CHAPTER III

EARLY MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

The unequalled grandeur of the Empire as it endured from 50 B. C. to about 350 A. D. is most strongly felt when we think of the Pax Romana--that Roman peace which forbade armed conflicts in the Mediterranean lands in which war had been the rule. To this Peace an altar was erected in Rome by the orders of Augustus. From the Caspian Sea to the Atlantic, and from the shores of the Baltic to the Atlas Mountains a consecutive and orderly government was maintained, fully as beneficent as has ever prevailed in any single nation of the earth, except in very recent years in Western Europe, and immeasurably superior to what has existed in those same regions, taken together during the past dozen centuries. One curiously complete difference existed, however, between the west and east halves of the Empire. In the West, Roman domination brought with it a civilization so superior to that known in those lands before the conquest that Gaul and Iberian must have looked upon the Italian domination as synonymous with all that makes for enlightenment and intellectual advance as well as good order. On the other hand, the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria, must have felt that in yielding to the Italian power they were yielding to a force, which, however beneficial politically, represented a lower intellectual civilization than their own. The business of the Empire was, as we now see it, to develop and hand on to the future, Hellenic civilization. The first dawn of this extended Hellenism must have been to the West a clear intellectual gain: but in the East it was not noticeable. The holders of Greek traditions may have enjoyed the apparent willingness of the conquerors to defer to the mental and moral superiority of the conquered: but they could not have bowed to Rome as the one civilizer known, as did the people of the west of Europe. And so it was that the people of the East took one view of the architectural problem when the Imperial system had fallen, while the Gallo-Romans, Britons and Spaniards took quite another view, which they impressed at once upon their Frankish, Visigothic and Saxon conquerors. The Roman builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after the Middle Ages. (See Chapters VI, VII, VIII.) The other prevailed at once: the needs of the Christian church were served by it; and the Westerners followed it in one way, the Easterners in a very different way. The people of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain developed Romanesque[33] architecture, the people of the Eastern Empire--which held together for centuries the Greeks, Albanians, Macedonians, Syrians, Phrygians--created Byzantine[34] architecture. The Romanesque is not ill-named: it is indeed quasi-Roman, Roman as near as the poor and scattered communities could make it. The Byzantine is a mixture of Persian and Roman habits and rules, and is the very finest thing that ever came out of such an almost conscious mixing of diverse element. It could not have been created but for the Roman Peace, which still held sway over the Eastern seas and lands after Italy and the West had gone back to pristine barbarism: but under that domination it spread all over the Balkan Peninsula with Greece, over southern and western Italy and Sicily, Syria, Egypt, and the coast regions of Asia Minor.

Now it so happens that both of these great styles were superseded in their turn by other and very vigorous styles: by the Gothic in Europe and the Saracen or Mohammedan in Asia: and therefore it is that we have only churches, and not many of them, from which to judge Romanesque and Byzantine architecture. At least, however, these are erect and complete, not too much altered, roofed and floored as of old, with window-openings and doorways, porches and apses in working order. It is with the present chapter, then, that we begin to study buildings which we can see complete. And, after all, the church was much the most important structure of the time. Here and there a ruined palace, like Barbarossa’s at Gelnhausen and the Hebdomon at Constantinople, makes us regret what we have lost: but these also prove the truth of our assumption that it was the Church Building in which was determined the growth of architecture. Indeed that was to be the march of events until the fifteenth century: only then did the residence and the house of state come to the front.

The earliest western churches are the Basilicas, buildings of a form and style derived partly from the Roman civic basilica[35], and partly from the well known peristyle or garden-like court of the large Roman house, with its pillars supporting the roofs of open galleries on three or four sides. The buildings of this character built or adapted for Christian uses were themselves basilicas--Christian basilicas or post-classic basilicas. They were flat roofed, without vaulting, imitating in this the majority of the older, classical basilicas. A good example of these buildings is seen in the still existing church in Rome, the Liberian basilica called commonly St. Mary the Greater (S. Maria Maggiore). Plate XV gives the interior of this building as drawn by Gutensohn for the great work of Bunsen: the late alteration which spoils the uniformity of the colonnade on either side being ignored. The columns of this colonnade are entirely antique, excepting repairs and slight alterations. It is probable that in this as well as in many similar structures the ancient pillars of a great outdoor portico, such as are described in Chapter II, were taken bodily for the interior of the church. The clergy of the fifth century cared much less for the beauty and completeness of the city outside than for, each, his own special dominion--the church which he controlled; and there was no municipality to prevent such spoliation. The plan of the church is easy to understand from the plate itself; apart from the numerous

outside chapels and sacristies of later time, a simple parallelogram about two hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, which width is divided into a broad nave and two much narrower aisles. And therefore a single glance reveals the whole structural character and the whole architectural design of the church. Three parallel halls divided by two rows of columns; the central hall (the nave) rising much higher than the roofs on either side, and showing, therefore, a broad space of wall towards the interior; and, towards the exterior, a wall less high by the vertical height of the aisle-roof. This great wall surface will be certain to have windows in it, because that is the obvious way of lighting the nave: then the roofs either finished within by a flat ceiling, as in the present instance, or showing the timbers of the roof, with only such decoration as color and a little very simple carving may supply. This type of building endured through the whole epoch of what we call the Middle Ages, and has never been wholly abandoned since. Our larger churches are close studies of it.

