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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.

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.

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.

CENTRAL MEDIAEVAL DESIGN

The style was developed in that tract of country which lies between the Loire on the south, the Somme on the north, the Meuse on the east, and, on the west, a line drawn north and south through the cities of Caen and Angers--a district about one hundred and thirty by two hundred and fifty miles, equal to England and Wales south of the Trent and the Mersey, or, say, the State of Pennsylvania. The style was never quite at its best except in what is now France, though the boundaries of the district above named were soon overpassed by the perfected Gothic. The most nearly French, and therefore most normal and faultless, examples out of France are those of the Rhine and of northern Spain where French master-masons seem to have worked. The Gothic, beginning as early as 1290 in England, is of extreme beauty in a simple, quasi-domestic, less grand and less perfectly developed way than the French. The Gothic of Germany and the Austrian dominions differed from the normal type in being somewhat fantastical and irregular, but still more in a lack of a thoroughly intelligent proportion of the parts. The so-called Gothic of Italy is never admirable as a style except in a few Cistercian monastic churches: and the magnificent cathedrals such as Orvieto, Siena, Monreale, and Florence are rightly beloved indeed for their magnificent combination of the decorative arts of form and color--their mosaics, their delicate sculptures in marble, their wrought and highly developed porches, their superb wall-tombs--but are of minor architectural importance from the very fact of their complete lack of constructional significance.

The Gothic builders had other thoughts over and above their logical desire to show everywhere the true structure. They had also the taste for upward-pointing lines: a taste which seems to have grown with the development of the style. It was not this taste which in the first place made their buildings high as compared with their width: that was a mere matter of convenience and of obtaining very large windows above the aisle roofs. But the pointed arch itself, and the steep roof needed to protect the stone vaults from rain in a rainy climate, led these builders constantly towards the steeper pitch, the sharper point, the more lofty and soaring design.

Now in judging such building, and such artistic intention as this, it is evident that we cannot use the maxims which are convenient to observe in the case of a Greek or a Greco-Roman monument. Lightness takes the place of evident stability: that is the first thing to notice. It is not so much that the walls are thin, as that they have disappeared: there are no walls--only a series of piers dividing windows, the opening filled with glass being much greater, if measured along a horizontal line running through the windows, than is the extent of the solid masonry. You see at once wherein there is an excuse for the saying "a wall of glass with a roof of stone." But there is more than this: the primary object of the designer has been to treat his construction as the main inspiration of his design. Inside and out everything is shown as it really is, the exact duty done by every stone in the structure is clearly visible to even an uncareful observer. This may be thought true of early Greek work as well: but then the structure of the Greek temple is the simplest conceivable, a mere carrying of stone beams upon stone posts--no arches to thrust, no windows to open in the wall, most of all, no attempt to roof anything with masonry except in so far as a stone beam is strong enough to span a small open space between two strong pillars. Moreover, the Greek temple was so covered up with painting, and where the paint did not conceal the whole surface that surface was already so carefully smoothed and unified, that it was hard to distinguish stone from stone even in the marble-built temples of Athens--whereas those of the soft stone regions, coated with stucco, were in architectural effect absolutely monoliths. As for the Roman structure, built with unexampled massiveness, and wonderfully imposing in its mass and in the great size and noble proportions of its interiors, it was concealed from view by the entirely contradictory pretense at trabeated construction in the modified Greek orders of columns and pilasters: and where these were not in use the walls were very commonly concealed by marble in great sheets, by tiling of glass, or by moulded stucco. The Gothic building also was painted: nor was there any hesitation on any one's part in putting up surfaces of stucco to paint upon where an elaborate picture was wanted: but this concealed nothing except the joints of a few courses of stone. The essential facts of the structure remained visible outdoors and in, and it was by a judicious proportioning of the parts of these structures, each to all the others, that the chief architectural effect was obtained.

