The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors Architects, Volume 1 | Page 8

about the year of grace 438, of S. Vitale which was built in the year 547, and of the abbey of Classi di fuori, and indeed of many other monasteries and churches built after the time of the Lombards. All these buildings, as I have said, are great and magnificent, but the architecture is very rude. Among them are many abbeys in France built to S. Benedict and the church and monastery of Monte Casino, the church of S. Giovanni Battista built by that Theodelinda, Queen of the Goths, to whom S. Gregory the Pope wrote his dialogues. In this place that queen caused the history of the Lombards to be painted. We thus see that they shaved the backs of their heads, and wore tufts in front, and were dyed to the chin. Their clothes were of broad linen, like those worn by the Angles and Saxons, and they wore a mantle of divers colours; their shoes were open to the toes and bound above with small leather straps. Similar to the churches enumerated above were the church of S. Giovanni, Pavia, built by Gundiperga, daughter of Theodelinda, and the church of S. Salvatore in the same city, built by Aribert, the brother of the same queen, who succeeded Rodoaldo, husband of Gundiberta, in the government; the church of S. Ambruogio at Pavia, built by Grimoald, King of the Lombards, who drove from the kingdom Aribert's son Perterit. This Perterit being restored to his throne after Grimoald's death built a nunnery at Pavia called the Monasterio Nuovo, in honour of Our Lady and of St Agatha, and the queen built another dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Pertica outside the walls. Cunibert, Perterit's son, likewise built a monastery and church to St George called di Coronato, in a similar style, on the spot where he had won a great victory over Alahi. Not unlike these was the church which the Lombard king Luit-prand, who lived in the time of King Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, built at Pavia, called S. Piero, in Cieldauro, or that which Desiderius, who succeeded Astolf, built to S. Piero Clivate in the diocese of Milan; or the monastery of S. Vincenzo at Milan, or that of S. Giulia at Brescia, because all of them were very costly, but in a most ugly and rambling style. In Florence the style of architecture was slightly improved somewhat later, the church of S. Apostolo built by Charlemagne, although small, being very beautiful, because the shape of the columns, although made up of pieces, is very graceful and beautifully made, and the capitals and the arches in the vaulting of the side aisles show that some good architect was left in Tuscany, or had arisen there. In fine the architecture of this church is such that Pippo di Ser Brunnellesco did not disdain to make use of it as his model in designing the churches of S. Spirito and S. Lorenzo in the same city. The same progress may be noticed in the church of S. Mark's at Venice, not to speak of that of S. Giorgio Maggiore erected by Giovanni Morosini in the year 978. S. Mark's was begun under the Doge Giustiniano and Giovanni Particiaco next to S. Teodosio, when the body of the Evangelist was brought from Alexandria to Venice. After the Doge's palace and the church had suffered severely from a series of fires, it was rebuilt upon the same foundations in the Byzantine style as it stands to-day, at a great cost and with the assistance of many architects, in the time of the Doge Domenico Selvo, in the year 973, the columns being brought from the places where they could be obtained. The construction was continued until the year 1140, M. Piero Polani being then Doge, from the plans of several masters who were all Greeks, as I have said. Erected at the same time, and also in the Byzantine style, were the seven abbeys built in Tuscany by Count Hugh, Marquis of Brandenburg, such as the Badia of Florence, the abbey of Settimo, and the others. All these structures and the vestiges of others which are not standing bear witness to the fact that architecture maintained its footing though in a very bastard form far removed from the good antique style. Further evidence is afforded by a number of old palaces erected in Florence in Tuscan work after the destruction of Fiesole, but the measurements of the doors and the very elongated windows and the sharp-pointed arches after the manner of the foreign architects of the day, denote some amount of barbarism. In the year after 1013 the art appears to have received an access of vigour in the rebuilding of the beautiful church of S. Miniato on the Mount in