THE COLUMN ANDTHE ARCH
ESSAYS

ON ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

By

WILLIAM P. P. LONGFELLOW

@

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1899

Mam.“- tuurmr .~.- I M 64mm?" --\. Jacki-511.5 19.13me

ENVI

COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

PREFACE

Some of these essays have been already printed,
and I have to thank the proprietors of the Amer-
ican Architect and the Architectural Record for per-
mission to repeat them here; others of them ap-
pear now for the first time. I have brought them
together with the wish to trace in sequence the
main thread that binds the successive phases of
European architecture, and the evolution of the
two leading features of its forms, the classic order
and the arch. I have passed by the Byzantine
style because it was a collateral development, and
outside the cycle which, beginning with Greek
architecture, returned upon itself in the Renais-
sance. For a like reason I have touched but lightly
on the Gothic, a splendid growth that structurally
was the completion of the Romanesque, but, as a
matter of form, was hows de ligne, like the Byzan-
tine, and like it had no successor; for the logical
predecessor of the Renaissance was the Roman-
esque, and the development of the older forms was
finished when that merged in the pointed Gothic.

While I have made the essays historically con-
V

vi PREFA CE

secutive and have carried the same line of thought
through them, I have not tried to make them con-
tinuous. I have allowed certain repetitions be-
cause they cover points which seem to me important
to keep in mind and necessary to the completeness
of the several discussions.

W. P. P. L.

CAMBRIDGE, November, 1898.

nANDSCAPE
ARCHITECTURE

AddEE
Farrand Giff

II.
III.

IV.

VI.
VII.

VIII.

CONTENTS

THE LOTUS COLUMN
GRJECC-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE .
THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE .
EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE
THE RENAISSANCE

SAINT PETER’S

628

rmacmwmme
NA203

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PAGE

19
61
90
125
154
222

262

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING

MEDINET-ABU—COLUMNS OF RAMESES III. .

LOTUS COLUMNS—1. ABUSIR, 2. BUBASTIS. From
Foucart

THESEUM, ATHENS—THE GREEK ORDER

ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS, ROME—THE RO-
MAN ORDER . . . . . .

SANTA COSTANZA, ROME—TIME OF CONSTANTINE

SAN APOLLINARE IN CLASSE, RAVENNA—EARLY
CHRISTIAN BASILICA . . . . .

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE, ROME—REAR FACADE
SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE, ROME—INTERIOR
CATHEDRAL, SPEYER—ROMANESQUE TOWERS
CATHEDRAL, GENOA—SOUTH DOORWAY

CATHEDRAL, PARMA—DOUBLE BAYS AND CLUS-
TERED PIERS

CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE—BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME .
SAN SPIRITO, FLORENCE—BRUNELLESOHI’S ORDER
SAN ANDREA, MANTUA—ALBERTI’S ORDER .

ST. PETER’S, ROME—MICHELANGELO’S DOME

ST. PETER’S, ROME—MICHELANGELO’S SKETCH.
From a drawing in the Ufizi Gallery . .

PAGE

1

19

48
61

90
125
134
154
178

190
222
238
254
262

290

 

THE LOTUS COLUMN

CONVENTIONAL ornament among the ancient
Egyptians, as among all primitive peoples, re-
flected their habits of life. They were a flower-
loving people. Living on a long strip of fertile
alluvial land, exhaustively cultivated, and bordered
by bare hills or desert sands, they had few trees
or even shrubs besides the palms that grew on the
edge of the desert. But the river-banks, the pools
left by the inundations, and the wet marshes dur-
ing their season, gave them abundance of wild
aquatic plants, and their gardens were full of
bloom. They decorated their houses with flowers,
covered their altars and filled their tombs with
them; the women wore them in their hair. They
carved them on the stems and stems of their
boats, on their thrones and harps; they painted
them on their ceilings and walls, on their chests
and coffins. It brings these remote and grimly
imaged people curiously near to real life to be
told that in the tomb of a high priest of Ammon,
which was Opened half a dozen years ago at Deir-

el-Bahari, among the withered garlands and
‘ 1

2 THE LOTUS 00L UMN

wreaths of flowers beside the dead man lay a bee.
It had been tempth in by the freshness of the
flowers when they were laid there, and had been
intombed with them for five thousand years. Pos-
sibly the Egyptians’ love of color grew out of their
love of flowers; at least the two were in accord.
Everything they decorated was alive with color,
generally with bright color, and everything they
used or made they decorated. They painted their
statues, the bas-reliefs that covered the walls of
their houses and tombs, and the pylons of their
temples. Their ceilings, their cornices and col-
umns, their mummy cases, furniture, and imple-
ments, even the sails of their boats, were covered
with a mosaic of painted ornament.

The basis of this decoration, so far as it was not
pictorial, or hieroglyphic, or purely abstract, that
is, so far as it was absolute ornament, was almost
entirely floral. The aquatic plants which were
native to the Nile gave types that were peculiarly
apt for this use. The skill with which the Egyp-
tians used them in borders, surface patterns, and
other conventionally applied ornament is conspic-
uous. They not only conventionalized their ele-
ments with marvellous skill in the borders and
panels of walls and ceilings, on mummy cases and
chests, but they painted or carved them alone and
in groups along the bases of walls and round the
shafts and capitals of columns. \Vith this simply

THE LOTUS COLUMN 3

ornamental use of floral motives there was also
much of symbolism. The favorite lotus, emblem -
of the resurrection and of the sun, was a religious
symbol, consecrated to the sun-god Osiris, and is
the most abundant element of their decoration.
They decorated their temples with its natural
fl0wers, laid them on their altars and in their
graves, and hung them in clusters about the posts
of their tabernacles. Its ran-like Open blossoms
and long olive-shaped buds are seen everywhere
in paintings and has-reliefs. You may find it as
an offering in the hands of priests or kings, gath-
ered in heavy bunches, or coiled into the likeness
of a trumpet, or piled in heaps among the harvest
tribute. The decorative handling to which the
Egyptians subject it is singularly firm and monu-
mental, and at the same time singularly free. It
appears carved into the high finial that overhangs
the steersman of a Nile boat, or twined round the
handle of a spoon, or wrapped about the body of a
vase and spread open to form its foot. Even the
prisoners that kneel at the feet of the great statue
of Rameses II. in the Ramesseum are tied to-
gether with a rcpe whose ends are tasselled with
flowers.

There are innumerable examples, pictured in
papyri and bas-reliefs, of various types of columns.
Some are mere compositions of floral and other
unarchitectural elements, as unreal as the most

4 THE LOTUS COLUMN

incredible painted architecture of the Pompeian
decorators, or the panelling of the Renaissance or
the Rococo; others have the air of imitating more
or less closely real constructions. They are all
much attenuated, as indeed architectural forms or-
dinarily are, in conventional representations of
every style; and they range from the simplest
outline to elaborate delineation. It is diflicult
and dangerous to draw decisive conclusions from
pictures which seem to treat their originals with
so much freedom. Archaeologists have disputed
much about their meaning. By far the greater
part of the representations show distinctly one
order of forms without very essential variations.
They consist of a slender shaft crowned with a sin-
gle lotus or a bunch of them, sometimes the open
flower and sometimes the close bud. The more
carefully drawn are apt to show a bunch of flow-
ers or buds tied close about the upper end of the
shaft by a banded ligature, Whose ends are often
floating in the air; and smaller buds, set about
the base of the larger cluster, are tucked in be-
neath the ligature, with their stems hanging down
below it. We may even see tall flowers reared
against the shafts as if they had grown there,
and tied to it by other bands. The lotus being
their favorite religious emblem, it was natural
enough that it should be used about tombs and
shrines, and there we find it in abundance, both in

THE LOTUS 00L MEN 5

the architecture of the tombs themselves and in
pictures of shrines and canopies over the gods. It
is all in accordance with what we know of the
evolution of architecture among ancient peoples,
Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks alike, that when
they came to develop monumental forms they
should fix in solid material the semblance of these
decorations.

It is the distinction of the Egyptian capitals
among all others that they alone have no practical ‘
office, and this accords well with their floral ori-
gin. From the Greeks down, every capital has
shown, besides the wish to mark the transition be-
tween the shaft and the beam or arch, which is the
aesthetic office of every capital, a distinct structural
effort to strengthen the junction of the shaft and
its load. All other capitals expand where they
take hold of the lintel or archivolt. They seem to
show that the upper end of the shaft was liberally
enlarged where it receives the charge, and then
what material could be spared at the corners was
cut away in ornamental forms to smooth the pas-
sage from the round shaft to the angular mass
above. This is most manifest in those styles in
which the shaft is slenderest in proportion to its
load, as in the Saracenic and the late Romanesque,
and thirteenth century Gothic. But in the Egyp-
tian, most ponderous of all, the precaution is abso-
lutely neglected, or rather rejected, as if in com-

6 THE LOTUS COLUMN

memoration of the dainty originals of their mas-
sive capitals. The architrave is ostentatiously
lifted clear from the cap by a square block, which
takes the place of the classic abacus. Instead of
expanding, the block is made as small as it can
reasonably be 2 in the bell-cap or papyrus capital,
and in the other spreading types, it is no wider
than the top of the shaft ; in the lotiform it is no
larger than is necessary to receive the top of the
bud, which may be even smaller than the shaft.
So the stern Egyptian builder, who would not ad-
mit the arch among the elements of his severely
straight-lined monuments, and hid away his vaults
in the interior of his pyramids, would have no en-
tangling alliance between decoration and construc-
tion, but uncompromisingly insisted on his great
capitals as mere ornaments.

Lately, M. George Foucart, formerly French Cu-
rator and Inspector of Excavations and Museums
in Egypt, has published a very careful monograph
on the lotiform order, using as his point de repére
M. De Morgan’s discovery, in 1894, of the column
of Abusir. The mastaba, or monumental tomb in
which this column was found, was one at Abusir,
near Cairo, hitherto unexplored, which, by its in-
scriptions, was proved to be that of a certain Phtah
Shepses, minister of public works under Sahura,
the great king of the fifth dynasty, whose pyramid
adjoins the mastaba. Among the reliefs, broken

THE LOTUS COLUMN 7

statues, and other decorations that were found, the
most interesting and significant things were the
remains of two columns which had carried the roof
of the principal chamber, including pieces which,
when put together, made a practically complete
capital. This capital, which has been carefully
restored and set up in the museum at Ghizeh, is
of what is called the lotus-bud type, and, fortu-
nately the contour, the delicate carving, and even
the color, have been preserved almost unhurt.
The importance of the discovery lies in the fact,
familiar to all students of architectural history,
that before it the oldest known columns in Egypt,
and therefore, presumably, the oldest in the world,
were those at Beni Hassan, which have been as-
cribed to the twelfth dynasty. The column of
Abusir, taking its place half way back from Beni
Hassan toward the beginning of Egyptian archi-
tecture, gives a new point of adjustment, and
should naturally bring us considerably nearer to
the forms we find in the pictured monuments, which
we may assume to preserve the original types.
The Abusir column has for its base the flat,
bevelled disc which is common to early Egyptian
columns, and has even been found at Tiryns, in
Greece. The monolithic shaft is straight-lined,
slightly tapering, and clustered like a Gothic pier,
as if it were made up, that is, of smaller shafts
bound together, in this case of six. The capital,

8 THE LOTUS COLUMN

likewise sixfold, is made of partly opened lotus-
buds. The stems of the buds continue those of
the shaft, showing for a moment above the five-
fold cincture which binds the whole together. Be-
tween these large buds and round their bases are
ranged as many little buds, looking very much like
brushes in a house-painter’s belt, their hanging
stems tucked into the cincture, and fitting neatly
in the grooves between the reedings or colonettes
of the shaft. The great buds, in spite of their rig-
orously controlled outline and slight relief, are
very delicately carved, and follow close to nature.
The end of the stem expanding into the receptacle
for the corolla, the parted sepals threaded with fine
veins, the two rings of alternating petals, all are
there, rendered with delicate relief and exquisite
fineness of line, and carefully distinguished in flat
colors of Egyptian clearness, not too naturalistic.
The smaller buds are treated with the same care.
Insignificant as they look, they prove in the his-
torical analysis to be the clew that guides us
through the later transformation of the column.
The proportions and contours of the column are
remarkably fine. The student of Egyptian art
knows well the subtlety and beauty of the abstract
lines that in the sculptures look queer to ordinary
eyes. They are fully borne out here. The outline
of this capital is in marked contrast with the
straight lines, hooked at the end, which we see in

THE LOTUS COLUMN 9

the later lotus caps. Its beauty and elasticity are
not less than those of the echinus of the Greek
Doric at its best.

We have here then the oldest known column in
the world, and the most beautiful of its own type.
There must have been a long period of experi-
ment and progress before work of this quality was
evolved, but it is lost to us. In the architecture
of Egypt, as in her sculpture and painting, we find
the earliest that we can discover is the finest.
The period of immaturity still eludes us: as far
as purity of type is concerned the ancient empire
seems to have surpassed its successors. In mag-
nificence and grandeur the Theban Empire went
far beyond it, as Roman architecture went beyond
Greek, and the architecture of that empire will re-
main the standard of what is most impressive in
Egyptian building; but as itgained in grandeur
it lost in purity.

The next example in chronological order, as was
implied above, is the column of Beni Hassan,
which M. Foucart, by reason of lately examined
inscriptions, dates from the eleventh dynasty, in-
stead of the twelfth as has been the custom. This
is already an advance of some half a thousand
years from Abusir, during which the seat of
empire had been transferred from Memphis to
Thebes. The capital has lost a good deal of its
naturalism, and a part of its grace. The shaft,

10 THE LOTUS 00L UJIN

still monolithic, and the capital are fourfold in-
stead of sixfold; the fine shape and delicate carv-
ing of the leaves are gone ; and they are replaced
by a sort of formal plaiting; the little buds have
dwindled to twigs or rods. The proportion of the
cap is ruder, its outline coarser; the capital has
changed from a delicate piece of half realistic
sculpture to a conventional architectural member.

Next come certain columns lately found at Bu-
bastis, the best capital of which is now in the
Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, and is ascribed
to the twelfth dynasty. They are monoliths of
red granite, a material which is characteristic of
that dynasty. Already there is a considerable and
significant change in them from the capitals of
Beni Hassan. Shaft and capital are now eight-
fold, but the lobes of the cap, while they retain
in the main their old contour, have lost all the
lotus form, and but for the expansion above the
cincture, simply continue the lines of the shaft.
The colonnettes or reedings of the shaft are no
longer simply rounded, but cut to an edge, almost
a ridge, so that the section of the whole is like
the plan of a flower with eight pointed leaves.
The important change, however, is in the little
buds set about the base of the capital. These
have grown in size and increased to groups of
three, but like the others have ceased to be buds.
They are compressed into the grooves and flat-

THE LOTUS COLUMN - 11

tened to suit the round sectional outline of the
column, so that they almost usurp the circumfer-
ence ; and they are bound together in threes by
little horizontal bands, which mock the cincture
beneath them after a fashion that is common in all
the arts of design of echoing in the smaller mem-
bers something of the character of the larger. The
column is stouter than that of Beni Hassan ; it is
constricted at the butt like a tenpin, in a way that
henceforth becomes characteristic.

Here is the lotus-type 1 practically reshaped. It
has thrown away the downright imitation of the
early form, and with it has lost much of its original
grace. At the same time it has departed farther
from the straightforward idea of an architectural
support, and has taken on an unreal and irrational
look which is redeemed only by its massiveness.
The shape which it took under Usirtasen and
Amenemhat at Bubastis and Hawara it seems to

1 It is to be noticed that the column which is here called the
lotiform, and is commonly so called, has been thought by some
scholars to be modelled not on the lotus, but on the papyrus.
\Vithout going into controversy it is enough to say here that the
balance of proof seems to incline the other way. It was the 10-
tus and not the papyrus that was the sacred emblem; it is clearly
this that we see in the sculptures of the temples and tombs, of-
fered to the gods or carried in the hands of kings. It is this
that is tied about the columns in the pictured MSS. In the col-
umn of Abusir the naturalism of the sculpture distinctly imitates
the buds of the lotus, and the conventionalized capital of Beni
Hassan shows them almost as clearly.

12 . THE LOTUS COLUMN

have kept unchanged for several himdred years.
There followed one of the periods of arrest which
from time to time interrupted the progress of
Egyptian art, and which have tempted writers from
Plato down to proclaim its everlasting fixity. The
Arab invaders, known as the Hyksos or Shepherd
Kings, overran Egypt somewhat as the northern
races afterward overran the Roman Empire, and
paralyzed art, especially architecture, for centuries.
When at last the native rulers, prevailing again,
came down from upper Egypt, and once more es-
tablished themselves at Thebes with the eighteenth
dynasty, apparently they took up architecture just
where it had been left five hundred years before,
under the twelfth. But the great Pharaohs of the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynasties
were far more powerful and wealthier than those
of the earlier dynasties; they built with a magnifi-
cence of which their forerunners had not dreamed.
They went on building larger and larger temples
till their work culminated in the great temple at
Karnak, whose famous hypostyle hall surpasses all
other architecture in scale.

This great revival of building naturally led to
changes of detail, and the column resumed the
course of its development. Its changes, as one
would expect, were not in an invariable line of
progress, as if to a preconceived ideal; yet a gen-
eral tendency is noticeable, which led to a marked

., THE LOTUS COLUMN 13

modification of type. The small buds, as we may
still call them, tended to spread till they almost
met, and made a crown about the base ‘of the capi-
tal. Their hanging stems enveloped the shaft in
a sort of sheath, the clustering of the shaft became
less marked ; the cinctures were in some cases re-
peated, and the grooves became shallower till the
column lost its corrugated look, and first the shaft
and then the capital grew round and smooth; and
at last the whole column, as we see it at Karnak or
Medinet Abu, looks as if it had been turned in a
lathe for the convenience of the sculptor who was
to inscribe it. In truth, this last purpose seems
to have been at the end the determining one, for
the Ramessides, who were not only a magnificent
race, but an ostentatious one, grew into the habit
of inscribing their names, titles, and performances
on every smooth surface that they could procure,
and perhaps from this, or perhaps from piety, be-
ginning with the lintels and abaci, and gradually
appropriating the whole surface of the column,
they covered it with their cartouches, their em-
blems, their deities, and themselves. This is prac-
tically the end of the lotus-column. The smooth
pillar of Karnak, its outline unmodulated except
for the swelling near the top, its surface incrusted
or chased, as it were, with a multitude of flat reliefs
and picked out from top to bottom with bright
colors, is still a stately thing, august even, in its

14 THE LOTUS COLUMV

enormous size and serried order as we see it in the
great hypostyle halls; but we should not know it
for the offspring of the early lotus column if its
pedigree were not so clear that we cannot mis.
take it.

It was displaced, apparently, from its old pre—
eminence. The great central aisle in the hypo-
style halls that were now added to the temples,
was reserved for the newer bell or papyrus column.
The lotus column was remanded to the side aisles,
and the tall shafts with bell capitals, towering
above them, carried the clerestory that brought a
dim light into these tremendous halls. I have
called these the newer columns, because none of
them have been found which are earlier than what
is named the New Empire, beginning with the
nineteenth dynasty. This should be said with
some reserve nevertheless, for all the temples
which are older than this dynasty have disap-
peared, and we have only what is found in tombs.
In these we find all the types except the bell col-
umns—the lotus, the proto-Doric, the palm leaf,
and the Hathor column or pier. It is possible
that if we found older temples we should find in
them the bell column, and M. Foucart reminds us
that we may still discover them ; but the evidence
thus far is that all the others are older.

With these changes of form went necessarily
great changes of construction and workmanship,

THE LOTUS COLUMN 15

and even of material. The buildings of the early
empire had been either quarried from the lime-
stone hills that line the Nile from Cairo to Edfu,
or excavated in them. Their columns are mono-
liths of this stone, which allowed of free and deli-
cate carving, as we see in this new example from
Abusir, and in the column of Beni Hassan. The
builders of the twelfth dynasty, more ambitious
than their predecessors, and authors of almost all
the structures of the middle empire which we know,
brought the red granite of Syene at the first cata-
ract for their columns. Those of Bubastis and
Hawara are examples. They wrought them and
their sculptures in the same obdurate material with
the decision and cleanness of handling which we
all know, although with the sacrifice of some of
the delicate detail of the earlier work. Up to this
time nothing less than a monolith seems to have
been thought worthy to stand as a column ; but if
the Usirtasens and Amenemhats of the twelfth dy-
nasty could do their modest building in this way,
the Ramessides, who bordered the river from the
first cataract to the Delta with their huge con-
structions, could not follow it. Shafts of columns
from sixteen to twenty feet high for a few build-
ings of moderate size could be brought down to the
Fayum or the Delta; but when it came to columns
forty or fifty feet high, or even sixty and seventy,
and in groves, as we see them at Luxor or Karnak,

16 THE LOTUS COLUMN

this method was impracticable. The Pharaohs of
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynas-
ties used the sandstone of the quarries above Edfu.
Its facility in cutting and handling suited the scale
of their buildings and the speed with which they
could carry them on. They laid their shafts in
drums or slices, or, as the columns grew larger,
they built them up in coursed masonry. This they
covered with stucco, to dissemble the joints, and
give them a fair surface for sculpture and paint-
ing. So were built the great pillars of the temples
that stand on the plain of Thebes, at Karnak, Me-
dinet Abu, at Kurnah (called by the French Gour-
neh), at Luxor, and even the earlier work of Seti
I. at Abydos. The huge central columns of the
hypostyle hall at Karnak, seventy feet high and
twelve thick—on the tops of whose bell capitals a
hundred men might sit, we are told—are towers,
and had to be built as towers are built. It is
strange to think of the Jerry-builder in Egypt;
but there is nothing new, and some of these won-
derful columns are merely shells of roughly coursed
masonry filled in with a cheap concrete of stones
and lime. We read of some whose filling was
found to be a soft mortar that crumbled at the
touch into yellow powder. This is explanation
enough why we may see these massive monuments,
built for eternity in a climate where the great de-
stroyers, frost and rain, cannot reach them, crum-

THE LOTUS 00L UMV 17

bling and sagging into decrepitude, even where the
hand of man has not been heavy on them. The
Ramessides were wonderful builders, with an in-
stinct for grandeur that has not been equalled.
They trusted in plaster, and it has at last betrayed
them; the wonder is that the gnawing sand of the
desert and mere daily changes of temperature have
not sooner destroyed it, and that so much of the
sculptured record which was committed to it still
survives.

The lotus order ended its development on the
Theban plain. If not precisely the latest in date,
the columns of the hypostyle hall at Karnak show
its final outcome, the last term of its logical prog-
ress. There remains only a stout well-propor-
tioned Spindle, covered by a square block, and
supporting a squared architrave. Simplicity of
form could hardly go farther, and grandeur of ex-
ecution has never again gone so far. After the
Ramessides the great building days of Egypt were
over. There were moments of some activity, as
under the Nectanebos, when there was an attempt
to copy the old forms. Under the Ptolemies there
was a considerable revival; then and under the
Roman rule a sort of composite of the early types
was evolved, on a smaller scale, which delights the
eyes of travellers in the picturesque temples of
Edfu, Denderah and Phylae. But the splendid
career of the ancient Egyptians had come to its

18 THE LOTUS COLUMN

end. The rule of their land was gone from their
hands forever. The Ramessides, greater than all
their predecessors, were the last of their nation.
Their architecture, too, had run its career. It had
gone through a series of magnificent transforma-
tions, had had its full development, and was ready
for its decline. To our unprophetic eyes it had
finished the cycle of its development, and there
was no new progress left for it. In all this there
is no sign of that immobility which it has been a.
fashion to attribute to Egypt and her art. It is
the usual human history of progress and arrest,
progress again, exaltation, and downfall. It has a.
strange sound to a modern ear when M. Foucart
talks of the “feverish impulse” given to build-
ing under Seti and Rameses the Great; but though
the pace of the Nile-boat and the chariot is not
the pace of the railway and the telegraph, man is
always man, energy is energy, and progress is prog-
ress. It is not in the nature of man, and never
was, to stand still. The Egyptians were entirely
human, and immutability is superhuman.

 

GREGG-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

GREEK architecture and Roman architecture are
commonly spoken of as two distinct styles, yet
they are really but stages in the continuous evolu-
tion of one architecture under progressive modifi-
cation, and hear much the same relation to each
other in art that Saxon and English bear in lan-
guage. The Greek is the main stock; the influ-
ence of the conquering Romans added new mate-
rial and developed new shapes without destroying
the underlying Greek type; so the conquering
Normans imported into the Saxon language their
Norman French and Gallicized Latin, which in
the end transformed it into English, while the sub-
stance of the language, like the mass of the people,
kept its national character. Yet, the usual nam-
ing of the styles has its convenience, and is too
well rooted to be displaced, though it represents
the facts better to speak of a single style, the Clas-

sic, more significantly the Grmco-Roman, of which
19

20 GREC'O—ROJIAN ARCHITECTURE

the Greek and the Roman are two distinct branches
or phases.

Greek building in comparison with other great
architectures of the world was small in scale and
simple. It was entirely a public architecture ; its
domestic building amounted to very little. The
towns were small, gathered for security within a
circuit of close walls, in tangles of close streets
more cramped than the most secluded towns of
Italy or Switzerland at this day ; in which small,
low houses were huddled together. Even in the
larger cities, where the houses gradually over-
flowed the fortified citadels and accumulated in
Open suburbs, they crowded together in streets so
narrow that in Athens, we are told, in the time of
the Pisistratidae, Hipparchus laid a tax on over-
hanging stories, and doors that obstructed the way
by opening into it. In Rome also,’ under the
Empire, the case was hardly better; for modern
excavations show that on the Palatine itself the
streets that isolated the imperial palaces were like
”the narrowest lanes that we see in the old quarters
of Genoa and Venice to-day, and we read that the
high houses overhung in story after story, till the
uppermost stories joined, and the ways below
were left in darkness. The life of the Greeks was
in the market-places and public buildings, pre-em-
inently a town life, for they were, if I may dare
say it, a race of martial cockneys, and a mercan-

GRAEOO-ROJIAN ARCHITECTURE 21

tile race, in this a good deal unlike the Romans.
Their houses were for the most part only places
to eat and sleep in, with a little yard or garden
where their women took exercise or recreation,
when they could afford room for it. It was not
till their architecture was fixed and the decline of
the ancient cities had begun that Demosthenes
found reason to complain that private houses were
getting too large and public buildings too small.
The primitive Greek life was a life of religion and
warfare; religious traditions shaped their archi-
tecture by making the temples, which served
equally for the service of the gods and the com-
memoration of victories, as dominant and repre-
sentative as were the churches in the Middle Ages.
About them gradually clustered the few and sim-
ple buildings that served the public.

II

All building naturally divides into two classes,
the architecture of the beam and that of the arch,
which have been called trabeated and arcuated—
according to the means which it uses for covering
openings and Spaces—the first being that which
covers them by beams or lintels, the second that
which uses arches. The logical development of
- the two classes leads in the one to flat ceilings and
straight roofs, in the other to vaults and domes.

22 GRAEO’O-ROM'AN ARCHITECTURE

Classic architecture stands beside Egyptian as the
great representative of the trabeated, using the
constructive principle of the beam in the Greek
unreservedly, under the Romans ostensibly, and
deriving its main forms from it. This principle
of construction forces on it the predominance of
straight lines, especially horizontal lines, and of
right angles, which give to all such architecture
its most distinctive character, the square and hor-
izontal aspect that marks Greek and Egyptian
buildings. When, as in many of those buildings,
built for warm or mild climates, the walls are sup-
pressed or subordinated, leaving an architecture
of which the roof-lines are predominant, the hor-
izontal lines and the squareness are specially
characteristic. In both Greece and Egypt the
wall, which elsewhere is the chief part of a build-
ing, was apt to be subordinate, and sometimes
hardly entered into the effect at all.

The underlying Greek form is the Order; that
is, a primary unit of composition, consisting of
two parts, the column and the entablature, which
are the supporting member and its load. These
parts were gradually evolved and shaped by the
Greeks into fixed canonical forms, of which there
were two, closely related, making the Doric and
Ionic orders. The upper part of the Order, the
entablature, whether Doric or Ionic, consisted of
the architrave, which spanned from column to

GREOO-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE 23

column; the frieze, a band of wall, plain or deco-
rated, borne by the architrave ; and the cornice,
an overhanging slab, supported by mouldings or
brackets, which crowned the frieze, and usually
united it with a roof. The Order, thus consti-
tuted, was the direct embodiment, with much
elaboration, of the simplest idea of building con-
struction next- to a mere walled hut, the idea of a
beam or post supporting a roof. It was and re-
mained the essential thing in Greek architecture,
and continued through the classical period the
typical form for all building that was meant to be
monumental.

The archetype of all Greek buildings was the
temple; its underlying form was almost the sim-
plest that could be devised. The saddle roof, set
on .the stone but which was the original temple,
with gables apparently at first open, and over—
hanging eaves at the sides, remained to the last.
The columns, probably first added at the ends and
afterward at the sides, completed the type for all
time. The gables were in time made into pedi-
ments, that is, were tied across the feet with hor-
izontal cornices; the number of columns was
varied; their details and those of the entablar-
ture were shaped, refined, adjusted, and readjusted
to the last perfection of artistic effect; but the
type and the shape did not change during five
hundred years while the Greeks went on building

24 GREC'O-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

their temples. The oldest temple at Selinus and
the Parthenon at Athens were perhaps two hun-
dred and fifty years apart, and the builders of one
had probably never seen the other, yet they do not
differ so much in their ordinance as the American
carpenter’s country church differs from the city
original which he fancies he is faithfully copying.
But having only one form of building, and that a
consecrated one, and having but a single type be-
fore their eyes, they concentrated their thoughts
upon the evolution of their temple, elaborating
and refining their one type from generation to
generation. They had nothing of the modern de-
sire to exchange an old idea for a new one before
it was perfected. The new did not crowd out the
old—blessed privilege of primitive peOples, who
hold to an idea till they have got all there is in it.
To an American who may have seen four or five
styles adopted and dismissed in succession, as
fashion after fashion has spread over his country,
and innumerable forms of buildings devised in
each, the fidelity with which the Greeks clung to
their type may seem impossible. They sacrificed
original invention, consciously or not, which we
value above everything else ; but in exchange for it
they secured perfection, for which we unfortunate-
1y do not care. They wrought and rewrought, re-
fined and developed on one line, till by persistence
and cumulative study they had brought the em-

GREG 0-18 OMAN AR CHI TE (J T URI] 25

bodiment of their idea nearer to absolute per-
fection than any other people ever reached.
Hence comes the striking contrast between the
naive simplicity of the conceptions on which
Greek architecture is built and the mature perfec-
tion of their carrying out. Their constructive
scheme was of the simplest; the ideas that under-
lie the design of the Doric entablature and the
Ionic capital are small even to triviality—puerile
we may fairly call them—yet their final expression
in the Parthenon and the Erectheum embodies a
mastery of architectural effect and a fineness of
artistic sense that are the highest example to all
ages.

Thus the temple furnished to, the Greeks, and
consecrated for them, the few elements which
sufficed for their architectural needs—the plain
pitched roof with pedimental ends, the order, and
the colonnade. The scale of their buildings, as I
have said, was small ; not only their typical form,
but their composition, was simple. They did not
build for large assemblies or for complicated uses.
Their temples held a shrine and a statue, some—
times a treasure-room; the multitude was not re-
ceived into them, and the public rites were per-
formed outside. Their great gatherings were held
out of doors, in the agoras, or in unroofed theatres
which, being sunk in the ground and without
walls, are hardly to be called buildings. The

26 GREC'OvR OMAN ARCHITECTURE

shelter which was provided for considerable num-
bers of persons was in long, narrow aisles, as in
the stoae, which were galleries lined and divided
by colonnades, bordering agoras, as in Elis, or
connecting other buildings, as on the southern
slope of the Acropolis at Athens and at Olympia.
The few really large temples, like those of Miletus
and Ephesus, were enlarged by doubling the rows
of columns without greatly widening the enclosed
space of the cella, and these were exceptional.
The size of the temple was increased by increas-
ing the scale of the order, whose proportions were
the same on a great scale as on a small; the
smaller was as the photographic reduction of the
larger. The Greeks rarely attempted to roof a
space of more than thirty feet. Even the great
temple at Agrigentum, colossal and never finished,
being divided into aisles, called for no wider span
than forty feet. The Order was, indeed, the whole
substance of their architecture, enlarged or dimin-
ished to the necessary dimensions without there-
by changing proportion or detail. The aim of the
builders was always monumental, and to their
eyes the simplicity of the single order seems to
have been essential to monumental efl'ect. They
avoided putting one over another, as became com-
mon under the Romans, and preserving the grand
lines of the single order, they made their build-
ings, exteriorly at least, in one story, whatever

GREG 0-18 OMAN ARCHITECTURE 27

their scale. The order covered the whole build-
ing, with nothing above it but the pediment or the
roof, and nothing beneath but a platform, or at
most a low stylobate or basement wall. It stood
alone in kingly isolation, in long porticos or colon-
nades, usually without a break, and occupying the
whole height of wall. It held a royal dominion
and royal inviolability.

A system of architecture so restricted and formal
did not provide for many combinations, and neces-
sarily lacked flexibility. Two orders of different
scales would not match in any part, and when
buildings or parts of buildings were combined it
was rather by juxtaposition than by adaptation.
The ceilings of the porticos of a Doric temple—of
the Parthenon, for instance—will show how, while
the adjustment of each part in itself is exquisitely
managed, the cella and the two orders of columns
(the porticos) are jammed together, as it were,
without interadjustment. The contumacy of the
orders in combination appears still more strik-
ingly in the Erectheum, where the united struct-
ures, though picturesquely proportioned to each
other, do not fit together anywhere above the base
moulding. Their construction tended, moreover,
to restrict the size of Greek building, for their
whole proportion being fixed, their height could
not be increased without increasing the intervals
of the columns. This could not be done beyond

28 GRECO-R OMAN ARCHITECTURE

a moderate degree without an enormous cost
suited only to an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman
emperor, and soon reached the limit of impossi-
bility. On the other hand, the very narrowness
and uniformity of the means which were em-
ployed, the consistency with which they were ad-
hered to, is a controlling element in the singular
charm of harmony which belongs to them. Greek
architecture is, indeed, the architecture of the
beam in its most characteristic form; the Greek
Order is its highest phase. The consistent use of
the lintel and the banishment of conspicuous
curves gave it the preponderance of horizontal
lines and right angles which secured simplicity
and breadth of effect. These, with the contrast
of the upright lines of the columns, which are the
most characteristic parts of the order, insure the
firmness, repose, and stateliness that distinguish
it above all others; the symmetrical arrangement
of parts which belonged to it added to its dignity
and tranquillity. The exquisite refining of its pro-
portions, in which solidity and vigor were never
lost, and the charm of its beautiful. detail, were
the crowning grace which made it unapproach-
able.

Trabeated architecture was distinctively the
religious architecture of antiquity. The colon-
nade was the feature that redeemed it from heavi-
ness, and that gave it- interest. The column is,

OREC’O-R OMAN AR CHI TE 0T URE 29

indeed, the natural support of the beam, for it is
only a beam set on end. The lintel and the colon-
nade were the architectural stock of the religious
nations, the Egyptians, the Greeks, even the He-
brews, so far as we can judge, where they had an
architecture—all but the Chaldeans, who had no
stone to build them with. It is not easy to de-
cide, nor need we, which of the two systems, that
of the beam or that of the arch, lends itself most
to great architectural effects. But for some rea-
son or other a column, if it be large enough,
carries a greater impression of stateliness than
any other architectural form. This may be due to
its uprightness and its isolation, which give it an air
of immovable supremacy, like that of a tall man
towering above a crowd. At any rate, I suspect
that the most majestic architecture that has ever
been built, making due allowance for mere scale,
has been columnar.

III

The second branch or phase of classic architect-
ure is called Roman, and a great deal has been
written about it under that name; yet, as one
studies the matter, the question forces itself for-
ward: Was there a Roman architecture? It de-
pends on how we use the word Roman. The archi-
tectures of the world have for the most part been

30 01211910042 OMAN AR CHI TE CT URE

distinguished by ethnical names—Assyrian, Egyp-
tian, Greek, Gothic, Saracenic, Indian, and so on—
and I believe that when we speak of Roman archi-
tecture we instinctively think of it as the creation
of that race of Romans to whom we ascribe the
great deeds of early Roman history, of the race
which built up Rome. The Roman peOple, let us
remember, was probably mixed from its earliest
days, and in later times reinforced by those of in-
numerable conquered states, so that Paul, a Jew
born in Tarsus, could discomfit his captors by de-
claring himself a Roman, and appealing to Caesar
must be taken to Rome to be tried. But the
Romans who made Rome appear like one race
compounded of allied clans, of a persistent type
such as points to a common origin and a peculiar
strongly marked character, by virtue of which they
conquered the world, created an empire and ruled
it, though themselves but a handful among those
whom they took into their people. The question
then resolves itself into this : Did the Romans who
created the empire create the architecture which
we call Roman? I suspect not.

The real Romans as we see them in history were,
it seems to me, singularly like the English of the
nineteenth century. Masterful in their ways, con-
fident in their power and natural right to rule the
world, they were a vigorous, hard-headed, practi-
cal people, with a great gift for administration and

GRxECO-R OMAN ARCHITECT URE 31

great political sagacity. As they succeeded they
grew grasping, as is the natural way of such
people, and when they grew rich they grew osten-
tatious and vain-glorious. By the time they had
conquered Greece, they had become sufficiently
luxurious to covet art as the nozweau m'che of to-
day covets it; all through the second century be-
fore Christ the portable works of art in Greece
were gathered into Rome, as Napoleon brought his
plunder of pictures and statues from Italy, and ap-
parently from the same motives. They pursued
art because it tended to magnificence, and litera-
ture because they thought it due to themselves.
But they were too practical to become artistic or
literary, too gifted for command to do any work
but that of governing. For the historian and poet
the Roman of position had more regard than for
the artist, because he saw in his works his own
title to fame. A like feeling perhaps, led him to
prefer the sculptor before the architect, for his ap-
petite for busts and portrait-statues was enormous
—the sculptor too could immortalize him in away——
and his house had a chamber full of the efiigies of
his forefathers, to which his own was to be added.
But his attitude toward the artist was apparently
that of the English nobleman of the last century;
he scorned while he patronized. He would give his
own energy to ruling others, wisely and uprightly
if he were honorable, tyrannically if he were ra-

32 GREUO-R OMAN ARCHITECTURE

pacious. The Roman of lower degree would not
do the work which his patron despised ; he had
as little aptitude for art, and if he could not govern
he would live in idleness. So the artists of Rome
as well as the artisans seem to have been practi-
cally all conquered foreigners, which means slaves,
or freedmen, or their children. Virgil’s well. known
lines tell the Roman attitude:

Excudant alii spirantia mollius aera—
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.

Cicero, attacking Verres for his extortions in
Sicily, seems to feel hardly more respect for his
connoisseurship than for his moral character, and
speaking of a Cupid by Praxiteles, confesses loftily,
almost apologetically, that since he has been in-
quiring into that man’s conduct, he has learned
the names of the “ workmen.” And Plutarch who,
though a Greek, and living in the age of the An-
tonines, when the arts were under the special care
of the emperors, was a Roman in temper, says:
“ N o generous-minded young man ever wished, at
the sight of the statue of Jupiter at Pisa, to be a
Phidias.”

It need not surprise us, then, that even under the
empire, when the wealthy patricians, shut out from
active public life, were degenerating into profli-
gate dilettanti, though the work of art was prized

GREC'O-ROM'AN ARCHITECTURE 33

the artist was of little account. 'Connoisseurship
was then, what it has been in all ages, the minis-
ter of ostentation, the amusement of idleness; and
though the name of the slave or freedman or the
conquered subject who had carved a statue or de-
signed a building was preserved as a label, appar-
ently no one concerned himself much about his
personality, and no writer recorded more than his
name, unless to point some anecdote, as in case of
Apollodorus, and that criticism of the amateur
architect Hadrian which cost him his life. It had
been the conquered Etruscans who in the earlier
days of the republic provided the arts for the Ro-
mans ; they were in its later days replaced by the
conquered Greeks. Under the Empire the work-
shops of Rome were full of imported workmen
and artists, of whom most were Greeks, and as Re-
ber says, from Caesar’s time to Hadrian’s Greek art
seems to have migrated into Italy.

Thus it was in Rome; away from Rome and
in their native countries it is likely that artists
had more of the consideration which provincials
secure most easily at home. Indeed, although
Rome was the richest and most splendid city in
the world, it is not clear that she was the home of -
the best architects, or even of the best architect-
ure. It is likely that the innovations and advances
which developed fast in the first and second cen-
turies after Christ, were made in the provinces as

34 GREGG-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

well as in Rome itself, perhaps as fast. Certain
it is that the remains of building show better
art and a finer detail. in those cities where Greek
workmen were less trammelled by Roman influ-
ence than in the metropolis—at Pompeii and Cori
in Italy, in many cities of Syria, for instance. In
spite of the influence of Roman connoisseurship,
art does not seem to have been as metropolitan as
it is in our time. Apollodorus, just mentioned,
who was Trajan’s architect and built his column,
his bridge over the Danube, and many buildings,
came from Damascus. Trajan himself, in one of
his letters to Pliny, concerning public building
which Pliny has undertaken to do in his province
of Bithynia, tells him not to send to Rome for
architects, for the Romans get theirs from Greece.
Later, at Constantinople, where there was more
centralization even than there had been at Rome,
Justinian got the two architects who built Sta.
Sofia for him, the one from Miletus, the other from
Tralles. Doubtless the men of Rome themselves
were responsible in great degree for the rapid
transformation of architecture under their empire.
They probably influenced it as American men of
business in our time influence the new architecture
of our cities. They were the clients, exacting and
despotic clients, we may be sure; their demand
must have called out the supply, and determined
its character. But what we call Roman architect-

GREOO-R OMAN AR OHITECTURE 35

ure was the architecture of the world at that time,
evolved through simultaneous labor all over the
civilized world, then under control of the Roman
empire, with local differences, but yet with more
unity of style than was seen in the world’s build—
ing at any other epoch—more than in the Gothic,
the Renaissance, or the building of today. It was
stimulated and in a way governed by the Romans,
as they governed the world, but its forms and
style, so far as we can see, were determined by the
same spirit and invention which had formed classic
architecture in the beginning and had delivered it
to the Romans, the spirit and invention of the
Greeks. The Romans had what they wanted.
They impressed their character on the architect-
ure, expressed their wants and their tastes in it,
gave it sumptuousness, ostentation, scale, com-
plexity, new shapes of building suited to new uses;
but the Greeks, it would seem, still found form for
it. Nevertheless, we need a name for this archi-
tecture. It is the architecture of the Empire and it
is convenient still to call it Roman Architecture,
but remembering that it is the architecture of the
Roman Empire and not of the Roman race.

