To sum up, it is clear that for these and various other reasons by the time of Constantine sculpture had already fallen into decline, together with the other fine arts. And if anything were needed to complete their ruin it was provided decisively when Constantine left Rome to establish the capital of the Empire at Byzantium. For he took with him to Greece not only all the finest sculptors and other artists, such as they were at that time, but also countless statues and other extremely beautiful works of sculpture.
After Constantine had departed, the Caesars whom he left in Italy continually commissioned new buildings, both in Rome and elsewhere. They endeavoured to have the work done as well as possible; but we can see that sculpture and painting and architecture went inexorably from bad to worse. And the most convincing explanation for this is that once human affairs start to deteriorate improvement is impossible until the nadir has been reached. Under Pope Liberius the architects evidently tried to achieve great things when they built the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. But they were not altogether successful. Admittedly, the building (which was also constructed from spoils) has the right proportions. Nevertheless, other faults apart, it is undeniable that the space above the columns going right round the church, which is decorated with stuccoes and paintings, is of very poor design; and there are many other features of that great church which bear witness to the imperfect condition of the arts at that time.
Many years later, when the Christians were being persecuted under Julian the Apostate, a church was built on the Coelian Hill and dedicated to the martyrs SS. John and Paul; and this was so inferior in style to the churches mentioned above that it proves conclusively that by then art had almost completely died out.
The buildings put up in Tuscany during that period also give eloquent testimony of this. I shall pass many others over in silence, and cite only the church which was built outside the walls of Arezzo and dedicated to St Donatus, the bishop of Arezzo who was martyred with the monk Hilarion under Julian the Apostate. It was architecturally no improvement at all on the church mentioned above; and this was simply because of the lack of good architects, for it was built at great cost, with no expense spared. As we have been able to see in our own lifetime, the church was constructed with eight sides from the remains of the theatre, the colosseum, and other buildings which had stood in Arezzo before the city was converted to the Christian faith; it was adorned with columns of granite, porphyry, and variegated marble, taken from those buildings. For myself, I am convinced, considering what was lavished on the church, that if the Aretines had had better architects they would have produced something marvellous. We can see from what they did achieve that they spared nothing to make the building as rich and well proportioned as possible. And since, as we have said several times already, architecture was in better shape than the other arts, their church did have some good aspects. The church of Santa Maria in Grado was also built at that time and dedicated to Hilarion, who had lived in Arezzo for a long time before he received the palm of martyrdom with Donatus.
However, after fortune has carried men to the top of her wheel, she usually, for sport or from regret for what she has done, spins the wheel right round again. Just so, after the events we have described almost all the barbarian nations rose up against the Romans in various parts of the world, and this within a short time led not only to the humbling of their great empire but also to worldwide destruction, notably at Rome itself. This destruction struck equally and decisively at the greatest artists, sculptors, painters, and architects: they and their work were left buried and submerged among the sorry ruins and debris of that renowned city. Painting and sculpture were the first of the arts to fall on evil days, since they existed chiefly to give pleasure. Architecture, being necessary for sheer physical existence, lingered on, but without its former qualities or perfection. Statues and pictures intended to immortalize those in whose honour they had been done could still be seen by succeeding generations; had it not been so, the memory of both sculpture and painting would soon have been destroyed. Some men were commemorated by effigies and inscriptions placed not only on tombs but also on private and public buildings such as amphitheatres and theatres, baths, aqueducts, temples, obelisks and colossi, pyramids, arches, and treasuries. But a great many of these were destroyed by savage and barbarian invaders, who indeed were human only in name and appearance.
Among them were the Visigoths who, under Alaric, assailed Italy and Rome and twice sacked the city mercilessly. The Vandals, coming from Africa under King Genseric,1 followed their example; and then, content neither with the cruelties he inflicted nor with the booty and plunder he seized, Genseric made slaves of the people of Rome, plunging them into terrible misery. He also enslaved Eudoxia, wife of the Emperor Valentinian who had been murdered a little while previously by his own soldiers. These men had mostly forgotten the ancient valour of the Romans; a long time before, all the best troops had left with Constantine for Byzantium and those who remained were dissolute and corrupt. At one and the same time every true soldier and every kind of military virtue were lost. Laws, customs, names, and language were all changed. All these events brutalized and debased men of fine character and high intelligence.
But what inflicted incomparably greater damage and loss on the arts than the things we have mentioned was the fervent enthusiasm of the new Christian religion. After long and bloody combat, Christianity, aided by a host of miracles and the burning sincerity of its adherents, defeated and wiped out the old faith of the pagans. Then with great fervour and diligence it strove to cast out and utterly destroy every least possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvellous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods; and as well as this it destroyed countless memorials and inscriptions left in honour of illustrious persons who had been commemorated by the genius of the ancient world in statues and other public adornments. Moreover, in order to construct churches for their own services the Christians destroyed the sacred temples of the pagan idols. To embellish and heighten the original magnificence of St Peter’s they despoiled of its stone columns the mausoleum of Hadrian (today called Castel Sant’Angelo) and they treated in the same way many buildings whose ruins still exist. These things were done by the Christians not out of hatred for the arts but in order to humiliate and overthrow the pagan gods. Nevertheless, their tremendous zeal was responsible for inflicting severe damage on the practice of the arts, which then fell into total confusion.
