HOW TO JUDGE ARCHITECTURE

H o w t o J u d g e
A r c h i t e c t u r e

A POPULAR GUIDE TO THE APPRECIATION
OF BUILDINGS
By
RUSSELL STURGIS, A.M., Ph.D.
Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Member of
The Architectural League of New York, The National
Sculpture Society, The National Society of Mural
Painters, etc., etc. Author of “Dictionary of
Architecture and Building,” “European
Architecture,” etc., etc.
NEW YORK: THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO.
33-37 East Seventeenth St., Union Sq., North

Copyright, 1903, By The Baker & Taylor Co.
Published, September, 1903

Contents

Illustrations

How to Judge Architecture

CHAPTER I
EARLY GREEK DESIGN

IN trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient. It is very easy to hinder one’s growth in knowledge by being too ready to decide. The student of art who is much under the influence of one teacher, one writer, or one body of fellow-students, is hampered by that influence just so far as it is exclusive. And most teachers, most writers, most groups or classes of students are exclusive, admiring one set of principles or the practice of one epoch, to the partial exclusion of others.

The reader must feel assured that there are no authorities at all in the matter of architectural appreciation: and that the only opinions, or impressions, or comparative appreciations that are worth anything to him are those which he will form gradually for himself. He will form them slowly, if he be wise: indeed, if he have the gift of artistic appreciation at all, he will soon learn to form them slowly. He will, moreover, hold them lightly even when formed; remembering that in a subject on which opinions differ so very widely at any one time, and have differed so much more widely if one epoch be compared with another, there can be no such thing as a final judgment.

The object of this book is to help the reader to acquire, little by little, such an independent knowledge of the essential characteristics of good buildings, and also such a sense of the possible differences of opinion concerning inessentials, that he will always enjoy the sight, the memory, or the study of a noble structure without undue anxiety as to whether he is right or wrong. Rightness is relative: to have a trained observation, knowledge of principles, and a sound judgment as to proprieties of construction and design is to be able to form your opinions for yourself; and to understand that you come nearer, month by month, to a really complete knowledge of the subject, seeing clearly what is good and the causes of its goodness, and also the not-so-good which is there, inevitably there, as a part of the goodness itself.

It will be well, therefore, to take for our first study some buildings of that class about which there is the smallest difference of opinion among modern lovers of art, namely, the early Greek temples. There is no serious dispute as to the standing of the Greek architecture previous to the year 300 B. C., as the most perfect thing that decorative art[1] has produced. It is extremely simple: a fact which makes it the more fit for our present purpose: but this simplicity is to be taken as not having led to bareness, lack of incident, lack of charm: it has merely served to give the Greek artist such an easy control over the different details and their organization into a complete whole, that the admiration of all subsequent ages has been given to his productions.

It must be noted, however, that nothing of this complete beauty is now to be seen above ground. [Plate I] shows the famous temple at Pæstum on the west coast of Campania, southeast of Naples: the temple called that of Poseidon, to which god (called by the Romans, Neptune) the ancient town which stood on this site was dedicated. This is the most nearly well preserved of the Doric[2] temples, with the single exception of the small building in Athens called the Theseion, or Theseum, see [Plate III], and it is larger and more interesting than that. [Plate II] gives the Parthenon at Athens from the northwest

[PLATE I.]

[PLATE II.]

and from the northeast. This building by common agreement of modern students was the most perfect in design and the most highly elaborated in detail of all the Doric temples of early time. The Parthenon as we see it now in its decay, dominating the town of Athens from the top of its rock or looked at close at hand, lighted by the Grecian sun or by the moon for those who are romantically inclined, is unquestionably a most picturesque and charming ruin; it is imposing in its mass, interesting still in its details, and invested, of course, with an immeasurably great tradition, historical and poetic. That fact must not be forgotten for a moment: but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that this admiration, this enthusiasm, is not given to the work of art. It is not at all to produce such a ruin as we now see that the Grecian artist thought and toiled. Admire the ruin to your heart’s content: but be careful that you do not allow too much of this romantic association to enter into your love of the artistic entity, of the lost Parthenon, which we have to create out of the air, as it were. And beware of the admiration of ruins as you would of the “tone” given to a picture by time: it is not that which the artist proposed to himself or even thought of, and it is the artist’s purpose that you must ask for, always. That is the first thing. Until you are sure you know that purpose, fully, it will not do to find fault with the work of art, or even to praise it too unreservedly.

On the other hand, it is extremely important to consider the probable ancient surroundings of the building in question. The upper figure of [Plate III] may show, not only the interesting building itself from a good point of view and with its peculiarities strongly accentuated (as is pointed out below), but also as showing how, except for its coloring, the temple must have been seen by the Athenians in the days of Conon. The modern houses are very like what the ancient houses must have been, for, although the ancient houses had even less door and window-opening upon the street and more upon a court or yard, yet we may imagine ourselves in such a yard of antiquity, and the red-tiled roofs, the homemade chimney, the humble and unkempt aspect of the whole may be assumed to stand very well for the humbler quarters of Athens in antiquity. This temple also is a ruin: but the fact that, as seen in [Plate III], there are still visible the sculptures of the metopes,[3] and the fact that the roof of the pteroma[4] is still in place, so that there is no sunshine coming down behind the columns where sunshine was never meant to be—these conditions go far to give us a peep at the building as it stood in those great days. No other photograph can give a better idea of how the columns are set closer near the corner; nor a better idea of the reasons for this peculiarity; for the sky is seen between the columns at the right hand; and the dark wall of the naos[5] in the same relative position on the left hand, and the chief cause for the smaller intercolumniation at the corners is obvious enough, as shown below in connection with the model [Plate IV].

Look back at [Plate I], and [Plate III], upper figure, and note that these buildings have six columns on the front instead of eight and, therefore, according to the general proportions of Greek temples, should have a greater height relatively to width than the Parthenon, [Plate II]. Note, farther, that the columns are very much higher and more slender in the octastyle[6] Parthenon than in the Italian hexastyle[7] building, and the relative height of the entablature[8] greater, or as one to two and a half in Pæstum, one to three in Athens. The Doric Order[9] is capable of just about as much diversity in relative heights and other dimensions as is shown here.

The comparatively short and thick columns of the Italian temple are characteristic of an earlier and less developed style than that denoted by the higher and more slender columns of the Parthenon. In like manner the comparatively great thickness of the superstructure in the Pæstum temple, giving a very broad architrave,[10] and a still broader frieze[11] is also suggestive of an earlier date. Now it is agreed that the more lofty and slender proportions of the Order of the Parthenon must have given to the original building a charm beyond that given by the stumpy proportions of the Pæstum temple: but it is also undeniable that many lovers of architecture, of this as of other epochs and styles, love especially the early work, that which is commonly known as archaic. It is exactly like the great enthusiasm excited in many students of Italian art by the earliest paintings, those of the primitifs: in each case the very single-minded and diligent work of the early men has a charm peculiarly its own.

Although the Parthenon is, as mentioned above, a ruin and nothing else, there are still to be found in the shattered stones of that ruin a certain part of that theoretical beauty, that imagined glory of the destroyed work of art, which we are gradually building up in our thoughts. Thus it is in the existing ruins that there have been discovered those curious curves where straight lines had been supposed to exist. If you stand at one end of the stylobate[12] and look along it towards the other end, you will see that it curves upward in the middle with a decided convex sweep. (See [Plate III].) If you raise yourself on a scaffolding and look along the underside of the architrave you will find that that also rises in a curve, not exactly parallel or concentric to that of the stylobate, but nearly so. Furthermore you will notice, if you walk about the temple and examine it closely, that the two outer-most columns of the front are much nearer together than the others, as noted above in Plate III: or that, in other words, the three columns which form the corner are grouped much more closely than are the others. Furthermore, it has been discovered by minute measurements that these columns slope inward a very little. Of course, it has always been known that the very visible diminution of the shaft in thickness from the bottom to the top is not according to straight lines (that is to say, that the shafts are not conical) but is according to a very slow and hardly perceptible curve which we call the entasis. Great folios of carefully drawn plates have been devoted to the exact curvature of the entasis and to the more recently discovered irregularities: and a minute series of measurements have been made, by which the whole amount of the irregularity in any one case is now easily ascertainable. This is one of the many elements out of which we have to make up our general appreciation of the building, our appreciation of the existence and the character of these slopes, curves, risings, sinkings, slopings: all of them, it is clear, planned in the most careful and elaborate way, and as the result of many previous experiments. Their object is, of course, to add to the charm of the building, to give it in one case the effect of being very broad in the base and therefore very secure and permanent—in another case, to prevent any possible appearance of sagging or depression in the middle of the long horizontal lines; in another case still, to substitute the subtile grace of a slight and almost imperceptible curve for the harshness of a straight line. Still another thing is traceable in these ruins: the unceasing care with which the work was done, the way in which the separate drums or solid blocks, of which the shafts of the columns are made up, were ground together, one upon another, until they fitted with but the slightest visible or tangible separation. The channeling or grooving of the shafts was evidently done after the drums had been put into place, and it is highly probable that the bells[13] of the capitals were also finished, or received their final very delicate curvature, after the blocks out of which they had been cut had been set, and indeed after the superincumbent block, the abacus, had been lowered upon each one of them.

