Val d'Arno

148. Returning to our door at Pisa, we shall find these general questions as to the distribution of ornament much confused with others as to its time and style. We are at once, for instance, brought to a pause as to the degree in which the ornamentation was once carried out in the doors themselves. Their surfaces were, however, I doubt not, once recipients of the most elaborate ornament, as in the Baptistery of Florence; and in later bronze, by John of Bologna, in the door of the Pisan cathedral opposite this one. And when we examine the sculpture and placing of the lintel, which at first appeared the most completely Greek piece of construction of the whole, we find it so far advanced in many Gothic characters, that I once thought it a later interpolation cutting the inner pilasters underneath their capitals, while the three statues set on it are certainly, by several tens of years, later still.

149. How much ten years did at this time, one is apt to forget; and how irregularly the slower minds of the older men would surrender themselves, sadly, or awkwardly, to the vivacities of their pupils. The only wonder is that it should be usually so easy to assign conjectural dates within twenty or thirty years; but, at Pisa, the currents of tradition and invention run with such cross eddies, that I often find myself utterly at fault. In this lintel, for instance, there are two pieces separated by a narrower one, on which there has been an inscription, of which in my enlarged plate you may trace, though, I fear, not decipher, the few letters that remain. The uppermost of these stones is nearly pure in its Byzantine style; the lower, already semi-Gothic. Both are exquisite of their kind, and we will examine them closely; but first note these points about the stones of them. We are discussing work at latest of the thirteenth century. Our loss of the inscription is evidently owing to the action of the iron rivets which have been causelessly used at the two horizontal joints. There was nothing whatever in the construction to make these essential, and, but for this error, the entire piece of work, as delicate as an ivory tablet, would be as intelligible to-day as when it was laid in its place.[33 - Plates 6 and 7 give, in greater clearness, the sculpture of this lintel, for notes on which see Appendix.]

150. Laid. I pause upon this word, for it is an important one. And I must devote the rest of this lecture to consideration merely of what follows from the difference between laying a stone and setting it up, whether we regard sculpture or construction. The subject is so wide, I scarcely know how to approach it. Perhaps it will be the pleasantest way to begin if I read you a letter from one of yourselves to me. A very favourite pupil, who travels third class always, for sake of better company, wrote to me the other day: "One of my fellow-travellers, who was a builder, or else a master mason, told me that the way in which red sandstone buildings last depends entirely on the way in which the stone is laid. It must lie as it does in the quarry; but he said that very few workmen could always tell the difference between the joints of planes of cleavage and the—something else which I couldn't catch,—by which he meant, I suppose planes of stratification. He said too that some people, though they were very particular about having the stone laid well, allowed blocks to stand in the rain the wrong way up, and that they never recovered one wetting. The stone of the same quarry varies much, and he said that moss will grow immediately on good stone, but not on bad. How curious,—nature helping the best workman!" Thus far my favourite pupil.

{Illustration: PLATE VI.—THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. ADVENT.}

{Illustration: PLATE VII.—THE STORY OF ST. JOHN. DEPARTURE.}

151. 'Moss will grow on the best stone.' The first thing your modern restorer would do is to scrape it off; and with it, whatever knitted surface, half moss root, protects the interior stone. Have you ever considered the infinite functions of protection to mountain form exercised by the mosses and lichens? It will perhaps be refreshing to you after our work among the Pisan marbles and legends, if we have a lecture or two on moss. Meantime I need not tell you that it would not be a satisfactory natural arrangement if moss grew on marble, and that all fine workmanship in marble implies equal exquisiteness of surface and edge.

