How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

to the quality of the old Greek genius. At its best, under the impulse of a high spiritual purpose, it has expressed itself in terms of Truth and Beauty that no modern nation has rivalled. Even when its motive has been trivial, its manner of expression has redeemed it from insignificance, the craftsmanship being in itself so true and beautiful. Moreover, the French spirit is so agile and responsive, that it has caught and reflected back the diverse thought and feeling of other countries, and, further, has so marked a strain of originality that it has preserved the faculty of creativeness. NETHERLANDISH RENAISSANCE

The Netherlands, through their commercial intercourse with Italy, early came in touch with the Renaissance. But the self-reliance of the people was such that the earliest influence only improved their own way of expressing their racial consciousness. For example, the town halls in which the pride of their cities was enshrined, owed nothing to Italy except some later refinements of decoration. The painting of the Van Eycks was not only different from but technically superior to the contemporary art of Italy and furnished the latter with the practical processes of the oil medium. In time the mannerisms of Italian painting made themselves felt in the work of Van Orley and others, but the genuine reaction of the Flemish genius to the Italian Renaissance did not develop until the seventeenth century, when it produced a reinvigorated expression of itself in the genius of Rubens.

Political and religious causes, due to the grip of the Spanish rule, had retarded the progress of the Flemish provinces, while, on the other hand, it was the break away from this absolutism that started the northern provinces of Holland on their Renaissance. The Holland Renaissance of the seventeenth century, which moved step by step with their struggle for political and religious liberty and their consolidation into a united nation, represented a most remarkable blend of Humanism and Revival of Learning. It was unique at its time and has preserved its significance, because both these engines of activity were devoted deliberately to national and individual betterment. The Dutch zest of life stimulated them not only to obtain their liberty, but also to improve in a multitude of practical ways the conditions of living. It caused them to organise industry and commerce, to cultivate their land intensively and to extend their explorations and trade over the seven seas. Nor were the intellectual resources overlooked. The university of Leyden became a great centre of human culture and its scholars and scientists set the course of thought and research in the direction of modern life.

Holland’s prosperity, however, proved her undoing. After defying and withstanding the absolutism of Spain, she fell a victim to that of Louis XIV. And less by direct conquest than by the insidious sapping of French influences. She became inflated with the ambition of being a world-power, while her citizens emulated the fashions of French society. Losing at the same time political liberty and intellectual and artistic initiative and independence, she followed the human sheep-trail that led southward over the Alps and for more than a century became a clumsy imitator of the past art of Italy.

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

England’s insular position tended to delay her reception of the New Spirit. When at length it reached her it came simultaneously in the form of Italian influence and of the Reformation. Yet both had been anticipated a century earlier; the Reformation in the teaching of Wycliffe, the Renaissance in the poetry of Chaucer. But the harvest of the new spirit had been deferred by the French wars, the Wars of the Roses, and the persecution of the Lollards, so that it was not until 1536, when the King, Lords, and Commons by the Act of Supremacy established the Reformed Faith as the State Religion, that England entered definitely, says Symonds, on a career of intellectual activity abreast with the foremost nations of the Continent.

By this time the latter had accomplished the work of collating and printing the classic authors and had produced a varied mass of literature in the modern languages; all of which became food for the omnivorous appetite of the English. Assimilation, at first, was slow and retarded by imitation. Wyatt and Surrey, for example, grafted the graces of Italian poetry onto the native stock, introducing the forms of the sonnet and blank verse; Sidney experimented with the classic metres, while tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalled the similarly pedantic imitations of Italian and French dramatists. Gradually, however, the vigour of English digestion accomplished a complete assimilation.

England, through her sympathy with Holland, had found herself involved in the conflict of the Counter-Reformation. She broke the rival power of Spain by the destruction of the Armada, and through the buccaneering exploits of Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins opened up the beginnings of colonial expansion. She leaped at a bound into consciousness of nationality and in the glow of her enthusiasm discovered her own capacity of originality.

Shakespeare is at once the crown and symbol of the English Renaissance. He drew the material of his plots from a variety of foreign sources, but creatively impressed upon his plays either a new and a universal significance or unmistakably the English spirit of his day. Meanwhile, Spenser, while deriving his allegory from the Middle Ages and decorative richness from the Italian Renaissance, added thereto a sweetness, purity, and splendour of imagination peculiarly English. And by the side of Spenser and Shakespeare, as representative of the creative imagination of the English Renaissance, must be set Bacon, the expositor of the modern scientific method.

This flowering of the English Renaissance, in which intellectual brilliance walked hand in hand with beauty, was rudely interrupted, firstly, when the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was revived by James I and Charles I; secondly, by the resultant Puritan reaction, and the equally resultant license of the Restoration. A cleavage between morals and beauty was opened up that to this day has not been bridged. On the other hand, the spirit, let loose by the Renaissance and the Reformation, pushed forward persistently on the path of political liberty, and England’s mightiest contribution to the civilisation of the world has been the realisation, however imperfect, of the ideal of human freedom. Meanwhile, in the realm of the arts, it is in the province of Literature, rather than in those of the Fine Arts, that her Renaissance has reaped its most abundant harvest.

CHAPTER II

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY

The foregoing summary of Renaissance culture anticipates three marked characteristics of the architecture which responded to it.

Renaissance architecture was developed from the study of classical antiquities and, to some extent, of classic literature. It was adapted to conditions of society which became increasingly elegant and luxurious. It was created, no longer by gilds of craftsmen, but by individual designers, whose names are recorded and identified with their respective works.

We are also prepared to find that as the study of classic examples lost the freshness of its early inspiration, it led to a growing formalism in the use of the classic details; and that, as the temper of the time declined in taste and grew in grossness, the architectural style reflected the decadence in increasing pretentiousness and extravagance of forms.

The Renaissance proper, in so far as the term New-birth is justified, occupies the fifteenth century, the period called by the Italians the Quattrocento. To the first half of the sixteenth century, the Cinquecento, belongs the more formally classic style, after which appeared the decline of the latter half of the century, known as the Baroque style, followed during the seventeenth century by the further degeneration into the Rococo.