Ralph Adams Cram

FROM Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delayed, and never more than an echo at most. There were bad kings until the second Crusade and the coming of the Cistercians in 1174, and little culture; but from then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a new impulse in religion and in life, and as a result the output of art of all kinds was greatly increased. The three elements entering into the new architecture were: the revived tradition of the old work of the Carolings, much of which still existed in ruinous form, the new ideas brought home from Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cistercian monks always exerting their austere and reforming influence toward simplicity.

Many of the earliest examples of this new work—at least the earliest now existing—are across the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are outside our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, are all beyond our territory, but Cologne is this side the river and contains some of the most organic and best of the late tenth and early eleventh century work. Sta. Maria in Capitolio and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar type of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of equal size and semicircular in plan. The central tower is supported on four piers made up of groups of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse and transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the main walls being carried on columns, set rather close together and carrying round arches. It is an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great possibilities of development, though it has almost never been used elsewhere; probably it is of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by early crusaders, though it may be Byzantine, in which case also it was probably derived from Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of value to them in the development of the later art of Europe. St. Martin’s has also a very beautiful tower with a high broach spire and admirably designed corner turrets. The composition of the church from the east, with its curving apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades of Lombard form under the eaves, and the graceful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, and the whole building is far more organic and logically articulated than the bigger work of a century later farther up the Rhine.

The Church of the Apostles is nearer this later type and has its unfortunate agglomeration of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is sui generis; it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for it is made up of a simple little aisleless church of three bays with a round apse and two small transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular decagon of a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, with large niches in each of the eight lateral sides and a square porch or narthex at the west end. This anomalous “nave” is early thirteenth century it is true, while the eastern church is one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and takes the place of a structure of somewhat similar plan built by the Empress Helena. The sequence is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical Roman building, on the foundations of which the Empress Helena built her church, the crypt of which still remains, then the easterly choir was built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh century, and finally the original main church was torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about 1225.

In nearly all the Romanesque churches of Cologne an attempt has been made to reproduce the original polychromatic decoration which once covered all portions of the masonry, but the results are not eminently satisfactory, for mechanical diaper and stencilling cannot take the place of the old work which was done freely and without exactness of line and spacing, while the colours and the medium used were quite different from what is employed to-day. There is no doubt that once every Gothic interior, now grey and sombre, or garish in its clean whitewash and mathematical jointing of painted lines, was entirely covered with the richest possible surface decoration in colours and gold, and the result must have been a gorgeousness and a gaiety of which we know nothing and that would probably shock our sensitive taste to the point of hysteria. One would like to see some great church with full colour decoration, but as matters now stand, with oil paint, stencils, coal-tar colours, and all that, the experiment could hardly be made with any degree of safety.

In Cologne also are many early, middle, and late Gothic churches; that of the Minorites, St. Severins, St. Panteleon, St. Andreas, St. Cunibert; in fact, Cologne is especially rich in churches of many styles and most of them remarkably good, but they are apt to be overlooked by the tourist who can see, and cares to see, only the overgrown grandeur of the cathedral. Farther up the Rhine we find a long succession of great churches which are characteristically German and well show the best the Teutonic genius was capable of under the highest impulse; Bonn, Coblentz, Mayence, Worms, and Spires are all huge structures and quite in a class by themselves. They are not beautiful by any stretch of courtesy; big they are and massive, with curious combinations of multiplied apses and transepts and towers, but they are without organic quality of any kind, their composition is diffuse and casual, their

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detail crude and uninteresting. Nowhere is there a step forward in the development of organism, and as they increase in size they show only a multiplication of rather infelicitous parts. Underneath is an idea that was susceptible of development into something fine and national, but it never had either the time or the spirit to work itself out and so remains a heavy and rather illiterate labouring after something too dimly seen to be really stimulating in the sense in which the ideal in Normandy and France was stimulating. Actually there was more of promise in the work of the eleventh century, as we see it at Hildesheim and Cologne, but this also was left undeveloped and never worked out its inherent possibilities.

The architectural development of Germany began too late; it was always a full century behind France and Italy, and when the Rhenish people were hammering away at their clumsy and uninspired giants of masonry that never seemed to become anything else and never produced any elements of novelty or progress, either structurally or Æsthetically, Normandy already had struck out those masterpieces of crescent vitality, JumiÈges and the abbeys of Caen, while France was well along the highroad of her consummate Gothic, through St. Denis, Noyon, Laon, and Paris.

