Val d'Arno/Lecture 07
LECTURE VII.
marble rampant.
161. I closed my last lecture at the question respecting Nicholas's masonry. His mouldings may be careless, but do you think his joints will be?
I must remind you now of the expression as to the building of the communal palace—"of dressed stones"[1]—as opposed to the Tower of the Death-watch, in which the grip of cement 
"The Charge to Adam (Giovanni Pisano)"
"The Charge to Adam (Modern Italian)"
had been so good. Virtually, you will find that the schools of structural architecture are those which use cement to bind their materials together, and in which, therefore, balance of weight becomes a continual and inevitable question. But the schools of sculptural architecture are those in which stones are fitted without cement,—in which, therefore, the question of fitting or adjustment is continual and inevitable; but the sustainable weight practically unlimited.
162. You may consider the Tower of the Death-watch as having been knit together like the mass of a Roman brick wall.
But the dressed stone work of the thirteenth century is the hereditary completion of such block-laying as the Parthenon in marble; or, in tufo, as that which was shown you so lately in the walls of Romulus; and the decoration of that system of couchant stone is by the finished grace of mosaic or sculpture.
163. It was also pointed out to you by Mr. Parker that there were two forms of Cyclopean architecture; one of level blocks, the other of polygonal,—contemporary, but in localities affording different material of stone.
I have placed in this frame examples of the Cyclopean horizontal, and the Cyclopean polygonal, architecture of the thirteenth century. And as Hubert of Lucca was the master of the new buildings at Florence, I have chosen the Cyclopean horizontal from his native city of Lucca; and as our Nicholas and John brought their new Gothic style into practice at Orvieto, I have chosen the Cyclopean polygonal from their adopted city of Orvieto.
Both these examples of architecture are early thirteenth-century work, the beginnings of its new and Christian style, but beginnings with which Nicholas and John had nothing to do; they were part of the national work going on round them.
164. And this example from Lucca is of a very important class indeed. It is from above the east entrance gate of Lucca, which bears the cross above it, as the doors of a Christian city should. Such a city is, or ought to be, a place of peace, as much as any monastery.
This custom of placing the cross above the gate is Byzantine-Christian; and here are parallel instances of its treatment from Assisi. The lamb with the cross is given in the more elaborate arch of Verona.
165. But further. The mosaic of this cross is so exquisitely fitted that no injury has been received by it to this day from wind or weather. And the horizontal dressed stones are laid so daintily that not an edge of them has stirred; and, both to draw your attention to their beautiful fitting, and as a substitute for cement, the architect cuts his uppermost block so as to dovetail into the course below.
Dovetail, I say deliberately. This is stone carpentry, in which the carpenter despises glue. I don't say he won't use glue, and glue of the best, but he feels it to be a nasty thing, and that it spoils his wood or marble. None, at least, he determines shall be seen outside, and his laying of stones shall be so solid and so adjusted that, take all the cement away, his wall shall yet stand.
Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the walls of the Kings, this gate of Lucca, this window of Orvieto, and this tomb at Verona, are all built on the Cyclopean principle. They will stand without cement, and no cement shall be seen outside. Mr. Burgess and I actually tried the experiment on this tomb. Mr. Burgess modelled every stone of it in clay, put them together, and it stood.
166. Now there are two most notable characteristics about this Cyclopean architecture to which I beg your close attention.
The first: that as the laying of stones is so beautiful, their joints become a subject of admiration, and great part of the architectural ornamentation is in the beauty of lines of separation, drawn as finely as possible. Thus the separating lines of the bricks at Siena, of this gate at Lucca, of the vault at Verona, of this window at Orvieto, and of the contemporary refectory at Furness Abbey, are a main source of the pleasure you have in the building. Nay, they are not merely engravers' lines, but, in finest practice, they are mathematical lines—length without breadth. Here in my hand is a little shaft of Florentine mosaic executed at the present day. The separations between the stones are, in dimension, mathematical lines. And the two sides of the thirteenth century porch of St. Anastasia at Verona are buil in this manner,—so exquisitely, that for some time, my mind not having been set at it, I passed them by as painted!
