Lombard architecture

“ If their churches are not enough, the civil architecture of that epoch also affords proof of Lombard influence in Germany. Compare the windows and style of the ancient dwelling-house at Cologne which Fergusson illustrates, p. 590, with those of any Lombard building whatsoever, from the Palace of King Desiderius in the eighth century to the Bargello of Florence in the thirteenth, and you will find them identical. The only German innovation is in the high gabled roof. ”

“ Worms, 996-1016, Lombard style, with round arches; the parts with pointed architecture are much more modern. This list proves that the earliest churches were built by Italian Masters, or at least in the Italian style.
Indeed Hope classes most of them as Lombard. The Germans themselves expanded the Lombard style into the pointed, which also came up through Italy, its first signs being seen at Assisi, next at Pisa, and then Florence.
Milan was a later reflex of the perfected German Gothic, though chiefly executed, as we shall see later, by the hands of Comacine Masters. ”

“ The scheme is based on the mediæval campanile, the earliest form of which is the Lombard Romanesque tower. The Lombard tower is characterized by its simple rectangular outline, the walls rising sheer from the ground to the cornice, and strengthened and adorned with shallow pilaster-strips, corbelled string-courses marking the successive stories, and by small grouped openings. The tower of Santa Maria Novella in Florence is designed on this model, and the neighbouring tower of Prato and Giotto’s famous campanile are later and richer modifications of the same type. ”

“ The first, or encompassing, order of the portal of Como is like the façade of such a mediæval porch wrought in relief against the wall as an ornamental framework. For the [148] Lombard columns the Renaissance designer has substituted pilasters, for the plain lintel an entablature, and for the mediæval gable a classic pediment with an entablature.
A curious instance of a somewhat similar composition of lines in a Lombard Romanesque portal without an overhanging porch occurs in the façade of the San Pietro in Cielo d’Oro in Pavia (Fig. 84) . ”

“ Probably some of his monks were—like many Franciscans and Dominicans—members of the Guild of Freemasons, and so trained in the science of architecture.
In any case, the buildings at Padua are neither true Lombard nor true Gothic, and not even Oriental, but a mixture of all three. The Lombard has partly had his way in the façade, where the upper part is full of galleries and archlets; the lover of the new Gothic arches has put his mark on the lower part of the façade; and the monks, who remembered the native land of their saint, have put the seven domes and minarets ”

“ The problem which the wealthy orders set themselves was, like that of the Lombard church-builders in Italy, to adapt the basilica plan to the exigencies of vaulted construction. Massive walls, round arches stepped or recessed to lighten their appearance, heavy mouldings richly carved, clustered piers and jamb-shafts, capitals either of the cushion type or imitated from the Corinthian, 164 and strong and effective carving—all these are features alike of French, German, English, and Spanish Romanesque architecture. ”

“ He notes that art in Europe, from the seventh to the thirteenth century, consisted of a combination of Byzantine and Roman elements, but in the ninth century a third element mingled, which had in itself so much that was original, as to constitute an independent style. "This," he goes on to say, "was the Lombard or Comacine architecture, as it is called, which is distinguished by its low-pitched roofs, its circular arches, rounded on columns, which assimilate to the Greek and Roman styles. ”

“ Lombard blind arcade recalled in the ch. of Santa Maria dei Miracole, Venice, 151 (cut) .
Lombard Romanesque architecture, towers, 82.
Lombard Romanesque, style modified by neo-classic elements mark the Renaissance architecture of northern Italy, 144; a porch which forms a model from which an illogical Renaissance portal is derived, 145 (cuts) .
Lombardi, the, 149; architectural carving of, 169 (plate) .
Lombardo, Martino, Scuola di San Marco, Venice, façade, 156.
Lombardo, Pietro, 149; ch. of Santa Maria dei Miracole, Venice, 151 (cut) ; Palazzo Corner-Spinelli, Venice, 160 (plate) . ”

“ Instead of dealing with abstract principles, the strong psychological appeal of a single engineering problem is used. Some of the principles in which many graduates are especially weak have been given exceptionally clear and satisfactory treatment. The typographical work, the drawings and reproductions are also distinctly superior to previous standards.” J. P. J. Williams
PORTER, ARTHUR KINGSLEY. Lombard architecture. 4v v 1-3 ea *$12, v 4 *$15; set *$50 Yale univ. press 723 (17-9830)
Professor Porter describes his book as “a definite synthetic analysis of Lombard architecture.” ”

“ He seems to think that the nucleus of this union was Lombardy, where the superiority of the architecture, under the Lombard kings, was such that the term Magistri Comacini became almost a generic name for architects. He says that builders and sculptors formed a single grand fraternity, whose scope was to find work outside Italy. Indeed distance and obstacles were nothing to them; they travelled to England under Augustine, to Germany with St. Boniface, to France with Charlemagne, and again to Germany with their brother magister, Albertus Magnus ”

“ Was this the origin of that characteristic Eastern mark of the Lombard style in Italy?—or was it an importation from Italy to Byzantium, where Procopius at least seems duly astonished by it? It is a question for experts to solve. There is much for the archæologist to do yet in finding the true pedigree of architecture. 71
CHAPTER IV
COMACINE ORNAMENTATION IN THE LOMBARD ERA
The Comacine Masters were distinctly sculptor-architects, and their ornamentation was an essential part of their buildings. Yet, to them, sculpture was by no means mere ornament. ”

