An Architect's Vacation

IV.

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.

IT is not a bad thing to be the only old fellow in a traveling party. One young companion can man the guidebook ; another can do the bargaining and banking; a third can look after the sketchbooks; the fourth traveler can take his ease, and, except when addressed with respect as “ sir,” can imagine himself to be as young as the rest. Thus our party traveled over the hills of Tuscany, climbed from the Adriatic to the rugged heights of Urbino, and crossed the flat and wellfurrowed plains of Lombardy ; and thus, too, we made a hurried visit to Rome. Together we reviewed the causes of that wonderful overturn of the old systems that we now call the Renaissance of architecture, and together we saw and studied the work done in that great epoch by Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Peruzzi, and the other architects of that time.

But in Italy the field is by no means occupied only by the work of the artists of the Renaissance. While we are often told that Gothic art never took root there, many a sketchbook contradicts such a statement, and shows that Gothic arch and crocket and gable had for long a treatment of their own on Italian soil. True, if Gothic architecture be held to be a complete principle of construction, to which ornament is but an accessory, we must promptly agree that neither the Italians nor any other people except its French inventors really ever thoroughly mastered its principles. But it is possible, also, to regard architectural detail merely as a decorative expression, and as an indication of the bias of mind of those who use it. This is all the substance there is to most of the marked historical styles, and, accepting this view, we must admit that in Italy of the Middle Ages Gothic forms were universal, and Gothic detail was imbued with native peculiarities. In mediæval Florence, the tall Gothic tower of the Palazzo Vecchio watched the stir and the strife of the city, its pageants and its agonies, while above its Duomo the bells rang notes of triumph or alarm, of joy or sadness, from amid the spiral shafts and pointed arches of Giotto’s Gothic belfry. Siena certainly, even to-day, seems a Gothic city. Its narrow streets are closed in with grim mediæval palaces, and the shadow of its lofty clocktower tells off the hours on the fronts of Gothic houses encircling its great piazza. Perhaps the spirit of the Middle Ages has clung more to San Gemignano than to any other Tuscan city. The Renaissance left little mark upon it, and there has been hardly a change since the days when Dante trod its streets. Pointed arch and cusp and trefoil adorn it, and above steep street and rugged mediaeval palaces the city still “lifts to heaven her diadem of towers.” In fancy, we easily garrison these lofty eyries with the rioting factions of the Salvucci and Ardinghelli, hurling rocks, and blazing tar from tower to tower. Thus, although Tuscany was the birthplace of the Renaissance, we find it on all sides still retaining a vast amount of mediaeval character.

Not far away, however, from these Gothic cities lies Montepulciano, one of those Tuscan towns where the Renaissance spirit had free play. It is remote from the railroad, and, like so many of its neighbors, clings, a shaggy growth, to the gray mountain top. For two hours we toil upwards. In the mists far below us are the green waters “ of reedy Thrasymene,” and the broad plain that beheld the triumph of Carthage stretches afar to where, in the haze, lie distant Siena and the heights of Perugia and Arezzo. The main street of the town climbs steep between crowded buildings to the Palazzo Pubblico, above which a battlemented tower crowns the city. On the sides of the little square and all down the narrow streets are Renaissance palaces, while the church of San Biagio is a most successful example of the Renaissance domed church with four short arms. If in San Gemignano we see a town that stopped building with the advent of the Renaissance, its neighbor, Montepulciano, indicates what happened to those which prospered and built when classical forms began to meet with favor. Still more is this apparent in the little town of Pienza. Here was born Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who finally became Pope Pius II., and whose history forms the subject of Ghirlandaio’s matchless frescoes on the walls of the Library at Siena. Before its prosperous son returned to it, the town must have been a very humble one, for there is nothing in it now of any interest to the traveler except the little square that is surrounded by the papal buildings. Here a Renaissance cathedral faces a public palace, and the classic dwelling of the Pope is vis-àvis to that of the bishop. The whole group surrounding the piazza is interesting, as being the plaything of a church dignitary who, in the days of the Renaissance, affected Humanism, and, like his fellows, enjoyed the building arts.