152. You will observe also that the importance of laying the stone in the building as it lay in its bed was from the first recognised by all good northern architects, to such extent that to lay stones 'en delit,' or in a position out of their bedding, is a recognized architectural term in France, where all structural building takes its rise; and in that form of 'delit' the word gets most curiously involved with the Latin delictum and deliquium. It would occupy the time of a whole lecture if I entered into the confused relations of the words derived from lectus, liquidus, delinquo, diliquo, and deliquesco; and of the still more confused, but beautifully confused, (and enriched by confusion,) forms of idea, whether respecting morality or marble, arising out of the meanings of these words: the notions of a bed gathered or strewn for the rest, whether of rocks or men; of the various states of solidity and liquidity connected with strength, or with repose; and of the duty of staying quiet in a place, or under a law, and the mischief of leaving it, being all fastened in the minds of early builders, and of the generations of men for whom they built, by the unescapable bearing of geological laws on their life; by the ease or difficulty of splitting rocks, by the variable consistency of the fragments split, by the innumerable questions occurring practically as to bedding and cleavage in every kind of stone, from tufo to granite, and by the unseemly, or beautiful, destructive, or protective, effects of decomposition.[34 - This passage cannot but seem to the reader loose and fantastic. I have elaborate notes, and many an unwritten thought, on these matters, but no time or strength to develop them. The passage is not fantastic, but the rapid index of what I know to be true in all the named particulars. But compare, for mere rough illustration of what I mean, the moral ideas relating to the stone of Jacob's pillow, or the tradition of it, with those to which French Flamboyant Gothic owes its character.] The same processes of time which cause your Oxford oolite to flake away like the leaves of a mouldering book, only warm with a glow of perpetually deepening gold the marbles of Athens and Verona; and the same laws of chemical change which reduce the granites of Dartmoor to porcelain clay, bind the sands of Coventry into stones which can be built up halfway to the sky.

153. But now, as to the matter immediately before us, observe what a double question arises about laying stones as they lie in the quarry. First, how do they lie in the quarry? Secondly, how can we lay them so in every part of our building?

A. How do they lie in the quarry? Level, perhaps, at Stonesfield and Coventry; but at an angle of 45° at Carrara; and for aught I know, of 90° in Paros or Pentelicus. Also, the bedding is of prime importance at Coventry, but the cleavage at Coniston.[35 - There are at least four definite cleavages at Coniston, besides joints. One of these cleavages furnishes the Coniston slate of commerce; another forms the ranges of Wetherlam and Yewdale crag; a third cuts these ranges to pieces, striking from north-west to south-east; and a fourth into other pieces, from north-east to south-west.]

B. And then, even if we know what the quarry bedding is, how are we to keep it always in our building? You may lay the stones of a wall carefully level, but how will you lay those of an arch? You think these, perhaps, trivial, or merely curious questions. So far from it, the fact that while the bedding in Normandy is level, that at Carrara is steep, and that the forces which raised the beds of Carrara crystallized them also, so that the cleavage which is all-important in the stones of my garden wall is of none in the duomo of Pisa,—simply determined the possibility of the existence of Pisan sculpture at all, and regulated the whole life and genius of Nicholas the Pisan and of Christian art. And, again, the fact that you can put stones in true bedding in a wall, but cannot in an arch, determines the structural transition from classical to Gothic architecture.

154. The structural transition, observe; only a part, and that not altogether a coincident part, of the moral transition. Read carefully, if you have time, the articles 'Pierre' and 'Meneau' in M. Violet le Duc's Dictionary of Architecture, and you will know everything that is of importance in the changes dependent on the mere qualities of matter. I must, however, try to set in your view also the relative acting qualities of mind.

You will find that M. Violet le Duc traces all the forms of Gothic tracery to the geometrical and practically serviceable development of the stone 'chassis,' chasing, or frame, for the glass. For instance, he attributes the use of the cusp or 'redent' in its more complex forms, to the necessity, or convenience, of diminishing the space of glass which the tracery grasps; and he attributes the reductions of the mouldings in the tracery bar under portions of one section, to the greater facility thus obtained by the architect in directing his workmen. The plan of a window once given, and the moulding-section,—all is said, thinks M. Violet le Duc. Very convenient indeed, for modern architects who have commission on the cost. But certainly not necessary, and perhaps even inconvenient, to Niccola Pisano, who is himself his workman, and cuts his own traceries, with his apron loaded with dust.

