Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

From Macmillan's Magazine. RECENT WORKS ON THE BUILDINGS OF

ROME.

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

of the First Crusade, when the monk of Malmesbury stops his narrative to describe the topography of Rome, to tell us how the Romans, once the lords of the Of all the various forms of homage world, were now the lowest of mankind, which the world has paid to the city who did nothing but sell all that was which was once deemed to be its mis- righteous and sacred for gold. The tress, none is really more speaking than chain never breaks; we have pictures of the countless multitudes of books of Rome in every age; but unluckily the which Rome has been the subject. If picture drawn in each age sets before us we say that works on Roman topography less than the picture drawn in the age have been growing for the conventional just before it. Archbishop Hildebert of term of a thousand years, we are some Tours, whose verses William of Malmescenturies within the mark. We might bury copies, sang of Rome, when the almost venture to add another half mil-marks of the sack of Robert Wiscard lennium of formal and distinct descrip- were still fresh upon her, as a city already tions of Rome, as distinguished from ruined. But the worst ruin had not notices in the works of historians, poets, and professed geographers. Modern scholars still edit and comment on the topographical writings of the fourth and fifth centuries, which describe Rome as it stood when the line of the Western Cæsars, reigning in Italy at least if not in Rome, was still unbroken.† And the series goes on, through the middle ages, through the Renaissance, till we reach those great works of modern German research which have worked out every detail, both of the surviving remains and of the lost buildings, of the Eternal City. We can still track out our way round the walls of Rome by the guidance of the anonymous pilgrim from Einsiedlen in the eighth century.‡ We pause not unwillingly in the history

[blocks in formation]

come in his day. We may forgive the Norman and the Saracen; we may forgive the contending Roman barons; but we cannot forgive the havoc wrought by Popes and Popes' nephews in the boasted days of the Renaissance. When we look at what they have done, we may be thankful that there are still some things, heathen and Christian, which have lived through four ages of relentless destruction and disfigurement. For Rome as the monumental city, as the museum of art and history, the evil day was, not when the Goth or the Vandal or the Norman entered her gates, but when Popes came back from their place of happy banishment to destroy their city piecemeal. We may rejoice that their day is over. New causes of destruction may arise, as the capital of new-born Italy spreads itself once more over hills which have become almost as desolate as they were when the first settlers raised their huts on the Palatine. As new streets arise, there is danger that many

William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum iv. 351.) thus begins his account of Rome: "De Roma, quæ quondam domina orbis terrarum, nunc ad compara tionem antiquitatis videtur oppidum exiguum, et de Romanis, olim rerum dominis genteque togata, qui nunc sunt hominum inertissimi, auro trutinantes justitiam, pretio venditantes canonum regulam."

↑ The verses of Hildebert begin thus:
"Par tibi Roma nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina;
Quam magni fueris integra, fracta doces."

Presently after we read:

"Non tamen aut fieri par stanti machina muro, Aut restaurari sola ruina potest."

and of revival, the time of mere dominion, the time of the Republic and of the earlier Empire, has but a secondary charm. Its proudest monuments yield in interest, as historical memorials, alike to the foundations of the primæval Roma Quadrata and to the churches reared in all the zeal of newly-won victory out of the spoils of the temples of decaying heathendom. The purely artistic student naturally looks on them with other eyes. The stones of the primitive fortress can hardly claim the name of works of

columns brought from other buildings,

relics of old Rome, many ruined frag-deep and enthralling interest, the memoments, many foundations which have to rials of Rome's second birth, of the day be looked for beneath the earth, may be when with a new faith she put on a new swept away or hopelessly hidden. But life. Between these two periods of birth the main source of evil is dried up; there is no fear of columns being pounded into lime, no fear of perfect or nearly perfect buildings being used as quarries; perhaps even there is less danger of that subtler form of destruction which cloaks itself under the garb of restoration. All has become, if not wholly safe, at least safer than it was, now that the power which so long boasted itself that it could do mischief is happily banished beyond the bounds of the ancient Rome, shut up in a modern palace in a suburb which formed no part of the city either of Ser-art at all. And the basilicas, built with vius or of Aurelian. Of the general antiquities of Rome, columns often of unequal proportions, of its early topography and early history, and of the light which modern researches have thrown upon them, I do not mean to speak here at any length. The history of Rome is indeed written in her monuments, and new pages of that history, above all in its earliest chapters, are almost daily brought to light. We can now see many things in a new light through the great works of digging which are still going on in various parts of the city, above all on the spot which was the cradle of Rome and on the spot which was the centre of her full-grown life, on the Palatine Hill and in the Roman Forum. But the pages of history which are thus brought to light are pages which need the greatest caution in reading. They are oracles which tell their own tale, but which tell it only to inquirers who draw near in the spirit of sound criticism, not in that of blind belief or hasty conjecture. Of all the works of men's hands in the Eternal City, two classes speak to the mind with a deeper interest than any others. The first are the small remains of primitive times, the still-abiding relics of the days when the Ramnes of the Palatine and the Titienses of the Capitol lived each on their separate hills, as distinct and hostile tribes. These relics speak of the first birth of Rome; next to them, almost beyond them from the pointing of its name was forgotten, and it was connected of view of universal history, come, in with the legendary King Servius Tullius.

