Part 1
[Illustration: THE JUMMA MUSJID, INDIA.]
Historic Buildings
As Seen and Described by Famous Writers
EDITED AND TRANSLATED
BY ESTHER SINGLETON
AUTHOR OF “TURRETS, TOWERS AND TEMPLES,” “GREAT PICTURES,” “WONDERS OF NATURE,” “FAMOUS PAINTINGS,” “PARIS,” “LONDON” AND “A GUIDE TO THE OPERA,” ETC.
_With Numerous Illustrations_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1903
_Copyright, 1903_ BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
_Published October, 1903_
Preface
Two principles of selection have guided me in the preparation of this book, the sixth of a series which has met with a cordial reception. One is the beauty or interest from an artistic standpoint; the other, the historical associations. If the reader should miss some famous edifices, he will kindly remember that a small volume cannot contain a complete collection of all the historic buildings still standing, and that many other historic buildings have already appeared in my former books of this series, _Turrets, Towers and Temples_ and _Romantic Castles and Palaces_.
I have endeavoured to find descriptions that deal with both views, giving the history of the building itself, and a description of its architectural features; and as this book contains, in consequence, a great variety of buildings of all periods and many countries, the student of both art and history will doubtless find pleasure in comparing these various styles of architecture and in composing a mental picture of events that have occurred within their walls.
Some of the buildings will aid him in realizing more fully, perhaps, than before some of the various influences that have aided in developing certain races; for instance, a study of the text and pictures of the cathedrals of Monreale and Palermo will demonstrate the presence of Norman and Saracen in Sicily. In other instances, it is not a long vanished race, but the still-felt presence of some strong personality like that of Shah Jehan, whose mosques and palaces and Taj Mahal stand as monuments not only to the great conqueror, but to the magnificence of his taste.
In this book, I have included several towers and fortresses as well as castles and baronial halls, and the Certosa of Pavia and La Grande Chartreuse, from which later historic home the Carthusian monks of France have lately been driven. In addition to the cathedrals and temples which have been the scenes of memorable historical events, I have added the particularly sacred shrines of the Holy Sepulchre, the Holy House of Loretto and the Campo Santo, Pisa, which attract thousands of the faithful.
Many of the extracts I have translated expressly for this book, and I have taken no liberties with the text, except a little cutting for the sake of space limitations.
E. S.
NEW YORK, _September, 1903_.
Contents
THE JUMMA MUSJID, DELHI 1 G. W. STEEVENS.
SAN DONATO, MURANO 5 JOHN RUSKIN.
THE PALACE OF THE POPES, AVIGNON 20 CHARLES DICKENS.
THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM 29 PIERRE LOTI.
LA GRANDE CHARTREUSE 40 WILLIAM BECKFORD.
THE TEMPLES OF HATCHIMAN, KAMAKOURA 54 AIMÉ HUMBERT.
CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF WELLS 62 EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN.
THE COLISEUM, ROME 75 I. EDWARD GIBBON. II. CHARLES DICKENS.
GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS, LAHORE 84 G. W. STEEVENS.
THE GIRALDA, SEVILLE 92 THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
THE CATHEDRAL OF MONREALE 95 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
THE LUXEMBOURG PALACE, PARIS 102 AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.
THE GREAT LAMA TEMPLE, PEKIN 107 C. F. GORDON-CUMMING.
HADDON HALL 112 JOHN LEYLAND.
CATHEDRAL OF PALERMO 125 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
THE FORTRESS AND PALACE OF GWALIOR 129 LOUIS ROUSSELET.
THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO 135 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
THE ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE 145 EDMUNDO DE AMICIS.
THE TOWER OF BELEM, LISBON 149 ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN.
VENETIAN PALACES 156 THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
SAINT OUEN, ROUEN 163 L. DE FOURCAUD.
CARISBROOKE CASTLE, ISLE OF WIGHT 172 SIR JAMES D. MACKENZIE.
