Val dArno | Page 9

Severn, (the son of Keats's Mr. Severn,) was with me, looking
reverently at those remains, last summer, and has made, with help from
the sun, this sketch for you (Plate III.); entirely true and effective as far
as his time allowed.
Half destroyed, or more, I said it was,--Time doing grievous work on it,
and men worse. You heard Vasari saying of it, that it stood on twelve
degrees of twelve-faced steps. These--worn, doubtless, into little more
than a rugged slope--have been replaced by the moderns with four
circular steps, and an iron railing; [1] the bas-reliefs have been carried
off from the panels of the second vase, and its fair marble lips choked
with asphalt:--of what remains, you have here a rough but true image.
[Footnote 1: In Mr. Severn's sketch, the form of the original foundation
is approximately restored.]
In which you see there is not a trace of Gothic feeling or design of any
sort. No crockets, no pinnacles, no foils, no vaultings, no grotesques in
sculpture. Panels between pillars, panels carried on pillars, sculptures in
those panels like the Metopes of the Parthenon; a Greek vase in the
middle, and griffins in the middle of that. Here is your font, not at all of

Saint John, but of profane and civil- engineering John. This is his
manner of baptism of the town of Perugia.
42. Thus early, it seems, the antagonism of profane Greek to
ecclesiastical Gothic declares itself. It seems as if in Perugia, as in
London, you had the fountains in Trafalgar Square against Queen
Elinor's Cross; or the viaduct and railway station contending with the
Gothic chapel, which the master of the large manufactory close by has
erected, because he thinks pinnacles and crockets have a pious
influence; and will prevent his workmen from asking for shorter hours,
or more wages.
43. It seems only; the antagonism is quite of another kind,--or, rather,
of many other kinds. But note at once how complete it is--how utterly
this Greek fountain of Perugia, and the round arches of Pisa, are
opposed to the school of design which gave the trefoils to Niccola's
pulpit, and the traceries to Giovanni's Campo Santo.
The antagonism, I say, is of another kind than ours; but deep and wide;
and to explain it, I must pass for a time to apparently irrelevant topics.
You were surprised, I hope, (if you were attentive enough to catch the
points in what I just now read from Vasari,) at my venturing to bring
before you, just after I had been using violent language against the
Sienese for breaking up the work of Quercia, that incidental sentence
giving account of the much more disrespectful destruction, by the
Perugians, of the tombs of Pope Urban IV., and Martin IV.
Sending was made for John, you see, first, when Pope Urban IV. died
in Perugia--whose tomb was to be carved by John; the Greek fountain
being a secondary business. But the tomb was so well destroyed,
afterwards, that only a few relics remained scattered here and there.
The tomb, I have not the least doubt, was Gothic;--and the breaking of
it to pieces was not in order to restore it afterwards, that a living
architect might get the job of restoration. Here is a stone out of one of
Giovanni Pisano's loveliest Gothic buildings, which I myself saw with
my own eyes dashed out, that a modern builder might be paid for
putting in another. But Pope Urban's tomb was not destroyed to such
end. There was no qualm of the belly, driving the hammer,--qualm of
the conscience probably; at all events, a deeper or loftier antagonism
than one on points of taste, or economy.
44. You observed that I described this Greek profane manner of design

as properly belonging to civil buildings, as opposed not only to
ecclesiastical buildings, but to military ones. Justice, or Righteousness,
and Veracity, are the characters of Greek art. These may be opposed to
religion, when religion becomes fantastic; but they must be opposed to
war, when war becomes unjust. And if, perchance, fantastic religion
and unjust war happen to go hand in hand, your Greek artist is likely to
use his hammer against them spitefully enough.
45. His hammer, or his Greek fire. Hear now this example of the
engineering ingenuities of our Pisan papa, in his younger days.
"The Florentines having begun, in Niccola's time, to throw down many
towers, which had been built in a barbarous manner through the whole
city; either that the people might be less hurt, by their means, in the
fights that often took place between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or
else that there might be greater security for the State, it appeared to
them that it would be very difficult to ruin the Tower