Val d'Arno. Ruskin John
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painting of him); and Justice or Righteousness enters by the gate of the other, over strewn forest branches. Now, for example of this second kind of military architecture, look at Carlyle's account of Henry the Fowler,5 and of his building military towns, or burgs, to protect his peasantry. In such function you have the first and proper idea of a walled town,—a place into which the pacific country people can retire for safety, as the Athenians in the Spartan war. Your fortress of this kind is a religious and civil fortress, or burg, defended by burgers, trained to defensive war. Keep always this idea of the proper nature of a fortified city:—Its walls mean protection,—its gates hospitality and triumph. In the language familiar to you, spoken of the chief of cities: "Its walls are to be Salvation, and its gates to be Praise." And recollect always the inscription over the north gate of Siena: "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit."—"More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you."
33. When next you enter London by any of the great lines, I should like you to consider, as you approach the city, what the feelings of the heart of London are likely to be on your approach, and at what part of the railroad station an inscription, explaining such state of her heart, might be most fitly inscribed. Or you would still better understand the difference between ancient and modern principles of architecture by taking a cab to the Elephant and Castle, and thence walking to London Bridge by what is in fact the great southern entrance of London. The only gate receiving you is, however, the arch thrown over the road to carry the South-Eastern Railway itself; and the only exhibition either of Salvation or Praise is in the cheap clothes' shops on each side; and especially in one colossal haberdasher's shop, over which you may see the British flag waving (in imitation of Windsor Castle) when the master of the shop is at home. 34. Next to protection from external hostility, the two necessities in a city are of food and water supply;—the latter essentially constant. You can store food and forage, but water must flow freely. Hence the Fountain and the Mercato become the centres of civil architecture.
Premising thus much, I will ask you to look once more at this cloister of the Campo Santo of Pisa.
35. On first entering the place, its quiet, its solemnity, the perspective of its aisles, and the conspicuous grace and precision of its traceries, combine to give you the sensation of having entered a true Gothic cloister. And if you walk round it hastily, and, glancing only at a fresco or two, and the confused tombs erected against them, return to the uncloistered sunlight of the piazza, you may quite easily carry away with you, and ever afterwards retain, the notion that the Campo Santo of Pisa is the same kind of thing as the cloister of Westminster Abbey.
36. I will beg you to look at the building, thus photographed, more attentively. The "long-drawn aisle" is here, indeed,—but where is the "fretted vault"?
A timber roof, simple as that of a country barn, and of which only the horizontal beams catch the eye, connects an entirely plain outside wall with an interior one, pierced by round-headed openings; in which are inserted pieces of complex tracery, as foreign in conception to the rest of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of the windows of some church in an advanced stage of fantastic design at Nuremberg or Frankfort.
37. If you begin to question, hereupon, who was the Italian robber, whether of marble or thought, and look to your Vasari, you find the building attributed to John the Pisan;6—and you suppose the son to have been so pleased by his father's adoption of Gothic forms that he must needs borrow them, in this manner, ready made, from the Germans, and thrust them into his round arches, or wherever else they would go.
We will look at something more of his work, however, before drawing such conclusion.
38. In the centres of the great squares of Siena and Perugia, rose, obedient to engineers' art, two perennial fountains Without engineers' art, the glens which cleave the sand-rock of Siena flow with living water; and still, if there be a hell for the forger in Italy, he remembers therein the sweet grotto and green wave of Fonte Branda. But on the very summit of the two hills, crested by their great civic fortresses, and in the centres of their circuit of walls, rose the two guided wells; each in basin of goodly marble, sculptured—at Perugia, by John of Pisa, at Siena, by James of Quercia.
39. It is one of the bitterest regrets of my life (and I have many which some men would find difficult to bear,) that I never saw, except when I was a youth, and then with sealed eyes, Jacopo della Quercia's fountain.7 The Sienese, a little while since, tore it down, and put up a model of it by a modern carver. In like manner, perhaps, you will some day knock the Elgin marbles to pieces, and commission an Academician to put up new ones,—the Sienese doing worse than that (as if the Athenians were themselves to break their Phidias' work).
But the fountain of John of Pisa, though much injured, and glued together with asphalt, is still in its place.
40. I will now read to you what Vasari first says of him, and it. (I. 67.) "Nicholas had, among other sons, one called John, who, because he always followed his father, and, under his discipline, intended (bent himself to, with a will,) sculpture and architecture, in a few years became not only equal to his father, but in some things superior to him; wherefore Nicholas, being now old, retired himself into Pisa, and living quietly there, left the government of everything to his son. Accordingly, when Pope Urban IV. died in Perugia, sending was made for John, who, going there, made the tomb of that Pope of marble, the which, together with that of Pope Martin IV., was afterwards thrown down, when the Perugians enlarged their vescovado; so that only a few relics are seen sprinkled about the church. And the Perugians, having at the same time brought from the mountain of Pacciano, two miles distant from the city, through canals of lead, a most abundant water, by means of the invention and industry of a friar of the order of St. Silvester, it was given to John the Pisan to make all the ornaments of this fountain, as well of bronze as of marble. On which he set hand to it, and made there three orders of vases, two of marble and one of bronze. The first is put upon twelve degrees of twelve-faced steps; the second is upon some columns which put it upon a level with the first one;" (that is, in the middle of it,) "and the third, which is of bronze, rests upon three figures which have in the middle of them some griffins, of bronze too, which pour water out on every side."
{Illustration: PLATE III.—THE FOUNTAIN OF PERUGIA.}
41. Many things we have to note in this passage, but first I will show you the best picture I can of the thing itself.
The best I can; the thing itself being half destroyed, and what remains so beautiful that no one can now quite rightly draw it; but Mr. Arthur Severn, (the son of Keats's Mr. Severn,) was with me, looking reverently at those remains, last summer, and has made, with help from the sun, this sketch for you (Plate III.); entirely true and effective as far as his time allowed.
Half destroyed, or more, I said it was,—Time doing grievous work on it, and men worse. You heard Vasari saying of it, that it stood on twelve degrees of twelve-faced steps. These—worn, doubtless, into little more than a rugged slope—have been replaced by the moderns with four circular steps, and an iron railing;8 the bas-reliefs have been carried off from the panels of the second vase, and its fair marble lips choked with asphalt:—of what remains, you have here a rough but true image.
In which you see there is not a trace of Gothic feeling or design of any sort. No crockets, no pinnacles, no foils, no vaultings, no grotesques in sculpture. Panels between pillars, panels carried on pillars, sculptures in those panels like the Metopes of the Parthenon; a Greek vase in the middle, and griffins in the middle of that. Here is your font, not at all of Saint John, but of profane and civil-engineering John. This is his manner of baptism of the town of Perugia.
42. Thus early, it seems, the antagonism of profane Greek to ecclesiastical Gothic declares itself. It seems as if in Perugia, as in London, you had the fountains in Trafalgar Square against Queen Elinor's Cross; or the viaduct and railway station contending with the Gothic chapel, which the master of the large manufactory close by has erected, because he thinks pinnacles and crockets have a pious influence; and will prevent his workmen from asking for shorter hours, or more wages.
43.
"Frederick," vol. i.
The present traceries are of fifteenth century work, founded on Giovanni's design.
I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune denied to me. "The market-place, or great Piazza, is a large square, with a great broken-nosed fountain in it." ("Pictures from Italy.")
In Mr. Severn's sketch, the form of the original foundation is approximately restored.