Charles Herbert Moore

“ Towards the end of King James I's Reign, and in the Beginning of his Son's, Taste in Architecture made a bold step from Italy to England at once, and scarce staid a moment to visit France by the way. From the most profound Ignorance in Architecture, the most consummate Night of Knowledge, Inigo Jones started up, a Prodigy of Art, and vied even with his Master Palladio himself. From so glorious an Out-set, there was not any Excellency that we might not have hoped to obtain; Britain had a reasonable Prospect to rival Italy, and foil every Nation in Europe beside. ”

“ Beneath the arcade of sculptured statues is an elegant open arcaded gallery; while the great open arcade of the top story of Paris gives place, here at Amiens, to two superposed lesser arcades connecting the towers above the cornice. It is sadly to be regretted that the great rose has lost its original tracery—the existing flamboyant tracery wholly disagreeing with the spirit of the rest of the design. In this façade wall-spaces are everywhere in effect suppressed, and the Gothic character is everywhere strongly emphasised. ”

“ The Roman Doric order of the portico has much simple beauty. The entasis of the columns is more moderate than is common in later Renaissance design, and the light falls on their rounded surfaces, as they stand relieved against the dark void of the porch, with admirable effect. The façade as a whole is monotonous, but it has an expression of architectural reserve that is worthy of praise. ”

“ A freer spirit of enterprise, a wider experience of life, and a more majestic service were needed to call into activity the highest powers of invention, and fully to develop the genius of the Middle Ages. Yet there are few things more interesting, more instructive, or more beautiful in human history than the way in which these early cowled builders struggled against difficulties and disadvantages, and laid the foundations of an art which was, in the stronger hands of their lay successors, to culminate in the perfections of Chartres and Amiens. ”

“ The artist is keenly appreciative of nature, but he equally perceives the purposes of his art. In judgment of what to take and what to leave he is unerring. The springy line and gracefully undulating surface are caught from nature and wrought into the stubborn stone; but the designer experiences no embarrassment in keeping within the limits of what stone can be made rightly to express.
This living and refined beauty, coexisting with architectural subordination, is as marked in Gothic figure sculpture as it is in that of the lower forms of ornament. ”

“ Among the many influences that were stirring the artistic minds of the Renaissance there were two of chief importance, the Neo-pagan revival, and the true intellectual life of the people which was independent of the retrospective movement, and had been growing up through the Middle Ages. The most sterling qualities of the artistic products of the period are due to this intellectual life, and Florentine and Venetian painting, the two most admirable phases of the supreme art of Italy, are the finest expression of this. ”

“ A building of the Renaissance is thus always the product of the fancy of a particular designer, as a building of the Middle Ages is not. But architecture of the highest excellence can hardly be produced by an individual working independently. The noblest architecture of the past has always been an evolution of a people, the joint product of many minds, and the natural expression of many conditions. ”

“ There is a fine system of continuous, radiating, and encompassing curves in the wings and drapery; as well as an artful sympathy of position in the bodies, and repetition of masses in the placing of the heads. It would be difficult to point, in the whole range of plastic art, to a figure of more subtle beauty than that of the angel on the left, who stoops forward to support the shoulder of the Virgin—a figure which is at the same time adroitly employed by the artist to balance, by an opposing form, the rest of the composition. ”

“ Its lack of visible organic connection with the substructure makes it inferior in effect to the dome of Florence, where the structural lines of the edifice, from the ground upward, give a degree of organic unity, and the buttressed half-domed apses, grouped in happy subordination about the base of the drum, prepare the eye to appreciate the majesty of the soaring cupola as it rises over them. The dome of St. Peter’s has not the beauty of logical composition. Beauty in architecture may, I think, be almost defined as the artistic coördination of structural parts. ”

“ The plastic art of France in the twelfth century does not exhibit any of those superficial attractions which appear at a later date; but it is little inferior to that of any other time or school in expression and essential grace. And of such art there is hardly a more admirable work than this lintel of Senlis. In execution it is no less excellent than in design and sentiment. Wrought in a firm, close-grained stone—which takes a finish almost equal to that attainable in marble—every mass is finely modelled, and every detail is crisply cut. ”

“ From the Roman copies of fauns, Apollos, and Venuses that had been preserved in Italy, it was impossible that high inspiration and true guidance should be drawn.
The Fine Arts of the Renaissance are in part a reflection of this decadent art of classic antiquity, and in part an expression of something quite different which was peculiar to the Italian genius at this time. To the man of the Renaissance the classic inspiration was necessarily different from what it had been to the man of antiquity. To the ancient Greek and Roman the pagan ideals had been real, and their inspiration was genuine ”

“ But rudeness is by no means a characteristic of Gothic, which is not a product of unmixed Northern genius. For, by the time that Gothic architecture had begun to take form, the mingling of races, that had long been going on, had produced,, in the locality where this art first appeared, a people in whose constitution were happily blended some of the finest characteristics of the Latin and Germanic stocks. It was this people who developed the Gothic style and gave to its marvellous constructive system an equally new and appropriate system of adornment. ”

“ But, unhappily, English life among the upper classes in the sixteenth century was not without sophistication. Many of the great houses were built, not for convenience and propriety, but to gratify a spirit of ostentation and pedantry. False notions of symmetry were allowed to control design at the expense of fitness, and classic details, even more grotesquely disfigured than in Italy and France, and combined with elements of nameless character, began to overlay the walls, and break the sky-lines. ”

