Val d'Arno

John of Pisa not only adopts Gothic tracery, but first allows himself enthusiastic use of rampant vegetation;—and here in the façade of Orvieto, you have not only perfect Gothic in the sentiment of Scripture history, but such luxurious ivy ornamentation as you cannot afterwards match for two hundred years. Nay, you can scarcely match it then—for grace of line, only in the richest flamboyant of France.

177. Now this fact would set you, if you looked at art from its aesthetic side only, at once to find out what German artists had taught Giovanni Pisano. There were Germans teaching him,—some teaching him many things; and the intense conceit of the modern German artist imagines them to have taught him all things.

But he learnt his luxuriance, and Giotto his severity, in another school. The quality in both is Greek; and altogether moral. The grace and the redundance of Giovanui are the first strong manifestation of those characters in the Italian mind which culminate in the Madonnas of Luini and the arabesques of Raphael. The severity of Giotto belongs to him, on the contrary, not only as one of the strongest practical men who ever lived on this solid earth, but as the purest and firmest reformer of the discipline of the Christian Church, of whose writings any remains exist.

178. Of whose writings, I say; and you look up, as doubtful that he has left any. Hieroglyphics, then, let me say instead; or, more accurately still, hierographics. St. Francis, in what he wrote and said, taught much that was false. But Giotto, his true disciple, nothing but what was true. And where he uses an arabesque of foliage, depend upon it it will be to purpose—not redundant. I return for the time to our soft and luxuriant John of Pisa.

179. Soft, but with no unmanly softness; luxuriant, but with no unmannered luxury. To him you owe as to their first sire in art, the grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the awe of Michael Angelo. Second-rate qualities in all the three, but precious in their kind, and learned, as you shall see, essentially from this man. Second-rate he also, but with most notable gifts of this inferior kind. He is the Canova of the thirteenth century; but the Canova of the thirteenth, remember, was necessarily a very different person from the Canova of the eighteenth.

The Cauova of the eighteenth century mimicked Greek grace for the delight of modern revolutionary sensualists. The Canova of the thirteenth century brought living Gothic truth into the living faith of his own time.

Greek truth, and Gothic 'liberty,'—in that noble sense of the word, derived from the Latin 'liber,' of which I have already spoken, and which in my next lecture I will endeavour completely to develope. Meanwhile let me show you, as far as I can, the architecture itself about which these subtle questions arise.

180. Here are five frames, containing the best representations I can get for you of the façade of the cathedral of Orvieto. I must remind you, before I let you look at them, of the reason why that cathedral was built; for I have at last got to the end of the parenthesis which began in my second lecture, on the occasion of our hearing that John of Pisa was sent for to Perugia, to carve the tomb of Pope Urban IV.; and we must now know who this Pope was.

181. He was a Frenchman, born at that Troyes, in Champagne, which I gave you as the centre of French architectural skill, and Royalist character. He was born in the lowest class of the people, rose like Wolsey; became Bishop of Verdun; then, Patriarch of Jerusalem; returned in the year 1261, from his Patriarchate, to solicit the aid of the then Pope, Alexander IV., against the Saracen. I do not know on what day he arrived in Rome; but on the 25th of May, Alexander died, and the Cardinals, after three months' disputing, elected the suppliant Patriarch to be Pope himself.

182. A man with all the fire of France in him, all the faith, and all the insolence; incapable of doubting a single article of his creed, or relaxing one tittle of his authority; destitute alike of reason and of pity; and absolutely merciless either to an infidel, or an enemy. The young Prince Manfred, bastard son of Frederick II., now representing the main power of the German empire, was both; and against him the Pope brought into Italy a religious French knight, of character absolutely like his own, Charles of Anjou.

183. The young Manfred, now about twenty years old, was as good a soldier as he was a bad Christian; and there was no safety for Urban at Rome. The Pope seated himself on a worthy throne for a thirteenth-century St. Peter. Fancy the rock of Edinburgh Castle, as steep on all sides as it is to the west; and as long as the Old Town; and you have the rock of Orvieto.

