Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/499

Rh ITALIAN.] A 11 C H I T E C T U II E 441 be dimiuislied in regular gradation. When columns are attached, or pilasters are used, in Italian architecture, the almost invariable custom is to break the entablature over every column or pilaster, or over every two when they arc in couples. Because of the great length of the intercolum- niation, this would appear to have been done at first; but it has frequently been done by some of the most distinguished practitioners of the school, even without that excuse, so that it may be held as approved by them. A basement is either a low stereobate or a lofty story, according as it is intended to support a single ordinance the whole height of the main body of the structure, or indeed the lowest of two or more orders ; or as it occupies the ground story of a building, and supports an ordinance, or the appearance of one, above. In either case much is necessarily left to the discretion of the architect ; but in the latter the height of the order it is to support is the generally prescribed height of the basement. A basement may be rusticated or plain ; if it be low, and is not arranged like a continued pedestal, it must have neither cornice nor blocking course ; but if lofty, a deep bold blocking course is indispensable. An attic may vary in height from one-quarter to one-third the height of the order it surmounts ; attics are arranged with a base, dado, and coping cornice, like pedestals, and gene rally have pilasters broken over the columns below. The rule for the form, composition, and application of pediments in Italian architecture, if it may be gathered from the practice of the school, appears to be to set good taste at defiance in them all. We find pediments of every shape, composed of cornices, busts, scrolls, festoons, and what not, and applied in every situation, and even one within another, to the number of three or four, and each of these of different form and various composition. The proportion laid down for the height of a pediment is from one-fourth to one-fifth the length of its base, or the cornice on which it is to rest. Balustrades are used in various situations, but their most common application is in attics, or as parapets on the summits of buildings, before windows, in otherwise close continued stereobates, to flank flights of steps, to front terraces, or to flank bridges. Their shapes and proportions are even more diversified than their application ; that of most frequent use is shaped like an Italian Doric column, compressed to a dwarfish height, and consequently swollen in the shaft to an inordinate bulk in the lower part, and having its capital, to the hypotrachelium, reversed to form a base to receive its grotesque form. The base and coping cornice of a balustrade are those of an ordinary attic, or of a pedestal whose dado may be pierced into balusters. The general external proportions of an edifice, when they are not determined by single columnar ordi nances, appear to be unsettled. The grand front of the Farnese Palace in Rome is in two squares, its length being twice its height ; the length of each front of Yignola s cele brated pentagonal palace of Caprarola is two and a quarter times its height above the bastions. In Palladio s works we find the proportions of fronts to vary so considerably as to make it evident that he did not consider himself bound by any rule on that point. In some cases we find the length to be one and a sixth times the height, in others one and a fourth, one and a half, two, two and a sixth, and even three and a sixth; and elevations by other masters of the school are found to vary to the same extent. The pro portions of rooms, again, range from a cube to the ratio of one to two, though it is preferred that the height should be a sixth, or even a fifth, less than a side when the plan is a square ; but the sesquialteral form, with the height equal to the breadth, and the length one-half more, is considered the most perfect proportion for a room. There is consider able variety and beauty in the foliate and other enrich ments of an architectural character in many structures in Italy, but very little ornament enters into the columnar composition of Italian architecture. Friezes, instead of being sculptured, are swollen ; the shafts of columns, it has been already remarked, are very seldom fluted, and their capitals are generally poor in the extreme ; mouldings are indeed sometimes carved, but not often ; rustic masonry, ill-formed festoons, and gouty balustrades, for the most part supply the place of chaste and classic enrichment. This refers more particularly to the more classic works of the school ; in many of the earlier structures of Italy, and especially on monuments of various kinds, we find what may be called a graceful profusion of ornament, of the most tasteful and elegant kind ; few carved mouldings, however, and very few well-profiled cornices, are to be met with in Italian compositions of any kind. In many of the later architectural works of that country we find again a profusion of ornament of the most tasteless and inelegant description, chiefly in the gross and vulgar style, which ia distinguished as that of Louis XIV. of France. In the 15th century such was the reverence of men for the revived works of ancient literature and science, that the pretence of the Italians, that they had restored ancient classical architecture on the precepts of an architect of the Augustan age, was sufficient to open the way for them all over civilised Europe. In the course of that and the fol lowing century Italian architecture was adopted and Italian architects employed in France, Spain, Germany, Great Britain, and their respective dependencies ; and now, in the 19th century, Vitruvius and Palladio are as predominant on the shores of the Baltic as on those of the Mediterranean ; though in England and in some parts of the Continent their influence is considerably diminished since the time of Inigo Jones and Claude Perrault. It has been already remarked, too, that the Cinquecento was later in gaining a footing in Britain than on the Continent, in consequence of the love of the beautiful national style of architecture, which our ancestors do not appear to have been induced to resign to the barbarian innovators of the South, as readily as most other nations were to give up theirs. The French, though they received the Vitruvian architecture from the Italians, were patriotic enough, as soon as they had acquired its principles, to confine the practice of it almost entirely to native architects, in whose hands it assumed a differ ent character from that which it possessed in Italy, and became what maybe called the French style of Cinquecento. Its ecclesiastical structures are less faulty than are those of the corresponding period in Italy, but its secular edifices are as far inferior to those of that country. The grand palatial style, which is exemplified in the Farnese Palace in Home, never found its way into France ; but instead, there arose that monstrous and peculiarly French manner, of which the well-known palaces of the Tuileries and Luxembourg are egregious examples. In the age of Louis XIV. the French appear to have reverted to the Italian manner in a certain degree ; for the palace of Versailles includes almost all the extravagances of that school in its worst period, and contains, moreover, architectural defor mities which Italy never equalled till it imitated them. They consist in the style of enrichment which is distin guished by the name, and is due in part to the gross taste, of the monarch in whose reign it had its origin. The same period produced one of the most classical architects of the French school its Palladio or Inigo Jones Perrault, whose design for the buildings of the Louvre was preferred to that of Bernini, though, indeed, the preference was no compliment to the one nor discredit to the other, consider ing to whom the decision was of necessity referred. The Hotel des Invalides is of the same age : it exhibits the graces of the Italian cupola, surmounting a composition which includes more than all the faults of St Peter s in II. 56