Mediæval art, from the peace of the church to the eve of the renaissance, 312-1350

Front matter

HAROLD B. LEt LIBRARY ttJGHAM YOUNG UNIVEROT PROVO, UTAH

Digitized by

MEDIAEVAL ART

Preface

As preface I should like to say a word on the great loss to knowledge that comes about from our having no accessible collection of photographs of historical works of art. Books can be collected at any time, but photographs are now very often the only authentic records of buildings which have been restored out of all validity. Every year travellers in out-of-the-way parts of the world, such as Sinai, Syria, Asia Minor and Armenia, bring back valuable photographic documents, but they are for the most part lost to science owing to there being no centre where they are collected. Again, during the whole of the last century English architects were diligently measuring or sketching all the mediaeval buildings in Europe, yet very few original collections of material for this period are to be found, and it is to be feared that in the majority of cases such records have been destroyed. May I venture to point out to travellers that any of our national collections would, I am sure, treasure such drawings and also copies of photographs of interesting works of art ?

viii PREFACE

For the use of drawings and other kind services I wish to thank Mr. T. M. Rooke, Mr. S. C. Cockerell, Mr. A. Christie, Mr. A. H. Powell, Mr. R. W. Schultz, Mr. H. Ricardo, and Mr. H. F. B. Lynch. I must also particularly acknowledge the continuous help of E. C. L., especially in translating German, and in the preparation of the Index.

in Inverness Terrace, August 1904.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction ....... i

CHAP.

Introduction

"The knife is in the meat, and the drink is in the horn, and there's revelry in the hall, and except for a craftsman who brings his craft the gate will not be open to-night." — Mabinogion.

Art is man's thought expressed in his handwork. The course of art has left a great series of documents for the history of civilisation. Moreover, the quality, importance, and number of monuments are likely to vary according to the greatness of the periods in which they were produced. They are witnesses which cannot lie ; they are, indeed, not so much records of the past as samples of actual history. Westminster Abbey is a great piece of the middle of the thirteenth century still projecting above the later strata of English life and effort. Periods of art are those in which a process of development has been set up by which certain ideals have been followed for generations and centuries, so that possibilities of thought-expression have been continuously explored and built up. In such great art are crystallised the aspiration and consciousness of an era of national life.

A wide view of history makes it evident that periods of art have coincided with the crests of general development. Where we have no other chronicle it is safe to argue from

A

ART AN INDEX the existence of a school of art to a period of culture ot which it was the outcome. For instance, we know nothing of the people who built Stonehenge but Stonehenge itself ; we know little of the Mycenaeans save the wonderful remnants of their work-civilisation ; and in the long chain of Egyptian culture undulations in the state of society may be directly inferred from the index curve of art, and we know that the Great Period synchronised with the reigns of Seti and Rameses. It was Pericles who raised the Parthenon, and Augustus who gave his name to the great Roman epoch. Old St. Peter's stood for the first power of the Christian Empire, and Sta. Sophia for its Eastern culmination under Justinian. The Dom of Aachen marks the rule of Charlemagne; Jumieges and Durham witness to the might of the Normans ; the building of Notre Dame coincides with the rising power of Philip Augustus ; and our own English art came to its crown with Edward I.

It would be of interest to trace the movements of the art centre of Western civilisation from generation to generation and to mark out the forces radiating from the several points by a sort of artistic meteorology.

Every school of art is the product of antecedent schools plus the national equation of the moment, and these two factors may either be found as almost distinct and existing side by side, or they may run together into a new compound form. So true is this that the history of art may be compared to chemical analysis ; and one of the offices of its historian is to distinguish and weigh the component parts of any given example. If his tests were rigorous enough he should be able to trace every element.

EXTENT OF CHRISTIAN ART

At the time when our story begins Roman art had long been subjected to Greek influence, and the centre of development was in the east of the Empire rather than in Rome. Moreover, the needs and desires of the Church, itself of the East, soon further sweetened and freed official

Fig. i. Pottery vessel in the British Museum. A figure of Christ with cruciform nimbus between profiles of Constantine and Faustina, who are named in the surrounding inscription : c. 320, probably of Syrian or Egyptian origin.