These classic houses of Montepulciano, its church of San Biagio, and the piazza of Pienza, found in such remote places and in the close neighborhood of mediæval Tuscany, indicate how promptly and decidedly the Renaissance spirit appealed to the Italian mind of the fifteenth century. It was strange to find thus rude and rugged the places from which culture and refinement and modern civilization were sent forth into the world ; but what seemed to us far more remarkable, here and throughout Tuscany, was the sweeping manner in which all Gothic and mediæval traditions appear to have been, not only forever, but at once overturned in these their strongholds. It was with ever-increasing surprise that we recognized the strength and spontaneity with which the new spirit, almost full grown, took immediate possession of the world.

This Renaissance of classic architecture began in Florence, under Brunel leschi and Alberti. Later, in the north, another school arose in Milan, under Bramante, and these two branches finally met and produced their highest results at Rome. We tried to trace these schools in their respective fields, and it was of course in Florence itself that we found the visible firstfruits of the Renaissance, so far as architecture is concerned. At Pisa, it is true, we saw how Nicholas, the sculptor, had drawn inspiration from ancient Roman models for the figures on his pulpits ; but the Gothic carvers of the facades of Paris and Amiens had done as much a hundred years earlier, and the wonder is that artists and craftsmen should ever have ceased to cherish and assimilate the ancient work by which they were surrounded, and which was so far beyond their own powers. Apparently, however, for a hundred years after Nicholas of Pisa, men paid no heed to the architectural monuments of antiquity around them. The real awakening came almost simultaneously to collectors, who were eager for jewels, coins, and ivories from Greece and Rome ; to scholars, who with avidity sought the classic manuscripts that until then had been buried in the monasteries; to painters and sculptors and architects, who suddenly saw beauty in the models of classical antiquity, and strove to graft the antique traditions on the civilization of their own time. What the French sculptors of the twelfth century strove to imitate ; what Nicholas of Pisa faintly saw in the thirteenth century ; what Petrarch at Padua, and Giotto, Orcagna, and Simone Memmi in Tuscany, found in the classics to delight them in the fourteenth century, all this finally took form with the quattrocentists, and was spread by many helping spirits over Tuscany and the world. As for architecture, this movement began in Florence, and the return to detail, carefully studied upon the ancient Roman models, was abrupt and without transition. Brunelleschi was the guiding active mind, the Medici gave the opportunities, Donatello’s refined genius inspired the decoration. The spirit of the Renaissance gradually became a patriotic fervor. Men thought they had reclaimed their inheritance from the Cæsars, and wondered that they had ever fallen away from the wonderful models all around them.

While the hill country of Tuscany appears to us rude and savage as a birthplace for the graces of modern life, the same cannot be said of the Val d’Arno. On the contrary, it seems but fitting that from amid such natural beauty should spring all that is dignified and refined. Its setting of hill and farm, of river and verdure, gives to the City of the Lily half of its charm. What walks and drives we take in these early spring days by the wooded banks of the Arno, where men are filling their long-prowed shallops with sand, and where, beneath the trees, across the wide stretches of river, we get glimpses of the city’s domes and towers ! We have to shut our eyes to the signs of modern progress in the close neighborhood of the city, but soon boughs of flowering peach and almond hang over the walls that border the roads, and then we emerge among the green and fruitful fields. The broad roofs and white walls of villa and farmhouse are backed by dark and slender cypresses, and beneath the vines that are festooned from tree to tree the ground is bright with anemone and poppy, with cowslip and primrose. We climb the hills above these verdurous plains, through gray olive orchards and brown oak woods, to beyond the heights of Fiesole, and look away over dark pine grove and rocky hillside, and across the hazy checkered plains, to the purple mountains. Far beneath us, the silver thread of the Arno, winding swiftly by field and farm, divides the widespread city, amid which rise Arnolfo’s palazzo and Giotto’s Campanile and the vast mass of Brunelleschi’s dome.

