CHAPTER VI

REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

About the year 1420 A. D. there was a great change in the architectural outlook in central Italy. The Risorgimento[44] was already in full vigor, and this had to do especially with the study of the literature of classical antiquity which had been going on for nearly a century. Latin authors were studied afresh, and, for the first time in Europe Greek authors were inquired for and discussed, though the time had not yet come for the serious study of the language. There was also a very marked change in the feelings, the aspirations, and the power of painters and sculptors. Giotto had done his work and had been dead nearly a century, and Simone Martini as long: Niccolò Pisano had been dead so long that his influence was felt chiefly in the work of his son Giovanni who also had died a century before our present enquiry begins: Orcagna, architect as well as painter and sculptor, had opposed in the spirit of Italian tradition the influence of the Northern school of Gothic art, and had left behind him when he died, about 1380, the admirable portico in Florence known as that of the Lancers. (See Plate XLII.) Each of these men had done what he could to lead the direction of artists’ thought away from the non-national Gothic style. As sculptor and as painter, each of these artists had much to aid him in the ruins of antiquity. Had there been only the sarcophagi and other portable relief-sculptures they would have had material enough to begin their work in the direction of a higher realism, a more perfect study of the human body, a more refined casting of drapery, a more severe style of composition, than previous centuries had allowed. The classical feeling had taken possession of the painters and the sculptors: Paolo Ucelli, Castagno, Gentile, Masolino, and most of all the great Masaccio, were at work: and as for sculpture, Lorenzo Ghiberti was forty years old and Donatello thirty-four, and the modern arts of form had taken shape. The sculptors and the painters had been encouraged in their ambitions by the works of Greco-Roman art about them: but monuments of ancient architecture were so much defaced, even in the fifteenth century, that it required a very different lesson before their significance could be learned, and this lesson, this strong teaching, was to be given through scholarship rather than through the observation of the artist. It was not until ancient literature had been well studied for half a century that an enthusiastic young builder, Fillipo Brunellesco, undertook to study the Roman ways of vaulting and went for that purpose to Rome as the place where the greater number of important classical buildings remained, or perhaps as the place where stood the always famous Pantheon. (See Chapter II.) It was 1430 before the first building was begun in which an attempt was made to use the classical orders in wholly new work. This was the Chapel of the Pazzi, attached to the church of Santa Croce, in Florence, and the exterior of this is shown in Plate XLIII as far as it is possible to obtain an intelligible photograph of its more important parts. It is a small thing; but assuredly it is marvellous to see, because of the boldness required on the part of its designer. If we try to imagine the habit of mind of a man who had never seen anything built in Greco-Roman orders in any form, or designed in the Greco-Roman spirit, who knew buildings of classical design only as fragmentary ruins and who himself had carried out many designs of his own in a spirit, not Gothic indeed, but assuredly not classic, and who then, at the age of fifty-five, in a time when life was shorter and began earlier than now, undertook and carried out such a composition as this, there will indeed seem cause for surprised admiration. There is a modern Italian feeling in the little rondels which

adorn the frieze above the columns: but these rondels are filled with cherubs and the whole composition may be set down to the Christian ecclesiastic feeling. Again the fifteenth century spirit is seen in the sculpture of the central arch, both on the archivolt[45] and the intrados:[46] but he had no antique example of a decorated arch and as an artist he felt the need of one. There is a mistaken use of ancient forms in the carved flutings of the uppermost frieze, the strigil ornament taken from some sarcophagus; but this also may be condoned in view of the fact that sculptor as he was he dared not undertake architectural carving of would-be classical intent. The coupled pilasters of the upper story are hardly classic; in fact the pilaster in any form is a rarity in external architecture, so far as we know the buildings of Imperial Rome; and this feature was destined to be altogether characteristic of the Neo-classic architecture: but in first introducing it here, Fillipo must have seemed to himself to be doing only what a Roman designer of the second century would have done had he undertaken so small and so refined a design. We are not to forget that it was huge monuments, the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the basilica of Constantine, which the Italian masters had to study when there was question of general dispositions. They had indeed something which we have not in the as yet unspoiled interiors of certain structures on the Palatine Hill and near the Forum: but they can hardly have had many examples of design on a small scale--of the best architectural treatment applied to buildings of very small size. This portico cannot exceed thirty-five feet in total height and its length is not much greater: there cannot have been many jewels of refinement like that left among the ancient ruins of Italy, even in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