167. That is the first character of the Florentine Cyclopean. But secondly; as the joints are so firm, and as the building must never stir or settle after it is built, the sculptor may trust his work to two stones set side by side, or one above another, and carve continuously over the whole surface, disregarding the joints, if he so chooses.
Of the degree of precision with which Nicholas of Pisa and his son adjusted their stones, you may judge by this rough sketch of a piece of St. Mary's of the Thorn, in which the design is of panels enclosing very delicately sculptured heads; and one would naturally suppose that the enclosing panels would be made of jointed pieces, and the heads carved separately and inserted. But the Pisans would have considered that unsafe masonry,—liable to the accident of the heads being dropped out, or taken away. John of Pisa did indeed use such masonry, of necessity, in his fountain; and the bas-reliefs have been taken away. But here one great block of marble forms part of two panels, and the mouldings and head are both carved in the solid, the joint running just behind the neck.
168. Such masonry is indeed, supposing there were no fear of thieves, gratuitously precise in a case of this kind, in which the ornamentation is in separate masses, and might be separately carved. But when the ornamentation is current, and flows or climbs along the stone in the manner of waves or plants, the concealment of the joints of the pieces of marble becomes altogether essential. And here we enter upon a most curious group of associated characters in Gothic, as opposed to Greek architecture.
169. If you have been able to read the article to which I referred you, 'Meneau,' in M. Viollet le Duc's dictionary, you know that one great condition of the perfect Gothic structure is that the stones shall be 'en delit,' set up on end. The ornament then, which on the reposing or couchant stone was current only, on the erected stone begins to climb also, and becomes, in the most heraldic sense of the term, rampant.
In the heraldic sense, I say, as distinguished from the still wider original sense of advancing with a stealthy, creeping, or clinging motion, as a serpent on the ground, and a cat, or a vine, up a tree-stem. And there is one of these reptile, creeping, or rampant things, which is the first whose action was translated into marble, and otherwise is of boundless importance in the arts and labours of man.
170. You recollect Kingsley's expression,—now hackneyed, because admired for its precision,—the 'crawling foam,' of waves advancing on sand. Tennyson has somewhere also used, with equal truth, the epithet 'climbing' of the spray of breakers against vertical rock.[2] In either instance, the sea action is literally 'rampant;' and the course of a great breaker, whether in its first proud likeness to a rearing horse, or in the humble and subdued gaining of the outmost verge of its foam on the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla, and seahorse, by the head and crest of the man, dog, or horse, with the body of the serpent; and of which you will find the slower image, in vegetation, rendered both by the spiral tendrils of grasping or climbing plants, and the perennial gaining of the foam or the lichen upon barren shores of stone.
171. If you will look to the thirtieth chapter of vol. i. in the new (1873) edition of the "Stones of Venice," which, by the gift of its publishers, I am enabled to lay on your table to be placed in your library, you will find one of my first and most eager statements of the necessity of inequality or change in form, made against the common misunderstanding of Greek symmetry, and illustrated by a woodcut of the spiral ornament on the treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. All that is said in that chapter respecting nature and the ideal, I now beg most earnestly to recommend and ratify to you; but although, even at that time, I knew more of Greek art than my antagonists, my broken reading has given me no conception of the range of its symbolic power, nor of the function of that more or less formal spiral line, as expressive, not only of the waves of the sea, but of the zones of the whirlpool, the return of the tempest, and the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems to me scarcely a day since, with boyish conceit, I resisted his wise entreaties that I would re-word this clause, and especially take out of it the description of a sea wave as "laying a great white table-cloth of foam" all the way to the shore. Now, after an interval of twenty years, I refer you to the passage, repentant and humble as far as regards its style, which people sometimes praised, but with absolute reassertion of the truth and value of its contents, which people always denied. As natural form is varied, so must beautiful ornament be varied. You are not an artist by reproving nature into deathful sameness, but by animating your copy of her into vital variation. But I thought at that time that only Goths were rightly changeful. I never thought Greeks were. Their reserved variation escaped me, or I thought it accidental. Here, however, is a coin of the finest Greek workmanship, which shows you their mind in this matter unmistakably. Here are the waves of the Adriatic round a knight of Tarentum, and there is no doubt of their variableness.