Roman art into Early Christian art, which quickly spread over an enormous field — over Syria, Asia Minor, Arabia, Armenia, North Africa, and Egypt, where early churches are found far up the Nile beyond Khartum.

After_the fourth century ^Constantinople became the artistic capital of_the__»[0_rld, but only maintained its pre-eminence until the rise of the Mohammedan Empire, when

EAST AND WEST the vital centre moved eastward. The early buildings of the Arab conquerors, erected for them by Christian builders in a style at first Byzantine, or more properly what we might call Hellenesque,* and then slowly changing into more Eastern complexions, form one high peak in the chain of art. The Dome of the Rock, the Aksa in Jerusalem, and the Mosque of Damascus, are more energetic and clearer in expression than any other architecture of the time. The Arab-Byzantine school attained enormous power, and, indeed, this Eastern wave of Hellenesque art is not yet exhausted in Persia and India.

To come back to Rome and the West. During the years of the Gothic wars and the folk-migrations art must have been almost wholly eradicated, and such as remained was compounded of the dying classical tradition, of barbarism, and of the fresh influences of the Christian East.

When Theodoric set up a stable society, with its centre at Ravenna, he borrowed from the art of Constantinople, and not long afterwards Ravenna became the seat of an exarch representing the Eastern Empire. From this time the Eastern element was for centuries the most vital one in Italy and the West.

When Charlemagne, having founded the new Empire,

built his monumental church at Aachen at the end of the

eighth century, he obtained marbles and mosaics from

Ravenna, and it was planned like San Vitale in that city

and other churches further east. The influences emanating

* By "Hellenesque" I mean most simply the Oriental Christian styles, including Byzantine. It was developed out of the Hellenistic art as Romanesque is generally supposed to have developed from Roman.

TWO MEDIEVAL STYLES 5 from the Carlo vingian centre in turn affected the whole West. After the division of the Prankish Empire followed a period of disintegration and stagnation, until, with Otto EL, a time of renewed energy began, and from this we may date the origin of the great Rhenish school.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries several forms of what is usually called Romanesque art arose in various States in North Italy and France. Of these States, one of the most powerful was Normandy, and here was early developed a great branch of Romanesque art which was soon carried into England.

During all this time further waves of Oriental impulse passed westward, especially over the southern parts of Italy and France; and with the Norman conquest of Sicily a mixed style arose there out of northern and eastern elements.

In the middle of the twelfth century the germ of modern France, the small royal domain, began to wax in power, and at this moment its local phase of Romanesque began to change and speedily matured into Gothic, a noble and adventurous style which formed the western efflorescence of art in the Christian era.

In briefest summary, there are two chief styles of mediaeval art to be dealt with in these pages — the eastward culmination, or the Byzantine school, and the western, or Gothic. To recapitulate from this point of view. The long and eventful period, the thousand years from a.d. 300 to 1300, from Roman to Renaissance art, is yet a perfectly organic one. It begins with a change in the spirit of Classical art, produced by Oriental mysticism and Christianity, which profoundly affected the subject-

BYZANTINE matter dealt with, and supplied an epic interest and human meaning which had been so markedly lacking in it. This soon brought forth the first great mediaeval school in the East. After the mighty disturbances in the West, when Goths, Franks, Lombards, and the rest flowed in over the Roman Empire, when western society began once more to solidify, to wake to national consciousness, and to desire the works of peace, it was natural that men should turn towards the great artistic capitals of the East, and absorb what they might of the traditions which had in them been preserved. The populations of Western Europe had in different measures been freed and rebarbarised, and the arts they now developed witness perfectly both as to the derived seed and the new ground in which it was planted.

