Chapter 17

Ages.

+LOMBARD STYLE.+ Owing to the general rebuilding of ancient churches under the more settled social conditions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, little remains to us of the architecture of the three preceding centuries in Italy, except the Roman basilicas and a few baptisteries and circular churches, already mentioned in Chapter X. The so-called Lombard monuments belong mainly to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are found not only in Lombardy, but also in Venetia and the Æmilia. Milan, Pavia, Piacenza, Bologna, and Verona were important centres of development of this style. The churches were nearly all vaulted, but the plans were basilican, with such variations as resulted from efforts to meet the exigencies of vaulted construction. The nave was narrowed, and instead of rows of columns carrying a thin clearstory wall, a few massive piers of masonry, connected by broad pier-arches, supported the heavy ribs of the groined vaulting, as in S. Ambrogio, Milan (Fig. 90). To resist the thrust of the main vault, the clearstory was sometimes suppressed, the side aisle carried up in two stories forming galleries, and rows of chapels added at the sides, their partitions forming buttresses. The piers were often of clustered section, the better to receive the various arches and ribs they supported. The vaulting was in square divisions or _vaulting-bays_, each embracing two pier-arches which met upon an intermediate pier lighter than the others. Thus the whole aspect of the interior was revolutionized. The lightness, spaciousness, and decorative elegance of the basilicas were here exchanged for a sombre and massive dignity severe in its plainness. The Choir was sometimes raised a few feet above the nave, to allow of a crypt and _confessio_ beneath, reached by broad flights of steps from the nave. Sta. Maria della Pieve at Arezzo (9th-11th century), +S. Michele+ at Pavia (late 11th century), the +Cathedral of Piacenza+ (1122), +S. Ambrogio+ at Milan (12th century), and +S. Zeno+ at Verona (1139) are notable monuments of this style.

+LOMBARD EXTERIORS.+ The few architectural embellishments employed on the simple exteriors of the Lombard churches were usually effective and well composed. Slender columnettes or long pilasters, blind arcades, and open arcaded galleries under the eaves gave light and shade to these exteriors. The façades were mere frontispieces with a single broad gable, the three aisles of the church being merely suggested by flat or round pilasters dividing the front (Fig 91). Gabled porches, with columns resting on the backs of lions or monsters, adorned the doorways. The carving was often of a fierce and grotesque character. Detached bell-towers or _campaniles_ adjoined many of these churches; square and simple in mass, but with well-distributed openings and well-proportioned belfries (Piacenza S. Zeno at Verona, etc.).[18]

[Footnote 18: See Appendix B.]

+THE TUSCAN ROMANESQUE.+ The churches of this style (sometimes called the +Pisan+) were less vigorous but more elegant and artistic in design than the Lombard. They were basilicas in plan, with timber ceilings and high clearstories on columnar arcades. In their decoration, both internal and external, they betray the influence of Byzantine traditions, especially in the use of white and colored marble in alternating bands or in panelled veneering. Still more striking is the external decorative application of wall-arcades, sometimes occupying the whole height of the wall and carried on flat pilasters, sometimes in superposed stages of small arches on slender columns standing free of the wall. In general the decorative element prevailed over the constructive in the design of these picturesquely beautiful churches, some of which are of noble size. The +Duomo+ (cathedral) of +Pisa+, built 1063-1118, is the finest monument of the style (Figs. 92, 93). It is 312 feet long and 118 wide, with long transepts and an elliptical dome of later date over the _crossing_ (the intersection of nave and transepts). Its richly arcaded front and banded flanks strikingly exemplify the illogical and unconstructive but highly decorative methods of the Tuscan Romanesque builders. The circular +Baptistery+ (1153), with its lofty domical central hall surrounded by an aisle, an imposing development of the type established by Constantine (p. 111), and the famous +Leaning Tower+ (1174), both designed with external arcading, combine with the Duomo to form the most remarkable group of ecclesiastical buildings in Italy, if not in Europe (Fig. 92).