.36 GREGO-ROJIAN ARCHITECTURE

IV

The Romans had been the natural inheritors of
Greek architecture, the architecture of the beam and
the order, through the Etruscans, whether by direct

descent or by co-heirship; they took it also direct- ,

1y from the Greeks by right of conquest. In their
early days they were as conservative as primitive
peoples always are, and until prosperity made them
worldly they were religious. They were, therefore,
faithful to tradition in preserving the ancient form
of the temple, with its single order, very much as
the Greeks, or the Etruscans, transmitted it to
them, and this form had naturally a determining
influence on the character of the architecture of
the Empire, so far as its monumental intention was
concerned. The single order stood to them as to
the Greeks for what was most esteemed in archi-
tecture, the indispensable form for monumental
effect. Yet while they honored the traditional
form, they did not shrink from incongruity. in ap-
plying it. Thus when they needed a larger sanc-
tuary in their temples, they expanded the cella
till it took in the whole width of the platform; but
the lateral colonnades were kept imbedded, as it
were, in the side walls and were useless. The col-
umn, thus engaged, as the term is (for which in-
deed Greek architecture had furnished a prece-

f.‘\
I

GR/EOO-ROM'AN ARCHITECTURE 37

dent), and still bearing witness to its inalienable
right, was an important member of the style of the
Empire, most distinctive in its combination with.
the arch in secular building.

For along with the order the architecture of
Rome had inherited from the Etruscans the arch,
despised and rejected by the Greeks, but honored
and monumentally used by these. It was probably
the child of the bricklayer, who has no other means
of bridging an opening; at least we find it first in
alluvial Mesopotamia, where the Chaldees, who had
no stone to build with, raised their great pyramids
and built their palaces of bricks, and where the
Assyrian conquerors who appropriated their civ-
ilization and art, as the Romans did the Greek,
adopted it from them, and used it on a great scale.
Born in the oriental brick-fields, it came to the
Greeks with all the associations of ignoble mate-
rial, profane uses, and hated sponsors. Every in-
fluence of religious association, conservatism, and
respect for the Egyptian example, from which they
had learned much, bound them to their trabeated
style. Still more, the instinct for harmony of form
which dominated both Egyptians and Greeks could
but warn them that the use of the arch not only
implied a change of their constructive system, but
was at war with -their whole architectural scheme
of lines, proportions, and monumental efi'ect. Even
as late as the time of Hadrian, after long subjection

38 GREUO-ROJIAN ARCHITECTURE

of Greece to Roman control, the arcaded conduit
to the Tower of the Winds at Athens seems to
show the persistent resistance of Greek workmen
on their own soil to the very principle of the arch,
for the arches are cut through solid slabs of stone
instead of being built up in the fashion of the true
arch.

Over the Romans such traditions and feelings
had no influence. As we have seen, the Etruscans
had used both order and arch, keeping the one as
pure in their temples as the Greeks did, and em-
ploying the other in their tombs and in their civic
building. They were not brick-builders, and while,
as Vitruvius tells, they retained the primal con—
struction of the orders in wooden beams, they built
their arches in stone. The gateways of Volterra
and Perugia still show us how monumentally they
used them. The early Romans, building their city
in an alluvial region, and being’for some genera-
tions little more than a community of needy out-
laws, were naturally in the habit of building in
brick rather than stone. The often-quoted boast
of Augustus that he found the city of brick and
left it of marble, “ Marmoream se relinquere quam
latericiam1 recepisset,” as Suetonius repeats it, in-

1The use of the word latem'cz'am implies sun-baked bricks,
and we find that Vitruvius gives careful directions for their
manufacture. The kiln-burned brickwork of the Empire was
famous, of great variety and excellence of workmanship, and
provided an admirable school for the study of arches and vault-

GRzE’CO-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE 39

dicates that to the end of the republic ,brick must
have been the chief building material.

That the Romans, then, whose city had grown
up under the shelter of the arch, should insist on
its being incorporated into their perfected archi-
tecture was inevitable. As they grew powerful
and extended their rule, their civic functions and
their life became complicated, their architectural
needs increased, they grew sumptuous and osten-
tatious. Even before their imperial days they
were grown too progressive and too full of new
wants to be restricted in their use of architectural
forms by old religious associations or by any of
the feelings which we call sentimental. Indeed,
in their worldly greatness they appear to have
worn lightly even the restraints of piety, in our
sense of the word, and their reverence seems to
have been but shallow. They did not concentrate
their aspiration and effort on their temples as the
Egyptians and Greeks had done. They did not
build them on the same imposing scale. The
temples were many, and sometimes large, but were

ing, in which the Roman builders attained great skill. It is not
to be understood that there was no building in stone and marble
under the republic. Though little remains of pre-Augustan
architecture, we know that the temples were not built of brick
—their orders indeed could not be. But even Tarquin‘s Cloaca
Maxima is arched in travcrtine, and we are told that Metellus
built the first marble temple as early as 140 B.C. The boast of
Augustus was only rhetorically true.

4O GREUO-R OMAN AR OHITEUT URE

unimportant beside their civic buildings. Many
of them they dedicated to their own fellows, for
they did not hesitate to thrust their dead em-
perors, the good and the bad alike, into the com-
pany of the gods, to which, far from unexception—
able as it was, most of these did but scanty credit.
They were not to be constrained, therefore, like
the Greeks, by either traditional reverence or ar-
tistic instinct, to keep their Order pure. They
had received it as the embodiment of all that was
finest in architecture. It was too much honored
not to have the first place; yet the arch was their
own, and was too serviceable to be set aside.
They set their architects to combine the two. .
‘When and how the combination was first evolved
is an obscure question, for the pre-Augustan ar-
chitecture of Rome is almost gone. We do not
doubt, however, that the Romans themselves com-
pelled it, and that it was first done in Rome. It
at least shows itself completely accomplished in
the form to which we are used in the remains of
the Tabularium, which was built at the base of
the Capitoline Hill in 78 13.0.

The arch was the great constructive factor in
the architecture of the Empire; it added enor-
mously to the builder’s resources in planning, and
to his means of architectural effect. It gave him
the means of spanning wide Openings, and when
expanded into the vault, of covering great spaces ;

GRECO-R OMAN AR 0H1 TE 0T URE 41

it habituated him to curved lines and surfaces.)
Helped by it, and spurred by the new wants of
the complex Roman civilization, he enlarged the
scale of his buildings and greatly increased the in-
tricacy of their plans. He used his new combi-
nations with a boldness and fertility of invention
that have been the wonder of the world from his
age to ours, cclnstructing on a scale that dwarfed
eyerything that had gone before except W
buildings of Egypt. ‘i-Under a new stimulus, andt

 

with new means of effect, Roman building greatly ‘

outstripped that of the Greeks in extent, in vari-,/
ety, and magnificence. The cities grew into great
accumulations of various buildings.’ ’ The temples
no longer dominated each important town, as in
Greece in earlier days, conSpicuous in the land-
scape and in the city’s fame, like the cathedrals in
mediaeval towns. The civic buildings, and even pri-
vate, far outshone them. Streets lined with porti-
cos, arcades above arcades, rank over rank of col-
umns, houses in so many stories that in Rome
their height had to be restricted by law, took the
place of the low-built and unpretending towns of
the early Greeks. Instead of the trim little market-
place, or the old cross-roads with their careless
cluster of simple and refined shrines, stoae and
town-hall, were dense and richly adorned forums.
The theatres and amphitheatres, no longer sunk in
the ground, towered above the lesser buildings with

_— ..-.....

42 GRECO-ROM'AN ARCHITECTURE

arcades and vaults in many stories. In palaces
and thermae one stately court followed another,
halls of every size opened together, vaulted or
domed, round, square, or cruciform, with niches,
exedras, porticos, splendid with bronze, gold, and
rare marbles, pictured walls and painted ceilings,
peopled With statues—all in marvellous contrast to
the simple dwellings of the early days of Greece
and Rome. The country seat of Diocletian con-
tains most of the present town of Spalato; the
villa of Hadrian and the golden house of Nero
were probably larger. This architectural splendor
was not confined to the metrOpolis or to Italy, but
covered the civilized world from Gaul, and even
from Britain, to Syria and the East, as city after
city passed under the dominion of Rome and grew
rich under her administration and commerce. The
heart of Rome herself was occupied, not by streets,
but by a connected series of great forums, or
squares if we may call them so, laid out in emula-
tion by one emperor after another. The wayfarer
in the time of the Antonines, coming up from the
Arch of Tit-us and along the Via Sacra between the
swarming Forum Romanum and the Basilica Julia,
would find before him the long way winding up the
Capitol Hill among the temples of Saturn, of Ves-
pasian, and of Concord, behind which rose the ar-
cades of the Tabularium and over them the Capitol,
and still above it the lofty temple of Jupiter Cap-

GREGG-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE 43

itolinus—a mighty pile of buildings. Then if he
turned off to the right, passing by the golden mile-
stone of Augustus and the venerable Bostra, he
could go from forum to forum, from court to court,
as in a palace of giants, from the colonnaded Forum
of Caesar surrounding the temple of Venus Gene-
trix, through the galleries of the Forum of Nerva
into that of Vespasian, which encircled with its
porticos the great temple of Peace, enriched with
the spoils of the temple at Jerusalem. Then
crossing again the Forum of Nerva with the tem-
ple of Minerva displayed at its northerly end, he
would come to the Forum of Augustus and pass
the famous temple of Mars Ultor, where the square
widened out between great sweeping galleries.
Then he would enter the Forum of Trajan, the
design of the unhappy Apollodorus, after a half-
mile of walking through sumptuous squares and
pillared corridors, and see before him the great en-
closure flanked by deep exedrae behind its por-
ticos, closed on the farther side by the enormous
double-colonnaded Ulpian basilica, behind which
soared the column of Trajan as it still soars to-
day, and still farther on the great peripteral temple
of Trajan, with its enclosing peribolus. On every
side his eye would meet splendid monuments, for-
ests of columns, crowds of statues, roofs above roofs
shining with gilded tiles, and fringed with more
statues, pediments crowded with sculpture. There

44 GREGG-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

is nothing in the world now to give a picture of
such an accumulation of architectural magnificence.
It was the culmination of a splendid stateliness.
Perhaps nothing in our day has come so near sug-
gesting it, in its stateliness though not in its splen-
dor, as that great gathering of transitory build-
ings, enormous in scale and magnificently disposed,
with which Americans celebrated their four hun-
dredth anniversary at Chicago in 1892. This
wonderful cumulative efl'ect of architecture was a
thing which the Egyptians never reached, although
something like it was secured by simpler means
in the great Egyptian temples. The Greek habit
of grouping their important buildings together
tended toward it; and must have given all the
architectural effect of which their comparative-
ly small towns were capable. The Acropolis at
Athens with its group of temples, its monuments,
dominated by the great Athena Promachos and its
imposing Propylaea, gave a hint of it on a small
scale; but the habits of the Greeks, their wants
and their means, did not lead to it, and their simple
architecture of temples and store, with their two
orders, though they bent it to a considerable vari-
ety of forms, would have been greatly strained to
provide such efl'ects on the scale to which the R0-
mans grew accustomed.

GRECO-R OMAN AR 0111 TE 0T U123 45

V

Much contumely has been poured upon the
Romans for neglecting to design a special style to
suit the arch, which was their peculiar form. But,
letting alone the question I have already suggest-
ed, whether the Romans, as distinguished from the
Greeks, did design architecture at all, it is difli-
cult to see what should have led the men of the
Empire to do this. No race and no nation which
had already a finished style of its own has ever
deliberately set it aside to make another to suit a
new form. Their problem was, and they could
hardly escape it, to combine the arch and the or-
der. It was a thankless problem, for the two
forms involved hostile principles of construction,
and the union, it must be said, was artistically im-
perfect; but it was not in their nature to reason
this out. For them the union was inevitable, and
their success was much greater than the last gen-
erations of English and American critics have
been willing to allow.

If We consider the problem as it faced the
Romans, and examine the solution without pre-
possession, we shall be more inclined, I think, to
admire their skill than to deplore, as has been the
fashion, their dulness. The problem was probably
solved by Greek brains—just as the solution was

46 GREGG-R OMAN ARCHITECTURE

doubtless worked out by Greek hands, and with
the prepossession of race in favor of the orders.
The Order, as we have seen, was a structure of
beams, horizontal and upright, executed in stone
instead of wood, practically suppressing the wall,
which is commonly the substance of a stone build-
ing; its natural embodiment was the Colonnade.
The arch was simply a hole in the wall, its
security depending on its having the mass and
weight of the wall to hold it together. Arcuated
architecture is then the architecture of surface and
mass, as trabeated architecture is that of lines and
angles. The Roman method of combining the two
was to build the wall, pierced by its series of
arches, and to set the order against it, showing
always an arch between two columns, which
carried the entablature above it. The columns
were lifted on pedestals by which their height and
the scale of the order were lessened, but the stride
of the colonnade was rather unbecomingly in-
creased. To ally the order with the arch a sort
of capital, the impost moulding, was put about the
pier to receive the arch, the parts were bound to-
gether at the foot by carrying the base-mouldings
of the pedestal round the pier, the archivolt or
band about the arch echoed the architrave of the
order, and finally a keystone, set into the crown
of the arch, was carried up till it bore against the
architrave. This keystone, which is perhaps the

GIRzECO-R OMAN ARCHITECTURE 47

best detail contributed by the Roman builders, and
is of great aesthetic importance in binding the arch
and the order together at the most critical point,
has been as much abused, to the disfigurement of
arches, as any other feature in architecture. The
Romans, with a just sense of its oflice, rejected it
from detached arches and confined it to its first
purpose; it was reserved for modern architects to
thrust it on the arch for an inevitable companion,
like the old man of the sea on the shoulders of
Sindbad ; and though it has no structural value
whatever beyond any other stone in the arch, the
keystone has been accepted by the world as a
structural type, and all the honor due to the arch
has been heaped upon it in language and litera-
ture. .

In this transformation the architects of the Em-
pire held unquestioningly to the traditional idea of
the supremacy of the Order, to which the Greek
workman was held by his tradition as the es-
sential in all architecture. The Order had a patent
of nobility; the right thing was to give it unques-
tioned precedence, and to remand the serviceable
arch to service under it. For the exigencies of the
Roman world the simple one-story architecture of
the Greeks, with a single order constituting the
whole facade, was altogether insufficient, the range
of forms which the Greeks provided them was also
insufficient. The modern degradation of the or-

T

48 GREOO-ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

ders by which two or three stories are crowded
under one of them, was not thought of till the
Renaissance architects contrived it in their one-
sided zeal to combine the spirit of classic archi-
tecture with their necessities. So the ,Romans
piled order on order and arcade over arcade as
they set one story after another to their buildings.
To the two orders of the early Greeks they added
three new ones. We see four stories of columns
and pilasters on the Colosseum ; there were seven,
we are told, on the Septizonium of Septimius
Severus. They provided a store of new details,
pedestals, niches, pilasters, pedimental window-
caps, keystones, brackets and the like. They de-
vised numberless forms and combinations of halls,
courts, porticos, to increase the extent and magnif-
icence of their palaces and baths, and covered
them with domes and vaults in a great variety of
forms. The ornament of Greek buildings had
been rich and abundant, but delicate and restrained ;
the sumptuous taste of the Romans called for a sur-
feit of decoration, but was not fastidious. \Vhole
orders were incrusted with unremitting sculpture,

v.

like a Chinese ivory, as appears in the remains of
what has been commonly called the Temple of
Jupiter Stator. Floors, walls, ceilings were cov-
ered with lavish decoration in marbles, stucco, mo-
saic, painting, gold and bronze, sometimes delicate,
and sometimes coarse, but everywhere exuberant.

 

 

 

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GILECO-ROM’AN ARCHITECTURE 49

The arch was too important to be left in the
utter subserviency to which it was first subjected.
It had, so to speak, much of the character of the
Romans themselves: it was by nature ambitious
and domineering. It is not easy to put the arch
and the order together without attracting the eye
more to the arch than to the other. The order
and the column are in the nature of things limit-
ed in scale 3 the arch may be built to any scale.
The Romans evidently liked it for its dignity as
much as for its convenience. Their monumental
use of it appears in the triumphal arches that were
strewn over Italy, over Europe we may say, by the
conquerors from Augustus to Constantine, in the
great hall of the basilica of Maxentius or Constan-
tine, and in that of the baths of Diocletian, which
Michel Angelo turned into the church of Sta. Ma-
ria degli Angeli at Rome. It tended to overbear
the order which was set over it, and in the shape
of the vault and dome it was set above the order,
as we see in these halls. The element in Greek
architecture which was suited for combination with
the arch was the column, and its reasonable place
was under the arch,'but it had been from the be-
ginning married to the entablature, and builders
were slow to conceive the idea of divorcing it. /
Moreover, the natural consort of the arch was the
pier. An arch, as we have noticed, was but a hole
‘i'fi'a wall, and when two arches were brought to-

50 GRECO-R OMAAI A12 CHI TE 0 T URE

gether they had between them a pier. The bear-
ing of the arches on the pier was direct and nat-
ural; to replace this pier by a column and read-
just the bearings was a matter of contrivance and
difficulty; nor can a range of arches stand without
a pier at each end. And yet the column could
not in the long run be spared. The mediaeval
Italians, fully in love with it, used it often to the
complete neglect of the pier, and held the arch
together without abutment by tying it with iron;
but the tie was an obvious makeshift, and other
nations have not imitated them. The appropria-
tion of the column by the arch, however, involved
the complete disruption of the Order, and that
was too sacred to be tampered with; its alliance
with the arch lasted through the classical period. /
At the end of the classical period the vault,
which later was the occasion of the development
of mediaeval architecture, gave an indication of
the way in which the connection of the arch and
the column was to be reached. The arch of a
vault could not, like an arch in a wall, be set be-
tween columns; the columns must stand below.
The lunettes of the groined vaulting of a lofty
clerestory, like that of the baths of Diocletian, left
between them a thin pendant which must either
die away obscurely in the wall or show in a pro-
jection that called architecturally for some special
support. This was exactly the place for a single

GRzEOO—R OMAN ARCHITECTURE 51

column. The Romans were used to columns
standing apart—on the fronts of their triumphal
arches, for__i_r_1stan$~—‘but in every case a bit of the
inseparable entablature was set above it, and sup-
ported a statue or something else. An order was
an order, and could not be broken. Column and
entablature were as inseparable as the Dioscuri.
At least this was the case in Rome, where, under
the Empire, the canons of art were most strictly
followed, where everything was more normal and
more formal than elsewhere, and where, it would
seem, except when an emperor, like Trajan or
Marcus Aurelius, set up a colossal column by it-
self for a monument, the column was never seen
without the entablature. It was reserved for the
provinces, which, under the later emperors, were
the home of all the progressive spirit of the time,
to find the new path for architecture. The late
Mr. E. A. Freeman, in a notable essay some thirty
years ago, called attention to arcades in the palace
built for Diocletian after his abdication at what is
now the town of Spalato, in which are the earliest
examples we know of arches set directly upon the
capitals of columns, the entablature being entirely
left out. Whether this change, which meant a
revolution in architecture, was seen here for the
first time, we do not know; we cannot doubt that
it was an Eastern innovation, and may believe

that it was Greek. The Eternal City held her

52 GRECO-ROLMN ARCHITECTURE

orders inviolate as long as she kept her empire
and her religion. Her empire passed with the
barbarian Constantine to Constantinople, which,
with a population of Greeks and barbarians, be-
came under the first Eastern emperors the focus
of all the progress of the world. The conserva-
tive influence of Rome gone, classic architecture
perished. The column kept its new place under
the arch; the entablature dwindled to a band of
mouldings or to a mere stilt, and presently disap-
peared. The union of the column and the arch
has never been set aside. Its survival alongside
of the resuscitated Order, when classic architect-
ure was renewed in the Renaissance, was the most
important difference between the new classic and
the old. Its history in the intervening period
belongs to Byzantine and Romanesque architect-
ure.

VI

The Romans applied the system of what we now
call la g'rande culture to architecture. Methods of
building, types of design, orders, arches, propor-
tions, ornaments, they reduced all to a manufact-
uring system. They were essentially engineers
and builders rather than architects. They dealt
in masses of masonry, walls, and piers on an enor-
mous scale. Being masterful and not artistic,

azmjome OMAN AR CHITE’CTURE’ 5.:

with a genius for administration, they might natu-
rally fancy that architecture could be handled, like
building, by reducing it to a machine-made prod-
uct, to be turned out in quantity for every emer-
gency. There are indications that their great
buildings were in charge of engineers rather than
of artists; the character of the architecture seems
to imply that it was their care to contrive such a
system of design that when the scheme of a great
building had been devised by an engineer or chief
constructor, designers could fit the conventional
architectural forms to it by rule and formula. In
this way we have seen many public buildings car-
ried through in our time under the control of en-
gineers with the aid of expert draughtsmen. The
method is favorable to efficiency and rapidity.
The construction of Roman buildings was of akind
to be carried out under a similar system by an
army of ordinary workmen, with great speed and
on an extraordinary scale. This was only possible
with an architecture which had been disciplined
into a rigid system of proportion and decoration,
where every form and every detail was definitely
prescribed, and small details were repeated in ab-
solute uniformity by the hundred or by the rod.
If we may reason from Vitruvius, this was the rule
under which the imperial architecture was brought.
No architecture could have submitted to it so read-
ily as that of the orders; none could have fur-

54 GRzECO-ROJIAN AR OHITEC’TURE

nished so good a basis for it as that of the Greeks,
in which the conditions of harmony, effectiveness,
beauty of form, and a fair adaptability were al-
ready provided. Under such conditions, with in-
creasing wealth and increasing population, in the
pressure of new wants and an enormous demand
for new buildings, it was natural that skill in con-
struction should grow and that art should fail.
They had taken the efficient way, but they lacked
the true instinct; they were wise enough to join
the architect to the engineer, yet apparently not
wise enough to let him work in his own way.

The Greeks, to be sure, had been in their kind
as good constructors as the Romans, and far bet
ter, so far as mechanical execution goes. The
Romans carried nicety of construction as far as
their practical needs called for it; the Greeks as
far as they could. It was enough for the Roman
if his construction was sound, and if it could be
conveniently and rapidly put up. He wanted
things to move, and would not waste his time. He
built so massively that he could build fast, even
hastily, and mainly by unskilled workmen. His
buildings were piles of rough bricks and concrete ;
he overlaid them with an architectural envelope,
stately, elaborate, and finely enough wrought to
satisfy the not very exacting taste of his time. The
Greek never could do his work finely enough, me-
chanically as well as artistically. His monumental

G’RzEOO-R OMAN AR CHI TE 01’ U RE 55

instinct pursued him everywhere. Plutarch, speak-
ing of the wonderful work of building in Athens
under Pericles, says that the greatest wonder of
all was the speed with which it was done. Yet the
drums of the great columns of the Parthenon, six
feet in diameter, are so closely set, without mor-
tar, that a sheet of paper could not be worked into
the joints, and the whole structure is laid with the
same precision. The Greek, under guidance of
his monumental instinct, went on to the end of his
independent career, steadily refining the quality of
his work. The Roman work, on the other hand,
deteriorated in execution and in artistic quality
from its first great outburst under the early em-
perors, while it gained in greatness and richness
of conception; that is, it came more and more
completely under Roman influence, so that the last
great monuments of the Empire, the baths of Cara-
calla and Diocletian and the basilica of Constan-
tine, while they were its most splendid monuments,
were its most inferior in execution. The triumphal
arch of Septimius Severus is a much ruder work
than that of Titus, and when Constantine would
glorify himself by one of his own, more magnifi-
cent than its predecessors, he had to pillage tha
of Trajan to find decoration for it.

It has been a recent habit to vilipend the RO-
mans for the falsity of their construction—build-
ing on arches and making a pretence of lintels,

56 016/1500-13 OMAN Ala! CIIITECTURE

using concrete within and travertine or marble
without—and to praise the Greeks for the truth-
fulness of theirs. But the modern doctrine of
sincerity in building, of the faithful correspond-
ence of decoration and appearance to the reality of
construction, finds little comfort in either. In
truth the doctrine as such is apparently altogeth-
er a thing of the literature of this century. The
work of the best mediaeval period seems to have
been, for reasons which we cannot discuss here, in
consonance with it; but it is doubtful whether
artists, left to themselves, would ever have dis-
covered it. Evidently neither Greek nor Roman
concerned himself with it. To the Romans con-
struction was confessedly one thing and architect-
ure another; with the Greeks, though appearances
are in their favor, it was not so very different. It
is true that their traditional system of construc-
tion was at the bottom of their whole decorative
scheme. Yet if we examine the Parthenon mi-
nutely, we shall find that the delicately fitted joints
in the columns are only wrought in a ring a few
inches wide at the circumference, where the drums
have been ground together like the neck of a bot-
tle and its glass stopper, and that all the inner
surface is cut away roughly so as to escape contact
and leave the greater part of the joint open and hol-
low. So the great mass of the marble contributes
less to the support of the heavy superstructure

012475004? OMAN ARCHITECTURE 57

than the concrete filling of Roman walls, or 'the
rubbishy cores of the great columns of Rameses at
Karnak. Worse than this, the magnificent spread-
ing capitals of the Parthenon, that with their solid
abacus and springing echinus assume to carry
lightly the weight of the great entablature, gather-
ing it in securely to the shaft, really do no work at
all. Lest the finely wrought edges of the abacus
should be damaged by any unequal pressure from
the architrave, the weight of the entablature is
taken by a shoulder or bench a fraction of an inch
high, the scamillus of Vitruvius, which receives
the architrave and carefully holds it up out of
reach of the capital. This scamillus, a miniature
of the die set visibly above the Egyptian capital,
is so low that it could not be seen or suspected
Without a close examination made high up at the
level of the abacus itself. The Greeks were before
all things artists, and they would not detach ar-
tistic beauty from perfection of execution, difi'er-
ing in this from those artists of our day who pour
contempt on mechanical perfection. But like all
artists in whom the artistic sense is entirely dom-
inant, they did not look below the surface. In
architecture, which is pre-eminently the art of
form, they did not trouble themselves about reality
in what has been called functional expression; it
was enough for them to maintain carefully the ap-
pearance of it. That the builders of the Roman'

58 GR/ECO-ROHAN ARCHITECTURE

Empire should infuse into their art ethical princi-
ples for which the life of their day had no counter-
part, or should inherit what had not gone before,
was hardly to be expected.

The treatment which the orders themselves re-
ceived at the hands of the Empire, apart from their
combination with the arch, has brought reproach
upon the Romans, not without cause. While
building went on increasing in scale and mass, the
builders kept lightening the orders, so that these,
instead of gaining a corresponding robustness, lost
the vigor which they had in the hands of the
Greeks of the golden time. The Doric sufi'ered
most. They thinned its architrave, on whose
massiveness the grandeur of the Greek Doric
greatly depends, and also the cornice; they wi-
dened the frieze and narrowed the triglyphs ; they
elongated the columns and gave them bases. These
changes, it must be said, were in line with those
that showed themselves in Greek architecture after
it had passed its prime. They would seem to be
at least in the direction of delicacy, but they were
neutralized by the want of artistic feeling with
which they were made. The Ionic capital was
squeezed and flattened out of all its grace. In Rome
especially the details of the orders were vulgarized;
their ornaments were degraded, their mouldings
were reshaped, and lines of the rule and compass,
which might be traced by an ordinary workman,

GRECO-ROM'AN ARCHITECTURE 59

were substituted for the delicate hand-drawn pro-
filing of the Greeks. So the one charm which the
Romans might have saved if they could have rec-
ognized it, in which there was no hostility to the
practical requirements to which their architecture
was bent, was cast aside as if their eyes were
closed to it.

It is easy to forget the debt which the architect-
ure of the world owes the Roman Empire. The
arch and its congener the vault gave to the art of
building a flexibility and power that enormously
increased its capabilities. They could carry walls
of any height and span openings and spaces of al-
most any width. They could adapt themselves to
curved walls and rounded plans, at which the lintel
visibly relucts, though we have seen it constrained
to them. The curved wall itself, once introduced
into building with the arch, added immense va-
riety to the resources of both plan and eleva-
tion; the vault and dome gave forms of dignity
and grace which in due time revolutionized the art
of building. The multiplied arch opened later a
new kingdom of richness and picturesqueness.
The buildings of the Empire show a command of
resources, a power of adaptation that astonish
us; no other architecture compares with them in
those qualities of design till we come to the Re-
naissance. Though we conclude that the carrying
out of these works was in the hands of Greek work-

60 GREGG-ROMAN A12 OHITEUTURE

men, yet it would seem that the spirit which im-
pelled the transformation must have been that of
the Roman masters. The architecture of the Em-
pire went as far beyond the Greek in its power of
conception, as it fell below in artistic quality of exe-
cution. Did the Greek race, under the masterful
stimulus of Roman influence and of the practical
requirements of their time, furnish the conceptions
as well as the execution? At any rate, let us give
the imperial architecture the credit that is due it,
of being greater in ideas, more abundant in re-
sources, fuller in invention, than any that had been
known in the world before.

~-~--

 

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

I

IF we look back in the history of Rome to the
accession of Constantine, at the beginning of the
fourth century, we shall remember that, though
her prestige remained, influence and energy were
long gone out of her. The seat of influence was
the seat of military p9_vy9r..that.-i§z. the army 3 and
the army. was kept busy on the frontiers, where
the barbarians were always harrying the empire,
and especially in the East. The army had for a
long time made the emperors; some of the most
noted of them were provincials, of barbarian stock.
Septimius Severus was an African, Diocletian an
Illyrian; Constantine, born in Moesia in Asia
Minor, was made emperor at York. Rome had
little to do with the empire except to live on it,
and be its figure-head. The active emperors
spent their time away from her, and some of them
never saw her during their reigns; she lived in
indolent tranquillity, undisturbed except for occa-

sional riots. Her population consisted of the old
61

62 THE A 0 E OF CONS TAN TI NE

patrician families, who lived on their incomes,
supported their troops of dependents, and gave
the tone to the city; the tradesmen and work-
people, mostly slaves and freedmen; and the idle
populace, who held themselves superior to the
tradesmen and work-people, and lived on the
largess of the empire. She had no stirring mid-
dle class; commerce was nothing to her. The
city was finished, overbuilt indeed; her art and
literature, imported from Greece, were decadent,
and given over to the lifeless imitation of old
models. The Senate still sat and legislated per-
functorily; its only duty was to pass the edicts of
the emperors. Rome was the stagnant home of
old traditions, old customs, old ideas, and old
superstitions. She was full of an overweening
veneration for the traditions and memories of her
old greatness, and closed to the ideas of progress
with which the world outside was already fer-
menting. There was a considerable body of Chris-
tians among her people, chiefly among the slaves
and freedmen, it would seem; some of them were
prosperous and even wealthy, and beginning, in
the cessation of persecution, to let their worship
appear, and to build churches for it above ground,
but outside the walls. As yet few persons of in-
fluence were among them, and they were looked
down upon by both the patricians and the idle
populace.

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE . 68

Rome was pagan, and pagan she remained, even
after Constantine, in her ruling spirit. The patri-
cians were slow to accept the Christian religion,
and clave to their old worship, at first publicly,
afterward secretly, long after the official religion
was established. Julian the Apostate, half a cen-
tury after Constantine’s conversion, only gave
public expression to this smouldering paganism
when he tried conscientiously to bring back the
empire to the worship of its old gods. This was
a part of the ineradicable conservatism of Rome,
a conservatism which fairly matches that of her
later years. Even among the lower classes, who
formed the body of the faithful, the superstitions
of the old worship lingered almost unimpaired for
many generations; the worship of saints took the
place of the cult of nymphs and fauns; the Chris-
tian festivals were set designedly on the days of
heathen feasts, and it is curious to note how many
popular superstitions which have survived in Italy
to this day, and from her spread through Christen-
dom, are clear survivals of the superstitions of
pagan mythology, such as the evil eye, the sinister
meaning of omens seen on the left, and a hundred
common signs of good luck or ill.

As she was pagan, so she was classic. Her art
was interwoven with her religion, interpenetrated
1337 it, shaped by it and by the traditions which
came down with it from her early history. That

64 THE A GE 01" CONSTANTINE

her conservatism should show itself especially in
art was inevitable. For the gospel which was to
work a radical change in the moral and social
order of the world had no direct message whatever
for art. The Church took her art where and as
she found it. The only change she made in it
was by the introduction of new symbolism, and
even her characteristic symbols were in great part
the symbols of the old worship invested with a
new meaning, which may or may not have been
discriminated by the multitude of believers. Thus
the emblem of Bacchus became one of the cher-
ished emblems of Christ, and the amoretti which
sported among the vines on the walls and vaults
of the imperial palaces continued their gambols
unrebuked in the name of cherubs on the vaults of
Sta. Costanza and on the Christian sarcOphagi of
the fourth and fifth centuries.

This obstinate conservatism of classic art has
not, I think, been sufficiently recognized. So
long as the art of Italy lasted it was classic. It is
common to assume that the new religion brought
a new impulse to art, and began at once to develop
a new system of forms which grew continuously
into the art of the Middle Ages. But the new art
did not germinate in the \Vest till the old had ex-
pired; and before this the greater part of Italy
had been reduced by violence,'disorder, impover-
ishment, pestilence, famine, and depOpulation, to

THE A GE" 0F CONSTANTINE 65

a condition in which art was the last thing to
which her wretched inhabitants had attention to
give. It was the destroyer himself who lifted her
out of this condition, and when she rose again it
was not only to a new social order and a new. art,
but practically with a new population. It was
not to the new religion, but to the new blood that
art owed its regeneration.

It was in the East that. the barbarians began to
overrun the empire. There they did not anni-
hilate the social and political order as in Italy,
but rather were absorbed and assimilated by it,
till in the end they may be said to have absorbed
it. This process was going on before Christianity
became the religion of the empire. As order and
government did not perish in the East, but were
gradually transmuted into new forms which suited
a new people, so it was with art; and the art
shaped by this process of transmutation retained
in the end much more of classic character than in
the new German kingdoms of Italy, Where, when
it grew again, it grew de novo.

To the East, then, we naturally look for the
connecting links that join classic art to Christian ;
but there these links are peculiarly difficult to
trace, for they have been nearly obliterated by the
later invasion of later races, bringing a new and
militant religion—races which have not assimi-
lated with tho conquered people, and whose blood

63 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

has rather curdled than clarified that of the coun-
tries which the Turk has overrun. But the great
palace that Diocletian built at Spalato, the later
churches at Constantinople, culminating in Sta.
Sofia, the buildings of Theodoric and his succes-
sors at Ravenna, purely Byzantine in style, and
scattered survivals here and there, especially the
singularly preserved series of stone buildings of
Syria, give, when comparatively studied, a very
convincing picture of the progressive changes of
architecture in the East. It has been a habit to
look on the East, including Greece after the loss
of her independence, as the home of conservatism,
given over to intellectual coma, and lost to prog-
ress. But though the later empire of the East stif-
fened into immobility and routine, and though
after the Roman conquest Greece declined into
artistic stagnation as well as political, yet in the
brilliant days of the Roman dominion, through
the reigns of the Antonines and down to the time
of Justinian and later, the Eastern provinces were
the focus of the energy and progress of the world.
While Rome lived in idle indulgence on tributary
wealth, the busy cities of the East created that
wealth. The ruins of Asia and Syria Show their
astonishing prosperity and prove their continual
progress. The exceeding refinement of form and
fastidious adjustment of detail that belonged to
the Greeks had been gradually lost, as was natural

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE’ 67

when the consecrated classic forms, refined by two
or three centuries of consecutive study, came to be
modified or supplanted; yet, if we may trust De
Vogiié’s plates, the detail of architectural work
done in Syria from the second or third century to
the seventh was as clear-cut and well-adjusted as
any except that of the very best times, and far
finer than contemporary work in Italy. It is not
fair, I think, to speak of the first Christian cen-
turies as a period of general decadence in archi-
tecture. In some respects a great change had
come over architecture and the spirit in which it
was designed. Though the exquisite sense of the
Greek architects for proportion and for refinement
in detail had decayed under the Romans, the
period of Roman formalism was passed and a
decorative spirit had come in which, if it lacked
the perfect grace of the old Greek and was over-
exuberant, as some of us would say, was yet full
of freshness, vigor, and invention. It could not
easily outdo, I suspect, the richness of pure Greek
art, which was more sumptuous than .we are. apt
to imagine; but it substituted an opulence of su-
perb material, a wayward freedom and exuberance
of form, and, especially with the development of
mosaic, a profusion of colored surface decoration
’ that outshone the splendor of the earlier time.
.The technique of architecture, apart from the fin-
ish of its workmanship, had in some ways greatly

68 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

advanced under the Romans, and continued to ad-
vance. The squared masonry and simple lintel
construction of the Greeks, unequalled in its kind,
had been replaced by a complex system of arches,
vaults, and domes, with a carefully lavish use of
rough material, cased in wrought stone or marble,
carried to a gigantic scale, with unexampled gran-
deur of effect, and building structures of a com-
plexity, size, and audacious conception which even
the nineteenth century shrinks from attempting.
The technical advance by no means stopped as the
splendor of the empire decayed after the period of
the Antonines. The steps of the succeeding de-
velopment are not clearly traced, owing to the dis-
appearance of the buildings which should have
shown them, but the monuments of Constantine
and the more fully developed architecture of J us-
tinian show a transformation that could not have
come of a sudden change—a thing which never
happened in architecture till in modern days fash-
ion got its hands upon it—but indicate clearly a
continuous modification, some phases of which,
at least, are still to be seen in the architecture of
Central Syria and in scattered monuments that
survive elsewhere.

So, while Rome was decadent, and art was de-
cadent in her, architecture at least was not only
alive but in some ways advancing in the East.
Constantine’s great predecessor, Diocletian, when

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE 69

he withdrew from empire retired—if it was re-
tirement to move nearer than his capital to the
centre of all activity—to his native Illyrium, and
there built the great palace which is our record of
the progress of architecture up to his day. I say
up to his day, for the changes shown in it can
hardly be the sudden efflorescence of that one
building, but must be in the main examples of
what was going on in the current of contemporary
progress.

The palace, surviving in isolation, cannot have
been the only practising ground for such great in-
novations as it shows us. We find in it not only
that direct imposition of the arch on the column
for which it has been specially called into notice,
but the continuous wall-arcade, the corbelled col-
umn, the razeeing of the entablature almost to a
stilt-block, precursor of Ravenna and Thessalonica,
the bending of the whole entablature about the
arch, as in Syria, the plate-band, the arch carried
over a lintel and cornice without impost or pilas-
ter. All these are not signs of a sudden impulse
due to a great opportunity, but rather, it would
seem, are part and parcel of a consecutive devel-
opment in the art of architecture. If we turn to
Central Syria, we find in the early churches, as old
as Constantine or older, the basilican form well
established, the nave and aisles with bordering
arcades, the round eastern apse flanked by two

70 THE AGE OF CONSTA- ’J’INE

I rooms like sacristies (the prothesis and diaconicon
of the Byzantine churches), the clerestory, and the
narthex across the front. In the great church, or
rather quadruple group at Kalat-Siman, built, so
far as we can make out, only about a century after
Constantine’s time, we see the clerestory beset by
a range of corbelled columns carrying an upper
range of corbels on which the roof-trusses rested,
an apse surrounded without by ranges of like col-
umns running up into the arcaded cornice, a pro-
jecting triple-arched porch with three gables
crossing the front, and three eastern apses, as in a
"Western church of the twelfth century. The one
feature wanting to the Syrian churches is the
transept, as is natural in these small churches, in-
tended either for monastic use, or for small con-
gregations, and for the celebration of the service
by a small number of the clergy.

II

If we look at the architecture of the Church in
Italy in Constantine’s reign, taking this as a con-
spicuous period rather than as the epoch of a great
architectural transformation, we shall find archi-
tecture well advanced in the transition from clas-
sic forms to those of the Christian Church. We
shall have reason to believe that the transition
was accomplished in the East rather than in Italy,

THE AGE OF CONSTANTLVE 71

and that it was a deliberate, consecutive develop-
ment of architecture apart from its special uses,
whether secular or ecclesiastical, although certain
definite forms of buildings had been evolved for
the special use of the church. The indications
are that the transformations were the work of the
same Greek people who had invented or shaped
the classic architecture itself. By this time, ap-
parently, the colonnade and entablature had gen-
erally gone out of use in the East; and under the
guidance probably of Greek artists the arch,
which Greece had refused in the days of her first
architectural glory, was taken where the Romans
left it, and made the dominant and controlling
element both in design and construction, lifted
from servitude to a regal position which it kept
through all the Middle Ages. It is likely that
Constantine first brought the new architectural
forms into Rome—perhaps they had as yet no
place in Italy, and that they found there an uncon-
genial home.

The kind of church which Constantine built, and
which his successors perpetuated, must have been
developed in the East, though. it differs from the
smaller churches which we have just noticed in
Syria. That which Paulinus, bishop of Tyre,
built, as Eusebius describes it, so far as we can
understand his description, was substantially of
the same type, and Eusebius does not stint his

7 2 THE A 0E 0F 0 ONS TAN 2 'INE

words in describing its splendor. Tyre was at this
time the most prosperous city of Syria, and the
Church had been important there. In many cities
of Asia Minor the churches were prosperous from
the first centuries, and as they gained in member-
ship and wealth, where they were not under a ban
as in Rome, there was every reason for providing
them with buildings of size and importance. The
prominence of the early churches, the complexity
of organization which they soon deve10ped, the
growth of ceremonial and ritual, all testify not only
to numbers but to position and wealth. There is
a significant edict of Licinius, Constantine’s rival
in the East, which orders that men and women
shall enter their churches through separate doors,
and which, whether or not it testifies to their
orderly ways, indicates considerable importance in
the communities which were so disciplined by im-
perial edict. It probably points to a system of
which the need had come to be recognized, and
which finds its recognition in the plans of the
basilicas of that time, that is, the separation of the
sexes among the worshippers.

