The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  VIII. ITALIAN GOTHIC: 1200–1300

  Medieval Italians called Gothic lo stile Tedesco; and Renaissance Italians, equally mistaken about its origin, invented the name Gothic for it, on the ground that only the transalpine barbarians could have developed so extravagant an art. The decorative exuberance and exalted audacity of the style offended the classic and long-chastened tastes of the Italian soul. If Italy at last adopted Gothic, it was with a reluctance verging on contempt; and only after she had transformed it to her own needs and mood could she produce not only the exotic brilliance of Milan Cathedral, but the strange Byzantine-Romanesque Gothic of Orvieto and Siena, Assisi and Florence. Her soil and her ruins alike abounded in marble, with which she could face her shrines in slabs of many tints; but how could she carve a marble façade into the complex portals of the freestone North? She did not need the enormous windows by which the chill and cloudy North invited light and warmth; she preferred the small windows that made her cathedrals cool sanctuaries against the sun; she thought thick walls, even iron braces, no uglier than stilted buttresses. Not needing pinnacles or pointed arches as devices of support, she used them as ornaments, and never quite appropriated the constructive logic of the Gothic style.

  In the North that style had been, before 1300, almost entirely ecclesiastical; and the few exceptions were in such commercial cities as Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. In northern and Central Italy, even richer than the Lowlands in manufacturing and trade, civic architecture played a prominent role in the Gothic development. Town halls, city walls, gates, and towers, feudal castles and merchant palaces took on Gothic form or ornament. Perugia began its Palazzo del Municipio in 12 81, Siena its Palazzo Pubblico in 12 89, Bologna its Palazzo Comunale in 1290, Florence its unique and graceful Palazzo Vecchio in 1298—all in Tuscan Gothic style.

  At Assisi in 1228 Brother Elias, to accommodate his numerous Franciscan monks and the swelling crowd of pilgrims to St. Francis’ tomb, ordered the erection of the spacious convent and church of San Francesco—the first Gothic church in Italy. The commission was given to a German master builder whom the Italians named Iacopo d’Alemannia; perhaps it was for this reason that Gothic was known in Italy as “the German style.” Iacopo built a Lower Church in Romanesque groined-vault style, and upon this an Upper Church with traceried windows and ribbed and pointed vault. The churches and the convent make an imposing mass, not quite as interesting as the remarkable frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, and Giotto’s pupils, or the tourists and worshipers who daily flock from a hundred towns to the shrine of Italy’s favorite and least-heeded saint.

  Siena is still a medieval city: a public square with government buildings, open market stands, and modest adjoining shops that make no effort to attract the eye. From this center a dozen alleys pick their shady, hazardous way between dark and ancient tenements hardly ten feet apart, filled with a kindly and volatile people to whom water is a luxury rarer and more dangerous than wine. On a hill behind the tenements rises La Metropolitana—the cathedral of the city—in an unpleasant striation of black and white marble. Begun in 1229, it was completed in 1348. In 1380, from plans left by Giovanni Pisano, a new and gorgeous façade was added, all of red, black, or white marble, with three Romanesque portals flanked by jambs of splendid carving and surmounted by gables of crocketed design; a vast rose window filtered the setting sun; arcades and colonnades running along the front presented a parade of statuary; pinnacles and towers of white marble softened the corners; and in the high pediment a vast mosaic showed the Virgin Mother floating up to paradise. The Italian architect was interested in a bright and colorful surface; not, like the French, in the subtle play of light and shade upon recessed portal orders and deeply sculptured façades. There are no buttresses here; the choir is topped with a Byzantine dome; the weight is borne by thick walls and by round arches of gigantic span rising from clustered columns of marble to a vault of round and pointed ribs. Here is a Tuscan Gothic still predominantly Romanesque, all the world apart from the heavy miracles of Amiens and Cologne. Within is the white marble pulpit of Niccolò and Giovanni Pisano, a bronze Baptist by Donatello (1457), frescoes by Pinturicchio, an altar by Baldassare Peruzzi (1532), richly carved choir stalls by Bartolomeo Neroni (1567); so an Italian church could grow from century to century through the never-ending stream of Italian genius.