184. Here, enthroned against the gates of hell, in unassailable fortitude, and unfaltering faith, sat Urban; the righteousness of his cause presently to be avouched by miracle, notablest among those of the Roman Church. Twelve miles east of his rock, beyond the range of low Apennine, shone the quiet lake, the Loch Leven of Italy, from whose island the daughter of Theodoric needed not to escape—Fate seeking her there; and in a little chapel on its shore a Bohemian priest, infected with Northern infidelity, was brought back to his allegiance by seeing the blood drop from the wafer in his hand. And the Catholic Church recorded this heavenly testimony to her chief mystery, in the Festa of the Corpus Domini, and the Fabric of Orvieto.

185. And sending was made for John, and for all good labourers in marble; but Urban never saw a stone of the great cathedral laid. His citation of Manfred to appear in his presence to answer for his heresy, was fixed against the posts of the doors of the old Duomo. But Urban had dug the foundation of the pile to purpose, and when he died at Perugia, still breathed, from his grave, calamity to Manfred, and made from it glory to the Church. He had secured the election of a French successor; from the rock of Orvieto the spirit of Urban led the French chivalry, when Charles of Anjou saw the day of battle come, so long desired. Manfred's Saracens, with their arrows, broke his first line; the Pope's legate blessed the second, and gave them absolution of all their sins, for their service to the Church. They charged for Orvieto with their old cry of 'Mont-Joie, Chevaliers!' and before night, while Urban lay sleeping in his carved tomb at Perugia, the body of Manfred lay only recognizable by those who loved him, naked among the slain.

186. Time wore on and on. The Suabian power ceased in Italy; between white and red there was now no more contest;—the matron of the Church, scarlet-robed, reigned, ruthless, on her seven hills. Time wore on; and, a hundred years later, now no more the power of the kings, but the power of the people,—rose against her. St. Michael, from the corn market,—Or San Michele,—the commercial strength of Florence, on a question of free trade in corn. And note, for a little bye piece of botany, that in Val d'Arno lilies grow among the corn instead of poppies. The purple gladiolus glows through all its green fields in early spring.

187. A question of free trade in corn, then, arose between Florence and Rome. The Pope's legate in Bologna stopped the supply of polenta, the Florentines depending on that to eat with their own oil. Very wicked, you think, of the Pope's legate, acting thus against quasi-Protestant Florence? Yes; just as wicked as the—not quasi-Protestants—but intensely positive Protestants, of Zurich, who tried to convert the Catholic forest-cantons by refusing them salt. Christendom has been greatly troubled about bread and salt: the then Protestant Pope, Zuinglius, was killed at the battle of Keppel, and the Catholic cantons therefore remain Catholic to this day; while the consequences of this piece of protectionist economy at Bologna are equally interesting and direct.

188. The legate of Bologna, not content with stopping the supplies of maize to Florence, sent our own John Hawkwood, on the 24th June, 1375, to burn all the maize the Florentines had got growing; and the abbot of Montemaggiore sent a troop of Perugian religious gentlemen-riders to ravage similarly the territory of Siena. Whereupon, at Florence, the Gonfalonier of Justice, Aloesio Aldobrandini, rose in the Council of Ancients and proposed, as an enterprise worthy of Florentine generosity, the freedom of all the peoples who groaned under the tyranny of the Church. And Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo,—all the great cities of Etruria, the root of religion in Italy,—joined against the tyranny of religion. Strangely, this Etrurian league is not now to restore Tarquin to Rome, but to drive the Roman Tarquin into exile. The story of Lucretia had been repeated in Perugia; but the Umbrian Lucretia had died, not by suicide, but by falling on the pavement from the window through which she tried to escape. And the Umbrian Sextus was the Abbot of Montemaggiore's nephew.

189. Florence raised her fleur-de-lys standard: and, in ten days, eighty cities of Romagua were free, out of the number of whose names I will read you only these—Urbino, Foligno, Spoleto, Narni, Camerino, Toscanella, Perugia, Orvieto.

And while the wind and the rain still beat the body of Manfred, by the shores of the Rio Verde, the body of Pope Urban was torn from its tomb, and not one stone of the carved work thereof left upon another. 190. I will only ask you to-day to notice farther that the Captain of Florence, in this war, was a 'Conrad of Suabia,' and that she gave him, beside her own flag, one with only the word 'Libertas' inscribed on it.

I told you that the first stroke of the bell on the Tower of the Lion began the carillon for European civil and religious liberty. But perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, Florence did not understand, by that word, altogether the same policy which is now preached in France, Italy, and England.