Perhaps the youthful Brunelleschi made his famous journey to Rome, in 1403, in hope of learning from ancient examples how to roof the great church that Arnolfo and Giotto had left unfinished. At all events, he and Donatello spent three years there together, measuring and sketching, and returned wild with enthusiasm at all they had seen, an enthusiasm that had far-reaching consequences. The huge dome with which Brunelleschi later crowned the church is always spoken of as the great work of the early Renaissance. A great work it surely is, but possibly less a work of the highest art than a great engineering feat. His contemporaries were amazed at it as a work of construction. Alberti, for instance, generously praised it, but chiefly because such a wonder was built without the aid of wooden centring; and its barren grandeur certainly suggests little artistic excellence except such as it obtains from immense size. It was, without doubt, the first great dome of its kind, and the prototype of innumerable later and of many better designs ; but it seems probable that usually it most impresses beholders as a vast and capacious object. In Florence, Brunelleschi as a constructor and engineer was visible in this enormous barren dome, but to find Brunelleschi the artist, the original inspiring spirit of Renaissance architecture, we had to seek him in the churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. In these pure and simple works, antique colonnades take the place of Gothic piers, and classic caissoned ceilings are the substitute for Gothic vaulted roof. Every ornament not rigidly architectural is excluded, and what remains is chaste and simple and strictly after classic Roman models. The rugged walls of the Pitti Palace are also due to Brunelleschi, and are broad and grandiose, though devoid of ornament; but in the Pazzi chapel, which forms one side of the cloister of Santa Croce, we find him using dainty classic ornament, rich and elaborate, and rivaling the similar work of Bramante. The earlier Italians were mainly decorators, caring for infinite detail, no matter to what extent it might mask fundamental constructive form. We see such work in the incrustations of Giotto’s Campanile, and of the Duomos at Orvieto and Siena. From these influences Brunelleschi’s simple, clear, and noble methods led men’s minds not only to the new fashion of ancient classic detail, but to true architectural methods.

During a brief period Florence abounded in designers who followed in the steps of Brunelleschi, and the city is not so changed but that imagination readily peoples it with the rich and ardent life of these early days of the Renaissance. We can forget for the moment the fresh Italian regiments that now tread these old gray streets to the merry notes of their bugles, and see instead the brightgarbed crowds that Benozzo Gozzoli, and Masaccio and Masolino, and Fabriano have depicted for us; Poggio with manuscripts cunningly rifled from monastery libraries, Della Robbia dreaming of liis blue-and-white Madonnas, Fra Angelico seeing brilliant angels in the golden sunsets down the Arno, Ghiberti devising his portals, Donatello modeling his statues, Mino da Fiesole carving tomb and pulpit and altar, Michelozzo ,and Sangallo directing the building of palace and of church. Alberti’s generous letter, praising the work of his friends, Brunelleschi, Della Robbia, and Masaccio, faintly suggests the enthusiasm that prevailed among this emulous band of artists. Their labors can be traced in all the towns about Florence. At Prato we admire the classic elegance of Sangallo’s work in the church of the Carceri. One sees at Rimini and elsewhere the gracious and elegant work of that most picturesque personality, Alberti, — that canon of the Church who embraced the Renaissance sentiment with such fervor that, far from being content with an inspiration gained from antiquity, he dreamed of a definite restoration of pagan life and a reëstablishment of the ancient civilization. But after all, the astonishing thing to note everywhere about the Tuscan Renaissance is the rapidity with which it reached maturity. When Brunelleschi and his comrades left the field to others, little remained to be done on the lines that they had laid down. Broadly speaking, they anticipated the greater part of what was perfected during the next hundred years.

While the Florentine school had been pursuing the course mapped out by Brunelleschi, another school and another master, as before mentioned, had been at work in the north.

In Milan and its neighborhood we can trace and study the early work of Bramante. There are many buildings in the flat Lombard country that are either by him, or by pupils so near to him that they are truly Bramantesque. In the main they are a little disappointing. The Bramante of this period is a shadowy sort of person, vaguely recognized as a power working for elegance, proportion, and daintiness. Perhaps the school reached its highest perfection in the Incoronata of Lodi, where to the delicate Bramantesque detail is added the charm of faded, pale frescoes and golden-vaulted ceilings picked out with strong red and blue.

