul or anima of
the first three buildings is in their windows; but of the last three, in
their walls.
All these points I may for the present leave you to think over for
yourselves, except one, to which I must ask yet for a few moments your
further attention.
159. The trefoils to which I have called your attention in Niccola's
pulpit are as absolutely without structural office in the circles as in
the panels of the font beside it. But the circles are drawn with evident
delight in the lovely circular line, while the trefoil is struck out by
Niccola so roughly that there is not a true compass curve or section in
any part of it.
Roughly, I say. Do you suppose I ought to have said carelessly? So
far from it, that if one sharper line or more geometric curve had been
given, it would have caught the eye too strongly, and drawn away the
attention from the sculpture. But imagine the feeling with which a
French master workman would first see these clumsy intersections
of curves. It would be exactly the sensation with which a practical
botanical draughtsman would look at a foliage background of Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
But Sir Joshua's sketched leaves would indeed imply some unworkmanlike
haste. We must not yet assume the Pisan master to have allowed himself
in any such. His mouldings may be hastily cut, for they are, as I have
just said, unnecessary to his structure, and disadvantageous to his
decoration; but he is not likely to be careless about arrangements
necessary for strength. His mouldings may be cut hastily, but do you
think his _joints_ will be?
160. What subject of extended inquiry have we in this word, ranging from
the cementless clefts between the couchant stones of the walls of the
kings of Rome, whose iron rivets you had but the other day placed in
your hands by their discoverer, through the grip of the stones of the
Tower of the Death-watch, to the subtle joints in the marble armour of
the Florentine Baptistery!
Our own work must certainly be left with a rough surface at this place,
and we will fit the edges of it to our next piece of study as closely as
we may.
LECTURE VII.
MARBLE RAMPANT.
161. I closed my last lecture at the question respecting Nicholas's
masonry. His mouldings may be careless, but do you think his joints will
be?
I must remind you now of the expression as to the building of the
communal palace--"of _dressed_ stones" [1]--as opposed to the Tower
of the Death-watch, in which the grip of cement had been so good.
Virtually, you will find that the schools of structural architecture are
those which use cement to bind
[Footnote 1: "Pietre conce." The portion of the has-reliefs of Orvieto,
given in the opposite plate, will show the importance of the jointing.
Observe the way in which the piece of stone with the three principal
figures is dovetailed above the extended band, and again in the rise
above the joint of the next stone on the right, the sculpture of the
wings being carried across the junction. I have chosen this piece on
purpose, because the loss of the broken fragment, probably broken
by violence, and the only serious injury which the sculptures have
received, serves to show the perfection of the uninjured surface, as
compared with northern sculpture of the same date. I have thought
it well to show at the same time the modern German engraving of the
subject, respecting which see Appendix.]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--"THE CHARGE TO ADAM." GIOVANNI PISANO.]
their materials together, and in which, therefore, balance of _weight_
becomes a continual and inevitable question. But the schools of
sculptural architecture are those in which stones are fitted without
cement, in which, therefore, the question of _fitting_ or adjustment
is continual and inevitable, but the sustainable weight practically
unlimited.
162. You may consider the Tower of the Death-watch as having been knit
together like the mass of a Roman brick wall.
But the dressed stone work of the thirteenth century is the hereditary
completion of such block-laying, as the Parthenon in marble; or, in
tufo, as that which was shown you so lately in the walls of Romulus; and
the decoration of that system of couchant stone is by the finished grace
of mosaic or sculpture.
163. It was also pointed out to you by Mr. Parker that there were two
forms of Cyclopean architecture; one of level blocks, the other of
polygonal,--contemporary, but in localities affording different material
of stone.
I have placed in this frame examples of the Cyclopean horizontal, and
the Cyclopean polygonal, architecture of the thirteenth century. And as
Hubert of Lucca was the master of the new buildings at Florence, I have
chosen the Cyclopean horizontal from his native city of Lucca; and as
our Nicholas and John brought their new Gothic style into practice at
Orvieto, I have chosen the Cyclopean polygonal from their adopted city
of Orvieto.
Both these examples of architecture are early thirteenth century work,
the beginnings of its new and Christian style, but beginnings with which
Nicholas and John had nothing to do; they were part of the national work
going on round them.
164. And this example from Lucca is of a very important class indeed.
It is from above the east entrance gate of Lucca, which bears the cross
above it, as the doors of a Christian city should. Such a city is, or
ought to be, a place of peace, as much as any monastery.