LATE MEDIAEVAL DESIGN

In Greek building, in Roman building, in Romanesque building, and especially in its culmination in the Gothic system, we are to look to the way in which the buildings have been carried out. Plan, that is to say the arrangement of parts for utility or internal effect, has much to do with our appreciation of a building: but the structure, the actual putting together of materials, is of still greater importance. You do not pretend to judge of a Greek temple without being able almost to count the stones of which it is composed or without appreciating fully the relative part which they play. In Gothic architecture, assuredly no person would dream of finding any enjoyment in a church without having first secured a good working knowledge of how it came to be what it is--how the stone roof is kept in place in the wonderful way that we see it and what part is played by pier and flying buttress. But this interest in the life of the structure becomes faint as we consider the buildings of the four centuries beginning with the year 1400. We have to consider some splendid works of art produced between that year and the outbreak of the French Revolution, but in none of them is there any special call for studying the theory or practice of the builders. They may build well or they may build carelessly: that is comparatively indifferent under the new r?gime, for designs are made and carried out for their own sake; nor is the master of construction any longer the master of design.

The reader will understand that in such general statements as these in matters of fine art there are always many drawbacks and qualifications. The fifteenth century had still a deal of Gothic vigor, in all the north of Europe. There were great builders after, as before, the pivotal year 1400. This discussion will even include the names of men especially praised as being great constructors: the point is that their system of construction had little to do with their design. Jacopo Sansovino and Sir Christopher Wren were great builders, but their designs were not in any special way the better for that. Their work is marked everywhere with the modern characteristic of being designed abstractly, and as if intended to be carved out of a single block, and afterwards put into terms of mortar-masonry and cut stone, because that was the only way in which the builders of the time could proceed.

upon the numerous radiating ribs which seem to be the very framework of the structure. They are decorative mouldings worked upon the surface of a solid stone vault, built in a single shell which extends from one to another of the great transverse arches which span the nave.

The famous Town Halls of the Netherlands have preserved for us the most perfect, because the most unmingled, traces

In the famous south porch of the cathedral at Albi, this florid Gothic has reached its culmination. Plate XL shows the outer porch; that which, when the cathedral was really a fortress of some importance, guarded the first approach to the long flight of stairs, the outer perron. Nothing is more attractive among the minor charms

of spirited old architecture than these mixtures of florid and even fantastical design with the grave solemnity of fortress towers and the harsh line of battlements intended for the service of war. Passing through this gateway which is pierced in a fortress-wall merely and leads directly to no covered apartment of any sort, the visitor mounts some twenty-five stone steps and reaches the porch shown in Plate XLI, but he does not enter it by the larger archway; that is the south archway to which there is meant to be access on the level of its own sill. On the right and partly hidden by the huge buttress-pier is the narrower eastern doorway, to which access by the steps is had, from the outer porch, Plate XL. The great inner porch dates from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and is one of the greatest triumphs as it is one of the very latest productions of that strange art which has abandoned the essential character and basis of Gothic architecture without losing its derived and secondary charm, which may be defined as the charm of picturesque variety and sharp contrast--the very reverse, or so it seems, of the calm harmony of Greek design.

REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

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 and the intrados: 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, 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 and the Medici Palace 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.

LATER REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

The student, as he approaches either of these interesting buildings, has to remember that the style of the earlier one, Plate L, was compelled to make room for the newer style, as that in its turn was soon out of fashion and was replaced by the more severely classical buildings which are mentioned below. The evolution was not perfect, the growth was not merely natural and inevitable, the style did not ripen, growing slowly from point to point of development, from simpler to richer, from less to greater pitch of complication. It was the constant influx of fresh appeals from Italy and from Italianized travellers, sometimes nobles of the great court, like the Constable of Montmorency, sometimes princes of the church, like the two cardinals of Amboise, and sometimes scholars only, humble students of Greek and Latin,

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 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 ?couen, 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. 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.

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 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 --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.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN

In rather less than a century from the beginning of the Risorgimento all play of fancy or vivacity had gone out of the designs of the Italians. As early as 1510 there is little left except reserve and a dignified rejection of all exterior ornament which could be spared.