As if these disasters were not enough, Rome then suffered the anger of Totila:1 the walls of the city were destroyed, its finest and most noble buildings were razed to the ground with fire and sword, and then it was burned from one end to the other, left bereft of every living creature and abandoned to the ravages of the conflagration. For the space of eighteen days not a living thing moved; Totila tore down and destroyed the city’s marvellous statues, its pictures, mosaics, and stuccoes. As a result, Rome lost, I will not say its majesty but rather, its identity and its very life. Now the ground floors of the palaces and other buildings in Rome had been decorated with stuccoes, paintings, and statues; these were buried under the ruins, and only in our own day have many of these rare works been rediscovered. Those who lived after the disasters, believing that everything was lost, planted vines on the rubble; and so the ground floors of the buildings which had been destroyed stayed for centuries under the earth. For that reason in modern times they have been called grottoes, and the paintings that can now be seen in them have been called grotesques.
After the Ostrogoths had been exterminated by Narses, the ruins of Rome were inhabited in miserable fashion until, a hundred years later, the arrival of Constantine II, the emperor of Constantinople; he was affectionately welcomed by the Romans, yet he dissipated, despoiled, or carried away everything of value which had been left (more by chance than by the deliberate choice of the plunderers) in their unhappy city. True enough he was unable to enjoy his boot
y, because while at sea he was swept by a tempest to Sicily, where he was justly killed by his own men, losing to fortune his spoils, his kingdom, and his life. However, fortune, not content with the losses Rome had already suffered, in order to prevent what had been stolen ever being brought back led a band of Saracens to the island, who carried off to Alexandria the wealth of the Sicilians and the spoils taken from Rome, to the great shame and loss of Italy and the Christian faith. So what had not been destroyed by the pontiffs (notably St Gregory, who is said to have issued an edict against all the remaining statues and works of art, which were taken from the buildings) was finally lost because of that wicked Greek. In the end there was left not the slightest trace of good art. The next generation of artists were awkward and crude, especially when it came to painting and sculpture. However, prompted by nature and civilized by the very atmosphere in which they lived, they did start to create works of art, not according to the rules of good art, of which they were ignorant, but with each one following his own ideas.
Such was the condition of the arts of design before, during, and after the period when the Lombards ruled Italy as despots. Precious little was done, but the practice of the arts did at least continue, and so did their decline. The work produced could not have been more awkward or more lacking in the qualities of design. Of this, one proof among many is provided by some figures above the doors in the portico of St Peter’s at Rome, which were made in the Byzantine style and which commemorate some Fathers of the Church who had defended Holy Church before some of the Councils. Other examples can be found in the city and throughout the Exarchate of Ravenna, notably some figures just outside the city in Santa Maria Rotonda, made soon after the Lombards were chased out of Italy. I cannot deny that this church contains one impressive and very noteworthy feature, namely, the vaulting or rather cupola which covers it. This is nearly twenty feet in diameter and serves as a roof covering the whole building, and yet it is all in one piece. It seems impossible that such a large, unwieldy slab of stone, weighing over two hundred thousand pounds, could have been raised so high.1 But to go back to what I was saying: what came from the hands of the artists of those times were only fantastic abortions of the kind we can still see in many old works.
Architecture met the same fate as sculpture. Men still had to build, but all sense of form and good style had been lost by the death of good artists and the destruction and decay of their work. Consequently those who practised architecture produced buildings which were totally lacking in grace, design, and judgement as far as style and proportion were concerned. And then new architects came along who built for the barbarians of that time in the kind of style which we nowadays know as German; they put up various buildings which amuse us moderns far more than they could have pleased the people of those days. Then some idea of form and some approximation to the good ancient rules were rediscovered by better architects, who have left examples of their style throughout Italy in the oldest as distinct from the antique churches. For instance, they built a palace for Theodoric, king of Italy, at Ravenna, another at Pavia and another at Modena, all of which, however, were in that barbarous style, vast and ornate but showing little grasp of sound architectural principles. The same criticism can be levelled against San Stefano in Rimini, San Martino in Ravenna, and the church of San Giovanni Evangelista built in the same city by Galla Placidia, around the year 438 A.D., as well as San Vitale which was built in 547, the Abbey of Classe di Fuori, and in short against many other monasteries and churches built after the time of the Lombards. All these buildings, as I have said, are vast and magnificent, but extremely clumsy in their architecture; they include many monasteries in France, dedicated to St Benedict, the church and monastery of Monte Cassino, and the church of San Giovanni Battista at Monza, built by that Theodolinda, queen of the Goths, to whom Pope St Gregory addressed his Dialogues. It was there that the history of the Lombards was painted for the queen. The scenes show that the Lombards shaved the back of their heads, wore their hair long in front, and dyed their bodies up to their chin. Like the Angles and Saxons, they wore broadcloth, multicoloured cloaks, and sandals open along the foot and bound at the ankle with leather straps.