I shall not go into the question of the origin of
the Christian basilica; it is long, intricate, and
difficult. It is enough to recall that secular basili-
cas were common in Rome, that they existed and
were probably abundant in provincial cities, and
that there is no record of the conversion of any

THE AGE OF C'OIVSTANTLVE ’73

civic basilica to the use of the church. Constan-
tine built basilican churches both in the East and
the West, and the type was naturally the same,
though there are indications of certain significant
differences. One of his first cares was to redeem
and reconsecrate the Holy Sepulchre. There had
been, we are told, a systematic attempt of the
pagans to obliterate it by covering it up with
earth and by building a temple of Venus over it.
The temple must have perished, for it needed su-
pernatural intervention to enable him to find the
sepulchre. He restored it and built over and about
it a splendid basilica. It is not easy to fully under-
stand Eusebius’s description of this, owing to our
uncertainty as to the meaning of the Greek tech-
nical terms—an uncertainty in which possibly the
pious bishop had a share—but it shows plainly
enough the principal points: first, toward the east
was a great atrium apparently enclosing the sepul-
chre, with porticos on three sides ; then, facing the
east, a porch and three doors ; then an inner ves-
tibule; and, then the body of the church, “built
up to infinite height, spread out to immensity in
length and breadth.” The splendor-loving Con-
stantine would have it as magnificent as became

the place where the head of the Church was laid, .

now that so much magnificence was gathered about

‘a-

the shrines of his folloWers. In his letter of in- '

structions to Macrinus, bishop of Jerusalem, he

74 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

orders “that all the churches which in every State
hold the first place, shall be far surpassed by the
dignity of this: ” “for this place, which is easily
the first in all the world, must be worthily set off
with every adornment.” So the church was to be
built outwardly of smooth-wrought stones and in-
wardly lined with varied marbles, divided length-
wise by colonnades or arcades, covered with fret-
ted ceilings of wood, and partly with vaulting, and
ended in a western apse, surrounded with twelve
columns typifying the twelve apostles. I see no
indication of a transept in this description, but
in another great basilica, which Constantine, his
mother, and Helena built at Bethlehem over the
place of Christ’s nativity, as he thought, and which
survives to-day, the transept is conspicuous. The
plan of this transept, to be sure, is so unusual for
Constantine’s time, having round apsidal ends, that
some critics have concluded that it must date from
J ustinian’s; but the structure of the building is
said to be evidently of one date; its style is so
clearly that of the fourth century, and so absolute-
ly not that of the sixth, that in the lack of any
trustworthy record that Justinian ever built at
Bethlehem, and with the support of the history
of the building, which is unusually continuous, I
think we must conclude with De Vogiié that this is
the original building. It is a five-aisled basilica,
divided by rows of columns which carry wooden

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE 75

architraves supporting the clerestory walls and the
ceilings of the aisles. The nave has now an open
wooden roof; probably it was at first a flat cofl'ered
ceiling. Nave and aisles reappear, as it were, be-
yond the transept, the choir ending like the tran-
sept arms in an apse, so that the east end is three
arms of a Greek cross. This peculiarity does not
appear in any of the churches built by Constantine
in Rome, nor in any of those which were modelled
on them. It is more than possible that the plan of
this east end, which is essentially three apses look-
ing toward a common centre, instead of the usual
single apse, is due to the fact that here the focus of
interest is in that centre, where is the crypt that
contains the birthplace of Christ. It is a note-
worthy peculiarity of its design that, although the
arcade had become fully established, and though
we may reasonably suppose it to have mainly super-
seded the colonnade in the East, here it is refused,
and the columns carry an architrave.
Constantine’s Roman basilicas difi‘ered essen-
tially from this at Bethlehem in the arrangement
of the transept. The three great basilicas, nearly
contemporaneous, of St. Peter, St. John Lateran,
and St. Paul outside the walls were of one type—
five-aisled, with large transept, and single east—
ern apse opening from the middle of it. They had
an open porch across the front, and before it an
atrium surrounded by Cloisters. These churches

76 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

fixed what may be called the Latin type, peculiar
to Rome and to the small number of cities which
took their precedents directly from her—except for
the double aisles, which were rare—and adhered to
in Rome herself, with all that conservatism which I
have ascribed to her, long after the progress of
Romanesque architecture in Italy and elsewhere
had altogether changed the type of churches out-
side of her. In some of the lesser churches the
transept was omitted, as in San Clemente, Sta.
Maria in Cosmedin and Sta. Croce in Gerusa-
lemme. The first of these three gives the best ex-
ample that remains of. the atrium of these primi-
tive basilicas. Where that has disappeared, or was
from the beginning omitted, we usually find a sur-
vival of it in the entrance porch opening with a
colonnadc or arcade in most cases, but sometimes
overbuilt and closed, as in Sta. Maria Maggiore and
Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, and serving as a narthex.

It is not worth while to dwell here on the details
of these churches, which are pretty well known to
architects, but I wish to emphasize two points
which seem to me most characteristic, and which
illustrate more than others the pertinacity with
which decadent Rome clung to her own ways, and
let the progress of the world go by. The first of
these is the adjustment of the transept to the body
of the church, and is the thing which most charac-
teristically distinguishes the Latin form of church

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE 77

or the Roman form. It is common to think and
speak of all churches with transepts as cruciform,
and to assume that the cruciform type prevailed
wherever Christian churches were built. But the
more precise and the better meaning of cruciform
implies two members that mutually intersect, mak-
ing four arms projecting from a centre which is
common to both. In this sense the Latin churches
are not cruciform at all; the cruciform church
never prevailed in Rome till the Renaissance, and
I have not been able to discover that it appeared
there at all till the Gothic period. In the cru-
ciform mediaeval church the nave and transept
penetrated each other, though by virtue of the pre-
dominating aspect of the nave and the uses of
the choir, which occupied the eastern arm and
the crossing together, and often took in part of the
nave, the crossing came to appear as part of the
long aisle of the church, and the transept-ends like
twin arms added to a continuous body. The plan
of the Latin basilica was not a cross, but a T, the
apse being a mere excrescence on the transept.
The relation of the two parts was very much like
the head-house and train-house of a modern rail-
way station. The transept was the dominant\
member of the building, a continuous hall against
which the nave and aisle abutted and stopped i
short, and which further asserted its dignity by
lifting its whole floor above that of the others.

/
\

78 THE A 0E 0F CONS TA NTINE

This architectural exaltation of the transept was a
characteristic of the Christian basilica, and it may
well be that it belonged to great basilicas of the
East which have disappeared. The early Eastern
churches of this form which remain to instruct us
are for the most part without transept, but they are
all comparatively small, and naturally would vary,
like the smaller churches Of Rome, from the plan
of the great ones. The motive of the transept is
obvious. It was to provide an ample and exalted
position from which a great number of privileged
persons, including the clergy, and doubtless the
superior members of the imperial court, who could
not be confounded with the mass of the faithful in
the body of the church, might share or watch the
services.

The architectural mediator between the transept
and nave was the t1'iur_n;p_hal arch. It is best seen
in St. Paul withoiitwthe walls, where the primitive
arch remains, spared by the fire which destroyed
the nave early in this century. Here its impost is
an entablature which is borne by two great col-
umns, much higher than those of the nave, which
stand out in the line of the transept wall. Occa-
sionally the impost is continuous with the entabla-
ture or main string-course of the nave, as in Sta.
Maria Maggiore, but usually the arch claims supe-
riority in an architecture on a larger scale than the
rest, appearing only as a decorative feature of the

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE 79

transept, to enhance whose dignity is its chief of-
fice. This disposition of the church, while it served
its purpose by exalting and in a way secluding
that part which was reserved for the dignitaries,
was an injury to the architectural composition. It
is imperial in sentiment, and an echo of it still sur-
vives in the Greek Church, where the priests do
their office behind a screen, the Iconostasis, while
the congregation waits in the nave. I say an injury
to the architectural composition, for the nave, the
original member, and far the more important in
structure and effect, is degraded into a vestibule
for the transept, which, for all its high function
and the concentration of adornment about the cen-
tre, is in truth a mere cross-gallery. It is quite
inferior in expression to the later form in which
the nave is continued through to the apse, and the
crossing appears as its natural climax, expanding
upward into a great central tower as in the fully
developed cruciform church of the Middle Ages, or
into a dome as in the Renaissance church.

But this was the type which Rome preferred,
and to which she held with that conservatism on
which I have dwelt before. From her example,
apparently, it became the basis of that type wlnch
with more or less variation is often called the
Italian type, in which the transept is still continu-
ous, and bordered on its eastern side with chapels
or apses, of which the middle one is simply a little

80 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE’

more important than the rest. The type prevailed,
I think, in provinces which were subject to the
immediate influence of Rome, or were more or less
excluded from that of the German blood which was
poured into Italy—in the States of the Church, in
Tuscany, and Campania, for instance. We find it
in the great churches of Florence, where the
church of Sta. Croce‘is a conspicuous instance; in
Naples, as in the cathedral of San J anuarius, and
in a hundred well-known instances throughout
Italy; it held its own till the invasion of Pointed
Gothic, and even reappears in some churches of
the Renaissance.

Rome held unswervingly to the Latin type until
the time of the middle Renaissance, when, under
the rule of Julius II. and Leo X., and the artists
whom they called about her, she suddenly flung
away her conservatism, and became for the time
the leader of progress, though it was progress in
the revival of her own ancient forms of art and
literature. I do not know of any acknowledgment
in Rome of the cruciform type before this period,
unless it be in her one Gothic church of Sta. Maria
sopra Minerva. IVhen in her lesser churches the
transept was omitted, she kept the form unimpaired
in other respects. To be sure, in the small church
of SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio the nave is carried
through the transept, and the apse attached to it,
But even here the cruciform shape is not suggested,

THE A G E 01" CONS TANTINE 81

for the transept arms, lower than the nave, merely
abut against it behind two larger arches in the
continuous arcade. There is no thought of inter-
penetration; moreover the whole east end, includ-
ing the transept, is an afterthought, added in the
fourteenth century, and an anomaly which belongs
to no type or series of buildings. It would be in-
teresting to find out when and where the idea first
occurred of pushing the nave through the transept,
and joining it to the apse. The suggestion is an
obvious one, and the thing once done, it was natu-
ral to push both nave and apse beyond the farther
transept wall, and make an eastern arm. When
the triumphal arch at the entrance of the transept
and that where the apse had joined it were re-
tained, and similar arches crossing the transept
marked the continuation of the nave, the cruciform
church was complete. The crossing became part
of both nave and transept, but the need or the
habit of extending the choir into and even beyond
the crossing prevailed, the transept arms were soon
disused in the celebration of the service, and be-
came subordinate instead of principal, while the
united nave and choir took their natural predomi-
nance, to the architectural benefit of the church.
This arrangement was sufficiently foreshadowed
in those smaller churches of Rome which had no
transept, of which San Clemente and Sta. Maria in
Cosmedin are the best known examples. In the

82 THE AGE OF CONSTANTLVE'

last the continuity of the longitudinal members is
emphasized by the exceptional fact that the aisles
as well as the nave end in apses. But Rome re-
fused the cruciform plan.

The second point which I wish to emphasize,
wherein Rome clung to her classic precedents, is
her favor for the entablature rather than the arch.
We have seen how the classic Romans subjugated
the arch, which was their own, to the order, which
had been to them the representative of what was
august and sacred, while the arch had been ser-
vant of all work. The Greeks, as the Syrian build-
ings show, had before Constantine’s time rehabil-
itated the arch and given it the honor that suited
its kingly qualities, but the Romans in their con-
servatism seemed to look upon it as an upstart,
unworthy of the place it had won. The arcade
was far cheaper than the colonnade, for it required
fewer columns. It was easier to build, for it was
built of much smaller stones. It was more ser-
viceable, for it favored in the interior that open-
ness which was one great advantage of the basilican
form of church. Among the three great basilicas
of the fourth century, in that which was the most
august, if not the most venerable, that which Con-
stantine built at the special intercession of Pope
Sylvester to Peter, the patron saint of Rome and
head of the Universal Church, the nave was lined
with a colonnade and the arcades were remanded

TI] E’ A 0E 0117 CONSTA NTLVE 83

to the divisions between the aisles. The other
great basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore, built by
Sylvester’s successor, Liberius, owes its striking
effect to the interminable colonnades with their
continuous entablatures that border the nave, and
tempt us to believe that the Romans were right
if they ascribed a peculiar solemnity to the un-
broken order. The colonnade appears even in the
East in the church of Helena and Constantine at
Bethlehem, as we have, noticed; we find it once at
Constantinople in the oldest church there, the St.
John of Studios, built in the fourth century. In
Rome it reappears at intervals in the more memora-
ble churches all the way to the thirteenth century;
in San Lorenzo fuori 1e mura, where it is pieced
together out of fragments laboriously gathered
from various buildings; in Sta. Maria in Traste-
vere, in Sta. Prassede, San Martino a1 Monte and
others. In several of these churches, in Sta. Maria
in Trastevere and Sta. Prassede, for instance, re-
lieving arches are built in the frieze, to take the
weight from the architrave, and hidden by the dec-
oration rather than give the arch the place which
its constructive importance deserves. While the
entablature was banished from the rest of Eu-
rope in the centuries of her depopulation and pov-
erty, when building had almost entirely stopped in
Rome, her preference still shows itself in San Lo-
renzo in the sixth century, in Sta. Prassede in the

84 THE AGE OF CONSTANTLVE

ninth, and when she began to revive in the twelfth,
when the fully developed Romanesque was ready
to break out into Gothic outside her walls, with a
new prosperity came a new reversion to her old
love, and the church of Sta. Maria in Trastevere
was rebuilt in the old way, and the porch added
to the front of San Giorgio in Velabro, and that
built across the front of Sta. Maria Maggiore and
since covered up by Fernando Fuga, but shown in
an illustration quoted in Letarouilly’s book, es-
chewed the arch and went back to the entablature.
Even the sumptuous cloisters of San Paolo fuori
and St. John Lateran show for their principal
feature above their graceful arcades the revived
entablature, not true to the old proportion, but
faithful to the old idea.

III

If Augustus boasted that he had found Rome of
brick and left her of marble, we might almost as
well say that Constantine found an architecture
of marble and left one of brick. The temples of
Rome had been mostly of marble ; the early Chris-
tian churches were mere brick walls roofed in.
Their one strictly architectural feature was the ar-
cading; an exuberant decoration was the compen-
sation for their architectural poverty. They were
really churches of the decorator rather than of the

q‘

TIIE AGE OF CONSTANTINE - 85

architect. After the transfer to Constantinople,
the East and the West took different ways in art
as well as in politics. In the East the prosperity
of a renewed empire kept the arts alive, and out-
side architecture was not forgotten; but the By-
zantine style quickly supervened and the basilicas
disappeared. In Italy there was for some centuries
only the early Christian. There the art of sculpt-
ure had died out, and that of stone-cutting nearly
so before Constantine’s reign. But Roman brick-
work had been abundant, skilful, and varied.
There were always masons, and churches could be
built of brick and rough stone, to be left bare out-
side or plainly plastered over. So they were built,
so we find them in Rome and Ravenna, and scat-
tered over Italy in other places. The only things
that the stone-cutter was called upon to do were
to cut the arch-stones for the arcading, to fit to-
gether the pieces of architecture and other old
fragments that were worked in, and occasionally
by a tour de force to supply an imitated capital
where an ancient one was not forthcoming for a
stolen shaft, which he did pitiably enough. Brick-
building became again, for a time, as it had been
in the beginnings of Rome, the architecture of
Italy, so far as any remained. The arches of the
arcades themselves were apt to be simple brick
arches encased in marble, where they were not
covered with plaster or mosaic. The skill of the

86 TH E A 0 E OF CONS TA .VTINE

bricklayer even in that day of decadence was
enough for what was asked of him in the simply
designed churches, or, more exactly, perhaps, the
demands were limited to what his skill could fur-
nish. In Rome, where, except outside the walls,
the city was closely built, and churches had to be
accommodated to lots where they were hemmed in
on sides and rear, as we may see in the hopelessly
unsymmetrical plan of San Giorgio in Velabro, for
instance, the exterior was of little account, except
in buildings that are meant for public monuments.
The porches and the overflow of the inside deco-
ration upon the front were all that needed atten-
tion. That abiding reverence for the Order and
for the lines of the entablature which showed it-
self in here and there retaining the horizontal lines
of the entablature within I have already noticed,
and it deserves keeping in mind, for we shall have
to refer to it again more than once. But for the
outside the monumental aspect was renounced in
Rome, whatever the reason was, and the brick
walls were, it would appear, simply plastered over.
In Ravenna, where the most important group of
early churches is preserved, and where the eastern
influence was strong, the buildings dating from the
end of the fifth century and early in the sixth, that
is, nearly two centuries later than the first great
churches of Rome, are still of brick, and show the
lingering traditions of Roman brickwork, while

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE 87

there are in them many things that, like the stone
architecture of Syria which I have mentioned
above, are distinctly significant anticipations of
the peculiarities of the Lombard style. They
were built to show unplastered, and considerable
skill is shown in the effort to relieve the bare-
ness of the walls. We find in them, and also in
some nearly contemporary work at Rome, careful-
ly designed brick cornices, with corbel tables and
ratchet-courses, string-courses of moulded bricks,
and round-arched panels in which the windows are
enclosed, separated by pilasters running up from
the ground in the Lombard fashion.

Building having thus passed into the hands of
the bricklayers, who had nothing of the art of the
classical architect, it had inevitably to lapse away
from classical forms. These were stone forms
evolved in the development of the architecture of
the beam; inasmuch as. brick beams are impos-
sible, the trabeated details, which were also un-
suited to brickwork, disappeared with the lintel.
The arch had already been emancipated from the
order, in the way that I have mentioned in the es-
say on the Graeco-Roman style. In the desolation,
poverty, depopulation, and repeopling that present-
ly fell upon Italy the art of architecture passed
away from her, as the art of sculpture had
passed away. When, some centuries after, a new
architecture was needed, there was no one to pro-

-—.— “-mm-

88 THE AGE OF CONSTANTINE

vide it but the untrained artisan. He worked it
out constructively, as those who come to art from
the mechanical side have always done, and so it
started to all intents anew, from a constructive
beginning, as the architecture of the Greeks had
started fifteen hundred years before. Its begin-
nings were obscure and rough; it took centuries
to bring it into shape again, but it was unfettered
by any fixed tradition. A new constructive prin-
ciple, the application of the arch, underlay and
directed it. Its evolution went on consistently
for another seven hundred years or so in an un-
broken line through the successive forms of R0-
manesque and Gothic, till there came in the fif-
teenth century a sudden transformation, as by the
shift of a magic lantern, into the fashion of the
Renaissance.

But it was outside of Rome that these changes
went on. \Vithin her the classic feeling remained,
and though in her helplessness she let the forms
of the old architecture slip away from her, she
took no further share in the new than to accept
that one innovation of Constantine, the basilican
arcade. As we look back over her history we see
imaged in her architecture the same self-consist-
ency, the same persistent individuality that marks
her political endurance. All other cities whose
architecture records their history show that they
have been different cities at different times. In

THE AGE OF CONSTANTINL’ 89

Rome alone that adherence to her old tradition
which held her to a straight course in the time of
Constantine is embodied in all her later aspects
except for the vagaries of‘ to-day. She is the one
architecturally harmonious city in the world, as
she is the oldest. She has clung to the forms of
her architecture as she has to the traditions of her
supremacy, and both are witnesses to the strange
tenacity which has enabled her to assert her
primacy through all ages, in spite of poverty, neg-
lect, humiliation, and all that would degrade an-
other city. She is to us a symbol of stability,
a symbol perhaps of indifference to that progres-
siveness which the world loves, often to the things
that mean real advance in the condition of men,
but also of a noble endurance of time and disaster,
of a steadfast dignity which makes the nobility of
later ages seem petty, and which has held the
. garment of her majesty about her—at least till our
day.

.,—..—uv.-nr-a'

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

I

THE beginnings of Christian architecture are
dark, as are the beginnings of every architecture.
Starting in obscurity and passing her first years in
persecution, the Church had no need or opportu-
nity for conspicuous buildings. But when she be-
gan to prevail, and to take possession of the world,
her growth in numbers and means was so great
that the buildings which had served her at first
were useless to her. She came, moreover, out of
no such period of primitive civilization as the
earlier religions were born in, and therefore had
no art which grew in her from its infancy, no mon-
uments which brought down with them the rever-
ence of her earliest days, like the primitive temples
of Greece and Rome—like the Heraeum of Argos,
for instance, which, surviving from remotest an-
tiquity and reverently guarded, was only renewed
and replaced piece by piece and with stone for
wood as it fell away in process of decay. The me-

morials which she cherished were the tombs of her
90

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARC'HITECTURE 91

martyrs, and it was not till the day of her pros-
perity that she could adorn these as became her
veneration, or even visibly commemorate them
without exposing them to desecration. When in
the fourth century after Constantine’s Peace of the
Church and the public conversion of the Empire,
she found the wealth of cities and nations in her
control, she fell immediately to covering the world
with new churches, and those of her old ones
which survived were remodelled or abandoned.
So we are left with no examples to show the archi-
tecture of her childhood. She had, however, no
need to provide an art of her own. The art of the
world had become hers with its wealth. It was a
fully developed art, abounding in forms for every
use, in spite of the decadence which had already
set in. The impression that Christianity had to
create an art, or even forms of art, and did so de
move is a wrong one. She naturally took into her
service what was ready to her hand, finding it suf-
ficient for her present needs, selecting and com-
bining the elements that suited her. Only as she
formed new habits, and new wants developed with
her growth, did she gradually transform and renew
the arts of Rome and Greece.

The oldest Christian churches that we know
come from the reign of Constantine and later.
They show us types so well developed and so
accepted that we must believe them to be the out-

92 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

come of confirmed habit. The main types are
two, round churches and basilicas; these two fur-
nished the models for two great classes of churches
that have persisted through many centuries. \Vith
the round churches are classed not only the cir-
cular but the whole group of what the Germans
call Central-kirchen—those which are symmetri-
cal about a geometric centre, whether circular in
plan, or polygonal, or crosses with short equal
arms, or star-shaped. They are in great variety,
from the simple circle or octagon which we see in
the tomb of Theodoric or the old baptisteries to the
most complicated system of aisles, niches, chapels,
and arms radiating about a round or polygonal
middle, like San Stefano Rotondo at Rome or San
Vitale at Ravenna. Those buildings were in no-
wise suited to the whole ritual of the Christian
church, nor to the accommodation of the great
congregations which it gathered; their form was
adapted to the consecration and preservation of a
central object—a font, or the tomb of a potentate
or conspicuous saint. It was a Roman form, famil-
iar to the world in the mausoleums of Augustus
and Hadrian, the tomb of Cecilia Metella and
many others, a form which in imitation of the
Romans has been used for the monuments of the
great from their day to ours, in many lands and in
many styles. It was peculiarly suited to baptis-
mal use, so that this round type has been com-

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 93

mon for baptisteries everywhere. When the dome
was added to it, it assumed a monumental shape
which has made it attractive in all ages ; it became
the nucleus of the prevailing Byzantine type,
and was a favorite of the artists of the Renais-
sance. Constantine himself set the Christian ex-
ample when he built a round church over the
Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where he joined
with it the other great type of Christian church,
the basilican, an example which was resumed and
followed often in Europe after the Crusaders had
made the West familiar with the Sepulchre, eSpeci-
ally by the Knights Templar, whose churches were
habitually built after this model. But the type
was variable, its uses were special, and though it
was kept alive for monumental purposes, it did not
establish itself as a ruling type.

The second type developed into the church
which was called basilican. Much labor has been
spent and many theories have been evolved in try-
ing to find an origin for it. Perhaps all the theo-
ries have sinned in that they have been exclusive,
prompted by that familiar inclination which men
have to find a simple cause for even a complicated
result. The oldest, long-accepted theory which
Alberti propounded, guided by the identity of
name, is that the Christian basilica is only the
Roman basilica—a building of analogous form—
converted or copied for Christian worship. Lately

94 EARL Y CHRIS TIAN ARCHITECTURE

other theories have been brought forward: that
the basilica was copied or developed from the
Greek Schola, a building for school use, or from
the chambers of the catacombs; that it grew di-
rectly out of the plan of the Roman house, or the
Greek house; that it was a building planned
afresh to suit the needs of Christian worship.
This is not the place to enter into such controver—
sies, which demand the compass of a volume and
a long array of arguments and citations, but it is
difficult to refrain from noticing a few points.
And first, what was a basilica? The Christian
basilica, which we find fully shaped during Con-
stantine’s reign, and which determined the form of
churches for hundreds of years after, was an ob-
long building divided lengthwise by rows of col-
umns into aisles, usually three, sometimes five.
The middle aisle, or nave, was higher and wider
than the others, and furnished most of the light
for the church through a clerestory of windows
set in its long walls above the colonnades and the
roofs of the aisles. It was entered from one end
through doors, one for each aisle, and at the other
end, against the nave, was a semicircular apse or
bay, lined with seats for the clergy, in front of
which was the altar. Often a transept, as high as
the nave if not so wide, crossing the back of the
church, was interposed between the apse and the
three aisles, which opened into the transept each

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 95

by a great arch; the principal arch, at the end of
the nave and opposite the apse, being called in
later times the triumphal arch. Across the front
of the church and over the entrance doors was
built an open porch called the narthex, resting on
columns. Before the narthex was the atrium, an
open squared court built round with colonnaded
or arcaded galleries, of which the narthex made
one side, and entered through a gateway opposite
it. This is the characteristic type of early Chris-
tian churches throughout Europe, and inasmuch
as it represents the first architecture of the Latin
church, it is convenient to call it the Latin type.
The type is well known to us in the great basil-
icas of St. Paul outside the walls and Santa Maria
Maggiore, and approximately in the smaller ones
of San Clemente and Santa Maria in Cosmedin in
Rome, in the two great basilicas of San Apollinare
at Ravenna, and in many others; but the atrium,
which seems to have been universal, at least in
important churches, in Rome and probably in
Italy, though not common in the East, has in most
cases disappeared. There is plausibility in all the
theories of its origin which I have mentioned,
but no close correspondence with any of the pro-
totypes. We have no record that any Roman
basilica, or any other, was ever taken for Christian
worship, or other public buildings, except in un-
usual cases a temple, like the Pantheon or the

96 EARL Y CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

temple of Antoninus and Faustina. The Roman
house, the example which has been most lately
pressed, hardly accounts for all the facts, and
there seems to be no need of mooring our expla-
nations to that. It is likely that the basilican
church, like every other type of building that has
become fixed and exemplary, was the gradual and
tentative development from wants that showed
themselves successively, and that it took its ideas
wherever it found them. There was time enough
for this; between the perfected church as we see
it in Constantine’s reign and the founding of the
Christian religion some three centuries had inter-
vened. The Christians had passed through sea-
sons of persecution, when they had to hide their
worship, but they had grown very numerous; they
had pervaded the civilized world, had converted
many of the rich and even of the powerful; they
had come out of hiding; in the East especially
they formed wealthy and important communities.
When Constantine declared himself a Christian
and proclaimed the new religion as that of the
Empire, he did not join himself to an insignificant,
inconspicuous, unimportant sect; he took the side
of one great party in the state, a party that had
never been in power, and had lately under Diocle-
tian been the prey of violent and desolating per-
secution from the party which was in power. But
it was a rapidly growing party, the progressive

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 97

party, which, though as yet it had no share in
public affairs, apparently contained a great pro-
portion of the best activity of the Empire, at least
out of Rome, and was coming to include, it is
likely, a preponderating influence among those
lower classes to whose support, next to that of the
army, the emperors had learned to appeal. It
had even to a considerable extent gained converts
in the army itself. The Christians were in Con-
stantine’s time a numerous body, an important
part of the whole people, so important that Ga-
lerius had tried to depress their power by persecu-
tion, not for the sake of religion, but for reasons
of state; and they must have been so before, for
such a body does not grow in a night. If we
had no records to show it, we should have to be-
lieve that they had many churches, but there is
abundant record. The earliest church building
of which history tells us is that “temple of the
Christian Church” which, as the Chronicle of
Edessa declares, was destroyed by a great flood
in that city in A.D. 201. But what there was in
Edessa there was, doubtless, in many other cities
of equal or greater importance in the history of
the Church. Allusions here and there in the his-
torians assure us that wherever the pressure of
persecution was lifted the Christian worship came
to the light, and the churches multiplied. Before
the persecution of Diocletian, we are told,- there

98 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

were in Rome itself more than forty Christian
basilicas, and Eusebius is eloquent over not only
the number, but the size and splendor of those in
the East, bewailing their loss in the time of perse-
cution. Making all allowance for the churchman’s
enthusiasm, we could not believe that he was
speaking of few or insignificant buildings, even if
we could believe that there was a sudden jump to
an elaborate and complex plan sufficiently organ-
ized to suit for centuries the wants of a pompous
ritual, a great hierarchy, and enormous congrega-
tions of every degree.

II

From the point of view of art, it was a fortunate
coincidence that Christianity came to prevail at a
moment of transition in architecture. The con-
servatism of Greece, backed by the artistic con-
servatism of Rome, had begun to yield to rad-
ical changes of detail which were leading the way
to an actual metamorphosis of style. The setting
of the arch directly upon the column had meant-
the permanent disruption of the Order which had
stood for the whole of classic architecture; and
that was the prelude to the breaking up of the
classic style. How or just where the breaking up
was accomplished it is hard to say. The ravage of
war and depopulation, still more the greater ravage

EARLY CIIRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 99

of new growth, of states reformed, of prosperity re-
newed, and cities rebuilt, have obliterated most of
the traces of the transition. It is only in cities
that have been suddenly ruined, like Selinus or
Palmyra or Pompeii, or have sunk into perpetual
coma like some of the mediaeval towns of Italy
and Spain, that we may look to see the record of
their early building preserved. The enormous
spread and duration of the Eastern Empire, the
repeated incursions of the Saracenic conquerors,
the shifting mastery of opposite rulers and prog-
ress, the long decay here, the repeated revival
there, these have so changed the face of the whole
East that only in neglected corners is there here
and there a remnant to hint for us at the changes
of these early times. One thing is clear, that the
transition did not take place in Rome, nor con-
sequently in those regions whose progress was
directly guided by her influence, that is, in Italy.
The history of Rome, the phases of her architect-
ure, are written in her monuments without an in-
terruption. The last buildings of pagan Rome are
unwaveringly classic. The baths of Diocletian,
the basilica (so called) of Maxentius, which Con-
stantine finished in his own name, the triumphal
arch with which he commemorated his triumph,
in spite of decadent workmanship, negligence in
proportion and detail, are the full embodiment of
classic ideas, with no trace of new intention. Be-

100 EARL Y CHRISTIAN AR CHI TE 0 T URE

tween them and his Christian buildings there is an
absolute break, a complete change of type. The
later buildings bear no witness to the transitions
through which the change was accomplished. Yet
such a change has never been seen in the history
of architecture without a considerable series of in—
termediate steps, except in some modern instances
where an old style has been deliberately revived
by copying. The one sign of a lingering attach-
ment to the old ways that the early Christian
churches show is the use in Rome in some instances
of the entablature instead of the arcade to carry
the walls of the clerestory. In the old St. Peter’s,
built over the apostle’s grave by Constantine, in
Sta. Maria Maggiore, built a quarter of a century
later by Liberius, in San Lorenzo outside the walls,
and in some churches of less importance, the naves
were separated from the aisles by an order with
the classical entablature, instead of the arcade
borne directl 0 ns which from the
beginning the distinction of 6 Christian churches.
This variation, which "tiypiiie‘s’tfiIEKunimpre‘gnable
conservatism of the city of Rome, is the sign of a
certain classic instinct that was never eradicated
from her. It cropped out in her under the full
swing of the Middle Ages among the few works
of restoration or new building that were under-
taken in her season of poverty. It was one of
the links in the chain that seemed to bind her

 
 

 

EARL Y CHRISTIAN ARUHI TECTURE 101

permanently to her imperial greatness, and gave a
point of attachment for the Renaissance movement
in architecture when that passed over to her. But
it was peculiar to Rome and the neighborhood in
the range of her immediate influence. There are
scarcely any examples of it to be found outside this
range ; one is in the basilica of the Nativity built
at Bethlehem by Constantine, another is a small
church in one of the towns of Central Syria. In
Rome itself, except for this one almost pathetic
protest against the utter abandonment of the glo-
ries of her old architecture, the triumph of the
new was complete, and even in most of her early
churches the distinctive arcade took its place. The
other great basilicas of Constantine, St. John
Lateran’s and St. Paul’s outside the walls, rivals
of St. Peter’s, were built with arcades in the new
way, and so were the most of the one or two hun-
dreds of churches which followed them in the next
twelve hundred years. '
It is to the East that we must look for evidences
of the progress of this transformation. A11 prog-
ress and all initiative had died out of Rome and
Italy long before Constantine’s accession. All the
vigor of the Empire was in the East, and Constan-
tine only followed the fact when he transferred
the capital to that quarter. The real strength of
the realm lay already among the barbarians which
it had lately conquered and absorbed, and whose

102 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

kindred were soon in their turn to conquer the
Empire and rejuvenate its population by the ad-
mixture of their own blood. They furnished the
armies that still defended it; they had for a cen-
tury furnished the capable men among its emper-
ors; its generals and administrators came from
them. In the East, which, including Greece, had
provided most of the architects and other artists
that had made Rome beautiful, was apparently all
the spirit of invention and progress that trans-
formed the arts. The cities of the East have
been but little explored by archaeologists; the
unvisited ruins of Asia Minor probably cover a
vast amount of instructive remains. Here and
there, in Baalbec, Palmyra, Antioch for instance,
we can see the modifications which classical ar-
chitecture underwent on its way to become med-
iaeval. .

The most striking examples are in the district
called the Hauran in the middle of Syria, where a
whole architecture of the first Christian centuries
has been surprised within a few years, as the re-
mains of Pompeii and Herculaneum were in the
last century. Here, in and near a valley behind
the Lebanon range, was a series of small towns
which had been overwhelmed, laid waste, and de-
populated by the Arabs in the first years of the
Mohammedan conquests. Waste and depopulated
they have remained ever since, not reoccupied,

rm.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 103

and so not destroyed, unvisited and almost un-
known to geographers. At the time when they
were built the country was already bare of tim-
ber, and the buildings, all of hard stone even to
floors and roofs, doors and window-shutters, have
borne the wear and tear of climate more stoutly
than the ruins of Egypt. It is a singular and
priceless benefit to the history of architecture that
habitually their dates, which extend from the
second to the seventh century, are marked upon
them. Here we see houses, squares, public build-
ings, convents, churches—whole towns grouped
about narrow streets, scarcely injured by twelve
centuries of neglect. Their carefully wrought and
often elaborate architecture shows in the course
of five centuries a range of innovation that aston-
ishes us. There is not only the cardinal change
which distinguishes Diocletian’s palace, the set-
ting of the arch directly on the column, but a
score of other inventions which we had been wont
to ascribe to Byzantine architecture or to the R0-
manesque builders of Italy and Germany—bal-
conies, corbel—tables, pilasters running up into ar—
caded cornices, broad arches spanning the naves,
or carrying clerestories from pier to pier, domes
set upon polygonal or square substructures, clus-
tered piers, even the shafted and arcaded eaves-
cornice which is to us the most conspicuous char-
acteristic of Lombard architecture. The plans of

104 EARL Y CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

the churches, and apparently of some of the pre-
Christian buildings, are those of Christian basil-
icas, and the atrium itself, which seems to have
been mostly banished from the Eastern churches,
is found here. We are almost tempted to say
that there was nothing new in Romanesque archi-
tecture, and that its whole development was pre-
figured in the developments from classic architect-
ure which we find in this provincial region, part of
the kingdom of the Seleucidae, where the language
was Greek and the whole civilization must have
been of the same. It would almost seem that the
inexhaustible Greek, who developed the most per-
fect arts within their limited range that have ever
been seen, who invented and shaped classic archi-
tecture, who provided for the Romans the great
modification of it that they required, who turned
aside to create his own Byzantine version of the
mediaeval, furnishing the world with the dome that
was to make the greatest triumph of the Renais—
sance as well, had forestalled and shaped at least
the outside forms of the whole domain of Roman-
esque builders.

III

That the Church should flourish most in the
most progressive parts of the Empire was natural.
The East, in which was gathered the vitality of
the civilized world, was the home of the Church,

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 105

so far as she can be said to have had a home in the
world at that time. Up to the fourth century her
growth, the development of her organization, her
literature and her ritual, her advance in numbers
and importance, were mainly in the East. In the -
course of the second century there was a great in-
crease in the complexity of her administration and
in the formalism of her worship. The modern stu-
dent is surprised to see how early her hierarchy
became rigid and her worship hardened into elab-
orate forms. With a more elaborate ritual must
have soon come the need of special provision in
'her buildings, and occasional indications in her
writings argue for this. The first assemblies of
Christians had been scattered and independent;
every knot of friends seems to have worshipped
separately. But the insufficiency of this was soon
felt. In the second half of the first century the
exhortations of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, plead-
ed urgently for union in worship ; before the end
of it all the faithful, in Corinth for instance, were
united in one congregation, and the consolidation
went on through the East. Persecution, when it
followed, was a strong consolidator. By the third
century the clergy was segregated from the laity,
the faithful were ordered in classes, the ordinance
of the religious services was minutely appointed.
When the earliest churches come to our notice
they are adapted to their complicated ritual with a

106 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

formality that smacks of imperial authority. The
bishops have become great potentates ; the clergy
of presbyters and deacons is a highly organized
and numerous body; the wealth at the disposal of
. the Church is already great. With the favor of
Constantine the depressed Roman Church entered
suddenly into the state and magnificence that
had been preparing for her in the East. Let us
hear what Eusebius tells us of the basilica which
Bishop Paulinus built in Tyre at the beginning of
the fourth century, after the cessation of Diocle-
tian’s persecution, but a dozen years before the first
of the Constantinian basilicas was built in Rome.
The bishop, he says, enclosed the whole site
with a strong encompassing wall for protection’s
sake—like the peribolus (that is the word he uses)
of a Greek temple—and through a broad and lofty
outer porch (propylon) which faced the rising sun
he gave the coming visitor a glimpse of the beauty
within. But that this visitor might not tread the
sanctuary with profane and unwashed feet, he set
apart between the porch and the church an ample
fore-court, girt about with colonnades under a slop-
ing roof, whose pillars were joined with wooden
railings up to the mid-height of a man; and the
court was open to the view of heaven, to the sun-
light, and.to the air. In the midst of it, before
the front of the church, was a fountain with a full
flow of water for the washing of feet. This was the

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 107

first station for those who entered, both a fair
adornment of the church and a seemly place for
lingering to him who waited for entrance. Then,
surpassing the beauty of all these things, he ranged
within a second and greater porch the entrances of
the church, three doors in line, which looked again
toward the rising sun. The middle door he made
both higher and broader than the others, and he
overlaid it with plates of brass and with carving,
so that it stood like a queen, with a handmaid on
either side. In like manner he arranged within
the church pillared aisles on either hand, as many
as the doors, and above them, that there might be
abundant light, he set windows in order, and fitted
them with comely gratings of wood. Of rich and
precious materials he built the kingly house, and
in the generosity of his sacrifice he spared no cost.
“ Therefore,” continues Eusebius, checking him-
self at a moment when his testimony would have
been precious to us, “it seems to me needless to
recount the length and breadth of the building, its
splendid beauty, its majesty beyond the reach of
words, the glorious aspect of its particulars, its
walls that soar to heaven and the cedars of Leb-
anon that rest upon them.” After he had so fin-
ished the church, the account goes on, Paulinus
provided it with lofty seats in honor of the clergy,
and, moreover, with benches ranged in fitting order
for the congregation. But, above all, he set in the

108 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

midst of it the most holy altar; and the place of
this, that it might not be invaded by the crowd, he
enclosed with barriers of wood, crowned by cun-
ning carved work, wonderful to look upon. Even
the pavement he did not neglect, but adorned it
beautifully with rich marbles. Finally he gave
heed to the outside of the church, and built apses
and walls against its sides artfully and of large
size, and opened them with doors to the interior.
Such buildings, he says, did our blessed Solomon,
the builder of this temple, provide for those who
still waited for the purification of baptism. The
description is clear, although the good bishop of
Caesarea fails us at some points, and it gives us the
picture of the complete basilica of the fourth cen-
tury, as Constantine repeated it. There is no men-
tion of a transept, which was probably lacking,
since it was not usual in the East, nor of an apse
for the clergy, which doubtless existed, for we
know of no church without it. But the seats for
the presbyters which lined the apse are described,
as well as those for the congregation, of which we
read little, though the writings of the church show
us that at least in some parts it was the habit of
the congregations to listen sitting to the reading
and preaching; and the altar railed off from the
crowd of worshippers is mentioned. The orienta-
tion, it will be seen, is clearly that of the classic
temples, and, indeed, of the temples of the whole

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 109

East, the doors being open to the sun as it rose, a
custom which, after some vacillation, the church
definitely changed, turning, as a rule, the apse and
altar toward the east, so that the whole congrega-
tion faced in that direction. The basilica which
Constantine adjoined to the round church that he
built over the Holy Sepulchre seems also, accord-
ing to Eusebius, to have faced the east, and the
same may be said of the three great basilicas of
Constantine’s time in Rome, St. John Lateran, St.
Peter’s, and St. Paul’s outside the walls.

We see then that when Constantine came to
build churches the type was already fixed: there
was practically nothing left to do in shaping it.
The one new thing which seems to have been done
in Rome was to add the transept. This, as well
as the enormous size of the great churches there,
was clearly due to the multitude of believers who
had to be provided for, and the great increase of
the number of the clergy—bishops, presbyters, and
deacons—who must have their'own place plainly
marked off from the congregation and subdivided
into three orders, for which the apse alone no lon-
ger sufliced. The emperors and their household,
too, could not be confounded with the mass of
the worshippers, and there must be room apart
reserved for them.1 The three great churches

’ It had not taken many generations to lift the church above
that level of brotherly equality that belonged to it under the

110 EARL Y CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

were of extraordinary size because the Lateran
basilica was the special church of the bishop—it
was the chapel of the pOpes so long as the Lateran
was their residence, that is, until they went to
Avignon—and the other two were dedicated to the
two great apostles who had suffered martyrdom in
Rome, and the growing cult of the saints made the
population flock to their shrines.

IV

I have said that the evolution of the basilica was
from the beginning dictated by the growth of the
ritual. The atrium was the place of gathering and

ministration of Peter and John and Paul. The apse or hemi-
cycle round which the presbyters sat in dignified order was at
first set up above the body of the church, and the bishop’s
throne was high above the rest. \Vhen the church became im-
perial, and the transept was added to make room for more. digni-
taries, that too was exalted over the mass of believers. Its front
wall and the triumphal arch which opened into it, were decorated
with all the splendor which the art of the Empire could give. It
is hardly worth while to inquire too curiously into the relative
shares which worldly pomp and religious reverence had in this
exaltation. A curious poem of Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of
Constantinople in A.D. 380, gives a characteristic picture of the
assembling of worshippers in his own church. He sees himself,
in a dream, exalted on his episcopal throne, while the presby-
ters sit ranged about him on either side. The deacons stand in
order below; the great crowd of the faithful swarms like bees
against the barriers, while others stream in behind through the
sacred doors, and the maiden lambs and chaste matrons sit lis-
tening in the lofty galleries.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 111

of purifying, the anteroom and the place of bap-
tism. The unconverted, the catechumens, the peni-
tents, waited there, as we have seen, and in the
narthex. Within the churches it was early found
desirable to separate the sexes. The fact that men
and women attended worship together in crowds,
especially at night, that they celebrated their com-
munions or love-feasts together was itself an of-
fence, most of all in the East, where the segrega-
tion of women was traditional, and made it easy
to associate the new religion with the worship of
Venus and Cybele, of Astarte and Mithras. One
of the earliest complaints of bigots and scofi'ers
was that the Christian meetings were scenes of
debauchery. A well-known letter of the younger
Pliny to Trajan shows how these susPicions led to
his interfering with these meetings by the em-
peror’s command, while yet he was diSposed to
justify them. The importance that was ascribed
to separating the sexes is shownby many allusions
to it in the writings of the Church fathers. The
edict of Licinius, at the beginning of the fourth
century, either recognized or established a rule
under which men and women entered at separate
doors, where doorkeepers stood ready to remand
them to their places. The assigning of one side
of the church to the men and the other to the
women corresponded naturally to the division of
the buildings into aisles, and the position of the

112 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

doors; but in the eastern churches a severer di-
vision was common, the women being confined to
an upper gallery over the aisles, which was called
the gynaeceum. This last distribution, which,
perhaps, would hardly suit either the relative num-
ber or the temper of the fairer worshippers in our
day, was adopted in many places in the West, and
was maintained in conventual churches through
the Middle Ages. The system of construction to
which it led, of building the aisles in two stories,
even in churches which were non-monastic, and for
general uses, appeared in various churches through-
out Europe down into the thirteenth century. The
cathedrals of Paris, Laon, Geneva, and Peter-
borough, for instance, are so built.