A very similar result is seen in the North as well; and here also it comes within less than a century of the complete establishment of the classical Renaissance in France, Germany or the Low Countries. It began in the North, this classical renascence, about 1510, and was well established by 1525. Accordingly, as early as 1600, the independent and vigorous life has gone out and it becomes an architecture of the decadence. Now, it is not to be assumed that decadence is the same thing as decay. Decadence in fine art is a term applied to the slow, and often very interesting, decline from the highest pitch of enthusiastic work and of combined energy and good taste. Defined in this way, there was a decadence of Roman imperial art from the reign of Trajan; or, as some would have it, from the reign of Vespasian. And yet what noble things were built even more than two hundred years after the later of those two dates! So there was a decadence in Gothic art dating from the middle of the thirteenth century; for everywhere there was a replacing of the energy of the new style by formality, by regularity, by the constant repetition of closely similar parts: and the pride of the skillful builder carried it over the refined taste of the artist. And still we have to remember with admiration and amazement such wonderful conceptions as the church of Saint Urbain at Troyes , such masterly combinations as those of Saint Ouen at Rouen , and all the finer buildings of the florid Gothic in France--of the perpendicular architecture with fan vaulting in England. All these are works of the decadence, and what is needed is the substitution for the term we are using of another term which shall not sound so much like our English word, "decay."

In like manner, there is decadence in the South from 1510, or thereabout,--in the North from a point of time eighty-five years later, and this decadence continued until the whole ancient world of traditional art was destroyed in the stormy time of the French Revolution. Since then, there has been neither decadence nor growth, but a bewildering series of experiments, none of which have as yet brought the world into a state of wholesome and natural progress in the arts of decorative design, that is to say, of design based upon structure and utility. Decadence in the South, then, lasted for two centuries and three quarters: in the North it lasted nearly two centuries. It stands to reason that during such long spaces of time there were ups and downs, periods of more rapid decline, periods of attempted restoration, of almost a new birth. Thus, there are fantastical and baroque designs as early as 1620 in the North, and much earlier in the South: whereas, in either case, fine, pure, stately buildings were erected at a much later period; still, the general tendency is from the more simple and more reasonable to the more extravagant; and this from the natural desire of the designers to try something new and not to be fettered too closely by the traditions of neo-classic design. There was, of course, a reaction from that greater freedom, and the boldness of the men of 1720 and thereabout was offensive to their successors who established the latest neo-classic with its Roman colonnades and a general absence of other details of interest.

Some part of this twofold tendency--of this revolution and counter-revolution--this drag towards an unseemly lack of dignity and quietness, with the inevitable pull backward to a more tranquil method of design--is to be seen in the church of the Theatiner monks, at Munich. The local authorities, which seem to be trustworthy, say that this church, which is dedicated to Saint Cajetan, was built in 1675, except the front and the towers, which are later--the date usually given being a century after the completion of the church, though this can only apply to the upper stories. As long as the low buildings, the three-story houses with not very lofty roofs, remained unaltered, the view of this church from the Ludwigstrasse or from the Square in front of the theatre, looking over the houses between, is one of the most impressive to be had anywhere when a single building is under consideration. The proportion between the dome and the two towers, and secondarily, between the towers and the front of the clearstory raised high between them, and between this, with its long nave roof, and the cupola, again, is uniformly beautiful. In our American cities we can only secure such a result by building at great, and generally impossible, cost, on a free open plot of ground: but for a town or a neighborhood in which the height of the houses could be guaranteed for a term of years, no better type of metropolitan church can be imagined. You cannot get away from its towering masses; from far and from near they are alike impressive. Whatever reluctance there has been to admit and insist upon the beauty of this church is caused by the inferiority of its details. Let us, therefore, consider those details. In the first place, for the cupola itself and the drum which supports it there would be a general acceptance of it as sufficiently of the graver style to which it belongs, that which the Germans call the Hoch-Renaissance, except for some part of the copper lantern at the top which smacks of a less pure style. But when the towers are considered, then there would be a general rejection of that treatment of the pilasters which causes them to appear as members, only, of a continuous group of vertical mouldings, emphasizing the corners, but also out of keeping as parts of a recognized neo-classic style.

