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 These—worn, doubtless, into little more than a rugged slope—have been replaced by the moderns with four circular steps, and an iron railing;8 the bas-reliefs have been carried off from the panels of the second vase, and its fair marble lips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. It seems only; the antagonism is quite of another kind,—or, rather, of many other kinds. But note at once how complete it is—how utterly this Greek fountain of Perugia, and the round arches of Pisa, are opposed to the school of design which gave the trefoils to Niccola's pulpit, and the traceries to Giovanni's Campo Santo.
The antagonism, I say, is of another kind than ours; but deep and wide; and to explain it, I must pass for a time to apparently irrelevant topics.
You were surprised, I hope, (if you were attentive enough to catch the points in what I just now read from Vasari,) at my venturing to bring before you, just after I had been using violent language against the Sienese for breaking up the work of Quercia, that incidental sentence giving account of the much more disrespectful destruction, by the Perugians, of the tombs of Pope Urban IV., and Martin IV. Sending was made for John, you see, first, when Pope Urban IV. died in Perugia—whose tomb was to be carved by John; the Greek fountain being a secondary business. But the tomb was so well destroyed, afterwards, that only a few relics remained scattered here and there.
The tomb, I have not the least doubt, was Gothic;—and the breaking of it to pieces was not in order to restore it afterwards, that a living architect might get the job of restoration. Here is a stone out of one of Giovanni Pisano's loveliest Gothic buildings, which I myself saw with my own eyes dashed out, that a modern builder might be paid for putting in another. But Pope Urban's tomb was not destroyed to such end. There was no qualm of the belly, driving the hammer,—qualm of the conscience probably; at all events, a deeper or loftier antagonism than one on points of taste, or economy.
44. You observed that I described this Greek profane manner of design as properly belonging to civil buildings, as opposed not only to ecclesiastical buildings, but to military ones. Justice, or Righteousness, and Veracity, are the characters of Greek art. These may be opposed to religion, when religion becomes fantastic; but they must be opposed to war, when war becomes unjust. And if, perchance, fantastic religion and unjust war happen to go hand in hand, your Greek artist is likely to use his hammer against them spitefully enough.
45. His hammer, or his Greek fire. Hear now this example of the engineering ingenuities of our Pisan papa, in his younger days.
"The Florentines having begun, in Niccola's time, to throw down many towers, which had been built in a barbarous manner through the whole city; either that the people might be less hurt, by their means, in the fights that often took place between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or else that there might be greater security for the State, it appeared to them that it would be very difficult to ruin the Tower of the Death-watch, which was in the place of St. John, because it had its walls built with such a grip in them that the stones could not be stirred with the pickaxe, and also because it was of the loftiest; whereupon Nicholas, causing the tower to be cut, at the foot of it, all the length of one of its sides; and closing up the cut, as he made it, with short (wooden) under-props, about a yard long, and setting fire to them, when the props were burned, the tower fell, and broke itself nearly all to pieces: which was held a thing so ingenious and so useful for such affairs, that it has since passed into a custom, so that when it is needful, in this easiest manner, any edifice may be thrown down."
46. 'When it is needful.' Yes; but when is that? If instead of the towers of the Death-watch in the city, one could ruin the towers of the Death-watch of evil pride and evil treasure in men's hearts, there would be need enough for such work both in Florence and London. But the walls of those spiritual towers have still stronger 'grip' in them, and are fireproof with a vengeance.
"Le mure me parean die ferro fosse,
. . . e el mi dixe, il fuoco eterno
Chentro laffoca, le dimostra rosse."
But the towers in Florence, shattered to fragments by this ingenious engineer, and the tombs in Perugia, which his son will carve, only that they also may be so well destroyed that only a few relics remain, scattered up and down the church,—are these, also, only the iron towers, and the red-hot tombs, of the city of Dis?
Let us see.
47. In order to understand the relation of the tradesmen and working men, including eminently the artist, to the general life of the thirteenth century, I must lay before you the clearest elementary charts I can of the course which the fates of Italy were now appointing for her.
My first chart must be geographical. I want you to have a clearly dissected and closely fitted notion of the natural boundaries of her states, and their relations to surrounding ones. Lay hold first, firmly, of your conception of the valleys of the Po and the Arno, running counter to each other—opening east and opening west,—Venice at the end of the one, Pisa at the end of the other.
48. These two valleys—the hearts of Lombardy and Etruria—virtually contain the life of Italy. They are entirely different in character: Lombardy, essentially luxurious and worldly, at this time rude in art, but active; Etruria, religious, intensely imaginative, and inheriting refined forms of art from before the days of Porsenna.
49. South of these, in mid-Italy, you have Romagna,—the valley of the Tiber. In that valley, decayed Rome, with her lust of empire inextinguishable;—no inheritance of imaginative art, nor power of it; dragging her own ruins hourly into more fantastic ruin, and defiling her faith hourly with more fantastic guilt.
South of Romagna, you have the kingdoms of Calabria and Sicily,–Magna Graecia, and Syracuse, in decay;–strange spiritual fire from the Saracenic east still lighting the volcanic land, itself laid all in ashes.
50. Conceive Italy then always in these four masses: Lombardy, Etruria, Romagna, Calabria.
Now she has three great external powers to deal with: the western, France—the northern, Germany—the eastern, Arabia. On her right the Frank; on her left the Saracen; above her, the Teuton. And roughly, the French are a religious chivalry; the Germans a profane chivalry; the Saracens an infidel chivalry. What is best of each is benefiting Italy; what is worst, afflicting her. And in the time we are occupied with, all are afflicting her.
What Charlemagne, Barbarossa, or Saladin did to teach her, you can trace only by carefullest thought. But in this thirteenth century all these three
In Mr. Severn's sketch, the form of the original foundation is approximately restored.
