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Stones of Venice [introductions]

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SECTION XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger
scale; and yet even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp
folds and points of the marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness.
The ground of it is gold, the sculpture in the spandrils is not more
than an inch and a half deep, rarely so much. It is in fact nothing more
than an exquisite sketching of outlines in marble, to about the same
depth as in the Elgin frieze; the draperies, however, being filled with
close folds, in the manner of the Byzantine pictures, folds especially
necessary here, as large masses could not be expressed in the shallow
sculpture without becoming insipid; but the disposition of these folds
is always most beautiful, and often opposed by broad and simple spaces,
like that obtained by the scroll in the hand of the prophet seen in the
Plate.

The balls in the archivolt project considerably, and the interstices
between their interwoven bands of marble are filled with colors like the
illuminations of a manuscript; violet, crimson, blue, gold, and green
alternately: but no green is ever used without an intermixture of blue
pieces in the mosaic, nor any blue without a little centre of pale
green; sometimes only a single piece of glass a quarter of an inch
square, so subtle was the feeling for color which was thus to be
satisfied. [Footnote: The fact is, that no two tesserae of the glass are
exactly of the same tint, the greens being all varied with blues, the
blues of different depths, the reds of different clearness, so that the
effect of each mass of color is full of variety, like the stippled color
of a fruit piece.] The intermediate circles have golden stars set on an
azure ground, varied in the same manner; and the small crosses seen in
the intervals are alternately blue and subdued scarlet, with two small
circles of white set in the golden ground above and beneath them, each
only about half an inch across (this work, remember, being on the
outside of the building, and twenty feet above the eye), while the blue
crosses have each a pale green centre. Of all this exquisitely mingled
hue, no plate, however large or expensive, could give any adequate
conception; but, if the reader will supply in imagination to the
engraving what he supplies to a common woodcut of a group of flowers,
the decision of the respective merits of modern and of Byzantine
architecture may be allowed to rest on this fragment of St. Mark's
alone.

From the vine-leaves of that archivolt, though there is no direct
imitation of nature in them, but on the contrary a studious subjection
to architectural purpose more particularly to be noticed hereafter, we
may yet receive the same kind of pleasure which we have in seeing true
vine-leaves and wreathed branches traced upon golden light; its stars
upon their azure ground ought to make us remember, as its builder
remembered, the stars that ascend and fall in the great arch of the sky:
and I believe that stars, and boughs, and leaves, and bright colors are
everlastingly lovely, and to be by all men beloved; and, moreover, that
church walls grimly seared with squared lines, are not better nor nobler
things than these. I believe the man who designed and the men who
delighted in that archivolt to have been wise, happy, and holy. Let the
reader look back to the archivolt I have already given out of the
streets of London (Plate XIII. Vol. I., Stones of Venice), and see what
there is in it to make us any of the three. Let him remember that the
men who design such work as that call St. Mark's a barbaric monstrosity,
and let him judge between us.

SECTION L. Some farther details of the St. Mark's architecture, and
especially a general account of Byzantine capitals, and of the principal
ones at the angles of the church, will be found in the following
chapter. [Footnote: Some illustration, also, of what was said in SECTION
XXXIII above, respecting the value of the shafts of St. Mark's as large
jewels, will be found in Appendix 9, "Shafts of St. Mark's."] Here I
must pass on to the second part of our immediate subject, namely, the
inquiry how far the exquisite and varied ornament of St. Mark's fits it,
as a Temple, for its sacred purpose, and would be applicable in the
churches of modern times. We have here evidently two questions: the
first, that wide and continually agitated one, whether richness of
ornament be right in churches at all; the second, whether the ornament
of St. Mark's be of a truly ecclesiastical and Christian character.

SECTION LI. In the first chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" I
endeavored to lay before the reader some reasons why churches ought to
be richly adorned, as being the only places in which the desire of
offering a portion of all precious things to God could be legitimately
expressed. But I left wholly untouched the question: whether the church,
as such, stood in need of adornment, or would be better fitted for its
purposes by possessing it. This question I would now ask the reader to
deal with briefly and candidly.