This custom of placing the cross above the gate is Byzantine-Christian;
and here are parallel instances of its treatment from Assisi. The lamb
with the cross is given in the more elaborate arch of Verona.
165. But farther. The mosaic of this cross is so exquisitely fitted that
no injury has been received by it to this day from wind or weather. And
the horizontal dressed stones are laid so daintily that not an edge of
them has stirred; and, both to draw your attention to their beautiful
fitting, and as a substitute for cement, the architect cuts his
uppermost block so as to dovetail into the course below.
Dovetail, I say deliberately. This is stone carpentry, in which the
carpenter despises glue. I don't say he won't use glue, and glue of the
best, but he feels it to be a nasty thing, and that it spoils his wood
or marble. None, at least, he determines shall be seen outside, and his
laying of stones shall be so solid and so adjusted that, take all the
cement away, his wall shall yet stand.
Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the walls of the Kings, this gate of Lucca,
this window of Orvieto, and this tomb at Verona, are all built on the
Cyclopean principle. They will stand without cement, and no cement shall
be seen outside. Mr. Burgess and I actually tried the experiment on this
tomb. Mr. Burgess modelled every stone of it in clay, put them together,
and it stood.
166. Now there are two most notable characteristics about this Cyclopean
architecture to which I beg your close attention.
The first: that as the laying of stones is so beautiful, their joints
become a subject of admiration, and great part of the architectural
ornamentation is in the beauty of lines of separation, drawn as finely
as possible. Thus the separating lines of the bricks at Siena, of this
gate at Lucca, of the vault at Verona, of this window at Orvieto, and
of the contemporary refectory at Furness Abbey, are a main source of the
pleasure you have in the building. Nay, they are not merely engravers'
lines, but, in finest practice, they are mathematical lines--length
without breadth. Here in my hand is a little shaft of Florentine mosaic
executed at the present day. The separations between the stones are,
in dimension, mathematical lines. And the two sides of the thirteenth
century porch of St. Anastasia at Verona are built in this manner,--so
exquisitely, that for some time, my mind not having been set at it, I
passed them by as painted!
167. That is the first character of the Florentine Cyclopean But
secondly; as the joints are so firm, and as the building must never
stir or settle after it is built, the sculptor may trust his work to two
stones set side by side, or one above another, and carve continuously
over the whole surface, disregarding the joints, if he so chooses.
Of the degree of precision with which Nicholas of Pisa and his son
adjusted their stones, you may judge by this rough sketch of a piece of
St. Mary's of the Thorn, in which the design is of panels enclosing very
delicately sculptured heads; and one would naturally suppose that the
enclosing panels would be made of jointed pieces, and the heads carved
separately and inserted. But the Pisans would have considered that
unsafe masonry,--liable to the accident of the heads being dropped out,
or taken away. John of Pisa did indeed use such masonry, of necessity,
in his fountain; and the bas-reliefs _have_ been taken away. But here
one great block of marble forms part of two panels, and the mouldings
and head are both carved in the solid, the joint running just behind the
neck.
168. Such masonry is, indeed, supposing there were no fear of thieves,
gratuitously precise in a case of this kind, in which the ornamentation
is in separate masses, and might be separately carved. But when the
ornamentation is current, and flows or climbs along the stone in the
manner of waves or plants, the concealment of the joints of the pieces
of marble becomes altogether essential. And here we enter upon a most
curious group of associated characters in Gothic as opposed to Greek
architecture.
169. If you have been able to read the article to which I referred you,
'Meneau,' in M. Violet le Duc's dictionary, you know that one great
condition of the perfect Gothic structure is that the stones shall be
'en de-lit,' set up on end. The ornament then, which on the reposing or
couchant stone was current only, on the erected stone begins to climb
also, and becomes, in the most heraldic sense of the term, rampant.
In the heraldic sense, I say, as distinguished from the still wider
original sense of advancing with a stealthy, creeping, or clinging
motion, as a serpent on the ground, and a cat, or a vine, up a
tree-stem. And there is one of these reptile, creeping, or rampant
things, which is the first whose action was translated into marble, and
otherwise is of boundless importance in the arts and labours of man.
170. You recollect Kingsley's expression,--now hackneyed, because
admired for its precision,--the '_crawling foam_,' of waves advancing
on sand. Tennyson has somewhere also used, with equal truth, the epithet
'climbing' of the spray of breakers against vertical rock. [1] In either
instance, the sea action is literally 'rampant'; and the course of a
great breaker, whether in its first proud likeness to a rearing horse,
or in the humble and subdued gaining of the outmost verge of its foam on
the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous
precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a
giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant
energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla,
and sea-horse, by the head and crest of the man, dog, or horse, with
the body of the serpent; and of which you will find the slower image, in
vegetation, rendered both by the spiral tendrils of grasping or climbing
plants, and the perennial gaining of the foam or the lichen upon barren
shores of stone.
