arto.
TEE BYZANTINE COURT OP THE CRYSTAL PALAOB.
The Byzantine architecture, not less than the Saracenio, which came under our review last week, is distinguished by its love of colour. There is this difference, however—that whereas the former is above all things beautiful, the latter has not embodied its ideal unless it is imposing. The first delights, the second produces what the French expressively term exaltation: a palace is the type of the one, whose charms are actualities of the earth ; a church of the other, whose dories hint of the city to come, where the light shall be "like unto a stone moat precious, even a jasper-stone, clear as crystal." There is
nothing solemn in the Saracenic architecture. It may indeed in some 'floods, foster a kind of "lotus-eating" tendency, and conduce as a con- sequence to "mild-minded melancholy " ; but this is a thing apart. On the contrary, the Byzantine style has something solemn even in its trivial- ities.
The court in the Crystal Palace embraces Byzantine art, properly so called, and Romanesque art ; the latter illustrated chiefly from Germany, England, and Ireland, or parts directly influenced by the Irish style.
Byzantine art arose under mingled Greek, Roman, and Oriental im- pulses, in the building of Constantinople. The Iconoclastic persecution
spread the seeds of it from the Empire of the East over most parts of Eu- rope, among the Arabians, and in Asia Minor. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries it struggled against Gothic art, decayed, and at last succumbed. The pointed arch had overcome the round arch throughout non-Sdavonic and non-Grecian Europe. In Byzantium itself and the Eastern Empire, the style was not unmindful of the traditions of its precursors, and still less of its own. Curved forms became universal, columns of continual recurrence, mosaic work one of the most remarkable and elaborate features. Human and other figures disappeared. "The general arrangement of the churches," as Mr. Wyatt says in his Handbook, "is that of a Greek cross inscribed within a square, with four central piers supporting a large hemispherical
dome, the arms of the cross being surmounted by four smaller cupolas." The Lombard and other Romanesque styles, those of Normandy, England,
and Ireland, and in a less degree of the Rhine districts and Germany generally, bear only faint and fragmentary relation to the Byzantine. The fetterless and law-defiant mode and profusion in which the builders of these countries introduce figures and subjects—often, it would seem, in a spirit even of riotous glee—would alone suffice to mark the barrier be- tween the two.
The Directors of the Crystal Palace and Mr. Digby Wyatt have got together a considerable variety of examples of the Byzantine and Roman- esque schools. The arcade forming the façade is from the cloisters of St. Mary in Capitolo at Cologne and four Byzantine portraits, Charles the Bald, Theodora, (a pale face, not much unlike Mademoiselle Rachel's,) Justinian, and Nicephorus Botoniates III, are painted above it. Turning the angles is a figure of Night, from a Greek psalter of the tenth century, in a style which may be called the poetical, though not showing any extraordinary power; another of Day, "slightly altered," and a Virgin and Child, tending towards a naturalistic treatment. The cloisters con- tain examples from St. Mark's at Venice and from Gelnhausen in Suabia.