The church of San Giovanni at Pavia, built by Theodolinda’s daughter, Gondiberta, was similar to the churches mentioned above, as also was the church of San Salvatore (built in the same city by Aribert, Gondiberta’s brother, who succeeded Rodoald, the queen’s husband) and the church of Sant’Ambrogio of Pavia, built by Grimoald, the Lombard king who drove out Bertrid, the son of Aribert. After the death of Grimoald when Bertrid was restored to the throne he built in Pavia a convent, in honour of Our Lady and St Agatha, called the New Convent, and his queen built a convent outside the walls, dedicated to Our Lady in Pertica. Bertrid’s son, Cunibert, erected, in the same style as the above, a monastery and church in honour of St George, called San Giorgio di Coronate, at the spot where he had won a major victory over Alahi. And similar to these was the church which the Lombard king Luitprand, who was a contemporary of Charlemagne’s father, King Pepin, built at Pavia, which is called San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. Also in the same style was the church of San Pietro Clivate, in the diocese of Milan (which was built by Desiderius who reigned after Astolphus), the monastery of San Vincenzo in Milan, and the monastery of Santa Giulia in Brescia: they were all very costly works, but in the ugliest, most impure styles. Later on, architecture showed some improvement, and in Florence the church of SS. Apostoli, which was built by Charlemagne, was extremely beautiful even though it was small. The shafts of the columns are formed of separate pieces, but they are very graceful and finely proportioned; and, moreover, the capitals and the arches which form the vaulting for the two side aisles show that one good artist remained, or rather arose, in Tuscany at that time. In fact, the architecture of the church is such that Filippo Brunelleschi was not ashamed to use it as a model when he built the churches of Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo in Florence.
The same progress can be seen in the church of St Mark at Venice (not to mention the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, built by Giovanni Morosini in 978). St Mark’s was started near San Teodosio under the Doges Justiniano and Giovanni Particiaco, when the body of the Evangelist was brought to Venice from Alexandria; after the Doge’s palace and the church itself had been damaged several times by fire, it was eventually rebuilt on the same foundations in the Byzantine style, as it appears today, at tremendous expense and under the direction of several architects. This was in A.D. 973, when the doge was Domenico Selvo. It was he who had the columns brought from various parts of the world. Work on the church continued, with as I said several architects, all Greeks, supervising the design, until 1140, when the doge was Piero Polani.
The seven abbeys which Count Ugo, marquis of Brandenburg, built in Tuscany at that time were also Byzantine, as we can see from the Abbey of Florence, the one at Settimo, and from the others. All these buildings and the ruins of others show us that architecture was still alive, although very bastardized and very remote from the sound antique style. The same is shown by many old palaces which were built in Florence after Fiesole was destroyed. These are the work of Tuscans, but they are barbarously impure in style, as we can see from the proportions of their ridiculously long windows and doors, and from the zigzags in the vaulting of their arches after the practice of foreign architects of that time. Then in 1013 the reconstruction of the beautiful church of San Miniato sul Monte showed that architecture had regained some of its earlier vigour. This was when the Florentine Alibrando was bishop of Florence. The interior and the exterior of the church are richly ornamented with marble, and its façade shows how the Tuscan architects were striving to reproduce in the doors, the windows, columns, arches, and cornices as much as they could of the pure antique style, which to some extent they recognized in the very ancient church of San Giovanni in their own city.1 At the same period the art of painting, after having almost completely disappeared, started to revive a little, as we can see from the mosaic exec
uted in the principal chapel of San Miniato.
From these beginnings the arts of design slowly started to revive and flourish in Tuscany. In the year 1016, for example, the Pisans began to construct their cathedral; and at that time it was a major step forward to set to work on a church which had five naves and was almost entirely faced with marble, both inside and out. This church was built from the designs and ideas of a Greek from Dulichium by the name of Buschetto, a notable architect of that time. It was constructed and decorated by the Pisans from innumerable spoils shipped from all parts of the world, they being then at the height of their power. We can see this clearly from the cathedral’s columns, bases, capitals, and cornices, and from the other stones of every kind which it contains. These materials were of various sizes, small, large, and medium; so in fitting them together and arranging them to build the church Buschetto showed no little skill. The exterior and interior of the cathedral are both beautifully constructed. Not to mention other things, for the principal façade of the church Buschetto used a great number of columns, achieving a very ingenious diminution towards the gable, which he adorned with various kinds of sculptured columns and antique statues. Similarly he made the principal doors of the façade; and it was between these (near the door of the Carroccio)2 that Buschetto was subsequently given an honourable burial-place, with three epitaphs, one of which, in Latin verse, is typical of the style of the period. It reads as follows:
Lives of the Artists Page 4