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Stones of Venice [introductions]

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The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of
Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century
had taken away the religious heart of Venice.

SECTION XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of
Architecture will be our task through many a page to come; but I must
here give a general idea of its heads.

Philippe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, says,--

"Chascun me feit seoir au meillieu de ces deux ambassadeurs qui est
l'honneur d'Italie que d'estre au meillieu; et me menerent au long de la
grant rue, qu'ilz appellent le Canal Grant, et est bien large. Les
gallees y passent à travers et y ay veu navire de quatre cens tonneaux
ou plus pres des maisons: et est la plus belle rue que je croy qui soit
en tout le monde, et la mieulx maisonnee, et va le long de la ville. Les
maisons sont fort grandes et haultes, et de bonne pierre, et les
anciennes toutes painctes; les aul tres faictes depuis cent ans: toutes
ont le devant de marbre blanc, qui leur vient d'Istrie, à cent mils de
la, et encores maincte grant piece de porphire et de sarpentine sur le
devant.... C'est la plus triumphante cité que j'aye jamais veue et qui
plus faict d'honneur à ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus
saigement se gouverne, et où le service de Dieu est le plus
sollennellement faict: et encores qu'il y peust bien avoir d'aultres
faultes, si croy je que Dieu les a en ayde pour la reverence qu'ilz
portent au service de l'Eglise." [Footnote: Mémoires de Commynes, liv.
vii. ch. xviii.]

SECTION XVI. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons.
Observe, first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of
Venice: of which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with
some glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real
life had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression
instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder
palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have
their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away,
and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their
fronts."

On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces
which so struck the French ambassador. [Footnote: Appendix 6,
"Renaissance Ornaments."] He was right in his notice of the distinction.
There had indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the
fifteenth century; and a change of some importance to us moderns: we
English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe in general owes
to it the utter degradation or destruction of her schools of
architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may understand
this, it is necessary that he should have some general idea of the
connection of the architecture of Venice with that of the rest of
Europe, from its origin forwards.

SECTION XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is
derived from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the
East. The history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the
various modes and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once
for all: if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all
the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many
beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all
Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and
what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic,
Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks
gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the
arch. The shaft and arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture,
are from the race of Japheth: the spirituality and sanctity of it from
Ismael, Abraham, and Shem.

SECTION XVIII. There is high probability that the Greek received his
shaft system from Egypt; but I do not care to keep this earlier
derivation in the mind of the reader. It is only necessary that he
should be able to refer to a fixed point of origin, when the form of the
shaft was first perfected. But it may be incidently observed, that if
the Greeks did indeed receive their Doric from Egypt, then the three
families of the earth have each contributed their part to its noblest
architecture: and Ham, the servant of the others, furnishes the
sustaining or bearing member, the shaft; Japheth the arch; Shem the
spiritualization of both.

SECTION XIX. I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are
the roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five
orders; but there are only two real orders, and there never can be any
more until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex:
those are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the
other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,
Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional
form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the centre or root of
both. All other orders are varieties of those, or phantasms and
grotesques altogether indefinite in number and species. [Footnote:
Appendix 7, "Varieties of the Orders."]

SECTION XX. This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was
clumsily copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result,
until they begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service;
except only that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it,
and the Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often
very beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity:
seized upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it;
invented a new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all
over the Roman empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest
at hand, to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman
Christian architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of
the time, very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many
respects ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of
imagination, which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores
of the Bosphorus and the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea, and then
gradually, as the people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes
Corpse-light. The architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange,
gilded, and embalmed repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so
would have remained for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has
been undisturbed. [Footnote: The reader will find the _weak_ points of
Byzantine architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the
opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever opened,--
Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."] But rough wakening was ordained.

Section XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into
two great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other
at Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque,
properly so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative
perfection by Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But
I wish the reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art
together in his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the
same; that is to say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of
the art of old Rome itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the
fountain-head, and entrusted always to the best workmen who could be
found--Latins in Italy and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may
be ranged under the general term of Christian Romanesque, an
architecture which had lost the refinement of Pagan art in the
degradation of the empire, but which was elevated by Christianity to
higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed with brighter
forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in its various
branches over all the central provinces of the empire, taking aspects
more or less refined, according to its proximity to the seats of
government; dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of
the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed,
losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived
of its beauty, but benumbed and incapable of advance or change.

SECTION XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While
in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by
inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of
this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;
and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art
was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and
borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and consistency. The
reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as
broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately
languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the
imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early
organization, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely
nominal extent.

