On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - Ruskin John

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exquisite, of the narrowly-pierced heading of window already described, into a veil of tracery—and aided throughout by an accomplished precision of design in its moldings which we believe to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another and a barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern Gothic wrought out with diamond-shaped penetrations inclosed in squares; at Bergamo another, remarkable for the same square penetrations of its rich and daring foliation;—while at Monza and Carrara the square is adopted as the leading form of decoration on the west fronts, and a grotesque expression results—barbarous still;—which, however, in the latter duomo is associated with the arcade of slender niches—the translation of the Romanesque arcade into pointed work, which forms the second perfect order of Italian Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well developed in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della Spina at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished by the extreme purity and severity of its ruling lines, owing to the distance of the centers of circles from which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet a more noble school—and passes through the richer decoration of Padua and Vicenza to the full magnificence of the Venetian—distinguished by the introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency or effeminacy, and by the breadth and decision of moldings as severely determined in all examples of the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.

      43. All these groups are separated by distinctions clear and bold—and many of them by that broadest of all distinctions which lies between disorganization and consistency—accumulation and adaptation, experiment and design;—yet to all one or two principles are common, which again divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic—and whose importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never foul nor dim; its undecomposing surface preserves a soft, fruit-like polish forever, slowly flushed by the maturing suns of centuries. Hence, while in the Northern Gothic the effort of the architect was always so to diffuse his ornament as to prevent the eye from permanently resting on the blank material, the Italian fearlessly left fallow large fields of uncarved surface, and concentrated the labor of the chisel on detached portions, in which the eye, being rather directed to them by their isolation than attracted by their salience, required perfect finish and pure design rather than force of shade or breadth of parts; and further, the intensity of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect gradations, and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner anatomy and minuteness of outline as would have been utterly vain and valueless under the gloom of a northern sky; while again the fineness of material both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the climate was calculated to exhibit.

      44. All these influences working together, and with them that of classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess little more than picturesque vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak leaves and acorns of the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed, but rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character, and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern door of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves, each leaf modulated as if dew had just dried from off it—yet each alike, so as to secure the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment. But the Gothic fullness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a bird, moth, serpent, snail—all different, and each wrought to the very life—panting—plumy—writhing—glittering—full of breath and power. This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North.

      45. One other distinction we must notice, in the treatment of the Niche and its accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently consists only of a bracket and canopy—the latter attached to the wall, independent of columnar support, pierced into openwork profusely rich, and often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of indefinite height. But in the niche of pure Italian Gothic the classic principle of columnar support is never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is actually supported by the wall behind, it is apparently supported by two columns in front, perfectly formed with bases and capitals:—(the support of the Northern niche—if it have any—commonly takes the form of a buttress):—when it appears as a detached pinnacle, it is supported on four columns, the canopy trefoliated with very obtuse cusps, richly charged with foliage in the foliating space, but undecorated at the cusp points, and terminating above in a smooth pyramid, void of all ornament, and never very acute. This form, modified only by various grouping, is that of the noble sepulchral monuments of Verona, Lucca, Pisa, and Bologna; on a small scale it is at Venice associated with the cupola, in St. Mark's, as well as in Santa Fosca, and other minor churches. At Pisa, in the Spina chapel it occurs in its most exquisite form, the columns there being chased with checker patterns of great elegance. The windows of the Florence cathedral are all placed under a flat canopy of the same form, the columns being elongated, twisted, and enriched with mosaic patterns. The reader must at once perceive how vast is the importance of the difference in system with respect to this member; the whole of the rich, cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being dependent on the accumulation of its niches.

      46. In passing to the examination of our Author's theory as tested by the progress of Sculpture, we are still struck by his utter want of attention to physical advantages or difficulties. He seems to have forgotten from the first, that the mountains of Syene are not the rocks of Paros. Neither the social habits nor intellectual powers of the Greek had so much share in inducing his advance in Sculpture beyond the Egyptian, as the difference between marble and syenite, porphyry or alabaster. Marble not only gave the power, it actually introduced the thought of representation or realization of form, as opposed to the mere suggestive abstraction: its translucency, tenderness of surface, and equality of tint tempting by utmost reward to the finish which of all substances it alone admits:—even ivory receiving not so delicately, as alabaster endures not so firmly, the lightest, latest touches of the completing chisel. The finer feeling of the hand cannot be put upon a hard rock like syenite—the blow must be firm and fearless—the traceless, tremulous difference between common and immortal sculpture cannot be set upon it—it cannot receive the enchanted strokes which, like Aaron's incense, separate the Living and the Dead. Were it otherwise, were finish possible, the variegated and lustrous surface would not exhibit it to the eye. The imagination itself is blunted by the resistance of the material, and by the necessity of absolute predetermination of all it would achieve. Retraction of all thought into determined and simple forms, such as might be fearlessly wrought, necessarily remained the characteristic of the school. The size of the edifice induced by other causes above stated, further limited the efforts of the sculptor. No colossal figure can be minutely finished; nor can it easily be conceived except under an imperfect form. It is a representation of Impossibility, and every effort at completion adds to the monstrous sense of Impossibility. Space would altogether fail us were we even to name one-half of the circumstances which influence the treatment of light and shade to be seen at vast distances upon surfaces of variegated or dusky color; or of the necessities by which, in masses of huge proportion, the mere laws of gravity, and the difficulty of clearing the substance out of vast hollows neither to be reached nor entered, bind the realization of absolute form. Yet all these Lord Lindsay ought rigidly to have examined, before venturing to determine anything respecting the mental relations of the Greek and Egyptian. But the fact of his overlooking these inevitablenesses of material is intimately connected with the worst

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