Charles Herbert Moore

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Arch of Titus is the finest in proportions of all the Roman triumphal arches, and the grandest in monumental simplicity. Sansovino's changes and ornamental additions spoil the composition, and do not fit the design for the building to which it is attached. Such a design could not have any proper relationship to such a building. To attach any sort of a Roman triumphal arch scheme to the base of a mediæval tower is an architectural absurdity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But however this may be, the building is indeed a stately and magnificent one, of quiet aspect, and for the most part free from meaningless features.
Hardly any other one of the Florentine palaces of the Renaissance equals the Riccardi in beauty and dignity. That part of the Pitti which was begun by Brunelleschi in 1435, though equally free from meaningless features, is almost too bald to be called an architectural design. Each story of its long façade is as monotonous as the Claudian aqueduct which it closely resembles. ”

“ In seeking to change architecture superficially by an application of classic details the neo-classicists erred. They ought to have seen that classic details do not lend themselves to new uses. Their very perfection for classic use unfits them for any other. To distort and misadjust them, as the architects of the Renaissance did, is not to adapt them. There was no true adaptation of classic elements in Renaissance design. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ARCHITECTURAL CARVING OF THE RENAISSANCE
All effective sculpture on buildings, including that of the human figure, is architectural carving; but it is in Gothic art only that sculpture of the human figure, as well as that of subordinate ornamentation made up of the other elements, has at once an appropriate architectural character and a high degree of excellence in the development of form. In the best Greek art the carving of the human figure has, indeed, a grandly monumental quality ”

“ 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. ”

“ The east end has the strictly Roman form of a semicircular apse with a half-dome vault. The details of the interior consist of a single order of pilasters, on high pedestals, set on the angles of the piers, and of rich Roman coffering on the surfaces of the vaulting. The piers closely resemble those of the so-called arch of the Silversmiths in Rome, which it is not unlikely that Alberti had in mind in designing them, inasmuch as he was a devoted student of Roman architectural antiquities. This interior is, I think, one of the very finest that the Renaissance produced. ”

“ I think it may be said that he enlarged it too much, and that, in common with the cornices of most of these Renaissance palaces, it is too heavy. The Strozzi, more than any other of the palatial houses of its time, has the fortress-like character which indicates the turbulent condition of Florence in the fifteenth century. The vast basement of ponderous masonry, with no window openings near the ground, gives a gloomy and forbidding aspect to the front, and marks a survival of the savage habits of feudal life in this epoch of advanced Italian civilization and culture. ”

“ The building as a whole is characterized by incongruity and extravagance, and when we consider further that the ornamentation of the interior is for the most part a cheap deception, the rich coffering of the vaulting and the pilasters of the great order being wrought in stucco on a foundation of brickwork, we get the measure of the ideals and architectural standards of men who, like Vasari, could write of it that, "not in Christendom, nor in all the world, can a building of greater magnificence and grandeur be seen." ”

“ Its form is, as we have seen, as favourable to stability as it would be possible to make that of any vault which could be properly called a dome. It appears to the inexperienced eye as stable as a crest of the Apennines. Every precaution as to material and careful workmanship seems to have been taken to make it secure. The wall of the drum on which it rests is five metres in thickness, and the solid base of the dome itself is built, if the architect’s scheme was carried out as he had stated it before the Board of Works, of large blocks of hard stone, thoroughly bonded and clamped with iron. ”

“ The monster of the Renaissance, like his Roman ancestor, has no organic life, no suggestion of reality, and therefore no impressiveness comparable to that of the grotesque creature of the Gothic carver. ”

“ Thus a brief consideration of these conditions in the Middle Ages on the one hand, and in the period of the Renaissance on the other, may help us to understand the nature of the above-mentioned change, and to gain a more discriminating appreciation of the real character of the artistic productions of the latter epoch.
During the Middle Ages ideas and imagination were governed by a religious faith which, though in many ways mistaken and misguided, was for the most part firm and unquestioning. Mediæval Christianity was a living power with the masses, and an inspiration to men of genius. ”

“ The shaft of an order has not, indeed, a proper form for an abutment, and has no buttress expression. Its resistance to thrust is slight, but it is better than nothing at all. Following Sansovino, the architect has introduced a balustrade in each opening of the arcade, and a continuous one as a crowning feature of the cornice.
Palladio himself thought well of this work, and he does not hesitate to say in his book that it will bear comparison with the most beautiful buildings of antiquity. ”

“ In the deep and elaborate cornice, dentils and modillions and the egg and dart are worked in with Gothic gargoyles and a corbel-table; while a rich parapet crowns the whole, and dormers of picturesque form, with pseudo-classic orders surmounted by gables and pinnacles, rise against the vast high-pitched roofs which are further broken by ornamented chimney-stacks. ”

“ It is, however, justifiable only on the principle, universally accepted by the architects of the Renaissance, that structural members may be used for ornamental purposes without any structural meaning or expression in harmony with the character of the building to which they are applied. But this is a principle which finds no support in any thoroughly noble system of architecture—Greek, Byzantine, or Gothic. Structural members may be used properly enough with a primarily ornamental purpose when they have a character in keeping with the real structural system in which they are used. ”