Another feature in this remarkable design is to be traced in the ruins, and was much more plainly discoverable at an earlier, though still recorded and well-known, date: namely, the original painted adornment of the building, in strong primary colors. In the temples built of soft and rough stone, like that in [Plate I], there is known to have been a thin coat of fine plastering spread over the whole surface, and the final delicacy of curve and sharpness of edge must have been wrought in that plaster even more accurately than in the stone beneath. But in the Parthenon, built entirely of fine-grained and hard marble, no such coating was necessary, and the paint was applied directly to the crystalline surface itself. This painting covered very large parts of the exterior, nor is it probable that any single foot of the

[PLATE III.]

[PLATE IV.]

marble was left in its original whiteness. Where the solid coating of red or blue paint was not applied, the marble seems to have been tinted a dull yellow, as by the application of wax to the surface, which wax, if melted on with hot irons, would act as a preservative for the marble. It appears then that all modern dreams about the whiteness and purity and abstract loveliness of the Grecian temples are mistaken. Browning’s Artemis says that, always excepting Hera, she is the equal of any goddess of them all—

“. . . . surpassed
By none whose temples whiten this the world.”

The Artemis of any Greek poet would have used a different phrase: to her, the temples erected to the gods of Olympus would not have seemed white objects—they would have been to her the properly sacrificial and devotional embodiment of all that was splendid and gorgeous in the arts of men at that time: sculptured marble and wrought metal indeed, but also color and gold freely and even lavishly applied. [Plate IV] is a photograph of the restored model of the Parthenon which belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the restoration of which, and the whole work, is due to Charles Chipiez, a well-known and very competent archæologist in the direction of classical architecture. But this restoration is extremely reserved and quiet; it assumes almost nothing; it is restrained quite beyond what is to be expected of a modern enthusiast in Greek art. If, instead of this, we were to study the careful and conscientious drawings published by that French student who has made a special study of the buildings in Epidauros (Alphonse de Frasse) or in Olympia (Victor Laloux) we should find the decoration by means of painting and by the application of golden shields or other members in gilt metal, assumed as very much more elaborate and rich. Thus the restored façade of the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros and that of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are shown as having been painted in the most elaborate way, with figure subjects of conventionalized form and distribution on all the larger flat surfaces, and patterns of leafage and scroll-work on the small ones. It is known that very rich mosaic floors existed in many of these cases and known also that the ceilings, such as those above the open galleries (pteroma) behind the great colonnades, were adorned very richly, sometimes with painted and gilded terra cotta.

There is still to be considered the sculptured ornament, painted, indeed, in vivid colors, but also planned with care, and executed with vast knowledge, minute skill, and what seems to us faultless good taste. In the Doric temples there was no leaf-sculpture, no scroll-work, no carved ornaments of any sort: we shall find a different condition of things in the Ionic style, but even in the elaborate and very costly Parthenon there were only the human and animal forms, expressed in statues and reliefs made as perfect as was possible to the artist of the time. Some temples had none of this: others had the metopes of the frieze (see footnote, Entablature) carved with high reliefs: others had reliefs in the great triangular panel of the pediment:[14] others again had this panel filled with statues, standing and seated, forming a group, and expressing some legend of Greek historical and religious life. Finally, there are instances of long unbroken bands of sculpture in very low relief. The Parthenon had all of these: a horizontal band along the top of each wall of the naos filled with bas-reliefs; high reliefs in the metopes, statues in both pediments.

If, then, our opinion of ancient Greek architecture is to be formed, and a relative judgment of any two fine specimens of it is to be reached, we have to study with some care what is known about their appearance and character when intact. What statues did they have? What high reliefs in square panels, or bas-reliefs in long and narrow strips? Of what value were these sculptures to the general effect of the structure? What seem to have been the proportions of the building? If we can call up an image of it before the mind, is this an image of perfect proportion, or is it clear that greater height or other change in dimension would have been an advantage? It is true that we generally accept Greek buildings of the best time as faultless: but it is also true that there were great differences among them. The hexastyle temple is necessarily more high and more narrow than the octastyle building. If we consider that the temple with six columns at each end has only thirteen on each side (that is, eleven without counting the corner columns which form part of the two fronts) while the wider Parthenon has seventeen columns on each side, we find that the comparative height of the temple of Poseidon at Pæstum, or of Zeus at Olympia, or of Athena at Sunion, is very much greater when seen from one corner, in perspective, than that of the Athens temple. Suppose that we trace from [Plate IV] so much of the colonnade as will leave out two of the end columns and four of those on the flank, and then put a corresponding pediment and entablature, which proportion shall we prefer? Which building is nearer to perfection? The Parthenon, as the very flower and glory of Greece? If so, why was the hexastyle form so very much more common? There are no other octastyle Doric temples known to us: and, if it be said as an explanation, that of course the heights of column and entablature would be varied for the change from the 8 × 17 peristyle to the 6 × 13 type, the question still remains for us—was it practicable to make an octastyle temple as perfect in proportion as were numerous hexastyle examples, large and small, scattered over Greece, Southern Italy and Sicily? These doubts are suggested in order that the reader may see in this commencement of his studies what kind of unsettled and never to be settled questions will come before him at every step of his inquiry. He will be equally uncertain whether he is to prefer the east end of Reims cathedral or that of Bourges, or that of Paris. As with the important Greek temples, so the Gothic cathedrals just named are the very flower of their epoch and represent in the highest perfection known to us their respective styles. So much the student will be able to discover without too great a mental effort: and once sure of this he will understand that no further mental effort in this direction is even desirable, and that comparison among works of very high excellence can never cease—can never be brought to an end by any authority or any outside decision whatsoever, and that here the student’s own preferences must be perforce his only guide.

There is still one point of view from which the Greek temples must be regarded. It is to many persons the most important consideration of all. Those who are realists in architecture are always inclined to favor the utilitarian plan and the logical structure and to hold these as of even greater value than the abstract proportion or the beauty of detail. On the other hand, writers like Ruskin never suggest the importance of the destination of the edifice, nor its merit as a piece of intelligent building: nor do the students of proportion, as in Neo-classic[15] buildings, think much of this matter. In the case of the Greek temples this practical consideration can be stated in a very few words. No large roofed hall was ever desired; no interior effect, as of a great vaulted room, was thought of; no room for a congregation or an audience within the solid walls was ever proposed. The naos of the temple served only to house the great image of the Divinity with other minor statues of the same or of kindred significance together with the gifts presented to the shrine. The people gathered in front of the great portico; public sacrifices were performed there; the temple itself, like the choir[16] of a Christian church long afterwards, was for the priests alone. Moreover, the buildings of different character left us by the Greeks, even in ruins, are so very few that we are unable to establish with certainty their character; and those which, like the famous Meeting-hall (Telesterion) at Eleusis, must have accommodated a number of persons seated to listen to the words of speakers, were obviously of extreme simplicity—involving no new principles of plan or of design. Next, as to the construction: that as the photographs show, was of the simplest possible character. Uprights of stone carried horizontal beams of stone, and these again cross-beams to span the width of the portico, which cross-beams might be of stone, or of wood encased perhaps with terra cotta slabs. As for the interior of the naos, in the larger temples it was divided into a wider middle hall and two narrower ones, like the nave and aisles of Christian churches: and all roofed with timber, in simple framing, which carried a roofing of tile: but whether the roof was always complete and solid, or whether, as some persons think, a part of this was often omitted so as to allow the light of day to enter from above, is uncertain.

