The Stones of Venice, Volume 1 (of 3)

53

Appendix 8.

54

Not of Renaissance alone: the practice of modelling buildings on a minute scale for niches and tabernacle-work has always been more or less admitted, and I suppose authority for diminutive battlements might be gathered from the Gothic of almost every period, as well as for many other faults and mistakes: no Gothic school having ever been thoroughly systematised or perfected, even in its best times. But that a mistaken decoration sometimes occurs among a crowd of noble ones, is no more an excuse for the habitual—far less, the exclusive—use of such a decoration, than the accidental or seeming misconstructions of a Greek chorus are an excuse for a school boy’s ungrammatical exercise.

55

And worth questioning, also, whether the triple porch has not been associated with Romanist views of mediatorship; the Redeemer being represented as presiding over the central door only, and the lateral entrances being under the protection of saints, while the Madonna almost always has one or both of the transepts. But it would be wrong to press this, for, in nine cases out of ten, the architect has been merely influenced in his placing of the statues by an artist’s desire of variety in their forms and dress; and very naturally prefers putting a canonisation over one door, a martyrdom over another, and an assumption over a third, to repeating a crucifixion or a judgment above all. The architect’s doctrine is only, therefore, to be noted with indisputable reprobation when the Madonna gets possession of the main door.

56

The arch heading is indeed the best where there is much incumbent weight, but a window frequently has very little weight above it, especially when placed high, and the arched form loses light in a low room: therefore the square-headed window is admissible where the square-headed door is not.

57

I do not like the sound of the word “splayed;” I always shall use “bevelled” instead.

58

“Seven Lamps,” p. 53.

59

On the north side of the nave of the cathedral of Lyons, there is an early French window, presenting one of the usual groups of foliated arches and circles, left, as it were, loose, without any enclosing curve. The effect is very painful. This remarkable window is associated with others of the common form.

60

I have spent much of my life among the Alps; but I never pass, without some feeling of new surprise, the Chalet, standing on its four pegs (each topped with a flat stone), balanced in the fury of Alpine winds. It is not, perhaps, generally known that the chief use of the arrangement is not so much to raise the building above the snow, as to get a draught of wind beneath it, which may prevent the drift from rising against its sides.

61

Appendix 20, “Shafts of the Ducal Palace.”

62

I have taken Professor Willis’s estimate; there being discrepancy among various statements. I did not take the trouble to measure the height myself, the building being one which does not come within the range of our future inquiries; and its exact dimensions, even here, are of no importance as respects the question at issue.

63

The admiration of Canova I hold to be one of the most deadly symptoms in the civilisation of the upper classes in the present century.

64

Thus above, I adduced for the architect’s imitation the appointed stories and beds of the Matterhorn, not its irregular forms of crag or fissure.

65

Appendix 21, “Ancient Representations of Water.”

66

By the friend to whom I owe Appendix 21.

67

One is glad to hear from Cuvier, that though dolphins in general are “les plus carnassiers, et proportion gardée avec leur taille, les plus cruels de l’ordre;” yet that in the Delphinus Delphis, “tout l’organisation de son cerveau annonce qu’il ne doit pas être dépourvu de la docilité qu’ils (les anciens) lui attribuaient.”

68

Vide Wilkinson, vol. v., woodcut No. 478, fig. 8. The tamarisk appears afterwards to have given the idea of a subdivision of leaf more pure and quaint than that of the acanthus. Of late our botanists have discovered, in the “Victoria regia” (supposing its blossom reversed), another strangely beautiful type of what we may perhaps hereafter find it convenient to call Lily capitals.

69

Appendix 22, “Arabian Ornamentation.”

70

Vide “Seven Lamps,” Chap. IV. § 34.

71

Shakspeare and Wordsworth (I think they only) have noticed this, Shakspeare, in Richard II.:—

“But when, from under this terrestrial ball,He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines.”

And Wordsworth, in one of his minor poems, on leaving Italy:

“My thoughts become bright like yon edging of pinesOn the steep’s lofty verge—how it blackened the air!But, touched from behind by the sun, it now shinesWith threads that seem part of his own silver hair.”

72

Some valuable remarks on this subject will be found in a notice of the “Seven Lamps” in the British Quarterly for August, 1849. I think, however, the writer attaches too great importance to one out of many ornamental necessities.

73

Appendix 23: “Varieties of Chamfer.”

74

I do not here speak of artistical merits, but the play of the light among the lower shafts is also singularly beautiful in this sketch of Prout’s, and the character of the wild and broken leaves, half dead, on the stone of the foreground.

75

Vide the “Seven Lamps,” p. 122.

76

The sections of all the mouldings are given on the right of each; the part which is constantly solid being shaded, and that which is cut into dentils left.

77

As, however, we shall not probably be led either to Bergamo or Bologna, I may mention here a curiously rich use of the dentil, entirely covering the foliation and tracery of a niche on the outside of the duomo of Bergamo; and a roll, entirely incrusted, as the handle of a mace often is with nails, with massy dogteeth or nail-heads, on the door of the Pepoli palace of Bologna.

78

Another most important reason for the peculiar sufficiency and value of this base, especially as opposed to the bulging forms of the single or double roll, without the cavetto, has been suggested by the writer of the Essay on the Æsthetics of Gothic Architecture in the British Quarterly for August, 1849:—“The Attic base recedes at the point where, if it suffered from superincumbent weight, it would bulge out.”

79

I have put in Appendix 24, “Renaissance Bases,” my memorandum written respecting this building on the spot. But the reader had better delay referring to it, until we have completed our examination of ornaments in shafts and capitals.

80

Appendix 25, “Romanist Decoration of Bases.”

