A Text-Book of the History of Architecture Part 29

CHALUKYAN: Temples at Buchropully and Hamoncondah, 1163; ruins at Kalyani; grottoes of Hazar Khutri.

DRAVIDIAN: Rock-cut temples (raths) at Mahavellipore; Tiger Cave at Saluvan Kuppan; temples at Pittadkul (Purudkul), Tiruvalur, Combaconum, Vellore, Peroor, Vijayanagar; pavilions at Tanjore and Vijayanagar.

There are also many temples in the Kashmir Valley difficult of a.s.signment to any of the above styles and religions.

APPENDIX.

A. +PRIMITIVE GREEK ARCHITECTURE.+--The researches of Schliemann commented by Schuchardt, of Dorpfeld, Stamakis, Tsoundas, Perrot, and others, in Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns, and the more recent discoveries of Evans at Gnossus, in Crete, have greatly extended our knowledge of the prehistoric art of Greece and the Mediterranean basin, and established many points of contact on the one hand with ancient Egyptian and Phnician art, and on the other, with the art of historic Greece. They have proved the existence of an active and flourishing commerce between Egypt and the Mediterranean sh.o.r.es and Aegean islands more than 2000 B.C., and of a flourishing material civilization in those islands and on the mainland of Greece, borrowing much, but not everything, from Egypt.

While the origin of the Doric order in the structural methods of the pre-Homeric architecture of Tiryns and Mycenae, as set forth by Dorpfeld and by Perrot and Chipiez, can hardly be regarded as proved in all details, since much of the argument advanced for this derivation rests on more or less conjectural restorations of the existing remains, it seems to be fairly well established that the Doric order, and historic Greek architecture in general, trace their genesis in large measure back in direct line to this prehistoric art. The remarkable feature of this early architecture is the apparently complete absence of temples.

Fortifications, houses, palaces, and tombs make up the ruins thus far discovered, and seem to indicate clearly the derivation of the temple-type of later Greek art from the primitive house, consisting of a hall or _megaron_ with four columns about the central hearth (whence no doubt, the atrium and peristyle of Roman houses, through their Greek intermediary prototypes) and a porch or _aithousa_, with or without columns _in antis_, opening directly into the _megaron_, or indirectly through an ante-room called the _prodomos_. Here we have the prototypes of the Greek temple _in antis_, with its _naos_ having interior columns, whether roofed over or hypaethral (see pp. 54, 55). It is probable also that the evidently liberal use of timber for many of the structural details led in time to many of the forms later developed in stone in the entablature of the Doric order. But it is hard to discover, as Dorpfeld would have it, in the slender Mycenaean columns with their inverted taper, the prototype of the ma.s.sive Doric column with its upward taper.

The Mycenaean column was evidently derived from wooden models; the st.u.r.dy Doric column--the earliest being the most ma.s.sive--seems plainly derived from stone or rubble piers (see p. 50), and thus to have come from a different source from the Mycenaean forms.

The _gynecaeum_, or women's apartments, the men's apartments, and the bath were in these ancient palaces grouped in varying relations about the _megaron_: their plan, purpose, and arrangement are clearly revealed in the ruins of Tiryns, where they are more complete and perfect than either at Troy or Mycenae.

B. +CAMPANILES IN ITALY.+--Reference is made on page 264 to the towers or campaniles of the Italian Gothic style and period, and six of these are specifically mentioned; and on page 305 mention is also made of those of the Renaissance in Italy. The number and importance of the Italian campaniles and the interest attaching to their origin and design, warrant a more extended notice than has been a.s.signed them in the pages cited.

The oldest of these bell-towers appear to be those adjoining the two churches of San Apollinare in and near Ravenna (see p. 114), and date presumably from the sixth century. They are plain circular towers with few and small openings, except in the uppermost story, where larger arched openings permit the issue of the sound of the bells. This type, which might have been developed into a very interesting form of tower, does not seem to have been imitated. It was at Rome, and not till the ninth or tenth century, that the campanile became a recognized feature of church architecture. It was invariably treated as a structure distinct from the church, and was built of brick upon a square plan, rising with little or no architectural adornment to a height usually of a hundred feet or more, and furnished with but a few small openings below the belfry stage, where a pair of coupled arched windows separated by a simple column opened from each face of the tower. Above these windows a pyramidal roof of low pitch terminated the tower. In spite of their simplicity of design these Roman bell-towers often possess a noticeable grace of proportions, and furnish the prototype of many of the more elaborate campaniles erected during the Middle Ages in other central and north Italian cities. The towers of Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, Sta. Maria in Trastevere, and S. Giorgio in Velabro are examples of this type. Most of the Roman examples date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In other cities, the campanile was treated with some variety of form and decoration, as well as of material. In Lombardy and Venetia the square red-brick shaft of the tower is often adorned with long, narrow pilaster strips, as at Piacenza (p. 158, Fig. 91) and Venice, and an arcaded cornice not infrequently crowns the structure. The openings at the top may be three or four in number on each face, and even the plan is sometimes octagonal or circular. The brick octagonal campanile of +S. Gottardo+ at Milan is one of the finest Lombard church towers. At Verona the brick tower on the Piazza dell' Erbe and that of S. Zeno are conspicuous; but every important town of northern Italy possesses one or more examples of these structures dating from the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth century.