It appears then that, as suggested in the first page of this chapter, the requirements and the structure of the Grecian religious building were so very simple that no long examination into the matter is needed to show the connection between the plan and the exterior effect, or between the structure and the exterior effect. We have no Greek interiors to study and the exteriors at once tell us how the whole structure was brought into being, and also that it could not fail to serve its daily uses in a very perfect manner.

CHAPTER II
LATER GREEK AND ROMAN DESIGN

IN chapter one there was discussion of the simplest Greek architecture—that which we call Doric—which reached its culminating point about 450 B. C. Considering now, very briefly, the later and more elaborate Greek buildings we find that they were more generally of the Ionic[17] style, that the most important of them were built along the Asiatic coast by the Greek colonists there, and finally, that not one of the larger monuments remains in any such condition that it can be seen even as an attractive ruin. The only important Ionic building which we can find impressive, as it stands, is the Erectheion at Athens, and this, though a very small building, is admitted to contain the most exquisite details of the Ionic style which are known to us. [Plate V] gives two views of the Erectheion in its present condition, and [Plate VI] gives the small portico of caryatides on the south flank of the same building. The views given here shows the curious and entirely unexampled relation of these different parts to one another. The full significance of this combination of small apartments is not understood.

As a general thing the Ionic temples were not different in purpose from the Doric temples; they have therefore the same plan and the same simple structure; but they have a much more elaborate decorative treatment. Thus, we find here architectural sculpture, properly so called, introduced into the building. [Plate VII] gives a number of separate details of Ionic buildings, and it will be readily seen that here an influence was at work far different from that which ordained the absolutely unmodified square-edged and formal Doric building depending upon proportion and upon brilliant color; and that here

[PLATE V.]

[PLATE VI.]

conventionalized leafage, independently designed curvatures and broken lines, and the play of surface given by slight reliefs alternating continually with smooth flat planes, are all introduced. If, farther, we look back to [Plate VI] and note the treatment of that splendid “Portico of the Maidens,” we shall see what Greek thought was capable of in the way of architectural sculpture. Now there is no difference of opinion about the beauty of the simple patterns, the anthemions,[18] the egg-and-dart[19] mouldings, and the like; but the very greatest difference of opinion exists with regard to the essential propriety of human figures used as architectural members of such great importance as these, and especially when used as supports for a superincumbent weight. The author of this volume admires this portico as, on the whole, the finest thing left us by Greek architectural art, combining as it does the exquisite design and faultless modelling of each separate figure, the successful combining into a group of the four maidens of the front, or of the whole six, with their superincumbent weight of marble, and the exquisite management of the whole structure so that it shall seem light and yet solid, fanciful and yet dignified, graceful and yet enduringly noble. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out (“Entretiens,” vol. I., p. 293) how successfully the figures are posed and grouped to express their constructional function. There are excellent judges who think differently and who would fain ignore the Pandrosion,[20] as it is sometimes called, or relegate it to the position of a mistake made by that race of artists who were of all races the least likely to make mistakes. In this

[PLATE VII.]

[PLATE VIII.]

connection it may be noted that the buildings of the Ionic style offer other and very curious exceptions to the more usual treatment of sculpture when applied to buildings. Thus in the Erectheion itself, the principal frieze was of dark gray marble in smooth slabs, upon which were fixed figures in white marble in vigorous action, the scale small, and the whole composition much more nearly pictorial than anything in the Parthenon. Again, in the balustrade built about the little temple of Victory on the edge of the cliff at the west of the Acropolis, reliefs of moderate projection are treated with singular vivacity: draped goddesses in active and easily understood movement.

There is also in Greek architecture the beginning of the Corinthian[21] style, of which the best example known to moderns is the totally ruined Tholos[22] near Epidauros in the Morea, and the most familiar, that little monument in Athens, called the Choragic[23] Monument of Lysicrates: but for this style we must refer to the Roman buildings in which it reached its highest development.

When we come to consider more especially the traditional repute of Grecian architecture, and the influence which it has had in shaping the opinions of what we call the taste of sixty generations throughout all the European lands, we are brought at once to the work of the Roman imperial times. All the nationalities—all the peoples—which take their recent and existing social form and opinions in art and literature from the same common source, the all-embracing empire of Rome, have taken up Greek art as they have taken up Greek literature, as their chief and original guide to thought. Indeed it has been shown, and is accepted as true, that the chief mission of the great Roman empire was in preserving Hellenic thought in art and literature for the future. It is because of this, as has been truly said, that the works of Homer and Æschylus and of the Greek sculptors are plants growing in our own garden. They might have been, and but for the Roman empire they would be, as foreign to the modern world as are the thought and literature of Persia and India. It is therefore necessary to consider what Greek architecture was to the five or six centuries which followed its greatest epoch, and again what it was to the five or six centuries which followed the Middle Ages, in Europe. From 450 B. C. to 400 A. D., and again from 1400 A. D. to recent times, Greek thought in these matters of fine art was the central thing, the spring of life. To the peoples of antiquity Greek architecture was a guide and inspiration, even under the much altered conditions of a foreign and irresistible rule: it was constantly and uniformly the model. To the peoples who have built and designed since the fourteenth century, Greek art has been of weight generally as acting through the Roman styles of design, for it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the actual buildings of the Greek peoples in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Italy, and in Sicily, came to be known at all: but it was the Greek part in Roman imperial art that interested those Moderns. At the time of the first explorations and discoveries of Stuart, Revett, Penrose, Cockerell, Pennethorne, Texier, Renan, and the other explorers of the years from 1760 to 1850, the Greek buildings were in ruins. Not one single roof remained in place. Not one single building was so far preserved that the question could be definitely answered whether the temples had openings in the roofs for light in all or in any cases: so that the hypæthral[24] theory remains a theory only, and is apparently incapable of verification. On the other hand, the details, not only the mouldings and flutings and channelings, but also the carving in conventionalized leafage, were plainly to be seen and were capable of exciting the most enthusiastic interest. Thus [Plate VIII] shows the order and some other details of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor: the drawings having been made about 1766 under the direction of Dr. Richard Chandler and the architect Nicolas Revett. The general plan remained doubtful, but as it was evident that the buildings had received the most careful thought, with a view to their artistic character, and as, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proportion in the larger distributions of the building was esteemed the most important element of architectural greatness, it was taken for granted that the Greek buildings would be found to have also such excellence of proportion; and it was believed that this particular beauty could be enjoyed and judged by those who were patient and shrewd enough to combine the shattered ruins and deduce from them the original form of the buildings which they represent. What one temple would not give, another supplied. What one temple had lost, another had preserved. The height of the columns could be ascertained and the diameters of their shafts at top and at bottom: the distance apart of these columns could be ascertained: the shapes of the capitals were there to be noted: the entablature could be restored by a mental process and drawn out with almost perfect certainty. In this way the Greek temples were put into shape for the modern student. No such student had ever seen one except in the state of apparently hopeless ruin: but no such student could fail to grasp the evident significance of the original building when presented to him as a work of pure form, white and colorless, simple in construction, refined in detail beyond anything that later times had ever achieved, presumably faultless in proportion, and invested with minute and delicate decoration in conventionalized leaf form and the like. We have then to keep in mind two different ways of judging of the Greek buildings; first, the truly historical and also truly critical way, in which we take them as buildings once very real and really put to use, made rich by splendid color and abounding variety of detail, much of this detail being in paint or in gilding alone without form to represent it; and the other way, the modern traditional way, by means of which a small body of writers and lecturers swayed architectural opinion for a century and a half, and until the accurate examination and close study, given to the subject in the second half of the nineteenth century, had produced its effect.

In the later chapters of this little book there will be found frequent reference to this professional or technical view of pure Greek architecture. Still, what has been thought about it since its discovery in the eighteenth century, is of less importance to our inquiry than the similar assumptions with regard to the architecture of Imperial Rome; for that architecture influenced the peoples of Europe at all times during the Middle Ages, and more especially at the important periods of revival or of change in the fifth, the eleventh, and the fifteenth centuries.