155. Again, the redent—the 'tooth within tooth' of a French tracery—may be necessary, to bite its glass. But the cusp, cuspis, spiny or spearlike point of a thirteenth century illumination, is not in the least necessary to transfix the parchment. Yet do you suppose that the structural convenience of the redent entirely effaces from the mind of the designer the aesthetic characters which he seeks in the cusp? If you could for an instant imagine this, you would be undeceived by a glance either at the early redents of Amiens, fringing hollow vaults, or the late redents of Rouen, acting as crockets on the outer edges of pediments. 156. Again: if you think of the tracery in its bars, you call the cusp a redent; but if you think of it in the openings, you call the apertures of it foils. Do you suppose that the thirteenth century builder thought only of the strength of the bars of his enclosure, and never of the beauty of the form he enclosed? You will find in my chapter on the Aperture, in the "Stones of Venice," full development of the aesthetic laws relating to both these forms, while you may see, in Professor Willis's 'Architecture of the Middle Ages,' a beautiful analysis of the development of tracery from the juxtaposition of aperture; and in the article 'Meneau,' just quoted of M. Violet le Duc, an equally beautiful analysis of its development from the masonry of the chassis. You may at first think that Professor Willis's analysis is inconsistent with M. Violet le Duc's. But they are no more inconsistent than the accounts of the growth of a human being would be, if given by two anatomists, of whom one had examined only the skeleton and the other only the respiratory system; and who, therefore, supposed—the first, that the animal had been made only to leap, and the other only to sing. I don't mean that either of the writers I name are absolutely thus narrow in their own views, but that, so far as inconsistency appears to exist between them, it is of that partial kind only.

157. And for the understanding of our Pisan traceries we must introduce a third element of similarly distinctive nature. We must, to press our simile a little farther, examine the growth of the animal as if it had been made neither to leap, nor to sing, but only to think. We must observe the transitional states of its nerve power; that is to say, in our window tracery we must consider not merely how its ribs are built, (or how it stands,) nor merely how its openings are shaped, or how it breathes; but also what its openings are made to light, or its shafts to receive, of picture or image. As the limbs of the building, it may be much; as the lungs of the building, more. As the eyes[36 - I am ashamed to italicize so many words; but these passages, written for oral delivery, can only be understood if read with oral emphasis. This is the first aeries of lectures which I have printed as they were to be spoken; and it is a great mistake.] of the building, what?

158. Thus you probably have a distinct idea—those of you at least who are interested in architecture—of the shape of the windows in Westminster Abbey, in the Cathedral of Chartres, or in the Duomo of Milan. Can any of you, I should like to know, make a guess at the shape of the windows in the Sistine Chapel, the Stanze of the Vatican, the Scuola di San Rocco, or the lower church of Assisi? The soul or anima of the first three buildings is in their windows; but of the last three, in their walls.

All these points I may for the present leave you to think over for yourselves, except one, to which I must ask yet for a few moments your further attention.

159. The trefoils to which I have called your attention in Niccola's pulpit are as absolutely without structural office in the circles as in the panels of the font beside it. But the circles are drawn with evident delight in the lovely circular line, while the trefoil is struck out by Niccola so roughly that there is not a true compass curve or section in any part of it.

Roughly, I say. Do you suppose I ought to have said carelessly? So far from it, that if one sharper line or more geometric curve had been given, it would have caught the eye too strongly, and drawn away the attention from the sculpture. But imagine the feeling with which a French master workman would first see these clumsy intersections of curves. It would be exactly the sensation with which a practical botanical draughtsman would look at a foliage background of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

But Sir Joshua's sketched leaves would indeed imply some unworkmanlike haste. We must not yet assume the Pisan master to have allowed himself in any such. His mouldings may be hastily cut, for they are, as I have just said, unnecessary to his structure, and disadvantageous to his decoration; but he is not likely to be careless about arrangements necessary for strength. His mouldings may be cut hastily, but do you think his joints will be?