  While Siena’s cathedral and campanile were taking form, a miracle reported from the village of Bolsena had architectural results. A priest who had doubted the doctrine of transubstantiation was convinced by seeing blood on the consecrated Host. In commemoration of this marvel, Pope Urban IV not only instituted the Feast of Corpus Christi (1264), but ordered the erection of a cathedral at neighboring Orvieto. Arnolfo di Cambio and Lorenzo Maetani designed it, engaged forty architects, sculptors, and painters from Siena and Florence, and worked on it from 1290 to its completion in 1330. The façade followed the style of Siena’s, but with finer finish of execution and better proportion and symmetry; it is a vast painting in marble, whose every element is itself a painstaking masterpiece. Incredibly detailed and yet precise reliefs on the broad pilasters between the portals tell again the story of creation, the life of Christ, the Redemption, and the Last Judgment; one of these reliefs, the Visitation, has already the perfection of Renaissance sculpture. Delicately carved colonnades divide the three stages of the lofty façade, and shelter a population of prophets, apostles, Fathers, and saints; a rose window dubiously ascribed to Orcagna (1359) centers the whole complex composition; and above it a dazzling mosaic (now removed) portrayed the Coronation of the Virgin. The strangely striated interior is a simple basilican arcade under a low wooden ceiling; the light is poor, and one can hardly do justice to the frescoes by Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Luca Signorelli.

  But it was in opulent Florence that the fury of building which swept through Italy in the thirteenth century worked its greatest marvels. In 1294 Arnolfo di Cambio began the church of Santa Croce; he retained the traditional basilican plan without transepts and with flat wooden ceiling, but he adopted the pointed arch for the windows, the nave arcade, and the marble façade. The beauty of the church consisted less in its architecture than in the wealth of sculptures and frescoes within, showing all the skill of a maturing Italian art. In 1298 Arnolfo refaced the baptistery with that tasteless alternation of black and white marble layers which disfigures so many works of the Tuscan style by crushing the vertical elevation under a plethora of horizontal lines. But the proud spirit of the age—another cockcrow of the Renaissance—can be heard in the edict (1294) by which the Signoria commissioned Arnolfo to build the great cathedral:

  Whereas it is sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high origin to proceed in its affairs in such wise that the wisdom and magnanimity of its proceedings may shine forth in its visible works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our commune, shall prepare models or designs for the restoration of [the cathedral of] Santa Maria Reparata, with the most exalted and the most prodigal magnificence, in order that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with that which our wisest citizens have declared and counseled in public session and in secret conclave—that no hand be laid upon the works of the commune without the intention of making them correspond to the noble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united in one will.32

  As doubtless this expansive proclamation was intended to do, it stimulated public giving. The guilds of the city joined in financing the enterprise; and when, later on, other guilds proved slack, the wool guild took over the entire cost, contributing as high as 51,500 gold lire ($9,270,000) a year.33 Accordingly, Arnolfo laid out dimensions on a grandiose scale. The stone vault was to be 150 feet high, equal to Beauvais’; the nave 260 by 55; and the weight was to be borne by thick walls, iron braces, and pointed nave arches remarkable for their small number—four—and their enormous sixty-five-foot span and ninety-foot height. Arnolfo died in 1301
; the work went on, with considerable alteration of plans, under Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Brunelleschi, and others; and the ugly pile, renamed Santa Maria de Fiore, was not consecrated till 1436. It is a structure immense and bizarre, which spanned six centuries in building, covered 84,000 square feet, and proved inadequate for Savonarola’s audience.

  IX. SPANISH GOTHIC: 1091–1300

  As the monks of France had brought Romanesque architecture to Spain in the eleventh century, so in the twelfth they carried Gothic over the Pyrenees. In the picturesque little town of Avila the cathedral of San Salvador (1091f inaugurated the transition with round arches, a Gothic portal, and, in the apse, elegant columns rising to pointed ribs in the vault. At Salamanca piety preserved the old transitional cathedral of the twelfth century beside the new one of the sixteenth; the two together form one of the most imposing architectural ensembles in Spain. At Tarragona difficulties of finance prolonged the building of the seo or episcopal see from 1089 to 1375; the simple solidity of the older elements forms a fit background for the Gothic and Moorish decoration; and the cloisters—Romanesque colonnades under a Gothic vault—are among the most beautiful productions of medieval art.