[Footnote: Perhaps I am thinking of Lowell, not Tennyson; I have not
time to look.]
171. If you will look to the thirtieth chapter of vol. i. in the new
edition of the "Stones of Venice," which, by the gift of its publishers,
I am enabled to lay on your table to be placed in your library, you
will find one of my first and most eager statements of the necessity of
inequality or change in form, made against the common misunderstanding
of Greek symmetry, and illustrated by a woodcut of the spiral ornament
on the treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. All that is said in that chapter
respecting nature and the ideal, I now beg most earnestly to recommend
and ratify to you; but although, even at that time, I knew more of Greek
art than my antagonists, my broken reading has given me no conception
of the range of its symbolic power, nor of the function of that more
or less formal spiral line, as expressive, not only of the waves of the
sea, but of the zones of the whirlpool, the return of the tempest, and
the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I
wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage
without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance
and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it
contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to
delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my
father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems
to me scarcely a day, since, with boyish conceit, I resisted his wise
entreaties that I would re-word this clause; and especially take out of
it the description of a sea-wave as "laying a great white tablecloth of
foam" all the way to the shore. Now, after an interval of twenty years,
I refer you to the passage, repentant and humble as far as regards its
style, which people sometimes praised, but with absolue re-assertion
of the truth and value of its contents, which people always denied. As
natural form is varied, so must beautiful ornament be varied. You
are not an artist by reproving nature into deathful sameness, but by
animating your copy of her into vital variation. But I thought at that
time that only Goths were rightly changeful. I never thought Greeks
were. Their reserved variation escaped me, or I thought it accidental.
Here, however, is a coin of the finest Greek workmanship, which shows
you their mind in this matter unmistakably. Here are the waves of the
Adriatic round a knight of Tarentum, and there is no doubt of their
variableness.
172. This pattern of sea-wave, or river whirlpool, entirely sacred in
the Greek mind, and the [Greek: *bostruchos*] or similarly curling wave
in flowing hair, are the two main sources of the spiral form in lambent
or rampant decoration. Of such lambent ornament, the most important
piece is the crocket, of which I rapidly set before you the origin.
173. Here is a drawing of the gable of the bishop's throne in the upper
church at Assisi, of the exact period when the mosaic workers of the
thirteenth century at Rome adopted rudely the masonry of the north.
Briefly, this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their
power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for
ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then
call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the Ægean
climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys.
Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut
with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root
we are able--but it must be in a lecture on crockets only--to trace the
succeeding changes through the curl of Richard II.'s hair, and the
crisp leaves of the forests of Picardy, to the knobbed extravagances of
expiring Gothic. But I must to-day let you compare one piece of perfect
Gothic work with the perfect Greek.
174. There is no question in my own mind, and, I believe, none in
that of any other long-practised student of mediæval art, that in pure
structural Gothic the church of St. Urbain at Troyes is without rival in
Europe. Here is a rude sketch of its use of the crocket in the spandrils
of its external tracery, and here are the waves of the Greek sea round
the son of Poseidon. Seventeen hundred years are between them, but the
same mind is in both. I wonder how many times seventeen hundred years
Mr. Darwin will ask, to retrace the Greek designer of this into his
primitive ape; or how many times six hundred years of such improvements
as we have made on the church of St. Urbain, will be needed in order
to enable our descendants to regard the designers of that, as only
primitive apes.
175. I return for a moment to my gable at Assisi. You see that the crest
of the waves at the top form a rude likeness of a fleur-de-lys. There
is, however, in this form no real intention of imitating a flower, any
more than in the meeting of the tails of these two Etruscan griffins.
The notable circumstance in this piece of Gothic is its advanced form
of crocket, and its prominent foliation, with nothing in the least
approaching to floral ornament.
176. And now, observe this very curious fact in the personal character
of two contemporary artists. See the use of my manually graspable flag.
Here is John of Pisa,--here Giotto. They are contemporary for twenty
years;--but these are the prime of Giotto's life, and the last of John's
life: virtually, Giotto is the later workman by full twenty years.
But Giotto always uses severe geometrical mouldings, and disdains all
luxuriance of leafage to set off interior sculpture.