THE PANTHEON, ROME 178 AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.
ST. LAURENCE, NUREMBERG 182 LINDA VILLARI.
THE TORRE DEL ORO, SEVILLE 190 EDMUNDO DE AMICIS.
CATHEDRAL OF ORVIETO 193 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
THE BUILDINGS OF SHAH JEHAN, AGRA 206 G. W. STEEVENS.
THE PRIORY AND CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW, LONDON 216 CHARLES KNIGHT.
KUTB MINAR, DELHI 228 I. G. W. STEEVENS. II. ANDRÉ CHÉVRILLON.
KENILWORTH CASTLE 234 SIR JAMES D. MACKENZIE.
SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE 244 JOHN RUSKIN.
THE RAMPARTS OF CARCASSONNE 247 A. MOLINIER.
THE CATHEDRAL OF MODENA 254 EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN.
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS 257 LOUIS GONSE.
THE CASTLE OF S. ANGELO, ROME 267 AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL 276 W. J. LOFTIE.
THE CASTLE OF ANGERS 286 HENRY JOUIN.
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE 294 G. W. STEEVENS.
THE VENDRAMIN-CALERGI, VENICE 300 THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE 303 PIERRE LOTI.
THE DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, THE BAPTISTERY AND THE CAMPO-SANTO, PISA 310 H. A. TAINE.
ROCHESTER CASTLE 317 ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN.
SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE 326 JOHN RUSKIN.
THE CERTOSA OF PAVIA 336 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
Illustrations
THE JUMMA MUSJID _India_ _Frontispiece_
PAGE
SAN DONATO _Italy_ 5
THE PALACE OF THE POPES _France_ 20
THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE _Palestine_ 29
THE DAÏBOUDHS _Kamakoura_ 54
CATHEDRAL OF WELLS _England_ 62
THE COLISEUM _Italy_ 75
GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS _India_ 84
THE GIRALDA _Spain_ 92
THE CATHEDRAL OF MONREALE _Italy_ 95
THE LUXEMBOURG PALACE _France_ 102
HADDON HALL _England_ 112
CATHEDRAL OF PALERMO _Italy_ 125
FORTRESS AND PALACE OF GWALIOR _India_ 129
THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO _Italy_ 135
THE ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE _Spain_ 145
THE TOWER OF BELEM _Portugal_ 149
THE FOSCARI PALACE _Italy_ 156
SAINT OUEN _France_ 163
CARISBROOKE CASTLE _England_ 172
THE PANTHEON _Italy_ 178
ST. LAURENCE _Germany_ 182
THE TORRE DEL ORO _Spain_ 190
CATHEDRAL OF ORVIETO _Italy_ 193
THE PEARL MOSQUE _India_ 206
THE CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW _England_ 216
THE KUTB MINAR _Delhi_ 228
KENILWORTH CASTLE _England_ 234
SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE _Italy_ 244
THE RAMPARTS OF CARCASSONNE _France_ 247
THE CATHEDRAL OF MODENA _Italy_ 254
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS _France_ 257
THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO _Italy_ 267
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL _England_ 276
THE CASTLE OF ANGERS _France_ 286
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE _India_ 294
THE VENDRAMIN-CALERGI _Italy_ 300
FOUNTAIN OF THE OLD SERAGLIO _Turkey_ 303
THE DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, BAPTISTERY AND CAMPO-SANTO _Italy_ 310
ROCHESTER CASTLE _England_ 317
SANTA CROCE _Italy_ 326
THE CERTOSA OF PAVIA _Italy_ 336
Historic Buildings
THE JUMMA MUSJID
G. W. STEEVENS
Delhi is the most historic city in all historic India.