The same style appears in more flamboyant shape in some of the churches of Lucca. The cathedral +S. Martino+ (1060; façade, 1204; nave altered in fourteenth century) is the finest and largest of these; +S. Michele+ (façade, 1288) and S. Frediano (twelfth century) have the most elaborately decorated façades. The same principles of design appear in the cathedral and several other churches in Pistoia and Prato; but these belong, for the most part, to the Gothic period.

+FLORENCE.+ The church of +S. Miniato+, in the suburbs of Florence, is a beautiful example of a modification of the Pisan style. It is in plan a basilica with two piers interrupting the colonnade on each side of the nave and supporting powerful transverse arches. The interior is embellished with bands and patterns in black and white, and the woodwork of the open-timber roof is elegantly decorated with fine patterns in red, green, blue, and gold--a treatment common in early mediæval churches, as at Messina, Orvieto, etc. The exterior is adorned with wall-arches of classic design and with panelled veneering in white and dark marble, instead of the horizontal bands of the Pisan churches. This system of external decoration, a blending of Pisan and Italo-Byzantine methods, became the established practice in Florence, lasting through the whole Gothic period. The +Baptistery+ of Florence, originally the cathedral, an imposing polygonal domical edifice of the tenth century, presents externally one of the most admirable examples of this practice. Its marble veneering in black and white, with pilasters and arches of excellent design, is attributed by Vasari to Arnolfo di Cambio, but is by many considered to be much older, although restored by that architect in 1294.

Suggestions of the Pisan arcade system are found in widely scattered examples in the east and south of Italy, mingled with features of Lombard and Byzantine design. In Apulia, as at Bari, Caserta Vecchia (1100), Molfetta (1192), and in Sicily, the Byzantine influence is conspicuous in the use of domes and in many of the decorative details. Particularly is this the case at Palermo and Monreale, where the churches erected after the Norman conquest--some of them domical, some basilican--show a strange but picturesque and beautiful mixture of Romanesque, Byzantine, and Arabic forms. The +Cathedral+ of +Monreale+ and the churches of the +Eremiti+ and +La Martorana+ at Palermo are the most important.

The +Italo-Byzantine+ style has already found mention in the latter part of Chapter XI. Venice and Ravenna were its chief centres; while the influence, both of the parent style and of its Italian offshoot was, as we have just shown, very widespread.

+WESTERN ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE.+ In Western Europe the unrest and lawlessness which attended the unsettled relations of society under the feudal system long retarded the establishment of that social order without which architectural progress is impossible. With the eleventh century there began, however, a great activity in building, principally among the monasteries, which represented all that there was of culture and stability amid the prevailing disorder. Undisturbed by war, the only abodes of peaceful labor, learning, and piety, they had become rich and powerful, both in men and land. Probably the more or less general apprehension of the supposed impending end of the world in the year 1000 contributed to this result by driving unquiet consciences to seek refuge in the monasteries, or to endow them richly.

The monastic builders, with little technical training, but with plenty of willing hands, sought out new architectural paths to meet their special needs. Remote from classic and Byzantine models, and mainly dependent on their own resources, they often failed to realize the intended results. But skill came with experience, and with advancing civilization and a surer mastery of construction came a finer taste and greater elegance of design. Meanwhile military architecture developed a new science of building, and covered Europe with imposing castles, admirably constructed and often artistic in design as far as military exigencies would permit.

+CHARACTER OF THE STYLE.+ The Romanesque architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Western Europe (sometimes called the +Round-Arched Gothic+) was thus predominantly though not exclusively monastic. This gave it a certain unity of character in spite of national and local variations. The problem which the wealthy orders set themselves was, like that of the Lombard church-builders in Italy, to adapt the basilica plan to the exigencies of vaulted construction. Massive walls, round arches stepped or recessed to lighten their appearance, heavy mouldings richly carved, clustered piers and jamb-shafts, capitals either of the _cushion_ type or imitated from the Corinthian, and strong and effective carving--all these are features alike of French, German, English, and Spanish Romanesque architecture.