John of Pisa not only adopts Gothic tracery, but first allows himself
enthusiastic use of rampant vegetation;--and here in the façade of
Orvieto, you have not only perfect Gothic in the sentiment of Scripture
history, but such luxurious ivy ornamentation as you cannot afterwards
match for two hundred years. Nay, you can scarcely match it then--for
grace of line, only in the richest flamboyant of France.
177. Now this fact would set you, if you looked at art from its
aesthetic side only, at once to find out what German artists had taught
Giovanni Pisano. There _were_ Germans teaching him,--some teaching
him many things; and the intense conceit of the modern German artist
imagines them to have taught him all things.
But he learnt his luxuriance, and Giotto his severity, in another
school. The quality in both is Greek; and altogether moral. The grace
and the redundance of Giovanui are the first strong manifestation of
those characters in the Italian mind which culminate in the Madonnas of
Luini and the arabesques of Raphael. The severity of Giotto belongs to
him, on the contrary, not only as one of the strongest practical men who
ever lived on this solid earth, but as the purest and firmest reformer
of the discipline of the Christian Church, of whose writings any remains
exist.
178. Of whose writings, I say; and you look up, as doubtful that he has
left any. Hieroglyphics, then, let me say instead; or, more accurately
still, hierographics. St. Francis, in what he wrote and said, taught
much that was false. But Giotto, his true disciple, nothing but what
was true. And where _he_ uses an arabesque of foliage, depend upon it it
will be to purpose--not redundant. I return for the time to our soft and
luxuriant John of Pisa.
179. Soft, but with no unmanly softness; luxuriant, but with no
unmannered luxury. To him you owe as to their first sire in art, the
grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the awe of Michael Angelo.
Second-rate qualities in all the three, but precious in their kind, and
learned, as you shall see, essentially from this man. Second-rate he
also, but with most notable gifts of this inferior kind. He is the
Canova of the thirteenth century; but the Canova of the thirteenth,
remember, was necessarily a very different person from the Canova of the
eighteenth.
The Cauova of the eighteenth century mimicked Greek grace for the
delight of modern revolutionary sensualists. The Canova of the
thirteenth century brought living Gothic truth into the living faith of
his own time.
Greek truth, and Gothic 'liberty,'--in that noble sense of the word,
derived from the Latin 'liber,' of which I have already spoken, and
which in my next lecture I will endeavour completely to develope.
Meanwhile let me show you, as far as I can, the architecture itself
about which these subtle questions arise.
180. Here are five frames, containing the best representations I can get
for you of the façade of the cathedral of Orvieto. I must remind you,
before I let you look at them, of the reason why that cathedral was
built; for I have at last got to the end of the parenthesis which began
in my second lecture, on the occasion of our hearing that John of Pisa
was sent for to Perugia, to carve the tomb of Pope Urban IV.; and we
must now know who this Pope was.
181. He was a Frenchman, born at that Troyes, in Champagne, which I gave
you as the centre of French architectural skill, and Royalist character.
He was born in the lowest class of the people, rose like Wolsey; became
Bishop of Verdun; then, Patriarch of Jerusalem; returned in the year
1261, from his Patriarchate, to solicit the aid of the then Pope,
Alexander IV., against the Saracen. I do not know on what day he arrived
in Rome; but on the 25th of May, Alexander died, and the Cardinals,
after three months' disputing, elected the suppliant Patriarch to be
Pope himself.
182. A man with all the fire of France in him, all the faith, and all
the insolence; incapable of doubting a single article of his creed, or
relaxing one tittle of his authority; destitute alike of reason and of
pity; and absolutely merciless either to an infidel, or an enemy. The
young Prince Manfred, bastard son of Frederick II., now representing
the main power of the German empire, was both; and against him the Pope
brought into Italy a religious French knight, of character absolutely
like his own, Charles of Anjou.
183. The young Manfred, now about twenty years old, was as good a
soldier as he was a bad Christian; and there was no safety for Urban
at Rome. The Pope seated himself on a worthy throne for a
thirteenth-century St. Peter. Fancy the rock of Edinburgh Castle, as
steep on all sides as it is to the west; and as long as the Old Town;
and you have the rock of Orvieto.
184. Here, enthroned against the gates of hell, in unassailable
fortitude, and unfaltering faith, sat Urban; the righteousness of his
cause presently to be avouched by miracle, notablest among those of the
Roman Church. Twelve miles east of his rock, beyond the range of low
Apennine, shone the quiet lake, the Loch Leven of Italy, from whose
island the daughter of Theodoric needed not to escape--Fate seeking her
there; and in a little chapel on its shore a Bohemian priest, infected
with Northern infidelity, was brought back to his allegiance by seeing
the blood drop from the wafer in his hand. And the Catholic Church
recorded this heavenly testimony to her chief mystery, in the Festa of
the Corpus Domini, and the Fabric of Orvieto.