What she did understand by it, we will try to ascertain in the course of next lecture.

LECTURE VIII. FRANCHISE

191. In my first lecture of this course, you remember that I showed you the Lion of St. Mark's with Niccola Pisano's, calling the one an evangelical-preacher lion, and the other a real, and naturally affectionate, lioness.

And the one I showed you as Byzantine, the other as Gothic.

So that I thus called the Greek art pious, and the Gothic profane.

Whereas in nearly all our ordinary modes of thought, and in all my own general references to either art, we assume Greek or classic work to be profane, and Gothic, pious, or religious.

192. Very short reflection, if steady and clear, will both show you how confused our ideas are usually on this subject, and how definite they may within certain limits become.

First of all, don't confuse piety with Christianity. There are pious Greeks and impious Greeks; pious Turks and impious Turks; pious Christians and impious Christians; pious modern infidels and impious modern infidels. In case you do not quite know what piety really means, we will try to know better in next lecture; for the present, understand that I mean distinctly to call Greek art, in the true sense of the word, pious, and Gothic, as opposed to it, profane.

193. But when I oppose these two words, Gothic and Greek, don't run away with the notion that I necessarily mean to oppose Christian and Greek. You must not confuse Gothic blood in a man's veins, with Christian feeling in a man's breast. There are unconverted and converted Goths; unconverted and converted Greeks. The Greek and Gothic temper is equally opposed, where the name of Christ has never been uttered by either, or when every other name is equally detested by both.

I want you to-day to examine with me that essential difference between Greek and Gothic temper, irrespective of creed, to which I have referred in my preface to the last edition of the "Stones of Venice," saying that the Byzantines gave law to Norman license. And I must therefore ask your patience while I clear your minds from some too prevalent errors as to the meaning of those two words, law and license.

194. There is perhaps no more curious proof of the disorder which impatient and impertinent science is introducing into classical thought and language, than the title chosen by the Duke of Argyll for his interesting study of Natural History—'The Reign of Law.' Law cannot reign. If a natural law, it admits no disobedience, and has nothing to put right. If a human one, it can compel no obedience, and has no power to prevent wrong. A king only can reign;—a person, that is to say, who, conscious of natural law, enforces human law so far as it is just.

195. Kinghood is equally necessary in Greek dynasty, and in Gothic. Theseus is every inch a king, as well as Edward III. But the laws which they have to enforce on their own and their companions' humanity are opposed to each other as much as their dispositions are.

The function of a Greek king was to enforce labour.

That of a Gothic king, to restrain rage.

The laws of Greece determine the wise methods of labour; and the laws of France determine the wise restraints of passion.

For the sins of Greece are in Indolence, and its pleasures; and the sins of France are in fury, and its pleasures.

196. You are now again surprised, probably, at hearing me oppose France typically to Greece. More strictly, I might oppose only a part of France,—Normandy. But it is better to say, France,[39 - "Normandie, la franche." "France, la solue;" (chanson de Roland). One of my good pupils referred me to this ancient and glorious French song.] as embracing the seat of the established Norman power in the Island of our Lady; and the province in which it was crowned,—Champagne.

France is everlastingly, by birth, name, and nature, the country of the Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness, or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or Cockney-English word liberty,—Mr. John Stuart Mill's,—is not the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word liberté,—M. Victor Hugo's,—is not the equivalent of franchise.

197. The Latin for franchise, I have said, is libertas; the Greek is {Greek: *eleupheria*}. In the thoughts of all three nations, the idea is precisely the same, and the word used for the idea by each nation therefore accurately translates the word of the other: {Greek: *eleupheria*}—libertas—franchise—reciprocally translate each other. Leonidas is characteristically {Greek: *eleupheros*} among Greeks; Publicola, characteristically liber, among Romans; Edward III. and the Black Prince, characteristically frank among French. And that common idea, which the words express, as all the careful scholars among you will know, is, with all the three nations, mainly of deliverance from the slavery of passion. To be {Greek: *eleupheros*}, liber, or franc, is first to have learned how to rule our own passions; and then, certain that our own conduct is right, to persist in that conduct against all resistance, whether of counter-opinion, counter pain, or counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike of the mob's thought, of the adversary's threat, and the harlot's temptation,—this is in the meaning of every great nation to be free; and the one condition upon which that freedom can be obtained is pronounced to you in a single verse of the 119th Psalm, "I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts."