The chief difficulty in deciding it has arisen from its being always
presented to us in an unfair form. It is asked of us, or we ask of
ourselves, whether the sensation which we now feel in passing from our
own modern dwelling-house, through a newly built street, into a
cathedral of the thirteenth century, be safe or desirable as a
preparation for public worship. But we never ask whether that sensation
was at all calculated upon by the builders of the cathedral.

SECTION LII. Now I do not say that the contrast of the ancient with the
modern building, and the strangeness with which the earlier
architectural forms fall upon the eye, are at this day disadvantageous.
But I do say, that their effect, whatever it may be, was entirely
uncalculated upon by the old builder. He endeavored to make his work
beautiful, but never expected it to be strange. And we incapacitate
ourselves altogether from fair judgment of its intention, if we forget
that, when it was built, it rose in the midst of other work fanciful and
beautiful as itself; that every dwelling-house in the middle ages was
rich with the same ornaments and quaint with the same grotesques which
fretted the porches or animated the gargoyles of the cathedral; that
what we now regard with doubt and wonder, as well as with delight, was
then the natural continuation, into the principal edifice of the city,
of a style which was familiar to every eye throughout all its lanes and
streets; and that the architect had often no more idea of producing a
peculiarly devotional impression by the richest color and the most
elaborate carving, than the builder of a modern meetinghouse has by his
white-washed walls and square-cut casements. [Footnote: See the farther
notice of this subject in Vol. III., Chap. IV. Stones of Venice.]

SECTION LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and
then follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a
kind of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because,
while we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat
ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our
abbeys. But when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for
every shop door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal
baron and freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not
because the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the
revel or psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof
was easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our
cities; we have substituted one wholly devoid of beauty or meaning; and
then we reason respecting the strange effect upon our minds of the
fragments which, fortunately, we have left in our churches, as if those
churches had always been designed to stand out in strong relief from all
the buildings around them, and Gothic architecture had always been, what
it is now, a religious language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers know,
if they would arouse their knowledge, that this was not so; but they
take no pains to reason the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily
to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and
sometimes, even, that richness in church ornament is a condition or
furtherance of the Romish religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in
modern times: for there being no beauty in our recent architecture, and
much in the remains of the past, and these remains being almost
exclusively ecclesiastical, the High Church and Romanist parties have
not been slow in availing themselves of the natural instincts which were
deprived of all food except from this source; and have willingly
promulgated the theory, that because all the good architecture that is
now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist doctrines, all good
architecture ever has been and must be so,--a piece of absurdity from
which, though here and there a country clergyman may innocently believe
it, I hope the common sense of the nation will soon manfully quit
itself. It needs but little inquiry into the spirit of the past, to
ascertain what, once for all, I would desire here clearly and forcibly
to assert, that wherever Christian church architecture has been good and
lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common
dwelling-house architecture of the period; that when the pointed arch
was used in the street, it was used in the church; when the round arch
was used in the street, it was used in the church; when the pinnacle
was set over the garret window, it was set over the belfry tower; when
the flat roof was used for the drawing-room, it was used for the nave.
There is no sacredness in round arches, nor in pointed; none in
pinnacles, nor in buttresses; none in pillars, nor traceries. Churches
were larger than in most other buildings, because they had to hold more
people; they were more adorned than most other buildings, because they
were safer from violence, and were the fitting subjects of devotional
offering: but they were never built in any separate, mystical, and
religious style; they were built in the manner that was common and
familiar to everybody at the time. The flamboyant traceries that adorn
the façade of Rouen Cathedral had once their fellows in every window of
every house in the market place; the sculptures that adorn the porches
of St. Mark's had once their match on the walls, of every palace on the
Grand Canal; and the only difference between the church and the
dwelling-house was, that there existed a symbolical meaning in the
distribution of the parts of all buildings meant for worship, and that
the painting or sculpture was, in the one case, less frequently of
profane subject than in the other. A more severe distinction cannot be
drawn: for secular history was constantly introduced into church
architecture; and sacred history or allusion generally formed at least
one half of the ornament of the dwelling-house.