185. And sending was made for John, and for all good labourers in
marble; but Urban never saw a stone of the great cathedral laid. His
citation of Manfred to appear in his presence to answer for his heresy,
was fixed against the posts of the doors of the old Duomo. But Urban had
dug the foundation of the pile to purpose, and when he died at Perugia,
still breathed, from his grave, calamity to Manfred, and made from it
glory to the Church. He had secured the election of a French successor;
from the rock of Orvieto the spirit of Urban led the French chivalry,
when Charles of Anjou saw the day of battle come, so long desired.
Manfred's Saracens, with their arrows, broke his first line; the Pope's
legate blessed the second, and gave them absolution of all their sins,
for their service to the Church. They charged for Orvieto with their
old cry of 'Mont-Joie, Chevaliers!' and before night, while Urban lay
sleeping in his carved tomb at Perugia, the body of Manfred lay only
recognizable by those who loved him, naked among the slain.
186. Time wore on and on. The Suabian power ceased in Italy; between
white and red there was now no more contest;--the matron of the Church,
scarlet-robed, reigned, ruthless, on her seven hills. Time wore on; and,
a hundred years later, now no more the power of the kings, but the power
of the people,--rose against her. St. Michael, from the corn market,--Or
San Michele,--the commercial strength of Florence, on a question of free
trade in corn. And note, for a little bye piece of botany, that in
Val d'Arno lilies grow among the corn instead of poppies. The purple
gladiolus glows through all its green fields in early spring.
187. A question of free trade in corn, then, arose between Florence and
Rome. The Pope's legate in Bologna stopped the supply of polenta, the
Florentines depending on that to eat with their own oil. Very wicked,
you think, of the Pope's legate, acting thus against quasi-Protestant
Florence? Yes; just as wicked as the--not quasi-Protestants--but
intensely positive Protestants, of Zurich, who tried to convert the
Catholic forest-cantons by refusing them salt. Christendom has been
greatly troubled about bread and salt: the then Protestant Pope,
Zuinglius, was killed at the battle of Keppel, and the Catholic cantons
therefore remain Catholic to this day; while the consequences of this
piece of protectionist economy at Bologna are equally interesting and
direct.
188. The legate of Bologna, not content with stopping the supplies of
maize to Florence, sent our own John Hawkwood, on the 24th June, 1375,
to burn all the maize the Florentines had got growing; and the abbot
of Montemaggiore sent a troop of Perugian religious gentlemen-riders
to ravage similarly the territory of Siena. Whereupon, at Florence, the
Gonfalonier of Justice, Aloesio Aldobrandini, rose in the Council of
Ancients and proposed, as an enterprise worthy of Florentine generosity,
the freedom of all the peoples who groaned under the tyranny of the
Church. And Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo,--all the great
cities of Etruria, the root of religion in Italy,--joined against the
tyranny of religion. Strangely, this Etrurian league is not now to
restore Tarquin to Rome, but to drive the Roman Tarquin into exile. The
story of Lucretia had been repeated in Perugia; but the Umbrian Lucretia
had died, not by suicide, but by falling on the pavement from the window
through which she tried to escape. And the Umbrian Sextus was the Abbot
of Montemaggiore's nephew.
189. Florence raised her fleur-de-lys standard: and, in ten days, eighty
cities of Romagua were free, out of the number of whose names I
will read you only these--Urbino, Foligno, Spoleto, Narni, Camerino,
Toscanella, Perugia, Orvieto.
And while the wind and the rain still beat the body of Manfred, by the
shores of the Rio Verde, the body of Pope Urban was torn from its tomb,
and not one stone of the carved work thereof left upon another. 190. I
will only ask you to-day to notice farther that the Captain of Florence,
in this war, was a 'Conrad of Suabia,' and that she gave him, beside her
own flag, one with only the word 'Libertas' inscribed on it.
I told you that the first stroke of the bell on the Tower of the
Lion began the carillon for European civil and religious liberty. But
perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, Florence did not understand, by
that word, altogether the same policy which is now preached in France,
Italy, and England.
What she did understand by it, we will try to ascertain in the course of
next lecture.
LECTURE VIII.
FRANCHISE.