In France, as I have said, the diverse elements again ran together in the twelfth century and formed the western mediaeval school known as Gothic, an art perfectly clear, energetic, and homogeneous, in which the sculpture and painting were as noble as the structures were direct and daring. This French-Gothic school was widely spread over Western Europe by the middle of the thirteenth century, and was even carried into Italy, where it influenced the native Byzanto-Romanesque, and formed many exquisite mixed styles by the time that the millennium of mediaeval art drew towards its end.

In Italy, however, Gothic art was never fully assimilated, and it seems probable that it was even a conscious reaction of artistic patriotism against this Northern art that led to the endeavour to bring back the past of Rome, and initiated that substitution of scholarship for experiment the

AND GOTHIC which is the central principle of the Renaissance architecture by which Roman authority once again conquered the world.

Of the causes which produced the phenomena of Mediaeval Art, a large share is, as will be shown, to be assigned to Eastern forces acting on the West. A thousand years of receptivity seems to have come to a close with the Renaissance.

The Gothic^-inoleed, stands out as exclusively a western style, but even this came as a short summer time, fulfilling a long growth from widespreading roots, nourished by the rivers of Eden. There is much more of the East in Gothic, in its structure and fibre, than is outwardly visible. To account for Gothic we have to account for its historic basis and for the whole atmosphere of mysticism, chivalry, and work-enthusiasm, with all the institutions, monastic, romantic, and social, which formed its environment. Looking at the slow preparation for, and the rapid passing of, western gothic art, and considering the sudden and entire breakdown of its traditions and ideals, I am drawn to the conclusion that the causes which underlay this art are to be found in a long infiltration of the Oriental spirit to the point of saturation, and then the bursting out of the new, yet old, energy shaped to northern requirements.

I must not here bring forward particular instances to illustrate and fortify this hypothesis, but I may suggest that it will appear more probable when we survey mediaeval art as a whole, both historically and in its geographical distribution.*

* On eastern influence in western art see Byz. Zeits. 1903 and American Jour, of Archeology, 1894 and 1895.

8 DISRUPTION OF TRADITION

It is not generally realised in how large a degree the Persian, Egypto-Saracenic, and Moorish forms are members of one common art with Gothic and developed side by side with it. Gothic art, however, as it progressed broke away more and more from the body of ancient customs. The history of art between the Byzantine era and the present day, as can be seen with least confusion in the comparatively free arts of painting and sculpture, is the history of a transition from common tradition to individualist realism. Architecture has followed the same course, although the issue in regard to it has been more obscured and blocked by many attempted revivals of old forms.

II Bonfth

TEMPLE OF BAALBEC. CEILING OF PORTICO (Seep. 15)

Face t>. 8

Chapter I The Age Of Constantine : Rome And The East

The mighty Empire of Rome at the time when our inquiry begins was already showing signs of breaking up into three main divisions — the East, where the empire was continued for more than a thousand years ; Italy, where the Pope once more built up a great centralised power ; and the Western Provinces, over which flowed the Germanic invasions. Recent writers give a preponderating influence in the transformation of classic art into Christian, to such late Greek centres of culture as Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus, rather than to Rome. Dr. Strzygowski has presented the evidence for this view in a series of learned works.

Rome itself, long before the Edict of Milan in favour of Christianity in 313, had been subject to Eastern influences ; indeed, the removal of Constantine's capital to Byzantium a few years later, in 330, can only have been the result of great causes, long in action, which showed that the true centre of the empire's life was nearer to the East. There is a great difference between earlier and later Roman art, which is probably to be accounted for by increasing Oriental influence. This is particularly marked io CHANGE IN ROME in the Palace built directly after 300 at Spalato by Diocletian, which is distinctly Syrian. Even the colonnaded streets of Damascus and Gerash are repeated in this vast palace enclosure, and the architectural details resemble work at Baalbec and Palmyra.

