Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/67



a period of criticism, when peculiarities of style in ecclesiastical architecture are most rigidly considered, not only by professional men, but by connoisseurs, it seems desirable to enounce the principles in various stages of the progress of design in Campanili, which it appears to me were discoverable in the opportunity afforded of comparing not only the most striking examples, but also a great number of the more ordinary Italian mediæval bell towers.

If remarkable exceptions to the following classification should appear to exist, they will be found to be more strictly military towers, and generally so named: such as the Torre del Podestà, at Pistoia; the Asinelli and Garibaldi towers at Bologna;—or else they have been converted to their present uses; such is the campanile of the church at Villanuova, formerly part of the feudal tower of the San Bonifazii, and, in like manner, that march-tower between Lombardy and the Venetian States, near the Porta del Consilio at Vicenza, has been perverted into the belfry of a church.

The first class (A.D. 500—750) is only to be found at Ravenna, where the earliest towers may be deemed to have been cylindrical without stringcourses, as seen in S. Apollinare; the next step would be to build them square, also without stringcourses, as in S. Giovanni Evangelista; next came those which were round, but ornamented with stringcourses, as in S. Giovanni Battista; and when square, and similarly ornamented, they served as the type for the next class.

The date of the erection of these towers at Ravenna may be fairly placed after the introduction of the use of bells, which they were evidently intended to contain, and, from their architectural character, not much later than the time of Theodoric. These details are most important where they appear in the construction of the windows; and resemble those arches in the building called the Palace of Theodoric, which spring from capitals, projecting as double corbels in the direction of the thickness of the wall over them, and