4. The value of largeness of style in the design and treatment of the groups and figures themselves, both as sculpture pure and simple and as architectural ornament.

When we come to examine the accessories of Greek life, furniture, pottery, dress, we find them all characterized by the same qualities in design as we have just been noting in the architecture; the fundamental architectural feeling seems to pervade them. A simplicity of line, balance, and reserve of ornament distinguishes alike their seats and chairs and tables, caskets, vases and vessels, and the expressive lines of their dresses and draperies falling into the lines of the figure give life and variety, while they contrast with the severity of the architectural lines and planes.

Now, so far we have been considering the architecture of the lintel, and its bearing upon design, and the qualities and principles we may learn from it generally.

With the use of the round arch—invented, it is said, by the Greeks, but always associated with the Romans, who used it—quite different effects come in, with different motives and ideas in design. The Roman architecture, the round arch, fulfils the functions of both construction and ornament, on the same principle of recurrence, or repetition, we have noticed before; as, for instance, in the Colosseum, where the tiers of round arches which support the outer wall of the building serve both the constructive and decorative functions. With the use of the arch the arcade becomes a constructive feature of great decorative value, and takes the place in Roman and Romanesque buildings, with a lighter and more varied effect, of the columned Greek cella. Sunshine, no doubt, had much to do with its use, since a covered arcaded loggia, or porch in front of a building, so frequent in Italy, gave both shelter and coolness. The use of the arch led to vaulting, and to the use of arch mouldings, enrichments, and to the covering the vaults with mosaic and painting, and the vaulting led to the dome, which, again, offered a splendid field for the mosaicist and the painter.

The Romans borrowed all their architectural details from the Greeks, and varied and enriched them, adding many more members to the cornice mouldings, and carving stone garlands upon their friezes, to take the place of the primitive festal ones of leaves which were hung there, as in the relief of the visit of Bacchus to Icarius, a Romano-Greek sculpture in the British Museum.

They (the Romans) fully realized the ornamental value of colonnades and porticoes, and they used the column, varying the orders, and translating them into pilasters freely as decorations on the faÇades and walls of their buildings, slicing up the peristyles of temples, as it were, for the sake of their ornamental effect, cutting down the columns into pilasters, and placing them, with intervening friezes, one on the top of the other, masking the construction of the real building, a favourite device with the Renascence architects.

Roman architecture may be considered really as a transitional style. While its true constructive characteristic is the round arch, every detail of the Greek or Lintel architecture is used both without and with the arch, and in the latter case the column frequently becomes a wall decoration in the shape of a pilaster, as well as the cornice, and is no longer made use of, as in true lintel construction, to support the weight of the roof. In their viaducts and bridges and baths they were great builders with the arch, but, like some modern engineers, when they wanted to beautify they borrowed architectural ornament from the Greeks.

Nothing very fresh was gained for design in these adaptations except a certain heavy richness of detail in the sculptured cornices and friezes, and coffered ceilings. The use of the flat pilaster, however, led to the panelled pilaster with its elegant arabesque, which was afterwards revived and developed with such extraordinary grace and variety by the artists of the Renascence and carried from Italy westward.

With the round arch, too, several important decorative spaces were given to the designer, the spandrel, the panel, the medallion, all of which, with the frieze, may be seen utilized for the decorative sculpture on the arch of Constantine. The decorative use of inscriptions is also a feature in Roman architecture, and the dignity of the form of their capital letters was well adapted to ornamental effect in square masses upon their triumphal arches and along the entablature of their temples.

The Romans, too, brought the domed roof and the mosaic floor into use, and were great in the use of coloured marbles; also stucco and plaster work in interiors, the free and beautiful plaster work found in the tombs on the Latin Way being well known; so that on the whole we owe to them the illustration of the effective use of many beautiful arts, which the Italians have inherited to this day, though it must be said often with more skill than taste.

One might say, generally and ultimately, Roman art exemplified that love of show, and the external signs of power, pomp, splendour, and luxury which became dear as well as fatal to them, as they appear to do to every conquering people, until they are finally enervated and overcome as if by the Nemesis of their own supremacy.

The art of Greece, one may say, on the other hand, at her zenith represented that love of beauty as distinct from ornament, and clearness and severity of thought which will always cling to the country from whence the modern world derives the germ of nearly all its ideas.

But when the seat of the empire was transferred to Constantinople, and Roman art, influenced by Asiatic feeling, and stimulated and elevated by the new faith of Christianity, became transfigured into the solemn splendour of Byzantine art, the architecture of the round arch and the dome and cupola rose to its fullest beauty, and such buildings as St. Sophia at Constantinople, and St. Mark's at Venice, with the churches of Ravenna, mark another great and noble epoch in the arts of design.

Byzantine design, whether in building, in carving, in mosaic, or goldsmiths' work, impresses one with a certain restraint in the midst of its splendour; a certain controlling dignity and reserve appears to be exercised even in the use of the most beautiful materials, as well as in design and the treatment of form.