The Church had inherited from the Jews its
fondness for psalmody, as well as many other de-
tails of religious observance. Is any merry, let
him sing psalms, says the apostle, and the story
of the early Church is full of accounts of the sing-
ing of the Christians in their worship. By the
fourth century it was found advisable to establish
a prophylactic which the Church has maintained
ever since, by intrusting the psalmody to a special
body of trained singers, the chorus psallentimn,
for whom a space was reserved, not among the
clergy, but at the end of the nave next them, and
this too was surrounded by a barrier. The bishop
had in the beginning delivered his sermon from

0

EARL Y CIIRISTIAN AR CHI TE 0 T URE 113

his chair at the back of the apse, ex cathedra, but
as the churches grew larger, and one obstacle after
another, living or ritual, was interposed between
him and the body of the congregation, this became
impracticable ; a special desk or pulpit was set up
against the barrier of the chorus on one side, and
another opposite for the lector’s reading of the
Scriptures. These twin desks, the ambones, be-
came an essential part of the furniture of the
churches, and were singled out for special and
elaborate decoration, as many examples remind
us. After the musical liturgy was remodelled and
schools of singers established in the West by
Gregory 1., the singing became the duty of the
clergy, especially among the monks, the place of
the chorus was included within the clerical pre-
cinct, and the name “choir” came to cover the
whole space reserved for the celebration of the
service.

As the worship of the Church grew from con-
gregational into ritual, the altar naturally came to
be the most important point in the building. At
first it served only for the consecration and distri-
bution of the elements of the Holy Supper. In
the beginnings of the Church this ceremony, cel-
ebrated at night as the passover had been, and in
small private meetings, was not a mere observance,
but an actual meal, for which the partakers brought
their separate contributions of bread and wine to

114 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

be consecrated and consumed in common. When
the celebration which, if we must believe the testi-
mony of the apostle Paul as well as that of outside
heathen, had become in many cases an abuse and
even a scandal, was narrowed to a religious com-
memorative ceremony and attached to the morning
service in the churches, a table or altar was needed
on which the elements could be laid and conse-
crated by the bishop before they were distributed
by the deacons. This was at first in the form of a
table for more common uses, a slab of wood borne
on four or more pillars. In time wood was ex-
changed for stone; but till about the fifth century
the form was still the same. Refugees who took
sanctuary in the churches would creep under the
altar like children, and cling to its supports. Pope
Vigilius in one of his encyclical letters in the fifth
century tells of taking refuge under the altar of St.
Euphemia, whence he was dragged out by the feet,
clinging to its legs with such tenacity that if the
surrounding clergy had not held obstinately to the
table he would have pulled down the heavy slab
upon himself—and possibly have extinguished his
encyclicals forever. Indeed the absence of altars
of sacrifice and of the characteristics of ancient
worship was a reproach among the heathen, and
Minutius Felix exclaims : “ Cur nullas aras habent,
templa nulla, nulla nota simulacra? ” Why have
they no altars, no temples, no familiar statues? But

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 115

when after the Peace of the Church the cult of
saints and martyrs, which had been obscurely car-
ried on in the catacombs and tombs, grew into
great public observance, and churches were built
over the graves of the saints, these became places
of pilgrimage for thousands, and it was important
to bring the sacred remains into public view. As
the habit of martyrolatry increased more and more,
and bodies, bones, or other relics became a neces-
sity to every church, it became the habit to place
them under the altar, which was then boxed in,
and became a monument With a cavity in it called
the Confessio, and a window in front through
which the relics could be seen and revered. Al-
tars yet remain that have the transitional form, in
which the enclosure occupies only the middle of
the table, and the slab extends beyond it, sup
ported by legs or pillars at both ends. A taber-
nacle was presently built over it, in the form of a
roofed canopy supported on pillars, called a cibo-
rium, or afterward in Italy a baldacchino. This
suited well with the later ritual under which the
communicating became formal and restricted, and
the elements, laid upon the altar, were screened
during the consecration by rich curtains drawn
between the columns of the ciborium. The altar
with its canopy thus grew into an edifice Within
the church; all the riches and all the ornamenta-
tion which the Church had at command were lav-

116 EARL Y CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

ished on it. The splendor of these tabernacles of
the early churches outdid what modern churches
have to show. Costly marbles and stones, pillars
of silver, plates of gold and enamel studded with
precious stones, vessels of gold and silver, silken
curtains wrought with gold and needle-work and
starred with jewels, lavish sculpture, mosaic, and
painting, gave beauty to them. The historians of
the Church are as fond as the modern custode of
telling the number of pounds of silver or gold
plate, or the weight of columns or statues that
adorned the altars of this or that famous building.
Thus the Liber Pontificalis records that Sixtus III.
adorned the Confessio of St. Lawrence with col-
umns of porpliyry, and a grating of pure silver
weighing fifty pounds; the silver railing above
weighed three hundred pounds, the canopy over
it with the statue of St. Lawrence, two hundred
pounds. There were whole ciboriums made of
beaten silver, as in Sta. Sofia at ConstantinOple by
Justinian, in St. John Lateran by Sylvester, as
that given by Honorius to San Pancrazio which
weighed one hundred and eighty-seven pounds, and
others. There still remains in the museum at
Perugia a silver ciboriuin taken from the church
of San Prospero, and the silver-gilt sculptured
plates of the altars in San Ambrogio at Milan and
St. Mark’s at Venice are even now the wonder of
travellers.

EARL Y CHRISTIAN AR OHITEOTURE 1 17

V

It has been a commonplace of German criticism
to say that while Greek architecture was the archi-
tecture of the exterior, Gothic or Christian was
that of the interior. Though the saying is only
remotely true of Gothic, it is characteristic of the
early Christian basilica, at least in the West. The
old basilicas of Rome, so far as their original con-
dition appears, are outwardly no more than barns.
The classical temple was a monument, covering
a Splendid shrine; sacrifice and public worship
were performed in front of it. The basilica was a
hall of worship, the service and the congregation
were within; its exterior, except where the inside
decoration overflowed, as it were, retained a cer-
tain correspondence to the modest obscurity in
which the Church began. We have seen how
sumptuous its interior had become even before
the time of Constantine, what lavish decoration
was heaped upon its central feature, the altar with
its ciborium. The interior of the ancient temple
had been mostly dark, lighted only by such light
as came through the open door, or by lamps.1
The churches received a flood of light through
their clerestories, and contemporary accounts of

1Whether we hold with those archaeologists who believe in a.

hypaethrum, or with those who reject it, it is clear that the great
majority of temples were without it.

118 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

churches show that this abundance of light was
greatly valued, dimmed though it was by the
screens of perforated or translucent marble with
which the openings were filled, and for which
even in very early days glass was often substi-
tuted. Artificial light was also abundantly pro-
vided. The altar and ciborium were set about
with candlesticks and overhung by lamps ;1 and
Venatius Fortunatus, the poetical bishop of Poi-
tiers in the time of Gregory the Great, writes
sonorously, Bright glowed the very priest amid
the lamps:

Inter candelabros radiabat et ipse sacerdos.

The priest, as we know, in his resplendent vest-
ments, stiff with embroidery of gold and shining
with gems, was by no means the least radiant
adornment of the church.

The pervading light was reinforced by the color
and gilding which were generously distributed.
The timber roofs of the great basilicas were, in
many cases at least, screened off by horizontal
ceilings of wood, and these were apt to be highly
decorated. Of Constantine’s basilica of the Holy
Sepulchre, Eusebius says that the ceiling was in-

1 The Liber Pontificalis mentions a great chandelier (fa/rum)
given by Hadrian I. to St. Peter’s. It was in the form of a
cross, hanging before the presbyterium, and held thirteen hun-

dred and seventy candles: Habentem candelas mille trecentas
et septuaginta.

a

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARUIIITEOTURE 119

tricately combined of carved panelling spread over
the whole basilica like a great sea, and further,
that it was everywhere overlaid with bright gold,
so that the whole temple gleamed as if in a sea of
light. The church which we now know as San
Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, was originally
called, from the splendor of its ceiling, San Mar-
tino in coelo aureo. But the characteristic thing
in the decoration of these churches, the real con-
tribution which the first Christian centuries made
to the art of the world, was its mosaic. Mosaic
decoration had been abundant in classic times and
a great favorite of the Romans. There was the
opus sectile or Alexandrine, of variously colored
marbles cut to shape and fitted together in orna-
mental forms, used for pavements and continued
for that use in Christian buildings. There was
the finer mosaic of small tesserae of marbles and
stones, used both for pavements and the covering
of vaults and walls, and of which elaborate pict-
ures were made, like the famous battle of Alex-
ander, and decorative designs, simple or compli-
cated. There was even a certain use of glass
tesseraa for small ornamental work; we see it in
one or two objects, niches, and the like, preserved
to us at Pompeii, and familiar to all travellers.
The Christians took up this last kind, made of
little account before, and rapidly, almost sud—
denly, developed out of it a great system of deco-

190 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

ration, for which there had been no real prece-
dent, and has never been any substitute. They
spread it in a vast incrustation over. whole in-
teriors. They peopled these interiors with saints
and martyrs, with portraits of the Saviour, the
evangelists, and apostles, and covered them with
representations of all religious scenes, historic,
legendary, and apocalyptic.

This change brought a complete revolution in
the colored decoration of the churches. The poly-
chrome of which the Romans were fond had been
based on the natural colors of the earth. Their
particolored marble mosaic of floors and walls, re-
peated in sculptures, busts, even statues, of mixed
material gave a scale of color which was sober,
neutral, though varied and of considerable range,
easily harmonized in virtue of the quality of its
tones. Ancient painted decoration, Egyptian,
Greek, and Roman, had depended on the colors of
earths and minerals, colors, like those of later fres-
cos, which could be safely laid on plastered walls,
and which the use of encaustic did not heighten into
brilliancy. Even the splendid reds to which we are
used in Pompeian mural painting did not carry
the pitch of their coloring above sobriety. It was
their highest note, a deep, powerful, still sober
color, to which all the other tints subordinated
themselves, in dull yellows, browns, grays, gray-
blues, and dull greens, set off by much black, a1-

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 121

ways keeping on the warm side of the scale, and
inclining to neutral tones. But when the Christian
decorators turned to artificial tesserae with glazed
colors, their palette, as a painter might call it, was
absolutely changed. The splendor of the vitrified
pigments seems to have roused their desire for
color into exuberant activity. Splendor of color
had been the strong side of ancient glass, especially
of Egyptian, as countless vessels and vases in our
museums show, when all its manufactures were
small in scale. Many early writers show that glass
was used in church windows commonly, if not
generally. Prudentius, writing about A.D. 400, com-
pares the windows of the basilica of St. Paul to
meadows shining with spring flowers. The pos-
session of such brilliant materials inspired the
painters to key up their decoration to the highest
pitch, and spread it over the whole of their inte-
riors. The tone was shifted to the other end of the
scale of hues, and splendid harmonies of blue and
green and gold set off with other colors took the
place of the duller combinations of the Romans.
The glazed tesserae gave that vibrating play of
tone which has been the delight of all colorists,
filling with life and vivacity tints that without it
would have been monotonous. For such a rivalry
of glowing colors gold Was the only sufficient me-
diator, and the gilded tesserae were used with the
greatest freedom. The power and harmony with

122 EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

which those old decorators used their prodigious
palettes astonishes us. The backgrounds which at
first varied between deep blue and gold according
to the treatment of the subjects which were put
upon them, were afterward almost always of gold;
the walls shone, the hollows of apses, niches, and
vaults gleamed with its brilliant reflections. The
decoration was naturally concentrated upon the
apse, which was always domed, and the end of the
nave next it, the triumphal arch and its neighbor-
hood. The lower parts of the walls of the apses
where they were liable to blows and abrasion,
up to the level of the arcades, and sometimes the
walls up to the vaults, were covered with marbles
in panels, or Alexandrine mosaic. San Apollinare
Nuovo at Ravenna, the cathedral of Parenzo, Sta.
Sofia at Constantinople, and, later, St. Mark’s of
Venice, are conspicuous examples of this, as well
as of the glory of the mosaics with which the
domes, vaults, and upper walls were clothed.
Where the more costly mosaic could not be pro-
vided, the walls and roof were covered with paint-
ings, and these were apt to be carried through
aisles and over piers, till even in the more unpre-
tending churches the whole interiors were bright
with color and pictured with all the legends the
Church had to tell. The decoration overflowed in
many cases to the outside. The blank walls of the
exteriors were often covered with paintings, like

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE 128

the interiors; the fronts of the most important
basilicas at least had their adornment in mosaic.
Exposure, violence, and repairing have naturally
done away with most of this outside decoration,
but enough remains to show what it has been.
There are still conspicuous remnants of the old
mosaics on the front of the cathedral of Parenzo,
and we are told that the original basilicas of St.
Peter and St. Paul were decorated in the same
way. Probably it was common; Sta. Maria in
Trastevere is so adorned with mosaics of the
twelfth century. The continuation of the habit in
later generations is seen on St. Mark’s and on the
cathedral of Orvieto. The superb color of the
early mosaics holds its own in the face of all that
has been done since. We admire them in the
apses of Sta. Pudentiana and Sta. Prassede at
Rome, in the old Baptistery and the great churches
at Bavenna. '

At'first the subjects and treatment of the mosa-
ics, like those of Christian sculpture, were hardly
to be distinguished from the classic. The oldest
Christian mosaics, in Sta. Costanza at Rome, are
on a whitish ground like the old Roman, and
wrought in light, festive, straggling designs of
arabesques of vines, among which cupids, birds,
and animals are playing; in the Orthodox Bap-
tistery at Ravenna the style and the tone are still
classic, but Christian scenes, ideas, and emblems

124 EARLY UJYRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

prevail; in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia,
Where the deep blue dome Spangled with stars
first shows that representation of the starry sky
that decorators have ever since afi'ected, we see the
whole depth and fulness of color, and the full
illustration of Christian faith. Henceforth all the
stories of the mysteries of religion, of sacred his-
tory, miracle and martyrdom, came to be depicted
in the churches, and the painting to be as impor-
tant as the building.

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SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

ONE August night about the year 355 or 360, so
the legend of the church tells us, Liberius, bishop
of Rome, known in later history as Pope Liberius,
was visited in a dream by the Virgin Mary, who '
ordered him to build her a church upon a Spot
which he should discover in the morning marked
by a covering of new-fallen snow. Early the next
day messengers brought the wonderful news that
fresh snow, fallen in the summer night, had cov-
ered a space on the summit of the Esquiline Hill.
Presently a wealthy patrician, of whom we are only
told that his name was John, and that he and his
wife had wished to dedicate a church to the Vir-
gin, came to announce to Liberius a vision like his
own and his desire to carry out the Virgin’s com-
mand. The Pope and the patrician went together
to the place of the miracle and there in the surface
of the snow marked out at once the plan of the
basilica, which, in memory of its miraculous ori-
gin, came afterward to be called the church of St.
Mary of the Snows—Santa Maria ad Nives. It

was built under the authority of Liberius but at
1:35

120 SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

the cost of John, “juxta Libiae Macellum,” hard
by the meat market of Libia, as the historians
say, on the site of the private basilica of one Sici-
ninus, and so was called at first only the Basilica
Sicinina. After the death of Liberius it was called
the Basilica Liberiana, which is still its official
title, for the story of the miracle and the name
which is derived from it were not in common cir-
culation till some centuries later. The church so
founded, the earliest important church there dedi-
cated to the' Virgin, has been conspicuous in the
history of Rome; it passed through many trans-
formations and a variety of names before it became
universally known as the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore. No church in Rome, after the Lateran
and St. Peter’s, has held so large a share of public
veneration, has been more honored by the Catho-
lic Church herself, or so splendidly adorned and
maintained to this day; perhaps none at all re-
tains so much of the aspect of the great basilicas
which saw the early triumph of the Roman Church.

It is true that it is not easy to say how much of
the church of Liberius is to be seen in Sta. Maria
Maggiore to-day, and we can more safely say that
it still shows within, in its chief parts, the form
which it had after its restoration by Sixtus III.
eighty years later. We do not know how much he
altered its main structure, perhaps not greatly, but
we may believe that it was in need of restoration

SANTA MARIA MA 0 GIORE 127

when we consider what went on in Rome during
the fourth and fifth centuries. No sooner, for in-
stance, had Liberius died in 366 than it suffered
in one of those bitter schisms which surprise the
reverent inquirer into the early history of the
Church.

The Athanasian controversy which had troubled
the pontificate of Liberius was renewed in the
struggle of Damasus and Ursinus for his vacant
episcopal chair. This led to a factional fight so
furious that the Prefect of the City, instead of
quelling it, fled outside the walls; and when the
election of Damasus was verified, his party attacked
the followers of Ursinus, who were met for protest
and defiance in the church of Liberius. They set
fire to the doors of the church, climbed upon the
roof, which they tore open, and hurled its tiles
down upon the people within. At the end of the
fight one hundred and thirty-seven of Ursinus’s
party lay dead upon the floor of the church. In
the time of Sixtus III. it was the Nestorian con-
troversy that divided the Church ; and when that
heresy was set at rest by the council of Ephesus,
which declared the Virgin to be the mother of God
—9<-:o-ré/c09, Deipara—Sixtus, identifying himself
with the prevailing doctrine, determined to signal-
ize it by restoring the basilica, and dedicated it to
Sta. Maria Dei Genetrix, the first, as I have said,
and the greatest of the churches dedicated to her

128 SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

in Rome. Among the four early basilicas this one
is singular, the only one which has single aisles,
the aisles being double in St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s,
and the Lateran church. In this, no doubt,
Sixtus preserved the early form of the church, and
also in the round apse which closes the end of the
nave, and in which the windows were cut some
centuries later. Whether he found or added the
small transept, which subsequent alterations have
as it were obliterated by walling off the arms from
the choir, it is not easy or very important to de-
cide definitely. We may remember, however, that
all the great Roman basilicas of the fourth and
fifth centuries had transepts, unless it be San
Lorenzo fuori le mura, which was also rebuilt by
Sixtus, and whose original form is very much dis-
guised by the changes it has gone through. I
have before pointed out that in the early churches
of Rome there was no intersection of nave and
transept; but that the transept was a cross-wing
against which the nave and aisle stopped as ab-
ruptly as against a dead wall, and was broken only
by an apse set opposite the triumphal arch that
opened into the nave, and occasionally by other
apses opposite the aisles. The cruciform church
of the Middle Ages, as we know, was deve10ped
pretty early in Lombard architecture, and in a sort
in Byzantine, but the conservative Romans did not
soon accept it. After the helpless syncope of art

SANTA MARI A MA. 0 GI ORE 129

in Rome in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they
imported it from without, with the other forms of
mediaeval art, in the revival of the twelfth and
thirteenth. The earlier or Roman form has, never-
theless, been known in ecclesiology as the crux
commissa, meaning the T-shape, in distinction
from the crux immissa, or genuine four-armed
cross.

We may fairly suspect, from the analogy of the
other important churches of the first centuries
of Christendom, that Santa Maria Maggiore had
before it from the beginning an atrium or open
court surrounded by colonnades, with the usual
fountain or basin for ablutions in the middle. The
dimensions of the basilica were large. The nave,
two hundred and thirty feet long by fifty-five in
clear width, is as ample as the largest in the great
mediaeval cathedrals, though not so lofty, being
only some sixty feet high. Whoever enters it to-
day sees it essentially as Sixtus saw it. Its multi-
tudinous marble columns, said to have been taken
from the temple of Juno Lucina, carry, not the
arches that we commonly look for, but a straight
entablature whose lines, broken only once on each
side by a modern arch, lead the eye away down to
the great triumphal arch and round its imposts.
The Ionic order is of classic proportion and detail,
the entablature rather light, and the frieze decorated
with arabesques in mosaic. Here for once we have

‘

130 SANTA MARIA. MA 0 01018117

an interior of classic type which, loftiness apart,
more than competes with the great Gothic interiors
in effect of multiplicity and far-reaching perspec-
tive. The columns, much closer spaced than arcades
would allm countless ; the long lines in the
entablature, cornice, and cofi'ered ceiling, and in the
Alexandrine pavement, the very lowness of the
nave, all help to give a marvellous impression of
scale, distance, and majesty. The only dissonance
in this harmony is'the interruption of the entabla-
ture by the modern arches. But for that we should
have here the one unexampled instance of a church
interior purely classic in design, simple, continu-
ous, thoroughly harmonious and, in spite of its
monotony, unique in its impressiveness.

The deliberate retaining of the entablature in
certain of the most important buildings of Chris-
tianized Rome at the time when the arch was el-
bowing it out of use throughout the rest of the
world, is a singular sign of the conservatism of
Rome. Even in the eastern empire, of which we
are apt to think as the embodiment of conserva-
tism, we find almost no traces of the use of the
entablature after the time of Diocletian. But in
those days the east was the progressive branch of
the Empire and Rome the backward. The em-
pire of the east, founded by barbarians, developed
its polity, its society, and its arts with the fresh-
ness of a new state, and in the northern parts of

SANTA MARIA. MA 0 GIORE’ 131

Italy the German conquerors, settling themselves
among the Italians, gradually renewed the popula-
tion, transformed its habits, and in time reformed
the arts which their inroads had nearly destroyed.
But Rome sat apart, uninfluenced by the new life
that was stirring about her, her population unre-
newed and gradually wasting under oppression,
violence, pestilence, and famine. Only her hier-
archy gained in authority and wealth, while every-
thing else decayed about it. Again and again the
.floods of invasion threatened to overwhelm her;
now and then they surged up to her gates and fell
back. Four times her enemies burst in and pil-
laged her, strippin her of an incredible amount
of accumulated wealth; yet they did not fasten
upon her, but hastened away with their booty.
The awe or reverence with which for ages she had
inspired the outside world had twice turned back
Alaric before he finally abased her; and, aided by
the eloquence and venerable bearing of Leo the

Great, had even held the arrogant and savage
. Attila at a distance. It would seem that some-
thing of this reverence returned upon her conquer-
ors after the first impulse of their violence was
Spent, made them uneasy within their walls, and
drove them to leave her to herself in her humilia-
tion. So she lived in virtual isolation through the
dark ages, as Mecca or as Jerusalem lives now.
Pilgrims flocked to her, left their offerings and

132 SANTA MA RIA MA 0 GI ORE

went away. Her pontiffs gradually extended their
Spiritual authority throughout Christendom, rooted
their temporal authority, and gathered wealth from
all the world into her shrines. But little new
blood came into her population: numbers, char-
acter, learning, and art declined among them, and
like all decadent communities they held to their
conservatism. Constantine had found a great body
of Christians in Rome, mostly, it is true, among
the lower classes; and though his imperial pro-
mulgation of their religion made a great change in
external observance, it was long before even the
ancient worship was smothered in the city, longer
before the upper classes ceased to be secretly de-
voted to their paganism, longer still before the
Roman people radically changed their ways of
thinking and feeling. For centuries their old
superstitions clung to them; their attachments to
their old institutions, manners, arts, were peren-
nial.

It would seem that the older and consecrated
form of architecture was preferred by the early .
Roman Christians to the new; the entablature was
more in honor than the arch. It is likely that when
they first lined their naves with arcades instead of
colonnades, economy and ease of construction were
their determining motives. Their mechanical skill
had already deteriorated and it was easier to turn
plain arches than to cut entablatures. When they

SANTA MARIA MA GGIORE 133

had an excuse to plunder a heathen building they
could supply themselves not only with columns,
'but with the rest of the order, and repeated edicts
of the later emperors, and even of the Goth Theo-
doric, for the rescue of the old buildings from de-
struction, show that the reverence of the people for
the ancient monuments did not keep pace with
their attachment to the ancient forms. It would
appear, too, that Constantine and his bishops set
the example of destroying the old for the building of
the new, for there are few early churches in which
the conspicuous parts are not built out of old ma-
terials. But the opportunities for the despoiling
of old buildings were not unlimited, and while col-
umns could be stolen from distant towns, it was
not so easy to bring whole orders. Columns were
indispensable, but architraves and cornices were
not. So while it is apparent that the greater hon-
or attached in Rome—and in Rome only—to the
ancient form, we find the use divided between that
and the arch. In the old basilica of St. Peter’s,
pulled down at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury by Bramante to make way for the modern
church, and in the round church of fian Stefano,
the nave was lined with great colonnades bearing
entablatures, while the double aisles were separated
by smaller columns with arcades. The contempo-
rary basilicas of St. John Lateran and St. Paul’s
outside the walls were arcaded throughout; our

13-1 SANTA MARIA. MA 0 GIORE'

Sicinian' or Liberian basilica showed the entabla-
ture ; so did somewhat later the churches of San
Lorenzo without the walls, Sta. Maria in Traste-
vere, San Crisogono, San Martino ai Monti, and
Sta. Prassede, while in the lesser churches the
arcade was usual.

Above the order the walls of the nave have lost
something of their old and probably plainer as-
pect, each alternate clerestory window being filled
up and replaced by a modern painting, while an
order of Corinthian pilasters set between them
repeats and continues the lines of the columns be-
low. But the square panelled ceiling, with deep
cofi'ers and carved and gilded beams, although
added at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
doubtless renews very much the effect of the orig-
inal one, while the upper order with its cornice
and frieze is at least harmonious with the effect of
the lower part.

The most characteristic adornment is still the
series of mosaic pictures in square panels not
much spoiled by later restorations with which Six-
tus filled the space between the lower order and
the clerestory, leading up to the great group of mo-
saics that surrounds the triumphal arch. These
show how early aconsistent scheme of iconography
was arranged for the decoration of the church.
The mosaics on the walls of the nave represent in
the main a series of scenes from Old Testament

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SANTA MA RI A MAG GI ORE 135

history, the prophecies and forerunners of Christ.
Those about the arch show the story of his birth
‘ and infancy—the Annunciation, the Presentation,
the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the In-
nocents. They are among the most interesting in
Rome, as they are among the earliest. Late clas-
sic in style, they yet have a freedom of drawing
and invention and a skill in execution which were
lacking in the mosaics of the following centuries.
Over the arch is the simple inscription “ Sixtus
Episcopus Plebi Dei.” The ambones which stood
on each side of the nave near the choir, and the
two ciboria that flanked the entrance to the choir
are gone ; the baldacchino that stands in front of
the arch of triumph is modern ; a modern tomb on
each side of the entrance closes the first interco-
lumniation of the nave, yet the interior is singu-
larly harmonious. The warm tones of the marble
columns, tinged by age and by the smoke of innu-
merable censers, the marble pavement, the. rich
coloring of the mosaics and paintings, with the
quiet tints of the architectural members, enriched
here and there with gilding, the whole roofed by
the gilded beams and gray panels of the ceiling,
add a sober splendor to the dignity of the archi-
tecture.

The gifts which Sixtus III. added to his church
illustrate one of the singular phenomena of Roman
history—how, even after the pillage of the Goths,

136 SANTA MARIA MAG 0 I ORE

and while the decline and depletion of the city
were steadily going on, the Church kept on accu-
mulating wealth, repairing her losses. Her popu-
lation was wasted with want, and sometimes at
starvation’s door, but her shrines were adorned
with a luxury which sounds fabulous to us. \Ve
are told that Sixtus furnished the altar of Sta.
Maria with a scypus or chalice of gold which
weighed fifty pounds, and overlaid it with three
hundred pounds of silver plates; a silver stag
spouted water into the font, or the basin for ablu-
tions: his various gifts to the furniture of the
altar, says the Liber Pontificalis, amounted to
more than six hundred pounds of silver. At the
same time the Emperor Valentinian gave to St.
Peter’s a golden relief representing Christ and the
twelve apostles, and to St. John Lateran a silver
tabernacle. Perhaps it is not strange that one
barbarian sacking of Rome was followed by an-
other, that if the Arian Goths had respected the
orthodox shrines, the Vandals should have spared
none, but loaded themselves alike with the gilded
tiles of the temple of Jupiter, the spoils from the
temple of Jerusalem, and the furniture of the
Christian shrines, or that St. Jerome should de-
claim against the luxuriousness of the churches
and their services in his day.

It is only in the nave that the original character
of the basilica is preserved. The tunnel-vaulted

 

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE 137

aisles, faced with Ionic pilasters, and the groups
of chapels that lined them, are Renaissance; the
main apse or tribune, with its pointed windows and
mosaic, speaks chiefly of the short period when
the Gothic fashion prevailed at Rome. But it is
seven hundred years after the time of Sixtus III.
that we next find a definite account of important
changes in the church, though meanwhile the bell-
tower was built on the right of the main entrance,
where, added to in the thirteenth century and
again in the time of the Renaissance, it now lifts
its four variously arcaded upper stories and its
pointed roof over the main facade—the highest
tower in Rome.

Eugene III. found time during his troubled
pontificate, from 1145 to 1153, in spite of his
struggles with his republican rebels, to restore Sta.
Maria Maggiore and considerably modify it. He
built a new front with an open portico resting on
eight coupled columns of granite. The Romans,
with that fondness for past ways which I have
just discussed, reverted again during the later
Romanesque period to the classic entablature.
It is certain at least that the porches added to
churches—San Giorgio in Velabro and San Lo-
renzo fuori le mura and some others—are built
with an entablature in classic form instead of the
arcades which were elsewhere universal during
that period. It is probable that none of these

138 SANTA. MA RI A MA 6’ GI ORE

porches is older than the twelfth century. It is
also true that but for some bell-towers of Lombard
aspect and some one or two old arcaded Cloisters,
and the later apse of one church, there would
hardly be any evidence that the Lombard Roman-
esque, which took possession of the north of Italy,
ever found its way into Rome. An old print cited
by Letarouilly shows that the portico of Eugene,
like the porches I have just mentioned, had an
entablature and not an arcade. A more extraordi-
nary thing, which does Show the influence of the
contemporary style upon the revival or continua-
tion of the old one, is the coupling of the columns
in a colonnade, a thing unknown in ancient art,
hardly to be found in the Renaissance, and looked
upon as an innovation when it was introduced by
Perrault in 1665 in his famous colonnade of the
Louvre.

In truth, during the period of most rapid de-
velopment of Romanesque architecture, the elev-
enth century and most of the twelfth, Rome, im-
poverished, unpeopled, and entirely given up to
the evolution of her church, did almost no build-
ing of which we have record. If we may believe
the writers of a somewhat later time, she had sunk
to the lowest impotence in literature and art. It
is likely that being provided with churches to suit
the larger population of earlier days, she had no
occasion to build them, and there is abundant

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE’ 139

evidence that many of those she had were allowed
to fall to dilapidation, and were from time to time
rudely and hastily restored only to keep them
from tumbling to pieces; or the favorite church
of some dignitary was enriched by a small addi-
tion, or adorned with mosaics or a new shrine.
But this was all. Such conditions favored, not
progress, but conservatism and even retrogression.
The porticos which I have mentioned and which
are the characteristic monuments, perhaps the
only ones, of Roman architecture at this period,
are altogether classic in general form, and might
easily have been believed by their builders irre-
proachably so in all respects. Yet they show on
examination that they could not have been exe-
cuted at a date much earlier than that which his-
tory assigns them. The ratio of the columns to
their load, the proportions, and in some degree
the form of the details, betray the influence, very
likely then unrecognized, of the work that went on
outside of Rome. They give evidence of a sort of
revival in the twelfth century, whose rude begin-
ning shows into what decadence the Roman archi-
tecture had fallen, but which advanced both in
design and in mechanical skill, leading up to the
finished work of the Cosmati, and culminating in
the Cloisters of St. John Lateran and of St. Paul’s,
or outside of Rome in the porch of the cathedral
at Civita Castellana.

140 SANTA MARI A .KA 0 GI ORE

At the end of the next century, about 1290,
Nicholas IV. rebuilt, or at least redecorated, the
apse of Sta. Maria Maggiore. By this time the
Gothic wave had overflowed Italy, and even Rome
yielded so far as to admit the pointed arch.
Point-ed windows were cut in the apse, which are
still to be recognized on the inside, and it was
covered or re-covered with mosaics. These had
been a specialty of Rome ever since they were in-
vented, and pictorial mosaic had been carefully
fostered by the Church. It had sunk with the
other arts in the ninth and tenth centuries and
risen with them in the twelfth. Nicholas marked
his short reign by the mosaics with which he lined
the apses of the Lateran and Liberian basilicas,
the finest works of their day. Both were the
signed work of one artist, J acobus Torriti, a Fran-
ciscan monk, of whom only these works are
known, but who is not to be confounded with the
painter of the same name to whom are due the
earlier mosaics of the baptistery at Florence. “’6
may guess him to have been his kinsman. The
central composition here represents, in due se-
quence with the older mosaics of the nave and the
triumphal arch, the crowning conception of the
cult of the Virgin—the Incoronata. Colossal fig-
ures of Christ and the Virgin occupy a great disc
on the back of the dome. They are seated together
on a throne, his hand still raised to the crown

SANTA MARIA 1121607031? 141

which he has just set upon her head, and are di-
vided by a border of stars from the rest of the
composition. About them crowd ranks of angels,
behind whom modestly kneel on either side Nicho-
las and Cardinal Colonna, who shared the cost of
the decoration with him, overtopped by the tower-
ing figures of the patron saints of Rome, and of
the two Johns, the Baptist and the Evangelist,
and behind these again the newly canonized saints,
Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua. Beneath
is the inscription, more or less abbreviated:

MARIA VIRGO ASSUMPTA EST AD ETHERIUM
THALAMUM IN QUO REX REGUM STELLATO
SEDIT SOLIO

and below, this:

EXALTATA EST SANCTA DEI GENETRIX SUPER
CHOROS ANGELORUM AD COELESTIA REGNA.

The mosaic is remarkable for various reasons.
It marks, as I have said, the culmination of hom-
age to the Virgin, and is perhaps the earliest rep-
resentation of this conception that exists. It is
interesting to compare it with the corresponding
mosaic, a century and a half older, in the dome of
the apse of the other great early basilica dedicated
to the Virgin—Sta. Maria in Trastevere. There
again Christ and his mother are enthroned side by
side; but the son sits with his arm about her
shoulder, and with no emphasis of the crown, as ‘

142 SANTA. MARIA MA 0 GI ORE

if the enthronement were the event portrayed, and
the crown simply a part of the costume supplied
by the painter. The mosaic of Sta. Maria Maggi-
ore shows the advance in design and execution
due to the interval. From these figures the classic
attitudes have entirely disappeared, though some-
thing of classic breadth still lingers in the dra-
peries, but the upper part of the conch or dome is
occupied by arabesques on a large scale singularly
classic in design. It is easy to conjecture that
the enormous acanthus leaves from which they
Spring, and the dense reversing coils of heavy fo-
liage, in which figures of birds are enveloped, are
parts of the older decoration of the apse preserved
from the fourth or fifth century, while the borders
of the dome and of the pointed windows, though
still composed of classic motives, are distinctly
mediaeval in scale and treatment.

Of like character with the mosaics of the apse,
and almost the same date, are those which were
added at the end of the thirteenth century to the
old front above the portico and fortunately pre-
served when the front was remodelled and the pres-
ent loggia built over them. They represent in a
broad upper band great figures of Christ enthroned
with the Virgin and saints on each side, and below
these four characteristic scenes, framed in Italian
Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, tell-
ing with great animation the story of the founda-

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE’ 143

tion of the church—the vision of Liberius and
that of John the patrician, the reception of John
by the pope, and their identification of the site,
under an abundant but circumscribed snow-storm
sent down by Christ and the Virgin enclosed in an
aureole above. The upper band of mosaics is
signed by Philippo Rusuti, of whom again only
this work is known ; the lower ones are attributed
by Vasari to Gaddo Gaddi, who also, it is said,
added a range of small mosaics below those of the
conch of the apse. These are all contributions by
the cardinals Jacopo and Pietro Colonna, of a
family which cherished this church and much
adorned it in later days.

These are the last considerable changes in the
church itself of which we have record until the
days of the Renaissance. Within a dozen years—«-
in 1309—began the Babylonian exile, as it has
been called, of the popes to Avignon under Clem-
ent V. Seventy years later when Gregory XI.
brought back the papacy to Rome, he rebuilt or
built up the bell-tower of which I have spoken,
and the upper stories which he added, with round
arched arcades above pointed ones, may count as a
symbol of the brevity and instability of Gothic
influence upon the architecture of Rome. The
great churches of Rome seem to have fallen into
neglect and dilapidation during the exile, and to
have but slowly recovered. It is a curious coinci-

144 SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

dence that the three popes who since the establish—
ment of the Church by Constantine have at long
intervals borne the name of Sixtus are all asso-
ciated with this basilica. The next we hear of it
is that a hundred years after Gregory XI., the
magnificent Sixtus IV. of unsavory history, build-
er of the Ponte San Sisto and the famous Sistine
Chapel of the Vatican, adorned the church with
splendid furnishings, of which perhaps the only
remains are the four columns of porphyry that to-
day support the modern baldacchino over the high
altar. He added, through his French cardinal
D’Estouteville, arch-priest of the church, a chapel
which was probably among several that have been
swept away to make room for later and more
splendid additions.

At the end of the fifteenth century, while Co-
lumbus was discovering America, Alexander VI.—
the second and last pope of the Borgia family and
father of that precious pair, Caesar and Lucrezia—
made Giuliano Sangallo replace the ceiling of the
nave with that which we have described. History
is full of unexpected juxtapositions, and one of
these surprises us when we are told that the first
gold brought from the New World, given to the
church by Ferdinand and Isabella, is spread over
the gilt beams of this ceiling. Sixty years later
Michelangelo began, for Cardinal Guido Ascanio
Sforza, the chapel on the right of the nave, still

SANTA MARIA MAGUIORE 145

known as the Sforza chapel. He and the cardinal
died in the same year, 1564, and the chapel was
carried out for Cardinal Alexander, brother of the
first, by Giacomo della Porta. The design of the
chapel was modified, it is said, in the after exe-
cution, but the singular and extravagant plan
is probably due to Michelangelo, whose unruly
genius tended, in architecture, to the far-fetched
and the bizarre. It had an enriched facade toward
the nave, but this was taken down, probably with
advantage to the nave, in the later restoration
under Benedict XIV.

Of the other chapels that line the aisles two are
of special importance—the Capella. del Presepe and
the Borghese chapel, the chapels of Sixtus V. and
Paul V. These twin chapels stand on opposite
sides of the nave, and though to the vast basilica
they are but side chapels, they are on a scale that
would do for churches in these degenerate days
of scattered worship. They are Greek crosses in
plan, measuring some seventy-five feet each way
in size, the centres covered with domes of about
forty feet span. They are about sixty-five jeet
high to the__c_rown of_ the vaults_whigh cover the
"arms, one—hundred and thirty feet to theTofiflf‘the'
domes inside, and one hundred and sixty feet to
the summit of the lanterns without. Though built
twenty-five years apart, and by different architects,
they are alike in design, with some differences of

146 SANTA MARI A MA 0 GI ORE

detail. A great order of Corinthian pilasters, half
as high again as the main order of the nave, sur-
rounds each of them within, carrying the vaults
that cover the arms of the cross, and the penden-
tives which bear the domes. It was to give im-
portance to the approach to these chapels that the
colonnades each side the nave were broken, the en-
tablatures interrupted, and two columns on each
side spread apart and set close against their neigh-
bors1 so as to open two broad arches rising to the
level of the clerestory window-sills. This is, as I
have said, the only serious injury done to the orig-
inal design of the nave ; and it is serious, for it is
to the grand lines of the entablatures, continued
even round the imposts of the triumphal arch, and
to its serried ranks of columns, that the nave owes
its majesty. These are broken with an abruptness
that shocks the eye, and by arches which yet look
insignificant beside the triumphal arch.

The two chapels are finished inside with an
amazing sumptuousness of varied marbles, sculpt-
ure, gilding, and painting; their design and pro-
portion are elegant. The earlier one, the Sixtine,
was begun by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V.,
when he was Cardinal Montalto, and wished a
shrine of great splendor to receive the manger of
Christ. This had been brought from Palestine

1Literally, richer columns of gray granite have been sub-
stituted for the pairs that were thus displaced.

SANTA MARIA MA 0 GIORE 147

with the remains of St. Jerome by Theodore I.,
when he came from Jerusalem to St. Peter’s chair,
and had been preserved in one of the older chap-
els. The lavishness of this undertaking cost the
cardinal his allowance from the papal revenues;
for the pope, Gregory XIII., declared that a car-
dinal who could venture on such an undertaking
must be rich already. The work would have been
stopped, says Milizia, if the architect had not de-
voted his own savings to keep it going. Fontana
had his reward when the cardinal became Pope
Sixtus, being appointed with Della Porta to carry
on Michelangelo’s design for St. Peter’s, and he
speedily finished the chapel in Sta. Maria Maggi-
ore, with even more splendor than he at first in-
tended.

The five boards of which the manger consisted
are deposited below the pavement in the middle of
the chapel of Sixtus, under a magnificent shrine.
The little chapel in which they had been preserved
was some twenty yards away from their present
position, and Sixtus, as solicitous for the tradi-
tions of the Church as he was imperious, insisted
that the old chapel should be moved bodily with
the precious relic in it to its new place. His faith ‘
in. Fontana’s engineering ability had been fixed by
the skilful placing of the obelisk in front of St.
Peter’s; and the little building, with its walls and
vaults laboriously braced, crated in a great frame

148 SANTA MARIA MA GGIORE

of timber, and slung by a complicated system of
ropes, was moved to its position and lowered to its
new level. Above it is set a resplendent taber-
nacle of gilded bronze, and facing it on each side
are the sumptuous monuments of Sixtus himself
and of his sainted predecessor, Pius V.

The second of the two chapels was built twenty-
five years later for Paul V. by Flaminio Ponzio. It
is even more splendid than the chapel of Sixtus
which it c0pies, and more refined in its architect-
ural detail. It, too, has its venerated relic, en-
shrined under a magnificent canopy over its altar
—the sacred picture of the Virgin painted by St.
Luke, the same which was carried in the solemn
penitential procession to St. Peter’s by Gregory
the Great when pestilence was desolating Rome.
When Paul had finished his chapel the picture was
again carried in procession, and was fixed here in
its frame of amethyst, guarded by gilded angels
under a canopy of lapis-lazuli and jasper.

Closely as the two chapels agree in their de-
sign, there is one difi'erence which has, I think, a
special significance. The dome of Ponzio’s chapel
is the ordinary hemispherical dome of the Renais-
sance ; Fontana’s is lifted into an ellipsoid. Now
Michelangelo’s dome designed for St. Peter’s was
a hemisphere, and we know that Della Porta and
Fontana got permission from Sixtus, who insisted
that in every other respect Michelangelo’s design

SANTA MARIA MA 0 GIORE 149

should be carried out to the letter, to change the
outline of the dome and make it higher. The
dome of Fontana’s chapel is a pigmy compared
with that of St. Peter’s; its outline is not so fine,
but it is an embodiment of the same idea, an idea
which no one before Fontana seems to have had.
St. Peter’s dome was built in 1588—90, just after
this chapel ; and it would seem that here was em-
bodied the first conception of that soaring outline
which, more than its size, makes the distinction
of St. Peter‘s dome above all other domes of the
Renaissance.