Substitute a series of equal arches for the straight horizontal lintels which stretch from column to column and carry the clearstory[36] wall, and you have the very root of the Western Romanesque, and of its higher development in the Gothic style. (See Chapter IV.) Basilicas contemporaneous, or nearly so, with S. Maria Maggiore are often so built, with round arches sprung from column to column; and if we take a church of a much later period of central Italy we find often the basilica type in its simplicity--developed and made more complex only in detail. Plate XVI gives the interior of the church of San Miniato al Monte outside the walls of Florence. The noticeable peculiarity in this is the change of the arcade, supporting the clearstory wall, from a single uniform line of equal columns supporting equal arches, to a more organized structure of two great piers with two responds[37] and in each of the three spaces so left, two columns with three round arches. This system is found in churches as early as Santa Agnese outside the walls of Rome, and was never abandoned. To satisfy in some way the instinctive desire of the builders for a more complex plan than the perfectly unbroken nave and aisles, there was introduced the wall supported on a great round arch, which, as seen in Plate XVI, spans the nave at two points in its length and may be thought to stiffen the otherwise long and unbuttressed clearstory wall. The painted decoration of the timbers of this roof of San Miniato is very attractive, the color effect is more elaborate than the photograph can show: it is really a very beautiful thing: and it is rare in Europe to find an open timber roof treated so frankly as a thing susceptible of adornment. In other ways it is curious to see the way in which the poverty and lack of skill of the tenth century men alter the style of design from the huge Roman way of doing things. Lightness has to be substituted for ponderous masses; the walls are as thin as would stand alone and fairly steady: only the columns, taken from antique structures, can be thought capable of bearing more weight than is laid upon them; the decoration is by means of a marble inlay of large and bold design on the walls and of minute pattern in the pulpit, the altar rail and the like, and, in the half dome over the apse,[38] a mosaic picture of sacred significance--Christ with the emblems of the four evangelists and with the Virgin and San Miniato the patron of the church. In these mosaics and inlays there is to be noted a great interest in abstract patterns; a characteristic of Asiatic art, but unfrequent in Greek or in Roman art as we know it. Basilicas of the fifth century and of the sixth century at Ravenna (S. Apollinare

in Classe and S. Apollinare Nuovo), of those and later centuries in Rome, of the eighth century at Parenzo in Istria, of the tenth century at Lucca (San Frediano) of the twelfth century in Palermo and Monreale in Sicily, and others, still exist with their main characteristics unchanged. They retain the simpler plan of rows of columns of uniform size and placed uniformly. Another whole family of churches are of the San Miniato type: the length of the nave divided into three or four greater bays,[39] subdivided into minor bays. Such are the famous churches of San Zeno at Verona, and of San Michele at Pavia and Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan (see Plate XVII): but these two last named churches have vaulted roofs of stone. Plate XVIII gives the exterior of Gross St. Martin at Cologne and the interior of the cathedral of Tournai in Belgium, interesting in the highest degree as showing plainly how the Northern builders were not content with the simple programme of the Italians--an interior upon which all pains were lavished while the exterior was left to come as it might, a mere brick box with the round-headed windows cut plainly through the wall. These builders of French Flanders in the eleventh century made the exterior of their church effective by the process of building four square towers of very simple design, involving no sort of complexity in their construction, and grouping these towers at the four corners of a larger and lower central mass also of tower-like aspect, while to the westward stretched the long nave pierced with a series of precisely similar round arches, above and below, with long roofs of uniform section, and all this brought sharply up against the great rising mass of the towers from which again three semicircular apses went off to the east, the north and the south. In this way an external architectural effect was produced far more elaborate than anything that the Italians of that time had imagined. As the church of Tournai now stands, a late Gothic chancel has replaced the old eastern apse: it is easy, however, to restore mentally the original exterior of the church, and, if it were more difficult, the contemplation of other Romanesque churches, especially in Germany, would provide us with the material necessary. Plate XIX shows from the east end the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, and it is easy to imagine the three apses of somewhat different design grouped about the central and dominating mass of the Flemish church. This church at Cologne has two nearly round towers connecting the apses and seems to have had four such towers originally, or in the first design, with one square tower in the middle of the west front. The church of St. Martin in the same place (p. 77; Plate XVIII) differs from these and from most Romanesque churches in having a very noble central tower, one of the finest productions of the Northern Romanesque.