The great monument which best marks the change of

Fig. 2. Early Christian tomb front.

style, the Pantheon, was built more than 150 years before this time by Hadrian,* and the interval is filled by some extremely interesting buildings, of which the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica is a good example. This building is properly a Nymphaeum, erected about 260. There is a valuable unpublished plan of it made about 1 5 1 2 by Conero in his folio of original drawings now in the Soane Museum. The central chamber followed the most perfect type that can be devised ; the area being enlarged, and, at the same time, the construction strengthened,

* The vast Imperial Villa at Tivoli, recently well described in Gusman's fine volume, and which also dates from this time, shows how free and masterly was late Roman construction.

FREEDOM IN ART n by a series of domed recesses. These rise only to the half height, above which the thinner wall of the central chamber is supported by buttresses. The disposition of the lateral buildings given on the plan (see Fig. 3), which have now entirely disappeared, shows that the prin-

FiG. 3. " Temple of Minerva Medica," Rome, from an original drawing in the Soane Museum, made c. 1510.

ciple of supporting a high central dome by lower vaults was fully understood. The walls of the interior were once covered with slabs of porphyry and marble, and its dome was encrusted with shells and glass enamels.* From

* I find an interesting early view of this building about 1500 in the Italian engraving of Leda by the Master I. B. in the British Museum.

i2 BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE the same source is taken Fig. 4, a remarkable octagonal plan, which must be late Roman, although I cannot identify it.

In this later Roman school, building was carried to as high a point as it has ever reached. Construction was experimental, yet masterful, and all manner of exquisite

Fig. 4. Late Roman building, from a drawing in the Soane Museum, made c. 1510.

materials like coloured marbles, glass mosaic, and gilded bronze, were used in never equalled profusion, with fine freedom of handling, and often with excellent, if somewhat redundant, taste. Yet one thing it lacked to make it that still nobler thing — a great school of architecture. The elements of sculpture and painting were merely formal, and in no way epic ; they were added to a building as adornments, and were not the very soul of its life. The

CONSTANTINIAN ART 13 times in history when building, sculpture, painting, and other arts have been perfectly co-ordinated into a higher unity have, indeed, been very few ; but if we are to distinguish between fine building and noble architecture this organic unity must be the test.

In the Constantinian epoch there were two schools of " decorative n art in Rome — one, splendid, academical, and, on its expressive side, formular ; the other, the humble art of an Eastern sect hidden in the catacombs — a living art for the dead. Not only did the two schools respond to two classes of demand, but the artists must have belonged to entirely different camps. On the one side they were accurate, cultured, official ; on the other, simple, and almost amateur, yet their work was penetrated with ideas and full of emotion. The bringing of these elements together formed Constantinian art in Rome.*

It is a pity that Roman buildings have been examined under the guidance of the text of Vitruvius by men who looked for " Orders of Architecture " rather than for living experiment in building. And a great advance towards a reasonable view of Roman art has been made by Choisy,s studies of the principles of Roman construction. We further need above all a scientific study of Roman planning, abundant materials for which have now been collected.

Many of the links in the development and transformation of ancient art must have been irrecoverably lost by the destruction of Eastern cities.

* On the Catacombs, see Wilpert's fine book.

i4 THE EAST

For instance, Maundrell, in 1699, saw a remarkable building at Corus, near the borders of Mesopotamia, which he describes as " a noble old monument, sixsquare, which opens at six windows above, and is covered with a pyramidical cupola. In each angle within is a pillar of the Corinthian order of one stone, and there is a fine architrave all round just under the cupola, having c

Fig. 5. Early Christian Basilica, Saglassos, in Asia Minor. After Strzygowski.

Fig. 6. Early Church at Dodona, with transverse triple apse.

had heads of oxen carved on it, and it ends at top with a large capital of the Corinthian order.'"

Especially significant in regard to painting are the wax painted portraits from Egypt, some of which are shown in the vestibule of the National Gallery. They furnish the very facial types which are afterwards found in the catacombs and in the mosaics.