Our history of the old church of Sta. Maria
Maggiore may end here. The changes that since
this have taken place in the interior, where alone
the old church can be seen, are of little moment.
The important changes are in the exterior, or
rather in the architectural case that has been built
about the exterior. At the time that he built his
chapel, Fontana had, by order of Sixtus’, set up in
the open place behind the apse of the church an
obelisk which had long lain neglected near the
Mausoleum of Augustus. The task was in some
ways more difficult than the handling of the obe-
lisk before St. Peter’s, for this one was broken in
pieces and had to be cunningly mended before it
could be slung. At the same time he Opened the
long street that under the triple name of the Via

150 SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

Sistina, Via Felice, and Via dei Quattro Fontane
connects the basilica with the Trinita dei Monti
and the Spanish Steps. In like manner Paul V.,
the year after he had finished his chapel, set up
before the front of the basilica the great Corin-
thian column, sixty feet high between its lofty ped-
estal and its block of entablature, the last plunder
of the Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine, and
crowned it with the bronze statue of the Virgin
which we still see there. But Fontana and Ponzio
would hardly recognize the venerable basilica
which they left to be guarded by these two senti-
nels in the massive building which now stands
there, With two modern facades facing the long
streets that lead away from it a mile in each di-
rection. The old basilica is buried in a pile of
buildings occupied by the canons and other ofli-
cials that serve it, and from most points of View
has much more the aspect of an enormous palace
than of a church. The rear front, facing down the
slope of the Esquiline Hill toward the Trinita
dei Monti, was built for Clement X. (1670—76) by
' Carlo Bainaldi, and follows more or less the lines
of a design left for it by Ponzio. It is by far the
finest part of the exterior; standing well at the
summit of the lepe, with its simple masses and
long lines, and approached by an imposing flight
of steps, it is dignified and harmonious. The rear
of the basilica forms the central mass, and the

SANTA MARIA MA. 0 GI ORE 151

apse projects from the middle, showing in the in-
tercolumniations the windows of Nicholas trans-
formed by round arches. One great order of Co-
rinthian pilasters covers more than half the height
of the whole front; the second stage is too high in
the middle for a windowless attic, but in the wings
suits the windows of the second-story apartments.
The twin domes of the Sixtine and Pauline chapels
rising above the wings make an effective, though
divided, composition. The warm-toned travertine
of Which the whole outside is built adds a charm
to the architecture, and from a sufficient distance
the mediaeval bell-tower helps to unite the other-
wise disunited domes.

The main entrance-front, built for Benedict
XIV. in the middle of the eighteenth century by
Ferdinando Fuga, is much inferior. It is in fact a
many-windowed palace with a commonplace and
unrelated Italian church front protruding from the
middle. The cornice is at a uniform level, but the
palace is in five stories and the church in two.
There is some elegance of proportion in the two
orders, Ionic and Corinthian, that cover these two
stories, colonnaded below, arcaded above ; but the
flimsy detail, the multiplied breaks in the entabla-
tures and pediments, and the uneasy statues that
crown the balustrade, are in poor contrast to the
dignity of the other facade, and the centre swears,
as French critics would say, at the wings. The

152 SANTA MARIA MA 0 0 [ORE

venerable bell-tower lifts itself with a fine alert-
ness above the cornice, but stands de’paysée among
its surroundings. We owe thanks to Fuga, that
while he displaced the portico of Eugene III. and
used its columns for his own porch, he preserved
the old front above it. The open loggia which he
provided in the second story for the papal bene-
diction at once protects and displays the historic
mosaics of Rusuti which I have described.

Benedict did much to restore and adorn the
interior. He renewed the pavement, inserted the
responding pilasters of marble which bring the
aisles into harmony with the nave, refreshed the
paintings and mosaic, and added the baldacchino,
with columns of porphyry and canopy of gilt
bronze, which stands over the high altar. As he
left the church, we see it still. The only change
in recent days has been the rebuilding of the con-
fessio beneath the high altar by Vespignani for
Pius IX., who intended this for his own burial-
place, but whose body lies elsewhere.

L’art a dc la peine 66 se soustraire au paganisme,
says Letarouilly : in Rome at least, where Letarou-
illy wrote it, this is true. Sta. Maria Maggiore is
an epitome of the architectural history of Christian
Rome, and may serve to illustrate how little there
is or ever was in Rome of architecture distinctively
Christian, or of any architecture not essentially
classic. The earliest parts of the church that re-

SANTA. MARIA MAGGIORE 153

main, whether they are from the time of Liberius
or of Sixtus III., are as classic as the Arch of Con-
stantine. The arch emancipated from the entabla-
ture, which is the only unclassic feature that ever
naturalized itself in Rome, has found no place here.
The Lombard style, scarcely known in this
city, as we have seen, except by its campanili, is
represented in due proportion by the half-con-
cealed bell-tower. The great Gothic movement,
which changed the face of northern Europe, but
has hardly left any mark in Rome, is here but
just betrayed by the windows of the apse and
tower. The art that lifted its head in Rome af-
ter the collapse of the ninth and tenth centuries
turned instinctively to classic forms, as we have
seen in the vanished porch of Eugene III. The
Renaissance, born in Florence, found in Rome its
readiest welcome and natural home. It developed
here its most classic aSpect, its greatest sumptuous-
ness. The decorative arts through all these many
centuries hardly strayed away, it would appear,
from classic types. Even in the churchly rites of
Rome and her popular beliefs, in the superstitions
of her people, in the very days of her festivals, her
cult of saints, the forms of her religious observ-
ances, the classical substratum shows through at
every turn. To all these things the Liberian basil-
ica, in its architectural forms, in its pictured deco-
rations, and in its magnificence, is a witness.

ROMAN ESQUE ARCHITECTURE

I

IT is easy to forget, on the one hand, how dis-
tinctively architecture is a thing of race, or, on the
other, how wide has been the controlling influence
of the races that have given birth to styles. The
whole of classic architecture, I have tried to show
in another essay, was the creation of the Greeks.
Early Christian or Latin architecture, a transitional
phase, seems to have been a mixed product of
mixed influences, in which Greek skill and barba-
rian enterprise in the east and Italian conserva-
tism in the west all had a share. After the first
Christian centuries there was a division of styles
as of empire. That singular combination of Greek,
oriental, and northern elements which made the
Eastern Empire, made also the Byzantine style. In
due time grew up under the hands of the Teutonic
races that central stock of so-called Lombard
architecture which was really the common Bo-
manesque of Germany itself and of those parts of

Italy that were given up to German influence, and
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ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 155

of which the architectures of England and France
were variants. Somewhat later there germinated
separately in Tuscany, where Italian character
remained ascendant, but with a large infiltration
of Teutonic energy and imagination, the little
style which we call the Tuscan Romanesque. It
was really the fulfilling of the Early Christian,
worked out not pictorially, as a skeleton of walls
and roof wrapped within with a garment of paint-
ing and mosaic, like the basilicas of Rome and
Ravenna, but architecturally, with a rich and
delicate detail incorporated into its substance,
both within and without, of sculpture and colored
marbles. Its culmination was the cathedral of
Pisa. It had not the grandeur, the flexibility and
variety, the constructive shape, or the luxuriant
imagination of the Lombard Romanesque, but it
was complete within its limits, wrought out with
rare refinement, and in a perfection that foreshad-
owed that of the Renaissance, to which in the
course of time it led. That the peculiarities of
this singularly isolated style were due to qualities
of race it is hard to doubt. The evidence of the
obscure early history of Tuscany does not clearly
show what was the dominant blood in its people,
or what was the race whose peculiar instinct came
to the surface in Tuscan art in the Middle Ages.
It could hardly be the Roman race ; the Romans,
we have seen before, were not artistic. It could

156 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

not be Teutonic, for Tuscany was that part of
northern Italy into which the northern blood was
most scantily injected, and which was sharply dis-
sociated from northern art. What is left but the
Etruscan—the mysterious race which furnished
the Romans with their early art, whose history
is mostly hidden from us? But the question is
too difficult for discussion here.

II

There is no doubt that we owe Romanesque
architecture to the German race. The Latin
basilican style of Constantine’s time extended ap-
parently over the whole of western Christendom,
and was by no means the narrow or short-lived
style that we might be tempted to believe it. It is
true that scarcely any basilicas are left to us out-
side of Italy, few outside of Rome and Ravenna,
and none in Gaul and Spain, where, as we read,
many were built in the centuries that followed the
conversion of the Empire; yet all the evidence
shows that the Latin type remained without con-
siderable modification through the long period
while the Gothic, the Lombard, and the Merovin-
gian kingdoms, and the new empire of Charlemagne,
were forming and crumbling away. The fragments
of early Christian building that are still to be
found scattered over France and Germany, the

ROMANESQ U E ARCHITECTURE 157

testimony of contemporaneous writers so far as it
indicates anything clearly, show that even down
to the ninth century the form of the churches was
still essentially the same everywhere. By that
time the whole of Europe had been Teutonised ;
only the south of Italy and a fringe of its coast
territory, and in less degree the southern part of
Gaul, had retained their population and their char-
acteristics comparatively unimpaired. But the
Germans, and the peoples among whom they were
the controlling element, like those of northern Italy,
when they came to have leisure and inclination for
building, began with such buildings as their pred-
ecessors had built. Theodoric and Charlemagne,
the greatest figures in history between the Em-
pire and the Renaissance, aimed directly to con-
tinue and restore Roman civilization. Even the
Lombards, although their name has stuck to the
style that followed them, evidently attempted no
serious innovations. It was sufiicient for the re-
storers of architecture at first to try to recover the
skill and replace the buildings that had been lost
in the devastations of three centuries, and their
early attempts were impotent enough. The belief
which was common a few years ago, that the style
which we call Lombard was the product of the
Lombard kingdom, and that we see the work of
that kingdom in the oldest churches of Milan and
Pavia, has not stood against recent investigation.

.......

158 R OMANESQ UE A RCIIITE’UTURE

I speak of churches, for mediaeval architecture was
church architecture; its progress was made, its
important forms were developed in the building of
churches ; and the type with which I am occupied
here is that great central type, the cruciform
church, which embodied the building effort of the
Middle Ages, whose development took a thousand
years, growing out of the basilica of the fourth.
century, and into the cathedral of the thirteenth
and fourteenth.

The Middle Ages have been said to begin with
the breaking up of Charlemagne’s empire in the
ninth century. It was not till then that European
society, delivered from the strain of overwhelming
invasion and the dominion ()f individual will, be-
gan to crystallize into its own forms. Then fol-
lowed the prevalence of the feudal system in the
state, and in the Church the analogous hierarchy
of the monastic orders, in whose hands architect-
ure advanced and expanded enormously. It is
possible that students of monastic architecture
have exaggerated the influence of the monks in
church building, yet it is certain that the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, in which the great building
order, the Benedictine, was most exemplary and
powerful in the Church and the world, were those
of the greatest development of architecture. It is
certain that these orders maintained their own
schools of arts and letters, and that north of the

ROMANESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 159

Alps, where they were in greatest force, they were
not only the leaders but the chief possessors of
both literature and art; and that architecture, be-
ing the dominant art, took up the most of their in-
terest and activity. It is not so easy to prove that
the amount of building that was done in the north
was greater and its progress faster than in the
south, where it.was more the work of secular arti-
sans. The witness of the buildings themselves is
not so decisive as we could wish, for those of the
early ages of growth are mostly displaced by later,
and the questions of chronological sequence in
these dim centuries are difficult. In the fifth and
sixth centuries, before the prevalence of the mo-
nastic orders, building was in the hands of the
bishops; and there being no workmen among the
invaders, the north gathered them from the south,
and they worked in the southern fashion. The
clergy themselves, indeed, who were the movers
and inspirers of architecture, were up to this time
all Roman. Even Charlemagne’s building was, as
he at least believed, only a continuation of the tra-
ditions of the Roman empire. The invasions of
the ninth century undid most of the work of the
three or four previous centuries. The Northmen
in the north of France and the Rhinelands, the
Huns farther east, the Saracens in Italy, ravaged,
plundered, and burned. As Quicherat says, it was
a universal bonfire that the Normans made of the

160 ROMANE’SQ UE ARCHITECTURE

churches raised at so great cost by the Frankish
emperors. Decade after decade the marauders
returned, churches and convents went down wher-
ever they passed, till the lands were stripped of
their architecture and the inhabitants left with lit-
tle heart or hope for rebuilding. But these inva-
sions did not change the population like those of
the fifth century, except where the Northmen set-
tled, and founded the duchy of Normandy. When
the flood subsided, the people began where they
had left off, and the rebuilding went on slowly at
first in the old way.

The north of Europe had been full of monastic
settlements even before this. The south of Gaul
and the Rhinelands had been well sprinkled with
Roman towns; but northern Gaul and Germany
were wildernesses up to the end of the Empire,
and there were scarcely any German cities before
the ninth century. The German races abhorred
town life, scorned walls, and poured contempt on
those who dwelt behind them. While Roman
Gaul and Italy were civic countries, in which pow-
er, initiative, and example belonged to the cities,
the northern lands were purely rustic lands, in
which, as Villari says,1 the hamlet, not the city,

lVillari’s remark is interesting: It is certain that the Roman
empire was an aggregate of municipalities, which administered
themselves. The city was the primitive molecule, the cell, if
we may so speak, of the great Roman community, which began

R OMANE'SQ UE’ AR CHI TE 0 T URI} 161

was the unit. The key to the settlement of Ger-
many had been its conversion to Christianity in
the eighth century by the missionary monks,
chiefly by Winfried or Boniface, that great VVest-
Saxon monk from England who, made archbishop
of Mainz in spite of himself, reverted again and
again to his missionary work, going back and forth
among the unconverted Saxons of Germany, and
finally perishing in the midst of the savage heathen
by the far-off shore of the North Sea. There is
an interesting story, too long to tell here, of how
he and his pupil, Sturm, founded the famous con-
vent of Fulda, on a site which the venturous
Sturm chose in solitary exploration through the
heart of the Buchonian forest. There Boniface
began the Church of the Saviour which Sturm fin-
ished, and which after a thousand years of various
history was extinguished in the modern cathedral.
To it, after his death, the body of Boniface was
tenderly borne in procession, from city to city,
through hundreds of miles of that wilderness
which he had labored to Christianize. Wherever
his coffin rested by night or day crosses were set,
and a line of convents grew up at the stations to
mark its progress for later times. These were the

to fall to pieces when there came a lack at the capital of the
centripetal force which was needed to hold together so great a.
number of cities, separated by enormous country districts de-
serted, or populated only by the slaves that cultivated them.

162 R OMANESQ UE’ AR CHITE’UTURE

men, and this the spirit that converted Germany
from a Wilderness full of savage wanderers to a
settled and civilized country. This was the ardor
with which the wild men of the north, who had
brought ruin into Europe, turned from war to
spread the Christian religion when the time was
come. Germany was filled with monasteries, which
became each a centre of civilization, a teacher first
of husbandry and then of art and literature, pro-
viding perforce in its early isolation all the means
and occupations of life as well as the services of
religion for the community which gathered about
it, and increased with every year.

The first need of the monks was for buildings.
Almost before shelter worship was provided for.
The record is that artisans were at first imported
from the older settled countries, that in due time,
as the building increased more and more with the
spreading and population of the monasteries and
the settlements about them, the workmen gath-
ered in great companies, and regular schools or
unions were founded. The disastrous ninth cen-
tury appears, as I have said, to have more than
checked the progress of building, while it appar-
ently much increased the influx. of people to the
convents. For invasions from without had brought
disorders at home, and the social order was so
loosened that whoever longed for peace looked for
it naturally in the cloister, bringing his property

ROMANESQ UE’ AR 0H1 TEC T URE 163

as an offering for protection in this world and the
next. Under the accumulation of wealth which
this brought to the convents in the richer parts of
Europe, especially in the south, the great Bene-
dictine order which governed the most of them
grew luxurious and brought much scandal upon
the Church. Disorder and disrepute so increased
in France that various efforts at reform were made,
culminating 'in 920 with the establishment of the
famous monastery of Cluny, which gradually ac-
quired. almost supreme control of the Benedictines
in France. It became the mother of hundreds of
monasteries, and the founder of a great school
of building from which grew in the next century
thousands of churches. In time the Clunisian
monks also sank into luxury and sloth, and the
second reformed branch of the order, the Cister-
cian, succeeded in the twelfth century to their in-
fluence and their building energy.

Thus it is safe to say that in northern Europe
up to the time when in the twelfth century the
towns began to grow independent, and then rich
and powerful, the greater part of the building was
done by the Benedictines; and architecture, which
three centuries before had been in the hands
chiefly of the bislmps, had passed into theirs.
When the long disorders of the ninth century and
the slow attempts at recovery in the tenth had
passed, and with the growth of the feudal system

164 R OMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

a kind of order had established itself through
Europe, there followed an outburst of enthusiasm
in building which, looked at from the present,
seems amazing. French writers make much of
the depressing influence of the year one thousand,
and the expectation of the end of the world which
filled Christendom with uneasiness and deadened
every impulse of progress. It seems evident that
at least in the south—in France, and perhaps in
Italy—this had much effect and put a check for
the moment on the progreSs of building, though
there is record of many churches going on in the
north in the last decade of the tenth century. At
all events the growth in the eleventh was sudden
and general. Ralph the Bald, the monkish his-
torian of Cluny, writes thus of what he saw:
“ Towards the third year after the year one thou-
sand the sacred basilicas were rebuilt from foun-
dation to roof throughout almost the whole uni-
verse, especially in Italy and Gaul. Christian
people seemed to vie with each other in building
the fairest and richest churches; one would have ‘
said that the whole world with one accord had
put off its old worn garment to clothe itself anew
with churches, as with a white robe. It was not
enough for the- faithful to rebuild the churches of
the bishops, they restored and adorned the mon-
asteries that were dedicated to the saints, and
even the village chapels.” A passion for building

as "flw

ROMANESQ UE‘ ARCHITECTURE 165

seems to have infected Christendom. It is to be
remembered that the regular clergy, that is, the
monastic clergy, was at this time the popular
branch of the Church, recruited mainly from the
poorer classes of the people—although its digni-
taries were apt to be of higher position—and the
most democratic in organization; that within the
cloister worldly dignities vanished, or at least
were reduced to less importance than elsewhere.
Yet the feudal system which pervaded the whole
social fabric north of the Alps had its effect on
the clergy and in the convents. The sees and
convents came to be endowed with great domains
which the pious or the penitent had conferred on
them; their bishops, abbots, or priors held them
in fief and received feudal service for them. We
are told that in the twelfth century a fifth of all
the lands of France and England belonged to the
Church, and of Germany a third. Thus they
held control of the service of large numbers of
people by civil tenure as well as by religious or-
ganization. Not only did the monks themselves
work at building, husbandry, and other produc-
tive labor, but the people who were the subjects
of the convents were banded into trades for
special service. Prelates and monks familiar with
building work made plans for churches and con-
vents, and directed the workmen. We hear con-
tinually on the one hand of monks sent from

166 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

convent to convent or called away by this or
that bishop to take charge of buildings, and on
the other of men, apparently laymen, summoned
hither and thither to some convent that needed a.
building director. The zeal of the bishops and
abbots often bore hard on their monks and serfs.
We find even in Charlemagne’s time the monks of
Fulda appealing to the emperor for relief against
their active abbot Ratger, who kept them forever
at work in building, so that they had no time for
anything else. The complaint of an anonymous
monkish writer against the ambitious archbishop
Heribert of Cologne at the very beginning of the
eleventh century is an interesting commentary on
the words of the monk of Cluny which I have just
quoted. He writes: “ Under this bishop first be-
gan among us the pulling down of old buildings
and the putting up of new. His forerunners had
been pleased with very humble and simple build-
ings, but would have in them great abundance.
Yet this bishop and all his successors kept build-
ing new churches, new palaces, even new castles,
and doing this by forced labor they wore out the
working people with utter poverty. For while al-
most all the time for manuring, ploughing and the
rest of husbandry was given under constraint to
heaping up stones, and while yet the regular trib-
ute was exacted with extreme severity, the former
abundance was reduced to want, and the great

ROMANE'SQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 167

joyfulness which had been under former bishops
to abject wretchedness.” Surely the peOple in
those days did not give to God that which had
cost them nothing. If we needed other testimony
than that of the monuments themselves to show
the rapid progress of architecture in the eleventh
century, those extracts and other like passages
would indicate it; for men do not pull down their
old buildings till they see how to build better;
nor does it need more to show us how universal
and absorbing the passion for building had be-
come at this time, and how great a share of pro-
ductive labor it consumed. Indeed the very ra-
pidity and continuity of the progress makes now
one great obstacle to tracing out the sequence of
it, for as convents and sees grew rich, and as one
device in building followed another, the older
works fell behind the advancing skill or taste of
their day, and nothing would serve but they must
be replaced. Churches, begun as they usually
were at the east end, and growing year by year,
decade by decade, gaining in perfection as they
grew, had hardly reached their western front be-
fore the east ends ceased to satisfy, and they
must be begun again at the same point, perhaps
to go through the same process once more, and
even be ready for a second rebuilding. This not i
only disturbed chronology, but swept away a great
part of the evidence of history as fast as it was

168 ROMANESQ UE AR CHI TE 0T URE

provided, and has left the world stripped of most
of the buildings of the transition days, making
our record imperfect and the way of the student
difficult.

The share of the convents in the work is further
illustrated in the somewhat obscure history of the
lay brethren attached to them, by whom most of
the manual work was done. Attracted by the pros-
pect of repose, of steady support, relief from bear-
ing arms and from the oppressions of lay masters,
they gathered about the convents in great numbers
as these grew able to support dependants. They
were mainly mechanics, whose work was for the
most part concerned with building. They were sent
from convent to convent, from church to church,
as they were needed, and were even let out for
secular work, but were not free to go at their own
will, or work in manufacture of deadly weapons,
nor, among the Cistercians at least, for pay. Pre-
sumably we owe to them the most of the convents
and churches that in the Middle Ages were Sprin-
kled over the face of Europe. They were a rough,
busy, and rather turbulent class, half cloistered,
half worldly, under vows of celibacy and obe-
dience, and distinguished visibly from the monks
not only by dress but by their avoidance of the
tonsure. Known as fratres conversi, they were
nicknamed Barbatz' from their beards, to which
they held as tenaciously as some modern soldiers,

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 169

so tenaciously that when a certain Premonstaten-
sian abbot would have forced them to shave their
chins his bearded brothers mutinied and came near
to burning his convent about his ears. Their ex-
istence bears strong witness to the control of the
monastic orders on architecture, and they furnish
a connecting link with the bodies of secular build-
ers whose unions we know of in the south, merging
easily into the great unions of workmen who at
last took control of architecture in the thirteenth
century, and made it a secular thing even in the
service of the episcopate.

The famous monastic plan preserved in the
Benedictine abbey of St. Gall is not only the old-
est architectural working-drawing left to us, but
a precise and authentic record of the manner of
building in the ninth century, and in some ways
more valuable than if it depicted a particular set
of existing buildings, for it shows the ideal at
which the enlightened builders of that day were
aiming. It is a drawing on parchment, two and a
half feet by three and a half, dated 820, and sent
to Gozpert, abbot of St. Gall at that time, by some
friend who is not identified, for guidance or sug-
gestion in the rebuilding of his monastery which
was then to be undertaken. Carefully and mi-
nutely drawn, it shows with much detail the ar-
rangement of the buildings of a great monastery—
the central church surrounded by cloisters, chapels,

170 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

dormitories, refectories, assembly-rooms, kitchens,
breweries, store-houses, wine-cellar, workshops, in-
firmary, dwellings for the abbot and for visitors,
kitchen-garden, orchard—all that was needed by a
numerous, active, and well-to-do community, iso-
lated and sufficient to itself. The church is a
large basilica essentially of the Latin type, as we
might expect, but with some modifications which
show what the accumulated monks were beginning
to do even so early in the Carlovingian period. It
is some two hundred feet long, with a nave forty
feet wide divided from the aisles by arches borne
on columns, and intended for a wooden roof : the
only vaulting indicated is in the crypt under the
choir. The transept is as wide as the nave ; which
is prolonged through and beyond the transept in
an eastern arm ; and the transept arms are parted
011' into side chapels for special services, making a
defined crossing in the way that we shall consider
elsewhere. There are both an eastern and western
apse—a German characteristic that we see in the
great churches of Fulda, Trier, Mainz, Worms,
Laach, and many others, which has been a puzzle
to archaeologists—one great altar being here dedi-
cated to St. Peter and the other to St. Paul. \Ve
are surprised at the great number of altars, there
being no less than fifteen in the church, and the
aisles even being divided into something like sep-
arate chapels by screens against which altars are

ROM'A NESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 171

set. Near the western apse, but standing apart
from it in Italian fashion, are two round towers,
which according to the subjoined inscription were
accessible by winding stairs for overlooking the
universe—ascensus per cochlcam ad universe; super-
inspicz'enda—towers not unnecessary for watching
or defence, and connected with the church by gal-
leries or bridges. We are entitled to believe that
this plan, devised for an important occasion by
someone who was evidently skilled in building,
records the latest ideas of that progressive time.
It sums up for us many facts which without it we
must glean from comparison of scanty and scattered
remains of the buildings themselves. It illustrates
convincingly the importance and the organization
of the monastic communities, the inventive activ-
ity with which they pursued the art of building.
Dating as it does only six years after Charle-
magne’s death, at the very beginning of the time
of mediaeval transition, it may stand as the last
type of the Early Christian church, in which germs
are already implanted that are to develop into
characteristic forms of Romanesque architecture.

172 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

III

The conditions of their time gave the Roman-
esque builders a perfectly free hand; for all the
traditions of classical building had been swept
away, had even begun to yield before the Chris-
tian church had called up the new basilican type
of building. They found this type a ready object
for further development, with suggestive forms,
but almost devoid of architectural details, and de-
pendent in its structure on a feature, the arch,
whose simplest applications alone had been as yet
worked out. The mason, and rather an unskilled
kind of mason, had architecture in his hands, and
this accounts for some differences of detail be-
tween the German and the Italian branches of the
style. In the cities of Gaul, less completely des-
olated than those of Italy, and sooner brought to
some stability by the establishment of the Frank-
ish kingdom, the revival began in the middle of
the sixth century by the restoration of the great
episcopal churches of the cities on and near the
Rhine, Trier, Mainz, and Cologne. The Lombard
kings hardly began building before the seventh
century, and of their works it is difficult to say
that anything now exists. It is pretty clear that
their churches did not differ essentially from the
Latin basilicas; the evolution of new forms did not

ROMANESQ UE AR CHI TE 0T URE’ 173

begin till after the establishment of the Frankish
dominion in Italy by Charlemagne, at the begin-
ning of the ninth century. The cathedral of Tor-
cello, built in that city of refuge at the middle of the
seventh century, not by Lombards, to be sure, but
by a Roman bishop, may stand as an example of
the work of that period, and it has the unaltered
form of the basilicas of the fourth century. This
evidently was the accepted form of the earliest
churches throughout Christendom; it was the root
from which the mediaeval churches grew alike in
Germany and in Italy. \Ve see it unchanged in
the oldest German churches that are left to us,
which date from the reign of Charlemagne and his
immediate successors. The unique exception is
the cathedral of Trier, which belonged to the age
of Constantine, and whose much altered condition
betrays an original type peculiar to itself. The
one architectural adornment of these churches, the
column, was insisted on so long as the supply of
convertible Roman columns held out, and where-
ever such columns could be found; when and
where the columns were not to be had, the pier
was substituted and the arch brought back to its
original condition of a simple hole in the wall.
We may judge what value was set on the marble
shafts of Roman buildings when we remember that
the emperor Otto I. imported columns of marble
and porphyry from Italy, probably from Ravenna,

174 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

for the cathedral of Magdeburg. Laborious trans-
portation it must have been in the small vessels of
Otto’s time—round Sicily, through the Mediter-
' ranean, up the coast of Spain and France, through
the English Channel and the North Sea, and three
hundred miles or so up the Elbe. The eastern
apse, the division into aisles, and the clerestory,
except in the smallest churches, were universal.
Of this type is the basilica of Steinbach built by
Eginhard, Charlemagne’s minister, beside the
Rhine, perhaps the oldest German mediaeval
church that now survives except Charlemagne’s
own round minster at Aachen (Aix-la-chapelle).
Italy was still the model of all that was beauti-
ful and great in that age, at least to the peOple of
the north. There is a touch of humor or of
pathos, as one looks at it, in the effort of the great
Frank, greater than the men he emulated, to pat-
tern his mushroom state, whether in polity or in
art, on the mature empire which had been the
growth of a thousand years in both—that ill-
cemented state which ‘fell to pieces before it
reached the hands of his grandchildren; his second
Rome, with its extemporized Forum and its Sen-
ate of half-civilized Franks, his uncouth buildings
which rudely mocked the architecture of Ravenna.
We know that he gathered learned men, artists,
and skilful workmen from Constantinople, that
with the permission of Hadrian I. he brought col-

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 175

umns and marbles and mosaics from the palace of
his great forerunner Theodoric at Ravenna. The
poet Angilbert tells of the zeal with which he
pushed his schemes of building as soon as the
cares of conquest gave him time. “The second
Rome lifts herself,” he says, “in new unwonted
bloom with massive buildings whose lofty domes
touch the stars. The godly Charles stands far
from his palace selecting the various sites, and
fixes in their order the high walls of the future
Rome.” For his enormous building-work Charles
collected workmen “from all the countries this
side the sea,” meaning presumably the Mediter-
ranean. He included doubtless Italy, though the
times were changed since in the middle of the
sixth century Bishop Nicetius had to send there
for workmen to restore his cathedral. By this
time also there had been a considerable growth in
church building under the impulse of the mission-
ary monks ; at Fontanelle in Normandy there had
grown up a community of builders, an early ex-
ample of those which became afterward charac-
teristic of the great monasteries. From this com-
munity came the monk Ansegis, Charlemagne’s
architect or superintendent of building, who after
the emperor’s death returned to his convent as
abbot. He had before this been succeeded in the
direction of the buildings by Eginhard himself;
and there is again a touch of humor in the story

176 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

that this minister, anticipating the Alberti of
seven hundred years later, betook himself seri-
ously to the study of Vitruvius. Surely the
buildings which came of this study would have
struck the architect of Augustus with wonder.

The Romanesque builder, I have said, had a
perfectly free hand. Not only had the classical
Order been broken up and thrown aside, so that
there is not, I believe, in the whole course of
Romanesque building any sign of an attempt to
revive it—I am speaking of the main body of the
Romanesque—but what is perhaps more natural,
the classic idea of design, the mode of proceeding
was also lost, the idea of using a fixed architectural
element like the order and enlarging it to suit the
size of the building. The order, as we saw, was
in classic architecture enlarged or diminished, as
the building was made larger or smaller, so that
a great temple was a small one magnified. This
resulted in an absolute difference of method in
design between the two styles, a difference which
was not lost till the classic method was brought
back in the Renaissance. The Christian builders,
on the contrary, from the earliest churches that
we know, those of Charlemagne’s reign, used ele-
ments that were comparatively uniform; if the
church were larger, the number of elements was
increased, not their scale. The unit of size was
practically the intercolumniation, that is, the width

ROJfliNESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 177

of the arch. It is singular to notice that this unit
did not vary materially among all the basilicas
that are known to us, in Rome or Ravenna or
the other Italian towns, in Syria or Palestine
or Africa. The original basilica of St. Peter had
arcades of twenty-four arches, the little ones of
Syria perhaps a half a dozen, but in all these
examples, and even in the round churches, the
distance from centre to centre of the columns
hardly varies from ten or twelve feet.1 We can-
not say what, in the consciousness of the builders,
gave the scale to all these churches—whether it
was the convenience of constructing the arches,
which masons of small skill would not willingly
build much larger than these, or the size of the
columns which were at their disposal, or the com-
bination of the two. The proportion of the
arched interval, which came in the progress of the
Romanesque to fluctuate largely, did not in the
early churches differ greatly from that which the
Romans had fixed upon, and the columns are, on
the whole, as uniform in size as the arches. It is
astonishing at first thought that the builders could
have found ready-made so many thousands of
columns fifteen or eighteen feet high, and have

1There is a marked exception in two of the churches of
Central Syria, at Suweda and Ruweiha. In Ruweiha where,
to be sure, the arches rest on piers, they are as wide as the
nave.

178 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

used such a small proportion which vary much
from these limits. One is tempted to believe
that it was the habit of the Empire to build to
this scale. We know that the Romans, unlike the
Greeks, liked to build in stories with an order to
each story, when LL; building was not a temple or
some other great monumental structure. A col-
umn sixteen feet high means an order twenty feet
high, or, if a pedestal is added for the sake
of dignity, perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five.
These dimensions, account being taken of climate
and human habits, seem natural enough for the
stories of such domestic and civic buildings—
palaces, villas, porticos and the like—as were of
pretension enough to be adorned with orders, and
they chime well with Italian habits of building in
later times. The question is perhaps worth in-
vestigation if any one is found ready to study it
in the scanty remains of Roman civic and domes-
tic architecture.

This habit of proportion, once established, lasted
all through the Middle Ages. The scale of the
parts of a building had been adjusted no longer
to an artistic system but to the convenience of
man, and indirectly to his stature. It never
again, till the revival of classic architecture, be-
came the habit to set up columns of such size as
to dwarf the human beings who gathered about
their bases, or to call for enormous labor in hand-

 

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 179

ling them. The practical man had taken building
in charge. Struggling from the first with con-
structive difficulties which bore hard on the im-
perfect skill of his generation, he henceforth gave
himself up to working out the mechanical proc-
esses of construction, and shaped his slow-grow-
ing artistic sense by their guidance. Romanesque
architecture, and after it Gothic, became as abso-
lutely constructive as the Roman had been con-
ventionally artistic. When with the development
of their style, the churches grew lofty and compli-
cated in structure and the builders wanted to use
tall pillars, they did not increase the thickness of
the shafts accordingly. On the contrary, while
they grouped and multiplied the shafts, they
thinned them down to suit the semblance of their
relative constructive importance, without regard
to their increasing height, till they looked like
clusters of reeds. The capitals and bases, which
in the classic style had been proportioned to their
height, remained approximately the same, however
tall the shaft grew. Cornices and string-courses,
mouldings and capitals, did not expand as build-
ings grew large. Though the interiors of the
larger churches were more Open and the spans of
their arches in time were widened, the scale of the
details did not increase in proportion—the differ-
ence between a smaller church and a larger one
was not based upon the size of the parts, as in a

180 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

Greek or Roman temple, but on the accumulation
of them. This comparative fixity of size in details
gave a standard of measurement which insensibly
accustoms the eye to judge of dimensions, and to
compare one with another. There is no need to
cast about for something to give scale to a medi-
aeval building. The scale is there, and the specta-
tor is spared that disappointment in the apparent
size of the churches of the Middle Ages which he
too often feels in classical buildings.

IV

Smallness of material goes naturally with small-
ness of details, and arches and vaults are more
easily laid with small stones than with great.
The mediaeval system facilitated the work of the
builder enormously. There was no need of mono-
lithic shafts or big blocks of stone. The largest
churches were built of stones that could be got
into their places by hand, without calling for the
prodigious appliances which the Egyptian and
Roman builders must have used. The work could
be carried on rapidly. It did not demand the
massing of men in battalions, as we see them
sculptured on Egyptian walls, but allowed of in-
definite subdivision, each man to his own pait.
At the same time increasing complexity of con-
struction led, as we shall see, to close discrimina-

ROMANESQ UE AR CHI TEOT URE 181

tion of the office of every part and detail in the
structure, to separate expression of every function
in the forms. When at last we come to the Gothic
builder, so free and facile that he would cover his
whole building with decoration, the constructive
instinct was almost abnormally intensified in him,
so that his smallest detail must justify itself to
him by at least a semblance of mechanical pur-
pose. The full florescence of Gothic architecture
suggests, if I may venture on so medical a simile,
an actual hysteria of construction. Only rare dec-
orative grace and a marvellously free fancy could
save it at its best from such a pedantic dryness as
did overtake its last stages.

The columns which were borrowed from Roman
buildings for the earliest churches had a monu-
mental value of their own apart from their archi-
tectural office. The chroniclers lay great stress on
the value of the marbles. Tam marmora quamque
musiva, says the writer who describes Charle-
magne’s plunderings from Ravenna: it is ma'rmm'
pretz’osum again when we are told of the columns
brought for the cathedral at Magdeburg. Apart
from the difficulty of cutting them, for which the
early Christian workmen lacked skill, and the fact
that it was easier to steal than to reproduce, the
beauty and variety of the substance was tempta-
tion enough. The column, as it had been the most
important ornamental feature of Roman architect-

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182 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

ure, became the one structural adornment of the
churches; to many it gave the only beauty they
possessed. In remote places, where old marbles
were not easily come at, and piers had to be used
to support the main arcades, if a few columns or
a pair could be had, they were reserved for the
adornment of the most sacred part of the church.
Far down into the twelfth century and even the
thirteenth, when the form and details of the
churches had been thoroughly elaborated, and the
richly clustered pier had established itself as the
normal support of the arcades, the column was
preferred, at least in France, for the circuit of the
choir. In the Romanesque the column1 was every-
where the builder’s pet child. As soon as he ac-
quired skill to make them easily for himself he
abandoned the classical stature and made them of
various sizes, but chiefly small, reserving them
mostly for decorative positions, and leaving his
hard work to be done by piers. It seemed that he
never could accumulate enough to satisfy his de-
sire. The belfry stage of the old tower of St.
Front in Perigueux is a mere stockade of columns,
with hardly room to pass one’s arm between
them. The facade of Sta. Maria della Pieve at
Arezzo is covered by a throng of columns stand-

1 In all strictness the name column belongs to classic architect-
ure, but there is no other suitable name for the same thing in
other styles, and I use it here freely, as it is most often used.

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 183

ing on shelves as if exposed for sale, and bearing
small arcades, while the upper story fairly disap-
pears behind a fence of them, too thick set to
carry any arches at all. So fond of them the build-
er grew that he sought out and invented places
to put them. He cut them in halves and set them
up like buttresses against the walls of facades and
apses, running them into the cornices; he made
nooks for them and set them fourfold, sixfold, ten-
fold, in the jambs of doors, where the early Chris-
tian builders had posted them as sentinels in
pairs, like J achin and Boaz in the porch of Solo-
mon’s temple; he thrust them into his windows
for mullions; he cut out hollows to hold them in
the angles of walls and buttresses. In some places
and in moments of transition he built great tower-
like piers in the form of shafts, after the manner
of those of Karnak, as in the abbey of Montmajour
and the nave of the cathedral of Durham ; or later
he occasionally made stout columns to carry the
great niches and nave-walls, as in San Zeno at
Verona and the cathedral of Paris. 'But usually
he clustered them about piers, making them no
larger than his own body, and thinning them
down from that to the smallest thing that could
stand alone in stone, or even to slender rods which,
engaged on one side in- a pier or wall, were really
strips of moulding fitted with capitals and bases.
These multiplied upright lines, dlstributed in

 

 

184 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

groups, served, like the horizontal mouldings of
classic architecture, to mark the natural subdivi-
sions of the composition, to emphasize the mode
of its construction, to give richness and the con-
trast of line with surface. The classic architect
enforced the uprightness of his column by flutings
and channels, and his structure of beams by the
horizontal lines of architecture and cornice. The
mediaeval builder, to whom his shafts and arches
were everything, made light of his horizontal
members, emphasizing them no more than the nat-
ural division of his stories called for, and contin-
ually multiplying his verticals. The panelling of
walls by pilaster-strips, which began even in the
Latin period and was continued or resumed in the
Romanesque, enhanced rather than diminished
their look of solidity. Through all its changes
Romanesque architecture kept much of the mas-
siveness and consequent air of repose which dis-
tinguished it from the Gothic. The arches were
always, at least in the exteriors, Openings in a
broad wall, and never took on that frame-like
aspect which Gothic construction gave them. So
long as the distinguishing form, the round arch,
was retained, the natural structure of masonry in
horizontal courses was not put out of sight, string-
courses and cornices were not slighted. Buildings
preserved a fair breadth of tranquil surface, a
happy balance of line and mass, of movement and

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 185

repose. But meanwhile a gradual change went
on, and upright lines came to more and more em-
phasis. As constructive needs dictated, piers were
more subdivided, flat pilaster-strips swelled into
buttresses, round apses became polygonal, round
towers octagonal, surfaces were divided, but al-
ways vertically, angles and lines multiplied. At
last the lines became more interesting to the build-
er than the surface, and he sought opportunity
to accumulate them. Their upward Spring fasci-
nated him; he built as high as he dared. The
constructive effort to hold up his heavy vaults
challenged expression. The time of the transition
came; his Gothic arches were sharpened to points;
roofs grew high and steep; towers were multi-
plied and crowned with tall Spires; buttresses
were set on every angle whether they were needed
or not, and finials upon them even more for the
sake of the upward pointing than for their con-
structive value ; horizontal lines were cut through
and elbowed aside; the very wall to which Ro-
manesque architecture had owed its distinctive
character was suppressed as an intruder. The
eastern end of the cathedral of Amiens looks from
without more like a huge stack of upright beams
and poles than like a walled church. It is curi-
ous to note the returning analogy between the
extremes of European building. Greek architect-
ure had been a cunning frame of beams of stone,

 

186 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

upright and horizontal, fitted together like cabinet
work, with the wall dissembled behind them ;
Gothic became a frame of shafts and buttresses, of
oblique props, and arches that were curved braces,
with the walls rejected altogether. Greek had held
with a stately content to the level lines of the
earth and the sea; Gothic spent itself in the up-
ward rush of an impetuous aspiration. The im-
perial architecture and the Romanesque its suc-
cessor were those of massive walls and unstrained
arches, here sumptuous and there severe, apt alike
to express repose or energy.

As the lines of the shafts accumulated, so did
the lines of the arches—perhaps sooner, for it is
difficult to determine the sequence of changes.1
The distinction of the arch is its curve, and the
natural instinct is to emphasize this by repeating
it; so the Roman builders did, by carrying the
form of the banded architrave about it as an archi-
volt; they kept the soffit square and decorated it
by panelling, like the architrave. The Roman-
esque builders treated the arch with more vigor, or

‘ The compound or broken pier seems pretty clearly to have
been composed at first of the united jambs of arches that abut-
ted at right angles, as where the arcades of the nave met the tri-
umphal arch. As early as the first half of the sixth century the
windows of San Apollinare in Classe were circumscribed by a
concentric round-headed panel. It is but one step from this to
the double recessed arch, which indeed appears in the apes of
Sta. Sofia at Constantinople.

R OMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 187

at first more rudely, and broke it into recesses or
steps corresponding to those in the pier or jamb
that supported it. This at once gave importance
to the arch, enforcing its lines with more boldness,
and establishing an intimate connection with its
supports which was lacking to the Roman. When
the steps or nooks were multiplied, as in the door-
ways, and those in the jambs were filled with
shafts, it was natural to fill those in the arch with
mouldings that answered to the shafts. So a still
closer union was made between the arch and the
jamb, and so were designed those deep, expand-
ing, hospitable doorways, charged with all man-
ner of carved ornament, which delight us in the
twelfth-century churches. They joined arch to
arch as they. joined shaft to shaft. Their pictu-
resque arcades make the glory of the so-called
Lombard style, enlivening the walls, and making
deep shadows under the eaves, of countless
churches throughout Italy and Germany; they
lined the cloistered courts of the monks for cen-
tury after century all over Europe, from the rude
arcades of San Stefano, in Bologna, to the grace-
ful galleries of St. Trophime at Arles, and those
that mark the transition to the Renaissance in the
Certosa at Pavia. \Vhere there was no room for
shafts to carry the arches they accumulated them
in cornices and corbel-tables. With the vigorous
constructive habit of which I have spoken, their

188 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

effective guide because they had no other, if for
no different reason, they made the column the
chief means of their decoration and expression,
while the properties of the arch practically con«
trolled the structural forms of their buildings.