As specimens of English work, come the strange doorways from Kil- peek and Shobden ; liable, at first sight, to be ta, en for mere grotesques, but capable of being commented into profound sacred allegories. A com- partment from the cloister of St. John Lateran rendered in real porphyry, serpentine, and glass mosaic work—the grand fountain from Heisterbach —a doorway from Mayence Cathedral, with figure-subjects of the most artless quality, yet graceful and dreamlike—the bronze doors of Bishop Bernwardus of Hildesheim, somewhat more advanced in art, but less poetic in effect—the Fontevrault and other effigies, and Irish and Manx crosses—form some of the chief remaining contents of the court. The points which we have thus rapidly glanced at are not without af- fording some grounds for criticism. The style of Christian architecture became emphatically Gothic, as distinguished from Romanesque, Byzan- tine, or Norman, with the dawn of the thirteenth century ; and we are strongly inclined to think that a Mediteval Court would fairly claim as its own all that related to architecture from this time up to an advanced period of the fifteenth century in Italy, and a date still later in other countries. If the public is to be taught the characteristics of style in Middle-age architecture, why should the Temple effigies be appropriated to the By- zantine Court, at whose entrance they are placed ; and why do the Fon- tevrault effigies, the Rouen Cceur de Lion, and the rest, stand within its precincts ? Nothing in these is other than Gothic ;-; and the Wells Ca- thedral effigies, belonging to the very same period, are in the adjoining Medisival Court. The ceiling after Cimabue from San Francesco d'Assisi, no successfully reproduced by Mr. Clayton—a work rather solemn than beautital—is clearly Gothic ; although, like the Italian Gothic generally, falling short of Northern work in the intensity of its Gothicism. The groin is pointed, and the building is a recognized example of the style to which
we refer it. The space which this ceiling occupies in the Byzantine Court would have been well devoted to a specimen of mosaic figure-
work,—the great characteristic, and the most interesting one, in the deco- rative colouring of the style ; a specimen looked for almost as a matter of course, and nevertheless in vain. The position of this ceiling suggests another consideration,—for which, indeed, every step in the Byzantine and Romanesque Court affords matter of suggestion. It roofs the font from Winchester ; a work of savage rudeness utterly removed from affinity to the ceiling. True, the font may be Romanesque, or Angie-Norman, and the court includes the Romanesque as well as the Byzantine; but the marked and radical differences existing between the two styles should have pointed out to the Directors the propriety of setting some palpable sign of separation between them. There is no essential reason why the court should be laid out in a form which gives the idea of something like an entire budding, when its several members could not have coexisted in the same country or the same century ;.and we thinkemie arrangement in the way of screens would be decidedly preferable—especially if any sub- stantial teaching is to be sought from the collection. Again, the painted figures of the facade—the Justinian, Night, and others, of which we have spoken—are neither Byzantine, Gothic, nor anything else- in the way of style ; being entire failures in the indication of anything in this respect more remote than the nineteenth century, negligent and inefficient make-believes. -The shafts of the cloister- columns scarcely ahem, their decoration, that scrupulous regard to
good authority which should mark such an attempt. Nor do we think that the classicality which characterized Byzantine architecture in its early stages is adequately brought out,—a peculiarity ob- servable even in a building erected so. long after the advent of the Byzantine style as Canterbury Cathedral, some of the capitals in the choir of which are almost Roman ; nor yet that the rotund features so distinctive of the style, and which made the dome become its great type,, are prominent enough. To these objections we must add, that the. colouring, not only in figure-subjects, but in such matters as the imita- tions of serpentine and the like, is by no means of so high a quality of workmanship as the professions made by the Directors, and the claims which they prefer as art-educators, imperatively demanded. On the: other hand, we gladly recognize that the imitation of plain sculptured:. white stone in the interior of the court is especially successful ; and only regret that it contrasts with the tinted putty aspect of similar work iss the Iffediteval Court. The barbarism of colouring the effigies ought perhaps to be charged exclusively to their originals ; for Mr. Wyatt.. may plead that he is bound to reproduce, and not to modify or im- prove.
It is not an easy thing to define by a single quality the intrinsic ex- pression of Byzantine architecture. Perhaps it may be said to express the feeling of authority. It preserves and creates rigid traditions ; is grandiose, gorgeous, and ceremonial, in its decorations. A peculiar apti- tude for ecclesiastical ritual seems to belong to it, whether in its Easterre form, where richness of decoration and colour existed without the adjunct of pictured representation, or in its Western aspect, which united both.. Its transitional character, however, between Roman and Pagan archi- tecture and that which is the peculiarly Christian type, the Gothic, ' render it adapted for definition according to its external features aa it progressed from the one to the other, rather than according to its inward. spirit. The beauties which it has bequeathed to us, at Venice and else- where, are exquisitely refined even to lusciousness—full of soft repose and happy brooding contentment. The fantasies and fierce life with which it teemed, and the monsters it gave birth to under Lombardic sout Northern influences,—if indeed this "Romanesque" architecture can be at all reckoned in with the Byzantine' —belong essentially to the Gothic temper, and may be almost said, so far as any distinction need be drawn, to outgothicize the Galt
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