The early architecture of Rome, that is of the city and its neighborhood, is not under consideration; it is very little known even to modern archæologists, and it was not known at all to the people of the Risorgimento[25] or their successors, upon whose work the modern traditions and feeling about architecture have been based. The buildings which directly influenced the world of the Middle Ages, and then that later world of the fifteenth century, the time of Italian imitation of antiquity, were those of the early Emperors. There was, as has been discovered within the last quarter of a century, a special art introduced in the reign of Augustus, a beautiful art made up of sculpture not exclusively Greek in character; and, in its architectural form, of an enlarged and more decorative handling of the Greek system of design. In both of these innovations some loss in refinement comes with the gain in splendor and in utility: but we can see this Augustan architecture to have been a splendid decorative art. It is also true that somewhat more of it than we now see remained in place, and nearly complete, in the fifteenth century. The great buildings which partly remain to us from the Imperial epoch are generally later than the time of Augustus. The famous Pantheon (see [Plate IX]), as we now have it, with its huge rotunda, dates from the time of Hadrian (117-138 A. D.): the magnificent Forum of Trajan with its accessories, a group of buildings inconceivably vast and splendid, was completed during the same administration of Hadrian. The best preserved Roman memorial arch, which is also fortunately very rich in sculpture, that of Benevento in South Italy, was also built after Trajan’s death and in the time of Hadrian: the best preserved buildings of Palmyra and of the North-African cities are of the time of the Antonines, those of Heliopolis (Baalbec) of the same epoch and later. The temples on the old Forum—the Forum Romanum as distinguished from the later or imperial Fora—were restored and altered many times before the final collapse of the imperial power in Rome: the temple of Castor, apparently under Tiberius (14-37 A. D.), the temple of Saturn, with the State treasury in its basement, perhaps not later than the time of Augustus (30 B. C. to 14 A. D.), the temple of Vespasian, much rebuilt, under Severus and Caracalla, at the beginning of the third century, A. D. The buildings named as being in Rome itself, together with the Temple of Antoninus Pius, that of Mars the Avenger in the Forum of

[PLATE IX.]

[PLATE X.]

Augustus, the enclosing wall of the Forum of Nerva, and other fragments now wholly destroyed, were the pieces of architectural art which most especially influenced the studies of the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. [Plate X] gives what now remains of the Temple of Castor, and also what remains of the Temple of Mars; but as late as the sixteenth century there was much more to be seen and studied about these ruins. The building behind the Temple of Castor in the Forum, now entirely stripped of its architectural decorations, retained its interior order of marble columns until the sixteenth century, and this building also was of great importance to the earlier restorers of antique art: it is thought by modern archæologists to have been the Temple of Augustus, which is known to have existed in this neighborhood.

The buildings named above were generally columnar in character. The memorial arch and the Pantheon are the only two of them which were certainly vaulted structures. Now, the memorial arch required only one or three simple barrel vaults, and the example of the Etruscans must have made such work as that familiar to the people of Rome, but the Pantheon is a very different thing. This, as rebuilt under Hadrian, with the rotunda which we know, must have been one of the earliest Roman buildings in solid mortar-masonry. Its walls are very thick, faced on both sides with brick, but built actually of small stones laid in strong mortar, and it is roofed with extremely massive vaulting of the same materials. Other such buildings of which large parts exist are, in the city of Rome itself, the great Halls of the Thermæ of Caracalla (probably built about 205-10 A. D.); those of the Thermæ of Diocletian, built a century later, and that of the basilica of Maxentius and Constantine on the north side of the Forum Romanum, built between 312 and about 330 A. D. In these buildings a vaulting as massive as that of the Pantheon but of wholly different shape was used. The Pantheon, a circular building, is roofed by a circular cupola[26] which is kept in place by a ponderous superstructure carried up from the haunches of the vault, so that the thrust of the cupola could not, however great it might be, affect the stability of the structure. In the great halls of the Thermæ and the basilica above named, the conditions are very different, for the groined-vaulting[27] of these halls would, if built under ordinary conditions, exert a formidable pressure outward upon all its points of support. In these Roman examples, however, there were two influences at work to save the buildings from possible injury: the skillful disposition of walls and piers to take up or absorb the thrust from each point of support, and the fact that these vaults were built in such a fashion, with horizontal beds of stone laid in strong cement mortar, that there could not be much thrust when once the mortar was dry and the vault consolidated. The vault could not thrust outward without breaking: and it was too homogeneous to break. Buildings whose actual construction was carried out in this fashion exist throughout those Mediterranean lands which once were included in the great empire. This system of building gave the world those great permanent interiors which were the first in the world’s history to be of architectural importance. Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, both those of Greece and those of the Colonies—none of these great building nations had ever conceived of interiors prepared and designed for their own sake, and as the chief part of the building. The Assyrian kings in their palaces came nearer to understanding the possible effectiveness of the interior: but even they were satisfied with long and narrow halls shaped like what we call corridors. It was left for the Romans at once to develop their system of vaulting and at the same time to improve the construction of their roofs of wood and metal, so that halls fifty feet, sixty feet, even eighty feet wide, could be built with roofs of effective and beautiful form high above the floor. Under these conditions the most splendid possible interior effects were producible. Such vast columned interiors as that of the Ulpian basilica and that of the Septa Julia must have given an effect of stately grace absolutely unknown to the modern world; the true evolution of Greek art in one direction was assuredly to be found there. On the other hand the imperial dwellings on the Palatine Hill in Rome with their numerous vaulted halls, the temples of pure Roman design, like that of Venus and that of the City of Rome, built back to back, near the Colosseum, and the great halls of the basilicas and baths, as above suggested, were capable of being adorned in a permanent and strictly architectural way as none of the buildings of earlier races had been. The basilica of Maxentius had its middle division, its nave,[28] about eighty-three feet wide and roofed with a groined vault, although the span of that vault is less than this, about seventy-eight feet, because carried by immense columns which stand free of the wall on either side. This great hall was one hundred and twenty-five feet high to the top of the vault: and it was flanked on either side by an aisle[29] made up of three rooms, each about fifty-three feet square, opening into the central hall; and the barrel-vaults[30] even of these six minor divisions rose eighty feet from the pavement. (See [Plate XI].) This building dates from the declining days of the Empire and of classical civilization, when sculpture had already become a feeble and barbarous thing, without character, and when what we consider the Byzantine feeling in matters of decoration had already obtained the mastery throughout the greater part of the Roman world. The strong hold which the system of building had upon the engineers of the empire can be judged from this fact.

[PLATE XI.]

[PLATE XII.]

That which we are undertaking here is not a history of architecture, but in a sense a history of the modern way of judging of architecture. What then is the origin of those traditions and accepted doctrines upon which are based all our ways of criticising a building? This and the previous chapter are a partial answer to that question. The contribution of the Roman Imperial world to this tradition has been, by much, the greatest of all. It is upon the Roman practice that all subsequent European systems of decorative building have been founded, except the lightest and slightest—the wooden-framed houses of mediæval Europe and those of modern America, and their like. Apart from fortification, and from structures built by engineers without artistic intention, there is not a single form of building in masonry since the fifth century which has not been developed from the practice of the Imperial builders. Now it appears that those builders not only built in two different ways, but that they undertook the curious twofold task of constructing their buildings with massive walls and vaults of mortar-masonry (thereby abandoning wholly the example of the Greeks who never used mortar at all in the buildings we admire, and who had no arches nor windows nor interior designing of any sort in our modern sense), and of decorating these buildings within and without, by means of a borrowed Greek system of the Orders, which had nothing whatever to do with the actual structure. They allowed themselves to take certain liberties with the Greek Orders. They raised the column on a pedestal, they made the shaft of costly and beautiful material, of porphyry or granite or pavonazzetto marble or cipollino; and consequently, because the material was precious and also hard, they did not try to adorn the shaft with channels or flutes. They made the capital of bronze, cast hollow and gilded richly, and put such capitals around the top of the shaft as a mere ornamental jacket, concealing the actual supporting member. They built the horizontal architrave of wedge-shaped stones, making of each span between two columns a flat arch instead of a simple lintel of one block, and they protected this built-up lintel by a second arch above, a discharging arch to throw the weight upon the columns and relieve the centre of the lintel. Finally, they increased the amount of carved ornament upon all parts which seemed capable of receiving it. This they did, not only by making the sculpture of any one moulding very elaborate and rich, but also by increasing the number of sculptured mouldings. Thus in [Plate XII], there is given, that it may be compared with the carved work of Athens (see [Plate VII]) a part of the entablature of the Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum. And the differences between Greek and Roman practice in this respect are not limited to the amount of sculpture in a given moulding or a given monument: they affect also the very nature of the ornament itself. [Plate XII] gives one side of the imperial arch at Benevento; a monument intended primarily as a pedestal for a great group of bronze figures; the reliefs on the arch showing Trajan in war and in peace, sacrificing, conquering Dacians and Armenians. It is evident that no such use of human subject in sculpture had ever suggested itself to the Greek builders of the temples. It is historical: and it is also strictly decorative, and subordinate to the architectural design. For any similar conception arising among Greek peoples we moderns must go to buildings which were utterly unknown to the European artists who built up the neo-classic system, the men of the fifteenth and subsequent centuries. Such a building as the famous tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassos, now Budroun, on the coast of Asia Minor, may indeed have influenced greatly the Roman architects of the time of Hadrian. That Emperor, who was a great traveller, may have seen the Mausoleum; his favorite architect may have been a student of it from childhood; but any ideas which the men who brought classic art back to modern Europe drew from that famous structure came to them through the Roman designers.