172. This pattern of sea-wave, or river whirlpool, entirely sacred in the Greek mind, and the βόστρυχος or similarly curling wave in flowing hair, are the two main sources of the spiral form in lambent or rampant decoration. Of such lambent ornament, the most important piece is the crocket, of which I rapidly set before you the origin.
173. Here is a drawing of the gable of the bishop's throne in the upper church at Assisi, of the exact period when the mosaic workers of the thirteenth century at Rome adopted rudely the masonry of the north. Briefly, this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the Ægean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are able—but it must be in a lecture on crockets only—to trace the succeeding changes through the curl of Richard II.'s hair, and the crisp leaves of the forests of Picardy, to the knobbed extravagances of expiring Gothic. But I must to-day let you compare one piece of perfect Gothic work with the perfect Greek.
174. There is no question in my own mind, and, I believe, none in that of any other long-practised student of mediæval art, that in pure structural Gothic the church of St. Urbain at Troyes is without rival in Europe. Here is a rude sketch of its use of the crocket in the spandrels of its external tracery, and here are the waves of the Greek sea round the son of Poseidon. Seventeen hundred years are between them, but the same mind is in both. I wonder how many times seventeen hundred years Mr. Darwin will ask, to retrace the Greek designer of this into his primitive ape; or how many times six hundred years of such improvements as we have made on the church of St. Urbain will be needed in order to enable our descendants to regard the designers of that as only primitive apes.
175. I return for a moment to my gable at Assisi. You see that the crest of the waves at the top forms a rude likeness of a fleur-de-lys. There is, however, in this form no real intention of imitating a flower, any more than in the meeting of the tails of these two Etruscan griffins. The notable circumstance in this piece of Gothic is its advanced form of crocket, and its prominent foliation, with nothing in the least approaching to floral ornament.
176. And now, observe this very curious fact in the personal character of two contemporary artists. See the use of my manually graspable flag.[3] Here is John of Pisa,—here Giotto. They are contemporary for twenty years; but these are the prime of Giotto's life, and the last of John's life: virtually, Giotto is the later workman by full twenty years.
But Giotto always uses severe geometrical mouldings, and disdains all luxuriance of leafage to set off interior sculpture.
John of Pisa not only adopts Gothic tracery, but first allows himself enthusiastic use of rampant vegetation;—and here, in the facade of Orvieto, you have not only perfect Gothic in the sentiment of Scripture history, but such luxurious ivy ornamentation as you cannot afterwards match for two hundred years. Nay, you can scarcely match it then—for grace of line, only in the richest flamboyant of France.
177. Now this fact would set you, if you looked at art from its aesthetic side only, at once to find out what German artists had taught Giovanni Pisano. There were Germans teaching him,—some teaching him many things; and the intense conceit of the modern German artist imagines them to have taught him all things.
But he learnt his luxuriance, and Giotto his severity, in another school. The quality in both is Greek, and altogether moral. The grace and the redundance of Giovanni are the first strong manifestation of those characters in the Italian mind which culminate in the Madonnas of Luini and the arabesques of Raphael. The severity of Giotto belongs to him, on the contrary, not only as one of the strongest practical men who ever lived on this solid earth, but as the purest and firmest reformer of the discipline of the Christian Church of whose writings any remains exist.
178. Of whose writings, I say; and you look up, as doubtful that he has left any. Hieroglyphics, then, let me say instead; or, more accurately still, hierographics. St. Francis, in what he wrote and said, taught much that was false; but Giotto, his true disciple, nothing but what was true. And where he uses an arabesque of foliage, depend upon it, it will be to purpose—not redundant. I return for the time to our soft and luxuriant John of Pisa.