In Syria the transition from classic art to Christian can be traced through a large series of dated monuments, as is shown by the recently published results of the American

AND NATURALISM 15

Archaeological Expedition. And it appears that from first to last this Eastern art was Hellenistic rather than Roman. I do not suppose that there were any structural or decorative methods which were not absorbed by the artists of the Empire; Roman art, like its culture generally, was syncretic. Some of the decorative processes largely used in Christian art, such, for instance, as incrustation of wall surfaces with a veneer of precious marbles, seem especially to have been delighted in at the capital. But the informing spirit of architecture, and the way of looking at ornament, was very different in Rome from what it was in the East. The characteristics of Eastern art throughout are greater freedom in structure, and closer reference to nature with constant variety in ornamentation. We already have pure naturalism aimed at in the Assyrian reliefs. The fine Hellenistic sarcophagus from Sidon called " Alexander's " has a most exquisite meander of vine carved on its frieze. In the series of monuments represented by the Golden Gate at Damascus, and the ruins of Palmyra and Baal bee, besides the unfettered way in which the so-called " order " is treated, the carved ornamentation shows a strong life, full of imagination, executed in a forceful way. At Baalbec the frieze is practically suppressed ; it has become a band of carving lying flush with the outer member of the architrave, and under-carved so that the light falls through it as through a trellis. The " palmette w ornament of the cyma is continually changing in pattern, and even the " egg and tongue " moulding is made interesting from point to point by changing patterns in the alternating spaces. (Compare Plate 2.)

1 6 ORIGIN OF CHURCH TYPE

In these, and still more markedly in several Hellenistic sarcophagi, is to be seen a new principle in regard to sculptured ornament, a principle that becomes typical in Byzantine carvings, whereby the sunk portion is not regarded as a mere background, but as an alternating form. By this method sharply-defined shadows seem to be inlaid into the general shape of the member decorated. In the West the Palace of Diocletian at Spalato is certainly an offshoot of this school of art.

Even the Basilican church must have been developed outside of Rome. As early as 325, as an inscription shows, was built the little church of Orleansville in Algeria. Strzygowski thinks that some of the many churches found in Asia Minor may date from pre-Constantinian days. (Fig. 5 is of uncertain date.) The church at Nicomedia, destroyed in the Diocletian persecution, must have been built before the end of the third century. A description of what was probably a church of the second century is given in a Syriac MS., the Test amentum Domini* And still earlier the vision of the Heavenly Temple in the Book of Revelation must be based on the form of churches built by men.

The type of the primitive church was formed by the composition of many elements. The apsidal presbytery with its altar is so clearly in direct correspondence with the rite there celebrated that it is unnecessary to look for any other origin. It resembles the triclinia of private houses ; an alternative derivation has been suggested from the little memorial scholce built above the entrances to the catacombs in Rome, some of which have tri-apsidal * Rev. Art CyU. 1899, p. 515.

OLD AND NEW i7 terminations, like the church shown in Fig. 6.* But it is to be observed that memorial feasts were held in these buildings, and it is most probable that they were independently derived from the great apsidal dining-halls. This, therefore, furnishes some confirmation of the first theory, and in any case these little buildings are probably too local and too late to have influenced the first churches.

Certain traditions of temple-planning were also carried forward — notably in the orientation of churches, which, like temples, are built on an east to west axis, and the earlier churches had their great doors to the east like the temples, and in exact opposition to the later custom of having the doors to the west. The Atrium may also come from the forecourt of temples. It was natural when great churches were built for a large assemblage of people that, having to fulfil purposes analogous to those of the basilicas of justice, they should take over from them the colonnade and roof system as a current tradition of building. It is not that the church entered into the justice halls, but similar needs of covering large spaces brought about similar results. The word Basilica was in use for a church in Constantinian days, but it seems to have been applied to any form of church.

We will now turn to the first Christian churches of Rome.

Constantine, it is said, at the suggestion of Bishop (Pope) Sylvester, built the basilica of St. Peter, over the tomb of the Apostle, whose body he placed in a

* Churches of this form are not known in Rome. The finest are the White and Red Monasteries in Egypt, both of the fifth century.