Plate LV shows the front of a well-known building in Turin, and here architectural detail has been so handled that it is indeed a disfigurement. If the reader will look past the astonishing window casings and the really hideous filling of panels like those in the pilasters of the basement, he will see a well understood front. There is a high architectural basement, containing the basement story proper and a mezzanine; a grand story with the order, containing three stories of the interior, the pilasters well proportioned and well placed; and above this, a high entablature planned for the whole front with a story of rooms in it, and another story of rooms showing in little dormer windows above the cornice. Here are six "flats" of rooms, all abundantly lighted, and yet the front has been laid out in such a way that it has all the elements of a very imposing and stately structure. Even the singular soft rounding, with a plan made up of several curves, of the projecting central mass which includes the porch of entrance, is capable of perfectly dignified, and even stately, treatment. The appearance above of the great rotunda which holds the staircase, completes the composition of this central mass, and leaves one regretting that it might not be given to some modern designer of good taste, and a hard hand on the vagaries of his assistants, to work out the problem of this curious central mass, so manifold and so capable of unity. But, now, if one leaves for a moment that abstract way of regarding the whole front and allows those window casings to secure his attention, why then all is lost, of course: one cannot be expected to stand very long in front of such a building; it is a monster, but it is that merely because of the exceptionally ugly and wholly unreasonable gimcracks that are stuck all over it. If you should take the Hermes of Olympia and dress him like those "fantasticals" at an old-fashioned Paris masked ball, you would no doubt produce a very unsightly object and it would take the eye of an expert in human form, a sculptor, namely, to discover the beauty of the figure within.

That Turin building is of about 1690; see now what the reaction brought forth and what gravity of design was possible to the artists of thirty years later in the same city! There seems no doubt that this front of the Palazzo Madama was built by Filippo Juvara about 1715. To look at it is a rest indeed after the enormities of the Palazzo Carignano: and yet even here one finds himself wishing that the wretched device of carved trophies of arms, as the single motive of the exterior sculpture, were absent here. Sculptured ornament was beyond the strength of the eighteenth century: when they tried to introduce it, then the result was a failure. It is with relief that one looks at the front, Plate LIV, of the Ducal Palace at Genoa, which front seems to have been built by Cantoni, a well-known reformer in architectural style. The tendency has been through the whole century away from variety, away from the unexpected and the surprising, away from all external ornamentation, whether in color or in sculpture: the wheel has come full circle and there is nothing now entertaining or attractive in the details of the front, except only the neo-classic column with its accompanying entablature. The columns may be arranged in a continuous row or they may be coupled, as in the case before us, or they

NINETEENTH CENTURY: IMITATIVE DESIGN

When, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, men began to breathe free again in Europe, it became evident to those who observed the tendencies of their own time that there was no restraint of tradition left--at least no restraint which was recognized by more than a small group of men, while another group of men equally intelligent, perhaps, rejected those traditions and set up their own standard. King Ludwig of Bavaria had studied and travelled before his accession to the crown; he had purchased and brought to Munich the Greek sculptures from the temple at AEgina; he had seen the buildings of the Italian Renaissance and admired them; he was a comparatively unprejudiced dilettante with a liking for many styles, a sympathy for many forms of artistic thought. He and his architects started in his capital, Munich, the Ludwigskirche only a dozen years after Napoleon's final dethronement, and the royal Library a few years later--each of these being in a kind of Southern Romanesque style without columned porticoes or other attempts at classicism. The Allerheiligenhofkirche is of the same character of design with a somewhat more frank observance of Italian models. The Old Pinakothek was begun in 1826, contemporaneously with the Ludwigskirche, or nearly so, but this building is a careful study of the Italian Renaissance. The southern front of the Royal Palace, the K?nigsbau, is again of the same year as to its commencement, and this also is studied from Florentine fifteenth century palazzi. The north front of the Post Office, directly opposite the K?nigsbau, has a Florentine loggia of thirteen arches--fifteenth century style, not badly carried out. The Glyptothek is the earliest of all: it was begun before Ludwig's accession, and almost immediately after the restoration of peace to Europe, and the outside of this was meant to be as Greek as it was possible for a modern designer to make a building. Within, it had indeed to resort to the non-Greek device of vaulting, to cover its large halls: but it was still of Grecian taste in its details. The Valhalla, by which term the King designated a Temple of Honor built on a noble hill by the Danube, above Ratisbon, is of the same epoch and of the same deliberately Hellenic character of design; a really fine exterior, studied closely from a Doric Temple of the best period. Another such temple of honor stands at the southeastern edge of the new town of Munich, the Ruhmeshalle , begun in 1843, and as completely Greek as the two others. The basilica of St. Boniface was begun in 1835 and is a most faithful study of the later basilicas of the pure Latin style, that is to say, a basilica of the sixth or the seventh century. To complete the circle of the styles from the fifth century B. C. to the sixteenth century A. D., and to cover all the important styles which mark the circuit of those two thousand years, there was built in the Au suburb a Gothic church as completely in the fourteenth century spirit as the intelligence of the builder would enable him to make it. Roman imperial art was not represented, for the scholars had hardly begun to differentiate it from the pure Greek: and for some such reason, probably because the Germans have always been inclined to use the term "Byzantine" for all round-arched mediaeval work, the King's advisers made no attempt at a piece of rugged northern Romanesque: but all the other epoch-making styles of Europe were included in the enlarged capital city.