V

Although the accidents of fire and instability
and the destructiveness of a growing ambition
were, as we see them to be in our own country
and century, the chief occasions of improvement,
it was natural that the men of the Middle Ages
should try hard to build churches that would not
have to be constantly renewed. Inasmuch as the
wooden roofs were the most vulnerable parts they
worked with dogged persistence through centuries
to devise a practicable roofing of stone. The
builders of the Empire had contrived an excellent
system of vaulting, but it required skilful plan-
ning and ponderous abutments; it was incompat-
ible with the high, thin walls of the churches, and
the art of constructing it was lost. The story of
the mediaeval experiments is long, difficult, and in-
tricate—I shall be easily forgiven for not trying
to write it here. The history of vaulting is prac-
tically the history of mediaeval architecture. It
was also the history of a new type of church, the
cruciform. I have said in the essay on the Age

ROMANESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 189

of Constantine that the cruciform type was not
early Christian, and that it was never naturalized
in Rome till the Renaissance ; that in the Roman
type the transept was not two arms, but one body ;
that the nave did not pass through it, but abutted
against it, as the staff of a crutch abuts against
the shoulder-piece. In the cruciform church the
nave and the transept interpenetrated. Their in-
tersection, the crossing, belonged structurally to
both, and the nave was prolonged beyond the
crossing in an eastern arm to the end of which the
apse was removed. The transept arms were very
often separated by the expansion of the choir,1
which occupied the eastern arm, and which occa-
sionally even extended some distance down the
nave. The cruciform type, once established, which
it hardly was before the end of the eleventh cen-
tury, became the model which lasted till the Be-
naissance, and in less strict form has lasted ever
since. The great churches of the twelfth century
and of the Gothic period were built according to
it.

The most important characteristic of the cruci-
form church—more significant in truth than the
fact that it was cruciform—was its division into

1By the choir I mean that part of the church, greater or less,
which was set apart for the celebration of the service, and
which was the outgrowth of the Chorus Psallentium of the early

Christian churches. It is always the eastern arm, often some-
thing more.

l-_——’ —-.

190 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

bays. I have said that the unit of size of the
basilicas was the arch—one measures their size
by counting the arches. But there is no unit of
construction ; as the Germans would say, there is
nothing organic in their design. The walls in the
aisles and above the arcades are perfectly flat and
uniform, broken only by the windows, which may
or may not correspond with the arches. The de—
veloped Romanesque church or the Gothic church
is divided into bays corresponding to a single
arch, or sometimes to two, by shafts which run up
the clerestory walls and by arches or vaulting-ribs
which cross the nave and aisles. The arms of the
cross are thus divided into units of construction.
They are jointed, as it were, like a vertebrate ani-
mal; the size of the church depending on the
number of joints. They might be built in sec-
tions, each complete as far as it went, and in fact
they were very commonly so built, being begun at
the east end and continued westward as fast and
as far as money was found to carry them. They
often went on in this way year by year, generation
by generation; the history of such building is
written on the interiors of many churches; some-
times a blank wall across the end shows where
the last funds gave out, leaving the western bays
unbuilt. One bay thus came to be a model for
all the parts of the church, and its design once
achieved, the rest was only the assembling of the

R OMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 191

right number of parts, like laying a pavement.
Given adequate drawings of a single bay of the
cathedral of Cologne, and such a sketch-plan as
could be held in the palm of the hand, we could
build from them the whole church, ready for the
apse, the facades, and the towers. The bay at last
became, again with an analogy to classic art, a pat-
tern or formula out of which a whole church could
be educed, as a Greek temple or stoa could be
educed from an order. The difference was that
while the limits of variation were very narrow in
the order, in the mediaeval bay they were very
wide. In the order they hardly went beyond
slightly lengthening or shortening the column and
varying the curve of a moulding. In the bay,
although the general ordinance of an arch be-
tween its two supports and a wall above carrying
its section of vault on wall shafts was essential,
there remained the proportion of parts, the choice
of shaft or pier, the outline of piers, the forms of
capitals, the shape of vault and distribution of
shafts, the use or neglect of triforium and even of
clerestory. These were all at the designer’s pleas-
ure, and his pleasure so varied that it is as hard
to find among the thousands of medimval churches
that remain to us two bays in different ones that
are quite alike, as to find two oak-leaves that will
match.

The invention of the bay was as useful for con-

192 120.1124 .VL'SQ UE ARCHITECTURE

struction as for design, as soon as the problem of
vaulting was attacked. The Roman vaults had
been continuous geometric cylinders to whose
surface a mason’s line or straight-edge, laid par-
allel to its axis, would have fitted close from end
to end, and unbroken by any ribs, even where
they were groined, though chains of brickwork
were often let in, when the shells were of concrete,
to strengthen them While they were fresh. If
they were groined, it was by intersection with
other cylinders of the same kind. Such vaults,
being continuous, gave no places to stop, and
must be built continuously from end to end, or
else a ragged and unstable edge of masonry was
left, which involved an ugly patching. To make
the groins look well required a precision of work-
manship which the Romanesque builders up to
the twelfth century did not have. But when the
builders learned to divide the vault into separate
compartments by heavy projecting ribs which
they carried across the aisle or nave from pier to
pier, they had a series of sections which could be
built one by one, each complete and squarely fin-
ished. They would naturally build with less
scaffolding; there was no need for so careful ad-
justment of the surface, and imperfection of form
was masked by the heavy ribs. Moreover—what
is perhaps more decisive, as men are made—there
was a natural occasion for stopping at one place

ROM'ANE’SQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 193

rather than another, that is, at a rib; the work
could be left visibly complete as far as it went.

It is not easy to discover the beginning of the
use of the bay, or of the vaulting of churches, or
when and where the nave first penetrated. through
the transept and gave the church the shape of the
cross, or to judge whether Italians or Germans,
lay builders or monastic builders, were the leaders.
But apparently the vaulting was not seriously un-
dertaken until the division into bays was achieved
—or at least the idea of a bay distinctly cut ofi‘
from the adjoining parts. It is singular that the
first example of this, as of so many other medi-
aeval ideas, is to be found among the early
churches of Syria. The church of Ruweiha al-
ready noticed, although not cruciform and prob-
ably of the sixth century, is divided in pure
Romanesque form into square bays which are
separated by high orders across the nave bearing
upper walls that reach the roof. The piers are
subdivided in Romanesque fashion into pilasters
apportioned to the different arches, and those
which carry the cross arches have capitals high
up above the rest. The whole might have be-
longed to a Romanesque church of the twelfth
century. Yet there seems to have been no echo
of this in any early basilica of Italy or Germany.
It is to the circular or polygonal aisles of the
round churches that we must look for the first di-

194 ROM/{NESQUE ARCHITECTURE

vision into bays, of which the Byzantine churches,
indeed, had set the example. Here in the round
churches the necessity, real or supposed, of but-
tressing the inner ring-wall against the thrust of
the dome led to vaulting the aisles from the be-
ginning, and the convenience of vaulting to the
division into bays. We see this in San Vitale of
Bavenna in the sixth century; it was probably
revived next in the Rotonda of Brescia, if we
may believe the tradition that this was built by
the all-pervading Theudelinde at the beginning of
the seventh century or by later Lombards at the
end of it. It was repeated by Charlemagne in his
minster at Aachen at the beginning of the ninth.
Cattaneo, perhaps the best-informed student of
early Italian architecture, argues that the bay was
first set off in the basilican chm‘ches when the
monks, to provide a sheltered nook for their mid-
night services, walled ofi' from the aisles or tran-
sept a section of the nave next the apse, and
vaulted it. He finds the first recognizable case
in San Ambrogio at Milan, which was turned over
to a colony of monks at the beginning of the ninth
century. If this theory is right—and the plans
of St. Gall and the arrangement of various early
monastic churches in Germany accord with it—
the innovation meant in churches with a transept
the prolongation of the nave beyond the transept,
and so directly made them cruciform. Thus it

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 195

would accomplish at once the transformation to
a cruciform plan, the establishment of a vaulted
bay, and by the meeting of cross and longitudinal
arches the establishment of the compound pier,
all before the end of the ninth century. But we
have seen that the next hundred years were a dis-
astrous time for architecture, and that not till the
beginning of the eleventh century did building
revive abundantly. During the eleventh, twelfth,
and thirteenth centuries it looked as if all the
active force of the world that could be spared
from fighting, especially north of the Alps, went
into architecture. In the first half of this period,
the centre of progress, it would seem, shifted
northward. Germany and France, where the
monks had most numbers, wealth, and influence,
seem to have led the development. The problems
of building had been solved, or the way of solu-
tion had been pointed out in the struggling period
of the ninth and tenth centuries. The prog-
ress toward the perfected church of the twelfth
looks very rapid to our distant eyes, though it
took a hundred years of eager tentative labor, of
alternate advance and failure, of experiments tried
and results treasured or cast aside. With a unity
of effort and progress that seems to us astonish-
ing, considering the endless subdivision and po-
litical hostilities of the time, myriads of workmen
in communities scattered all over Europe toiled

196 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

for generation after generation at the working out
of one ideal, while the rich of the world gave
their wealth, the intelligent and pacific their
thought and care; even the princes and knights
whose lives were given to the destruction of their
neighbors planned, when death should make an
end for them of war, to hallow its plunder in
building churches for the glory of the religion of
peace. '

VI

The eleventh century was spent in the prelimi-
nary work of learning to vault the aisles, where
the want of a solid abutment on thews-ide of the
nave made it specially difficult. The slender col-
umn was hardly sufficient stay against the pressure
of the groining, and there being now no supply of
ancient columns to be had, it was the more natural
to resort to piers. The cross-rib called for a spe-
cial support at its springing ; therefore pilasters,
or more often half-columns, were set against the
pier and the outer wall of the aisle. Thus in the
early stages was established the characteristic
habit of incorporating in the pier a representative
of every member in the structure above which
bore upon it. It bears witness to the close pre-
occupation of the builder’s mind with the different
strains which he was trying to group and with-
stand; and the plan of the pier which thus em-

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 107

bodied them must have been for him, to use the
engineer’s language, a diagram of stresses to be
borne in mind and provided for.

The covering of aisles with vaults Whose span
was only a dozen feet or so, and whose height
above the ground was hardly more, was a compar-
atively simple problem. The vaulting of crypts,
which began as early as the ninth century and
grew with that cult of the saints that led to an ea-
ger traffic in their bodies and bones all over Chris-
tendom, had been naturally a school for the more
difficult covering of churches. Their subterranean
vaults, divided into narrow aisles, amply abutted
by the solid ground and having nothing but the
floors of the churches above to carry, were easily
covered with groined cylindrical vaults, in whose
capitals the extraordinary innovation of the Ger-
mans in ornamental sculpture first shows itself.
The vaulting of aisles above ground had been done
very early, we have seen, by the Byzantine archi-
tects, and in the western round churches. The
difliculty did not tax too severely the unskilled
masons of the tenth century. But to construct the
vaults of a nave thirty feet wide or more, and ef-
fectively stay against” their thrust the lighter walls
of a clerestory fifty feet high, balanced on the pil-
lars of an arcade, was a different and a perilous
thing. The study of the builders’ efforts to accom-
plish this is very interesting to the special student,

198 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

and equally perplexing. We should not say, as I
have heard a modern engineer contemptuously
assert, that for every mediaeval vault that stood
two tumbled down; yet the chronicles of the
eleventh century are full of stories of falling of
churches. But with the same persistence with
which their forefathers had repeated their attacks
on the Roman Empire through defeat after defeat,
the builders attacked and reattacked the diflicul-
ties of their building. Experiment after experi-
ment was tried; failure followed failure; every
failure taught something; one succesful device
disengaged itself after another; one danger after
another was guarded against, till by the twelfth
century the workmen had learned their task. They
succeeded in building vaults over their naves that
would stand safe, and after that it was only a ques—
tion of evolving the most satisfactory form for
them. Progress was fast, and this century, pro-
ducing the splendid churches of the finished Bo-
manesque, deve10ped that sure-handed skill whose
ease, audacity, and grace, after the change to the
forms of pointed Gothic, we admire in the incom-
parable vaults of Amiens and Beauvais.

The ways that opened to relieVe the builders
were two—to lighten and strengthen their mason-
ry, and to distribute and counterpoise the pressures
so as to make them harmless. To build a shell of
concrete half a yard thick in the Roman fashion,

ROMAIVESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 199

and balance it safely on the clerestory walls of an
early basilica, was hopeless. To stay a Roman
vault required the ponderous abutments of the
Romans. The slender columns with which the
Christian builders began, designed to support four
feet of entablature, would not have borne a high
Roman wall : their clerestories, having only a light
wooden roof to carry, and being steadied, not
strained, by the trusses, were as light as they could
build them. The Italian masons built them of
brick, which makes the lightest of firm walls and
the firmest of light walls. The men of the north,
not having Roman skill or Italian brick, but with
Roman ruins at hand, had begun by imitating as
well as they knew the Roman walls faced with
stones and filled with concrete or rubble. They
did this badly; their walls were rude and weak,
and seem, after standing a few years, to have been
continually crumbling. It took them two or three
troubled centuries to educate their workmen to
even tolerable skill. The building of Charlemagne,
with all the help of mechanics imported from Italy
and the east, is rough and uncouth. The work-
men had to learn to build firm walls of coursed
stones, to cut shafts and mouldings and capitals,
to build close-jointed piers and thin vaulting shells
of small stones. This seems not to have been ac-
complished without long training in the schools of
the monks, and its fruits do not show themselves

200 ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE

till the season of growth that began with the elev-
enth century. It is possible to arrange a series of
examples that make a natural sequence from the
rudest beginning to the completest result, but the
difficulties of chronology are so many that no such
sequence has been proved to be historically exact;
at various points we are left to inference and
probability. The division of the nave into bays,
which followed that of the aisles, seems to have
preceded the vaulting, for there are many churches
so divided which have never been vaulted, and
many others where a vaulting was added a century
or more after the church was built. \Ve have seen
how the little church of Buweiha was divided, as
early as the sixth century, by arches which bridge
the nave. The non-Lombard Tuscan church of
San Miniato at Florence is a well-known example
of the same thing, but there was evidently no in-
tention of vaulting it. The subdivision of the nave
by alternate supports, indeed, which came from the
east and is suggested very early in the naves of
St. Demetrius at Thessalonica (ca. 500) and of Sta.
Maria in Cosmedin in Rome (780) built by, or for,
a colony of Greek monks, seems to have charmed
the taste of the northern builders. The alterna-
tion of piers and columns, or some other way of
grouping the arches by twos or threes, is very char-
acteristic of Romanesque churches in Lombardy,
Germany, and England, and even appears in

ROMANESQ UE’ AR OHITEUTURE 201

France. The churches of San Ambrogio at Milan,
the Trinité at Caen, lValtham Abbey, the cathe-
drals of Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Meaux, and Noyon
are examples. The naves being, as a rule, twice
as wide as the aisles, one bay of the nave answered
to two of the aisles, and both remained square, or
nearly so. This introduced an element of variety
in harmony, a rhythmical element, as German
critics like to call it, which pleasantly breaks the
monotony of the long arcades, and adds the dignity
of a larger unit, while it does not sacrifice scale,
but brings animation into the design of the Roman-
esque interiors. It is one of the most attractive
features of the churches of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, one which, I think, the eye misses in
the somewhat monotonous perspective of the inte-
riors of the thirteenth.

When it came to vaulting the naves, the great
squ :ompartments that covered those double
bays gave them an air of special nobility. The
dignified amplitude of the broad vaults of the
cathedrals of Speyer and Mainz, for instance, and
in a less degree the six-part vaults of the subse-
quent transition, impress the spectator by compar-
ison with the smaller compartments of the Gothic
vaults. The subdivision of the bays by the smaller
aisle-bays preserves their scale, and redeems them
from the sparse bareness of some of the Italian
Gothic churches, whose great undivided bays, like

202 ROMANE’SQ UE AR UHITEUTURE

those of the cathedral of Florence, made them look
bald and empty, while yet they destroy the im-
pression of their size. But the weight of these
great sections of vaulting, four times as large as
those of the aisles, made them so much the more
difficult to deal with. Bearing down with their
pendants on every alternate pair of piers, they
made it necessary that these should be very mas-
sive, while the intermediate piers could be com-
paratively slight, in some cases actually reduced
to stout columns. This again added to the effect
of contrast, giving more emphasis to the large
bays and the alternation of supports. But to
stiffen the clerestory wall against the thrust of
these heavy vaults, was the chief requirement.
The many expedients that were tried necessarily
amounted to one of two things—building against
the nave wall from without, or increasing its own
weight and rigidity. The first could be done and
was done in many churches by increasing the
height of the aisles so as to bring the pressure of
their vaults higher against the walls of the clere-
story; and this led to an increased habit of adding
an upper gallery to the aisles which was also
vaulted, its vault rising high enough to nearly
contrabut that of the nave, sometimes quite, as in
San Ambrogio at Milan, where the vault of the
nave actually springs from the level of the floor of
the upper gallery. Such upper aisles are common

ROMANESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 203

in German churches of the later Romanesque, and
appear even as late as the transitional cathedrals at
Paris, Noyon, Laon, and others, as well as in
French churches of the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies. But in other churches, such as the great
Rhenish cathedrals of Speyer and Mainz begun in
the eleventh century, whose naves are over forty
feet wide, the vaults are abutted only by the mas-
sive clerestory walls, which stand, sheer and un-
buttressed, more than a hundred feet above the
pavement. This calls for great weight of piers
and walls; the piers are heavy and close, the walls
have by this time grown so thick that there is
room in their thickness for the outside galleries
of which Lombard architects were fond, which
decorate the eaves of many churches on the Rhine
and in Lombardy, or for the triforium passages
that became common in France. The builders of
Auvergne, in the middle of France, found a way of
their own of meeting the thrust which deserves to
be mentioned. They covered the nave with a
continuous barrel-vault, and to stay this vault they
built tall aisles in two stories, the upper gallery
being covered by the half of a similar vault whose
crown bore against the wall of the nave near the
springing of the main vault, and made a continu-
ous abutment for it. The lower story of the
aisles, vaulted sometimes with groining, sometimes
with transverse barrel vaults, stayed moreover

204 R OMANE’SQ UE AR 0H1 TE 02’ URE

with thick walls and heavy buttresses which by
this time were adopted, made a massive cellular
structure, solid enough to withstand the whole
pressure. It was taking the bull by the horns—
for the great vault was built in the most perilous
shape, needing support at every point and loaded
moreover in many cases with a heavy stone roof—
and meeting the difficulty in Roman fashion,
though not in Roman form, by sheer weight of
masonry ingeniously disposed. The churches of
Notre Dame du Port at Clermont in Auvergne,
and of St. Etienne at Nevers are fine specimens
of this treatment. These are small churches; would
we were allowed to see how the same problem was
solved by the builders of the great Benedictine
church of Cluny, whose barrel-vaulted nave, of
thirty-five feet span and more than a hundred feet
high, stood firm till it fell before the sordid dev-
ilry of the French revolution. The largest and
perhaps the finest of Romanesque churches, more
than 550 feet long, with double transepts, double
aisles, and a throng of towers—it was sold at
auction for its materials and pulled down. It is
some pleasure to know that this performance
brought out from Napoleon, when as emperor he
was besought to visit the town, the scornful retort :
“ You have sold and destroyed your beautiful
great church. Go, you are Vandals, I will not
visit Cluny.”

ROMANESQ UE AR CHI TE C’T URE 205

But this ingenious achievement of the French
builders was a digression from the direct line of
development that was followed by the Germans
and the men of the north of France. The system
was too heavy, too laborious, and therefore too
costly to prevail. When once vaults had been
made to stand secure, the eflort was to lighten con-
struction, and suppress unnecessary masonry. The
building of the great churches, which was the chief
public concern of the communities in which they
were, meant a prolonged strain on their resources
and energies; it called for a persistent effort to
which we are strangers nowadays, an effort of gen-
erations, sometimes of centuries. No wonder that
the builders were eager to hasten the work and see
the result of their sacrifices, that the chronicles
are full of disasters due to haste. Their construc-
tive instinct, sharpened in the long struggle with
mechanical difliculties, told perhaps as efficiently
in the same direction. They evidently took de-
light, as they went on, in banishing all superfluous
filling from their buildings, as the athlete works
off his superfluous flesh. Like him they liked to
display the muscles and sinews that did the hard
work of the structure, the ribs and shafts that held
it together, and even to suggest them where the
construction did not directly discriminate them.
The greatest step was made when at the end of
the Romanesque period the idea occurred of set-

906 ROMANE’SQ UE' ARCHITECTURE

ting independent ribs on the edges of the groins,
as they had long before been set across the aisles
under the surface of the vaults. Presently also
wall-ribs were set against the wall where the vault
abutted. This once done, the vaulting was divided
into a series of compai'atively small cells to be
separately constructed. The ribs could be built
first, and made a complete skeleton—a permanent
scaffolding, Viollet—Le-Duc called them. They
were built as suited the plan of the vault and bore
the weight and dictated the shape of the light
shells that filled in the spaces between. It is per-
haps a common impression in one who looks up
at a mediaeval vault that it is a great continuous
shell to which a series of subdividing ribs is ap-
plied. But it is something quite different. There
was a certain contumacy in the ribs which made
combination difficult and tended to disturb the
shape of the vaults ; for they were all semicircles,
and being of different diameters, especially when
the bays were not square, were of different heights.
So the centre of a compartment, where the high
diagonals crossed, was bunched up into the sem-
blance of a dome. The ribs were set up like the
wires of a cage, and the triangular cells between
were filled each by its independent arched shell
with less concern for continuity of surface than
the lobes of a melon. The separate cells were
hollowed and warped and twisted into any shape

ROMANESQ UE AR OHITECTURE’ 207

that the independent ribs required, and the whole
is as different as can well be from the fair broad
surfma Roman or Renaissance vault.

The builder’s eagerness to illustrate construc-
tion led him as fast as he added ribs to his vault
to put under each a separate shaft proportioned
to its size, which should seem to carry its weight
down to the ground or to some obviously firm
support below. So, as the ribbing grew compli-
cated, and the arehivolts of the arcades were more
and more divided, were developed those richly
grouped piers whose tall vaulting shafts, climbing
from the floor to the vaults and spreading in ribs
over their surface to meet those from the other
side, gradually substituted a continuity of upright
lines for the continuity of surface that was disap-
pearing. These piers, marking the confines of the
bays, symbolizing and summing up in their parti-
tion the structure of the building, have suggested
the remark that the mediaeval church was planned
from the top downward, inasmuch as the plan
of its very bases depended on and recorded the
Whole arrangement of the vaulting. We have
been told that the oblong groined vault was im-
practicable till the pointed arch was applied,
which made it possible to bring arches of differ-
ent span to the same height; but as a matter of
fact oblong groining is as old as Justinian, being
found in Sta. Sofia; it was a good deal used

208 ROMANESQ UE’ AR CHI TEO T URE’

in French Romanesque churches, and somewhat
in Germany. By the time the transition came on,
bringing that use of the pointed arch which was
first a structural convenience and then a fashion,
the besetting difficulties had been surmounted,
the direction of progress was clear, and architect-
ure was developing with an impetus which was to
carry it forward through three centuries. Even
the scheme of decoration was clearly established,
though its forms were Open to change; there was
nothing to do but go on extending and refining
the application of the principles of construction
and ornamentation which had been evolved.

VII

Nothing more conspicuously distinguished the
Romanesque church from every building that had
preceded it than its towers. Much speculation
has been spent on the questions when and where
these towers were first adopted, and for what
purpose. Was it for defence, for outlook, for ap-
pearance, or to carry bells? We cannot decide;
we can merely recall that till towers were adjoined
to churches they had been used only for defence,
as part of town walls; that the oldest church-
towers, those of Italy, not needed for defence,
were yet not incorporated with the churches, but
stood apart on one side ; that although bells were

ROMANE’SQ UE ARCHITECTURE 209

in use for churches as early as the seventh cen-
tury, till the eleventh they were so small that to
build large towers to carry them was preposter-
ous. And yet again we may remember that in
the deserted buildings of Syria, that strange
quarry of features that reappear in mediaeval
architecture, we see in the church of Turmanin
a pair of towers, with arcaded chambers like bel-
fries, flanking the great arch of the open vestibule.
As for date, though a few of the towers of Italian
basilican churches, or rather the lower stories of
them, are ascribed by writers of credit to the
seventh century and even to the sixth, they are set
later by other authorities, and they are monuments
which have nothing to do with the churches,
though they stand near and group with them.
With the sole exception of the architects of two
or three of the Syrian churches no one before the
Romanesque builders seems to have thought of
making a tower an integral part of a church.
Perhaps the first example we know is Charle-
magne’s at Aachen, where two small round towers
flank the great two-story entrance porch. The
church is on the boundary line between Early
Christian and Romanesque, and the towers are
only stair towers; in the plan for the monastery of
St. Gall, of which I speak elsewhere, and which
dates a score of years later in 820, the two round
towers are set entirely apart from the church in

210 R OHA NESQ UE' AR CHI TE 0T URE

Italian fashion. The fact that there are two,
while most Italian churches were contented with
one, is already significant of the enthusiasm for
them which the northern builders showed as soon
as they began to use them. It is also significant
of that greater fondness for picturesqueness which
has always characterized the people of the north.
The Germans especially, living remote from cities,
and building apart among hills, rejoicing appar-
ently in the romantic aspects of nature, embodi-
ments of picturesqueness in their lives and cus-
toms, were apt to build high up, where their
churches and castles rose conspicuously amid the
most pictorial surroundings. It was of their tem-
perament to like things that were striking, em-
phatic, and the strong accentuation which towers
give to an architectural composition was in keep-
ing with this. It was also natural that a race
which spent its days in ranging through woods
and hills, all whose lives were outdoor lives and
their Whole country an enchanted wilderness,
should take thought for the outdoor aspect of
their buildings and like to see far off their towers
rising above woods or rocky summits. I have al-
ready quoted the judgment that calls the archi-
tecture of the basilica an architecture of the in-
terior, and this was not unnatural for people who
lived among streets. 'The architecture of the
north was for outside effect as much as inside;

ROMAN/ESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 211

the picturesque feeling of the northern people
showed as fast as they developed an architect-
ural sense and began to build after their own in-
stinct.

The first position for the towers was on the
front of the church, where in the early Roman-
esque a single one covering the main entrance, or
more often in Germany at least, a pair embracing
it between them, was almost always to be found,
and was the most important factor of the facade.
They make the most conspicuous difference be-
tween the churches south of the Alps, where they
are almost always lacking, and those in the north.
The German builders could hardly have enough of
them. They soon added them to the sides of the
choir, and fell into the habit of building a larger
one over the crossing. Often towers were added
to the ends of the transepts. It became common
for churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
to have four, six, and even more. The influence of
this enthusiasm extended to Italy, where the
church of San Abbondio at Como, for instance,
and even the southern cathedral of Molfetta are
examples of a pair of towers flanking the choir.
“The Germans and Flemings,” complains an old
French writer, “ have big [bells] and a great many
of them: this comes of their small politeness.”
Certainly the ringing of bells harasses the ears of
travellers in Germany and the Low Countries, but

212 ROMANESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE

fondness for this will not account for the seven
towers of the picturesque abbey of Laach or of the
cathedral of Limburg on the Lahn ; for the peOple
of Ghent or Bruges manage to get all the noise
they want out of one belfry. The variety of me-
diaeval bell-towers is great; their design shows
the delight their builders took in them. Viollet-
le-Duc has said that the church towers are the
touchstone of the imagination of architects in the
Middle Ages. In France the builders were less
lavish of them than in Germany, though the repre-
sentations of the huge church of Cluny indicate
seven; there was apt to be but a single one or a
pair, on the facade or at the side. Often a great
tower over the crossing was the only one, and this
was also a common feature in Lombardy. But
the French builder took infinite pains with them,
especially when there was but one. While the
composition of his interior was rigorously sub-
jected to the plan of his vaulting, the play of fancy
and range of invention in his towers was sur-
prising: nothing better shows his skill, his re-
SOurces, and his grace than the towers he set on his
churches, even small churches, in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries. Richly elaborated belfry stages,
high stone roofs that grew into Spires even before
the pointed Gothic set in, pinnacles and shafted
canopies at the junctions, picturesque dormers, all
these belong to the Romanesque of France, espe-

ROMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 213

cially to Normandy, where the central tower was al-
ways a favorite, and in the middle provinces, where
the Spire was an early growth. In Germany, on
the other hand, where number seems to have been
preferred to elaboration, the types, though vigor-
ous and effective, were restricted. Plainer shafts,
square, round or octagon, or both or all clustered
together, simple groups of windows, high roofs of
wood, conical or pyramidal, broken only by dor-
mers if at all, distinguish the German church
towers. Combinations of these different elements
give the varied picturesqueness that pleases the
traveller on the Rhine and in Germany. But alike
in both countries the outside effect of the churches
was concentrated in the towers. They are the
direct embodiment of that aspiration for upright
lines and loftiness of expression whose growth we
can trace through all the progress of mediaeval
architecture from the eleventh century to the four-
teenth, which culminated in the soaring vaults and
Spires of Amiens, Beauvais, and Cologne, and
which died in the excesses of the fifteenth century.
Yet this upward aspiration did not, during the life
of Romanesque architecture, become a dominating
influence as it did in the thirteenth century. The
Romanesque was, to the end as in the beginning,
by virtue of the conditions of its birth, the archi-
tecture of walls and masses rather than of lines.
Breadth of surface was its characteristic. Italians

214 R OMANESQ UE AR CHITEOTURE

and Germans appear to have been too fond of this
characteristic to surrender it willingly in favor of
a Gothic predominance of lines. The Italians in
practically refusing the Gothic while they nomi-
nally accepted it, kept the character of the R0-
manesque. The Germans clung to the Roman-
esque for the better part of a century after the
French had made the transition into the Gothic,
but in the end they surrendered frankly, and even
outdid the French in the final wiriness of their
style.

VIII

Sculpture had been the prevailing decoration of
Greek architecture; Roman had been almost in-
crusted with carving, in its more elaborate exam-
ples. The early Christian churches in Italy had
been utterly bare of sculpture, though those in
the East, at least those which remain for us to see
in Syria, were liberally adorned with it. We saw
how the fancy of the Christian builders, denied or
refusing an outlet in sculpture, found expression in
lavishly covering the church interiors with mo-
saics. But this kind of decoration, which cen-
tred in two or three important cities—Constanti-
nople, Ravenna, Rome—was a costly specialty, and
seems not to have continued, except where Byzan-
tine or classical influence lingered. The Roman-
esque builders hardly used it, possibly because at

ROMANESQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE 215

first it was impracticable for them, and when they
could decorate at all their fancy was led in an-
other direction.1 The early Christian builders
could get along without sculpture ; the capitals of
their columns, the only really indispensable pieces
of carving, they took as they found them. The
Romanesque builders, left to their own» resources,
worked out their own sculpture from the begin-
ning. The indispensable capital was a permanent
school for them ; they wrought at it patiently and
with unflagging invention for three or four centu-
ries. On the capitals and the elaborate door-
ways their sculpture was mostly concentrated, and
the chief ornaments of the doorways were still the
capitals. The variety of forms which the sculpt-
ors invented for them was inexhaustible; but as in
other parts of architecture so in this, the medi-
wval artists found a treatment as far as possi-
ble from the classic. The sculptured classic capi-
tals, of which the Corinthian was the type, had
assumed. the shape of a bell about which leaves,
volutes, and other independent ornaments were ar-
ranged. The characteristic type of Romanesque
capitals, when they were not more or less directly
imitated from the Corinthian, was quite opposite.
Until the time of transition into Gothic drew near

1The mosaic in the apse of San Ambrogio at Milan seems to
belong to the oldest part of the construction, dating, it is thought,
from the ninth century, and is not Romanesque.

216 ROMiNE'SQ UE ARCHITECTURE

inthe latter half of the twelfth century, most of
them kept through all their variety the semblance
of their constructive type, which was a block of
stone, approximately cubical, narrowed or cham-
fered or rounded of? below to meet the shaft. In
this block, whose underlying form was rather em-
phasized than dissembled, the ornament was sunk,
displayed by cuttings which left it standing at the
original surface. This gave the purely construct-
ive type of capital, ornamented by surface carv-
ing which did not disguise the natural shape more
than do the corrugations of a walnut. In the clas-
sic sculptured capitals, the Corinthian or Compo-
site, the true capital, the bell, could be displayed
only by stripping off the leaves and ornaments
which wrap it round. Nearly all the capitals of
the Romanesque are of this incised constructive
form unless they are imitations of the Corinthian.
Mr. Ruskin has said, indeed, in his uncompromis-
ing fashion, that there are not, and never can be
more than two orders of capitals, the concave and
the convex, meaning these two classes which I
have indicated.

The most elementary form which these capitals
take, perhaps the most typical, is the cubic cap,
called in German Wfirfel-capital (die-capital), in
English often the cushion-capital. This, which is
the father of a large family, consists in its sim-
plest shape of a square die with its lower corners

R OMANESQ UE AR CHI TE 0 T URE 217

rounded off, usually in a sweep that makes each
face semicircular below, or nearly so. It belongs
to the whole range of German Romanesque, in
North Italy, in Germany, in Normandy and Eng-
land as well. The undercut corners, or the lateral
faces, or both, are subject to an endless variety of
ornamental carving, which sometimes obscures the
original form. It is the most direct and natural
shape possible to the simple constructive capital,
a rectangular block of stone mediating between
the impost above and the shaft below, left square
at the top to receive the impost, rounded beneath
to meet the shaft. Singularly enough it is to the
East once more that we must look to find the
beginnings of this characteristic form, as of so
many that afterward signalized the Romanesque.
If we may trust the accepted chronology, the old-
est examples are the columns in the famous build-
ing at Constantinople called by the Turks the
Hall of a thousand and one Columns, and identi-
fied with the cistern of Philoxenos which was built
in the fourth century. This type, then, is almost
of classic age, passing into the Byzantine and
Saracenic styles, as well as the Romanesque; it
comes next in longevity and fecundity to the pa-
triarchal Corinthian, whose posterity abounds in
every style, and whose race is not yet exhausted.
To insist that a feature which is so straightfor-
ward a product of mechanical exigency as the

218 R OMANESQ UE AR CHITEOT URE

cubic capital must be due everywhere to transmis-
sion, would be unsafe; yet borrowing is an easier
process than inventing.

The prevailing motives of Romanesque decora-
tion are familiar—the all-pervading interlace, as
characteristic of Norse and Celtic ornament as of
Byzantine and Moorish, the continuous alternating
scroll, the perennial acanthus, and the endless
variety of leafage derived from it, the lions and
griflins guarding the doorways of the churches
and submissively upholding their porches, the
eagles, peacocks, and whole fauna of other ani-
mals that play among the convolutions of their
vines, the grotesquely active human figures that
writhe and struggle through them. In Italy,
southern France, and the Rhineland, declining as
it stretched northward, the influence of Byzantine
workmen and Byzantine art is clearly marked. In
the south a certain effort for classic balance and
elegance and a respect for naturalism temper the
Teutonic vivacity. In the north the play of a wild
fancy led the artist away from naturalism and
from formality. Everywhere in his work are a
picturesqueness, a rough humor and fondness for
the grotesque, an energy and display of emotion
that are as far as possible from the classic quali-
ties of art. But it is all under the dominion of a
singularly strong sense of decorative effect. All is
put together with an instinct for design like that

ROMANESQ UE’ AR 0H1 TECTURE 219

of early Greek or oriental art, an easy compact-
ness that almost matches the solid harmony of
Egyptian decoration. The study of the symbol-
ism and the didactic purpose of the sculpture be-
longs to the iconography of the churches, into
which I do not enter here. The Teutonic mind
was as full of symbols as the Hebrew ; the whole
Bible story lay open to the sculptor, the legend
and the poetry of his own race were stimulating
material, and he had the plastic imagination to
embody both.

Men who have studied the Romanesque down
to its last development in the thirteenth century
are tempted to regret its sudden extinguishment
in the transition to the pointed Gothic, as we la-
ment the untimely death of a man who leaves half
fulfilled his promise of greatness. We would fain
have seen what beauty the perfect skill that was
lavished on the Gothic of the thirteenth century
would have evoked from the round arches and
broad walls of the older style. There have been
several attempts to revive it in our time, notably
among Germans, Who have with reason looked on
it as the style of their own race, and by one, the
ablest perhaps, among American architects. But
it has not prevailed, and most of the attempts have
not encouraged us to think that it suits the mod-
ern genius. Eyes long trained by inheritance and
schooling to the pr0portions of the orders and all

220 ROMANE'SQ UE’ ARCHITECTURE

the peculiar concinnity of the Renaissance do not
take kindly to the bold breadth of surface, the wil-
fulness of proportion, the concentration and vigor
of carved ornament that belonged to the Roman-
esque. We may take the relation of column and
arch as a most characteristic and crucial one, vary-
ing continually, yet at the best period always with
a negligent grace that eludes the modern designer.
The proportion of massive impost and slender
shaft, the luxuriant spreading capital and clinging
base, seem to defy his imitation. It is easy to
weave basket-work and twine interlaces, to inter-
weave grotesque birds and animals, to spread out a
spiky acanthus starred with drill-holes, such as we
see in the south of France or wherever else Byzan-
tine influence was marked. But to combine the
breadth and vigor of the old style with the refine-
ment which in the end it attained, to emulate the
exuberant fancy and untiring invention of the men
who pervaded the churches of the twelfth century
with their sculpture—this is not easy. One secret
of the difficulty is that Romanesque architecture
was a popular art; that the impulse, the religion,
and the convictions of whole races were behind it;
that the opulence of fancy and invention which
suffused this or that great church was the cumula-
tive offering of hundreds of workmen, each an ar-
tist in his kind, each bringing his own gift of skill
and imagination. Moreover, this architecture, in

R OMANESQ UE ARCHITECTURE 221

spite of its appeal to everyone who is attracted by
the picturesque, goes against the preconceptions
of those whose habit is formed on other styles, in
that it finds its main effort not in accumulation of
features and fixed proportions, not in aspiring lines
and pointed summits, but, like no other style that
we see, in the massing of wall-surface contrasted
by dark arches and upright shafts. It is the only
style that has set its chief value on what is really
the main substance of every building, the wall;
and the wall, more than any other part, strange to
say, is What the architects of the West have been
constantly tempted to dissemble, obscure, and
suppress.

THE RENAISSANCE

I

I HAVE noted in a previous essay that Rm
architecture was essentially secular, as Greek had
Wammflysacfe‘d’, an architecture "or palaces
and civic buildings, of buildings intended for os-
tentation and luxurious living, among which the
temples were comparatively unimportant. “That
was more characteristic, all the innovations, all the
advances, were in the service of secular building,
and the feature which was the means of them all,
the arch, was rejected from religious architecture
as it had been among the Greeks. Medizeval ar-
chitecture, on the other hand, was the child of the
Church, the heir of her wealth and her solici-
tude. All its types were evolved in the building
of churches; all its important buildings were
churches ; the form it developed for them was as
typical and almost as obligatory as that of the
Greek temple, though its variations were greater.
Secular buildings were as inferior in importance

and perhaps of as few types as among the Greeks ;
222

in M" w

 

THE RENAISSANCE 223

all their details were borrowed from the churches.
But the feature which the mediaeval builders most
exalted, on which the whole development of their
architecture was founded, was the very one which
had been banished from the religious architect-
ure of the ancients—the arch. Greek architecture
and mediaeval, then, were alike religious, though
the medizeval was as exclusively that of the arch
as the other had been that of the beam ; but the
mediaeval architecture of the arch was as charac-
teristically religious as the Roman had been secu-
lar. The ethical reason or significance of these
contrasts I have not tried to trace. There is no
lack of writers whose mission is of this kind.
But one characteristic all the ancient styles had in
common—they were all aristocratic. The art of
Egypt, it is well known, was purely hieratic. It is
difficult to trace the development of Greek art in
its social relations, but the cities of Greece, even
those that thought themselves most democratic,
were oligarchies, not democracies; and while it
is clear that the Greeks had exceptional artistic
gifts, the religious association of their architect-
ure, the fewness and inflexibility of its forms, its
conservatism, and the narrow lines of its evolution
give it, especially the Doric, a distinctly hieratic
character. It did not take the impress of common
interests and daily life as their sculpture and
painting did. The architecture of the Roman Em-

224 THE RENAISSANCE

pire again was the concern of emperors, rulers, and
the rich. The people, most of all in Rome, were by
their very condition excluded from care of it and
probably from direct interest, being either an
eleemosynary population, dependent on the largess
of the rich or of the state, or else of the artisan
and servile class. Roman architecture then, while
it was completely secular, was an aristocratic archi-
tecture, the architecture of the rich and powerful.
One significant thing we may recall here. In
all religions before the Christian the priesthood
was a segregated body, in many cases a caste; their
business was to serve the worship of inaccessible
deities to whom the mass of men had not even the
right to offer service. The crowd of‘ worshippers
was shut out of the sanctuary, and the worship
was vicarious. The priesthood lived in a remote-
ness which was analogous to that of the gods
themselves; the temple was the abode of the god,
not the resort of the people. Under the Christian
religion worship became the common function of all
the faithful, the clergy’s duty was to minister per-
sonally to all, the churches were built to harbor the
whole mass of the people. The clergy was concerned
from the beginning to stand as close to the people
as possible instead of holding aloof from them;
every interest of the Church was the interest of the
people; the church building was their common
shelter and their common care, often they used it

THE RENAISSANCE 225

for their secular gatherings as well as for worship,
and sometimes to its detriment. “’6 have seen
how under the influence of the monastic orders the
convents became great brotherhoods of laborers in
which most of the productive work of Christen-
dom was centred, how during the eleventh and
twelfth centuries especially, the greater part of
their labor went to the building of churches and of
other church buildings. History shows how un-
der the rise of the cities and the episcopate in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries the great cathe-
drals were built with the common prayers, ofi'er-
ings, and labor of all the people of the cities.
Architecture was the dominant art of the Middle
Ages. It absorbed the popular interest and laid
all other arts under tribute; it gathered to itself
the fruits of all other productive activities. We
may say then that the architecture of the Middle
Ages was a popular architecture as none other has
been before or since, so far as we know. It repre-
sented, moreover, not the individual ambitions,
avarice, or luxury of the people, but their most un-
selfish and unworldly interests, so that their high-
est producing faculty, their highest criticism, and
their highest aspiration went into it.