SECTION LIV. This fact is so important, and so little considered, that I
must be pardoned for dwelling upon it at some length, and accurately
marking the limits of the assertion I have made. I do not mean that
every dwelling-house of mediaeval cities was as richly adorned and as
exquisite in composition as the fronts of their cathedrals, but that
they presented features of the same kind, often in parts quite as
beautiful; and that the churches were not separated by any change of
style from the buildings round them, as they are now, but were merely
more finished and full examples of a universal style, rising out of the
confused streets of the city as an oak tree does out of an oak copse,
not differing in leafage, but in size and symmetry. Of course the
quainter and smaller forms of turret and window necessary for domestic
service, the inferior materials, often wood instead of stone, and the
fancy of the inhabitants, which had free play in the design, introduced
oddnesses, vulgarities, and variations into house architecture, which
were prevented by the traditions, the wealth, and the skill of the monks
and freemasons; while, on the other hand, conditions of vaulting,
buttressing, and arch and tower building, were necessitated by the mere
size of the cathedral, of which it would be difficult to find examples
elsewhere. But there was nothing more in these features than the
adaptation of mechanical skill to vaster requirements; there was nothing
intended to be, or felt to be, especially ecclesiastical in any of the
forms so developed; and the inhabitants of every village and city, when
they furnished funds for the decoration of their church, desired merely
to adorn the house of God as they adorned their own, only a little more
richly, and with a somewhat graver temper in the subjects of the
carving. Even this last difference is not always clearly discernible:
all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical
buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were
built, every man's house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna,
or of Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door,
and the Old Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the
grotesques of the brackets and the gables.

SECTION LV. And the reader will now perceive that the question
respecting fitness of church decoration rests in reality on totally
different grounds from those commonly made foundations of argument. So
long as our streets are walled with barren brick, and our eyes rest
continually, in our daily life, on objects utterly ugly, or of
inconsistent and meaningless design, it may be a doubtful question
whether the faculties of eye and mind which are capable of perceiving
beauty, having been left without food during the whole of our active
life, should be suddenly feasted upon entering a place of worship; and
color, and music, and sculpture should delight the senses, and stir the
curiosity of men unaccustomed to such appeal, at the moment when they
are required to compose themselves for acts of devotion;--this, I say,
may be a doubtful question: but it cannot be a question at all, that if
once familiarized with beautiful form and color, and accustomed to see
in whatever human hands have executed for us, even for the lowest
services, evidence of noble thought and admirable skill, we shall desire
to see this evidence also in whatever is built or labored for the house
of prayer; that the absence of the accustomed loveliness would disturb
instead of assisting devotion; and that we should feel it as vain to ask
whether, with our own house full of goodly craftsmanship, we should
worship God in a house destitute of it, as to ask whether a pilgrim
whose day's journey had led him through fair woods and by sweet waters,
must at evening turn aside into some barren place to pray.

SECTION LVI. Then the second question submitted to us, whether the
ornament of St. Mark's be truly ecclesiastical and Christian, is
evidently determined together with the first; for, if not only the
permission of ornament at all, but the beautiful execution of it, be
dependent on our being familiar with it in daily life, it will follow
that no style of noble architecture can be exclusively ecclesiastical.
It must be practised in the dwelling before it be perfected in the
church, and it is the test of a noble style that it shall be applicable
to both; for if essentially false and ignoble, it may be made to fit the
dwelling-house, but never can be made to fit the church: and just as
there are many principles which will bear the light of the world's
opinion, yet will not bear the light of God's word, while all principles
which will bear the test of Scripture will also bear that of practice,
so in architecture there are many forms which expediency and convenience
may apparently justify, or at least render endurable, in daily use,
which will yet be found offensive the moment they are used for church
service; but there are none good for church service, which cannot bear
daily use. Thus the Renaissance manner of building is a convenient style
for dwelling-houses, but the natural sense of all religious men causes
them to turn from it with pain when it has been used in churches; and
this has given rise to the popular idea that the Roman style is good for
houses and the Gothic for churches. This is not so; the Roman style is
essentially base, and we can bear with it only so long as it gives us
convenient windows and spacious rooms; the moment the question of
convenience is set aside, and the expression or beauty of the style it
tried by its being used in a church, we find it fails. But because the
Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches they are not therefore
less fit for dwellings. They are in the highest sense fit and good for
both, nor were they ever brought to perfection except where they were
used for both.