All of these imitations are as careful as possible. If in any detail the style imitated has been abandoned, even for a moment, it has been with a feeling of "needs must"; no pains have been spared to keep close to the ancient spirit. The interior is what is fine in the basilica of St. Boniface and it is a favorable way of regarding this epoch of copying to take this building as our example, because the construction and the system of design are so very simple, so easy to grasp and to imitate, that nothing more than a delicate care for details and the power of reproducing them is needed. The mosaics and the paintings of the interior are indeed not equal to those of a great Roman basilica, either in its original state or as it has come down to us; the painters and designers of the time were not competent to reproduce those; a critical judge would say that the carving of the marble capitals lacked something of initiative--something of energy; the general effect of color of the interior, though far from unpleasing, though even agreeable to the visitor, may be thought much less noble than that of a fine Italian church. And yet this is one of the most attractive interiors in Europe, and one may visit it many times during a season and like it better all the time. It is to be heartily enjoyed, and yet when there is a question of its artistic merit as a design, the favorable comment is much less unreserved. For what have we to admire? Only sympathy in observing, and fidelity in reproducing, monuments of the past. Do we feel as we speak the word "only" that such sympathy and such fidelity are so rare that they deserve very hearty recognition? That may be, and yet the praise given to the architectural effort may be not great. It is not by sympathy and fidelity alone that great designs are made.

Let it be admitted that if the architects of all Europe had been so delighted by this, or by some similar undertaking, as to begin to work, altogether, in the Latin style--to build all their churches in that style and to study the problem of designing civic buildings, and dwellings also, to correspond--a new style and a worthy one might have originated. Let that be admitted: the failure of the nineteenth century has been in the absence of any such unanimity. No great body of architects has ever agreed on what was to be done. There has always been a competing school, a rival school, sometimes several of them, armed with reasoning and enthusiasm as strong as that of the school in question and prepared to beat down its feeble growth.

Or let us take the Glyptothek, a composition as completely Greek as the feeling and the perception of the day enabled the architect to make it; are we to take the shafts without flutings, which seem to be called for, as so many violations of Greek verity? In all Grecian art, moreover, there are no round-headed niches, that is to say, niches covered by semi-domes, because there are no arches therein. There are no frontispieces made up of an entablature, a pediment and two pilasters, used for mere ornament and surrounding a round-topped opening. There are no entablatures constructed with flat arches which replace, or, as in this case, relieve a flat lintel composing the epistyle. None of those things are Greek: and yet it is clear that Klenze meant to be as Greek as Ictinos. Let us compare with that front the fa?ade which immediately confronts it from the south side of the broad K?nigsplatz, the Exhibition building, finished about 1840. Here is a building which is more purely classic than the Glyptothek in almost every respect, Roman rather than Greek in its proportions, in the free use of the Corinthian column, very elaborately worked, in the free use of pilasters with sculptured capitals, in the employment of carved modillions: and yet it is more truly Greek in its mouldings, which are studied with extreme care, and in the absence from it of such violations of archaeological accuracy as those already mentioned with regard to the Glyptothek. It would be thought by many to be a finer design, attracting less attention merely because not the home of a very important collection of classical sculpture, and a mere shelter for temporary exhibitions of modern art.