Undoubtedly the three most noted bell-towers in Italy are those of Venice, Pisa, and Florence. The great +Campanile+ of +St. Mark+ at Venice, first begun in 874, carried higher in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and finally completed in the sixteenth century with the marble belvedere and wooden spire so familiar in pictures of Venice, was formerly the highest of all church campaniles in Italy, measuring approximately 325 feet to the summit. But this superb historic monument, weakened by causes not yet at this writing fully understood, fell in sudden ruin on the 14th of July, 1902, to the great loss not only of Venice, but of the world of art, though fortunately without injuring the neighboring buildings on the Piazza and Piazzetta of St. Mark. Since then the campanile of S. Stefano, in the same city, has been demolished to forestall another like disaster. The +Leaning Tower+ of Pisa (see p. 160, Fig. 92) dates from 1174, and is unique in its plan and its exterior treatment with superposed arcades. Begun apparently as a leaning tower, it seems to have increased this lean to a dangerous point, by the settling of its foundations during construction, as its upper stages were made to deviate slightly towards the vertical from the inclination of the lower portion. It has always served rather as a watch-tower and belvedere than as a bell-tower. The +Campanile+ adjoining the Duomo at +Florence+ is described on p. 263 and ill.u.s.trated in Fig. 154, and does not require further notice here. The black-and-white banded towers of Sienna, Lucca, and Pistoia, and the octagonal lanterns crowning those of Verona and Mantua, also referred to in the text on p. 264, need here only be mentioned again as ill.u.s.trating the variety of treatment of these Italian towers.

The Renaissance architects developed new types of campanile, and in such variety that they can only be briefly referred to. Some, like a brick tower at Perugia, are simple square towers with pilasters; more often engaged columns and entablatures mark the several stories, and the upper portion is treated either with an octagonal lantern or with diminishing stages, and sometimes with a spire. Of the latter cla.s.s the best example is that of S. Biagio, at Montepulciano,--one of the two designed to flank the facade of Ant. da S. Gallo's beautiful church of that name.

One or two good late examples are to be found at Naples. Of the more ma.s.sive square type there are examples in the towers of S. Michele, Venice; of the cathedral at Ferrara, Sta. Chiara at Naples, and Sta.

Maria dell' Anima--one of the earliest--at Rome. The most complete and perfect of these square belfries of the Renaissance is that of the +Campidoglio+ at Rome, by Martino Lunghi, dating from the end of the sixteenth century, which groups so admirably with the palaces of the Capitol.

C. +BRAMANTE'S WORKS.+--A more or less animated controversy has arisen regarding the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Bramante, and the tendency has of late been to deny him any part whatever in several of the most important of these works. The first of these to be given a changed a.s.signment was the church of the Consolazione at Todi (p. 293), now believed to be by Cola di Caprarola; and it is now denied by many investigators that either the Cancelleria or the Giraud palace (p. 290) is his work, or any one of two or three smaller houses in Rome showing a somewhat similar architectural treatment. The evidence adduced in support of this denial is rather speculative and critical than doc.u.mentary, but is not without weight. The date 1495 carved on a doorway of the Cancelleria palace is thought to forbid its attribution to Bramante, who is not known to have come to Rome till 1503; and there is a lack of positive evidence of his authorship of the Giraud palace and the other houses which seem to be by the same hand as the Cancelleria. To the advocates of this view there is not enough resemblance in style between this group of buildings and his acknowledged work either in Milan or in the Vatican to warrant their being attributed to him.

It must, however, be remarked, that this notable group of works, stamped with the marks and even the mannerisms of a strong personality, reveal in their unknown author gifts amounting to genius, and heretofore deemed not unworthy of Bramante. It is almost inconceivable that they should have been designed by a mere beginner previously utterly unknown and forgotten soon after. It is inc.u.mbent upon those who deny the attribution to Bramante to find another name, if possible, on which to fasten the credit of these works. Accordingly, they have been variously attributed to Alberti (who died in 1472) or his followers; to Bernardo di Lorenzo, and to other later fifteenth-century artists. The difficulty here is to discover any name that fits the conditions even as well as Bramante's; for the supposed author must have been in Rome between 1495 and 1505, and his other works must be at least as much like these as were Bramante's. No name has thus far been found satisfactory to careful critics; and the alternative theory, that there existed in Rome, before Bramante's coming, a group of architects unknown to later fame, working in a common style and capable of such a masterpiece as the Cancelleria, does not harmonize with the generally accepted facts of Renaissance art history. Moreover, the comparison of these works with Bramante's Milanese work on the one hand and his great Court of the Belvedere in the Vatican on the other, yields, to some critics, conclusions quite opposed to those of the advocates of another authorship than Bramante's.