191. In my first lecture of this course, you remember that I showed
you the Lion of St. Mark's with Niccola Pisano's, calling the one
an evangelical-preacher lion, and the other a real, and naturally
affectionate, lioness.
And the one I showed you as Byzantine, the other as Gothic.
So that I thus called the Greek art pious, and the Gothic profane.
Whereas in nearly all our ordinary modes of thought, and in all my own
general references to either art, we assume Greek or classic work to be
profane, and Gothic, pious, or religious.
192. Very short reflection, if steady and clear, will both show you how
confused our ideas are usually on this subject, and how definite they
may within certain limits become.
First of all, don't confuse piety with Christianity. There are pious
Greeks and impious Greeks; pious Turks and impious Turks; pious
Christians and impious Christians; pious modern infidels and impious
modern infidels. In case you do not quite know what piety really means,
we will try to know better in next lecture; for the present, understand
that I mean distinctly to call Greek art, in the true sense of the word,
pious, and Gothic, as opposed to it, profane.
193. But when I oppose these two words, Gothic and Greek, don't run away
with the notion that I necessarily mean to oppose _Christian_ and Greek.
You must not confuse Gothic blood in a man's veins, with Christian
feeling in a man's breast. There are unconverted and converted Goths;
unconverted and converted Greeks. The Greek and Gothic temper is equally
opposed, where the name of Christ has never been uttered by either, or
when every other name is equally detested by both.
I want you to-day to examine with me that essential difference between
Greek and Gothic temper, irrespective of creed, to which I have referred
in my preface to the last edition of the "Stones of Venice," saying that
the Byzantines gave law to Norman license. And I must therefore ask your
patience while I clear your minds from some too prevalent errors as to
the meaning of those two words, law and license.
194. There is perhaps no more curious proof of the disorder which
impatient and impertinent science is introducing into classical thought
and language, than the title chosen by the Duke of Argyll for his
interesting study of Natural History--'The Reign of Law.' Law cannot
reign. If a natural law, it admits no disobedience, and has nothing to
put right. If a human one, it can compel no obedience, and has no power
to prevent wrong. A king only can reign;--a person, that is to say, who,
conscious of natural law, enforces human law so far as it is just.
195. Kinghood is equally necessary in Greek dynasty, and in Gothic.
Theseus is every inch a king, as well as Edward III. But the laws which
they have to enforce on their own and their companions' humanity are
opposed to each other as much as their dispositions are.
The function of a Greek king was to enforce labour.
That of a Gothic king, to restrain rage.
The laws of Greece determine the wise methods of labour; and the laws of
France determine the wise restraints of passion.
For the sins of Greece are in Indolence, and its pleasures; and the sins
of France are in fury, and its pleasures.
196. You are now again surprised, probably, at hearing me oppose France
typically to Greece. More strictly, I might oppose only a part of
France,--Normandy. But it is better to say, France, [1] as embracing the
seat of the established Norman power in the Island of our Lady; and the
province in which it was crowned,--Champagne.
[Footnote 1: "Normandie, la franche." "France, la solue;" (chanson de
Roland). One of my good pupils referred me to this ancient and glorious
French song.]
France is everlastingly, by birth, name, and nature, the country of the
Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness,
or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or
Cockney-English word liberty,--Mr. John Stuart Mill's,--is not
the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word
liberté,--M. Victor Hugo's,--is not the equivalent of franchise.
197. The Latin for franchise, I have said, is libertas; the Greek is
[Greek: *eleupheria*]. In the thoughts of all three nations, the idea
is precisely the same, and the word used for the idea by each nation
therefore accurately translates the word of the other: [Greek:
*eleupheria*]--libertas--franchise--reciprocally translate each other.
Leonidas is characteristically [Greek: *eleupheros*] among Greeks;
Publicola, characteristically liber, among Romans; Edward III. and the
Black Prince, characteristically frank among French. And that common
idea, which the words express, as all the careful scholars among you
will know, is, with all the three nations, mainly of deliverance from
the slavery of passion. To be [Greek: *eleupheros*], liber, or franc,
is first to have learned how to rule our own passions; and then, certain
that our own conduct is right, to persist in that conduct against
all resistance, whether of counter-opinion, counter pain, or
counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike of the mob's thought, of the
adversary's threat, and the harlot's temptation,--this is in the meaning
of every great nation to be free; and the one condition upon which that
freedom can be obtained is pronounced to you in a single verse of the
119th Psalm, "I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts."