The Propylaea , also at Munich, is the most nearly Greek of all, for even its use of details not known to us in ancient work, is very careful and marked by perfect feeling for the style. It is, however, only a gateway of honor: and in that capacity it has been easy to treat. The designer, Klenze, deserves credit for not having copied some one of the ancient gateways more closely, so as to avoid responsibility.

It is impossible to escape from this method of criticism. You cannot judge of these nineteenth century buildings without asking whether they are or are not faithful copies of some structure of the sixth century, A. D., or the fifth century B. C., or of whatever epoch of the past. Those who deprecate the unfavorable character of the general criticism which is based upon regret for this ceaseless copying, tell us constantly that the artists of the great times copied also, that they were always studying the buildings already erected and trying to improve upon them. That is true; but the buildings they copied, with alterations, with improvements, with enlargements, with refinements, with natural striving for growth, were the buildings of their own time, called forth by the same necessity which controlled them, fitted for the same community, based upon the same well understood method of construction. The familiar comparison and lesson drawn from the modern art of the shipbuilder illustrates this. The skilled shipbuilder whittles out his model with an eye on the past and on the present, and he proposes to modify the lines of his own latest partial success or of his rival's endeavor in such a way as to give his new hull more speed, more carrying capacity, more stiffness--whatever may be his immediate object. He never goes back to the ships of the time of Queen Elizabeth with a deliberate intention of building an Elizabethan hull and sparring it and rigging it in an Elizabethan way. No matter now about the causes of this difference; the fact remains, and we are face to face with this curious condition of things, that whereas every important change in building, in the past, has been accompanied by a change in the methods of design, so that even in the times of avowed revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth century and in what we have seen of the twentieth century our great new systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and great springing arches outside of a structure of thin, light, scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal--the appearance of a solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.

feet high and almost exactly equal to the total length.

As there is no architectural style peculiar to the nineteenth century in any of the lands occupied by Europeans, it is inevitable that the greater number of modern buildings should be more or less completely suggested by the fine art of the time when there was a style of interest and of individual character. Very few are the nineteenth century buildings which are absolutely without such suggestion. At the same time there are a certain number in which only a general study of ancient art is visible, and it is of these that our tenth chapter treats.

NINETEENTH CENTURY: ORIGINAL DESIGN

The work of Henry Hobson Richardson may be named as a noticeably intelligent attempt to regain the lost excellence of an ancient style without copying it closely. This appreciation has to do only with his buildings of the years from 1875 to a short time before his early death in 1886. He studied deliberately the Romanesque architecture of the middle and south of France, and as the elaborate sculpture of human subject, so common in the churches of that style, would not have been practicable in America in the nineteenth century, he developed, with the assistance of certain American sculptors, a semi-Byzantine system of foliated design which adapted itself well to his arched porticoes and his elaborate interior compositions of woodwork. Other lands than France were visited and their treasures put to use: thus, the central tower and the general grouping of the masses in his celebrated design, Trinity Church in Boston, Massachusetts , are evidently studied from a Spanish original. This is well shown in the illustration named, which shows the church as Richardson left it. The tower on the extreme left has been replaced by the accessories of the new west porch.

