Chapter VIII.

The generally chronological view which we are taking of all these changing styles, is a good help to memory, and through this, to swift and almost instinctive comparison. It helps the student also in his search for causes. In this way it becomes curious to note what the English were doing at the time that the classical Renaissance was thus safely begun in France; with Spain in the lead, Flanders (influenced by Spain) alongside, Germany only a little behind. The English were building the Tudor and Elizabethan country houses. Those built of timber with filling of masonry between the timbers belong to an old system of construction once as common in the northwestern parts of the Continent as in England: but those of more pretension have generally some slight invasion of forms derived from Italy mingled with the Tudor or semi-Gothic design. Thus Wollaton Hall, of which the principal front is shown in Plate LII, dates from a time later than Écouen, but it is a long way from the classic feeling shown in that stately edifice. We are not to compare it with any classical standard; we have to consider it abstractly, to note its merits as an exterior, expressing the use of the building and its character as a residence, and a certain abstract charm, as of propriety, which invests it. The huge windows are a mark of the time; they express the joy which all the more intelligent classes were feeling at the new cheapness and accessibility of glass: and it is noticeable how well the difficulty is met, how much more useful are the pilasters here than when we found them in Florence. (See Chapter VI.) The great building is not left a mere lantern: the opening up of the walls is almost as successful as we found it in the Gothic churches. (See Chapter IV.)

As noted above, the English cared less for vaulted roofs than did the people of the Continent. They developed a splendid system of decorative timbered construction, of which the finest mediæval example is the roof of Westminster Hall. Nearly two hundred years later than that splendid roof is the almost equally fine piece of timber work which covers Middle-Temple Hall, Plate LIII. This Hall shows us also the finest possible screen of Jacobean architecture. These screens were used when the plans of buildings were simple, when the great Hall of a country-house or a college or the building of a company of merchants filled the whole of the pavilion devoted to it, occupying all the space under its roof and within its four walls. To make a vestibule of entrance for protection against the cold and against undue publicity, the screens were built athwart one end of the interior space: and their

DUCAL PALACE, GENOA, ITALY.]

upper stories formed galleries of communication between the smaller buildings to left and right. We are to consider this room then as the meeting-room and dining-room of a great number of companions and associates whose semi-privacy would not be invaded too seriously by the coming and going behind the screen. So much for the fitness of the building for its purposes: as to other considerations, the vigor of design, both in constructive and purely decorative members, hardly needs demonstration.

In Italy, the changes between 1550 and the close of the seventeenth century are to be found generally in the way of increasing formality and a declining sense of the beautiful and the fit. And yet throughout this decline, there is seen the Italian feeling for composition. The Italians, though never a great building people--never originators in building--have always, since antiquity, known how to make fine designs--how to work with but little detail, how to handle that little with good effect, how to avoid solecism.

In this connection it will be well to study the Frontispiece. The great church of San Pietro in Vaticano was begun very early in the sixteenth century, to replace a very early basilica. Bramante (Donato d’Agnolo: called also Donato Lazzari; d. 1514) one of the most renowned of architects, made designs for it. He worked out the plan again and again in many forms; and achieved so much actual success that the great piers intended to carry the cupola and the pendentives above them were nearly completed, and the principal apse--that of the western end (for in this church the orientation is reversed)--was vaulted during his lifetime. After that time there were seemingly endless delays, unceasing controversy, never-ending changes; but the model of the cupola was completed by Michelangelo Buonarroti, and the cupola itself carried up as far as the top of the great drum below the rounded shell before the death of that great artist in 1564. Michelangelo, then, must have seen the church, in his imagination, almost exactly as it is shown in the Frontispiece. To any one who approaches the church from the city, crossing the bridge of Sant’ Angelo and walking up the Borgo to the Piazza San Pietro, the aspect of the building is altogether different; for the late additions, the unfortunate entrance-front, and the still more unfortunate long nave, mar the effect; the first by its absolute inferiority as a design, the second by its concealment of the cupola which, on that side, can only be seen when you are at least a mile and a half distant and halfway up the slopes of the Pincian Hill.

It has seemed worth while to insert this little bit of history, because such considerations of chance and change or such balancing of the qualities of different succeeding designs and their makers are inevitably part of every great and costly building; such a building as strains the resources of a nation or a church--such as takes, and must take, years in its completion. St. Peter’s cannot be judged in a morning nor qualified in a paragraph. There is in it the work of the masters of the Risorgimento in its very highest flight, and there is, more visible, the work of the artists of the Decadenza--of the better and the worse men, of the greater and the more ignoble epochs. A building so vast and of such prodigious variety can only be judged as a landscape might be judged; its details taking shape only after hours of patient looking, and that with a practiced eye.

It will generally be admitted that the church as seen in the Frontispiece is far more attractive than it is when seen from the East; also that the great Order of pilasters, 112 feet high, resting upon a basement of eighteen feet, is too colossal even for the “colossal Order”--the separate pilasters showing too much like towers of masonry and requiring a different architectural treatment from that which they received as mere subordinate details; that the design suffers from the absence of the complete group of minor cupolas, of which only two out of the four have been erected; that the great attic is too heavy even for the lower architectural story made up of the colossal order, and this very largely because of the dwarfing of that lower architectural story by the windows of the actual stories within giving the lie to the chief ordonnance, and cutting up that vast and mountainous exterior. All this will be granted generally by most students of European architecture as a whole rather than of one school or one epoch; and those students will also be of one mind as to the dignity of the whole group and as to the beauty of the cupola, drum and shell together, effective without and extremely beautiful when seen from within. Those who regard with an especial love the delicate architectural sculpture of the fifteenth century will find the huge church hard and cold. Those who care for reason and for intelligent growth of design out of building will care for it, while admitting its lack of charm, for it is of thoroughgoing masonry throughout, and what it appears outwardly to be that it really is. As we get to know it we find that the colossal order and the rest of the clumsy adornment within and without are mere excrescences, hardly affecting the massive pile. The cupola is one of the very few in Europe which have no wooden building-out to a metal outer shell: like the Pantheon and Florence cathedral and the smaller dome at Constantinople, it is of solid masonry within and without.