B i8

ST. PETER'S chest of bronze.* Directly above it stood the porphyry columns of the altar ciborium, and he placed between the apse and the body of the church some beautiful columns carved with tendrils of vine, which he brought from Greece. The church was a vast structure, having five avenues between colonnades, crossed at the end by the transept, from the centre of which, behind the beautiful vine columns, opened the apsidal presbytery, raised high above a crypt, and approached by a flight of steps on either hand. Around the apse were the presbytery seats in raised banks, the PontifTs throne being against the curved wall on the axis. Under the altar was the coivfessio of St. Peter, — the crypt which contained the tomb of the Apostle, — which was approached by a central flight of steps in front of the altar. Above the vine columns was an entablature which was enriched with plates of silver and supported candelabra. The nave was divided from the transept by the " triumphal arch,'" which was a little later covered with mosaic showing St. Peter presenting Constantine to Christ, to whom he was offering a model of the church. Across the arch was another beam, the head of the arch being filled with lattice-work, against which were attached a cross and two gigantic keys. This beam corresponds to the Rood beam in later Western churches. Nearly under it stood the ambo, in front of which, in the nave, a space was enclosed by low screens for the choir of the singers. The walls of the nave above the architraves supported by

* As the lateral walls of the Basilica stand on old Roman foundations, that the Apostle's body should have been found thus conveniently laced is nearly a topographical impossibility.

IN ROME the colonnades were entirely painted over with histories from the Bible. On the north side, between the windows, were Prophets, and beneath, panel pictures beginning with the animals entering the Ark. Opposite, to the south, the pictures were from the New Testament. The roof, of low pitch, showed its tie-beams and other timbers. In the eastern front of the church opened five entrances ; the great central doors being adorned with silver, on which were figures of St. Peter and St. Paul. A forecourt, or atrium, was surrounded by colonnades, in the midst of which was a fountain in the form of an enormous gilt bronze pine-cone throwing threads of water from multitudinous holes, and canopied over by bronze lattice-work, on which perched beautiful bronze peacocks. The outer gates of the atrium were adorned with mosaic. The facade of the church, rising above the cloister colonnade, was also covered with mosaic, where three ranges of figures portrayed Christ between the Virgin and St. Peter, with the four symbolic beasts, then the Evangelists themselves, with their books, and below the twenty-four elders putting off their crowns. This facade, with its mosaic, is shown in an eleventh-century manuscript preserved at Eton. The great church was but one building of a group. On the south side rose two circular Imperial tomb chapels, and on the north side was the palace of the Popes — a castle surrounded with walls and strong towers.

The solemn beauty of St. Peter's with its gable-mosaic shining in the morning sun as the people passed through the fountain court, and assembled for the early service in its dim, long-avenued interior, may hardly be imagined.

2o ST. PAOLO AND STA. SABINA

Of all these things only the pine-cone, two of the peacocks of the fountain, and several of the vine-columns which stood before the presbytery, remain to us. These last, according to one story, were said to have come from Solomon's Temple, and they are figured in Raphael's celebrated cartoon of the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. The pine-cone is antique, and bears the signature of P. Cincius Salvius, it has recently been shown that it was probably only placed in the " Paradise" of St. Peter's about noo, but Strzygowski says that a pine-cone was the traditional form for Church fountains. Compare Fig. 7 from a Byzantine MS.

The decorations of St. Peter's were mostly later than the structure, and were added from time to time through

the ages.

Fig. 7. Pine-cone fountain from a Byzantine MS. Constantine's basilica of St. Paul's outside the walls was quite a small church, the plan of which has been recovered by excavation. It was rebuilt from 386 as a large five-aisled basilica, facing in the other direction.

At St. John Lateran only the Baptistery seems to have been built by Constantine, and of this a portion remains.

We cannot stay to refer to any more of the basilican churches in Rome, save only to say that Sta. Sabina, built about 430, is probably the most complete and unharmed, and contains many early treasures in its mosaics, carved doors and marble incrustations. For

Fig. 8. Marble plating from spandrils of arches in Sta. Sabina, Rome, from a drawing by Mr. A. Christie.

22 STA. CONSTANTIA