The mosaics of the Ravenna churches alone are sufficient to exemplify this. The artists seemed fully to realize that the curved surfaces of the dome, the half dome of the apse, or the long flat frieze above the arch columns of the nave of the basilicas, like St. Apollinare in Classe, afforded splendid fields for a splendid material, the cross light from the deep-set windows enriching the effect, and that everything might well be secondary to it. The same principle or feeling is seen in St. Mark's where the architecture is quite simple, the arches and vaulting without mouldings, nothing to interfere with the quiet splendour of the gold or blue fields of mosaic varied with simple typical figures, bold in silhouette, placed frankly upon them, emblems, boldly curving scroll-work, and inscriptions. The execution, too, is as direct and simple as the design. Such design and decoration as this becomes an essential and integral part of the architectural structure and effect.

Note the way in which the tesserÆ are laid (in the head of the Empress Theodora from St. Vitale at Ravenna, for instance). The cube is used as much as possible, but the cubes vary much in size, and are set often with very open joints, the cement lines of the bedding showing quite clearly, and the surface of the work uneven, the tesserÆ being worked, of course, from the front and in situ, presenting a varied surface of different facets which, catching the light at different angles, give an extraordinary sparkle and richness to the effect as a whole. In the head of Theodora the effect is enhanced by the discs of mother-of-pearl used for the head-dress.

In the laying of the tesserÆ, too, note that the system is followed of defining the outlines with rows of cubes, and building up the masses (as in the nimbus) with concentric rows, as a rule, making the lines of the filling tesserÆ follow as far as possible the line of the boundary tesserÆ. This, of course, would naturally result as the simplest and most convenient, as well as most expressive, method of laying tesserÆ, in defining form by means of small cubes, and is one of the conditions of the work, and when, as in these mosaics, so far from being refined away, or concealed, or any attempt being made (as in later times) to imitate painting, these conditions are boldly and frankly acknowledged, we see how its peculiar beauty, character, and the quality of its ornamental effect depends upon these very conditions.

This principle will be found to hold good and true throughout all art. Directly, from a false idea of refinement, or with the object of displaying mechanical skill, the craftsman is induced to try to conceal the fundamental conditions of his craft, and to make it ape the qualities of some totally different sort of work, he ceases to be an artist, at all events. The true artist in any material is he who in acknowledging its conditions and limitations finds in them sources and opportunities of new beauty, and in being faithful to those conditions makes them subserve his invention.

After the decorative splendour of the Byzantine architecture, the Norman work left in our own land seems comparatively simple and plain as time has left it, but its remains show its Roman descent in the doorway and porch of many a quiet village church, as well as on a greater scale in so many of our cathedrals, which often illustrate, in a remarkable way, the transition or growth of one style out of another, the new evolved from the old.

At Canterbury, for instance, one reads the signs which mark the transformation of the Norman building into the Gothic. The first church founded by St. Augustine was Saxon. This was enlarged by Otho (938) as a basilica. This again was ruined by the Danes (1013). The Norman part of the present building was constructed by Bishop Lanfranc (1070), on to which was grafted, as it were, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century Gothic which distinguish it.

There is a tower on the south side of the transept known as Anselm's Tower (from Bishop Anselm, one of the Norman builders), and on the lower part runs an arcading of interlacing round arches, the tower itself being richly arcaded in several stories in round arches. But this lower band shows the period of transition, from the use of the round arch, to the pointed—the pointed lancet arches being formed by the interlacing of the round, so that we have here the actual birth of the pointed arch (at least, as a decorative feature), which leads us to our next typical division and characteristic epoch of architectural style.

We need not go out of our own country to find abundant illustrations of typical forms of pointed architecture. Almost any village church will give us the main features—the characteristic plan of nave and chancel, curiously following the plan of the ancient Roman basilica—the public hall and law court in one, and perpetuating for us the type of ancient dwelling or hall which may be said to have prevailed from the time of Homer to the end of the Middle Ages, varying chiefly in external features and architectural detail.

The severe lancet arch is characteristic of the first phase of the Gothic, which gradually grew out of the severer Norman. The gable took a higher pitch, and to support the weight and thrust of towers and spires, buttresses were used, and these became, also, a striking and characteristic feature of the pointed arch, which completed in the thirteenth century the period of its first development.

Lancet arch, high-pitched gable, buttress (plain and pinnacled), spired and pinnacled tower—these are the leading constructive exterior characteristics, the carved work, somewhat restrained, and chiefly manifested in peculiar foliation of the capitals and corbels, and in the hollows of arch mouldings in rows of sharp cut dog teeth.

In the interior clustered shafts took the place of the solid round Norman piers, rising, as we see in our cathedral naves, to support lofty vaulted roofs, the ribs moulded and covered at their intersections by carved bosses.

Again we may note the principle of recurring lines which repeat and emphasize the form of the arched openings and the structural lines of the vaulting in the mouldings. This recurrence gives that effect of extraordinary grace and lightness combined with structural strength which is so striking a characteristic of thirteenth century Gothic work, and of which there is no finer example than the nave of Westminster Abbey.