However much they might abandon the Greek use, that is to say, the rational and inevitable use of the Orders, the Roman architects still employed those Orders constantly, and in a way more splendid than anything the Greeks had attempted. The Eastern notion of adorning a town by a broad central avenue lined with colonnades two or three deep, an idea developing itself rapidly in the cities of Syria, obtained throughout the empire during its peaceful days. It appears that in the fourth century it was feasible to go afoot from almost any point in the central regions of Rome, north, south, east or west, for a mile or two, while keeping always under cover; except indeed as one crossed a street or avenue, though even at such crossings there was often the Tetrapylon, the four-fronted gateway, to carry the shelter on from portico to portico. This system of colonnaded porticoes, roofed always and enclosed very often with a solid wall on one side at least, was developed in many forms. A temple would stand in a great court surrounded by just such colonnades. A forum of a Roman town like an agora of a Greek town would be faced by colonnades on every side. For the purpose of display, great squares were opened up essentially for the purpose of surrounding them by just such porticoes. [Plate XIII] gives views of the ruins at Jerash in Syria, east of the Jordan, the remains of the city of Gerasa, whose glory seems to have been of the time of the Antonine emperors. The lower figure gives the great triple archway south of the ancient walls of Gerasa: the upper figure a view of the great oval or semi-oval space, whose shape is not determined, and which we may hardly call either a forum or an agora. [Plate XIV] gives a detail of the Forum Transitorium of Nerva, Emperor from A. D. 96 to 98. The whole enclosure was a massive wall about ninety feet high and built of huge blocks of limestone, the decorative treatment and the sculptures being on the inside and facing upon the Temple of Minerva. The figure

[PLATE XIII.]

[PLATE XIV.]

gives a trustworthy plan of the buildings called by the name of Trajan and built during his reign and that of his successor, Hadrian. The modern buildings and streets are shown, and it is seen from these how the actual plan can only be inferred by that which has been discovered by digging here and there, or by investigations in cellars of modern structures. Still the general type of the old design can be seized: a great open square, 270 by 370 feet and this surrounded on three sides by a covered portico fifty feet wide with two rows of great columns in addition to the wall outside, which itself was pierced by many openings filled with columns in antis.[31] Across one end of this great square, stretched the Ulpian basilica, as long as the whole square was wide, including its portico, and half as wide as that: in other words, the open interior of the basilica was about 180 by nearly 400 feet and the roof of all this was carried by two rows of columns on every side in addition to the outer wall which again was in parts opened up into a colonnade. The basilica may or may not have been covered in the central part: various conjectural restorations have been made, but nothing is absolutely certain. It is evident that it was very open to persons coming and going—that they were allowed to cross it almost as freely as one crosses through a great cathedral in France or in Italy, going in at the north door and out at the south door, almost at pleasure. Beyond it, was a court where stood the Column of Trajan, still erect, though without its accompanying minor buildings, and beyond that again and across what may have been an entirely open street was the temple erected to the deified Trajan, after his death, by the Senate, which temple was surrounded by another portico and covered nearly as much ground as the great forum itself. In this way a continuous space of nearly a thousand feet in length by a width of from three hundred to four hundred feet was either covered by the roofs of porticoes or open to the sky within belts of these same porticoes. To walk once around the whole, following the outside ambulatory of the porticoes would be to walk the best half of a mile, and this one could do without ever passing out under the open sky, except perhaps in crossing to the temple enclosure. Nor does this account of the whole composition include in the least the great semicircular buildings projecting from the forum and from the basilica on the northeast and southwest. Now as all of this vast congeries of splendid buildings must be assumed to have been entirely of trabeated[32] structure, a mere series of columns and horizontal lintels resting upon them with superstructure, it is evident that the Greek spirit and the Greek taste controlled all parts of this vast composition.

Mile upon mile of colonnades, as Greek in taste as the later age would allow, enclosed and led up to superb interiors of a dignity and magnificence immeasurably beyond anything conceived by the Greeks. This is the Roman signet, as it were, the stamp which the great Empire put upon the world.

CHAPTER III
EARLY MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

THE unequalled grandeur of the Empire as it endured from 50 B. C. to about 350 A. D. is most strongly felt when we think of the Pax Romana—that Roman peace which forbade armed conflicts in the Mediterranean lands in which war had been the rule. To this Peace an altar was erected in Rome by the orders of Augustus. From the Caspian Sea to the Atlantic, and from the shores of the Baltic to the Atlas Mountains a consecutive and orderly government was maintained, fully as beneficent as has ever prevailed in any single nation of the earth, except in very recent years in Western Europe, and immeasurably superior to what has existed in those same regions, taken together during the past dozen centuries. One curiously complete difference existed, however, between the west and east halves of the Empire. In the West, Roman domination brought with it a civilization so superior to that known in those lands before the conquest that Gaul and Iberian must have looked upon the Italian domination as synonymous with all that makes for enlightenment and intellectual advance as well as good order. On the other hand, the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria, must have felt that in yielding to the Italian power they were yielding to a force, which, however beneficial politically, represented a lower intellectual civilization than their own. The business of the Empire was, as we now see it, to develop and hand on to the future, Hellenic civilization. The first dawn of this extended Hellenism must have been to the West a clear intellectual gain: but in the East it was not noticeable. The holders of Greek traditions may have enjoyed the apparent willingness of the conquerors to defer to the mental and moral superiority of the conquered: but they could not have bowed to Rome as the one civilizer known, as did the people of the west of Europe. And so it was that the people of the East took one view of the architectural problem when the Imperial system had fallen, while the Gallo-Romans, Britons and Spaniards took quite another view, which they impressed at once upon their Frankish, Visigothic and Saxon conquerors. The Roman builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after the Middle Ages. (See Chapters VI, VII, VIII.) The other prevailed at once: the needs of the Christian church were served by it; and the Westerners followed it in one way, the Easterners in a very different way. The people of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain developed Romanesque[33] architecture, the people of the Eastern Empire—which held together for centuries the Greeks, Albanians, Macedonians, Syrians, Phrygians—created Byzantine[34] architecture. The Romanesque is not ill-named: it is indeed quasi-Roman, Roman as near as the poor and scattered communities could make it. The Byzantine is a mixture of Persian and Roman habits and rules, and is the very finest thing that ever came out of such an almost conscious mixing of diverse element. It could not have been created but for the Roman Peace, which still held sway over the Eastern seas and lands after Italy and the West had gone back to pristine barbarism: but under that domination it spread all over the Balkan Peninsula with Greece, over southern and western Italy and Sicily, Syria, Egypt, and the coast regions of Asia Minor.

Now it so happens that both of these great styles were superseded in their turn by other and very vigorous styles: by the Gothic in Europe and the Saracen or Mohammedan in Asia: and therefore it is that we have only churches, and not many of them, from which to judge Romanesque and Byzantine architecture. At least, however, these are erect and complete, not too much altered, roofed and floored as of old, with window-openings and doorways, porches and apses in working order. It is with the present chapter, then, that we begin to study buildings which we can see complete. And, after all, the church was much the most important structure of the time. Here and there a ruined palace, like Barbarossa’s at Gelnhausen and the Hebdomon at Constantinople, makes us regret what we have lost: but these also prove the truth of our assumption that it was the Church Building in which was determined the growth of architecture. Indeed that was to be the march of events until the fifteenth century: only then did the residence and the house of state come to the front.