SECTION XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not
susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps,
appear, like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with
the enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with
which they mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual
character. But others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its
influence, back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to
the ice creeks of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the
influence was of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two
nations, pre-eminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of
derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs
of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and
idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was laid
asleep in a glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both
horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over
its golden paralysis.

SECTION XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system
to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the
Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of
worship. The Lombard covered every church which he built with the
sculptured representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.
[Footnote: Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."] The Arab banished all
imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their
minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in their character and
mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the
North, and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they
met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very
centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of
the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck,
is VENICE.

The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of
the world.

SECTION XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between
the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.

SECTION XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to
mark the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures
were developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the
distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian
Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and
well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;
mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered
with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of
sacred symbols.

The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the
Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly
introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts
and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and
writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,
and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace
it: this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates
it on features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines
of color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the
dome, and adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.

SECTION XXVII. The changes effected by the Lombard are more curious
still, for they are in the anatomy of the building, more than its
decoration. The Lombard architecture represents, as I said, the whole of
that of the northern barbaric nations. And this I believe was, at first,
an imitation in wood of the Christian Roman churches or basilicas.
Without staying to examine the whole structure of a basilica, the reader
will easily understand thus much of it: that it had a nave and two
aisles, the nave much higher than the aisles; that the nave was
separated from the aisles by rows of shafts, which supported, above,
large spaces of flat or dead wall, rising above the aisles, and forming
the upper part of the nave, now called the clerestory, which had a
gabled wooden roof.

These high dead walls were, in Roman work, built of stone; but in the
wooden work of the North, they must necessarily have been made of
horizontal boards or timbers attached to uprights on the top of the nave
pillars, which were themselves also of wood. [Footnote: Appendix 9,
"Wooden Churches of the North."] Now, these uprights were necessarily
thicker than the rest of the timbers, and formed vertical square
pilasters above the nave piers. As Christianity extended and
civilization increased, these wooden structures were changed into stone;
but they were literally petrified, retaining the form which had been
made necessary by their being of wood. The upright pilaster above the
nave pier remains in the stone edifice, and is the first form of the
great distinctive feature of Northern architecture--the vaulting shaft.
In that form the Lombards brought it into Italy, in the seventh century,
and it remains to this day in St. Ambrogio of Milan, and St. Michele of
Pavia.

SECTION XXVIII. When the vaulting shaft was introduced in the clerestory
walls, additional members were added for its support to the nave piers.
Perhaps two or three pine trunks, used for a single pillar, gave the
first idea of the grouped shaft. Be that as it may, the arrangement of
the nave pier in the form of a cross accompanies the superimposition of
the vaulting shaft; together with corresponding grouping of minor shafts
in doorways and apertures of windows. Thus, the whole body of the
Northern architecture, represented by that of the Lombards, may be
described as rough but majestic work, round-arched, with grouped shafts,
added vaulting shafts, and endless imagery of active life and fantastic
superstitions.

SECTION XXIX. The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one
of the Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but
without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of
their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it
ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of
Gothic architecture is the history of the refinement and
spiritualization of Northern work under its influence. The noblest
buildings of the world, the Pisan-Romanesque, Tuscan (Giottesque)
Gothic, and Veronese Gothic, are those of the Lombard schools
themselves, under its close and direct influence; the various Gothics of
the North are the original forms of the architecture which the Lombards
brought into Italy, changing under the less direct influence of the
Arab.

SECTION XXX. Understanding thus much of the formation of the great
European styles, we shall have no difficulty in tracing the succession
of architectures in Venice herself. From what I said of the central
character of Venetian art, the reader is not, of course, to conclude
that the Roman, Northern, and Arabian elements met together and
contended for the mastery at the same period. The earliest element was
the pure Christian Roman; but few, if any, remains of this art exist at
Venice; for the present city was in the earliest times only one of many
settlements formed on the chain of marshy islands which extend from the
mouths of the Isonzo to those of the Adige, and it was not until the
beginning of the ninth century that it became the seat of government;
while the cathedral of Torcello, though Christian Roman in general form,
was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and shows evidence of Byzantine
workmanship in many of its details. This cathedral, however, with the
church of Santa Fosca at Torcello, San Giacomo di Rialto at Venice, and
the crypt of St. Mark's, forms a distinct group of buildings, in which
the Byzantine influence is exceedingly slight; and which is probably
very sufficiently representative of the earliest architecture on the
islands.