The controversy must be considered for the present as still open. There are manifest difficulties with either of the two opposed views, and these can hardly be eliminated, except by the discovery of doc.u.ments not now known to exist, whose testimony will be recognized as unimpeachable.

D. +L'ART NOUVEAU.+--Since 1896, and particularly since the Paris Exposition of 1900, a movement has manifested itself in France and Belgium, and spread to Germany and Austria and even measurably to England, looking towards a more personal and original style of decorative and architectural design, in which the traditions and historic styles of the past shall be ignored. This movement has received from its adherents and the public the name of "L'Art Nouveau," or, according to some, "L'Art Moderne"; but this name must not be held to connote either a really new style or a fundamentally new principle in art. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any clearly-defined body of principles whatever underlies the movement, or would be acknowledged equally by all its adherents. It appears to be a reaction against a too slavish adherence to traditional forms and methods of design (see pp.

370, 375), a striving to ignore or forget the past rather than a reaching out after any well-understood, positive end; as such, it possesses the negative strength of protest rather than the affirmative strength of a vital principle. Its lack of cohesion is seen in the division of its adherents into groups, some looking to nature for inspiration, while others decry this as a mistaken quest; some seeking to emphasize structural lines, and others to ignore them altogether.

All, however, are united in the avoidance of commonplace forms and historic styles, and this preoccupation has developed an amazing amount of originality and individualism of style, frequently reaching the extreme of eccentricity. The results have therefore been, as might be expected, extremely varied in merit, ranging from the most refined and reserved in style to the most harshly bizarre and extravagant. As a rule, they have been most successful in small and semi-decorative objects--jewelry, silverware, vases, and small furniture; and one most desirable feature of the movement has been the stimulus it has given (especially in France and England), to the organization and activity of "arts-and-crafts" societies which occupy themselves with the encouragement of the decorative and industrial arts and the diffusion of an improved taste. In the field of the larger objects of design, in which the dominance of traditional form and of structural considerations is proportionally more imperious, the struggle to evade these restrictions becomes more difficult, and results usually in more obvious and disagreeable eccentricities, which the greater size and permanence of the object tend further to exaggerate. The least successful achievements of the movement have accordingly been in architecture. The buildings designed by its most fervent disciples (_e.g._ the Pavillon Bleu at the Exposition of 1900, the Castel Beranger, Paris, by _H.

Guimard_, the houses of the artist colony at Darmstadt, and others) are for the most part characterized by extreme stiffness, eccentricity, or ugliness. The requirements of construction and of human habitation cannot easily be met without sometimes using the forms which past experience has developed for the same ends; and the negation of precedent is not the surest path to beauty or even reasonableness of design. It is interesting to notice that in the intermediate field of furniture-design some of the best French productions recall the style of Louis XV., modified by j.a.panese ideas and spirit. This singular but not unpleasing combination is less surprising when we reflect that the style of Louis XV. was itself a protest against the formalism of the heavy cla.s.sic architecture of preceding reigns, and achieved its highest successes in the domain of furniture and interior decoration.

It may be fair to credit the new movement with one positive characteristic in its prevalent regard for line, especially for the effect of long and swaying lines, whether in the contours or ornamentation of an object. This is especially noticeable in the Belgian work, and in that of the Viennese "Secessionists," who have, however, carried eccentricity to a further point of extravagance than any others.

Whether "L'Art Nouveau" will ever produce permanent results time alone can show. Its present vogue is probably evanescent and it cannot claim to have produced a style; but it seems likely to exert on European architecture an influence, direct and indirect, not unlike that of the Neo-Grec movement of 1830 in France (p. 364), but even more lasting and beneficial. It has already begun to break the hold of rigid cla.s.sical tradition in design; and recent buildings, especially in Germany and Austria, like the works of the brilliant _Otto Wagner_ in Vienna, show a pleasing freedom of personal touch without undue striving after eccentric novelty. Doubtless in French and other European architecture the same result will in time manifest itself.

