Russell Sturgis

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The tower is exceptional in its perfect building: but there is nothing in the scheme of construction: it is almost as simple as a Greek temple. And this is where the great cathedral by its side is similar in character. Not Gothic in proportion, nor in any system of buttresses, nor in the disappearing of walls in constructional piers, nor in the disposition of the sculpture; it is Gothic only in its having pointed arches, and ribbed vaults, though these are so stayed up by massive masonry that the thing is no more elastic than the halls of Roman thermæ. ”

“ When we come to consider more especially the traditional repute of Grecian architecture, and the influence which it has had in shaping the opinions of what we call the taste of sixty generations throughout all the European lands, we are brought at once to the work of the Roman imperial times. All the nationalities—all the peoples—which take their recent and existing social form and opinions in art and literature from the same common source, the all-embracing empire of Rome, have taken up Greek art as they have taken up Greek literature, as their chief and original guide to thought. ”

“ 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 liking and disliking of such details is very largely a matter of fashion; and the difficulty is with all such questions concerning the mere adornment of architecture without regard to its structural essence—that when a style, a detail, a method of adornment, is out of fashion, it often seems offensive to those who are working in the fashion; even as the most elegant coat or the most elegant ball-dress of 1840 is a monster of ugliness to-day and would be thought to disfigure the elegant man or woman who might endue it. ”

“ Now, in German lands, there is a little less freshness of artistic thought; the artist is always in the presence of the great past, in such a way that even his deviations from its spirit are self-conscious in a way; and this feeling it is which drives the daring designer—the man who would be original and who asks us to sympathize with his manly desire to build for the nineteenth century what the nineteenth century needs, not what a former century made for itself—to very strange vagaries. ”

“ 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{158} of the clumsy adornment within and without are mere excrescences, hardly affecting the massive pile. ”

“ The Roman builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after the Middle Ages. ”

“ But in every respect, in the high roof, the huge and richly ornamented chimneys, the free treatment of the fenestration, the still more free and easy handling of the staircase, with its ramps and openings treated with an obvious eye to spirited effect, and with but little care for classical gravity of proportion, all is still mediæval. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The mighty Gothic school was as vigorous and full of energy as it had been at any time since the middle of the thirteenth century, that is to say, since{144} the day of its first brilliant culmination: and every one, every mason, every carpenter, every bishop or abbot, every noble or great officer, knew what a building or a detail ought to be without asking the opinion of any student of the Roman past. ”

“ There is a large building in New York, the butt of endless ridicule, which is nevertheless extremely sensible in its dispositions, well arranged, well lighted, well imagined for its purposes. But the unlucky adoption of a style of design not unlike{166} this of the Theatiner towers has prevented it from receiving even a moment’s serious consideration. By 1920 it may be respected, and even admired as the premature attempt to introduce a style then popular. The view to take of such a design is, then, that which we would take of a work of art whose epoch we did not pretend to know. ”

“ Small statues should have been placed in the niches; but the building does not seem to suffer much from their absence. We can judge of it as being what it is, a most simple and practical City Hall, built with pointed arches, with a steep roof adorned by tower, dormer window{128} and pinnacle, and the whole structure covered by this thin veil of moulded, cusped and traceried ornament, chiefly because the church architecture of previous years had led up to that kind of design by natural evolution, and because the spirit of the time knew of but one architectural treatment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the other, we look across the choir proper, that is the liturgical enclosure, from southwest to northeast, seeing the beginnings of the curve of the chevet or rounded apse. In these interior views are seen in a more intimate way the characteristics of a great Gothic church. The vastness, the height, the soaring grandeur of the interior are for the moment ignored, and we see the lower vaults and the clustered pillars which support them and the higher vaults of the nave, as well as the delicate sculpture of the capitals. ”

“ Now it is agreed that the more lofty and slender proportions of the Order of the Parthenon must have given to the original building a charm beyond that given by the stumpy proportions of the Pæstum temple: but it is also undeniable that many lovers of architecture, of this as of other epochs and styles, love especially the early work, that which is commonly known as archaic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is hardly conceivable that a modern adept in the classical system of design should think much of detail except as to{200} the accurate copying of sculpture and of the curvature of mouldings from ancient examples.
In mediæval 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 ”

“ In the West, Roman domination brought with it a civilization so superior to that known in those lands before the conquest that Gaul and Iberian must have looked upon the Italian domination as synonymous with all that makes for enlightenment and intellectual advance as well as good order. On the other hand, the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria, must have felt that in yielding to the Italian power they were yielding to a force, which, however beneficial politically, represented a lower intellectual civilization than their own. ”

“ These are the two typical buildings of the time and they are typical too of the whole tendency of neo-classic architecture throughout the decadence, a tendency away from variety, away from movement and charm, towards gravity and dignity, but also towards cold uniformity, with nothing to break it except the semi-Roman Order, more or less well understood, more or less graceful in itself but having no real mission to fulfill and therefore not forming part of the organized and perfect whole which we call style in architecture. ”

“ 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.
This design marks the culmination in England of that florid Gothic in which early principles have a subordinate part, while newly required elaboration and tricks of deceptive brilliancy of workmanship come to the front and absorb the interest of the beholder. No one can remain indifferent to the fantastic and yet enduring charm of such a roof. ”

“ The Italians were ready to accept an imitation of classical architecture, in the hope that the real classical architecture would follow. No matter how poor the imitation, how inadequate the study had been, to the Italians it was so natural that architects should study that which they, the Italians, had always considered the best architecture, that they were willing to forgive mistakes. ”