It may not be the oldest--who shall say which is the oldest among rivals all coeval with time?--though it puts in a claim for a respectable middle-age, dating from 1000 B.C. or so. It has at least one authentic monument which is certainly fourteen or fifteen hundred years old. At that time Delhi’s master called himself Emperor of the World, and emperors, at least of India, have ruled there almost ever since. Mohammed, an Afghan of Ghor, took it in 1193; Tamerlane, the Mogul, sacked it two hundred years later; Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739; Ahmed Shah Durani, another Afghan, in 1756; the Marathas took it three years later. Half a century on, in 1803, General Lake took the capital of India for Britain. And British it has been ever since--except for those few months in 1857, when Mutiny brought the ghost of the Mogul empire into the semblance of life again; till Nicholson stormed the breach in the Kashmir Bastion, and dyed Delhi British for ever with his blood.
Look from the Ridge, whence the columns marched out to that last capture: the battered trophy of so many conquerors remains wonderfully fresh and fair. It seems more like a wood than a city. The rolls of green are only spangled with white, as if it were a suburb of villas standing in orchards. Only the snowy domes and tall minarets, the cupolas and gilded pinnacles, betray the still great and populous city that nestles below you and takes breath after her thousand troubles.
Let us go back to the city. Here at least is the Jumma Musjid, the great mosque, saved complete out of the storms--a baby of little more than two hundred years, to be sure, but still something. It is said to be the largest mosque in the world--a vast stretch of red sandstone and white marble and gold upstanding from a platform reached on three sides by flights of steps so tall, so majestically wide, that they are like a stone mountain tamed into order and proportion at an emperor’s will. Above the brass-mounted doors rise red portals so huge that they almost dwarf the whole--red galleries above them, white marble domes above them, white marble minarets rising higher yet, with pillars and cupolas and gilded pinnacles above all. Beside the gateways the walls of the quadrangle seem to creep along the ground; then, at the corners, rise towers with more open chambers, more cupolas and gilded pinnacles. Within, above the cloistered quadrangle, bulge three pure white domes--not hemispheres, like Western domes, but complete globes, only sliced away at the base and tapering to a spike at the top--and a slender minaret flanks each side.
The whole, to Western eyes, has a strange effect. Our own buildings are tighter together, gripped and focused more in one glance; over the Jumma Musjid your eye must wander, and then the mind must connect the views of the different parts. If you look at it near you cannot see it all; if far, it is low and seems to straggle. The West could hardly call it beautiful: it has proportion, but not compass. Therefore it does not abase you, as other great buildings do: somehow you have a feeling of patronage towards it. Yet it is most light and graceful with all its bulk: it seems to suit India, thus spread out to get its fill of the warm sun. It looks rich and lavish, as if space were of no account to it.
You have passed below the cloud-capped towers, out of the gorgeous palaces--and here is Silver Street, Delhi’s main thoroughfare. The pageant fades, and you plunge into the dense squalor which is also India. Along the houses run balconies and colonnades; here also you see vistas of pillars and lattice-work, but the stone is dirty, the stucco peels, the wood lacks paint. The houses totter and lean together. The street is a mass of squatting, variegated people; bulls, in necklaces of white and yellow flowers, sleep across the pavements, donkeys stroll into the shops, goats nibble at the vegetables piled for sale down the centre of the street, a squirrel is fighting with a caged parrot. Here is a jeweller’s booth, gay with tawdry paint; next, a baker’s, with the shopkeeper snoring on his low counter, and everything an inch thick with dust. At one step you smell incense; at the next, garbage.
Inimitable, incongruous India! And coming out of the walls, still crumbling from Nicholson’s cannon, you see mill-chimneys blackening the sky. Delhi, with local cotton, they tell you, can spin as fine as Manchester. One more incongruity! The iron pillar, the ruined mosque, the jewelled halls, the shabby street, and now the clacking mill. That is the last of Delhi’s myriad reincarnations.
[Illustration: SAN DONATO, ITALY.]
