|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 22
[Footnote 21: Given at much greater length in the lecture, with
diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them
would be unintelligible. The sum of what I said was a strong assertion
of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most
grotesque sculpture,--Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and
praised as Gallic-French--not Norman.]
How far the existing British nation owes its military prowess to
the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have never examined its genealogy
enough to tell you;--but this I can tell you positively, that whatever
constitutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced or taught
among the nations they conquered, they did not at first attempt with
their own hands to rival them in any of their finer arts, but used
both Greek and Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen,
and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men
thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.
In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the
Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that
there wasn't a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are,
every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of
�gina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and
with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger
II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it
is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb--temple over
sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on,
into acute angles--get pierced in the gable with foils, and their
sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the
fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. But what is the meaning of
the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily
(within thirty miles of the field of Himera)? Well, the main meaning
is that though the Normans could build, they couldn't carve, and were
wise enough not to try to, when they couldn't, as you do now all over
this intensely comic and tragic town: but, here in England, they only
employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more
driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed
the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet,
brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English
Gothic.
But even for the first decoration of the archivolt itself, they were
probably indebted to the Greeks in a degree I never apprehended, until
by pure happy chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was
writing the last pages of this lecture.
In the generalization of ornament attempted in the first volume of
the 'Stones of Venice,' I supposed the Norman _zigzag_ (and with some
practical truth) to be derived from the angular notches with which the
blow of an axe can most easily decorate, or at least vary, the solid
edge of a square fillet. My good friend, and supporter, and for some
time back the single trustee of St. George's Guild, Mr. George Baker,
having come to Oxford on Guild business, I happened to show him the
photographs of the front of Iffley church, which had been collected
for this lecture; and immediately afterwards, in taking him through
the schools, stopped to show him the Athena of �gina as one of
the most important of the Greek examples lately obtained for us by
Professor Richmond. The statue is (rightly) so placed that in looking
up to it, the plait of hair across the forehead is seen in a steeply
curved arch. "Why," says Mr. Baker, pointing to it, "there's the
Norman arch of Iffley." Sure enough, there it exactly was: and a
moment's reflection showed me how easily, and with what instinctive
fitness, the Norman builders, looking to the Greeks as their absolute
masters in sculpture, and recognizing also, during the Crusades, the
hieroglyphic use of the zigzag, for water, by the Egyptians, might
have adopted this easily attained decoration at once as the sign of
the element over which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek
goddess who ruled both it and them.
I do not in the least press your acceptance of such a tradition,
nor for the rest, do I care myself whence any method of ornament is
derived, if only, as a stranger, you bid it reverent welcome. But much
probability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition
of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon
and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France. These and
other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials
to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next lecture the
forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful
in them was inspired.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|