So far, the revival in architecture was conducted along lines of common sense, and when the scholar and humanist, Leo Battista Alberti, came to the front as an independent designer of architectural compositions and created the front of the Rucellai Palace, (Plate XLIV) which was begun in 1451, he added the flat pilaster of slight relief to a well-known type of house front. The curious thing about this introduction of the pilasters is that no sooner was it seen than it was disliked, at least in the front of the palazzo, with its round-arched window-heads. The Palazzo Pitti had been begun by Brunellesco himself and without any pilasters at all; then came his rival’s Rucellai front, and thirty years later we are back again at the old standpoint, and the Strozzi Palace (see Plate XLV) and the Medici Palace (afterwards Riccardi) are buildings without these seemingly inappropriate additions. It is surprising to see how much common sense there was among these early lovers of the antique grandeur.

The use of the northern style, the pointed Gothic, with its ribbed vault and its picturesque treatment, ceased altogether in Italy with the first examples of revived classical architecture: but not on that account did the ancient Roman way of building come into favor, nor did the Roman methods of design succeed without a struggle. Plate XLVI shows the courtyard of the Cancellaria in Rome, which can hardly have been built before 1475; and contemporaneous with this are many exquisite porticoes of similar design, porticoes in which the vaulting springs from the capitals of the columns; and the outer ordonnance--the seemly ordering of parts which had become to the Italians of the fifteenth century as important, relatively, as it had been to their ancestors eleven centuries before, very unlike the ordonnance of those ancestors. Only on the rarest occasions did the Roman architects of the classic period build in this way, with the arches springing from the capitals directly. The complete Roman Order is indeed seen side by side with this modern type. Plate XLVIII shows the interior court of the Palazzo di Venezia in

Rome, the date of which is always given as 1460, and here is the Roman Order indeed! Here is the complete reproduction of that most singular system of design according to which the engaged column, known to be a mere ornament or with a constructional utility limited to this slight thickening of the pier at that point, is made to look like the chief supporting member; while the arch which really does the work is treated as a subordinate filling of the panel between. This curious device, invented when the Romans of the Empire wished to build freely and yet to design as the Greeks designed, brought up again by their imitators in the fifteenth century and never abandoned since, has so passed into our modern life that we neither know nor see its inconsistency. A designer who might have a strong sense for the constructional in his work would find it impossible to reproduce this motive: on the other hand, those many designers who are sincerely enamored of the traditions of the schools accept it as one of the necessary features of great and dignified classical architecture. It is curious to compare with the examples just given that shown in Plate XLVII, in which the ground story arcade is classical Roman, except that a very shallow pilaster is substituted for the engaged column and in this way becomes a confessed ornament, while there is no definite archivolt furnished the arches between, so that the pilaster remains the single decoration of this story; while above, the most realistic method possible has been followed. Except for that odd little doubling of the consoles above the larger piers, this upper story is as logical and obvious as if it had been built in France in the thirteenth century. The lintel-course, resting alternately upon these larger piers with their pilaster-like treatment, and upon the small and slender columns of completely Renaissance design, carries in its turn the roof timbers and the gutter in front of them, and that is all. There is absolutely no pretense about it; no affectation of being that which it is not; and the combination of the two stories has

resulted in one of the loveliest pieces of composition in Italy. The date of this charming design, the cloister of S. Maria della Pace, may be set as the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fashions change even in neo-classic architecture, and when the Palazzo Borghese was under consideration in the last years of that same great century, the coupled column was in use as a favorite device. Long afterwards it appeared in Paris, adorning the famous eastern front of the Louvre; but here, as early as the days when Queen Elizabeth and her nobles were resisting the Spanish Armada, the coupling of the columns, almost unknown in antiquity, and never a device of the Rinascimento, finds itself in complete favor in that which we call the Classicismo.[47] Indeed this portico and loggia, Plate XLIX, has little real classical feeling about it, except the care with which the simpler Order, Tuscan or modified Doric, is kept in the ground story, and the Ionic Order above--the proportions of those columns being also carefully observed. The reader will hardly ignore the coldness of the design, the absence of flavor and freshness which marks it: the designer is so very sure of his methods and so fixed in advance as to his intentions that there is no longer any trace of the Rebirth left. If we cross the Alps, we shall find in buildings of this time the Renaissance in its full glory, but the Renaissance in France is nearly a century behind the Rinascimento in Italy.