198. Thy precepts:—Law, observe, being dominant over the Gothic as over the Greek king, but a quite different law. Edward III. feeling no anger against the Sieur de Ribaumont, and crowning him with his own pearl chaplet, is obeying the law of love, restraining anger; but Theseus, slaying the Minotaur, is obeying the law of justice, and enforcing anger.

The one is acting under the law of the charity, {Greek: *charis*} or grace of God; the other under the law of His judgment. The two together fulfil His {Greek: *krisis*} and {Greek: *agapae*}.

199. Therefore the Greek dynasties are finally expressed in the kinghoods of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, who judge infallibly, and divide arithmetically. But the dynasty of the Gothic king is in equity and compassion, and his arithmetic is in largesse,

"Whose moste joy was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, Have this."

So that, to put it in shortest terms of all, Greek law is of Stasy, and Gothic of Ecstasy; there is no limit to the freedom of the Gothic hand or heart, and the children are most in the delight and the glory of liberty when they most seek their Father's precepts.

200. The two lines I have just quoted are, as you probably remember, from Chaucer's translation of the French Romance of the Rose, out of which I before quoted to you the description of the virtue of Debonnaireté. Now that Debonnaireté of the Painted Chamber of Westminster is the typical figure used by the French sculptors and painters for 'franchise,' frankness, or Frenchness; but in the Painted Chamber, Debonnaireté, high breeding, 'out of goodnestedness,' or gentleness, is used, as an English king's English, of the Norman franchise. Here, then, is our own royalty,—let us call it Englishness, the grace of our proper kinghood;—and here is French royalty, the grace of French kinghood—Frenchness, rudely but sufficiently drawn by M. Didron from the porch of Chartres. She has the crown of fleur-de-lys, and William the Norman's shield.

201. Now this grace of high birth, the grace of his or her Most Gracious Majesty, has her name at Chartres written beside her, in Latin. Had it been in Greek, it would have been {Greek: *elevtheria*}. Being in Latin, what do you think it must be necessarily?—Of course, Libertas. Now M. Didron is quite the best writer on art that I know,—full of sense and intelligence; but of course, as a modern Frenchman,—one of a nation for whom the Latin and Gothic ideas of libertas have entirely vanished,—he is not on his guard against the trap here laid for him. He looks at the word libertas through his spectacles;—can't understand, being a thoroughly good antiquary,[40 - Historical antiquary; not art-antiquary I must limitedly say, however. He has made a grotesque mess of his account of the Ducal Palace of Venice, through his ignorance of the technical characters of sculpture.] how such a virtue, or privilege, could honestly be carved with approval in the twelfth century;—rubs his spectacles; rubs the inscription, to make sure of its every letter; stamps it, to make surer still;—and at last, though in a greatly bewildered state of mind, remains convinced that here is a sculpture of 'La Liberte' in the twelfth century. "C'est bien la liberte!" "On lit parfaitement libertas."

202. Not so, my good M. Didron!—a very different personage, this; of whom more, presently, though the letters of her name are indeed so plainly, 'Libertas, at non liberalitas,' liberalitas being the Latin for largesse, not for franchise.

This, then, is the opposition between the Greek and Gothic dynasties, in their passionate or vital nature; in the animal and inbred part of them;—Classic and romantic, Static and exstatic. But now, what opposition is there between their divine natures? Between Theseus and Edward III., as warriors, we now know the difference; but between Theseus and Edward III, as theologians; as dreaming and discerning creatures, as didactic kings,—engraving letters with the point of the sword, instead of thrusting men through with it,—changing the club into the ferula, and becoming schoolmasters as well as kings; what is, thus, the difference between them?

Theologians I called them. Philologians would be a better word,—lovers of the {Greek: *Logos*}, or Word, by which the heavens and earth were made. What logos, about this Logos, have they learned, or can they teach?

203. I showed you, in my first lecture, the Byzantine Greek lion, as descended by true unblemished line from the Nemean Greek; but with this difference: Heracles kills the beast, and makes a helmet and cloak of his skin; the Greek St. Mark converts the beast, and makes an evangelist of him.