The earliest western churches are the Basilicas, buildings of a form and style derived partly from the Roman civic basilica[35], and partly from the well known peristyle or garden-like court of the large Roman house, with its pillars supporting the roofs of open galleries on three or four sides. The buildings of this character built or adapted for Christian uses were themselves basilicas—Christian basilicas or post-classic basilicas. They were flat roofed, without vaulting, imitating in this the majority of the older, classical basilicas. A good example of these buildings is seen in the still existing church in Rome, the Liberian basilica called commonly St. Mary the Greater (S. Maria Maggiore). Plate XV gives the interior of this building as drawn by Gutensohn for the great work of Bunsen: the late alteration which spoils the uniformity of the colonnade on either side being ignored. The columns of this colonnade are entirely antique, excepting repairs and slight alterations. It is probable that in this as well as in many similar structures the ancient pillars of a great outdoor portico, such as are described in Chapter II, were taken bodily for the interior of the church. The clergy of the fifth century cared much less for the beauty and completeness of the city outside than for, each, his own special dominion—the church which he controlled; and there was no municipality to prevent such spoliation. The plan of the church is easy to understand from the plate itself; apart from the numerous

[PLATE XV.]

[PLATE XVI.]

outside chapels and sacristies of later time, a simple parallelogram about two hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, which width is divided into a broad nave and two much narrower aisles. And therefore a single glance reveals the whole structural character and the whole architectural design of the church. Three parallel halls divided by two rows of columns; the central hall (the nave) rising much higher than the roofs on either side, and showing, therefore, a broad space of wall towards the interior; and, towards the exterior, a wall less high by the vertical height of the aisle-roof. This great wall surface will be certain to have windows in it, because that is the obvious way of lighting the nave: then the roofs either finished within by a flat ceiling, as in the present instance, or showing the timbers of the roof, with only such decoration as color and a little very simple carving may supply. This type of building endured through the whole epoch of what we call the Middle Ages, and has never been wholly abandoned since. Our larger churches are close studies of it.

Substitute a series of equal arches for the straight horizontal lintels which stretch from column to column and carry the clearstory[36] wall, and you have the very root of the Western Romanesque, and of its higher development in the Gothic style. (See Chapter IV.) Basilicas contemporaneous, or nearly so, with S. Maria Maggiore are often so built, with round arches sprung from column to column; and if we take a church of a much later period of central Italy we find often the basilica type in its simplicity—developed and made more complex only in detail. [Plate XVI] gives the interior of the church of San Miniato al Monte outside the walls of Florence. The noticeable peculiarity in this is the change of the arcade, supporting the clearstory wall, from a single uniform line of equal columns supporting equal arches, to a more organized structure of two great piers with two responds[37] and in each of the three spaces so left, two columns with three round arches. This system is found in churches as early as Santa Agnese outside the walls of Rome, and was never abandoned. To satisfy in some way the instinctive desire of the builders for a more complex plan than the perfectly unbroken nave and aisles, there was introduced the wall supported on a great round arch, which, as seen in [Plate XVI], spans the nave at two points in its length and may be thought to stiffen the otherwise long and unbuttressed clearstory wall. The painted decoration of the timbers of this roof of San Miniato is very attractive, the color effect is more elaborate than the photograph can show: it is really a very beautiful thing: and it is rare in Europe to find an open timber roof treated so frankly as a thing susceptible of adornment. In other ways it is curious to see the way in which the poverty and lack of skill of the tenth century men alter the style of design from the huge Roman way of doing things. Lightness has to be substituted for ponderous masses; the walls are as thin as would stand alone and fairly steady: only the columns, taken from antique structures, can be thought capable of bearing more weight than is laid upon them; the decoration is by means of a marble inlay of large and bold design on the walls and of minute pattern in the pulpit, the altar rail and the like, and, in the half dome over the apse,[38] a mosaic picture of sacred significance—Christ with the emblems of the four evangelists and with the Virgin and San Miniato the patron of the church. In these mosaics and inlays there is to be noted a great interest in abstract patterns; a characteristic of Asiatic art, but unfrequent in Greek or in Roman art as we know it. Basilicas of the fifth century and of the sixth century at Ravenna (S. Apollinare

[PLATE XVII.]

[PLATE XVIII.]

in Classe and S. Apollinare Nuovo), of those and later centuries in Rome, of the eighth century at Parenzo in Istria, of the tenth century at Lucca (San Frediano) of the twelfth century in Palermo and Monreale in Sicily, and others, still exist with their main characteristics unchanged. They retain the simpler plan of rows of columns of uniform size and placed uniformly. Another whole family of churches are of the San Miniato type: the length of the nave divided into three or four greater bays,[39] subdivided into minor bays. Such are the famous churches of San Zeno at Verona, and of San Michele at Pavia and Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan (see [Plate XVII]): but these two last named churches have vaulted roofs of stone. [Plate XVIII] gives the exterior of Gross St. Martin at Cologne and the interior of the cathedral of Tournai in Belgium, interesting in the highest degree as showing plainly how the Northern builders were not content with the simple programme of the Italians—an interior upon which all pains were lavished while the exterior was left to come as it might, a mere brick box with the round-headed windows cut plainly through the wall. These builders of French Flanders in the eleventh century made the exterior of their church effective by the process of building four square towers of very simple design, involving no sort of complexity in their construction, and grouping these towers at the four corners of a larger and lower central mass also of tower-like aspect, while to the westward stretched the long nave pierced with a series of precisely similar round arches, above and below, with long roofs of uniform section, and all this brought sharply up against the great rising mass of the towers from which again three semicircular apses went off to the east, the north and the south. In this way an external architectural effect was produced far more elaborate than anything that the Italians of that time had imagined. As the church of Tournai now stands, a late Gothic chancel has replaced the old eastern apse: it is easy, however, to restore mentally the original exterior of the church, and, if it were more difficult, the contemplation of other Romanesque churches, especially in Germany, would provide us with the material necessary. [Plate XIX] shows from the east end the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, and it is easy to imagine the three apses of somewhat different design grouped about the central and dominating mass of the Flemish church. This church at Cologne has two nearly round towers connecting the apses and seems to have had four such towers originally, or in the first design, with one square tower in the middle of the west front. The church of St. Martin in the same place (p. 77; [Plate XVIII]) differs from these and from most Romanesque churches in having a very noble central tower, one of the finest productions of the Northern Romanesque.

It is evident that the admiration which we give to even the most important of these churches is a different thing from that which the great monuments of antiquity compel. The construction of the mediæval churches is as complex as that of the greatest Roman monuments; this coming from a necessity of providing interiors relatively larger than those of the Roman imperial epoch. The builders even of the twelfth century, and even in the most nearly well governed countries of Europe, had but limited resources. No king, no great noble controlling a province, no bishop, no convent, however rich, could dispose of resources for one instant comparable to those of a Roman pro-consul in even a small town of the empire. The mediæval men had to get as much building as they could for their money. If they built their walls thick, as they seem to the modern traveller, this was because they were unable to get good masons. A stone wall may be carried up forty feet high with a thickness of only three feet, even when pierced with windows, if you have good workmen in your employ and fairly good

[PLATE XIX.]

[PLATE XX.]

flat-bedded stone with tolerable mortar; but as your material is the worse and as your masons are the more unskilled, you have to build the thicker. Indeed the history of Romanesque architecture is that of a long-continued fight between the problem and the would-be solvers thereof. It was desirable to roof with masonry, partly as a safeguard when, as often happened, the wooden structure of the high roof above the walls caught fire and was destroyed, and also because of the comparative stateliness of effect, and because each bishop thought of building not for his own brief time only, but for his successors. And this very requirement, that each part of the building should be closed at the top with masonry, kept the builders of Western Europe busy from the time of Clovis on. The history of any one great church is a record of continual failure of walls, foundations or abutments; some part of the vaulting is forever crumbling and threatening to fall so that it has to be rebuilt; and now and then there’s a crash and a catastrophe. The buttresses[40] have to be enlarged; iron ties have to be inserted; even the plan of the vaulting has to be changed every now and then and a new experiment tried with a view to its greater permanence in another style of work. Hence it is that the modern student of such buildings has at once that delight in them which comes from their very archaism mingled with a kind of deprecatory pity: we sympathize with their builders’ aims and regret their feeble resources and their small knowledge: we love their buildings as we love the stammering speech of childhood. There is something else, no doubt: such a splendid tower-group as that at Tournai, such a noble interior as that of Mayence (Mainz) cathedral (see [Plate XX]), are individually, and as works of art, powerful enough to command our sincere admiration: but these are the exceptions.