179. Soft, but with no unmanly softness; luxuriant, but with no unmannered luxury. To him you owe, as to their first sire in art, the grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the awe of Michael Angelo. Second-rate qualities in all the three, but precious in their kind, and learned, as you shall see, essentially from this man. Second-rate he also, but with most notable gifts of this inferior kind. He is the Canova of the thirteenth century; but the Canova of the thirteenth, remember, was necessarily a very different person from the Canova of the eighteenth.
The Canova of the eighteenth century mimicked the Greek grace for the delight of modern revolutionary sensualists. The Canova of the thirteenth century brought living Gothic truth into the living faith of his own time.
Greek truth, and Gothic 'liberty,'—in that noble sense of the word, derived from the Latin 'liber,' of which I have already spoken, and which in my next lecture I will endeavour completely to develop. Meanwhile let me show you, as far as I can, the architecture itself about which these subtle questions arise.
180. Here are five frames, containing the best representations I can get for you of the facade of the cathedral of Orvieto. I must remind you, before I let you look at them, of the reason why that cathedral was built; for I have at last got to the end of the parenthesis which began in my second lecture (§ 40), on the occasion of our hearing that John of Pisa was sent for to Perugia, to carve the tomb of Pope Urban IV.; and we must now know who this Pope was.
181. He was a Frenchman, born at that Troyes, in Champagne, which I gave you (§ 174) as the centre of French architectural skill and Royalist character. He was born in the lowest class of the people, rose like Wolsey; became Bishop of Verdun; then. Patriarch of Jerusalem; returned in the year 1261, from his Patriarchate, to solicit the aid of the then Pope, Alexander IV., against the Saracen. I do not know on what day he arrived in Rome; but on the 25th of May Alexander died, and the Cardinals, after three months' disputing, elected the suppliant Patriarch to be Pope himself.
182. A man with all the fire of France in him, all the faith, and all the insolence; incapable of doubting a single article of his creed, or relaxing one tittle of his authority; destitute alike of reason and of pity; and absolutely merciless either to an infidel or an enemy. The young Prince Manfred, bastard son of Frederick II., now representing the main power of the German empire, was both; and against him the Pope brought into Italy a religious French knight, of character absolutely like his own, Charles of Anjou.
183. The young Manfred, now about twenty years old, was as good a soldier as he was a bad Christian; and there was no safety for Urban at Rome. The Pope seated himself on a worthy throne for a thirteenth-century St. Peter. Fancy the rock of Edinburgh Castle, as steep on all sides as it is to the west, and as long as the Old Town; and you have the rock of Orvieto.
184. Here, enthroned against the gates of hell, in unassailable fortitude and unfaltering faith, sat Urban; the righteousness of his cause presently to be avouched by miracle, notablest among those of the Roman Church. Twelve miles east of his rock, beyond the range of low Apennine, shone the quiet lake, the Loch Leven of Italy, from whose island the daughter of Theodoric needed not to escape—Fate seeking her there; and in a little chapel on its shore a Bohemian priest, infected with Northern infidelity, was brought back to his allegiance by seeing the blood drop from the wafer in his hand. And the Catholic Church recorded this heavenly testimony to her chief mystery, in the Festa of the Corpus Domini, and the Fabric of Orvieto.
185. And sending was made for John, and for all good labourers in marble; but Urban never saw a stone of the great cathedral laid. His citation of Manfred to appear in his presence to answer for his heresy was fixed against the posts of the doors of the old Duomo. But Urban had dug the foundation of the pile to purpose, and when he died at Perugia, still breathed, from his grave, calamity to Manfred, and made from it glory to the Church. He had secured the election of a French successor; from the rock of Orvieto the spirit of Urban led the French chivalry, when Charles of Anjou saw the day of battle come, so long desired. Manfred's Saracens, with their arrows, broke his first line; the Pope's legate blessed the second, and gave them absolution of all their sins, for their service to the Church. They charged for Orvieto with their old cry of 'Mont-Joie, Chevaliers!' and before night, while Urban lay sleeping in his carved tomb at Perugia, the body of Manfred lay only recognizable by those who loved him, naked among the slain.