+THE FRENCH ROMANESQUE.+ Though monasticism produced remarkable results in France, architecture there did not wholly depend upon the monasteries. Southern Gaul (Provence) was full of classic remains and classic traditions while at the same time it maintained close trade relations with Venice and the East.[19] The church of +St. Front+ at Perigueux, built in 1120, reproduced the plan of St. Mark’s with singular fidelity, but without its rich decoration, and with pointed instead of round arches (Figs. 94, 95). The domical cathedral of +Cahors+ (1050-1100), an obvious imitation of S. Irene at Constantinople, and the later and more Gothic Cathedral of +Angoulême+ display a notable advance in architectural skill outside of the monasteries. Among the abbeys, +Fontevrault+ (1101-1119) closely resembles Angoulême, but surpasses it in the elegance of its choir and chapels. In these and a number of other domical churches of the same Franco-Byzantine type in Aquitania, the substitution of the Latin cross in the plan for the Greek cross used in St. Front, evinces the Gallic tendency to work out to their logical end new ideas or new applications of old ones. These striking variations on Byzantine themes might have developed into an independent local style but for the overwhelming tide of Gothic influence which later poured in from the North.

[Footnote 19: See Viollet-le-Duc, _Dictionnaire raisonné_, article ARCHITECTURE, vol. i., pp. 66 _et seq._; also de Verneilh, _L’Architecture byzantine en France_.]

Meanwhile, farther south (at Arles, Avignon, etc.), classic models strongly influenced the details, if not the plans, of an interesting series of churches remarkable especially for their porches rich with figure sculpture and for their elaborately carved details. The classic archivolt, the Corinthian capital, the Roman forms of enriched mouldings, are evident at a glance in the porches of Notre Dame des Doms at Avignon, of the church of St. Gilles, and of St. Trophime at Arles.

+DEVELOPMENT OF VAULTING.+ It was in Central France, and mainly along the Loire, that the systematic development of vaulted church architecture began. Naves covered with barrel-vaults appear in a number of large churches built during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with apsidal and transeptal chapels and aisles carried around the apse, as in St. Etienne, Nevers, +Notre Dame du Port+ at Clermont-Ferrand (Fig. 96), and +St. Paul+ at Issoire. The thrust of these ponderous vaults was clumsily resisted by half-barrel vaults over the side-aisles, transmitting the strain to massive side-walls (Fig. 97), or by high side-aisles with transverse barrel or groined vaults over each bay. In either case the clearstory was suppressed--a fact which mattered little in the sunny southern provinces. In the more cloudy North, in Normandy, Picardy, and the Royal Domain, the nave-vault was raised higher to admit of clearstory windows, and its section was in some cases made like a pointed arch, to diminish its thrust, as at +Autun+. But these eleventh-century vaults nearly all fell in, and had to be reconstructed on new principles. In this work the Clunisians seem to have led the way, as at +Cluny+ (1089) and +Vézelay+ (1100). In the latter church, one of the finest and most interesting French edifices of the twelfth century, a groined vault replaced the barrel-vault, though the oblong plan of the vaulting-bays, due to the nave being wider than the pier-arches, led to somewhat awkward twisted surfaces in the vaulting. But even here the vaults had insufficient lateral buttressing, and began to crack and settle; so that in the great ante-chapel, built thirty years later, the side-aisles were made in two stories, the better to resist the thrust, and the groined vaults themselves were constructed of pointed section. These seem to be the earliest pointed groined vaults in France. It was not till the second half of that century, however (1150-1200), that the flying buttress was combined with such vaults, so as to permit of high clearstories for the better lighting of the nave; and the problem of satisfactorily vaulting an oblong space with a groined vault was not solved until the following century.