160. What subject of extended inquiry have we in this word, ranging from the cementless clefts between the couchant stones of the walls of the kings of Rome, whose iron rivets you had but the other day placed in your hands by their discoverer, through the grip of the stones of the Tower of the Death-watch, to the subtle joints in the marble armour of the Florentine Baptistery!

Our own work must certainly be left with a rough surface at this place, and we will fit the edges of it to our next piece of study as closely as we may.

LECTURE VII. MARBLE RAMPANT

161. I closed my last lecture at the question respecting Nicholas's masonry. His mouldings may be careless, but do you think his joints will be?

I must remind you now of the expression as to the building of the communal palace—"of dressed stones"[37 - "Pietre conce." The portion of the has-reliefs of Orvieto, given in the opposite plate, will show the importance of the jointing. Observe the way in which the piece of stone with the three principal figures is dovetailed above the extended band, and again in the rise above the joint of the next stone on the right, the sculpture of the wings being carried across the junction. I have chosen this piece on purpose, because the loss of the broken fragment, probably broken by violence, and the only serious injury which the sculptures have received, serves to show the perfection of the uninjured surface, as compared with northern sculpture of the same date. I have thought it well to show at the same time the modern German engraving of the subject, respecting which see Appendix.]—as opposed to the Tower of the Death-watch, in which the grip of cement had been so good. Virtually, you will find that the schools of structural architecture are those which use cement to bind 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.

{Illustration: PLATE VIII.—"THE CHARGE TO ADAM." GIOVANNI PISANO.}

162. You may consider the Tower of the Death-watch as having been knit together like the mass of a Roman brick wall.

But the dressed stone work of the thirteenth century is the hereditary completion of such block-laying, as the Parthenon in marble; or, in tufo, as that which was shown you so lately in the walls of Romulus; and the decoration of that system of couchant stone is by the finished grace of mosaic or sculpture.

163. It was also pointed out to you by Mr. Parker that there were two forms of Cyclopean architecture; one of level blocks, the other of polygonal,—contemporary, but in localities affording different material of stone.

I have placed in this frame examples of the Cyclopean horizontal, and the Cyclopean polygonal, architecture of the thirteenth century. And as Hubert of Lucca was the master of the new buildings at Florence, I have chosen the Cyclopean horizontal from his native city of Lucca; and as our Nicholas and John brought their new Gothic style into practice at Orvieto, I have chosen the Cyclopean polygonal from their adopted city of Orvieto.

Both these examples of architecture are early thirteenth century work, the beginnings of its new and Christian style, but beginnings with which Nicholas and John had nothing to do; they were part of the national work going on round them.

164. And this example from Lucca is of a very important class indeed. It is from above the east entrance gate of Lucca, which bears the cross above it, as the doors of a Christian city should. Such a city is, or ought to be, a place of peace, as much as any monastery.

This custom of placing the cross above the gate is Byzantine-Christian; and here are parallel instances of its treatment from Assisi. The lamb with the cross is given in the more elaborate arch of Verona.

165. But farther. The mosaic of this cross is so exquisitely fitted that no injury has been received by it to this day from wind or weather. And the horizontal dressed stones are laid so daintily that not an edge of them has stirred; and, both to draw your attention to their beautiful fitting, and as a substitute for cement, the architect cuts his uppermost block so as to dovetail into the course below.

Dovetail, I say deliberately. This is stone carpentry, in which the carpenter despises glue. I don't say he won't use glue, and glue of the best, but he feels it to be a nasty thing, and that it spoils his wood or marble. None, at least, he determines shall be seen outside, and his laying of stones shall be so solid and so adjusted that, take all the cement away, his wall shall yet stand.

Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the walls of the Kings, this gate of Lucca, this window of Orvieto, and this tomb at Verona, are all built on the Cyclopean principle. They will stand without cement, and no cement shall be seen outside. Mr. Burgess and I actually tried the experiment on this tomb. Mr. Burgess modelled every stone of it in clay, put them together, and it stood.

166. Now there are two most notable characteristics about this Cyclopean architecture to which I beg your close attention.

The first: that as the laying of stones is so beautiful, their joints become a subject of admiration, and great part of the architectural ornamentation is in the beauty of lines of separation, drawn as finely as possible. Thus the separating lines of the bricks at Siena, of this gate at Lucca, of the vault at Verona, of this window at Orvieto, and of the contemporary refectory at Furness Abbey, are a main source of the pleasure you have in the building. Nay, they are not merely engravers' lines, but, in finest practice, they are mathematical lines—length without breadth. Here in my hand is a little shaft of Florentine mosaic executed at the present day. The separations between the stones are, in dimension, mathematical lines. And the two sides of the thirteenth century porch of St. Anastasia at Verona are built in this manner,—so exquisitely, that for some time, my mind not having been set at it, I passed them by as painted!

167. That is the first character of the Florentine Cyclopean But secondly; as the joints are so firm, and as the building must never stir or settle after it is built, the sculptor may trust his work to two stones set side by side, or one above another, and carve continuously over the whole surface, disregarding the joints, if he so chooses.

Of the degree of precision with which Nicholas of Pisa and his son adjusted their stones, you may judge by this rough sketch of a piece of St. Mary's of the Thorn, in which the design is of panels enclosing very delicately sculptured heads; and one would naturally suppose that the enclosing panels would be made of jointed pieces, and the heads carved separately and inserted. But the Pisans would have considered that unsafe masonry,—liable to the accident of the heads being dropped out, or taken away. John of Pisa did indeed use such masonry, of necessity, in his fountain; and the bas-reliefs have been taken away. But here one great block of marble forms part of two panels, and the mouldings and head are both carved in the solid, the joint running just behind the neck.

168. Such masonry is, indeed, supposing there were no fear of thieves, gratuitously precise in a case of this kind, in which the ornamentation is in separate masses, and might be separately carved. But when the ornamentation is current, and flows or climbs along the stone in the manner of waves or plants, the concealment of the joints of the pieces of marble becomes altogether essential. And here we enter upon a most curious group of associated characters in Gothic as opposed to Greek architecture.

169. If you have been able to read the article to which I referred you, 'Meneau,' in M. Violet le Duc's dictionary, you know that one great condition of the perfect Gothic structure is that the stones shall be 'en de-lit,' set up on end. The ornament then, which on the reposing or couchant stone was current only, on the erected stone begins to climb also, and becomes, in the most heraldic sense of the term, rampant.

In the heraldic sense, I say, as distinguished from the still wider original sense of advancing with a stealthy, creeping, or clinging motion, as a serpent on the ground, and a cat, or a vine, up a tree-stem. And there is one of these reptile, creeping, or rampant things, which is the first whose action was translated into marble, and otherwise is of boundless importance in the arts and labours of man.

170. You recollect Kingsley's expression,—now hackneyed, because admired for its precision,—the 'crawling foam,' of waves advancing on sand. Tennyson has somewhere also used, with equal truth, the epithet 'climbing' of the spray of breakers against vertical rock.[38 - Perhaps I am thinking of Lowell, not Tennyson; I have not time to look.] In either instance, the sea action is literally 'rampant'; and the course of a great breaker, whether in its first proud likeness to a rearing horse, or in the humble and subdued gaining of the outmost verge of its foam on the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla, and sea-horse, by the head and crest of the man, dog, or horse, with the body of the serpent; and of which you will find the slower image, in vegetation, rendered both by the spiral tendrils of grasping or climbing plants, and the perennial gaining of the foam or the lichen upon barren shores of stone.