  Tarragona is distinctly Spanish; Burgos, Toledo, and Leon are progressively more French. The marriage of Blanche of Castile to Louis VIII of France (1200) widened the road of intercourse already opened by migratory monks. It was her nephew, Fernando III of Castile, who laid the first stone of Burgos Cathedral in 1221; it was an unknown French architect who designed the structure; a German of Cologne—Juan de Colonia—who raised the spires (1442); a Burgundian, Felipé de Borgoña, who rebuilt the great lantern over the transept cross (1539–43); at last his pupil, the Spaniard Juan de Vallejo, completed the edifice in 1567. The ornate traceried spires, the open towers that uphold them, and the sculptured arcade give to the west front of Santa Maria la Mayor a dignity and splendor that one cannot soon forget. Originally all this stone façade was painted; the colors have long since worn away; we can only try to imagine the resplendent mass that here once rivaled the sun.

  The same Fernando III provided the funds for the still more magnificent cathedral of Toledo. Few inland cities have a more scenic site—nestling in a bend of the Tagus River, and hidden by protective hills; none would guess from its present poverty that once Visigothic kings, then Moorish emirs, then the Christian monarchs of Leon and Castile made it their capital. Begun in 1227, the cathedral rose in slow installments, and was hardly finished by 1493. Only one tower was executed on the original plan; it is half Moorish in the style of the Giralda at Seville, and almost as elegant. The other tower was capped in the seventeenth century with a dome designed by Toledo’s most famous citizen, Domingo Teotocópuli—El Greco. The interior, 395 feet long and 178 feet wide, is a live-aisled maze of tall piers, ornate chapels, ascetic stone saints, iron grilles, and 750 windows of stained glass. All the energy of the Spanish character, all the gloom and passion of Spanish piety, all the elegance of Spanish manners, and something of the Moslem’s flair for ornament find form and voice in this immense cathedral.

  It is a proverb in Spain that “Toledo has the richest of our cathedrals, Oviedo the holiest, Salamanca the strongest, Leon the most beautiful.”34 Begun by Bishop Manrique in 1205, the cathedral of Leon was financed by small contributions rewarded with indulgences, and was completed in 1303. It adopted the French Gothic plan of building a cathedral chiefly of windows; and its stained glass ranks high among the masterpieces of that art. It may be true that the ground plan is taken from Reims, the west front from Chartres, the south portal from Burgos; the result is a charming cento of the French cathedrals—with finished towers and spires.

  Many other shrines rose to celebrate the reconquest of Spain for Christianity—at Zamora in 1174, Tudela in 1188, Lerida in 1203, Palma in 1229, Valencia in 1262, Barcelona in 1298. But, excepting Leon, we should hardly describe the Spanish cathedrals of this period as Gothic. They avoided large windows and flying buttresses; they rested their weight on heavy walls and piers; instead of arch ribs running from base to ceiling, the piers themselves rose almost to the vault; and these tall columns, rising like stone giants in the caverns of immense naves, give to Spanish cathedral interiors a dark grandeur that subdues the soul with terror, while Northern Gothic lifts it up with light. Portals and windows, in Spanish Gothic, often kept the Romanesque arch; amid the Gothic ornament the decoration by diverse layers and patterns of colored brick preserved a Moorish element; and the Byzantine influence survived in domes and half domes rising with pendentive modulations from a polygonal base. It was from these varied constituents that Spain evolved a unique style for some of the finest cathedrals in Europe.