+ONE-AISLED CHURCHES.+ In the Franco-Byzantine churches already described (p. 164) this difficulty of the oblong vaulting-bay did not occur, owing to the absence of side-aisles and pier-arches. Following this conception of church-planning, a number of interesting parish churches and a few cathedrals were built in various parts of France in which side-recesses or chapels took the place of side-aisles. The partitions separating them served as abutments for the groined or barrel-vaults of the nave. The cathedrals of +Autun+ (1150) and +Langres+ (1160), and in the fourteenth century that of Alby, employed this arrangement, common in many earlier Provençal churches which have disappeared.

+SIX-PART VAULTING.+ In the Royal Domain great architectural activity does not appear to have begun until the beginning of the Gothic period in the middle of the twelfth century. But in Normandy, and especially at Caen and Mont St. Michel, there were produced, between 1046 and 1120, some remarkable churches, in which a high clearstory was secured in conjunction with a vaulted nave, by the use of “six-part” vaulting (Fig. 98). This was an awkward expedient, by which a square vaulting-bay was divided into six parts by the groins and by a middle transverse rib, necessitating two narrow skew vaults meeting at the centre. This unsatisfactory device was retained for over a century, and was common in early Gothic churches both in France and Great Britain. It made it possible to resist the thrust by high side-aisles, and yet to open windows above these under the cross-vaults. The abbey churches of +St. Etienne+ (the Abbaye aux Hommes) and +Ste. Trinité+ (Abbaye aux Dames), at Caen, built in the time of William the Conqueror, were among the most magnificent churches of their time, both in size and in the excellence and ingenuity of their construction. The great abbey church of +Mont St. Michel+ (much altered in later times) should also be mentioned here. At the same time these and other Norman churches showed a great advance in their internal composition. A well-developed triforium or subordinate gallery was introduced between the pier-arches and clearstory, and all the structural membering of the edifice was better proportioned and more logically expressed than in most contemporary work.

+ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS.+ The details of French Romanesque architecture varied considerably in the several provinces, according as classic, Byzantine, or local influences prevailed. Except in a few of the Aquitanian churches, the round arch was universal. The walls were heavy and built of rubble between facings of stones of moderate size dressed with the axe. Windows and doors were widely splayed to diminish the obstruction of the massive walls, and were treated with jamb-shafts and recessed arches. These were usually formed with large cylindrical mouldings, richly carved with leaf ornaments, zigzags, billets, and grotesques. Figure-sculpture was more generally used in the South than in the North. The interior piers were sometimes cylindrical, but more often clustered, and where square bays of four-part or six-part vaulting were employed, the piers were alternately lighter and heavier. Each shaft had its independent capital either of the block type or of a form resembling somewhat that of the Corinthian order. During the eleventh century it became customary to carry up to the main vaulting one or more shafts of the compound pier to support the vaulting ribs. Thus the division of the nave into _bays_ was accentuated, while at the same time the horizontal three-fold division of the height by a well-defined triforium between the pier-arches and clearstory began to be likewise emphasized.

+VAULTING.+ The vaulting was also divided into bays by transverse ribs, and where it was groined the groins themselves began in the twelfth century to be marked by groin-ribs. These were constructed independently of the vaulting, and the four or six compartments of each vaulting-bay were then built in, the ribs serving, in part at least, to support the centrings for this purpose. This far-reaching principle, already applied by the Romans in their concrete vaults (see p. 84), appears as a re-discovery, or rather an independent invention, of the builders of Normandy at the close of the eleventh century. The flying buttress was a later invention; in the round-arched buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries the buttressing was mainly internal, and was incomplete and timid in its arrangement.

+EXTERIORS.+ The exteriors were on this account plain and flat. The windows were small, the mouldings simple, and towers were rarely combined with the body of the church until after the beginning of the twelfth century. Then they appeared as mere belfries of moderate height, with pyramidal roofs and effectively arranged openings, the germs of the noble Gothic spires of later times. Externally the western porches and portals were the most important features of the design, producing an imposing effect by their massive arches, clustered piers, richly carved mouldings, and deep shadows.