It is evident that the admiration which we give to even the most important of these churches is a different thing from that which the great monuments of antiquity compel. The construction of the mediæval churches is as complex as that of the greatest Roman monuments; this coming from a necessity of providing interiors relatively larger than those of the Roman imperial epoch. The builders even of the twelfth century, and even in the most nearly well governed countries of Europe, had but limited resources. No king, no great noble controlling a province, no bishop, no convent, however rich, could dispose of resources for one instant comparable to those of a Roman pro-consul in even a small town of the empire. The mediæval men had to get as much building as they could for their money. If they built their walls thick, as they seem to the modern traveller, this was because they were unable to get good masons. A stone wall may be carried up forty feet high with a thickness of only three feet, even when pierced with windows, if you have good workmen in your employ and fairly good

flat-bedded stone with tolerable mortar; but as your material is the worse and as your masons are the more unskilled, you have to build the thicker. Indeed the history of Romanesque architecture is that of a long-continued fight between the problem and the would-be solvers thereof. It was desirable to roof with masonry, partly as a safeguard when, as often happened, the wooden structure of the high roof above the walls caught fire and was destroyed, and also because of the comparative stateliness of effect, and because each bishop thought of building not for his own brief time only, but for his successors. And this very requirement, that each part of the building should be closed at the top with masonry, kept the builders of Western Europe busy from the time of Clovis on. The history of any one great church is a record of continual failure of walls, foundations or abutments; some part of the vaulting is forever crumbling and threatening to fall so that it has to be rebuilt; and now and then there’s a crash and a catastrophe. The buttresses[40] have to be enlarged; iron ties have to be inserted; even the plan of the vaulting has to be changed every now and then and a new experiment tried with a view to its greater permanence in another style of work. Hence it is that the modern student of such buildings has at once that delight in them which comes from their very archaism mingled with a kind of deprecatory pity: we sympathize with their builders’ aims and regret their feeble resources and their small knowledge: we love their buildings as we love the stammering speech of childhood. There is something else, no doubt: such a splendid tower-group as that at Tournai, such a noble interior as that of Mayence (Mainz) cathedral (see Plate XX), are individually, and as works of art, powerful enough to command our sincere admiration: but these are the exceptions.

Exceptions in another way are found in northern and central France. The buildings there are not so remarkable for their superiority in general design as they are for their unparalleled richness in sculptural adornment. They have at the same time many larger features which are of peculiar interest. Thus the tower of St. Radegonde at Poitiers (see Plate XXI), square below and coming to an octagon for the belfry, is a wonderfully spirited composition: and close to it is that famous church of Notre Dame la Grande, of which the west front is shown in the next plate. The builders of this latter church were lovers of sculpture and knew how to handle it in order to produce a great result, so they composed boldly in groups of statuary, floral sculpture, or sculpture as rich made up of wholly conventional forms. Plate XXII gives the wall above the three great portals of the west front of this extraordinary church; and while inferior in tasteful harmony to the cathedral at Angoulême near by, or indeed to many a noble church of the centre of France, the richness of conception, and the easy way in which the constructional parts of the building are loaded with carved adornment without injury to its massiveness and its dignity are surprising enough. The sculpture is barbaric in its lack of knowledge, but to be barbaric is not to be weak or insignificant. The nineteenth century workmen of Europe had no such power of effective design. In this, as in building, the eleventh century men were surpassed by those of the years to follow: and but for that still greater Gothic art (see Chapter IV) we should have to go to Romanesque architecture for constant stimulus.

The architecture of the Eastern half of the Empire was much less nearly Roman in its plan. Basilicas there were; but at a very early epoch the type of what the Germans call the _Centralbau_ prevailed. The centred building; so we might designate the plan and structure which presuppose a supremely important central feature, a hall, however opened up on three sides or four

sides to minor divisions, aisles, porches, and apses. See page 86. This great hall might be covered by a cupola, or, as often is found in the smaller churches, its vertical walls are carried up into a drum or round tower roofed in any one of several ways. The essence of the distinction between this plan and the Western plan is the absence of the “long drawn aisle”; and the arrangement of the whole around a central point from which the structures of the church may be said to radiate. There were, as has been said, straight-lined churches in the East: and in like manner there were radiating buildings in the West, notably, the round churches of San Stefano in Rome and the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle, St. Gereon at Cologne, and the rather numerous baptisteries, as at Florence, Parma, Ravenna and Pisa, which in their original state of being, were not baptisteries only, but became so after the basilica churches with nave and aisle had been built in the same towns for the cathedrals proper. Still, in connection with our immediate question, that of

the artistic appreciation of a building of any epoch, it is better to study round or radiating buildings in their own home of the Eastern provinces, as we study the basilica-shaped buildings in Western Europe.

