How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (free reads .txt) 📕

of the nave and transepts. The towers were square, polygonal, or circular, divided into stories which were pierced with windows or embellished with arcades. They were crowned, like the nave and aisles, with an exterior sloping roof.

Arcading.—The arcading, which now became a favourite method of embellishing walls, was of two kinds; either being open and permitting a passageway at the back of them, or with columns and arch mouldings attached to the wall, in the manner known as blind arcading. Another feature for strengthening as well as embellishing the wall was the use of masonry piers, which, resting on a plinth, projected from the wall only as far as the width of the cornice.

The exteriors, in fact, were no longer, as in early Christian churches, plain and almost barn-like, but assumed a varied picturesqueness that, however, was distinguished by a fine structural unity.

The arch, whether used in interior or exterior arcading or for the tops of doors and windows, was round; usually semicircular but occasionally stilted, the ends of the semicircle, that is to say, being raised on perpendicular lines. The later introduction of the pointed arch, it may be added, marks the transition from Romanesque to Gothic.

A characteristic development of the Romanesque style is the treatment of the doors and windows. The jambs or sides were carried back in a series of angular recesses, which were filled with small columns, whose abaci frequently united in a continuous moulding. In many cases the angular recesses of the jambs were prolonged around the arch.

The shafts of columns were decorated with fluting, which might be perpendicular, spiral, or barred like trellis-work. The capitals, except when antique Corinthian or Ionic columns were utilised, display a variety of embellishments, sometimes influenced by Byzantine examples, at other times representing an original working out of foliage motives, often rude in treatment, but, especially in the German work, vigorously decorative.

In the nave arcading, that is to say the series of arches on each side of the nave, the supports consisted of square piers, to the faces of which columns were attached. From two of them sprang the arches; a third supported the vaulting of the aisles, while a fourth was run up to a higher level to carry the vaulting of the nave.

Italian Romanesque.—Since the Romanesque style was coloured by the locality in which it appeared, it is necessary to study examples of it as they are found respectively in Italy, France, the Rhine Provinces, Spain, and England.

The Italian examples are conveniently subdivided into those of Northern, Central, and Southern Italy, or, more specifically, into the examples found in the districts north of the River Po, between the Po and the Tiber, and south of the latter. Of these the northern, to be considered later, are the most important, since they show, as we have noted, a more adventurous spirit in the matter of construction.

Central Italy.—On the other hand, the builders of Central and Southern Italy still followed the simple basilican plan and retained the wooden roofs and, in consequence, clerestory windows. They raised, however, in many cases the level of the choir and placed a crypt chamber beneath it; which sometimes, as in S. Miniato, Florence, is open to the nave. But their inventiveness was displayed rather in the details of decoration. Central Italy being rich in marbles, the use of this material for embellishing the exterior and the interior with bands and geometric designs was carried to such a perfection as virtually to constitute a style. The most beautiful example is that of S. Miniato, where, too, the open woodwork of the roof has been restored to its original colouring of gold, green, blue, and red.

Another notable example of this developed style of decoration is presented at Pisa, in the group of buildings comprising the Cathedral, Campanile, and Baptistry. Here the façades are embellished—one might almost say composed, for the embellishment is applied so constructionally—with tiers of blind arcades or of open arcades of red and white marble. Those of the Baptistry received in the fifteenth century additions of Gothic canopies and traceries, but the front of the Cathedral and the circular Campanile retain their original character. The Baptistry, also circular in plan, is crowned by an outer hemispherical dome, through which penetrates a conical dome, which in the interior is supported on four piers and eight columns. The influence of Byzantine workmen is seen here as well as in the dome which crowns the crossing of the Cathedral. The transepts of the latter are prolonged beyond the basilica plan and terminate in apses.

The Campanile, which comprises eight stories embellished with arcading, is known as “The Leaning Tower,” since it inclines from the perpendicular about 13 feet in a height of 179, the greatest inclination being in the ground story, after which there is a slight recovery toward the perpendicular. It was begun in 1174 and completed in 1350. Vasari, the historian of Italian artists, writing some 200 years later, ascribes this lean to a settlement of the foundations. His explanation, though occasionally disputed, had been generally accepted, until the investigations of Professor William H. Goodyear, in 1910, established the fact that the inclination was intentional and provided for from the start of the work.

The tower is constructed of an exterior and an interior cylinder of masonry, the space between them being occupied by a spiral staircase. The steps of the latter were individually measured by Professor Goodyear, who has set forth the results in a Bulletin of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (Jan. 21, 1911). Briefly, they show that the treads of the steps vary in height and that they incline sometimes toward the inner wall, sometimes toward the outer. In this way they tend to create a balance of strains on the whole structure, which is further secured by increasing the strength of the inner walls, where the inclination is inward. That the careful calculation involved in this was not due to an afterthought or the necessity of remedying the effects of a settlement is proved by the fact that the inclination begins at the lowest step.