Now in such a design as this we have to separate that which is frankly copied and that which is of independent design. Thus, the inlay of different colored stones, so marked in the apse, and in a simpler way in the transept, on the left of the picture, is taken directly from churches of Auvergne. The question, then, would be whether, the idea of a mosaic on a large scale being once adopted, the design furnished is a good one for the place. Such designs are almost common property: they float around the world and every designer has his mind stored with them: the question is not of originality in combining a star with some zigzags, but rather of providing a pattern of just the right size and character to fill the given spot, as well as to have an independent beauty of its own. The great central tower, studied probably from the cathedral of Salamanca in Spain, is evidently open to question as to whether it is sufficiently massive in appearance. There is to many persons an appearance as if the stone work were composed of too many and too slight colonnettes, lintels, arches, and the rest, involving the use of a great number of small stones, laid up not in a massive wall but in a slighter and more exposed fashion, not a skeleton, but suggesting the idea of something very open to the weather. The Spanish originals have somewhat the same effect but it is less marked in the old buildings and with them it is not combined with that mosaic of different colored stones which, although the practiced builder knows it to be superficial merely, yet gives to most spectators a feeling as if the wall were not solidly laid up. The building is certainly faulty in lacking the appearance of ponderosity. Seen through a haze or by dim light it is a noble composition, the forms exquisitely balanced, the central tower perfectly well marking its place and its structure. It is not until the building is seen in a brilliant light and its detailed effect begins to tell upon its general masses that any exception can be taken to its merit as a general central tower. That the lack of solidity in appearance may be the more clearly understood, it is well to compare with the church itself the porch which was built long after Richardson's death, though avowedly according to his general design. This porch, though a small structure, has a massiveness in all its parts, which the church has been said to lack. The sculpture is also especially noteworthy as being full of that mediaeval feeling which forced even the carefully modelled human figure, with elaborate drapery, into the service of the architectural design; while still the modelling has that anatomical truth which modern school-taught generations require.

The conclusion is, with regard to this church, that we are free to judge of it as an independent design once we have cleared away some few doubts of archaeological accuracy: once it is established that the designer has felt at liberty to take a general form of his central tower from impressions received in Spain, while many of the details are taken almost bodily from the heart of France, the rest is to be accepted, as also the adaptation and working-in of the borrowed details, as a design well adapted to the requirements of the building, to its place in an open and uncrowded site where the building stands free on every side, and to its material, a sandstone, not very fine nor very hard. It is one of the best designs in the picturesque fashion which modern times have seen.

A similar piece of bold adaptation to an ancient style is seen in Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, begun about 1880. No person who has lived among English cathedrals could ever mistake this building for a design of the Middle Ages; and yet

its character as a Gothic structure is perfectly maintained. It is to be judged, then, as an ancient Gothic building is to be judged. One asks whether the system of vaulting with ribs, and a filling or shell of light stone work between the ribs, is supported and resisted in the best and most economical way by the system of buttressing, and whether this system of buttressing without, and the system of vaulting within, are equally expressed in the artistic design. The fact that the modern building cannot be allowed the cost of much architectural sculpture in its exterior, though unfortunate, cannot be urged as a serious defect, in view of the fact that the English mediaeval churches have but little sculpture as compared with those of the Continent, their adornment being concentrated more generally upon the West front, or parts of the interior.

If now we try to call to mind some building inspired, on the whole, by classical taste and the classical spirit of design, but showing also independence and a strictly modern conception, we shall find that the search is not a rewarding one. There are few modern buildings in which the classic orders are used at all, or in which classic details have been carefully studied, without what seems to be a strict adherence to recognized types of classic or neo-classic general design. The Greek who was building oblong temples, very strictly limited to a given number of columns and a given slope of roof, might still group small shrines as they are grouped in the Erectheum; and he, the Greek designer, generally careful of his Orders, may substitute for his columns a row of draped statues with perfect success. The designers of imperial Rome, dealing with dwelling houses, all on one floor, with columned courtyards and covered porticoes surrounding gardens open to the sky, were still capable of building on the side of a cliff and in the Imperial City, too, and producing a house three stories high on one side and one story on the other--handling their semi-Greek and semi-Italian details with perfect ease and nearly perfect grace, and investing the whole with a consistent scheme of ornament. The modern designer in the classical styles will not do that very often. In the first place, he will have studied only the grandiose buildings of antiquity, the great temples and porticoes with their minutely accurate symmetry of plan: and in the second place, he will have conceived of the modern use of classic forms as being, on the whole, a simple thing, easy to the naturally gifted designer. The one thing which the modern workman in classic styles expects to get from his building is refinement of proportion, reaching on the one side towards dignity and on the other side towards grace. Now, to one who is naturally strong in such things, the obtaining of these beauties of proportion is an easy thing: it is achieved or it is not achieved in the course of a very few hours of preparation and study of the problem. It is hardly conceivable that a modern adept in the classical system of design should think much of detail except as to the accurate copying of sculpture and of the curvature of mouldings from ancient examples.