Now the peculiarity of the Eastern church-building, that of the central hall, is generally the absence of any very impressive exterior. This was not necessarily the result of the plan adopted. One does not see readily any sufficient cause for the general neglect among Eastern designers of the appearance from outside; unless it be this--that the cities of the Levant were then as they are now made up, so far as the stranger who walks their streets can discern, of blind whitewashed walls upon which open only the doorways of the dwellings, and here and there, in the ground story, a small unarchitectural and carefully grated window. The street effects, common to the cities of the north of Europe, even as early as the eleventh century, and well known to us for their picturesque and varied character, are, in the Levant, simply non-existent, except in those few cities which show strong external marks of commercial intercourse with Europe. The interior is indeed the chief thing in church building, anywhere, but in the Byzantine art it is everything, or so the student thinks. Plate XXIII shows the interior of the great church of Santa Sophia, at Constantinople, which seems to many the noblest architectural conception of the Christian world in any of its parts. Plate XXIV gives the exterior of the same building: and it will be seen at once how much there needs to be taken from it that its true Byzantine character may be judged. The tall round minarets are modern Turkish additions, put there for the muezzin who calls to prayer, the enormous buttresses, looking like lofty houses without windows, which rise one on either side of the great arch in the flank of the church, are additions resulting partly from the fall of the original cupola in the sixth century and partly from much later reparations; and all the small cupolas near, with the buildings which they cover, are wholly modern,

at least in their present form, whatever foundations of fifth century work there may be enclosed within them. It appears then that the only striking external feature of the original building would be the slow rise and swell of the central cupola, led up to by the similar curves of the two half cupolas covering the semicircular apses at the northeast and southwest, and contrasting boldly with the huge flat wall beneath the arch, on the northwest and southeast.

The magnificent conception of this interior is well known to be unique among the Byzantine churches; that is to say, no one of them has this same remarkable system of construction with four very open arches (one hundred foot span) supporting this low-pitched cupola which is then buttressed in a way by the half cupolas on two sides producing the striking interior form quite visible in the Plate XXIII. In other respects, however, this great church is rather the typical Byzantine church than a building apart. The other churches are like it in construction; they are like it in having the central mass nearly circular, and the minor parts ranged around it on every side; they are like it in having drawn their constructional character from the vaulted buildings of Persia and the neighboring lands. Thus the church of St. Theodore at Athens, of which the plan is given on page 86, though it has three apses turned towards the east and a narthex at the west end, is still a building with a dominant central feature around which other parts are grouped. Plate XXIV shows this plainly, for nothing can be more remote from the basilica type than the group here shown. The cupola is evidently not complete--not a fully organized design--it has been roofed as cheaply as possible and at as low a level as the windows would allow: for these windows replace the great light-openings of the western clearstory. In Moldavia and in the southern provinces of Russia these cupolas are found by hundreds with their design fairly well worked out. Plate XXV shows a monastery in the region of the Caucasus, in which the principal church

and three smaller chapels are all completed by the carrying up of just such cupolas above these central divisions. Now these buildings are all very small. The cupolas are twenty-five feet, eighteen feet, sixteen feet wide, within: St. Theodore’s little shrine would not hold a hundred worshippers. It is easy to see that the exterior design with the high cupola was worked out for these small buildings; but it is easy to see also that the general plan is capable of nobler exterior treatment. If, therefore, there should ever be an attempt made to build in modern Europe in the Byzantine style, it will be modified, inevitably, by this possibility, and by the obvious necessity of satisfying the general demand for a splendid outside. The recently built cathedral in London, spoken of below in Chapter X, is an instance of this.

Still, the glory of the Byzantine style must be found in its interior decoration. The Greek half of the Empire took from the Roman masters of the world the taste for splendid material; and, wherever some money could be had, the alabaster and the rosy and gray marbles of Greek and Asiatic quarries were brought to the spot. Mosaic gave a more vivid color; and this gave also the opportunity for the telling of the Gospel story and the legends of saints in permanent pictures. St. Mark’s church at Venice is the type for Europeans to study. The sense of pure delight in glowing and harmonious color, combined with soft and flowing line, is nowhere so strongly felt: no building, until Santa Sophia can be cleansed of Turkish whitewash, will affect the lover of splendid decoration so powerfully.