In 1493 misfortune overtook Bramante’s patron, and in 1499 Bramante left Milan for Rome. His successors in Lombardy paid less heed to that purity and simplicity of style which had distinguished him. One sees in the richly carved and incrusted facades of the Certosa at Pavia the iater work of this Milanese school. Bramante, however, at the age of fifty-five, and infirm so that he could not draw, now in Rome first saw the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Baths of Diocletian. He was not so old but that his spirit was stirred by the genius of antiquity. Suddenly abandoning his Milanese past, he changed his whole course, and became imbued with the antique classic spirit to a degree attained before only by Brunelleschi. In Rome he built in stone, and not in brick and terra cotta. At the papal court his clients were cultivated people, and in that capital he spoke to the world. Under such influences, he as naturally arrived at being great as before he had been pleasing; and so we find him at the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the Palazzo Giraud, and finally in the whole scheme of the Vatican courts and the church of St. Peter. His early training enabled him to add something of the variety and force and charm of northern and mediæval work to the majesty of ancient building; and to this man it was given not only to see, but to found, one school in the freshness of the early Renaissance in north Italy, and another in its zenith in Rome.

While, as we have said, the Renaissance of architecture took its rise in the Florence of Brunelleschi and Alberti, and was nurtured in Milan by Bramante, most of its great masters sooner or later were attracted to the Eternal City. Peruzzi added to the elegance of Bramante a richness and sumptuousness that the latter never permitted to himself. His work scores the high-water mark of the early Renaissance.

Almost directly after his day the sway of Michael Angelo began. Careless and unfinished is much of his architecture ; such, for instance, as that with which he surrounded the Medici tombs, or as his meaningless staircase at the Laurentian Library. We cannot, however, forget that he designed the mighty cornice of the Farnese Palace, and that it was his hand that “rounded Peter’s dome.” But it was in the use of the great orders that his example had the strongest and most lasting influence. Many of us may regret that the early Renaissance was turned aside into such paths before it had attained complete results. Most of us find delight in that fanciful and poetic phase of its history when to the love of antique form were joined the consummate skill and the graceful fancy that covered pilaster and panel, capital and architrave, church stall and marriage chest, with leaf, tendril, and flower, and a multitudinous world of real and imaginary animal forms. All these and the color that enlivened them passed away with this earlier school, but the close study of the orders which succeeded to it, and the rigid dependence upon them of the later school, had its peculiar merit. It was certainly architecture pure and simple, depending in no way on other allied arts. Its effects were due wholly to proportion, harmony, and a nice study of architectural detail. In reading Mr. Ruskin, one would be led to think that the orders are mechanical and easily applied devices. Perhaps the Renaissance architects did, in imitation of Vitruvius, too confidently assert what were the fit proportions for the various “ orders ; “ but those of Serlio varied from those of Alberti, while Palladio’s were not those of Scamozzi. Looking further back and at greater authorities, we find that in ancient Athens the Erechtheum boasted three varying Ionic orders, and that the Propylæa. while Doric without, was Ionic within. From all this we may fairly assume that while working with classical orders a man may have quite as much freedom as is good for him. They offer him liberty, but they cannot brook license. And so let us, not heeding Mr. Ruskin, reckon Scamozzi and Sansovino and Palladio and all the masters of the later Renaissance as great artists. Because the music of Mendelssohn is tuneful, it does not follow that the more intricate, formal, and ingenious harmonies of Bach are not also music. Because we are stirred by ballad or poem, we are not forbidden to admire the more polished sonnet.

As the Renaissance was in its origin a modern movement, so it has remained the foundation for modern art. It quickly established a type for modern palatial architecture in the frowning strength of the Florentine palaces and the dignity and elegance of those of Rome, while the later palaces of Venice, if somewhat vulgar in detail, are still grand and modern types.

In church architecture, however, the early Renaissance never reached a final or consummate result. At the very outset Brunelleschi gave an elegant classic dress to the ancient Gothic forms, but the most enthusiastic could scarcely claim that he surpassed the mediæval solution of the same problem. Perhaps he intended that color should adorn those rather chilly interiors ; and, set off by gold and fresco, their elegant detail would have given richer results. During the entire Renaissance period the favorite scheme for a church was a domed building with short projecting arms. Around Milan are many dainty examples of this idea, worked out under the influence of Bramante. Indeed, such was Bramante’s design for St. Peter’s; but one architect after another changed and marred it, and we now can only guess what might have been the perfected result of Renaissance church building.