In mediaeval styles, we moderns study the small town house, the humble parish church, with its squat tower and plain windows without tracery, as well as the great cathedral, typical of the style and embodying its full character. Of classical antiquity there were no such things to study, during the years when the modern feeling for classical art took shape; nor have there been until the present day many opportunities for judging of the smaller and simpler designs. And therefore we take from classical art mainly its colonnades, its stately use of the three great Orders of Greco-Roman antiquity, with a very few of their slighter modifications. Those buildings of the great days of the empire in which no columnar adornment existed, we have hardly learned to respect--we still look upon them as exceptions hardly worthy of the attention of one who would study the great arts of antiquity. Now it appears to one who will study the past closely and fearlessly, that the Romans themselves were a little overawed by their system of columnar architecture, and were slow to abandon or even modify it during the long centuries of its constant application to the diverse needs of the old Mediterranean world. Still more are we moderns overawed by the columns and entablatures, so that we dare not play with them: and yet, how can you hope to design if you are afraid to play with the members of your composition? The taste of the American communities, our great cities within the borders of the United States, is markedly for that kind of gravity which we associate with the classical styles--with the few large openings, the horizontal cornices, the low-pitched or invisible roofs, the smooth white, or light colored, surfaces of unbroken simplicity, the carefully studied classical colonnade. The taste of similar communities in England is as evidently based upon a long familiarity with the picturesque forms of the Middle Ages and of the Elizabethan and earlier Jacobean styles, that is to say, of so much of the Renaissance as reached England before the foundation, by Inigo Jones, of the Italian semi-classical style in that country. Similar to this is the feeling in Germany: for it is most surprising to Americans living, as they have done since 1880, in a time of almost complete agreement among the architects as to the unique and solitary importance of Italian neo-classic methods of design, to see the numerous German publications teem with studies of sixteenth century half timbered fronts, of seventeenth century stepped gables and turrets crowned with "extinguishers," and of eighteenth century florid modifications of the rococo style. In France there is an orthodox style, a recognized style: and yet it is in France that the most seriously considered departures from that style have been made.

The difficulty of expressing in words this complication of architectural thought is very great. The English designers are in one sense the most original of all, for they follow less closely in the general arrangements of the mass, or of the street front, the example set by former ages. In Germany, such indifference to what the past has taught is more seldom seen, and when seen, it takes, most generally, an ugly form of unrestrained fancy, guided neither by tradition nor by strong over-ruling good taste. In France, good taste is rather the rule. As in literature, so in all departments of fine art, the fault of the French work is in the desire not to be rash in the way of innovation, and good taste is always ready to instruct its votaries to follow the path marked out by the men who have just passed by in the human procession and who had needs to supply quite like those of the present day.

any past style as in the simpler and more commercial building. There is much sculpture, rather carefully designed and cut with great brilliancy. There is a rather free use of pseudo-classic columns and colonnettes; there is a daring combination of larger architectural details, such as gables of cut stone with rounded outline, capped with bold drip moulds, pinnacle-towers wrought into niches with statuary, a porch of entrance with a very boldly projecting hood, well handled, with caryatid figures, a staircase tower with a cut stone attic of great merit, and ventilation towers combined with the roof structure and differentiated finely from the masonry-built forms near them. It is a costly building, a refined and thought-out design; and yet one cannot say that there is anything of the past in it more than this--that it is based upon the spirit and taste of the Renaissance rather than upon that of the classic epoch, or of the mediaeval epoch, early or late, or of the Post-Renaissance epoch, beginning in the North about 1650. This relative independence is what the foreigner sees most strongly in modern English architectural practice.

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