The art of the Renaissance was in its spirit as
sharply distinguished from the mediaeval, which it
superseded, as in its form, or as was the Roman,
which it imitated. If the mediaeval styles had

226 THE RENAISSANCE

been religious and popular, the Renaissance was
aristocratic, and as we shall presently see, it was the
child of the learned, of dilettanti. Its protectors
were the new despots of Italy, warlike advent-
urers and condottieri like the Sforzas and Malat-
testas, or successful men of affairs like the Medici
—not, to be sure, an aristocracy of long descent,
but such an aristocracy as Italy had after the sub-
version of the feudal nobility which had sunk away
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and
disappeared with the wreck of the power of the
German emperors in her. It- was in nowise the
product of the people, who had to be educated to
receive it, in nowise an evolution from the style
which the people were practising when it was in-
troduced. It was as far from being religious as
from being popular; its strictest opponents were
the regular clergy, that monastic clergy in whom
were centred all the conservatism of the Church.
All its associations were secular, from its Roman
days to its latest; it would be difficult to find in
history a more irreligious class than the petty des-
pots who were its promoters, and the worldly prel-
ates who were the secular clergy of its time, or
sacred buildings which were less the embodiment
of pious zeal than the churches which it supplied.
Its forms and monuments suggest stateliness, ele-
gance, ostentatious splendor, or fastidious refine-
ment, but not the august solemnity of ancient re-

THE RENAISSANCE 227

ligions or the humility and devoutness of the
Christian. Pageantry, not reverence or sacrifice,
is its natural accompaniment. By the time of the
Renaissance the people, even the industrial and
commercial oligarchies that had ruled the large
cities, had lost their hold on government and every
sort of public‘undertaking. Arts as well as poli-
tics had passed out of their direction. Architect-
ure, like painting, was in the hands of a profes-
sional class, who were themselves the servants of
the rich and the powerful. The general public had
no longer control of it, and gradually lapsed into
that condition of indifference which has been its at-
titude ever since, and probably had been among an-
cient nations. We hear of no such popular absorp-
tion in the work of building under the Renaissance
as during the Middle Ages. We do not read of
the peOple harnessing themselves in crowds to
Wagons to drag their stones and heavy beams over
hills and through rivers, as in the building of the
cathedral of Chartres; of the town setting aside
a share of its revenue year after year to build its
cathedral, as in the great Tuscan cities ; of the
union of the trades calling the artists of the world
into council to build them a church of beauty such
as the world had not seen before, as in Florence;
of the imposts on provisions appropriated to fur-
nish the cathedral with a tower, as for the Butter
Tower at Rouen. There were not in Italy whole

228 THE RENAISSANCE

communities of busy artisans gathered under the
shadow of the great monasteries, and devoting
themselves to building, such as there were in
France and Germany in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. The architecture of the Renaissance
was in its social spirit and conduct, perhaps un-
consciously, as close a repetition of that of the
Empire as it aimed to be in its artistic spirit and
form.

II

There is apparently a common impression that
in architecture at least the Renaissance was a
sudden transformation, as when a precipitate is
produced by pouring together two chemical solu-
tions; and that the moment of mingling can be
accurately determined. But this is not the case.
It was as when a vessel of water has been long
cooling in stillness to the point of freezing with-
out visible change, and then at a sudden jar the
particles all at once rearrange themselves and the
mass crystallizes into ice. The change itself was
rapid and striking; the influences that led to it
were inveterate. If we wish to trace them we must
go back to the days of Charlemagne, and then we
find that we must look farther still and follow them
till we reach Constantine himself, from whose
time dates the first divergence from the types of
classic art. The truth is that the classic instinct

THE RENA ISSANC'E’ 5229

never died out of the Italians; its persistence
shows itself almost as much in architecture as in
literature and law. The story of Italy reminds one
of some man of strongly marked natural instincts
who, turned away from his natural bent by the
pressure of active life and companionship, reverts
at a later time for good or ill to tendencies that
have been dormant through his busy career, and
astonishes the world by a transformation that is
only the natural outcome of his character—like
Tiberius, for instance, or Diocletian in ancient
times, or Charles V. in modern.

In the Middle Ages all the northern and central
parts of Italy, possessed by Gothic, Lombardic,
and Frankish invaders, were given over to German
rule, and subjected really or nominally to the
northern emperors. They were for the time thor-
oughly dominated and Teutonised in manners, and
fell into the current of Lombard or Romanesque
architecture which spread over the middle of Eu-
rope wherever German influence dominated. But
the invaders had never possessed the coast regions
of Italy and the extreme south in the same way,
and there the native race had resisted the Lom-
bard style and yielded but slowly to it, in many
parts not at all. On the eastern shore the influ-
ence of Constantinople contended with the Ger-
man till the end of the Middle Ages. Rome had
never been permanently occupied by any of the

230 THE RENAISSANCE

German races, or by their styles of building. Her
population had remained comparatively pure, her
pride in her old station was undiminished, she
clung tenaciously to her old traditions. But her
power was the ecclesiastical power of the popes;
as a city she sank continually, while all the rest of
Italy rose from the abasement of the barbarian
conquest; to the civilization and arts of the Mid-
dle Ages she contributed nothing. During the
Babylonish captivity, as the popes called their
exile to Avignon, she became a decadent provincial
town, given over to poverty and depopulation, the
prey of a handful of disreputable nobles. In Tus-
cany, too, the population seems to have been al-
ways preponderatingly Italian, though Lombard
dukes and Frankish counts made haste to estab-
lish their rule in it. The peOple never lost the
tradition of Etruscan descent and of Roman em-
pire, but retained always a classic instinct which
showed in their building; the Lombard architect-
ure has scarcely left a trace there. Florence—
where, as Villari says, though the nobles were of
German origin, as were the feudal institutions, a
population collected which was principally arti-
san and Roman by origin and tradition—escaped
a change of population by her unimportance and
remoteness. Her feeling was all Roman. She
pleased herself by tracing her origin to the wars
of Cataline, her name to one of the generals who

THE RENA I S SANC B 231

fought against him; she called herself in her
young days the Little Rome. The Tuscan media;-
val architecture was a style apart, showing always
aoertain liking for classic qualities in fondness for
flat surfaces of wall, for columns not- stretched
much beyond classic proportion, and not contin-
ued through successive stories, for horizontal
lines, and lintels under arches or in place of them,
for gables in classic shape tied across like pedi-
ments, and an avoidance of great vertical lines or
features. The cathedral of Pisa, begun in 1063,
the first great work of the style, so far as we
know, has these characteristics, which won for it
the praise of the architects of the Renaissance, as
we may see in Vasari. The lower front of the
cathedral at Empoli, which is nearly as old, the
very similar facade of San lfiniato, and the fa-
mous baptistery at Florence show a distinct ten-
dency to continue or resume classical forms. In
Rome, neither Romanesque nor Gothic found en-
trance, except sporadically, brought in by colo-
nies of monks, and there the need of buildings
grew less and less instead of increasing. But
when about the beginning of - the thirteenth cen-
tury there came a temporary impulse to new build-
ing, when for a season the popes enjoyed a little
tranquillity and began to restore their buildings
under the lead of a. group of conspicuous artists,
the so-called Cosmati, there was a peculiar revival

232 THE RENAISSANCE

of decorative architecture in a classic fashion,
though on a small scale, which we may see in the
famous cloisters of St. Paul and St. John Lateran,
and in the porch added to San Lorenzo fuori 1e
Mura. To this time of revival, which was called
by some writers a proto-Renaissance, certain au-
thorities have even ascribed the nave of San Lo-
renzo and that of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, which
are lined with quasi-classic orders instead of the
usual arcades.

In Florence the case was different. Her season
of prosperity came late enough to save her from
being an object of greed or vengeance in the im-
perial wars, but by the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury she was too thriving, too progressive, too
busy in the affairs of the world not to take up its
fashions. The Gothic fashion found its way into
her in spite of the underlying classic feeling which
showed through her Romanesque. But the same
feeling tinctured even her Gothic in a variety of
ways. It is conspicuous in the habit, retained
from the Tuscan Romanesque, of putting the sem-
blance of an entablature between the column and
arch in doorways, or the moulded stilt between
the piers and arches of the arcades in the cathe-
dral and Loggia dei Lanzi. Though from the end
of the thirteenth century to the end of the four-
teenth the Gothic style swept over her as over all
Italy except Rome, and changed her aspect till the

THE RENA. ISSANCE 233

classical tendency seemed to be buried almost be-
yond resurrection, yet the Gothic spirit had not
taken possession of her. Through the whole pen-
insula we can see that Gothic buildings are not
designed as Gothic builders would have had them,
except here and there by imported hands; that the
classic love for broad walls and horizontal lines,
and even for round arches, shows through all.

As we all remember, the Renaissance did not
begin with architecture. It was a great general
movement in literature, art, science, a revolution
in ideas of life, history, manners, and thought,
which was, after all, a direct evolution from the
conditions which had preceded it. But for its
consonance with the spirit of the Italian people,
says Burckhardt, the Renaissance would not have
been the inevitable phase in the world’s history
that it was. The spirit of the Italian people at
this time was a complex inheritance from two
different peoples—a restless, inquiring, innovat-
ing, audacious spirit inherited or imbibed from
the northern races, with a distinct gift for expres-
sion in art and literature, but profoundly modified
by a sense of order and relation which descended
from the old Romans, and by constant companion-
ship with the broadly designed, harmoniously fin-
ished monuments of both literature and art that
antiquity had bequeathed, as well as by a thou-
sand associations in political, legal, social, and

234 THE RENA ISSA N 0E

even religious tradition which were of Roman
origin. The sense for breadth and coordination
in which lay the best success of the Roman people
and empire, shut out from political expression,
found their first outlet in literature, their examples
in the works of classic authors. These works,
cherished in the monasteries and schools during
the Middle Ages, were made accessible in larger
number by constant discoveries in the fourteenth
century and after, still more by the exodus of
scholars and literary men from Constantinople
after its capture by the Turks in the middle of the
fifteenth century. The close concentration of po-
litical action in the hands of the despots of the
fourteenth century had left hardly an opening for
most active-minded men of peace, except in the
study of literature and law. The fruitlessness of
the career of the scholar in politics, the rewards
which he could win by restraining himself to liter-
ature, are well illustrated in the life of Petrarch,
who may be considered the herald of the Renais-
sance. No wonder that uncloistered men of letters,
like him and his followers, revolting from dialec-
tics and the third or the thirtieth dilution of Aris-
totle, with the zest of a new sense for freedom of
thought and beauty of expression, should fall to
worshipping the works of Cicero and the Roman
poets. No wonder that the worship should spread
and absorb the whole class of secular scholars,

THE RENAISSANCE 235

stimulated as it constantly was by the discovery of
new authors, and seconded by the ineradicable in-
clination of the Italians to all things classic. No
wonder that it should come presently to include
all the forms of classic art, finding in them the
same qualities of balanced harmony, of measure
and grace which made classic literature admirable.
For the first time since the Empire, the connois-
seur reappeared, like the fastidious dilettante Nic-
colo Niccoli of Florence, who filled his house not
only with the collection of precious manuscripts
which now adorns the Laurentian Library, but
with every kind of classical bric-a-brac, examples
of the lesser decorative arts of Rome.

The Renaissance had it in favor of its success
from the beginning that it enlisted the rich and
the powerful, as well as the learned. It became
the fashion, and imprinted itself upon the arts by
force of patronage. That is, the style of the Re-
naissance did; its Spirit was in the nation, and
would surely have made itself conspicuous in some
change or striking outgrowth of civilization. But
its classic aspect was forced upon it of set purpose
as a fashion, and though the spirit was in the peo-
ple, it was chiefly in those who were socially at the
top by birth, or who by virtue of the possession of
it forced themselves to the top. The common peo-
ple did but reflect it in their handiwork, as was
natural. The despots, petty and great, who had

236 THE RENA I SSANCE

won control of the Italian states, and who no
longer needed to give themselves over to a life of
warfare, made it their means of distinction. They
surrounded themselves with the scholars, poets,
and artists who were illustrating the arts and let-
ters of antiquity. They sought pre-eminence as
patrons, connoisseurs, and even as scholars. The
Renaissance had permeated the air of Italy before
it infected its architecture.

111

Florence was the cradle of the Renaissance,
Rome was its school, Lombardy and Venice were
its playground. The passion for studying the
literature and art of Rome inevitably brought with
it the passion for imitating them. The first effec-
tive beginning of it was in Florence, which in the
fourteenth century became the most progressive
city in Italy and the most alive, the very focus of
the best activity, commercial, financial, political,
literary, and artistic. The band of literary men
who gathered in her to follow the lead of Petrarch
and Boccaccio—Niccoli, Manetti, Bruni, Salutato,
Latini, Leonardo of Arezzo, Poggio, Thomas of
Sarzana, who as Pope Nicholas V. carried the im-
pulse of the Renaissance to Rome—all these spread
the flame and set Italy on fire with it. The story
of Petrarch and his friend Colonna sitting on the

THE RENA ISSANCE 237

Colosseum and mourning over the fallen monu-
ments of Rome is a familiar one, as is that of
Rienzi’s deciphering and theatrical proclamation
of old inscriptions of the city. There is no indi-
cation, it is true, that either Petrarch or Rienzi
cared anything for Roman monuments as works of
art; but it was not a long step from the literature
of Rome to her art, and at an epoch of exuberant
artistic activity it was impossible that zeal for the
one should not soon come to include the other.
We may call the famous competition for the new
doors of the baptistery at Florence in 1403 the
signal for the Renaissance in art. After his dis-
appointment in this competition Brunelleschi, who
had imbibed the prevailing spirit of worship for
the antique, and was beset, moreover, with the
idea of the greater competition for finishing the
cathedral, which had been left without its central
cupola by Arnolfo a century before, went to Rome
determined to prepare himself by study of the re-
mains of the imperial architecture there. He was
the first person. so far as we know, who gave him-
self systematically to this study of antique build-
ings; it engrossed him for some years, during
which he examined, measured, and carefully re-
corded all the remains of antique building that he
had access to. When he returned he came pre-
pared for the competition of the cathedral, full of
ideas and great projects for the revival of classic

238 THE RENAISSANCE

architecture. His appointment as architect of the
Duomo set the seal of a great success on the new
movement, and made him the representative ar-
chitect of Florence. All the greatest buildings of
the time gravitated naturally into Brunelleschi’s
hands. In his greatest work, the dome of the
cathedral, the exigencies of the constructive prob-
lem seem to have governed his design. There
was no Roman precedent for such a dome, and it
is only in some of the subordinate details that his
classic predilections appear. The less exacting
designs that he executed while this was going on
show how entirely he broke with the traditions of
his day. The little chapel of the Pazzi, built in
1420, where small domes on pendentives above
round Roman vaulting are carried on a Corinthian
order, made an epoch by the novelty and grace
of its design, and is still a delight to architects.
Before his death in 1446 he had built the great
church of San Lorenzo, the hospital of the Inno-
centi with its graceful arcaded loggia, had begun
the Pitti Palace, and left a design for the church
of San Spirito which was carried out after his
death. There is some reason for believing that
he also planned for Cosimo dei Medici the Ric-
cardi Palace, which was built after his death by
Michelozzo. Perhaps the most striking example
of the originality of his conceptions and the clas-
sic feeling that underlay them was the great round

\ (A:

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THE RENA [SSA N CE 239

church of Santi Angeli, which also was left to be
built by his successors from his plans, but was
only carried a few feet above the ground, and
whose dishonored remains, hidden among the
houses of Florence, are unseen by most travellers.
Brunelleschi’s influence turned the course of archi-
tecture in Florence. The second great apostle of
the Renaissance, Alberti, had already appeared in
Florence, had visited Rome to study as Brunel-
leschi had studied, and to collect the knowledge
which he embodied in his treatise De Re ZEdifica-
toria. He devoted himself to the study of Vitru-
vius’s book, which had been discovered in a con-
vent by Poggio on his journey to the Council of
Constance in 1414:, though we have no evidence
that Brunelleschi had seen it. By the middle of
the century the new style had spread to other im-
portant cities in Italy. Brunelleschi himself had
carried it to Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara, his dis-
ciple Michelozzo to Venice, Alberti to Bimini.
Bernardo Rossellino had learned the trick and was
joined with Michelozzo in finishing the lantern for
Brunelleschi’s dome. In 1450 Thomas of Sarzana,
now become Nicholas V., the coryphaeus of the men
of letters of the fifteenth century, summoned Alberti
and Rossellino to Rome to undertake the building
of the great new church of St. Peter, and from this
time the Renaissance took possession of the archi-
tecture of Italy, as it had before of her literature.

240 THE RENAISSANCE

If the Renaissance was, as I have said, a fashion
in literature, it was more stringently a fashion in
architecture. For whereas before the Renaissance
Italy scarcely had a literature, she had an abund-
ant and vigorous architecture, the luxuriant growth
of five centuries since she had begun to recover
from her invasions. Her builders were busy prac-
tical men, absorbed in their own traditions, work-
ing in an established style with the accumulated
skill of many generations. The introduction of the
Gothic style into Italy had been a fashion, it is
true, but it was a fashion born in the regular de-
velopment of architecture. It was the builders of
the north who had conceived and worked out all
that was vital in that style; it was the logical out-
come of the Lombard Romanesque which had been
developed alike in Italy and in Germany. It was
at least a strictly professional importation into
Italy, brought in by builders themselves, by the
Cistercians in middle Italy, in Casamari and Fos-
sanova for instance, elsewhere by Specially im-
ported masters from the north, in Vercelli, Milan,
Assisi. Received rather slowly by the Italian
builders, it had been gradually amalgamated with
the native styles, modified by native prejudices,
and consolidated into a manner which was at last
very different from the northern style and dis-
tinctly Italian. The builders had not had to give
up their traditional ideas of construction and com-

THE RENAISSANCE 24].

position, to accept any radically new theories, or
conform to an essentially new taste. They had
only to adapt certain new motives of decoration to
their old forms of buildings, and they did it of
their own election, not under any outside dicta-
tion. To have thoroughly adOpted the Gothic
of the north they would have had to do much
more, but they stopped with this, and their Italian
Gothic was only Italian Romanesque dressed out
in Gothic detail.

The classic revival, on the other hand, was not
extended to architecture by men who were bred to
building, but by men who were attracted into it
from outside, by amateurs who came with a mission
of reform. Artists they were, but not architects.
Brunelleschi, who was first a goldsmith and then a
sculptor, did not begin his career as an architect
till he was more than forty years old; we have
seen that he was tempted into it by the problem of
putting the dome upon the cathedral of Florence.
It was only by virtue of a commanding genius, an
unequalled opportunity, a tact and persistency
that overbore every resistance that he won and
held his place. Alberti was an aristocrat, a scholar,
and a genius as well, but never a thoroughly qual-
ified architect. Beginning as a man of letters,
then a painter, and at last in the mere swing of his
orbit brought round to architecture, he was carried
into his position of a leader of the Renaissance

242 THE RENAISSANCE

only by his own individuality and by being on the
crest of the wave of a great new movement. The
two were in fact enthusiastic amateurs without
habits or prepossessions that bound them to old
ways of building ; their only restraint was in their
imperfect knowledge of what they had to do.
Brunelleschi had no guide but his own observa-
tion and instinct ; Alberti found Vitruvius to give
him a clew to the scheme of classical design which
he was eagerly searching out. Both felt from the
beginning that the secret lay in first subjecting
one’s whole composition to a scheme of carefully
combined proportions, and in adjusting every part
in harmonious relation to this. It was what Al-
berti meant by his much quoted phrase, “ tutta
quella musica.” With the help of Vitruvius’s pre-
cepts, which were perhaps more transparent to
him than to us of to-day, and by comparison with
his measurements of Roman monuments, he de-
duced a system of minute pr0portions which be
embodied in his treatise, and it must be said that
by virtue of it he came nearer than any of his con,
temporaries, in his facades for San Francesco at
Bimini and San Andrea at Mantua, to that look of
classic authenticity at which he aimed.

THE RENAISSANCE 243

IV

The central task of the architects of the Re-
naissance was to bring back the classic order in its
supremacy. This meant a radical change not only
in the forms employed in building, but in the con-
ceptions and feeling of the builder. It was not
only a reversion from the architecture of the arch
to that of the lintel and entablature, and an ex-
change of the decorative forms of mediaeval art to
classic; it meant also a revolution in artistic habit,
in the sense of the relative importance of parts, of
proportion and adjustment, that guided the de-
signer in his work; and this, as he knows, is a
more fundamental revolution than the other. It
meant nothing less than a change of heart in the
artist. No wonder that this went on somewhat
slowly; in the ordinary course of human devel-
opment it would have cost as many centuries as
the generations that were actually occupied in it.
But it was helped by an extraordinary coincidence
of changes in the life of Italy, by an extraordinary
advance for the moment in political stability, re-
pose, accumulation of wealth, and luxury of living,
and at the same time a metamorphosis of taste in
literature and art which was really sudden. Only
such causes, with the appearance of a new class of
leaders backed by authority, wealth, and the at-

244 THE RE’NA [SSA N 013

traction of a new fashion could have carried it
through. It needed also a community active-
minded, progressive, with a natural tendency to
expression in art, and an underlying sympathy
with the direction in which the movement was
made. Such a community with such a sympathy
was found in Florence in the fifteenth century.
There are many indications that the new move-
ment met opposition, instinctive and perhaps un-
conscious where it was not deliberate. The con-
vent-bred clergy, the democratic and conservative
bodyin the Church, the godparents of the Roman-
esque architecture in the north, doggedly resisted
the whole Renaissance movement from the first.
They saw in the beginning that its literature
threatened their spiritual authority; they accused
it, no‘. without reason, of immorality and impiety.
It was not natural that they should see with pa-
tience the contemptuous setting aside of mediaeval
architecture, the daughter and the glory of the
Church. It did not make the new style more
welcome that it was favored in Italy by an aris-
tocratic and worldly secular clergy. The clerical
opposition was not confined to the monks or to
the beginnings of the Renaissance. Two attempts
were made to finish the cathedral of Milan in the
new style, one when Brunelleschi was called in
1430 to consult about the building of the dome,
another a century later when Pellegrini began a

“m. 0...

THE RENAISSANCE 245

neo-classic facade; both attempts were frustrated,
and it remained for Napoleon to introduce discord
into its harmony. But the friction of the styles
showed itself also in a different way. Outside
Tuscany, and wherever the mediaeval traditions of
building were strong, though the new style made
its way fast, it was by admixture with the old, not
by at once di8placing it. The change appeared
first in the ornament of buildings of the old pro-
portion and design. Classic details, taken from
the lesser decorative works of Roman art, cippi,
candelabra, vases, or monuments like the so-called
Arch of the Silversmiths or Goldsmiths at Rome,
are naively interpolated into unclassic composi-

tions—finely wrought arabesques, capitals and con-'

soles, string-courses and cornices of classic pro-
file, delicate pilasters, pediments and small orders,
refined away from the robustness and self-assertion
of the classic types, a great profusion of surface
ornament and surface color. The builders and
artisans could not at once surrender themselves
frankly to the new mode. This is specially char-
acteristic of Lombardy in the fifteenth century,
and of Venice, where the Byzantine feeling for
polychrome material and surface decoration lin-
gered long. We see it in Fra Giocondo’s famous
loggia at Verona, in the oratory of San Bernar-
dino at. Perugia, in the church of Sta. Maria dei
Miracoli, the Dario Palace and other works of the

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246 THE RENA ISSANC’E

Lombardi at Venice. There was in this transitional
work of builders who inherited the mediaeval feel~
ing, a charm of abundant fancy, of picturesque-
ness, grace, and freedom that has delighted the
world. It was short-lived ; the inevitable progress
of the revival swept it away and it gave place to a
classic formalism.

In Florence, where the remnant of classic taste
provided a natural milieu, where the leaders were
not builders, and where the literary impulse of
classicism was already dominant, the style grew
differently; there was no transition. Brunelleschi
and Alberti, the Peter and Paul of the Renaissance,
were fully absorbed in the new, with no habits or
prepossessions that bound them to the old. The
sense of the pr0portions on which Roman design
was built was, to be sure, only partially awake in
Brunelleschi. His lean entablatures and starved
orders, the baldness of his details, contrast notably
with the freshness and nobility of his ideas and
with their classic intention. Both he and Alberti
were too intent on their large conception of the -
architect’s task to give their best thought to de-
tail, and, moreover, for lack of training, both were
probably incapable of designing it or criticising it
finely. They took care that their detail should be
classic in style and that it should keep its place
unobtrusively in their compositions; but they could
not avoid a certain prim baldness that character-

THE RENA Ib'SA NOE 247

izes their work, nor secure the charm -which a free
fancy and practised delicacy Qf handling gave to

the detail of the Lombard and Venetian builders:

But from the beginning, if the classicism of Bru-
nelleschi and Alberti was imperfect, it was ex-
clusive. In their work was no reminiscence of all
the centuries that had come and gone between
them and the reign of Diocletian. There was, as I
have just said, no transition for them; it was an
absolute breaking off, and a fresh beginning.
Bramante, the third of the great classicists, was
of a different kind. Coming from Umbria into
Lombardy as a painter, he decorated the walls and
ceilings of many churches and palaces, and turn-
ing naturally to architecture, entered it through
a professional door. His earlier buildings, exe-
cuted in the last quarter of the fifteenth century,
show the traditions of the old style mingled with
the new, or rather the details of the new engrafted
on the forms of the old, in the way I have men-
tioned. In the choir which was added to Sta.
Maria delle Grazie at Milan from his designs, and
in many other churches which are ascribed to him
in Lombard cities, we see the free handling of
classic forms, the crowding of columns and arcades,
the exuberance and animation of detail, the pictu-
resque composition, which the Renaissance of Lom-

bardy inherited from her Romanesque. When,

moved by the common impulse of the time, and by

W

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248 THE RENAISSANCE

the desire to study Roman building at first hand,
he came to Rome in 1500, he had passed his flam-
boyant period ; he was fifty years old, matured and
long practised in all the routine of architecture.
Here, under the influence of the Roman monuments,
he changed his manner completely, turning to sim-
plicity and grandeur of design and to strictness of
classical style. The continuation, or rather com-
plete renewal, of the new St. Peter’s, begun fifty
years before for Nicholas V. by Alberti and Ros-
sellino and now put into his hands by Julius II.,
gave him his great opportunity. He entirely remod-
elled the design, giving it the enormous scale and
greatness of conception which make it the wonder
that it is in spite of all the alteration that has be-
fallen it, even though not a stone that he laid be
now visible.

With Nicholas V. the centre of the Renaissance
in literature and art shifted from Florence to Rome.
Four great popes who held the chair at intervals
during the second half of the fifteenth century
and the first quarter of the sixteenth—Nicholas
himself, Pius II., Julius II., and Leo X.—gave
their energy to forwarding it. The great-est men of
letters of the time—none were very great, it must
be confessed—and the greatest artists, crowded
about them, or were compelled into their retinues.

Rome, whose abiding influence had inSpired the
' whole movement, now claimed her men, and be-

THE RENA ISSAN CE 249

came the focus of their activity. Her tonuments
schooled them ; her new wealth and worldly activ-
ity stimulated them. Bramante’s great schemes,
and the buildings which he actually executed,
seemed to renew the traditions of the Empire.
The disciples and followers whom he personally
influenced, Peruzzi, Raphael, Andrea Sansovino,
and many others, even the indocile Michelangelo,
took the tradition from him, carrying it on with
fuller knowledge and better trained hands, but
with no greater power, and hardly with so high a
reach of conception. The renewed prosperity of
Rome, the worldly splendor with which the great
popes of the sixteenth century surrounded them-
selves, concurred with the quick growth of the new
arts ; and the city became again as much the model
of the world’s magnificence, the leader of its civili-
zation, as it had been in the reign of Augustus.

V

The effort of the three pioneers, Brunelleschi,
Alberti, and Bramante, to adapt the forms of R0-
' man architecture to the uses of their century met
an obstacle in that combination of the arch and
the column which had become habitual in the
Middle Ages. Brunelleschi had found the arch
'joined to the column, and exalted above it; for in
Romanesque building the column, though it was

WMFQ-W- ' |

v‘.

250 THE RENA [SSA NOE

peculiarly petted and put forward on every oppor-
tunity, had been still a servant, everywhere domi-
nated by the arch. Even he never went so far as
to subject the arch to the order in the Roman
fashion. In the Capella Pazzi he had set his vault-
ing over a continuous order borne by columns. In
his great interiors of San Lorenzo and San Spir-
ito, it is true, he followed the method of the halls
of the Roman baths, carrying his great arches on
blocks of entablature over single columns ; but in
smaller compositions, such as the loggia of the
Innocenti and the cloister of Sta. Croce, he fol-

lowed frankly the mediaeval way, and set hisfl

arcades directly on the capitals of columns. This
method could not be displaced, by reason of its
convenience and naturalness; it remained the ruling
one for the arcades of galleries and courts. Its
use in the early Renaissance is gracefully and pict-
uresquely shown in the familiar cloisters of the
Certosa at Pavia. Indeed, at this period the col-
umn was mostly reserved for this use, and in pairs
for the ornament of doorways, the pilaster being
the general favorite. But Alberti, free as he was
from any mediaeval prepossession or influence of
habit or even of convenience, had a truly classic
reverence for the column and the entablature. He
felt strongly the dignity and individuality of the
order, and urged that while people of moderate
station might be content with arcades, distin-

THE RENA [SSA N CE 251

guished citizens should build their loggias with
entablatures. Nevertheless, perhaps he found an
entablature intractable in a vaulted gallery, for he
set the Rucellai loggia on arcades.

The entablature was repugnant to the habits of
builders outside of Tuscany and Rome. They
had habitually reduced their cornices and horizon-
tal members to great thinness. The multiplied
horizontal banding and especially the vigorously
projecting cornice of the entablature seem to have
gone very much against their grain, and as they
began to use them they thinned and flattened them
till they were the mere ghosts of classic forms.
Cornices and string-courses were to these builders
merely the ornaments and borderings of the walls
which were to them the substance of architecture;
it was not easy to look on these as essential com-
ponents of a building. Brunelleschi himself, re-
moved as he was from medizeval tradition, would
seem to have been influenced by the things he had
about him, and could never compass the true
robust richness of the classic orders. Alberti,
beginning where Brunelleschi had left off, and
helped forward by Vitruvius, did hit pretty well
their original pr0portions. In the church at Ri-
mini, which Sigismondo Malatesta filched from
St. Francis to dedicate it to a mistress, and which
Alberti undertook to turn into a temple, and in his
greater church of San Andrea at Mantua, Alberti’s

252 THE RENA ISSANCE

orders have the classic look. Here, too, he took the
step which for the first time assured the triumph
of the order, by putting the arch under it in the
true Roman fashion. After him better trained
designers continued the work, the look of rawness
which still marred Alberti’s orders was refined
away, and by the time of Bramante’s coming to
Rome, in 1500, the proportions both of the order
and of the Roman arcade were mastered. The
beautiful loggia or open narthex of the cathedral
at Spoleto, built at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, which has been ascribed to Bramante but
was really designed by the two Pippi of Florence,
shows the mastery not only of the order but of
the classic arcade that architects had reached at
that date, and fitly marks the end of the stage
which has been called the early Renaissance.

Up to this time the architects’ effort had been
to adapt classic forms to the needs of the fifteenth
century, apparently with no thought that the two
were in any wise discordant; it had been the
habit of centuries to suit pliant forms to positive
requirements. In the north the vault, being the
primary constructive necessity of building, had
controlled the secondary forms ; in Italy men had
built what structures pleased them or suited their
wants, and had moulded the forms with facile
adaptation to them. But now the inviolability of
the order had been enforced by the law of Vitru-

0

THE RENA [SSA NOE 253

vius, by the precept of Alberti, and the practice of
his followers. After two generations of artists had
spent their powers in deducing as by scientific
analysis its immutable types, and in educating
themselves to its appreciation, it put on for them
a sanctity such as the Greeks had attributed to it.
The problem changed; it became the architect’s
work to devise buildings which would suit the or-
ders that were to cover them. Under Bramante’s
successors, Raphael, Peruzzi, the Saugalli, Sanso-
vino, Vignola, and the rest, the knowledge of
Roman models and the Roman system became
”clearer, till all was learned from them that could
be learned. It was impossible not to come at last
to the conclusion that in the most impressive and
monumental works of the Romans, the temples and
triumphal arches and porticos, the order itself,
alone or combined with an arch, was the monu-
ment, and that the greater the scale the more im-
pressive was the order. Through the fifteenth
century the straightforward medizeval habit of
building in obvious stories was maintained, and
the order was almost invariably limited to the
height of a single story. The uncompromising
Alberti, to be sure, had used in San Andrea at
Mantua, both outside and in, a. single order sixty
feet high, covering the, whole height of the wall.
With the great leaders there had been a steady
pursuit of the simplicity of composition and large-

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254 THE RENAISSANCE

ness of scale that belonged to classic building.
'The underlying classical idea that a great building
was to be designed, not by multiplying its parts,
but by increasing the scale of them, was altogether
in consonance with the Florentine feeling. The
great interior arches of the cathedral show this,
and also those of the Loggia dei Lanzi ; maturer
study of the monuments of ancient Rome enforced
it on every student. In their palaces, the Renais-
sance leaders, controlled by practical conditions,
consented to multiply orders and restrain their
scale, but there was a constant tendency to increase
of scale and toward making a single order the
dominating element of a design. Bramante began
his work in Rome with the little Tempictto, as it
was called, of San Pietro in Montorio, in which to
the delight of his fellows for the first time since
imperial times a buildin was constructed out of
an orcle_r_ and nothin ore. The tendency reached
it‘s-climax in hisjesign 201‘ St. Peter’s, where he
proposed a single gigantic order to cover the whole
building, both outside and in, as Alberti had done
at Mantua, but on a still greater scale. Antonio
Sangallo, coming after, and as if startled by this
audacious venture, would have substituted two
stories of orders; but when Michelangelo was
called by Paul III. to carry on the church, he de-
clared, as the world knows, that Sangallo by mul-
tiplying the parts of the building was making a

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TIIE RENAISSANCE 255

Gothic design instead of a classical, and that every
step away from Bramante’s intention was a step
in the wrong direction. He restored the single
order and built it as Bramante apparently i11-
tended on a scale which had never been equalled,
making it a hundred feet high, and grouping under
it the windows of two stories, and in some places
of four.

This treatment was too obviously the logical
conclusion of a classic revival which had been
born of scholarly enthusiasm and educated by
pedant1y not to prevail As soon as the single
order was exhibited on a colossal scale it convinced
.a‘ndwas adopted. It became the prevailing motive
of classic design in chu1ches, especially within,
where it suits well with their natural ordinance;
in secular buildings also it became a habit to put
two or three stories under one order, a habit which
the world has never outgrown There is no doubt
that the device added grandeur to” architecture It
IS diflicult to Nbélie‘vé' that St. Peter’s and the othe1
great church inte1iors that we1e so built would
not lose something of their majesty by any other
classic treatment. Even the necessity of multiply-
ing stories under the great order tended to give it
scale, and prevented its size from being lost in the
effect. On the other hand, this combination of
several stories in one order was inharmonious and
essentially unclassic, a forced union which Greeks

256 THE RENAISSANCE

and Romans had never attempted, and hostile to
the very simplicity at which the architects aimed.
"But its stateliness as well as its novelty and its
[descent recommended it to an age in which
kings and princes, rising in power and wealth,
/ were gathering about them a ceremonious magnif-
\ii:ence. Its use spread rapidly over Italy, and
ore slowly over the north of Europe, where in
general the new style established itself nearly a
century later than in Italy. It produced what has
been called the Grand Style, what the French
recognize as the Louis Quatorze style, the style
in which Philip II. built the Escorial in Spain, the
style of Inigo Jones and \Vren in England. It
was the outcome of an overstrained effort to retrace
a past art, to apply its unyielding methods to the
obdurate requirements of a new life, to do as the
Romans did under conditions which the Romans
never met; it was Humanism in architecture, the
reductio ad absurdum of the Neo-Classic move-
ment.

VI

Meanwhile the study of the formulae recorded
by Vitruvius and enforced by Alberti became
closer. Vitruvius’s book was made the Koran of
a new faith. The great architects of the sixteenth
century—Vignola, Serlio, Scamozzi, Palladio -—
turned law-givers and each wrote his treatise, ex-

THE RENAISSANCE ‘ 257

pounding Vitruvius, or propounding their own
system of measures, prescribing the proportions of
every part of the order with wonderful minute-
ness. Thus they labored, as the Romans had in
their day, to reduce the elements of architectural
design to a system in which they could be freely
handled, arranged, and rearranged like blocks
in a geometrical mosaic. Only in this way, per-
haps, could these men have accomplished the im-
mense amount of work that they produced; only
in this way could the individual have left his
mark on it in every part as he did, by making
every part exactly repeat every corre8ponding
part.

It ill becomes those who walk in the footsteps
of others, said Michelangelo, to claim that they go
beyond them. Nevertheless, it is but just to say
that the architects of the Renaissance were great-
er artists than those of the Empire. They stood
socially, and probably in attainment, on a higher
level; they assumed to go beyond even the range
of acquirement which Vitruvius marks out for his
model architect. For they were educated in the
best fashion of their day ;‘ many of them were the
companions of princes and the favorites of culti-
vated courts. Lorenzo dei Medici maintained, we
are told, that aristocratic birth favored the artist’s
perfection, and that poverty was a hindrance to
inspiration. The aristocracy of the Renaissance

4'"-

258 THE RENA ISSA; 'C'E

was a mushroom aristocracy, it must be confessed,
as the Medici were, but its culture and its aptness
for art were higher than those of the Roman pa-
triciate; and they were reflected in its arts. The
constant aim of the artists was for perfection, as
they conceived it, just as the Greeks whom they
revered without knowing them had aimed. If
their work had not in the same degree as the
Greek its splendid and serene dignity, or that high
fineness which the French call spirituel, these men
did bring back in a new shape the refined richness
thich distinguished Gm.
ure from Roman. All the ornament of their
buildings was studied with a fastidiousness which
the Roman had not known. It had the charm of
a vitality that had gone out under the Empire.
They invented a hundred new details which found
places naturally in their architecture, and a whole
school of rich and delicate carved ornament which
took its color from the Roman, yet excelled it as
the rose excels the peony. Though they avoided
the Gothic system of construction, or dissembled
it as in the great domes of Florence and St.
Peter’s, .medigcral ,Yault.isa_rzsri.<1£4 . themaargg
store of new expedients for covering interiors, '
vaults of'a great variety of shape, and especially
the dome on pendentives which set the keynote
for their most magnificent designs. Their archi-
tecture surpassed the Roman in beauty and re-

THE RENA ISSANOE’ 259

finement, if it could not outdo it in stateliness
and richness.

But, as we have seen, the struggle for perfection
of form ended in formalism ; and of this, however
elegant it had become, architects soon tired. The
bonds had scarcely been drawn tight when they
burst. Men flung away the perfection almost as
soon as they had attained it, as if it had disap-
pointed them. A general débc’iclc followed. The
desire for freedom and novelty revived, and soon
ran into a wild license. Invention was stimulated
afresh, but the material with which it had worked
was exhausted; the principle which had guided it
was gone. As men gave up the pursuit of a defi-
nite ideal, the clear perception which the pursuit
had nurtured died out. They began to handle
with recklessness the classical forms that had
hitherto been treated with almost superstitious
reverence, and which under such handling quickly
lost their beauty. First came the misappropria-
tion of details, the careless breaking of lines, the
degradation of ornament which mark what is
called the Barocco period; then followed all the
reckless extravagance of the Rococo. The revival
of architecture had had the familiar career of as-
piration, achievement, and decadence. There had
been the delicate fugitive charm of the early Re-
naissance in the fifteenth century, the inspiring
growth and mastery of what has been called the

260 THE RENA ISSANCE'

Neo-Classic in the first half of the sixteenth, the.
frigid and elegant formality of the Grand Style in
the second half, the picturesque license of the Ba-
rocco in the seventeenth, and at the end the reck-
lessness of the Rococo.

The Renaissance movement was an effort to re-
store what was believed to be the one true form of
. architecture, to continue the interrupted tradition
of the greatest age of the world; but in one re-
spect it was the greatest innovation in art which
the world had seen—it made architecture a thing
of arbitrary fashion instead of a natural product
of the people, a thing whose form, progress, and
changes, instead of being a natural evolution, were
now for the first time dictated from without by a
company of self-elected rulers, of amateurs and
dilettanti. It was one part, and not the leading
part, in a still greater movement, set on foot by
literary enthusiasts but seconded by the instincts
of all Italy, to change the aspect of civilization
and bring back the antique glory of the pagan
world. Artificial as it was, it could hardly have
succeeded as it did in a living and practical art
like architecture, if it had not had the impulse of
the world behind it.

There is no doubt that the Renaissance at its
best was superior to that decaying form of Gothic
which it displaced, as it was superior to the R0-
man which it reverently imitated; but to it be-

THE RENAISSANCE 261

longs the reproach that it first diverted architect-
ure from the paths of orderly evolution that it had
follovved since building began, and sent it wander-
ing in that self-conscious search after fashions
which it has followed ever since.

SAINT PETER’S

I

THE Church of St. Peter is called the Vatican
Basilica, though it is not a basilica, because it was
so once; that is, it occupies the site and contains
the foundation of the greatest early Christian ba-
silica. At the place where the Vatican hill slopes
southeasterly to the bend of the Tiber, where the
lowland was crossed by the ancient Via Trium-
phalis, lay the gardens and circus of Nero, the scene
of the earliest and most wanton persecution of the
Christians; and here, tradition says, at the end of
the first century St. Anacletus, fourth bishop of
Rome, consecrated by St. Peter’s own hands,
built a modest oratory over the tomb where the
apostle had been laid after his martyrdom on the
neighboring J aniculan Hill. Two centuries later,
we are told, Constantine, passing the spot as he
entered Rome in triumph after his great victory
over Maxentius, in the first campaign that was
fought under the banner of the cross, vowed to

himself that he would build a church in honor of
262

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SAINT PETER’S 263

St. Peter. This church, built in 324—30, lasted
nearly twelve centuries—the most venerated
church in Christendom, and in course of time the
most sumptuous. It gradually usurped the impor-
tance that originally belonged to the Pope’s own
church, the basilica of St. John Lateran—which,
also founded under Constantine, is even now
called the Mother and Head of churches—and
when in the fourteenth century the popes, return-
ing from their exile in Avignon, transferred them-
selves from the palace of the Lateran to that of
the Vatican, St. Peter’s became the pOpe’s chapel.

The chronicles of the Roman Church are full of
accounts of its splendors and its vicissitudes, its
burnings, its plunderings and restorations. Fort-
unately, before Constantine’s building was pulled
down to make room for the present church careful
plans were made of it, so that we know what it
was; and representations of it may be seen in the
Stanze of the Vatican in Raphael’s paintings of
the Coronation of Charlemagne, which took place
in it, and of the Incendio del Borgo. It was a
great five-aisled basilica with projecting tran-
septs, nearly four hundred feet long and two hun-
dred and seventy in extreme width. It fronted
the east, as did the earliest Christian churches,
and as the present church does; its western apse
covered the tomb of St. Peter. An imposing flight
of forty steps and a broad platform, stretching all

264 SA INT PE TER’S

across the front, served the popes as a reception
place for the potentates who on great occasions
came to visit the church, and somewhere in front,
as now, was a balcony from which they delivered
their blessings to an assembled multitude. The
plain facade was the entrance not of the church
but of an atrium, open and lined on all four sides
with arcades, enclosing in the centre a bronze
fountain for the due purification of worshippers.
The arcaded galleries were decorated with painted
walls, and the side next the church, serving as a
narthex, contained many tombs and mosaic deco-
rations, while on the opposite wall was put later
the famous mosaic by Giotto called the “Navi-
cella,” which represented Peter walking on the sea,
and now, much altered by restorations, is replaced
in the present narthex. The main facade, rising
high over the atrium, and crowned by a low gable,
was covered with splendid mosaics which stretched
in bands across the front. There were as now five
doors, three in the nave and two in the aisles.
The nave itself was enormous, more than seventy
feet wide, or as wide as the present nave which
follows its lines, a hundred feet high, and nearly
three hundred long. It and the aisles were sepa-
rated by four rows each of twenty-three marble
columns, plundered, as were most of Constantine’s
building decorations, from older structures.