Exceptions in another way are found in northern and central France. The buildings there are not so remarkable for their superiority in general design as they are for their unparalleled richness in sculptural adornment. They have at the same time many larger features which are of peculiar interest. Thus the tower of St. Radegonde at Poitiers (see [Plate XXI]), square below and coming to an octagon for the belfry, is a wonderfully spirited composition: and close to it is that famous church of Notre Dame la Grande, of which the west front is shown in the next plate. The builders of this latter church were lovers of sculpture and knew how to handle it in order to produce a great result, so they composed boldly in groups of statuary, floral sculpture, or sculpture as rich made up of wholly conventional forms. [Plate XXII] gives the wall above the three great portals of the west front of this extraordinary church; and while inferior in tasteful harmony to the cathedral at Angoulême near by, or indeed to many a noble church of the centre of France, the richness of conception, and the easy way in which the constructional parts of the building are loaded with carved adornment without injury to its massiveness and its dignity are surprising enough. The sculpture is barbaric in its lack of knowledge, but to be barbaric is not to be weak or insignificant. The nineteenth century workmen of Europe had no such power of effective design. In this, as in building, the eleventh century men were surpassed by those of the years to follow: and but for that still greater Gothic art (see Chapter IV) we should have to go to Romanesque architecture for constant stimulus.

The architecture of the Eastern half of the Empire was much less nearly Roman in its plan. Basilicas there were; but at a very early epoch the type of what the Germans call the Centralbau prevailed. The centred building; so we might designate the plan and structure which presuppose a supremely important central feature, a hall, however opened up on three sides or four

[PLATE XXI.]

[PLATE XXII.]

sides to minor divisions, aisles, porches, and apses. See page 86. This great hall might be covered by a cupola, or, as often is found in the smaller churches, its vertical walls are carried up into a drum or round tower roofed in any one of several ways. The essence of the distinction between this plan and the Western plan is the absence of the “long drawn aisle”; and the arrangement of the whole around a central point from which the structures of the church may be said to radiate. There were, as has been said, straight-lined churches in the East: and in like manner there were radiating buildings in the West, notably, the round churches of San Stefano in Rome and the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle, St. Gereon at Cologne, and the rather numerous baptisteries, as at Florence, Parma, Ravenna and Pisa, which in their original state of being, were not baptisteries only, but became so after the basilica churches with nave and aisle had been built in the same towns for the cathedrals proper. Still, in connection with our immediate question, that of

the artistic appreciation of a building of any epoch, it is better to study round or radiating buildings in their own home of the Eastern provinces, as we study the basilica-shaped buildings in Western Europe.

Now the peculiarity of the Eastern church-building, that of the central hall, is generally the absence of any very impressive exterior. This was not necessarily the result of the plan adopted. One does not see readily any sufficient cause for the general neglect among Eastern designers of the appearance from outside; unless it be this—that the cities of the Levant were then as they are now made up, so far as the stranger who walks their streets can discern, of blind whitewashed walls upon which open only the doorways of the dwellings, and here and there, in the ground story, a small unarchitectural and carefully grated window. The street effects, common to the cities of the north of Europe, even as early as the eleventh century, and well known to us for their picturesque and varied character, are, in the Levant, simply non-existent, except in those few cities which show strong external marks of commercial intercourse with Europe. The interior is indeed the chief thing in church building, anywhere, but in the Byzantine art it is everything, or so the student thinks. [Plate XXIII] shows the interior of the great church of Santa Sophia, at Constantinople, which seems to many the noblest architectural conception of the Christian world in any of its parts. [Plate XXIV] gives the exterior of the same building: and it will be seen at once how much there needs to be taken from it that its true Byzantine character may be judged. The tall round minarets are modern Turkish additions, put there for the muezzin who calls to prayer, the enormous buttresses, looking like lofty houses without windows, which rise one on either side of the great arch in the flank of the church, are additions resulting partly from the fall of the original cupola in the sixth century and partly from much later reparations; and all the small cupolas near, with the buildings which they cover, are wholly modern,

[PLATE XXIII.]

[PLATE XXIV.]

at least in their present form, whatever foundations of fifth century work there may be enclosed within them. It appears then that the only striking external feature of the original building would be the slow rise and swell of the central cupola, led up to by the similar curves of the two half cupolas covering the semicircular apses at the northeast and southwest, and contrasting boldly with the huge flat wall beneath the arch, on the northwest and southeast.

The magnificent conception of this interior is well known to be unique among the Byzantine churches; that is to say, no one of them has this same remarkable system of construction with four very open arches (one hundred foot span) supporting this low-pitched cupola which is then buttressed in a way by the half cupolas on two sides producing the striking interior form quite visible in the [Plate XXIII]. In other respects, however, this great church is rather the typical Byzantine church than a building apart. The other churches are like it in construction; they are like it in having the central mass nearly circular, and the minor parts ranged around it on every side; they are like it in having drawn their constructional character from the vaulted buildings of Persia and the neighboring lands. Thus the church of St. Theodore at Athens, of which the plan is given on page 86, though it has three apses turned towards the east and a narthex at the west end, is still a building with a dominant central feature around which other parts are grouped. [Plate XXIV] shows this plainly, for nothing can be more remote from the basilica type than the group here shown. The cupola is evidently not complete—not a fully organized design—it has been roofed as cheaply as possible and at as low a level as the windows would allow: for these windows replace the great light-openings of the western clearstory. In Moldavia and in the southern provinces of Russia these cupolas are found by hundreds with their design fairly well worked out. [Plate XXV] shows a monastery in the region of the Caucasus, in which the principal church

[PLATE XXV.]

[PLATE XXVI.]

and three smaller chapels are all completed by the carrying up of just such cupolas above these central divisions. Now these buildings are all very small. The cupolas are twenty-five feet, eighteen feet, sixteen feet wide, within: St. Theodore’s little shrine would not hold a hundred worshippers. It is easy to see that the exterior design with the high cupola was worked out for these small buildings; but it is easy to see also that the general plan is capable of nobler exterior treatment. If, therefore, there should ever be an attempt made to build in modern Europe in the Byzantine style, it will be modified, inevitably, by this possibility, and by the obvious necessity of satisfying the general demand for a splendid outside. The recently built cathedral in London, spoken of below in Chapter X, is an instance of this.

Still, the glory of the Byzantine style must be found in its interior decoration. The Greek half of the Empire took from the Roman masters of the world the taste for splendid material; and, wherever some money could be had, the alabaster and the rosy and gray marbles of Greek and Asiatic quarries were brought to the spot. Mosaic gave a more vivid color; and this gave also the opportunity for the telling of the Gospel story and the legends of saints in permanent pictures. St. Mark’s church at Venice is the type for Europeans to study. The sense of pure delight in glowing and harmonious color, combined with soft and flowing line, is nowhere so strongly felt: no building, until Santa Sophia can be cleansed of Turkish whitewash, will affect the lover of splendid decoration so powerfully.

CHAPTER IV
CENTRAL MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

GOTHIC architecture is a natural development of the Romanesque architecture of northern France. It took its origin in the second half of the twelfth century, that origin being wholly constructional. The Romanesque builders were extremely harassed by their problems of masonry roofing, as mentioned in Chapter III, and there was taken up as a device to facilitate this vaulting the plan of an arched rib of carefully-worked hard stone, carried diagonally across the open space which required the stone roof: then another similar rib crossing the first one, leaving only triangles, each about one-fourth of the full size of the open space, which triangles could be vaulted with great ease. Instead of a square or parallelogram containing a thousand square feet horizontal and needing to be covered by a somewhat complicated vault, all that was required was the careful adjusting of two narrow arches in cut stone, and then the very simple vaulting of each one of the four triangles, about two hundred square feet each, horizontal. This was a simple and rather obvious device, one would think: but it took thirty years to develop, and once complete, the whole great system of Gothic building and the whole Gothic style, including everything from the cathedral of Reims to the smallest chapel, came from it as a matter of course.

