Pastor into scholar

Harold Acton

The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt Edited by Peter Murray (Secker & Warburg £30)

-E:very few years since my fervent child- ' ' hood I have read and reread Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Italian Re- naissance with increasing wonder and admiration. Here was a Swiss historian, born in Bask, who thoroughly understood and appreciated the achievement of the great Italian humanists in all their variety of character and expression at a period when Ruskin was fulminating against Re- naissance architecture as deplorable 'har- lotry'. This truly epoch-making book was first published in 1860, and it remains the most comprehensive panorama of Italian culture from the 13th century until Michel- angelo frescoed the Sistine Chapel. Burck- hardt's previous work, Der Cicerone (1855), was a pioneering guide to the enjoyment of Italian works of art, still valuable for students, though much of it has been superseded by the investigations of later scholars. At last his prodigiously erudite Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (1867) has been translated into lucid En- glish by Mr James Palmes, revised and edited impeccably by Professor Peter Mur- ray in a handsome volume containing 351 illustrations, many of which are repro- duced from old line-engravings, so much richer in detail than photographs.

The blurb on the jacket does not ex- aggerate, for indeed Professor Murray has 'supplemented the text with commentarY and updated and amplified an already unparalleled body of references'. As he states in his introduction, the value of this publication is due to Burckhardt's diges- tion of virtually every primary source, and most of the secondary ones, on Italy during that prolific period, 'and this is why the book is worth translating after the lapse of well over a century'. How fortunate that Burckhardt changed his mind about becoming a Protestant pastor and devoted himself to historY instead. Professor Mtirray provides a meti- culous bibliography for which specialists

cannot be sufficiently grateful. Unlike Burckhardt's previous books, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, though 'close to his heart', was not moulded into a continuous narrative. Pro- fessor Murray describes it as 'a set of reading-notes, not for the general reader seeking an introduction to Italian Renaiss- ance architecture', but a mine for the Specialist. Even so, the general reader will discover facts and opinions he would not find elsewhere, for instance, about the survival of the Gothic style alongside the Renaissance when it had become 'uncon- genial'. In his profound appraisal of Leon Hattista Alberti he writes:

Gothic architecture was merely a dynamic rhythm, that of the Renaissance is rhythm of masses, in the one the artistic content is expressed in the organism, in the other it lies essentially in the geometrical and cubic relationships. Alberti [in his arte edificatoria] thus makes no reference to structural forces

• • - but refers to the image which the building creates, and to the eye, which contemplates and enjoys this image.

Speaking of the versatility of the great artists of the time, he remarks that:

the beautifully fresh appearance of Renaiss- ance buildings derives from the fact that the designer was not merely the draughtsman, but, as sculptor, painter, or woodworker, was aware of the nature of all the materials and the whole formal vocabulary, so that he was able to visualise and evaluate an entire building and all its decorative features.

Voluminous examples are given in the two complementary sections: Book I dealing With architecture in 15 chapters, and Book

II dealing with decoration in nine chapters, all packed with learned references.

Some of Burckhardt's remarks about

Michelangelo are puzzling, such as: 'he liberated art more than was beneficial'.

Though he seems to have admired the Laurentian Library, he observed: `Miche- langelo's staircase, designed in Rome, for the vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, which caused such a sensation, Is, like the vestibule itself, an incompre- hensible jest on the part of the great master.' This is as incomprehensible to me as his disparagement of the facade of Villa Giulia in Rome, but in most respects Burckhardt was in advance of his contem- poraries. The Palazzo Gravina in Naples, SO much altered that it would be better not

to have survived', (sic) is fortunately no longer a Post Office.

Now that the repaving of Florence's Piazza della Signoria is the subject of Choleric controversy, it is meet to be reminded that it was completely paved With bricks in 1351.

Aspiring young architects and passionate sightseers should take copious notes from Burckhardt's notes comprising this pre- cious volume. Here they will find that 'unity of all the aesthetic arts' required by Wil- liam Lethaby, so lamentably lacking in our Philistine property developers and de- signers of industrial estates or office blocks.