Italian architecture

“ I have already spoken of the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays—so far as present Italy is concerned—as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. ”

“ Few of them had ever had a thorough training in architectural design and construction, such as had been general with the members of the great mediæval building corporations; and hardly any of them were endowed with a natural aptitude for logical construction. The artistic genius of the Italian people has, in fact, always been essentially a genius for painting, and the painter’s habits of mind are constantly manifested in the Italian architecture of all epochs. ”

“ Again, it is a life-like building, sparkling in its casements, brisk in its air, letting much light in at the walls and roof, low and comfortable looking in its door. The Italian's dwelling is much walled in, letting out no secrets from the inside, dreary and drowsy in its effect. Just such is the difference between the minds of the inhabitants; the one passing away in deep and dark reverie, the other quick and business-like, enjoying its everyday occupations, and active in its ordinary engagements. ”

“ The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly, moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher ideas and ideals. ”

“ The earliest architectural remains were either classical or Byzantine, which passed so easily into the Palladian and other modern Italian styles as to render Gothic architecture in Italy little more than an episode, and to leave no room for those impressions of vague sublimity and solemn grandeur which Gothic architecture produces, and which so naturally spring up in the minds of the inhabitants of countries covered like England and Germany with ruined castles and abbeys. ”

“ THE RENAISSANCE OF THE ARTS. Classic Roman architecture had never lost its influence on the Italian taste. Gothic art, already declining in the West, had never been in Italy more than a borrowed garb, clothing architectural conceptions classic rather than Gothic in spirit. The antique monuments which abounded on every hand were ever present models for the artist, and to the Florentines of the early fifteenth century the civilization which had created them represented the highest ideal of human culture. ”

“ These doubts and fears course rapidly through my mind—I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture—as they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. ”

“ Italy.—Though other countries have built pavilions characteristic of their soil and people, or have lavished their money on splendid examples of exposition architecture, it has remained for Italy to present in a single group a summary of the best that art has produced in a national history of two thousand years. (p. 159.) The Italian Pavilion does not attempt to reproduce any one architectural masterpiece. It echoes many. Therein is the triumph of the architect. Without copying, Piacentini has suggested in this building much that is famous in the architecture of Florence, Venice, and Rome. ”

“ The second obstacle was the persistence of classic traditions of form, both in construction and decoration. The spaciousness and breadth of interior planning which characterized Roman design, and its amplitude of scale in every feature, seem never to have lost their hold on the Italians. The narrow lofty aisles, multiplied supports and minute detail of the Gothic style were repugnant to the classic predilections of the Italian builders. ”

“ It would have cost them almost as little trouble as the building in question, which, by many of the Italian devotees to a purer style of architecture, is esteemed a masterpiece of ridiculous taste and elaborate absurdity. The front, encrusted with alabaster, is worked into a million of fretted arches and puzzling ornaments. There are statues without number, and relievos without end or meaning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Externally, it is encrusted with a coat of white marble, with Corinthian columns, and rich ornaments; the architecture of Bramante, and good of its kind, but it is of a kind which I do not greatly admire. Italian monumental architecture, with some favourable exceptions, is composed of little parts, and highly ornamented. It is more broken than that of their larger edifices, often handsome, and with great beauty and delicacy in the details, but without anything magnificent or impressive ”

“ In all Italian garden-architecture there is nothing quite comparable for charm and delicately reminiscent classicalism with this grotto-bath of Pope Julius’s villa. Here we find the tradition of the old Roman villa-architecture, as it had been lovingly studied in the letters of Pliny, transposed into Renaissance forms, with the sense of its continued fitness to unchanged conditions of climate and a conscious return to the splendour of the old patrician life. ”

“ Pointed architecture never was assimilated by the Italian. He endured it; he used it for churches, always with a difference. But for his home he would have none of it. He was surrounded by remains of the period of Roman domination over the world, vast structures, solid and enduring. Temples fell and were despoiled to decorate churches, but private dwellings, though they might be gutted, could not be defaced, when they had no face to be mutilated. ”

“ It is true that in Florence and Venice, where an independent style existed, the new buildings in their general principles of design were, copied from the old, but with no mixture of details as in France; in Brunelleschi’s church, Santo Spirito at Florence, the capitals and details are all pure Italian, as pure as if they had been carried out in the 3rd or 4th century, the fact being that already before the 15th century the craftsman’s work was approaching the new movement, and this was facilitated by the numerous remains still existing of Roman architecture. ”