198. Thy precepts:--Law, observe, being dominant over the Gothic as over
the Greek king, but a quite different law. Edward III. feeling no anger
against the Sieur de Ribaumont, and crowning him with his own pearl
chaplet, is obeying the law of love, _restraining_ anger; but Theseus,
slaying the Minotaur, is obeying the law of justice, and _enforcing_
anger.
The one is acting under the law of the charity, [Greek: *charis*] or
grace of God; the other under the law of His judgment. The two together
fulfil His [Greek: *krisis*] and [Greek: *agapae*].
199. Therefore the Greek dynasties are finally expressed in the
kinghoods of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, who judge infallibly, and
divide arithmetically. But the dynasty of the Gothic king is in equity
and compassion, and his arithmetic is in largesse,
"Whose moste joy was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, Have this."
So that, to put it in shortest terms of all, Greek law is of Stasy, and
Gothic of Ecstasy; there is no limit to the freedom of the Gothic hand
or heart, and the children are most in the delight and the glory of
liberty when they most seek their Father's precepts.
200. The two lines I have just quoted are, as you probably remember,
from Chaucer's translation of the French Romance of the Rose, out
of which I before quoted to you the description of the virtue
of Debonnaireté. Now that Debonnaireté of the Painted Chamber of
Westminster is the typical figure used by the French sculptors and
painters for 'franchise,' frankness, or Frenchness; but in the Painted
Chamber, Debonnaireté, high breeding, 'out of goodnestedness,' or
gentleness, is used, as an English king's English, of the Norman
franchise. Here, then, is our own royalty,--let us call it Englishness,
the grace of our proper kinghood;--and here is French royalty, the grace
of French kinghood--Frenchness, rudely but sufficiently drawn by M.
Didron from the porch of Chartres. She has the crown of fleur-de-lys,
and William the Norman's shield.
201. Now this grace of high birth, the grace of his or her Most Gracious
Majesty, has her name at Chartres written beside her, in Latin. Had it
been in Greek, it would have been [Greek: *elevtheria*]. Being in Latin,
what do you think it must be necessarily?--Of course, Libertas. Now M.
Didron is quite the best writer on art that I know,--full of sense and
intelligence; but of course, as a modern Frenchman,--one of a nation for
whom the Latin and Gothic ideas of libertas have entirely vanished,--he
is not on his guard against the trap here laid for him. He looks at
the word libertas through his spectacles;--can't understand, being a
thoroughly good antiquary, [1] how such a virtue, or privilege, could
honestly be carved with approval in the twelfth century;--rubs his
spectacles; rubs the inscription, to make sure of its every letter;
stamps it, to make surer still;--and at last, though in a greatly
bewildered state of mind, remains convinced that here is a sculpture of
'La Liberte' in the twelfth century. "C'est bien la liberte!" "On lit
parfaitement libertas."
[Footnote 1: Historical antiquary; not art-antiquary I must limitedly
say, however. He has made a grotesque mess of his account of the Ducal
Palace of Venice, through his ignorance of the technical characters of
sculpture.]
202. Not so, my good M. Didron!--a very different personage, this;
of whom more, presently, though the letters of her name are indeed so
plainly, 'Libertas, at non liberalitas,' liberalitas being the Latin for
largesse, not for franchise.
This, then, is the opposition between the Greek and Gothic dynasties, in
their passionate or vital nature; in the _animal_ and _inbred_ part
of them;--Classic and romantic, Static and exstatic. But now, what
opposition is there between their divine natures? Between Theseus
and Edward III., as warriors, we now know the difference; but between
Theseus and Edward III, as theologians; as dreaming and discerning
creatures, as didactic kings,--engraving letters with the point of the
sword, instead of thrusting men through with it,--changing the club into
the ferula, and becoming schoolmasters as well as kings; what is, thus,
the difference between them?
Theologians I called them. Philologians would be a better word,--lovers
of the [Greek: *Logos*], or Word, by which the heavens and earth were
made. What logos, _about_ this Logos, have they learned, or can they
teach?
203. I showed you, in my first lecture, the Byzantine Greek lion, as
descended by true unblemished line from the Nemean Greek; but with this
difference: Heracles kills the beast, and makes a helmet and cloak of
his skin; the Greek St. Mark converts the beast, and makes an evangelist
of him.
Is not that a greater difference, think you, than one of mere decadence?
This 'maniera goffa e sproporzionata' of Vasari is not, then, merely the
wasting away of former leonine strength into thin rigidities of death?
There is another change going on at the same time,--body perhaps
subjecting itself to spirit.
