Part 11

Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place, stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primæval walls of the hill-cities; but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediæval art such as in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona, the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position of a town-gate, since it bears the name of _Porta aurea_, to match the golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs, public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits of the "fortissimus princeps" whom it commemorates was the repair of the Appian Way. But it does not become us to find fault with any built and graven monument, specially with one of a time of which we have so few written monuments as the memorable reign of Trajan. We are so much the slaves of accidental associations, so apt to draw lines at some altogether unreasonable point, that we may doubt whether the reign of Trajan holds the place which it should hold in popular imagination. Suetonius wrote the lives of Twelve Cæsars, and this mere accident has caused the notion of a break which has no real existence between the Suetonian Twelve and those who next followed them. The reign of Trajan marks the Empire at its highest pitch of extent and power, at that highest pitch which, in its own nature, comes just before the beginning of decay. His days saw, too, the highest pitch of architectural magnificence; and with Tacitus and Juvenal to adorn it, one might be inclined to say that, as an age of Latin literature, the age of Trajan might hold its own against any earlier period of the Imperial rule. For we must remember that the great writers of the early days of Augustus are in truth writers of the republican period living on into the Empire. The Flavian period, continued under Trajan, is quite as rich as the earlier days of the Empire itself. And we may notice that the arch of Beneventum marks the reign of Trajan, and with it the Roman Empire, at what was really its highest point. It was raised at a time when it could commemorate conquered Dacia and tributary Armenia. That Dacia and Armenia could be brought within the range of that Roman world which is continued in the system of modern Europe is proved by daily witnesses. But the arch of Beneventum was built too early to commemorate its hero's later victories in the further East, momentary victories in lands which neither Alexander nor Trajan could bring within the abiding range of Western influences.

The arch of Trajan is so distinctly the most famous thing in Benevento that it has carried us out of all chronological order. But the historical interest of Beneventum lies earlier and later than Trajan's day. In truth the _Pax Romana_ forbade that the main interest of any Italian city should lie in Trajan's day. We may believe or not as we please in the presence of Diomêdês and Æneas; but Pyrrhos, Hanno, Totilas, and Manfred are visitors who cannot be forgotten. The city has looked out on many battles, from the overthrow of the Molossian to the overthrow of the Swabian. A pleasing tale in its history is when that Tiberius Gracchus who is the first of a name to appear in Roman history led back his victorious slave-soldiers to receive the reward of freedom, and to be welcomed by the rejoicing people of the faithful colony. For among the Thirty Cities of those days, the Latin colony of Beneventum was not one of the laggard twelve, but one of the faithful eighteen that were ready to endure all hardships. In later warfare the city seems to have been less steadfast. It welcomed Belisarius, and in after days Totilas took it without any trouble, and if he destroyed the walls it was not out of revenge for any resistance on the part of its inhabitants, but for fear they should supply a post of defence for an imperial army. But the greatest day of Beneventum as an historical city comes later than Totilas and earlier than Manfred. The memory of that day may be studied in the chief remaining buildings in the city, the two greatest churches and the castle. The west front of the metropolitan church, a grand example of Italian Romanesque, is furthermore a perfect chronicle of local history. There we may read, built up into the wall, a crowd of monumental records of the Lombard princes of Beneventum, with their deeds, especially their dealings with the dangerous power of the Franks, set forth at length. The bronze doors are famous, with their long array of Scriptural subjects ending in a lesson in the ecclesiastical geography of the province, the figures of the Archbishop of Beneventum and his suffragans. The harmony of the front is a little marred by the single low and massive corner-tower; but the inscription sums up the history of Beneventum, political and physical, for some ages. The city was laid waste by the Emperor Frederick in 1229 and by an earthquake in 1688. The tower was built after the first overthrow in 1279; it was restored after the second in 1690. Destruction wrought by the elements would thus seem to be more easily repaired than destruction wrought by the hand of Cæsar. But it is somewhat strange to find Frederick, in his own belief a successor of Trajan, a follower of Trajan in Eastern conquests, branded as a destroyer in the city where Trajan's memory is cherished. But Frederick had to deal with a kind of power which Trajan knew not. The wrath of the later Emperor fell on a city which was too faithful to the Roman Bishop. The course of Trajan's rule was not likely to be interfered with either by the obscure chief of the persecuted Christian sect, or by any minister of the creed of which Trajan was himself chief Pontiff.