“ It was not unnatural that such distaste for the pointed style should be felt in Italy, for the style was foreign to Italian genius and Italian traditions. It had been adopted merely as a fashion, and the very modifications which the Italians wrought in it show how little suited it was to their wants. It is, indeed, impossible for a people possessed of an art, which is a natural outgrowth of their wants and tastes, and hence proper to them, to adopt and practise rationally, and to make their own, another art which is an outgrowth of other and different needs and predilections. ”

“ Peter's, an attic is interposed, but to spring a vault from an attic wall is an architectural barbarism; though it is perhaps no greater one than to spring it from an entablature, as the architects of the Renaissance had done from Brunelleschi down. In the small order of the aisles the entablature is simplified, and has only an architrave and cornice; while a member, like a diminutive attic, in retreat of the cornice, is interposed at the impost. ”

“ Finally, the close connection that in all times of living art exists between the work of the hand and the ideas and emotions of the mind is pre-eminently displayed in the art we are considering. So much is this the case that not only is the stamp of thought and feeling impressed upon every fragment of sculpture in the manner that we have already noticed, but more than this, the church edifice was like a vast open page whereon were written in imagery, which the most illiterate could read, the sacred legends and traditions of the common faith. ”

“ It is not worth while to give an extended analysis of its redundant details which, with its vast chimneys adorned with free-standing orders, niches, panelled surfaces, and pinnacles; its dormers with overlaid orders of pilasters, pediments, scrolls, and endless filigree ornaments; and its great lantern with inverted consoles on entablatures forming flying-buttresses (where there is nothing to be buttressed) , make up a bewildering complex without structural meaning or artistic merit. ”

“ When the system was once developed in buildings of three or more aisles, it was natural to employ a simpler form of it in the construction of buildings of simpler plan. But it is unlikely that architecture like that of the Sainte Chapelle would ever have come into being had buildings of so simple plan only been required. It was the need of vast stone-roofed churches, such as could not be constructed without aisles, that stimulated the genius of the Gothic builders, and led to the remarkable results that fill us to-day with wonder and admiration. ”

“ When, after studying the architecture of Greece, we come to examine that of Rome, we are at once struck by the incongruous mixture of elements which it exhibits; and although we may be impressed by its grandeur, we are unable to give it our unqualified admiration. In Byzantine art we find Greek, Roman, and Oriental elements, logically modified in adaptation to new uses, and fused into a radically new and distinctive style of entire consistency and great nobility. ”

“ This ought to be emphasised, for there is no quality to which more of the impressiveness of such sculpture is owing. Multitudinous as are the details which enter into the design of any great cathedral front, there is rarely any scattered effect in the total impression. An harmonious relationship of mass to mass, from largest things to smallest, is maintained. Such breadth is, indeed, a fundamental quality of all good art; but its manifestation is perhaps more remarkable in Gothic architecture than in any other, because of the multitude of subdivisions through which it has to find expression. ”

“ In fact, the Renaissance was by no means an entirely noble movement in the interest of spiritual and intellectual emancipation, or an unqualified advance in ideas and attainments beyond those of the Middle Ages. With all of its abuses the church still stood for moral order and spiritual aspirations. The revolt against it was in part a revolt against both religion and morals. The animating spirit of the movement contained much that was unchristian and destructive of high ideals. ”

“ Into the service of this luxurious and immoral life the Fine Arts were now called, and of the motives which animate such life they become largely an expression. The mediæval endeavour to embody the beauty of Christian ideals in works of art gave place to the desire to make the Fine Arts minister to sensuous pleasure and to mundane pride. In the height of its splendour the vicious life of Florence, the chief centre of literary and artistic productions, was appalling. Men now not only sought to escape from all forms of ecclesiastical and ascetic restraint ”

“ To the great companies of workmen who, in France, wrought together for a common end—each one content to do his best work without thought of individual fame—there was hardly any parallel in Italy. And being an individual product, the work of the sculptor in Italy was naturally more independent of architectural connection than that of the Gothic sculptor had been. It never had such relationship with architecture as had existed in the French Gothic. The Italian regarded it rather as something to be particularly displayed than as a mere architectural auxiliary. ”

“ Gothic art is not an art of barbarians, as the pseudo-classicists of the Renaissance would have us suppose. It is far otherwise. It is the art of that civilised people which grew up, through generations of conflict and mutual interchange of thought, out of the fusion of Northern and Southern blood. ”

“ It is only by extension of the term that the architecture of England in the seventeenth century may be properly called Renaissance. But if, in architecture, we understand by Renaissance a revival of the use of classic details, such extension is justifiable, for in this architecture the use of classic details is becoming established, and the art of Jones and Wren stands in relation to the Elizabethan architecture as the art of Vignola and Palladio does to that of the early Renaissance in Italy, and that of Lescot and De l’Orme to the early French Renaissance. ”

“ There is no undue elaboration or attempt to give the hard stone a look of real hair; but as far as the material would naturally allow the sculptor as suggested it. With special care and tenderness has he wrought the mouth, the thin, gently compressed, lips, the light parted moustache, and the well-formed chin. The drapery is as simple and severe in its lines as is that of the preceding figure; but there is a superior grace of arrangement in the folds, and although the work is wanting in the freedom and skill of later productions, there is no trace of Byzantine convention in its modelling. ”