SECTION LVII. But there is one character of Byzantine work which,
according to the time at which it was employed, may be considered as
either fitting or unfitting it for distinctly ecclesiastical purposes; I
mean the essentially pictorial character of its decoration. We have
already seen what large surfaces it leaves void of bold architectural
features, to be rendered interesting merely by surface ornament or
sculpture. In this respect Byzantine work differs essentially from pure
Gothic styles, which are capable of filling every vacant space by
features purely architectural, and may be rendered, if we please,
altogether independent of pictorial aid. A Gothic church may be rendered
impressive by mere successions of arches, accumulations of niches, and
entanglements of tracery. But a Byzantine church requires expression and
interesting decoration over vast plane surfaces,--decoration which
becomes noble only by becoming pictorial; that is to say, by
representing natural objects,--men, animals, or flowers. And, therefore,
the question whether the Byzantine style be fit for church service in
modern days, becomes involved in the inquiry, what effect upon religion
has been or may yet be produced by pictorial art, and especially by the
art of the mosaicist?

SECTION LVIII. The more I have examined the subject the more dangerous I
have found it to dogmatize respecting the character of the art which is
likely, at a given period, to be most useful to the cause of religion.
One great fact first meets me. I cannot answer for the experience of
others, but I never yet met with a Christian whose heart was thoroughly
set upon the world to come, and, so far as human judgment could
pronounce, perfect and right before God, who cared about art at all. I
have known several very noble Christian men who loved it intensely, but
in them there was always traceable some entanglement of the thoughts
with the matters of this world, causing them to fall into strange
distresses and doubts, and often leading them into what they themselves
would confess to be errors in understanding, or even failures in duty. I
do not say that these men may not, many of them, be in very deed nobler
than those whose conduct is more consistent; they may be more tender in
the tone of all their feelings, and farther-sighted in soul, and for
that very reason exposed to greater trials and fears, than those whose
hardier frame and naturally narrower vision enable them with less effort
to give their hands to God and walk with Him. But still, the general
fact is indeed so, that I have never known a man who seemed altogether
right and calm in faith, who seriously cared about art; and when
casually moved by it, it is quite impossible to say beforehand by what
class of art this impression will on such men be made. Very often it is
by a theatrical commonplace, more frequently still by false sentiment. I
believe that the four painters who have had, and still have, the most
influence, such as it is, on the ordinary Protestant Christian mind, are
Carlo Dolci, Guercino, Benjamin West, and John Martin. Raphael, much as
he is talked about, is, I believe in very fact, rarely looked at by
religious people; much less his master, or any of the truly great
religious men of old. But a smooth Magdalen of Carlo Dolci with a tear
on each cheek, or a Guercino Christ or St. John, or a Scripture
illustration of West's, or a black cloud with a flash of lightning in it
of Martin's, rarely rails of being verily, often deeply, felt for the
time.

SECTION LIX. There are indeed many very evident reasons for this; the
chief one being that, as all truly great religious painters have been
hearty Romanists, there are none of their works which do not embody, in
some portions of them, definitely Romanist doctrines. The Protestant mind
is instantly struck by these, and offended by them, so as to be incapable
of entering, or at least rendered indisposed to enter, farther into the
heart of the work, or to the discovering those deeper characters of it,
which are not Romanist, but Christian, in the everlasting sense and power
of Christianity. Thus most Protestants, entering for the first time a
Paradise of Angelico, would be irrevocably offended by finding that the
first person the painter wished them to speak to was St. Dominic; and
would retire from such a heaven as speedily as possible,--not giving
themselves time to discover, that whether dressed in black, or white, or
gray, and by whatever name in the calendar they might be called, the
figures that filled that Angelico heaven were indeed more, saintly, and
pure, and full of love in every feature, than any that the human hand
ever traced before or since. And thus Protestantism, having foolishly
sought for the little help it requires at the hand of painting from the
men who embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to receive it
from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who
read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the
painters who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be
taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more
popular Protestant picture than Salvator's "Witch of Endor," of which the
subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul
and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, and a Neapolitan
hag.