“ The Lombards used, before the Normans, the alternate system of ground supports, cubic capitals, transverse arches, compound piers, crypts, and raised choirs, and their most striking feature of exterior decoration was the arched corbel table that made a continuous cornice. Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter says that diagonals were used in Lombardy early in the XI century as an expedient to economize wood, groin vaults being molded on a temporary wooden substructure, but as the Lombard never counterbutted his intersecting ribs, such vaults proved unsatisfactory and were given up after 1120. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is something to my mind more majestic yet in the life of an architecture like that of the Lombards, rude and infantine in itself, and surrounded by fragments of a nobler art of which it is quick in admiration and ready in imitation, and yet so strong in its own new instincts that it re-constructs and re-arranges every fragment that it copies or borrows into harmony with its own thoughts—a harmony at first disjointed and awkward, but completed in the end, and fused into perfect organization; all the borrowed elements being subordinated to its own primal, unchanged, life. ”

“ We know little of the actual state of architecture during this melancholy period. The notion of Charlemagne having found a distinctive style of architecture in Lombardy, and having transplanted it to the banks of the Rhine, seems to be little more than a myth, though I think it not improbable that the Lombards had already taken some steps towards the formation of a new style. ”

“ Not only does architecture, more than all other material things, co-operate in manifesting the fulfillment of those sacred prophecies, in the deep truth of which is rooted the ever-thriving tree of salvation, but it also bears the clearest trace of national character and pursuits. The Lombards were great hunters, and along their wide façades and around their soaring porticoes they built with constructive sculpture all the wild energy of the daring and tumultuous chase. ”

“ As far as style in building goes to prove anything, the Lombards certainly preceded the native Gothic architects in Germany. Hope enumerates several churches, such as those at Spires, Worms, Zurich, and several old ones at Cologne, built before or about the Carlovingian era, which have every sign of Lombard influence. ”

“ Yet the sun shines gloriously in the wide cortile this afternoon, making a stately pattern of light and shade in the arcades, and we recognise at least in the fair and spacious proportions of the building and the grace of sculptured column and curving arch, that Renaissance beauty of architecture which made it once a worthy setting for such a prince and princess as Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d’Este. ”

“ The joyous vitality of the Renaissance overflows in Amadeo and carries all his native characteristics to unrestrained excess. The Lombard love of pomp and gorgeous decoration runs to a riot of ornamentation in his reliefs, which are crowded and overloaded with rich and fertile fancies. Builder as well as sculptor, he sacrifices architectural effect without scruple for the sake of decorative detail, as the extraordinarily ornate façade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, one of his most famous works, testifies. This is a fault common to the Lombard architects. ”

“ In the front is a plain, but noble portico of the Tuscan order, executed in the most masterly manner; the columns are massy, and the intercolumniation large, which has an air of noble simplicity, that if compared with the most ornamented Gothic structures, shews the superiority of the Roman architecture in its plainest form, over the finest barbarism. The building, tho’ as plain as possible, is happily proportioned; the walls are of brick covered with plaister, and the corners of stone; the roof is flat, and though of great extent, is supported by the walls alone, without columns. ”

“ In Lombard Street, which I suppose is more expensive still, so expensive indeed that only concerns of the highest financial standing in the world can afford to exist beside its narrow road-way, there are even worse examples. In so narrow a thoroughfare every canon of good taste would call for flat reserved façades, yet instead we have in the newer structures, buildings of the strongest modelling and the highest ornateness. ”

“ Milan’s greatest moment was one in her art, and in her public life. The same spirit of freedom which stood up to Barbarossa and Frederick II., raised her incomparable brick buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this development of architecture on the large and reasonable lines of the old Roman building, modified by the mystic ideas and melancholy sentiment of the North, and by the capabilities of the rich and plastic material yielded by the alluvial soil, Lombardy shows the highest result of the mingled elements of her artistic life. ”

“ The visitor from the north of Europe is perplexed how to determine approximately the dates of the domestic buildings in every one of these Ligurian towns and villages. The architecture has a modern look, and yet the houses are decrepit, ruinous, and shabby. The windows and doors are square-headed, with scarce a moulding to differentiate them, and the pointed arch is only seen in the bridges that tie the houses together. Rarely, only in some palace or town hall, does the swallow-tail crenelation, or a feeble imitation of Gothic cornice, speak of the Middle Ages. ”

“ If the general idea of a Florentine palace is used for the façades of a modern building, as in University Club, it is used thoroughly and with knowledge; the small refinements of contrasting textures and mouldings, the massive bulk and cliff-like walls which go to make up the charm of the original finding their echo in the modern building. The building is not Florentine in the basement, Milanese in the middle stories, and Venetian at the top. I should say that the distinguishing note of modern American architecture is its scholarship. ”

“ The roofs were always in wood, and the exteriors of the simplest description. In the external decoration, however, of the apses of the churches of San Vincenzo in Prato, Santa Maria delle Caccie, the church at Agliate and the ancient portion of S. Ambrogio at Milan, we find the germ of that decorative feature which (afterwards developed into the eaves gallery) became throughout Italy and on the Rhine the most beautiful and characteristic element of the Lombard style. ”

“ Our illustration (Fig. 50) of the ancient Palace of the Jurisconsults at Cremona, is a good specimen of the secular architecture of North Italy. Originally the lower storey was a loggia, or open arcaded storey, but the arches have been built up. Telling, simple, and graceful, this building owes its effect chiefly to its well-designed openings and a characteristic brick cornice. It is entirely without buttresses, has no spreading base, no gables, and no visible [Pg 117] roof: some of these features would have been present had it been designed and erected north of the Alps. ”