186. Time wore on and on. The Suabian power ceased in Italy; between white and red there was now no more contest;—the matron of the Church, scarlet-robed, reigned, ruthless, on her seven hills. Time wore on; and, a hundred years later, now no more the power of the kings, but the power of the people, rose against her. St. Michael, from the corn-market,—or San Michele,—the commercial strength of Florence, on a question of free trade in corn. And note, for a little by-piece of botany, that in Val d'Arno lilies grow among the corn instead of poppies. The purple gladiolus glows through all its green fields in early spring.
187. A question of free trade in corn, then, arose between Florence and Rome. The Pope's legate in Bologna stopped the supply of polenta, the Florentines depending on that to eat with their own oil. Very wicked, you think, of the Pope's legate, acting thus against quasi-Protestant Florence? Yes; just as wicked as the—not quasi-Protestants—but intensely positive Protestants, of Zurich, who tried to convert the Catholic forest-cantons by refusing them salt. Christendom has been greatly troubled about bread and salt: the then Protestant Pope, Zuinglius, was killed at the battle of Keppel, and the Catholic cantons therefore remain Catholic to this day; while the consequences of this piece of protectionist economy at Bologna are cquallv interesting and direct.
188. The legate of Bologna, not content with stopping the supplies of maize to Florence, sent our own John Hawkwood, on the 24th June, 1375, to burn all the maize the Florentines had got growing; and the abbot of Montemaggiore sent a troop of Perugian religious gentlemenriders to ravage similarly the territory of Siena. Whereupon, at Florence, the Gonfalonier of Justice, Aloesio Aldobrandini, rose in the Council of Ancients and proposed, as an enterprise worthy of Florentine generosity, the freedom of all the peoples who groaned under the tyranny of the Church. And Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo,—all the great cities of Etruria, the root of religion in Italy,—joined against the tyranny of religion. Strangely, this Etrurian league is not now to restore Tarquin to Rome, but to drive the Roman Tarquin into exile. The story of Lucretia had been repeated in Perugia; but the Umbrian Lucretia had died, not by suicide, but by falling on the pavement from the window through which she tried to escape. And the Umbrian Sextus was the Abbot of Montemaggiore's nephew.
189. Florence raised her fleur-de-lys standard; and, in ten days, eighty cities of Romagna were free, out of the number of whose names I will read you only these—Urbino, Foligno, Spoleto, Narni, Camerino, Toscanella, Perugia, Orvieto.
And while the wind and the rain still beat the body of Manfred, by the shores of the Rio Verde, the body of Pope Urban was torn from its tomb, and not one stone of the carved work thereof left upon another.
190. I will only ask you to-day to notice further that the Captain of Florence, in this war, was a 'Conrad of Suabia,' and that she gave him, beside her own flag, one with only the word 'Libertas' inscribed on it.
I told you that the first stroke of the bell on the Tower of the Lion began the carillon for European civil and religious liberty. But perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, Florence did not understand, by that word, altogether the same policy which is now preached in France, Italy, and England.
What she did understand by it we will try to ascertain in the course of next lecture.
- ↑ "Pietre conce." The portion of the bas-reliefs of Orvieto, given in the opposite plate, will show the importance of the jointing. Observe the way in which the piece of stone with the three principal figures is dovetailed above the extended band, and again in the rise above the joint of the next stone on the right, the sculpture of the wings being carried across the junction. I have chosen this piece on purpose, because the loss of the broken fragment, probably broken by violence, and the only serious injury which the sculptures have received, serves to show the perfection of the uninjured surface, as compared with northern sculpture of the same date. I have thought it well to show at the same time the modern German engraving of the subject, respecting which see Appendix.
- ↑ Perhaps I am thinking of Lowell, not Tennyson; I have not time to look.
- ↑ "Ariadne Florentina," § 52.