If the student desire a clear notion of the nature and the appearance of Gothic rib-vaulting he may study [Plate XXVI], in which the structure can be seen better than in the high vaults of a cathedral. Each rib is a part of an independent arch of stone, perhaps a foot wide and twenty inches or two feet deep. The arch-solids (voussoirs) are very carefully cut, and the arch built with all its company of corresponding arches to meet at top, midway, in a boss of cut stone. This done, the triangular spaces are easy enough to build with smaller and rougher stones, and the haunches are loaded outside and above with still ruder masonry.

The style was developed in that tract of country which lies between the Loire on the south, the Somme on the north, the Meuse on the east, and, on the west, a line drawn north and south through the cities of Caen and Angers—a district about one hundred and thirty by two hundred and fifty miles, equal to England and Wales south of the Trent and the Mersey, or, say, the State of Pennsylvania. The style was never quite at its best except in what is now France, though the boundaries of the district above named were soon overpassed by the perfected Gothic. The most nearly French, and therefore most normal and faultless, examples out of France are those of the Rhine and of northern Spain where French master-masons seem to have worked. The Gothic, beginning as early as 1290 in England, is of extreme beauty in a simple, quasi-domestic, less grand and less perfectly developed way than the French. The Gothic of Germany and the Austrian dominions differed from the normal type in being somewhat fantastical and irregular, but still more in a lack of a thoroughly intelligent proportion of the parts. The so-called Gothic of Italy is never admirable as a style except in a few Cistercian monastic churches: and the magnificent cathedrals such as Orvieto, Siena, Monreale, and Florence are rightly beloved indeed for their magnificent combination of the decorative arts of form and color—their mosaics, their delicate sculptures in marble, their wrought and highly developed porches, their superb wall-tombs—but are of minor architectural importance from the very fact of their complete lack of constructional significance.

Let us consider the cathedral of Amiens in the department of the Somme, about sixty miles north of Paris. This we may take as being the accepted representative of French Gothic churches, lacking indeed some features which others of its own time have retained, but completely typical in its plan and structure. [Plate XXVII] gives the interior looking westward from the choir and shows the nave in steep perspective so that its seven bays are much foreshortened, and with this a part of the north aisle and a part of the choir in which we stand. The great height of the nave is shown without that sometimes disagreeable appearance of a narrowness disproportionate to the height such as is sometimes seen in photographs taken directly on the axis of so lofty a church. The members which go to make up this great height are also visible; the first row of nave arches repeated in the choir and in the transept, the second story of arched openings which gives us the triforium,[41] and the third story which is called the clearstory, and which contains the great windows as well as the vaulting which constitutes the inner roof of the church. The round window in the distance forms an important part of the west front. Close to the spectator the lofty wall broken up into canopies and arches and crowned with a forest of pinnacles is entirely of carved oak, and includes an incredible number of most exquisite carvings, which decorate all parts of the partition itself as well as the stalls or the seats for choristers which are dimly seen below. The iron gates, seen as closed, give access to this enclosure which is the liturgical choir, that is to say, the enclosure made within the architectural choir, and intended to serve for the clergy and their assistants. As to epochs, the whole structure of the church is of the thirteenth century: its vaulting, its arches and piers and windows and its delicate sculpture; and its original plan, though conceived during the last years of the twelfth century, cannot be thought to have been perfected until the structure rose upon it. The carved work of the choir is very much later, representing the last development of Gothic art and belonging more properly to our Chapter V:

[PLATE XXVII.]

[PLATE XXVIII.]

it is known to have been executed between 1508 and 1520. A very few years later were wrought the splendid sculptures in stone of the outer choir screen—the massive wall which encloses this graceful work in carved oak: but these must be referred to Chapter V. The great iron gates, beautiful of their kind, belong to the eighteenth century: they replace a noble jubé or rood screen which once separated the choir from the crossing, where nave and transepts meet.

Now it is clear enough what we have to admire and enjoy when we stand within such a church as this. The least attentive beholder is struck by the great height of the church; and the roof, one hundred and forty feet above the head, is not invisible nor lost in darkness, but shows its elaborate structure of elastic ribs carrying thin vaults which bear upon the ribs and thrust in every direction, so that the general character of the construction is readily grasped. The height is made manifest—it is in a manner explained—by its division into three stories, each of which again seems to be subdivided by the sculptured capitals which mark the springing of the arches. The cruciform plan leading the eye away into halls and passages, not perceived at first, adds to the ultimate effect of grandeur dependent upon space, however much it may delay the fullness of that impression. The abundant detail in mouldings and in floral sculpture as well as in constructional elements probably increases the effect of size by means of the constant repetition of its similar groups: and it is in itself capable of giving the greatest pleasure to the student who finds in it, as it were, a museum of decorative sculpture arranged not in meaningless succession as when fragments are arranged upon a shelf, but in highly significant order and in sequences both horizontal and vertical. There is still for the student of such matters the constantly growing respect for the logical acumen of the builders, who insert nothing for mere ornamentation but who make their constructional members tell as decorative features. Here are no slabs of precious marble nor any bas-reliefs delicately wrought in stucco, as in the buildings of imperial Rome, nor, at present, any chromatic effects whatever, except those of the great windows; for whatever traces of painting were left from the Middle Ages have been destroyed long ago. The building can never have affected surface decoration, in the Roman sense: a decoration covering all parts of its interior and concealing or ignoring the structure; the effective paintings that there were we know to have been local in their character, near the eye, and having a definite message of ecclesiastical import. The decorative instinct of the Gothic builders was not there but in the treatment of the actual building. Let us consider another great cathedral, that of Reims in the department of the Marne. [Plate XXVIII] gives two views in the interior, both near the east end. In the one, you look westward far down the north aisle, about four hundred and twenty feet from where we stand, to the open door seen in the west front. In the other, we look across the choir proper, that is the liturgical enclosure, from southwest to northeast, seeing the beginnings of the curve of the chevet or rounded apse. In these interior views are seen in a more intimate way the characteristics of a great Gothic church. The vastness, the height, the soaring grandeur of the interior are for the moment ignored, and we see the lower vaults and the clustered pillars which support them and the higher vaults of the nave, as well as the delicate sculpture of the capitals. The interior, however, though certainly the thing of primary importance, is not all that we have to study.

The outside of the Gothic Church is as closely related to the structure as is the inside and forms one with it. [Plate XXIX] gives the exterior of Amiens cathedral. The highest windows are those of the clearstory, which is the upper part of the central nave, in this case the nave of the choir. Below these is the roof of the inner aisle hidden here by the pyramidal roofs of the

[PLATE XXIX.]

[PLATE XXX.]

chapels, built much later. Now as to the forest of flying buttresses, those sloping bars of stone carried on stone arches, which surround the clearstory, the only purpose of these is to receive and neutralize the thrust of the vaults within. The high vault above the clearstory pushes against the uppermost flying buttresses. The vault of the inner aisle has its much less formidable thrust taken up by the vaults of the outer aisle as far as the lines of the plan are straight, east and west, and by those of the chapels as soon as the curve of the chevet[42] begins. By means of the double set of flying buttresses, those within and higher and the outer and lower ones, the thrust of the high vaults is carried across the whole space occupied by the two aisles, and finally turned over to the upright piers which themselves serve also as buttresses for the outer aisle. Or, to approach the same set of counteracting forces from without, we have as we walk along either flank of the church, or around the curve of the chevet, a row of heavy and solidly built stone piers with much their greatest horizontal dimension in a direction across the axis of the church; that is to say, each one of them is perhaps twenty feet in and out by three feet or three and a half or four feet in width, measured east and west. Each one of these piers is built in with the low wall outside the outer aisle, or of the chapel, as seen in [Plate XXIX], and the lower part of this wall helps to resist the thrust of the roof-vaulting of that same aisle or chapel. As the pier goes up, it is soon left clear of all walls and roofs, and the flying buttresses from the vaults butt against it.

The Gothic builders had other thoughts over and above their logical desire to show everywhere the true structure. They had also the taste for upward-pointing lines: a taste which seems to have grown with the development of the style. It was not this taste which in the first place made their buildings high as compared with their width: that was a mere matter of convenience and of obtaining very large windows above the aisle roofs. But the pointed arch itself, and the steep roof needed to protect the stone vaults from rain in a rainy climate, led these builders constantly towards the steeper pitch, the sharper point, the more lofty and soaring design.