Within the church the repairs done after the earthquake have wrought a good deal of mischief. But we can still see the four ranges of columns of a mighty basilica which must once have taken its place among the noblest of its class. Their capitals are a little nondescript; but they do not offend the eye; if they were certified to be of Trajan's day, it would doubtless be the right thing to admire them. The ambones and the Easter-light are lovely work of the early fourteenth century, the days of a real _Renaissance_, truer than that which followed. The treasury is rich in vestments and other precious things; but the reader of Anselm's _Life_ looks in vain for that specially gorgeous vestment which a Beneventan Archbishop of the eleventh century bore away from Canterbury in exchange for the arm of St. Bartholomew, and which made its wearer the most splendid object among the assembled fathers at Bari. If this missing garment carries our thoughts to England, the round church of St. Sophia--hexagonal in its inner range--carries us to the Eastern world, and reminds us that there was more than one line of successors of Trajan, and that Beneventum came under the influences of both. The cloister, with its amazing series of capitals, its birds, its elephants, its hunting scenes, may rank with those of Aosta and of Arles, of which that of Aosta can supply camels to match the Beneventan elephants. The castle dates only from Pope John the Twenty-second, far away at Avignon; we look perhaps more carefully at the older fragments built up in its walls and on the lion in front of it. With the lion in our thoughts we may look out for other beasts, graven or molten or abiding in their own relics. Procopius saw there the tusks of the Kalydonian boar, as in later times he might, either at Warwick or at Bristol, have seen the ribs of the dun cow. It is for palæontologists to say what it was that the Beneventan antiquaries really showed him. Failing this natural wonder we go to pay our respects to another beast whose shape is due to man's device, in quite another part of the city. A rudely carved bovine animal, in which local patriotism sees the Samnite bull--the bull which, on the coins of revived Samnium, so proudly trampled down the Roman wolf--is now cruelly to be ruled as nothing better than a monument of intruding Apis-worship. We have less time to spend at Benevento than at some other cities; but the Roman arches and vaults of the strange building called _Quaranta Santi_, the grand Roman bridge below, must not be forgotten, and we must still give one more thought to the two mighty men whose hopes were shattered at Beneventum. Manfred fell with his faithful Saracens around him; Pyrrhos lived to fall by a meaner end at Argos; but Beneventum ended the real career of both. It is strange how the two were in some sort the converse of each other. Pyrrhos carried the Epeirot arms into Sicily and southern Italy; Manfred, lord of Sicily and southern Italy, established a Sicilian dominion on the coast of Epeiros. Korkyra, Corfu, the island which has seen every master except the Turk, formed part of the dominions of both alike. We leave Benevento for another city in which the East and the West of Europe, and a crowd of other elements besides, meet yet more closely than they do at Benevento. At Beneventum the eye of Horace began to be caught by the well-known mountains of Apulia; Procopius somewhat boldly speaks of inland Beneventum as being opposite to Dalmatia. The city which we take as our next chief goal, if not strictly opposite to Dalmatia, is so marked as being opposite to one Illyrian port as to have sent its name, so to speak, across the Hadriatic. We will not trouble ourselves to look out for Equotuticum, or to regale ourselves with either the bread or the water of Canusium. It is to the walls of Bari, fishy Bari, that we have to make our way; at Bari, Greek, Latin, Saracen, even Englishman, are all at home, and Bari is opposite to Antivari.

VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia.

At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the _iter ad Brundisium_ is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire, or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi, has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder, while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent. Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar it. It was--indeed, with all mutilations, it still is--a fine front of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as they do a kind of earlier and more healthy _Renaissance_, which, taking classical form as its general models, took them only as general models, and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.

Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller--at least the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and Benevento--by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place, if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms--not without a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen--which is the characteristic style of this region, the natural result of its political history. Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades, and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports. The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of the whole region at Bari.

Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.

The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle--better suited for the purpose than anything else--all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come--as they possibly may have come--from a mosque.

Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of styles--more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style, for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly, by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.

IX. Bari.