“ The Renaissance style was inaugurated in Italy, where, as already stated, the Gothic never took root, and spread thence to the other countries of Europe, assuming in each country a certain distinctive character of its own in harmony with its environment. In Italian Renaissance ecclesiastical architecture the old basilican plan was revived, the dome became again, as in ancient Rome, the crowning glory of the building, and was combined with horizontal entablatures upheld by columns, with capitals of one or another of the Greek orders, and porticoes with pediments. ”

“ No excellence of proportions can atone for disproportion in regard to consistency of embellishment, and for the general disharmony of the whole composition. Italian Architects not unfrequently either overload their compositions with ornament, or leave them quite bare, and make no scruple of putting a cornice of the most meagre description, without either dentels or modillions, to an Order whose capitals denote it to be intended for Ionic or Corinthian. ”

“ I believe that good architecture may generally be detected at once, by the excellence of such apparently small matters as the shape of a cusp.{385} I am certain that good Italian architecture invariably has cusping, which is both nervous in its curve and yet delicate; and I believe that most modern cusps are drawn by the hundred as a mere matter of routine, without care and without pleasure, and consequently without good effect. ”

“ The native traditions and innate tendencies of the Italian people were enough of themselves to give a strong classic quality to their art. In architecture what of classic feeling was natural to them needed only in the fifteenth century to be freed from the elements which had been misappropriated from the mediæval art of the North to allow it true expression in forms adapted to their needs. In normal human progress each successive stage of development creates its own appropriate forms ”

“ For instance, the preservation of local hues throughout the great masses of a design, by the avoidance of neutral shading, which truth to nature demands, secures at the same time the full decorative value of every colour field. The mediæval Italian always preserved his local hues, both from a habit of pictorial veracity, and from a true decorative instinct. Hence the wall painting of Italy in the Middle Ages was as decorative and monumental in character as that of the Northern Gothic, while it became much more developed and beautiful as painting. ”

“ Because of this, architecture was among the first of the arts to be affected by the new Italian taste. We have before noticed the inter-relation of the needs and styles of the architect with those of the glass artist, and therefore we are not surprised to find our windows testifying that the latter quickly perceived Gothic architecture was being superseded by the classic style. During the last two centuries he had grown to appreciate more and more the light-admitting advantages of the canopy window, but now he changes the simulated architecture from Gothic to Renaissance. ”

“ The architecture of a people inevitably retains much of its original character while yielding to foreign influences. It had been so with the Italian art of the Middle Ages when it was subjected to the Gothic influence, and it could not be otherwise with the French art of the sixteenth century when the later Renaissance wave swept over it. ”

“ Gothic architecture, on the contrary, resembles the overarching branches, and imparts the same solemn tranquillity as the aspect of a venerable avenue or darksome glade. The Italian architects seem not to have known well what to do with the vast space enclosed by the majestic walls of their edifices. They afforded glorious room for the painter; but where not adorned by him, they are bare, presenting no image of beauty, and inspiring no solemn feeling. The pictures and sculpture we find are, 160however, sources of ever new delight ”

“ But in the architectural thought of the Renaissance little heed was given to structural propriety or structural expression, and the Italian writers, who have largely shaped our modern architectural ideas, have not only failed to recognize the inherent weakness of such a building as the dome of Florence, but have even considered the work praiseworthy on account of those very characteristics which make it weak. ”

“ Peter's at Rome and many of the great palaces and hospitals that now are the subject of so much admiration and attention from scholarly visitors to Italy. In our own time the reproduction of Renaissance architectural types and the careful study of what the Italian Renaissance did in modifying for modern use classic types of architecture has done more to give us handsome monumental buildings than any other inspiration that men have had. ”

“ The style of architecture prevalent in Italy at the same period, presented, on the contrary, large blank surfaces, which could only be rendered interesting by covering them with mosaic or painting.
The Italians were not at the time capable of doing this for themselves, and mosaicists were brought from Constantinople, who covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of the Eastern splendour. ”

“ The ordinary church roof is of flat pitch and frequently concealed behind a parapet. Dormer windows, crestings, and other similar features, by the use of which northern architects enriched their roofs, are hardly ever employed by Italian architects.
Mouldings and Ornaments.
Ornament is almost instinctively understood by the Italians, and their mastery of it is well shown in their architecture. The carving of spandrels, capitals, and other ornaments, and the sculpture of the heads and statues introduced is full of power and beauty. ”