and crowned with capitals of different orders, are apt to be looked on simply as signs of the depth of degradation into which art had fallen. Of these two propositions the truth of the former cannot be denied; the latter is true or false according to the way in which the history of art is looked at. The fortresses of primæval days from which, if we only read them aright, we may learn such precious lessons of primæval history, are hardly to be called works of architecture; they are simply works of construction. They are simply the putting together of stones, sometimes in a ruder, sometimes in a more workmanlike fashion, to serve a practical need. There is no system of decoration, no ornament of any kind, upon them. Indeed among the scanty remains which we have of primæval work at Rome we could not look for any system of decoration. There is not so much as a gateway of the primæval fortress left to us, and in no age should we ask for much of architectural detail in the mouth of a sewer or in the roof of an underground well-house. Had Rome never risen higher than the

other cities

of the building which bears the name-mediavai only, All scholars seem now agreed that the lower story but still perhaps traditional- of the Mamertine Prison, was at first simply a well-house or tullianum, and that, when it was afterwards used as a prison, the true mean

of Latium, she might have been as rich, What Rome began in her sewers, she in remains of these early times as some carried out in her gateways, in her of the other cities of Latium still are. aqueducts, in her baths and her amStill in the early remains of Rome, scanty phitheatres. Other nations invented as they are, in these abiding relics of a the round arch as well as Rome; in time when the names and deeds of men Rome alone it found an abiding home. are still legendary, we can see clear signs It was only in Rome, and in the lands of two stages in the art of construction. which learned their arts from Rome, that We can see a stage when the greatest of it became the great constructive feature, all constructive inventions was still un- used on a scale which, whatever we say of known, and another stage when it was the Roman architects, stamps the Roman already familiar. We can see in Rome, builders as the greatest that the world as in Latium, in Greece, in Ireland, and ever saw. But it was not till, in common in Central America, works of the time belief, the might, the glory, and the art when men were still striving after the of Rome had passed away, that Rome, great invention of the arch. We can working in her own style in the use of see works which are clearly due to a her own great constructive invention, stage when men were still trying various learned to produce, not only mighty experiments, when they were making works of building, but consistent works various attempts to bring stones so as to of architecture. overlap and support one another, but In this way the two turning points in when the perfect arch, with its stones the history of Rome, her birth and her poised in mid-air by a law of mutual me- new birth, the days of her native infancy chanical support, had not yet rewarded and the days when she rose to a new life the efforts of those who were feeling at the hands of her Christian teachers their way towards it. The roof of the and her Teutonic conquerors, are brought Tullianum is no true vault, any more into the closest connection with one anthan the roof of New Grange or of the other. From the point of view of the Treasury at Mykênê. In some of the unity of history, the course of the archipassages connected with it the roof has tecture of Rome strikingly answers to real mutually supporting voussoirs; but the course of the literature of Rome. the shape of the voussoirs is still polyg- Her architecture and her literature alike onal; the most perfect form of the arch are, during the time of Rome's greatest had not yet been lighted on. In the outward glory, during the ages which Cloaca Maxima we find the round arch purists mark out by the invidious name in its simplest form, but in a form per-classical," almost wholly of an imitafect as regards its construction. This tive kind. As men followed Greek modgreat invention, which was independently els in literature and clothed Roman made over and over again in times and words and thoughts in the borrowed places far apart from one another, was metres of Greece, so men followed Greek also made at Rome, or at all events models in art also. They clothed a somewhere in Central Italy. The round Roman body in a Greek dress, and arch, the great invention of Roman art, masked the true Roman construction the very embodiment of Roman strength under a borrowed system of Greek ornaand massiveness, the constructive ex- mental detail. In both cases the true pression of the bounderies which were national life was simply overshadowed; never to yield, of the dominion which it was never wholly trampled out. While was never to pass away, came into being philosophy and rhetoric, epic and lyric in a work characteristically Roman. The poetry, were almost wholly imitative, law beginning of Roman architecture is to be and satire and, to some extent, history found, not in a palace or in a temple, but remained national. So too in architecin those vast drains which were said to ture. If we stand in the Forum and adform an underground city, rivalling in ex-mire the exotic grace of the columns of tent the city which they bore aloft. the temple of Vespasian and of the Great

« ПредишнаНапред »