+CLOISTERS, ETC.+ Mention should be made of the other monastic buildings which were grouped around the abbey churches of this period. These comprised refectories, chapter-halls, cloistered courts surrounded by the conventual cells, and a large number of accessory structures for kitchens, infirmaries, stores, etc. The whole formed an elaborate and complex aggregation of connected buildings, often of great size and beauty, especially the refectories and cloisters. Most of these conventual buildings have disappeared, many of them having been demolished during the Gothic period to make way for more elegant structures in the new style. There remain, however, a number of fine cloistered courts in their original form, especially in Southern France. Among the most remarkable of these are those of +Moissac+, +Elne+, and +Montmajour+.

+MONUMENTS.+ ITALY. (For basilicas and domical churches of 6th-12th centuries see pp. 118, 119.)--Before 11th century: Sta. Maria at Toscanella, altered 1206; S. Donato, Zara; chapel at Friuli; baptistery at Boella. 11th century: S. Giovanni, Viterbo; Sta. Maria della Pieve, Arezzo; S. Antonio, Piacenza, 1014; Eremiti, 1132, and La Martorana, 1143, both at Palermo; Duomo at Bari, 1027 (much altered); Duomo and baptistery, Novara, 1030; Duomo at Parma, begun 1058; Duomo at Pisa, 1063-1118; S. Miniato, Florence, 1063-12th century; S. Michele at Pavia and Duomo at Modena, late 11th century.--12th century: in Calabria and Apulia, cathedrals of Trani, 1100; Caserta, Vecchia, 1100-1153; Molfetta, 1162; Benevento; churches S. Giovanni at Brindisi, S. Niccolo at Bari, 1139. In Sicily, Duomo at Monreale, 1174-1189. In Northern Italy, S. Tomaso in Limine, Bergamo, 1100 (?); Sta. Giulia, Brescia; S. Lorenzo, Milan, rebuilt 1119; Duomo at Piacenza, 1122; S. Zeno at Verona, 1139; S. Ambrogio, Milan, 1140, vaulted in 13th century; baptistery at Pisa, 1153-1278; Leaning Tower, Pisa, 1174.--14th century: S. Michele, Lucca, 1188; S. Giovanni and S. Frediano, Lucca. In Dalmatia, cathedral at Zara, 1192-1204. Many castles and early town-halls, as at Bari, Brescia, Lucca, etc.

FRANCE: Previous to 11th century: St. Germiny-des-Prés, 806, Chapel of the Trinity, St. Honorat-des-Lérins; Ste. Croix de Montmajour.--11th century: Cérisy-la-Forêt and abbey church of Mont St. Michel, 1020 (the latter altered in 12th and 16th centuries); Vignory; St. Genou; porch of St. Bénoit-sur-Loire, 1030; St. Sépulchre at Neuvy, 1045; Ste. Trinité (Abbaye aux Dames) at Caen, 1046, vaulted 1140; St. Etienne (Abbaye aux Hommes) at Caen, same date; St. Front at Perigueux, 1120; Ste. Croix at Quimperlé, 1081; cathedral, Cahors, 1050-1110; abbey churches of Cluny (demolished) and Vézelay, 1089-1100; circular church of Rieux-Mérinville, church of St. Savin in Auvergne, the churches of St. Paul at Issoire and Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont, St. Hilaire and Notre-Dame-la-Grande at Poitiers; also St. Sernin (Saturnin) at Toulouse, all at close of 11th and beginning of 12th century.--12th century: Domical churches of Aquitania and vicinity; Solignac and Fontévrault, 1120; St. Etienne (Périgueux), St. Avit-Sénieur; Angoulême, Souillac, Broussac, etc., early 12th century; St. Trophime at Arles, 1110, cloisters later; church of Vaison; abbeys and cloisters at Montmajour, Tarascon, Moissac (with fragments of a 10th-century cloister built into present arcades); St. Paul-du-Mausolée; Puy-en-Vélay, with fine church. Many other abbeys, parish churches, and a few cathedrals in Central and Northern France especially.