Why then was this design adopted? Professor Goodyear furnishes the answer in two subsequent Bulletins. Reduced to briefest terms it is this: The Pisan Baptistry also has an inclination from the normal, both perpendicular and horizontal. Thus, in the south façade there is an inclination in the horizontal lines of 2 feet 2 inches toward the choir. Meanwhile, the vertical lines of the west façade are perpendicular to this slope and, consequently, the front inclines inward toward the nave. And these are only instances of a number of asymmetries that occur throughout the cathedral, all of which are proved to have been intentional in the original design.

Further, the asymmetries at Pisa bear a close analogy to the numberless asymmetries that appear in S. Mark’s, Venice. The latter was built by Byzantine workmen, who therein followed the Oriental and the Hellenic dislike of formal mathematical regularity; and it is the Byzantine tradition again which in this respect, as in other details of decoration, domes and so forth, influenced the Romanesque group of buildings at Pisa. The order in which they were erected is, the Cathedral, Baptistry, and Campanile; so that in the Leaning Tower the architects merely carried the principle of asymmetry to an extreme pitch.

The influence of Pisa is found in S. Michele and S. Martino in Lucca, and in the Cathedral of Pistoia.

South Italy.—The most important Southern examples are found in Sicily, which in the tenth century was overrun by the Saracens, who in the following century were routed by the Normans. Consequently, the Saracenic influence is mingled with the Byzantine in the Cathedral of Monreale, near Palermo. The plan is basilican, with apses at the eastern ends of the nave and aisles. The choir is raised. The arches of the nave are pointed but not recessed, and are supported on columns, with Byzantine capitals. The aisle walls have a dado of white marble, twelve feet high, inlaid with borders, composed of porphyry, while the arches and clerestory of the nave are embellished with mosaics of biblical subjects, framed in arabesque borders. Of a sombre richness of colour, they display the Byzantine characteristic of severity of design, and impart to the interior a solemn grandeur.

North Italy.—It is in Northern Italy, particularly in the Lombard churches, that the constructional development is most marked. For, while the plan remained basilican, only occasionally showing well-defined transepts, the architects devoted their energies to the problem of vaulting. A notable instance is San Ambrogio, Milan, which is an early example of the use of ribs in vaulting. The original church, erected in the ninth century, had wooden roofs; but in the rebuilding the nave was divided into four square bays, and immense piers were constructed to carry the diagonal, transverse, and longitudinal ribs.[6] Of corresponding massiveness are the transverse ribs, while to support the strain on the longitudinal ribs intermediate piers were introduced with an upper and a lower tier of double arches. These open into the two stories of the groin-vaulted aisles, which are given this treatment in order to act as buttresses to the thrust of the nave vaults. This compelled the omission of clerestory windows, thus adding to the sombreness of effect. Indeed the whole suggestion is one of ponderousness. It is the work of men experimenting with a new method of construction and intent for the present on achieving stability. The combination of the latter with dignity of height and the grace of lightness was yet to be developed in the Gothic treatment of the ribs.

The west end is approached by a narthex, opening into an arcaded atrium.

In the external decoration of the triple apse of the east end appears the rudimentary principle of the open arcade. The walls above the semi-dome and beneath the wooden exterior roof are crowned with a cornice, composed of arches supported upon corbels, the space between each being penetrated with a niche. This produces a series of deep shadows, in contrast with which the actual construction of the corbels assumes a lightness of effect. It was the preliminary step to the substitution of small detached columns for the corbels and the development of external arcading.

The open arcading in its full development appears in the west façade of S. Michele, Pavia, where it serves its characteristic purpose of constructively lightening the effect of the cornice of the roof. In this instance, as in many of the Lombard façades, the nave and aisles are included in a single gable, their interior separation being marked upon the exterior by masonry piers. Into this façade also, as in the older part of the exterior of San Ambrogio, are set pieces of earlier sculptured ornament. These exhibit a strange mingling of grotesque animals with Scandinavian interlaces and Byzantine features—a notable fact, since they correspond with the sculptured ornament found on some of the Rhenish churches. This suggests that Lombard workmen were employed in Germany and that they brought back with them some of the German taste for symbolism in ornament.

In the west front of the Cathedral at Piacenza, we find the same use of single gable and masonry piers, but the cornice arcade is supplemented by two horizontal bands, that mark the division of the aisles into two stories. Moreover, each of the three entrances is embellished with a two storied porch, supported on columns that rest on recumbent lions. Over the nave porch the wall is penetrated by a characteristically Romanesque feature—a rose or wheel window. A comparison of this façade with the elaborate ones of Central Italy illustrates the preference of the Lombard architects for organic disposition of decoration rather than decoration for the sake of decoration.

An important feature of North Italy is the Campanile. Intended, it is supposed, as