Our party are till familiar with Rome, but we pass one wonderful Easter Day there ; and as we traverse its streets, the whole history of the Renaissance architecture we have been studying is passed in review. Here stand before us not alone the highest results of that art, which, as we have seen, came to Rome from Florence and Milan, but also the ancient classic models which had inspired both Florentine and Milanese.

It is a wonderful experience ! True, it is not the Rome best known to the oldest of our party ; the Rome of the great council, when the streets were full of the state coaches of dignitaries ; when St. Peter’s was brilliant with processions, and the Pope, borne aloft beneath the ostrich plumes, was followed by graybearded patriarchs and red-robed cardinals, and by archbishops and bishops beyond numbering; when Papal Zouaves made the streets and cafés bright, and the Ghetto’s narrow lanes swarmed with picturesque contadini ; when the Tiber flowed between marshy banks, and death lay in wait for the forestieri who dared to breathe its pestilential miasma at sunset. Much as the modern improvements have despoiled the city of its picturesque charm, the simplest humanity does not permit us to look upon the walled river-banks, the wide streets, and the destruction of dirt and filth without a certain approval. In crossing the city, our road lies by the great temples and the forums. Accustomed as we are to lineengravings of the orders, and to hearing ancient Roman architecture described as mechanical and inartistic by writers like Mr. Fergusson, it is invigorating to get a fresh look at the real thing. Where will one find a richer, fatter, better carved, or more handsome decoration of any period than that on the remains of such a building as the Temple of Concord ? The freedom and juiciness of the early Renaissance work go back to classic days, and one appreciates in Rome that it is often hard to distinguish between carvings of the two periods.

But our drive extends beyond the Forum, and at last we enter the mighty Coliseum. How humble and minute we feel before the tremendous mass of that immense structure ! How small and insignificant seems the work that keeps us awake o’ nights ! One irreverent thought alone upholds us. It is a comfort to see that the giants who built it were unable to roof it. A paltry patch of velarium to keep the sun from the emperor’s eyes, and which must have been a sad trouble in a gale, was the nearest they could come to our spider-web, wide-spanned roofs.

When we have recovered our breath a little, we continue back by the Forum and the temples and the palaces of the Cæsars to the neighborhood of the Renaissance palaces, and pay homage to Bramante at the Cancelleria and the Giraud, to Peruzzi at the Massimi, and to Sangallo and Michael Angelo at the overpowering Palazzo Farnese. The sun shines brightly as we reach the glorious piazza before St. Peter’s church. The fountains on each side of the great obelisk flash gayly, and men are ringing Easter peals with tremendous clangor on the tower bells as we join the crowds moving up to the doors. It simply intoxicates us all. We have been living in Florence with such austere companions as Brunelleschi and Alberti and Sangallo, with a little merrymaking amid the picturesqueness of Siena and San Gemignano, and as we pass through St. Peter’s door, and the beauty of those goldand - white ceilings bursts upon us, — the church filled with crowds, the piers decked with red hangings, a great choir singing the service, and a cardinal at the lighted altar, — well, the heart beats fast, and the breath catches with a queer gasp. Mr. Fergusson says that the great pilasters are unmeaning, offensive, useless, and that the window details are in the most obtrusive and worst taste.

Doubtless these or other flagrant defects are there, but our little party are satisfied to sit down in a row on the base mouldings of those very pilasters, and feel humble and modest and small, and thankful for such a day.

The modern painter may he carried away by Parisian technique and passing fads, but for most great and lasting qualities the Renaissance masters still remain to him the Masters. The cleverness of modern writers has not yet made the study of the English of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of the Bible useless to one who would arrive at excellence in literary style. The modern architect, for the same reasons, studies the works of those who were not only the masters of modern architecture, but its very inventors. Our pilgrimage among their buildings is a memory, but we shall not forget the daintiness of the Roman villas or the grace and ornate beauty of the Roman palaces. We have learned respect for the giants who built the church of St. Peter and the Palazzo Farnese; and we have seen, too, with our own eyes, how closely they were the descendants and the rightful heirs of those earlier giants who covered the Campus Martius with temple and portico and circus, and adorned the Palatine with palaces ; who built the forums, and vaulted the baths, and domed the Pantheon ; and who raised on its mighty arches the stupendous mass of the Flavian amphitheatre.

Robert Swain Peabody.