171. If you will look to the thirtieth chapter of vol. i. in the new edition of the "Stones of Venice," which, by the gift of its publishers, I am enabled to lay on your table to be placed in your library, you will find one of my first and most eager statements of the necessity of inequality or change in form, made against the common misunderstanding of Greek symmetry, and illustrated by a woodcut of the spiral ornament on the treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. All that is said in that chapter respecting nature and the ideal, I now beg most earnestly to recommend and ratify to you; but although, even at that time, I knew more of Greek art than my antagonists, my broken reading has given me no conception of the range of its symbolic power, nor of the function of that more or less formal spiral line, as expressive, not only of the waves of the sea, but of the zones of the whirlpool, the return of the tempest, and the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems to me scarcely a day, since, with boyish conceit, I resisted his wise entreaties that I would re-word this clause; and especially take out of it the description of a sea-wave as "laying a great white tablecloth of foam" all the way to the shore. Now, after an interval of twenty years, I refer you to the passage, repentant and humble as far as regards its style, which people sometimes praised, but with absolue re-assertion of the truth and value of its contents, which people always denied. As natural form is varied, so must beautiful ornament be varied. You are not an artist by reproving nature into deathful sameness, but by animating your copy of her into vital variation. But I thought at that time that only Goths were rightly changeful. I never thought Greeks were. Their reserved variation escaped me, or I thought it accidental. Here, however, is a coin of the finest Greek workmanship, which shows you their mind in this matter unmistakably. Here are the waves of the Adriatic round a knight of Tarentum, and there is no doubt of their variableness.

172. This pattern of sea-wave, or river whirlpool, entirely sacred in the Greek mind, and the {Greek: *bostruchos*} or similarly curling wave in flowing hair, are the two main sources of the spiral form in lambent or rampant decoration. Of such lambent ornament, the most important piece is the crocket, of which I rapidly set before you the origin.

173. Here is a drawing of the gable of the bishop's throne in the upper church at Assisi, of the exact period when the mosaic workers of the thirteenth century at Rome adopted rudely the masonry of the north. Briefly, this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the Ægean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are able—but it must be in a lecture on crockets only—to trace the succeeding changes through the curl of Richard II.'s hair, and the crisp leaves of the forests of Picardy, to the knobbed extravagances of expiring Gothic. But I must to-day let you compare one piece of perfect Gothic work with the perfect Greek.

174. There is no question in my own mind, and, I believe, none in that of any other long-practised student of mediæval art, that in pure structural Gothic the church of St. Urbain at Troyes is without rival in Europe. Here is a rude sketch of its use of the crocket in the spandrils of its external tracery, and here are the waves of the Greek sea round the son of Poseidon. Seventeen hundred years are between them, but the same mind is in both. I wonder how many times seventeen hundred years Mr. Darwin will ask, to retrace the Greek designer of this into his primitive ape; or how many times six hundred years of such improvements as we have made on the church of St. Urbain, will be needed in order to enable our descendants to regard the designers of that, as only primitive apes.

175. I return for a moment to my gable at Assisi. You see that the crest of the waves at the top form a rude likeness of a fleur-de-lys. There is, however, in this form no real intention of imitating a flower, any more than in the meeting of the tails of these two Etruscan griffins. The notable circumstance in this piece of Gothic is its advanced form of crocket, and its prominent foliation, with nothing in the least approaching to floral ornament.

176. And now, observe this very curious fact in the personal character of two contemporary artists. See the use of my manually graspable flag. Here is John of Pisa,—here Giotto. They are contemporary for twenty years;—but these are the prime of Giotto's life, and the last of John's life: virtually, Giotto is the later workman by full twenty years.

But Giotto always uses severe geometrical mouldings, and disdains all luxuriance of leafage to set off interior sculpture.