The search for novelty and the desire to dispense wholly with historic forms of design which are the chief marks of the Art Nouveau, were emphatically displayed in many of the remarkable buildings of the Paris +Exhibition of 1900+, in which a striking fertility and facility of design in the decorative details made more conspicuous the failure to improve upon the established precedents of architectural style in the matters of proportion, scale, general composition, and contour. As usual the metallic construction of these buildings was almost without exception admirable, and the decorative details, taken by themselves, extremely clever and often beautiful, but the combined result was not satisfactory.

In the United States the movement has not found a firm foothold because there has been no dominant, enslaving tradition to protest against. Not a few of the ideas, not a little of the spirit of the movement may be recognized in the work of individual architects and decorative artists in the United States, executed years before the movement took recognizable form in Europe: and American decorative design has generally been, at least since 1880 or 1885, sufficiently free, individual and personal, to render unnecessary and impossible any concerted movement of artistic revolt against slavery to precedent.

E. +RECENT AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.+--Architectural activity in the United States continues to share in the general prosperity which has marked the years since 1898, and this activity has by no means been confined to industrial and commercial architecture. Indeed, while the erection of "sky sc.r.a.pers" or excessively lofty office-buildings has continued to be a feature of this activity in the great commercial centres, the most notable architectural enterprises of recent years have been in the field of educational buildings, both in the East and West. In 1898 a great international compet.i.tion resulted in the selection of the design of Mr.

_E. Benard_ of Paris for a magnificent group of buildings for the +University of California+ on a scale of unexampled grandeur, and the erection of this colossal project has been begun. An almost equally ambitious project, by a firm of Philadelphia architects, has been adopted for the Washington University at St. Louis; and many other universities and colleges have either added extensively to their existing buildings or planned an entire rebuilding on new designs. Among these the national military and naval academies at +West Point+ and +Annapolis+ take the first rank in the extent and splendor of the projected improvements. Museums and libraries have also been erected or begun in various cities, and the +New York Public Library+, now building, will rank in cost and beauty with those already erected in Boston and Washington.

In other departments mention should be made of recent Federal buildings (custom-houses, post-offices, and court-houses) erected under the provisions of the Tarsney act from designs secured by compet.i.tion among the leading architects of the country; among those the +New York Custom House+ is the most important, but other buildings, at Washington, Indianapolis, and elsewhere, are also conspicuous, and many of them worthy of high praise. The tendency to award the designing of important public buildings, such as State capitols, county court houses, city halls, libraries, and hospitals, by compet.i.tion instead of by personal and political favor, has resulted in a marked improvement in the quality of American public architecture.

F. +THE ERECHTHEUM: RECENT INVESTIGATIONS.+--During the past two years, extensive repairs and partial restorations of the Erechtheum at Athens, undertaken by the Greek Archaeological Society, have afforded opportunities for a new and thoroughgoing study of the existing portions of the building and of the surrounding ruins. In these investigations a prominent part has been borne by Mr. Gorham P. Stevens, representing the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America, to whom must be credited, among other things, the demonstration of the existence, in the east wall of the original structure, of two windows previously unknown. Other peculiarities of design and construction were also discovered, which add greatly to the interest of the building. These investigations are reported in the _American Journal of Archaeology_, Second Series; _Journal of the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America_, Vol. X., No. 1, _et seq._ The ill.u.s.trations, Figures 35 and 36, are, by Mr. Stevens'

courtesy, based upon, though not reproductions of, his original drawings.

GLOSSARY

OF TERMS NOT DEFINED IN THE TEXT.

ALCAZAR (Span., from Arabic _Al Kasr_), a palace or castle, especially of a governing official.

ARCHIVOLT, a band or group of mouldings decorating the wall-face of an arch; or a transverse arch projecting slightly from the surface of a barrel or groined vault.

ASTYLAR, without columns.

BALNEA, a Roman bathing establishment, less extensive than the _thermae_.

BEL ETAGE, the princ.i.p.al story of a building, containing the reception rooms and saloons; usually the second story (first above the ground story).

BROKEN ENTABLATURE, an entablature which projects forward over each column or pilaster, returning back to the wall and running along with diminished projection between the columns, as in the Arch of Constantine (Fig. 63).

CANTONED PIERS, piers adorned with columns or pilasters at the corners or on the outer faces.

CARTOUCHE (Fr.), an ornament shaped like a shield or oval. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, the oval encircling the name of a king.

CAVETTO, a concave, quarter-round moulding.

CHEVRON, a V-shaped ornament.

CHRYSELEPHANTINE, of ivory and gold; used of statues in which the nude portions are of ivory and the draperies of gold.

CONSOLE, a large scroll-shaped bracket or ornament, having its broadest curve at the bottom.

CORINTHIANESQUE, resembling the Corinthian; used of capitals having corner-volutes and acanthus leaves, but combined otherwise than in the cla.s.sic Corinthian type.