SECTION LX. The fact seems to be that strength of religious feeling is
capable of supplying for itself whatever is wanting in the rudest
suggestions of art, and will either, on the one hand, purify what is
coarse into inoffensiveness, or, on the other, raise what is feeble into
impressiveness. Probably all art, as such, is unsatisfactory to it; and
the effort which it makes to supply the void will be induced rather by
association and accident than by the real merit of the work submitted to
it. The likeness to a beloved friend, the correspondence with a habitual
conception, the freedom from any strange or offensive particularity,
and, above all, an interesting choice of incident, will win admiration
for a picture when the noblest efforts of religious imagination would
otherwise fail of power. How much more, when to the quick capacity of
emotion is joined a childish trust that the picture does indeed
represent a fact! It matters little whether the fact be well or ill
told; the moment we believe the picture to be true, we complain little
of its being ill-painted. Let it be considered for a moment, whether the
child, with its colored print, inquiring eagerly and gravely which is
Joseph, and which is Benjamin, is not more capable of receiving a
strong, even a sublime, impression from the rude symbol which it invests
with reality by its own effort, than the connoisseur who admires the
grouping of the three figures in Raphael's "Telling of the Dreams;" and
whether also, when the human mind is in right religious tone, it has not
always this childish power--I speak advisedly, this power--a noble one,
and possessed more in youth than at any period of after life, but
always, I think, restored in a measure by religion--of raising into
sublimity and reality the rudest symbol which is given to it of
accredited truth.

SECTION LXI. Ever since the period of the Renaissance, however, the
truth has not been accredited; the painter of religious subject is no
longer regarded as the narrator of a fact, but as the inventor of an
idea. [Footnote: I do not mean that modern Christians believe less in
the _facts_ than ancient Christians, but they do not believe in the
representation of the facts as true. We look upon the picture as this or
that painter's conception; the elder Christians looked upon it as this
or that, painter's description of what had actually taken place. And in
the Greek Church all painting is, to this day, strictly a branch of
tradition. See M. Dideron's admirably written introduction to his
Iconographie Chrétienne, p. 7:--"Un de mes compagnons s'étonnait de re
trouver à la Panagia de St. Luc, le saint Jean Chrysostome qu'il avait
dessiné dans le baptistère de St. Marc, à Venise. Le costume des
personnages est partout et en tout temps le même, non-seulement pour la
forme, mais pour la couleur, mais pour le dessin, mais jusque pour le
nombre et l'épaisseur des plis."] We do not severely criticise the
manner in which a true history is told, but we become harsh
investigators of the faults of an invention; so that in the modern
religious mind, the capacity of emotion, which renders judgment
uncertain, is joined with an incredulity which renders it severe; and
this ignorant emotion, joined with ignorant observance of faults, is the
worst possible temper in which any art can be regarded, but more
especially sacred art. For as religious faith renders emotion facile, so
also it generally renders expression simple; that is to say a truly
religious painter will very often be ruder, quainter, simpler, and more
faulty in his manner of working, than a great irreligious one. And it
was in this artless utterance, and simple acceptance, on the part of
both the workman and the beholder, that all noble schools of art have
been cradled; it is in them that they _must_ be cradled to the end
of time. It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss of power in
modern days, owing to the imperative requirement that art shall be
methodical and learned: for as long as the constitution of this world
remains unaltered, there will be more intellect in it than there can be
education; there will be many men capable of just sensation and vivid
invention, who never will have time to cultivate or polish their natural
powers. And all unpolished power is in the present state of society
lost; in other things as well as in the arts, but in the arts
especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake the polish for
the power. Until a man has passed through a course of academy
studentship, and can draw in an approved manner with French chalk, and
knows foreshortening, and perspective, and something of anatomy, we do
not think he can possibly be an artist; what is worse, we are very apt
to think that we can _make_ him an artist by teaching him anatomy,
and how to draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is
utterly independent of all such accomplishments: and I believe there are
many peasants on every estate, and laborers in every town of Europe, who
have imaginative powers of a high order, which nevertheless cannot be
used for our good, because we do not choose to look at anything but what
is expressed in a legal and scientific way. I believe there is many a
village mason who, set to carve a series of Scripture or any other
histories, would find many a strange and noble fancy in his head, and
set it down, roughly enough indeed, but in a way well worth our having.
But we are too grand to let him do this, or to set up his clumsy work
when it is done; and accordingly the poor stone-mason is kept hewing
stones smooth at the corners, and we build our church of the smooth
square stones, and consider ourselves wise.

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