81

In all the wildness of the Lombardic fancy (described in Appendix 8), this command of the will over its action is as distinct as it is stern. The fancy is, in the early work of the nation, visibly diseased; but never the will, nor the reason.

82

Vide end of Appendix 20.

83

Vide, however, their defence in the Essay above quoted, p. 251.

84

In very early Doric it was an absolute right line; and that capital is therefore derived from the pure cornice root, represented by the dotted line.

85

The word banded is used by Professor Willis in a different sense; which I would respect, by applying it in his sense always to the Impost, and in mine to the capital itself. (This note is not for the general reader, who need not trouble himself about the matter.)

86

The Renaissance period being one of return to formalism on the one side, of utter licentiousness on the other, so that sometimes, as here, I have to declare its lifelessness, at other times (Chap. XXV., § XVII.) its lasciviousness. There is, of course, no contradiction in this: but the reader might well ask how I knew the change from the base 11 to the base 12, in Plate XII., to be one from temperance to luxury; and from the cornice f to the cornice g, in Plate XVI., to be one from formalism to vitality. I know it, both by certain internal evidences, on which I shall have to dwell at length hereafter, and by the context of the works of the time. But the outward signs might in both ornaments be the same, distinguishable only as signs of opposite tendencies by the event of both. The blush of shame cannot always be told from the blush of indignation.

87

The reader must always remember that a cornice, in becoming a capital, must, if not originally bold and deep, have depth added to its profile, in order to reach the just proportion of the lower member of the shaft head; and that therefore the small Greek egg cornices are utterly incapable of becoming capitals till they have totally changed their form and depth. The Renaissance architects, who never obtained hold of a right principle but they made it worse than a wrong one by misapplication, caught the idea of turning the cornice into a capital, but did not comprehend the necessity of the accompanying change of depth. Hence we have pilaster heads formed of small egg cornices, and that meanest of all mean heads of shafts, the coarse Roman Doric profile chopped into a small egg and arrow moulding, both which may be seen disfiguring half the buildings in London.

88

I have taken these dates roughly from Selvatico; their absolute accuracy to within a year or two, is here of no importance.

89

Chap. I. § XIX., Appendix 7: and Chap. VI. § V.

90

Chap. I., § XIX.

91

The architrave is properly the horizontal piece of stone laid across the tops of the pillars in Greek buildings, and commonly marked with horizontal lines, obtained by slight projections of its surface, while it is protected above in the richer orders, by a small cornice.

92

Garbett on Design, p. 74.

93

Ed. Venetis, 1758, Lib. I.

94

Compare Appendix 12.

95

L’Artiste en Bâtiments, par Louis Berteaux: Dijon, 1848. My printer writes at the side of the page a note, which I insert with thanks:—“This is not the first attempt at a French order. The writer has a Treatise by Sebastian Le Clerc, a great man in his generation, which contains a Roman order, a Spanish order, which the inventor appears to think very grand, and a new French order nationalised by the Gallic cock crowing and clapping its wings in the capital.”

96

The lower group in Plate XVII.

97

One of the upper stories is also in Gally Knight’s plate represented as merely banded, and otherwise plain: it is, in reality, covered with as delicate inlaying as the rest. The whole front is besides out of proportion, and out of perspective, at once; and yet this work is referred to as of authority, by our architects. Well may our architecture fall from its place among the fine arts, as it is doing rapidly; nearly all our works of value being devoted to the Greek architecture, which is utterly useless to us—or worse. One most noble book, however, has been dedicated to our English abbeys,—Mr. E. Sharpe’s “Architectural Parallels”—almost a model of what I should like to see done for the Gothic of all Europe.

98

Except in the single passage “tell it unto the Church,” which is simply the extension of what had been commanded before, i.e., tell the fault first “between thee and him,” then taking “with thee one or two more,” then, to all Christian men capable of hearing the cause: if he refuse to hear their common voice, “let him be unto thee as a heathen man and publican:” (But consider how Christ treated both.)

99

One or two remarks on this subject, some of which I had intended to have inserted here, and others in Appendix 5, I have arranged in more consistent order, and published in a separate pamphlet, “Notes on the Construction of Sheep-folds,” for the convenience of readers interested in other architecture than that of Venetian palaces.

100

Not, however, by Johnson’s testimony: Vide Adventurer, No. 39. “Such operations as required neither celerity nor strength,—the low drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, digesting dictionaries, or accumulating compilations.”

101

We have done so—theoretically; just as one would reason on the human form from the bones outwards: but the Architect of human form frames all at once—bone and flesh.

102

Of course mere multiplicability, as of an engraving, does not diminish the intrinsic value of the work; and if the casts of sculpture could be as sharp as the sculpture itself, they would hold to it the relation of value which engravings hold to paintings. And, if we choose to have our churches all alike, we might cast them all in bronze—we might actually coin churches, and have mints of Cathedrals. It would be worthy of the spirit of the century to put milled edges for mouldings, and have a popular currency of religious subjects: a new cast of nativities every Christmas. I have not heard this contemplated, however, and I speak, therefore, only of the results which I believe are contemplated, as attainable by mere mechanical applications of glass and iron.

103

I shall often have occasion to write measures in the current text, therefore the reader will kindly understand that whenever they are thus written, 2 ,, 2, with double commas between, the first figures stand for English feet, the second for English inches.

104

I cannot suffer this volume to close without also thanking my kind friend, Mr. Rawdon Brown, for help given me in a thousand ways during my stay in Venice: but chiefly for his direction to passages elucidatory of my subject in the MSS. of St. Mark’s library.

105

I have not seen the building itself, but Mr. Owen Jones’s work may, I suppose, be considered as sufficiently representing it for all purposes of criticism.

106

The sculpture of the Drunkenness of Noah on the Ducal Palace, of which we shall have much to say hereafter.