I will not teaze you with farther questions. The facts are simple
enough. Theseus and Heracles have their religion, sincere and
sufficient,--a religion of lion-killers, minotaur-killers, very
curious and rude; Eleusinian mystery mingled in it, inscrutable to us
now,--partly always so, even to them.
204. Well; the Greek nation, in process of time, loses its
manliness,--becomes Graeculus instead of Greek. But though effeminate
and feeble, it inherits all the subtlety of its art, all the cunning of
its mystery; and it is converted to a more spiritual religion. Nor is
it altogether degraded, even by the diminution of its animal energy.
Certain spiritual phenomena are possible to the weak, which are hidden
from the strong;--nay, the monk may, in his order of being, possess
strength denied to the warrior. Is it altogether, think you, by
blundering, or by disproportion in intellect or in body, that Theseus
becomes St. Athanase? For that is the kind of change which takes place,
from the days of the great King of Athens, to those of the great Bishop
of Alexandria, in the thought and theology, or, summarily, in the spirit
of the Greek.
Now we have learned indeed the difference between the Gothic knight and
the Greek knight; but what will be the difference between the Gothic
saint and Greek saint?
Franchise of body against constancy of body.
Franchise of thought, then, against constancy of thought.
Edward III. against Theseus.
And the Frank of Assisi against St. Athanase.
205. Utter franchise, utter gentleness in theological thought. Instead
of, 'This is the faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he
cannot be saved,' 'This is the love, which if a bird or an insect keep
faithfully, _it_ shall be saved.'
Gentlemen, you have at present arrived at a phase of natural science in
which, rejecting alike the theology of the Byzantine, and the affection
of the Frank, you can only contemplate a bird as flying under the reign
of law, and a cricket as singing under the compulsion of caloric.
I do not know whether you yet feel that the position of your boat on
the river also depends entirely on the reign of law, or whether, as your
churches and concert-rooms are privileged in the possession of organs
blown by steam, you are learning yourselves to sing by gas, and expect
the Dies Irae to the announced by a steam-trumpet. But I can very
positively assure you that, in my poor domain of imitative art, not all
the mechanical or gaseous forces of the world, nor all the laws of
the universe, will enable you either to see a colour, or draw a line,
without that singular force anciently called the soul, which it was the
function of the Greek to discipline in the duty of the servants of God,
and of the Goth to lead into the liberty of His children.
206. But in one respect I wish you were more conscious of the existence
of law than you appear to be. The difference which I have pointed out
to you as existing between these great nations, exists also between two
orders of intelligence among men, of which the one is usually called
Classic, the other Romantic. Without entering into any of the fine
distinctions between these two sects, this broad one is to be observed
as constant: that the writers and painters of the Classic school set
down nothing but what is known to be true, and set it down in the
perfectest manner possible in their way, and are thenceforward
authorities from whom there is no appeal. Romantic writers and painters,
on the contrary, express themselves under the impulse of passions which
may indeed lead them to the discovery of new truths, or to the more
delightful arrangement or presentment of things already known: but
their work, however brilliant or lovely, remains imperfect, and without
authority. It is not possible, of course, to separate these two orders
of men trenchantly: a classic writer may sometimes, whatever his
care, admit an error, and a romantic one may reach perfection through
enthusiasm. But, practically, you may separate the two for your study
and your education; and, during your youth, the business of us your
masters is to enforce on you the reading, for school work, only of
classical books: and to see that your minds are both informed of
the indisputable facts they contain, and accustomed to act with the
infallible accuracy of which they set the example.
207. I have not time to make the calculation, but I suppose that the
daily literature by which we now are principally nourished, is so large
in issue that though St. John's "even the world itself could not
contain the books which should be written" may be still hyperbole, it
is nevertheless literally true that the world might be _wrapped_ in the
books which are written; and that the sheets of paper covered with type
on any given subject, interesting to the modern mind, (say the prospects
of the Claimant,) issued in the form of English morning papers during a
single year, would be enough literally to pack the world in.
208. Now I will read you fifty-two lines of a classical author, which,
once well read and understood, contain more truth than has been told you
all this year by this whole globe's compass of print.
Fifty-two lines, of which you will recognize some as hackneyed, and see
little to admire in others. But it is not possible to put the statements
they contain into better English, nor to invalidate one syllable of the
statements they contain. [1]
[Footnote 1: 'The Deserted Village,' line 251 to 302.]
209. Even those, and there may be many here, who would dispute the truth
of the passage, will admit its exquisite distinctness and construction.
If it be untrue, that is m
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