Its unique characteristic was that while the col-

SA INT PE TER’S 265

umns that lined the nave carried a horizontal en-
tablature, those that divided the aisles carried
arches. This is one of the evidences that although
by this time builders had succeeded in detaching
the arch from the entablature, and setting it di-
rectly on the capital of the column, they still con-
sidered the entablature to be the more monumental
crowning of the column, and relegated the arch to
an inferior place. The same feeling appears in
Sta. Maria in Trastevere, built only about fifteen
years later, in which the entablature is used, but
the frieze of flat arches that take the weight of the
wall 011' the architrave has been revealed by the
falling off of the plaster.

If it looks singular that this should be done a
quarter of a century after the building of Diocle-
tian’s palace at Spalato, in which, as Mr. Freeman
has insisted, the greatest step had been taken in
the development of Romanesque architecture by
the emancipation of the arch from its subservience
to the entablature, we may remember that by this
time Rome had become the home of conservatism,
that not only armies and emperors, but all the im-
pulses of progress were supplied by the provinces,
that the determining argument for the substitution
of the arch in a time of mechanical decadence was
likely to be its ease of construction and cheapness,
and that Spalato, where it first claimed supremacy

and respect, was within the range of that Greek

266 SAINT PETER’S

influence which was two centuries later to trans-
form architecture in the splendid buildings of
Justinian and Theodoric, and which would tempt
Constantine away, almost as soon as he was securely
possessed of the old Rome, to found a new Rome
on the shore of the Bosphorus.

Whatever we may assume to have been the ori-
gin of the form of the early Christian churches, we
must believe that Constantine’s first church fixed
the type for centuries to come of those in Rome,
except for burial churches—for which, also through
his example, another form was adopted—and for
some time to come elsewhere. The nave and aisles,
the transept not as broad as the nave, the great
triumphal arch opening from the nave into the
transept, the western apse, transferred to the east
when later the orientation was reversed and the
churches were entered from the west, the crypt
under the apse containing the body of the patron
saint, the long arcades, the clerestory, the narthex,
the atrium, all were there.

It does not appear that any of these parts were
here used for the first time, or perhaps that there
was any other novelty in the new basilica than its
size, its completeness, and its Splendor. Most of
its characteristics as a church were probably com-
mon in the East, where in the great cities the
Christian Church was prosperous and its places of
worship conspicuous while Rome was still, from an

SAINT PETER’ S 267

ecclesiastical point of view, an oppressed provin-
cial town. It probably had a cofl'ered and gilded
ceiling under its timbered roof, like that which
Eusebius mentions in his description of the later
basilica which Constantine built over the Holy
Sepulchre, and it was, at first or afterward, pro-
fusely decorated with rich mosaics, both within
and without.

Perhaps it was the decadence of Latin art which,
already begun, was continued and accelerated dur-
ing the dreary centuries that followed Constan-
tine’s reign, that prevented further development in
the form of the Roman churches until veneration
for those of Constantine had hardened into con-
servatism. Perhaps as the Church of Rome grew
stronger, and after a century and a half succeeded
to the authority of the Western Empire, it clung
loyally to the form of its first houses of worship,
the witnesses of its elevation. Perhaps the ab-
sence of Teutonic blood and of Teutonic rulers like
Theodoric and the Lombard kings conspired with
the aversion to change which belongs to ecclesias-
tical government. At all events, the progress of
church architecture in the early Middle Ages
passed Rome by. The great inventions of the
Romanesque period, the cruciform plan, the length-
ened choir, the compound bay, the vaulted nave,
were not found there. The type of Constantine’s
basilicas, St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, was contin-

268 S A INT PE TER’S

ued with little alteration except in scale from the
fourth to the twelfth century, in a series of
churches which still remain, though more or less
altered. In several of them, as well as in Sta.
Maria in Trastevere just mentioned, even in Sta.
Prassede so late as the end of the fifth century,
and in others which many authorities date later
still, we again find a reversion to the entablature
in place of the usual arcades of the nave.

So this church stood till the middle of the six-
teenth century, a monument to the conservatism
of Rome, revered, adorned, wasted, patched, plun-
dered, and restored, but substantially unchanged,
except for the clustering about it of many parasit-
ical buildings, that at once disfigured it and served
as props for its later decrepitude. It must have
been well built, for its situation was insecure. It
stood on the alluvial shore of the Tiber, on ab-
sorbent ground penetrated by the rising and fall-
ing river-water. This unstable substratum was a
sore trial to the architects of the modern St.
Peter’s, whose efforts to make their buildings se-
cure were again and again baffled by it. It is not
practicable or very important to unravel the struct-
ural history of the building. We do not know
when the flat ceiling of the outer aisles was re-
placed by a barrel-vault, nor when the ceilings of
Constantine were stripped from the roof trusses.
We know that two towers were added to the front,

SAINT PE TER’S 269

not of the basilica, but of the atrium, one by
Adrian I. in 772. Two round chapels, connecting
With each other and with the south transept, were
the mausoleum of Honorius, afterward the oratory
of St. Petronilla, and the chapel of St. Andrew.
South of the atrium was a small cruciform church
with two apses north and south, called the Church
of the Saviour, and devoted to the use and the
burial of pilgrims, and all about the basilica itself
clung a thick growth of smaller buildings, partly
identifiable and partly not, which appear on the
published plan. As for the legendary furnishings
with which the church was resplendent, the won-
der of pilgrims and historians in the Middle
Ages, they have left no trace. The spoils of the
Jewish Temple, transferred from the Temple of
Peace, and the accumulated riches of more than
a century, were carried off to Carthage by the
Vandals, under Genseric, in the middle of the
fifth century; the silver doors of Honorius, weigh-
ing nearly a thousand pounds, were the spoil of
the Saracens in the middle of the ninth. It is
almost incredible that, of the later splendors of
the church, the accumulation of the secure ages
of the Pontificate up to the sixteenth century,
nothing should have survived its removal; but
this seems to be the case. Whether the cause was
the eagerness of Julius II. to raise money for his
pet scheme of rebuilding, or the disdain of the

270 SAINT PE TER’S

artists of his day for the art of the barbarians, as
they called their predecessors, or what else, we
do not know; but the magnificent canopy of the
confessional, the silver candlesticks and altar rails,
the golden plates that lined the confessional and
its silver pavement, the bronze tomb with which
Constantine had provided St. Peter, and the
golden cross that surmounted it, the silver-gilt
ciborium, a ton in weight—all these seem to have
utterly disappeared. Only two or three relics of
especial sacredness and no money value have been
preserved: St. Peter’s statue and his chair, only
one or two works of art which were recent enough
to secure the interest of the artists of the Renais-
sance: the Navicella and the bronze doors of
Filarete and Simon the Florentine.

II

The middle of the fifteenth century may be
taken as the end of the Middle Ages, and peOple
who like to mark a gradual change by a definite
date have fixed upon the taking of ConstantinOple
by the Turks in 1453 as the limit. Then at least
ended the Eastern Empire, which had been in a way
a symbol of mediaeval civilization, as the “Testern
Empire had been the symbol of Latin civilization.
Byzantine art and the last Byzantine emperor
died together. Gothic architecture in the north

SAINT PETER‘S 271

had, it is true, still a century of life before it, more
or less; but the Renaissance had made its way in
Italy, architecture following the steps of letters
and of sculpture. In Florence, the cradle of the
Renaissance, it had asserted itself with a decision
and consistency that it was slow to attain in other
cities. Brunelleschi had built the church of San
Lorenzo, the front of the Pitti Palace, had added
his great dome to the cathedral, and had died.
Michelozzo had built the Riccardi Palace for Cos-
imo dei Medici, and the church of San Marco;
Brunelleschi’s great successor, Alberti, was at the
top of his fame, and Bernardo Rossellino had
made himself a name.

The pope at this time was Nicholas V. Raised
from a humble position by mere value of character
and acquirement, upright, generous, progressive,
scholarly, a patron of learning and enamored of
the arts, founder of the Vatican library, he came to
the papal chair in 1447. The stormy pontificate
of Eugene IV. had ended; the schism which he
had provoked died with him, and was buried two
years later at the abdication of the antipope Felix
V. For the first time in many years the Holy See
was at peace. The Renaissance was in the air;
but no building of importance had been under-
taken in Rome for half a century, and the new
style was represented there only in the restoration
of some of the older churches, so far as we know.

272 SAINT PET ER’S

Nicholas was a great builder, and Rossellino was
his favorite architect. He summoned Rossellino
from Florence, and set himself seriously to embel-
lish Rome. He undertook, says Vasari, the res-
toration of many churches and esPecially of the
principal basilicas. But his great undertaking was
the rebuilding of the suburb of the Vatican, com-
monly called 11 Borgo Nuovo, where were his
own church of St. Peter, and the comparatively
new palace which the popes had occupied since
the return from Avignon. For this Rossellino
planned a great scheme, which apparently did
not differ very much in its main lines from that
which was afterward carried out either by design
or by natural growth. Three great streets, lined
with arcades and shops, were to converge upon a
great open square, beyond which was an advanced
portico, next an atrium with a fountain, flanked by
colonnades, then another portico, and then the
church. The palace was to be rebuilt on an enor-
mous scale, enclosing courts and gardens, and con-
taining not only the pope’s own residence and that
of his cardinals, but sumptuous lodgings for visi-
tors, churchly and royal, with chapels, library,
Zoggz'c, and even a theatre for their amusement.
The nucleus of the whole project, or at least the
part that was first undertaken, was the design for
the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. For this Alberti
was called into council. He had come to Rome,

SA INT PE TER’S 273

and was employed by Nicholas to restore the aque-
duct by which the Aqua Virgo had been brought
into Rome by Augustus, and designed for it the
fountain of Trevi, afterward altogether remod-
elled by Salvi in 1735.

The old basilica, we are told, which had stood
through the storms and sieges, the conflagrations
and plunderings, the pilgrimages and ceremonies
of eleven hundred years, and survived the reigns
and accumulated the gifts of two hundred popes
and antipopes, and had become the most famous,
the richest, and the most venerated church in
Christendom, had grown decrepit, and needed to
be rebuilt. Whether it would have been thought
so if there had not been the temptation of a new
fashion we cannot know; at all events it had
strength enough to last another half-century with-
out accident, as its history shows. But the old
conservatism of Rome was gone or disappearing;
a series of pontifi's had begun who had no tender-
ness for the traditions or the relics of Christian
art, who were men of their own day and genera-
tion, prepared to lead the way in throwing over
the forms of mediaevalism, and reverting to the
classic in art, literature, and even in thought.
Nicholas determined to build a new St. Peter’s,
which should be greater than Constantine’s church,
and more splendid than Solomon’s temple. The
year of Jubilee 1450 arrived, and the work was

274 SAINT PETER’S

begun. The new church was to follow the lines
of the old, to preserve the same orientation, front-
ing the east, but to be longer at both ends.
The sacred martyrium, or confessio, over the
grave of St. Peter was to be undisturbed, the old
church remaining as long as possible while the
new one was built up about it, and the founda-
tion was- laid for a great apse behind that of the
basilica.

The tranquillity in which Nicholas began his
reign did not last. The fall of Constantinople
followed in three years, and Nicholas, stimulated
by the appeal of ZEneas Sylvius, who afterward
became Pope Pius II., began enthusiastically to
preach a new Crusade. The last years of his
pontificate were disturbed by political conflicts
like those which had made the reign of his prede-
cessor turbulent, and which were to occupy the
attention and revenues of his successors for the
next fifty years. In 1455 he died; the building
of St. Peter’s was discontinued, and for the rest of
the century the walls of its apse stood nakedly a
few feet above the ground, while the old basilica
maintained its place and rank.

Unfortunately the designs of the architects
have not been preserved, nor is there anything
to indicate what share Alberti had in them. Ros-
sellino’s name has always clung to the beginnings
of the new St. Peter’s. The charge of the build-

SAINT PE TER’S 275

ing was put into his hands. He did an immense
amount of work in restoring old churches both in
and out of Rome, chiefly for Nicholas, but his
great designs died with his patron. He was an
experienced builder, and it is likely that Alberti
was joined with him as a consulting architect on
account of his skill in the new fashion, and be-
cause he was a commanding figure, like Nicholas
himself, among the men of literature and art in
Florence. Vasari, indeed, says more than once
that Alberti would have succeeded better if he had
had more practical knowledge of building. But
he was one of the brilliant figures of the Renais-
sance, a type of its leaders. He was a noble and
a churchman, learned and courtly, an amateur of
all the arts, a writer, an enthusiastic student of
ancient art and literature, and of all the learning
of his day. He was an enthusiast who had come
to architecture from without, flushed with a gospel
which he was eager to embody in it. If he had
not the genius of Brunelleschi, he had at least a
rare talent, a keener sense, native or educated, of
pr0portion in mass and detail, the same inde-
fatigable diligence in studying and measuring all
the remains of ancient architecture that he could
get access to. He missed, and probably could
never have attained, the delightful naiveté and
unconstrained elegance that we have recognized
in the Renaissance of northern Italy. But he

276 SAINT PE TER’S

anticipated the stately consistency of style that
belonged to the next century, and the detail of
his facade of San Francesco at Rimini is almost
classic enough for Vignola or Serlio. At the time
when the luxuriant facade of the Certosa was
going up at Pavia, there was building at Mantua
Alberti’s greatest work, the church of San Andrea,
which, nevertheless, the late Mr. Street was will-
ing to describe as a “hideous classic edifice tacked
on to a most beautiful brick campanile.” It is a
church that might have been designed by Palladio
or Alessi a century later, and in which, as we
may see hereafter, many of the characteristics of
St. Peter’s are prefigured. It is interesting to
watch in his work the growing idea of largeness of
scale, of the predominance and sufficiency of a
single order, which Brunelleschi and Alberti both
recognized, and which Alberti embodied in San
Andrea as fully as it was afterward embodied in
St. Peter’s. The preference for the entablature
and the subordination of the arch Alberti carried
so far that he insists in his book that arches shall
always be borne on pilasters and that nothing but
an entablature shall rest on a column. Accord-
ingly he, like Brunelleschi, followed the Roman
habit of inserting under the arch, when it bears
on a column, the fragment of entablature which is
so offensive to many modern critics, but which
made its way among later architects until Milizia

SA [N T PETER’S 277

could say: “It would be ridiculous nowadays to
urge the importance of this principle, which is
known even to children ”—a saying which de-
served the attention of the late Mr. Freeman.
How far the first design of St. Peter’s was in-
fluenced by Alberti’s knowledge, which was doubt-
less greater than Rossellino’s, or by his principles,
it is impossible to judge. Whatever might have
been made of the church if it had gone on under
their care, it was probably begun in the undecided
style of the early Renaissance, for it was begun
before Alberti’s style had matured. The facade at
Bimini, which first shows a mastery of his new
style, was not begun till ten years later than St.
Peter’s; and San Andrea, which alone shows his
fully developed power, was ten years later still,
and finished after his death. Nevertheless, the
fact remains that the great church of Rome en-
gaged the service of three men who were, after
Brunelleschi, if not the best architects, at least the
greatest leaders of the Renaissance—Alberti, Bra-
mante, and Michelangelo—and if we compare it
with San Andrea we shall perhaps conclude that
it embodies, however they may have got there, as
many characteristic ideas of Alberti as of the
others. But when Nicholas died, Alberti went
back to Florence, where he was already building
the Rucellai palace. Rossellino also returned, soon
to be summoned by Pius II., the second great

278 SA LVT PETER’S

humanist pope, to build up the new city of Pien—
za, which consumed all of Pius’s architectural
zeal. Of the great scheme of Nicholas for restor-
ing the glories of ancient Rome nothing is left to
us but the idea, which was the inspiration of his
successors. Paul II. made some inefi'ectual efforts
to carry on the work. Sixtus IV..was too busy
with buildings of his own devising to continue it;
the other popes of the fifteenth century had their
hands full of political cares and expenses; the
church lay neglected for fifty years.

III

It is a well-known story how the magnificent
Julius 11., having ordered his tomb from Michel-
angelo, cast about for aplace to put it; and how
Michelangelo, who had designed the tomb on a
scale that outdid everything else of its kind, hit
upon the unfinished apse of Nicholas V. as an
adequate shrine for it. The pope took fire at the
suggestion, and calling his architects into council
determined to take up the project of Nicholas, and
rebuild the church of St. Peter, which still stood
untouched. He had about him the two Sangalli
and the veteran, Fra Giocondo. Bramante had
lately come to Rome with the same impulse that
had brought Brunelleschi and Alberti, in the ful-
ness of his Lombard fame, and had already distin-

SAINT PETER’S 279

guished himself there by some lesser works. He
soon came to the front by natural selection—Va-
sari says, by dint of his own skill in putting him-
self forward—and the undertaking passed into his
hands. Pope and architect attacked the work to-
gether with an impetuosity that was common to
both, Julius raising money for the building by the
sale of indulgences right and left, Bramante mak-
ing haste to begin pulling down the old basilicaz
as if to make it impossible to delay the new. It
had been the cardinal condition from the very be-
ginning that the confessio and tomb of St. Peter
should be left undisturbed, and that the high altar
of the new church as of the old should be set over
it. Rossellino’s apse had been built to conform
to this idea, and Bramante’s plan was adapted to i
it. His boast has become familiar that he would
set the dome of the Pantheon upon the arches of
the Temple of Peace, of the building, that is,
which we now know as the Basilica of Maxentius
or Constantine. This was not merely a figurative
boast, but a literal intention, as its issue proves;
for the lines of the nave of St. Peter’s are set on
those of the original basilican church of Constan-
tine, which were also, as we have seen, the lines
of Rossellino’s. By a notable coincidence that
church and the basilica of Maxentius have the
same Width of nave, so that the arches which carry
St. Peter’s dome really match those of Bramante’s

280 SA INT PE TER’S

“ Temple of Peace.” Moreover, the dome of the
Pantheon spans a hundred and forty-three feet,
and St. Peter’s one hundred and forty, so that as
nearly as practicable dimensions go the dome of
the Pantheon really rests on the arches of the
Temple of Peace. The actual dome, it is true, is
different enough from that of the Pantheon, but
that it was not so in Bramante’s intentions is clear
from all the records of them that we possess.
These show clearly that the soaring outline of the
dome as it stands is entirely apart from Braman-
te’s conception, and that he had intended a low
composition of much more classical outline, whose
principal mass was a dome not only hemispherical
like that of the Pantheon, but somewhat masked
like that by a series of steps or benches which en-
circles its base, partially obscuring its outline and
diminishing its apparent height. This shape of
dome, indeed, as the work of many architects
shows, from the Pantheon itself and Sta. Sofia
down to the old Capitol at Washington and the
buildings of the Chicago Fair, is that which best
accords with the low massing and horizontal lines
of classic architecture. So that if we would truly
divine the conception which first inspired Bra-
mante and to which he held faithfully, we must go
back to that lightly regarded phrase of his, and
take it not fancifully but seriously.

The controlling motive of Bramante’s whole de-

SAINT PE TER‘S 281

sign was his colossal dome—the dome of the Pan-
theon, but lifted off from its massive ring-wall that
needed no buttressing, and balanced high as the
very crown of the Pantheon on the tops of the
great arches of the classic basilica. It was not to
be supported on upright walls like the great dome
of Florence, nor standing directly on its four piers,
but overhanging by nearly thirty feet at the angles,
and poised on pendentives like that of Sta. Sofia,
yet it was to be half as wide again as Sta. Sofia’s.
To prepare for this dome was Bramante’s chief
preoccupation. He set to work in eager haste.
The rear of the old basilica was pulled down, its
columns, marbles, even tombs of buried dignitaries,
were hurriedly worked into the foundations of the
four great piers set about the tomb of St. Peter,
over which the dome was to centre. Bramante was
sixty-two years old when the corner-stone was laid
in 1506. He could not hope to see the end of his
work, and, as if to make sure that the essential
parts of his design should be unalterably fixed in
his lifetime, he hurried the piers so impetuously
that by the time the arches were laid on them they
already showed signs of being inadequately built.
In 1513 Julius died, and Bramante’s death followed
in a few months, but he had built his piers and
turned his great arches: the scale of the church
was fixed—the width of the nave and transepts, the
span of the dome—and has never been departed

282 SA INT PETER’S

from. Towers they are, these great piers nearly
seventy feet square and a hundred feet high to the
springing of the arches.

On his death-bed Bramante recommended Ra-
phael, his protégé and pupil, to Leo X., who had
succeeded Julius, and Raphael was appointed to
continue the work. The insecurity of Bramante’s
masonry, which developed as soon as the building
passed into other hands than his, seems to have
been good fortune disguised, for whereas Raphael
and his successor Peruzzi found enough to do
during their brief charge of the building in con-
solidating the work which was already done, the
younger Antonio Sangallo, who followed them, set
seriously to work to remodel the whole design for
Paul III. Bramante’s plans, it would appear, had
been either lost or obscured, and though Raphael
and Peruzzi had each prepared tentative designs,
they had not advanced the building far enough to
make important modifications. Paul required that
the project which he wished to take up with energy
should be put once for all into definite shape, and
Sangallo prepared an elaborate model thirty feet
long, which cost five thousand golden crowns and
is still preserved. The colossal order with which
Bramante had begun to decorate his interior no-
body had ventured to displace, but Sangallo’s de-
sign clothed the cxterior with two stories of small

orders of half the scale and greatly complicated the

SA I NT PE TER‘S 283

plan, so that Michelangelo, calling the design a
Gothic one, complained that Sangallo had frittered
away the architecture, and cut up the interior into
dens fit for counterfeiters. Paul nevertheless ac-
cepted the model, and Sangallc prepared for carry-
ing it out by once more strengthening Bramante’s
piers, filling up the great niches which Bramante
had left on their cardinal sides, and also raising the
floor of the church. Fortunately these prelimina-
ries consumed the whole of Sangallo’s administra-
tion, and when he died, in 1546, he had done
nothing of importance in changing the arrangement
of the building. Bramante’s gigantic piers with
their lofty pilasters and huge arches, and the walls
of his apse behind them, still towered over the
mutilated nave of the old basilica, consolidated
by the work of three successors, but practically
. unchanged, as we see by various contemporary
’ sketches which are still preserved. Michelangelo,
_ appointed in 1547 to succeed Sangallo, immediately
f threw aside all his projects of amendment, saying,
as I have quoted in another essay, that every step
away from Bramante’s intention was a step in the
wrong direction. Paul gave him a free hand. He
restored the design of Bramante in all its main
features, and before his death, seventeen years
later, he had given to the work such definite shape
that his plan was not departed from till the addition
of Maderno’s lengthened nave in the next century.

284 SAINT PE TER’S

IV

There has been much discussion among students
as to the share of the various architects of St.
Peter’s in the design of the church as it stands,
and especially as to Bramante’s intentions. Recent
researches of Baron von Geymiiller have done
much to clear up the question. The drawings
which he has unearthed, especially one large plan,
which seems clearly to have been Bramante’s,
appear to set forth his purpose convincingly.
Whether or not the relations between the dome of
the Pantheon and the arches of Maxentius sug-
gested to him the proportions of this plan, it is
clear that adjustment to those relations gave him
the central space, which is the dominant note of
the whole. Evidently the great dome filled the
minds of all popes and architects who had to do
with the building of the church, as it does the
minds of all travellers who visit it to-day. The
grand eflect of the expanding centre under Bru-
nelleschi’s dome at Florence could not fail to con-
vince all architects of that time. To produce an
equivalent effect in conjunction with Constantine’s
great nave required a dome as large as this. The
central expansion dictated the shape of the great
piers, which are essentially the same in plan as

those at Florence. Their Splayed faces, fronting

SAINT PE TE’R’S 285

the centre, give this expansion and are the key '

of the combination. They not only prepare for
the tremendous size of the dome, but they give
breadth and solidity to the pendentives that are
set on them, and relieve the arches of much of the
weight, transferring it directly to the piers. This
device, which belongs to Bramante, gives advan-
tage to St. Peter’s dome over most others almost as
much as its dimensions. Alberti had, first of all,
planned to set his dome on pendentives in San
Andrea of Mantua, but his piers were square. He
had designed the barrel-vaulted nave and the
high order of coupled Corinthian pilasters which
line it, though the dome was added two centuries
later than St. Peter’s. The church must have
been familiar to Bramante, and the grandeur of
this treatment could not escape him. His draw-
ings seem to show that the idea of the great order
was as tenaciously held from the beginning as that
of the dome itself. Their outline was planted in
his piers; they show in contemporary sketches
as they stood waiting from Bramante’s time to
Michelangelo’s. In truth the plans of those piers
prefigured the ordinance of the interior as clearly
as do the piers of a Gothic cathedral. The size,
the height, and the disposition of the Corinthian
order, the width and height of the arms of the
church, the span and division of the vaulting, the
dimensions and poising of the dome, all these

286 SA IN T PE TER’S

were written in the plans of Bramante’s piers, and
his successors did not depart from them. There
is an impression that the piers were greatly en-
larged after Bramante’s death, but Mr. von Gey-
miiller’s researches prove pretty conclusively that
though they were consolidated by more or less re-
building and by Sangallo’s filling up of niches in
them, their outline and the arrangement of the
order upon them was never varied. The varia-
tions of other architects were limited to the out-
lying parts of the plan and to the features of the
exterior. To Bramante we owe the things which
give the church its unique character, its enormous
scale, its imposing arrangement, the dignity of its
effect. His are the commanding dome and colon-
naded drum, though their form is changed, the
triapsal plan, the stupendous vaults, the colossal
orders without and within.

The intermediate architects had proposed many
changes in plan fluctuating between a Greek cross,
a Latin cross, and a rectangle. Michelangelo in-
sisted on returning to Bramante’s idea of a Greek
cross with three round ends; it was evidently
plain to him that the effect of the dome would be
lost if a long nave were put in front of it. He re-
jected Sangallo’s two stories of exterior orders,
though in so doing he had to include two stories
of windows, and in some places four, under the
one order of pilasters to which he reverted.

SA I NT PE TE'R’S 287

Michelangelo, like Alberti, never was a well-
trained, well-equipped architect. He was a painter,
a sculptor, a designer, a constructor, and before
all things a genius. In architecture his strength
lay, like Alberti’s, in his power of conception and
composition; his designs for detail were those of
a painter, and were sometimes atrocious. In spite
of his scorn for the Gothic character of Sangallo’s
design, and in spite of his recognizing that the
use of the single order was the logical classic
treatment, he was apparently less classic and more
mediaeval in feeling than he knew. If he had
lived in the first half of this century he would
probably have led the romantic school. In the
carrying out of St. Peter’s he departed from the
severity of the original design. We must think
that he bettered it in doing so, for the scheme in
itself was not adapted to so severe an execution as
Bramante’s projects imply. The pure architect-
ure of the orders in its classic shape does not well
bear being sketched to such an enormous scale.
Michelangelo held to the first idea of the great
dome surrounded by four small ones, but he added
to the upper part of the composition the move-
ment which his arrangement of the outside order
denied to the lower, by lifting the central dome
higher and giving it the soaring aspect which
Brunelleschi had given to the dome at Florence,
but which Bramante with the Pantheon in mind

288 SA INT PE TER’S

had omitted from his design. That he took a les-
son from Brunelleschi we may well believe if we
can trust the familiar tradition which makes him
say: “Better than he I cannot build, like him I
will not.” The design of his dome was his great-
est achievement, perhaps the greatest achieve-
ment of all the Renaissance. While he kept the
hemispherical shape, he displayed it by stripping
off the benches with which in imitation of the
Pantheon Bramante had disguised its haunches;
he raised it on an attic, and more important still,
broke up the importunate smoothness of Bra-
mante’s encircling colonnade, grouping the col-
umns by twos and combining them into buttresses,
between which the drum was displayed, the lines
of its order continued downward, and the contour
of the dome seen or felt to unite with the build-
ing below. The vertical lines, carried upward in
bold ribs that divide the surface of the dome, he
united and grouped again in the crowning lantern,
which breaks high in the air as the sea breaks in
spray over a half-sunken rock. It is true that the
final touch of grace was added by his successors,
when they modified the outline of the dome and
made it oval instead of hemispherical; the late
M. Garnier went so far as to say that this im-
proved outline was the one fine thing in the
whole church, but this is going too far. If the
conception of the domed church does not belong

SAINT PETER’S 289

to Michelangelo, the whole design of the dome is
his, the displaying of its form, the prOportion of
the drum, the attic, the buttressing, the ribbing,
and the lantern. It is praise enough for his suc-
cessors to say that they added the last touch of
nobility to what was already so noble.1

V

But what shall we say to this buttressing, this rib-
bing, this upward spring, the leading up of vertical
lines that end in a mass of pinnacles? The details
are classic, the origin of the dome is classic, but
how much of the classic is there in the composi-
tion or in the feeling in which it is wrought out?
The detail is harmoniously combined, the composi-
tion has the balance and stateliness of classic art;
it has also the upward movement, the continuity
of vertical lines, of Gothic. It would be hard to
say that Sangallo’s broken composition and re-
duplicated orders had more of that spirit in them
than this. All pettiness is not Gothic nor all
stateliness classic; so much difference it makes
whose ox is gored.

1 St. Peter’s has been cited as the first church in which adome
on pendentives was set upon a drum ; but the smaller church of
San Agostino in Rome, in which this treatment was used, was a
century older than St. Peter’s, being built near the end of the
fifteenth century. Its dome, which was taken down a hundred
years ago and replaced without its drum, has been forgotten;
but it must have been familiar to all the architects of St. Peter 8.

290 SAINT PE TER’S

Let us consider the construction of the dome.
Michelangelo was born with the constructive in-
stinct of a mediaeval builder, and the construction
of the dome is his alone. The great cupola con-
sists of four parts—the ring, which rests upon
the great arches and pendentives, appearing out-
side as a stylobate; the drum, divided into six-
teen bays by the buttresses with windows be-
tween ; the dome itself, with its supporting attic;
and the lantern. The drum and the attic above
are nearly seventy feet of masonry. The dome
consists of two shells. They unite for some thirty
feet above the attic in a solid zone, above which
they separate, the outer shell having a steeper rise
than the inner, till they are about ten feet apart.
The two shells abut at the crown upon a ring
which again unites them, and on which the lan-
tern rests. They are furthermore united by six-
teen great meridian arcs or vertical webs, as it
were, showing outside in the ribs of the dome, one
over each buttress. The outside of the inner shell
is notched in courses, up which the visitor may
climb, as up the Great Pyramid of Egypt, to the .
base of the lantern. This is itself a considerable
structure, being forty feet across and sixty-five
high without its finial, built of wrought stone, sur-
rounded by sixteen columnar buttresses which
repeat those about the drum, pinnacled and sur-
mounted by a conoidal roof or low spire. Here

 

SAINT PETER’S 291

then is an enormous accumulated weight, to be
poised on the tops of arches and pendentives one
hundred and fifty feet above the pavement, and
built up four hundred and fifty feet into the air.
The meridian arcs or webs may be said to pene-
trate the two shells, projecting above and below in
visible raised ribs. They are the principal support
ing members of the dome, and have the shape and
function of flying buttresses, transmitting the
weight of the lantern and thrust of the structure
directly to the buttresses below on which they
rest, while the surfaces of the dome may be re-
garded as a series of vaulting cells, filling the
spaces between them. They are indeed the real
skeleton of the construction, which is therefore
Gothic and not classic, and consists of a lantern
supported on sixteen huge flying buttresses that
are connected and steadied by the shells of the
dome. It is, in fact, an instance on an enormous
scale of the kind of structure of which the crowns
that sometimes surmount Scotch towers are a type,
and of which the belfry of St. Nicholas at New-
castle upon Tyne is a famous example, the dis-
tinction being one of architectural treatment. In
that at Newcastle the buttresses are displayed as
conspicuously as possible; at Rome the chief im-
portance is given to the domical shell with which
they are overlaid. The principle of the construc-
tion is not at all that of the classic dome, or the

292 SA INT PETER’S

Pantheon, in which the pressure is uniformly
transmitted and distributed over the ring at its
base; but truly that of the Gothic vault, where
the stress is collected in ribs, and concentrated
into a few points where it is met by buttressing.
In this respect it is more mediaeval than Brunel-
leschi’s dome, where the shell supports the lan-
tern, and where the ribs, although they are more
conspicuous on the exterior, are too few and too
slight for such an office.

Roman construction in truth gives no means
for solving such a problem as Michelangelo’s.
The Roman domes, resting on solid walls, were
stayed by mere weight of unbroken masonry; the
pendentive domes of the Byzantine, which opened
the way for those of the Renaissance, depended
on the abutting of dome against dome as in Sta.
Sofia, or else were on too small a scale to be diffi-
cult to build. Brunelleschi’s had the continuous
support of a massive ring-wall. For the gigantic
project of Michelangelo there was no precedent
and no guiding experience but in the methods
which the mediaeval builders had laboriously
worked out. Even his self-assured boldness did
not confront its difficulties empirically in new
ways; it was enough that he bent the old meth-
ods of construction to a new problem and to difii-
culties incomparably greater than they had ever
before provided for.

SA INT PE TER’S 293

Michelangelo suppressed the clerestory that is
suggested in Bramante’s designs, and bringing up
the aisles and lateral chapels to the level of the
rest, made his great outside order of Corinthian
pilasters cover and dissimulate all the internal
plan of the building. He added an attic to it
of which the original design gave no hint. Be-
low the unbroken level of the eaves his order is
everything; the niches and windows which are
set in stories between the pilasters jar With its
classic intention, but do not shake its predom-
inance; even the long curves of the apses can-
not subdue it. So far it enforces the classic
efl'ect, yet the deep shadows of the classic portico
or arcade are missed, and the intrusive wall is
a poor substitute for them. His facade, which
might have redeemed this defect, was never exe-
cuted. Of the four small domes with which he
intended to surround the great dome only two
were built by his pupil and successor Vignola ;
the lack of the others robs the design of a part of
its animation and harmony. I have said that
Michelangelo lacked the skill of a trained archi-
tect, that he was rather a painter or a sculptor.
The designing of detail was beyond or beneath
his powers, and that of St. Peter’s does not be-
lie this statement. But the great cupola is a
magnificent conception; if the world could show
no other architectural work of his than this,

204 SA INT 1 ’E T131658

it must still account him one of its greatest archi-
tects.

At his death Michelangelo left the drum fin-
ished, and happily had provided such a model for
the dome itself and the lantern that there was
no room for a change in the design. The only
departure from his intention was when Sixtus V.,
after the building had languished for twelve years
from the death of Vignela, resumed work on it
and appointed Della l’orta and Fontana to .carry
it on. They obtained Sixtus’s permission to
change the curve of the dome, which had been a
semicircle, and gave it the unapproachable out-
line that distinguished it from all other domes.
The credit of this change has been usually given
to Della Porta. I have suggested in the essay on
Sta. Maria Maggiore a reason for surmising that
it really belonged to Fontana. The two architects
so pressed the work that the laying of the finish-
ing stone of the ring which carries the lantern
could be celebrated by Sixtus in 1590, with a sol-
emn mass and the firing of cannon. The lantern
was added under Clement VIII., and the great
work of Bramante and Michelangelo was com-
plete but for the facade, a century after Bra-
mante had begun it. From this time every
builder who set his hand to it found something
to do to injure or degrade it. The architecture of
the Renaissance had passed its climax, and the

SAINT PE TER’S 295

movement of the Barocco had set in. Michel-
angelo himself had perhaps given the first im-
pulse to it in the wilful exaggeration of his detail.
The two men to whom it fell to finish St. Peter’s,
Della Porta and Maderno, were both chiefly dec-
orators, and, working in stucco, were facile in all
sorts of architectural license. Paul V. undertook
to add the facade, and finding that Michelangelo,
intent on building a monument, had neglected to
provide for all wants of the services, he decided
to lengthen the church, and called a competition
for a new design. In the consultations that
followed, it was agreed that St. Peter’s should
be lengthened, and the whole area which had
been consecrated by the occupation of Constan-
tine’s basilica must be included in it. This at

‘ once did away with the characteristics of the

original plan thus far maintained, changing it
from a Greek cross to a Latin. Maderno was
chosen as the architect and set to lengthen the
church, adding two or three hundred feet to it,
prefacing it with the great narthex, which crosses
the front, in itself a magnificent and serviceable
vestibule to such a church, and facing it with the
commonplace facade which it now wears. His in-
tention was to add two flanking towers at the end
of this front, but they were never built. Maderno
was not an architect, and the Nemesis that waits

on bad builders dogged his steps. The ground

296 SAINT PE TER’S

on which the church stands is treacherous ; great
care was necessary to lay secure foundations.
Mademo hurried this work with the eagerness with
which every architect attacked St. Peter’s. He
laid his foundations insecurely, and even got them
out of line ; his effort to correct this blunder in the
superstructure gave the walls an uneven bearing
which in the end worked disaster. He did not
dare build on them the towers which he had pro-
posed, but he finished his facade, and added his
name to those of his great predecessors as one of
the three men to whom St. Peter’s owes its shape.
After him came Bernini, a man of higher talent,
but of a decadent style. Under Urban VIII. he
contributed various decorations to the interior,
particularly the baldacchino which disfigures the
high altar. In an evil day he undertook to supply
Maderno’s missing towers. He had added two
stories of that at the northern end of the facade,
when Maderno’s foundation began to yield, and
the lower walls split hopelessly. Bernini’s rivals
attacked him for the fault of his predecessor; he
was displaced, and Borromini, who replaced him,
was let loose upon the interior of the church; but
the tower was pulled down and that disfigurement
of the injured church was evaded. Later he was
reappointed under Alexander VII., who had taken
up the idea of remodelling the architecture of the
great square in front of the church and bringing it

SAINT PETER’S 297

into accord with its front. For him Bernini built
the oval colonnades which encompass the Piazza
San Pietro With their tremendous arms. These
great swinging galleries, crowded with columns,
convert the whole square into a forecourt for the
church and reconcile the building with its sur-
roundings as perhaps nothing else could. Yet
their severity, only half relieved by the guard of
undisciplined statues mounted on their balustrades,
does not flatter the pseudo-classical quality of the
facade. Moreover, Bernini has managed by what
seems an unfortunate miscalculation of perspec-
tive effect to mar the aspect of both church and
galleries. He has connected his oval court with
the front which stands far behind it by a second
court, paraphrasing as it were the atrium of the
old basilica, which should naturally be rectangular.
But the side galleries which connect the oval with
the church, instead of being parallel as would be
expected, converge toward the oval, narrowing the
court at its entrance and making it a trapezoid.
This nullifies the looked-for perspective effect;
the galleries are seen so foreshortened that the
church seems to come to the front and loses its
scale, as a soaring hawk may look like a fly pro-
jected against the window-pane, While the receding
galleries are robbed of their apparent length, and
the oval colonnades look too high for the advanc-
ing church. This is in curious contrast with the

298 SA INT PE TER’S

common perspective trick of the Renaissance
architects, by which the walls of a retreating gal-
lery are made to converge into an artificial per-
spective as they retire, as in the Scala Regia which
Bernini built in the adjoining Vatican, or the still
more striking Teatro Olimpico of Palladio, where
the perspective of the stage is managed in like
manner, making an alley forty feet long of converg-
ing buildings look an eighth of a mile deep. Any
visitor to St. Peter's who will take the trouble to
compare the apparent length of the trapezoidal
court as it is seen from its entrance and from the
front of the church, will see that it looks shorter
from the first position, and will understand its
effect on the aspect of the church.

The glory of St. Peter’s is in two things: its
dome, of which I have said enough, and its in-
terior. I think the great preoccupation of Michel-
angelo, perhaps of Bramante also, was with its
exterior. Bramante’s idea remains, his form is
lost; he who would see the church as Michelan-
gelo conceived it must turn away from the front
and find a point of view behind, on the Vatican Hill
for instance, where he can see the dome rising
over the intervening houses with the lesser domes
and the three apses gathered about its base ; or be
content with such a picture of it as can be made
by taking a photograph from this side, and draw-
ing in the lower parts which are hidden by the

SAINT PETER‘S 299

buildings. The interior is at first disappointing
to most persons, because they cannot find a scale
for it and estimate its size. This is sometimes
apologized for by saying that its proportions are
so perfect that its size does not appear—which is
as if one should compliment a giant by calling him
so handsome that he looked like a doll. If a
building is made big, it is that it may look big,
and unless it does so it fails of its purpose. To
anyone who would avoid this early disappoint-
ment, which robs him of his most valuable impres-
sion—his first—I venture to recommend an ex-
pedient which I found successful. Let him,
entering from the narthex by one of the side doors
into the aisles, avoid turning or even looking into
the nave, especially keeping his eyes away from
the colossal sprawling babies that Borromini has
set under the vases of holy water, but linger on
his way up the aisle, which is as large asthe naves
of the greatest cathedrals, accustom his eye to it
and learn to appreciate its dimensions as he goes.
Then when he reaches the last bay and turns out
into the nave, and so to the central space under the
dome, passing from one great view to a greater
and to a greater still, he finds the growing sensa-
tion one of overwhelming grandeur. Thus, having
secured the first great impression, he can study the
elements of the composition without losing their
scale. The great length of the nave, which in any

\.

300 SA INT PE TER'S

front view of the church confessedly frustrates the
intention of the first architects, obscuring the
dome and hiding the composition, is certainly an
advantage to the interior. It is not too long an
introduction to the glory of the central space.
The gradual expansion from east to west gains
slowly upon one as he moves toward the choir, its
fulfilment as he reaches the centre is stupendous;
there is nothing of its kind like it in the world.
St. Peter’s was finished, as nearly as such a
building can be said to be finished, after two cen-
turies of labor. Thirty popes had watched its
progress; fifteen architects, the most distinguished
of their day, had spent their best inspiration upon
it. Its growth had embodied the history of the
Renaissance. Beginning with the period of its
early promise under Alberti and Rossellino, it rep-
resented the ideas of Bramante at the time of
the most splendid aspirations, of Michelangelo,
who, as Mr. Ruskin says, raised the style into all
the magnificence of which it was capable, of the
phase of traditional greatness under Bernini, of
decaying bathos under Borromini. If the highest
achievement of the Renaissance in respect of style
is not seen there—the purest forms, the finest de-
tail—there is the logical culmination of the en-
deavors of the Renaissance architects, the embodi-
ment, so far as it could be embodied, of their ideal,
to engraft the fruit of the imperial time upon the

SAINT PE TER’S 3C1

stock of the Middle Ages. It was a supreme efi‘ort
to get away from the restraints of modern habits
and modern exigencies into the realm of classical
ideas. If it contrasts sharply after all with every
building of the true classic age, it only shows, like
all great human undertakings, artistic, social, or
political, how men build their best, and build
otherwise than they intend.