  Not the least notable achievements of medieval architecture were the castles and fortresses of the countryside, and the walls and gates of the towns. The walls of Avila still stand to prove the medieval sense of form; and such gates as the Puerto del Sol in Toledo typically married beauty to use. From memories of the Roman castellum, and perhaps from observation of Moslem forts,35 the Crusaders built in the Near East mighty fortresses like that of Kerak (1121), superior in both mass and form to anything of their kind in that warlike age. Hungary, the bastion of Europe against the Mongols, raised magnificent castle-fortresses in the thirteenth century. The art flowed west, and left in Italy such masterpieces of military art as the fortress-tower of Volterra, and in France the thirteenth-century castles of Coucy and Pierrefonds, and the famous Château Gaillard that Richard Coeur de Lion constructed (1197) on returning from Palestine. Castles in Spain were no figments of fancy, but powerful masses of masonry that kept back the Moors and gave a name to Castile. When Alfonso VI of Castile (1073–1108) captured Segovia from the Moslems he built there a castle-fortress on the plan of the Alcazar of Toledo. In Italy castles rose as urban citadels for nobles; the towns of Tuscany and Lombardy still bristle with them; San Gimignano alone had thirteen before the Second World War. As early as the tenth century, at Châteaudun, France began to build the châteaux that in the Renaissance period were to form a lordly feature of her art. The technique of erecting stone castles passed into England with the Norman favorites of Edward the Confessor; it was advanced by the offensive and defensive measures of William the Conqueror, under whose iron hand the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and Durham Castle took their earliest forms. From France, again, castle-building migrated to Germany, where it became a passion with lawless barons, warrior kings, and conquering saints. The monstrous Schloss of Königsberg, built (1257) as a fortress from which the Teutonic Knights might rule a hostile population, was a proper victim of the Second World War.

  X. CONSIDERATIONS

  Gothic architecture was the supreme achievement of the medieval soul. The men who dared to suspend those vaults on a few stilts of stone studied and expressed their science with greater thoroughness and effect than any medieval philosopher in any summa, and the lines and harmonies of Notre Dame make a greater poem than The Divine Comedy. Comparison of Gothic with classic architecture cannot be made in gross but demands specification. No one city in medieval Europe rivaled the architectural product of either Athens or Rome, and no Gothic shrine has the pure beauty of the Parthenon; but neither has any classic structure known to us the complex sublimity of the Reims façade, or the uplifting inspiration of Amiens’ vault. The restraint and repose of the classic style expressed the rationality and moderation that Greece preached to effervescent Greece; the romantic ecstasy of French Gothic, the somber immensity of Burgos or Toledo, unwittingly symbolized the tenderness and longing of the medieval spirit, the terror and myth and mystery of a religious faith. Classical architecture and philosophy were sciences of stability; the architraves that bound the columns of the Parthenon were the meden agan of the Delphic inscription, laying a heavy hand upon exaltation, counseling steadiness, and almost forcing men’s thoughts back to this life and earth. The spirit of the North was properly called Gothic, for it inherited the restless audacity of the conquering barbarians
; it passed insatiate from victory to victory, and finally, with flying buttress and soaring arch, laid siege to the sky. But it was also a Christian spirit, appealing to heaven for the peace that barbarism had alienated from the earth. Out of those contradictory motives came the greatest triumph of form over matter in all the history of art.

  Why did Gothic architecture decline? Partly because every style, like an emotion, exhausts itself by complete expression, and invites reaction or change. The development of Gothic into Perpendicular in England, Flamboyant in France, left the form no future except exaggeration and decay. The collapse of the Crusades, the decline of religious belief, the diversion of funds from Mary to Mammon, from Church to state, broke the spirit of the Gothic age. The taxation of the clergy, after Louis IX, depleted the cathedral treasuries. The communes and the guilds that had shared in the glory and the costs lost their independence, their wealth, and their pride. The Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War exhausted both France and England. Not only did new construction diminish in the fourteenth century, but most of the great cathedrals begun in the twelfth and thirteenth were left unfinished. Finally the rediscovery of classic civilization by the humanists, and the revival of classical architecture in Italy, where it had never died, superseded Gothic with a new exuberance. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century Renaissance architecture dominated Western Europe, even through baroque and rococo. When, in its turn, the classic mood paled away, the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century re-created the Middle Ages in idealizing imagination, and Gothic architecture returned. The struggle between the classic and the Gothic styles still rages in our churches and schools, our marts and capitals, while a new and indigenous architecture, bolder even than Gothic, rides the sky.