SECTION XXXI. The Ducal residence was removed to Venice in 809, and the
body of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria twenty years later. The
first church of St. Mark's was, doubtless, built in imitation of that
destroyed at Alexandria, and from which the relics of the saint had been
obtained. During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the
architecture of Venice seems to have been formed on the same model, and
is almost identical with that of Cairo under the caliphs, [Footnote:
Appendix 10, "Church of Alexandria."] it being quite immaterial whether
the reader chooses to call both Byzantine or both Arabic; the workmen
being certainly Byzantine, but forced to the invention of new forms by
their Arabian masters, and bringing these forms into use in whatever
other parts of the world they were employed.

To this first manner of Venetian architecture, together with such
vestiges as remain of the Christian Roman, I shall devote the first
division of the following inquiry. The examples remaining of it consist
of three noble churches (those of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part
of St. Mark's), and about ten or twelve fragments of palaces.

SECTION XXXII. To this style succeeds a transitional one, of a character
much more distinctly Arabian: the shafts become more slender, and the
arches consistently pointed, instead of round; certain other changes,
not to be enumerated in a sentence, taking place in the capitals and
mouldings. This style is almost exclusively secular. It was natural for
the Venetians to imitate the beautiful details of the Arabian
dwelling-house, while they would with reluctance adopt those of the
mosque for Christian churches.

I have not succeeded in fixing limiting dates for this style. It appears
in part contemporary with the Byzantine manner, but outlives it. Its
position is, however, fixed by the central date, 1180, that of the
elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, whose capitals are the
two most important pieces of detail in this transitional style in
Venice. Examples of its application to domestic buildings exist in
almost every street of the city, and will form the subject of the second
division of the following essay.

SECTION XXXIII. The Venetians were always ready to receive lessons in
art from their enemies (else had there been no Arab work in Venice). But
their especial dread and hatred of the Lombards appears to have long
prevented them from receiving the influence of the art which that people
had introduced on the mainland of Italy. Nevertheless, during the
practice of the two styles above distinguished, a peculiar and very
primitive condition of pointed Gothic had arisen in ecclesiastical
architecture. It appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab
forms, which were attaining perfection upon the continent, and would
probably, if left to itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab
school, with which it had from the first so close a fellowship, that it
will be found difficult to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those
which seem to have been built under this early Gothic influence. The
churches of San Giacopo dell' Orio, San Giovanni in Bragora, the
Carmine, and one or two more, furnish the only important examples of it.
But, in the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and Dominicans
introduced from the continent their morality and their architecture,
already a distinct Gothic, curiously developed from Lombardic and
Northern (German?) forms; and the influence of the principles exhibited
in the vast churches of St. Paul and the Frari began rapidly to affect
the Venetian-Arab school. Still the two systems never became united; the
Venetian policy repressed the power of the church, and the Venetian
artists resisted its example; and thenceforward the architecture of the
city becomes divided into ecclesiastical and civil: the one an
ungraceful yet powerful form of the Western Gothic, common to the whole
peninsula, and only showing Venetian sympathies in the adoption of
certain characteristic mouldings; the other a rich, luxuriant, and
entirely original Gothic, formed from the Venetian-Arab by the influence
of the Dominican and Franciscan architecture, and especially by the
engrafting upon the Arab forms of the most novel feature of the
Franciscan work, its traceries. These various forms of Gothic, the
_distinctive_ architecture of Venice, chiefly represented by the
churches of St. John and Paul, the Frari, and San Stefano, on the
ecclesiastical side, and by the Ducal palace, and the other principal
Gothic palaces, on the secular side, will be the subject of the third
division of the essay.

SECTION XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic)
style of the Venetian work is centralized by the date 1180, and is
transformed gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from
the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century;
that is to say, over the precise period which I have described as the
central epoch of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year
1418; Foscari became doge five years later, and in his reign the first
marked signs appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe
de Commynes notices as above, the change to which London owes St.
Paul's, Rome St. Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly
supposed to be their noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of
every art she has since practised.

SECTION XXXV. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality
in existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps,"
chap. ii.)

All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at
once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of
extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a
strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the
main land into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and
the Cathedral of Como, (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian
Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della
Carta and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all
architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked
the state of religion over all Europe,--the peculiar degradation of the
Romanist superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which
brought about the Reformation.

SECTION XXXVI. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of
adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France
and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its
destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the
heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he
injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one
of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. It
may be a serious question how far the Pausing of the Reformation has
been a consequence of this error.

The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This
rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a
return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for
Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In
Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in
Architecture by Sansovino and Palladio.

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