SAN DONATO, MURANO
JOHN RUSKIN
We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated boats full of all manner of nets that look as if they could never be disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides; and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up in the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it, some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass a considerable church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square opposite to it with a few acacia trees, and then find our boat suddenly seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled into the tide-way of one of the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the town of Murano into two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed only by one wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current, looking at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly knowing if there be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the sunshine glows on their ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles on the rushing of the green water by the grass-grown quay. It needs a strong stroke of the oar to bring us into the mouth of another quiet canal on the farther side of the tide-way, and we are still somewhat giddy when we run the head of the gondola into the sand on the left-hand side of this more sluggish stream, and land under the east end of the Church of San Donato, the “Matrice” or “Mother” Church of Murano.
It stands, it and the heavy campanile detached from it a few yards, in a small triangular field of somewhat fresher grass than is usual near Venice, traversed by a paved walk with green mosaic of short grass between the rude squares of its stones, bounded on one side by ruinous garden walls, on another by a line of low cottages, on the third, the base of the triangle, by the shallow canal from which we have just landed. Near the point of the triangular space is a simple well, bearing date 1502; in its widest part, between the canal and campanile, is a four-square hollow pillar, each side formed by a separate slab of stone, to which the iron hasps are still attached that once secured the Venetian standard.
The cathedral itself occupies the northern angle of the field, encumbered with modern buildings, small out-house-like chapels, and wastes of white wall with blank square windows, and itself utterly defaced in the whole body of it, nothing but the apse having been spared; the original plan is only discoverable by careful examination, and even then but partially. The whole impression and effect of the building are irretrievably lost, but the fragments of it are still most precious.
We must first briefly state what is known of its history.
The legends of the Romish Church, though generally more insipid and less varied than those of Paganism, deserve audience from us on this ground, if on no other, that they have once been sincerely believed by good men, and have had no ineffective agency in the foundation of the existent European mind. The reader must not therefore accuse me of trifling, when I record for him the first piece of information I have been able to collect respecting the cathedral of Murano: namely, that the emperor Otho the Great, being overtaken by a storm on the Adriatic, vowed, if he were preserved, to build and dedicate a church to the Virgin, in whatever place might be most pleasing to her; that the storm thereupon abated; and the Virgin appearing to Otho in a dream showed him, covered with red lilies, that very triangular field on which we were but now standing amidst the ragged weeds and shattered pavement. The emperor obeyed the vision; and the church was consecrated on the 15th of August, 957.
Whatever degree of credence we may feel disposed to attach to this piece of history, there is no question that a church was built on this spot before the close of the Tenth Century: since in the year 999 we find the incumbent of the Basilica (note this word, it is of some importance) di Santa Maria Plebania di Murano taking an oath of obedience to the Bishop of the Altinat church, and engaging at the same time to give the said bishop his dinner on the Domenica in Albis, when the prelate held a confirmation in the mother church, as it was then commonly called, of Murano. From this period, for more than a century, I can find no records of any alterations made in the fabric of the church, but there exist very full details of the quarrels which arose between its incumbents and those of San Stefano, San Cipriano, San Salvatore, and the other churches of Murano, touching the due obedience which their less numerous or less ancient brotherhoods owed to St. Mary’s.
These differences seem to have been renewed at the election of every new abbot by each of the fraternities, and must have been growing serious when the patriarch of Grado, Henry Dandolo, interfered in 1102, and, in order to seal a peace between the two principal opponents, ordered that the abbot of St. Stephen’s should be present at the service in St. Mary’s on the night of the Epiphany, and that the abbot of St. Mary’s should visit him of St. Stephen’s on St. Stephen’s day; and that then the two abbots “should eat apples and drink good wine together, in peace and charity.”[1]
But even this kindly effort seems to have been without result: the irritated pride of the antagonists remained unsoothed by the love-feast of St. Stephen’s day; and the breach continued to widen until the abbot of St. Mary’s obtained a timely accession to his authority in the year 1125. The Doge Domenico Michele, having in the Second Crusade secured such substantial advantages for the Venetians as might well counterbalance the loss of part of their trade with the East, crowned his successes by obtaining possession in Cephalonia of the body of San Donato, bishop of Eurœa; which treasure he having presented on his return to the Murano basilica, that church was thenceforward called the church of Sts. Mary and Donato. Nor was the body of the saint its only acquisition: St. Donato’s principal achievement had been the destruction of a terrible dragon in Epirus; Michele brought home the bones of the dragon as well as of the saint; the latter were put in a marble sarcophagus, and the former hung up over the high altar.