We noted that the Greeks used the interstices of their construction for their chief decoration, their figure sculpture, and to some extent the same plan is followed in Gothic architecture, where we find the tympanums of doors, the spandrels of arcades (as in the Chapter House at Salisbury or the angel choir at Lincoln), and canopied niches (as at Wells), used for figure sculpture; but, at the same time, the structural features themselves are emphasized by ornament to a far greater extent, as in caps, arch mouldings, the junctions of the vaulting, and the like; and increasingly so in the succeeding Decorated and Perpendicular periods, until we get vaulted roofs of fan tracery like those of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, or Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster.

But if we may say that the chief decorative glory of Greek architecture was its figure sculpture, as mosaic was of the Byzantine churches, so we may say that the traceried window, filled with stained and leaded glass, became the chief decorative glory of Gothic architecture.

Unhappily great quantities of glass have disappeared from our cathedrals and churches, from one cause or another, but from the relics that remain we may form some idea of the splendour and quality of the old glass.

The famous windows of the south transept at York Minster, called "The Five Sisters," are good examples of the severer earlier style of pattern and colour, consisting of fine scroll-work and geometric forms, in which hatched grisaille patterns are heightened by bright points and lines of colour.

Thirteenth century glass, where figures are used, is characterized by the smallness of their scale in proportion to the window, and traces of Byzantine tradition in their drawing, intricate design, and deep and vivid colouring, the work being composed of small pieces of glass leaded together; the effect of the jewel-like depth and quality of the colour—deep crimsons, blues, and greens being much used—being increased by the close network of leading.

As windows, in the course of the evolution of the Gothic style, were made broader, or rather, the window opening proper from wall to wall being greatly increased in width and height, they were supported and divided into panels or lights by elaborate stone tracery, a tracery which becomes almost as distinct a province of design as the design of the glass itself—distinct from, yet in close relationship to the architecture of the building. The comparative slight divisions of the tracery, however, gave more scope to the stained glass designer, who shows very emphatic architectural influence in the elaborate canopies which surmount the figures occupying the separate lights of the windows from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth centuries, as well as in the general vertical arrangement of the lines of their composition. He gradually increased the scale of his figures and gave more breadth to his design, and brought it more into relation with the art of the painter and the sculptor, at the same time acknowledging with them, in the disposition of his figures in the space, and the disposition of the draperies and accessories, that architectural influence under which the artist and craftsman of the Middle Ages worked with extraordinary freedom and fertility of invention, and yet in perfect harmony2—a sign of that fraternal co-operation and the effect of the formation of men into brotherhoods and guilds, which, coming in with the adoption of Christianity and the organization of the Church, remained through all the turbulence and strife of the time the great social force of the Middle Ages.

It seems to me if we wish to realize the ideal of a great and harmonious art, which shall be capable of expressing the best that is in us: if we desire again to raise great architectural monuments, religious, municipal, or commemorative, we shall have to learn the great lesson of unity through fraternal co-operation and sympathy, the particular work of each, however individual and free in artistic expression, falling naturally into its due place in a harmonious scheme. Let us cultivate our technical skill and knowledge to the utmost, but let us not neglect our imagination, sense of beauty, and sympathy, or else we shall have nothing to express.

Through the thirteenth century onwards to the fifteenth Gothic architecture continued to develop, to pass through new phases, to take new forms, a living and growing style moving with the wants and ideals of men.

After the Early English comes the Decorated period, in which the mouldings and foliation become fuller, broader, and more ornate. To contrast decorated foliation and ornament with the earlier work, is like comparing the opening flower with the bud. The ogee arch was invented, the crockets of the pinnacles and canopies grew and increased and became finer in form, the finials larger and more varied. The carved canopies and tabernacle work grew richer and more intricate. The foliage followed nature more closely. The figure subjects of the carver were more freely treated, and dealt oftener with common life, with phantasy, or humour. The effigies of knight and lady, or priest, became more and more like portraits in stone or alabaster, the details of their dresses more rich, delicate, and beautiful. The maker of brasses showed a freer and more masterly hand, and greater sense of ornamental effect in the spacing and treatment of his figures. The work of the miniaturist and the scribe grew more and more delicate and exquisite in form, colour, and invention. The stained glass worker increased the scale of his figures, and varied the quality and treatment of his colours. The glazier invented new lead patterns; the wood carver revelled in stall work, screens, and misereres. The recessed and canopied tomb enriched the chantries of churches and cathedrals.

Beauty and invention of extraordinary fertility and richness characterized every form of art and handicraft associated with Gothic architecture. We can trace in each variety the architectural influence in every department of work. In some instances reproduction of actual architectural details and characteristics, as, for instance, when the wrought-iron railing of a bishop's tomb (at Wells Cathedral, 1464-5) reproduced the battlement, buttress and pinnacle as motives, giving them, however, a free and fanciful rendering suited to the material.