This backwardness in the acceptance of civilisation has always worked against the attainment of the highest levels of culture by that portion of the Germanic nation north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, while it has given it a certain advantage in the achievement of material ends, since the ethical and religious considerations, that in a measure held elsewhere, were naturally lacking. No part of this wild land of savage and heathen tribes ever felt the touch of Roman civilisation, such as it was, and it was the last part of central Europe to be Christianised. The Bavarians, Burgundians, and Franks all accepted Christianity at the end of the fifth century, but the tribes between the Rhine and the Weser were heathens for another three hundred years. The Wendish lands (where Berlin now is) did not come into Christian Europe until the early eleventh century, at about the time, let us say, of Duke Richard of Normandy and the founding of the great abbeys and schools of Bec, FÉcamp, and JumiÈges; Pomerania (where the grenadiers come from) was converted after a fashion a hundred years later still, in the days of the highest civilisation in Europe, but Prussia was the last of all, and when Christianity was preached in its arid plains and amongst its stubbornly heathen peoples Reims cathedral was rising into its sublime majesty, marking the high attainments of almost eight centuries of cumulative Christian culture.

Even in the Rhineland, however, there was something lacking to that culture that always has issue in great architectural art; many things were started but none was ever finished. The school of Cologne gave place to the Rhenish fashion and this was suddenly abandoned for Gothic after it had been raised to its highest point in France and was at the very moment of decline. Neither Cologne nor Strasbourg is of the same quality of perfection as Bourges or Amiens or Reims; indeed, they both fall immeasurably short, and though later, across the Rhine, in Freibourg, Erfurt, even as far afield as Vienna, Teutonic blood was to begin a new coursing through veins already hardening, again there was to be no culmination and the Renaissance was accepted, ready-made, as it came from France and Italy.

Cologne is a magnificent essay in premeditated art, and it has certain qualities of almost over-powering grandeur that are wholly its own; the west front with its vast towers is a masterpiece of consistent design, but it is so knowing and academic that it misses the inspiration accorded to more modest and God-fearing master builders, while the interior is wire-drawn and metallic and quite without the infinite grace and subtlety of the best French or even English work. Of the sense of scale it has little or nothing, its detail is of a cast-iron quality, and altogether it seems like a very successful nineteenth-century essay in academic design.

Of course, much of what we see is modern; the choir is fairly early for Gothic in Germany, having been begun in 1248 and finished just seventy-five years later; the transepts followed at once, and the lower portion of the nave, but interest died out and some time during the fifteenth century work completely stopped. During the Renaissance nothing was done except to mess up the forlorn interior with pseudo-classic ineptitudes, and finally the Revolutionists came over to turn the whole thing into a storage place for hay. In 1823 royalty conceived the scheme of restoring the ruin and completing the entire design in accordance with certain original plans which had been preserved. It is said, possibly with truth,

that the first architect, Master Gerard, sold his soul to the devil as the price for these same plans, and if so he would perhaps have done better had he followed the practice of the master masons of a century earlier in France, who preferred to deal with other spiritual powers and not on the basis of trade. However this may be, the work went on at the expense of all Germany, and was finally completed in 1880, at a cost of some five millions of dollars.

As it stands, then, it is largely the work of restoration and of nineteenth-century talent; hence, if in the fortunes of war it should be subjected to the hail of shell and shrapnel from French and British batteries, so working out the hard old Israelitish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and suffering even as Reims has suffered, the world would look on with far different sentiments since, apart from its windows (some of them) and pictures and tombs, nothing would be lost that could not be replaced and after a better fashion; for after all when you say the most you can for the nineteenth century it will generally be admitted that, even in Germany, it was not a stimulating era so far as creative or even archÆological Gothic art is concerned.

Strasbourg is much more interesting and poetic, with great refinement and originality in design, though its taste is far from impeccable, its structural sense gravely deficient. The tendency is wholly toward lace-like and fantastic design, but it has little resemblance to the late French flamboyant with its curving and interlacing lines; instead, it is more suggestive of the English perpendicular, with its scaffolding of vertical lines applied to, but not a part of, the basic fabric. It has no consistency of plan, for the eastern end, with its semicircular apse and portions of its transepts, is of a singularly noble type of twelfth-century Romanesque, while the nave is mid-thirteenth century and the tower and upper portion of the west front are a hundred years later. Confused as it is, there is an extraordinary charm about it all, for every part is personal and distinguished, full of novel and poetic ideas and all kinds of unaffected touches of genius. The wonderful colour of the exterior and the singularly fine glass of the interior have much to do with its general effect of a delicate mediÆval loveliness that makes amends for its architectural shortcomings.

Of the castle architecture of the Rhine there is

little left from the mediÆval period from which one can gain an adequate idea of its excellence, which was probably great. As in Luxembourg, everything has been shattered into wildly picturesque ruins which are outside the category of architecture, and such Renaissance work as Heidelberg is quite as far without the same category, though for another reason; here even picturesqueness of site and dilapidation cannot make amends for ignorance, assurance, and excruciating taste. As a matter of fact, the best architecture of the Rhine is the domestic building of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the half timber, many-gabled structures that give the little Rhine towns a charm that is unexcelled and testify to the native sense of beauty in the common people, when they were left alone and not confused by the self-satisfied and ill-bred interference of the connoisseur.