But the clergy of St. Stefano were indomitable. At the very moment when their adversaries had received this formidable accession of strength, they had the audacity “ad onta de’ replicati giuramenti, e dell’ inveterata consuetudine,” to refuse to continue in the obedience which they had vowed to their mother church. The matter was tried in a provincial council; the votaries of St. Stephen were condemned, and remained quiet for about twenty years, in wholesome dread of the authority conferred on the abbot of St. Donato, by the Pope’s legate, to suspend any of the clergy of the island from their office if they refused submission. In 1172, however, they appealed to Pope Alexander III, and were condemned again: and we find the struggle renewed at every promising opportunity, during the course of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries; until at last, finding St. Donato and the dragon together too strong for him, the abbot of St. Stefano “discovered” in his church the bodies of two hundred martyrs at once!--a discovery, it is to be remembered, in some sort equivalent in those days to that of California in ours. The inscription, however, on the façade of the church recorded it with quiet dignity:--“MCCCLXXIV. a dì XIV, di Aprile. Furono trovati nella presente chiesa del protomartire San Stefano, duecento e più corpi de’ Santi Martin, dal Ven. Prete Matteo Fradello, piovano della chiesa.”[2] Corner, who gives this inscription, which no longer exists, goes on to explain with infinite gravity, that the bodies in question, “being of infantile form and stature, are reported by tradition to have belonged to those fortunate innocents who suffered martyrdom under King Herod; but that when, or by whom, the church was enriched with so vast a treasure, is not manifested by any document.”
The issue of the struggle is not to our present purpose. We have already arrived at the Fourteenth Century without finding record of any effort made by the clergy of St. Mary’s to maintain their influence by restoring or beautifying their basilica; which is the only point at present of importance to us. That great alterations were made in it at the time of the acquisition of the body of St. Donato is however highly probable, the mosaic pavement of the interior, which bears its date inscribed 1140, being probably the last of the additions. I believe that no part of the ancient church can be shown to be of more recent date than this; and I shall not occupy the reader’s time by any inquiry respecting the epochs or authors of the destructive modern restorations; the wreck of the old fabric, breaking out from beneath them here and there, is generally distinguishable from them at a glance; and it is enough for the reader to know that none of these truly ancient fragments can be assigned to a more recent date than 1140, and that some of them may with probability be looked upon as remains of the shell of the first church erected in the course of the latter half of the Tenth Century.
It is roofed by a concha, or semi-dome; and the external arrangement of its walls provides for the security of this dome by what is, in fact, a system of buttresses as effective and definite as that of any of the northern churches, although the buttresses are obtained entirely by adaptations of the Roman shaft and arch, the lower story being formed by a thick mass of wall lightened by ordinary semicircular round-headed niches, like those used so extensively afterwards in Renaissance architecture, each niche flanked by a pair of shafts standing clear of the wall, and bearing deeply moulded arches thrown over the niche. The walls with its pillars thus forms a series of massy buttresses, on the top of which is an open gallery, backed by a thinner wall, and roofed by arches whose shafts are set above the pairs of shafts below. On the heads of these arches rests the roof. We have, therefore, externally a heptagonal apse, chiefly of rough and common brick, only with marble shafts and a few marble ornaments; but for that reason all the more interesting because it shows us what may be done, and what was done, with materials such as are now at our own command; and because in its proportions, and in the use of the few ornaments it possesses, it displays a delicacy of feeling rendered doubly notable by the roughness of the work in which laws so subtle are observed, and with which so thoughtful ornamentation is associated.
We must now see what is left of interest within the walls.