If Christian culture began too late along the Rhine to find a great expression in architecture, the same is not true of painting, which followed after and achieved much that the older art could not accomplish. The Teutonic tribes of the Rhine had always excelled in certain virtues of frugality, temperance, domestic morality, and a righteous revolt showed itself here against the corruption of the Church and society in the fourteenth century that followed the first downward trend of mediÆvalism. Early in the century men and women began to draw away from a world with which they had little sympathy, striving for personal righteousness, the sense of an inner relation to God, the attainment through mystical means of escape from the devastating wars, the pestilence and famine, the favouritism and cupidity and licentiousness of the Church. The centre of these mystical brotherhoods was Cologne, particularly at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and it is not a mere coincidence that here at Cologne also, and at the same time, a new school of painting should come into existence, exactly as had happened a few years earlier in Siena and Florence. There had been great wall painting for several centuries, but it had always been an essential part of architecture, hieratic, formal, monumental, impersonal; now the new spiritual impulse was to work out an original and very personal form of expression on the basis of these earlier works, but at smaller scale and with a minute craftsmanship borrowed partly from the goldsmiths’ work and the enamels for which Cologne already was famous; partly from the exquisite illumination of the vellum volumes of the time. It was somewhere about 1350 that Master Wilhelm, who holds the same place in the north that was attained by Cimabue in the south, was born. His pictures are rare but there is one of great value in Cologne cathedral, the “St. Clara Triptych,” and it shows all the elements now at work toward the development of the new art, the fine and masterly line and composition, with a strong rhythmic sense taken over from the fully developed wall painting of the preceding century, the delicate craftsmanship of the goldsmith, the illuminator, or the worker in enamels, and the extraordinary personal quality, the direct human appeal, that was furnished by the mystical seekers after union with God through a direct relationship outside the formalised institutions and practices of the Church. You get the quality best of all perhaps from the “Madonna of the Bean-flower” in the Cologne Museum, another picture by Master Wilhelm, and as lovely and personal as one could ask. There are also the “Paradise pictures,” equally human and even more mystical; visions of delicate and gracious gardens, where youths and ladies and children and angels all mingle in the midst of flowers and singing around the Queen of Heaven herself; efforts, one might think, to create a paradise for the imagination, where one could escape from the too numerous horrors of a none too accommodating world. The more specifically devotional pictures are very numerous and generally anonymous; painters then were craftsmen, members of guilds devoted to the upbuilding of the highest standards of workmanship, and caring little for their own personal fame. Picture exhibitions and competitions for prizes and medals were also unknown, which made a difference. In all these works is the same sweet humanism, the invariable personal appeal, and it is easy to understand that a new art such as this must have been a wonderful boon to a weary and disappointed generation.

The Teuton had at last found a field for the expression of that Æsthetic sense that was one of the inalienable possessions of man down to the nineteenth century, and he made the very best of it, as he was to make the best of the still newer art of music a few centuries later. The world wanted this new art, and from Cologne it spread rapidly to the west into Flanders and Brabant, and south to Franconia and Suabia. To the

school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, he could hardly have been what he was but for Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he added something of his own Flanders, and more of himself, and the art he initiated rose immeasurably above its source.

In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and congenial form of expression, but this art developed rather to the north and east of the Rhine. Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was here that Bishop Bernward gathered or educated his amazing craftsmen in bronze. Where such an artist came from, as he who made the cathedral doors and the bronze column, heaven alone knows, for it was early in the eleventh century that these came into existence. They began a school, however, that continued in Saxony for many centuries and had its influence over all Germany. The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in the cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that defy comparison. The great school of sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz Mountains, not only in Hildesheim but Halberstadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naumbourg, the masters of Magdebourg ranking with those of Amiens and Reims. Undoubtedly there is French influence here, perhaps through the training, under the masters of France, of the craftsmen who later went back to their native lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the French influence is even more clearly seen but here it is rather in the line of the more southerly schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find that singular and ingenious masterpiece, the “Pillar of the Angels,” slender grouped shafts with intermediate niches, one above the other, each containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an angel, or, at the top, our Lord at the Day of Judgment. This is one of those sudden and unprecedented happenings in mediÆval art that mark the vast vitality, imagination, and personal initiative of the time. It has no progenitors, no successors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the masterpiece of one Ervin de Steinbach, who appears to have been the architect for the later portions of the cathedral.

Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture seems never to have been a favoured art in the Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains its chief claim to honourable record, though stained glass reached considerable heights, as is seen both at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on definitely local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish schools of art of all kinds had succeeded by their sheer achievement in establishing their dominant influence along the Rhine, and with the Renaissance the lingering elements of an instinctive practice of beauty quite died away.