VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia
At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the iter ad Brundisium is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire, or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi, has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder, while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent. Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar it. It was – indeed, with all mutilations, it still is – a fine front of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as they do a kind of earlier and more healthy Renaissance, which, taking classical form as its general models, took them only as general models, and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.
Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller – at least the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and Benevento – by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place, if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms – not without a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen – which is the characteristic style of this region, the natural result of its political history. Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades, and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports. The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of the whole region at Bari.
Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.
The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle – better suited for the purpose than anything else – all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come – as they possibly may have come – from a mosque.
Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of styles – more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style, for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly, by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.
IX. Bari
We are now at Barium, Bari, the original Bari of the West, as distinguished from the Bari, Bar, Antibaris, Antivari, which repeats its name on the opposite coast. There we can now again, as we could have done seventy years back at Cattaro, land at a Montenegrin haven. The distinction between the two bearers of the name of Bari implies an association which is not out of place. The historic interest of Bari gathers wholly round its connexion with the lands on the other side of Hadria. In earlier days the place has really no history whatever. Its most memorable day was when the powers of the Eastern and Western Empires – powers which perhaps never again worked in such harmony – were needed to dislodge a Saracen Sultan from its walls. "Emir," some one will say, not "Sultan," and certainly we are more used in Europe to Sultans of much later date than the days of Lewis the Second and Basil the First, Sultans coming from quite other lands than any that can have sent forth the Mussulman prince of Bari. But he is called Sultan as well as Emir by his one biographer, the Emperor Constantine, and we cannot appeal from those august pages which still form the best guide-book to the eastern shores of the Hadriatic. Anyhow, the Sultan of Bari was a philosopher; he never laughed, except once when he saw a wheel go round; for that reminded him of the ups and downs of his own fortunes. Then Bari passes to the rule of the Eastern Empire; instead of a Sultan it has a Katapan, representative of the Eastern Augustus in that Italian dominion which had become so small at the beginning of the ninth century, and which was so great again at its end. Threatened again at the beginning of the eleventh century by new Saracen invaders, it is guarded by the fleets of Venice, still the faithful vassal of Constantinople against a common enemy. Seventy years later the arms of Robert Wiscard added the capital of Byzantine Italy to his Norman dominion, and before the century was out, Pope Urban, the great stirrer of the West against the Mussulman East, chose Bari as the scene of the Council called to denounce at once the practical abuses of the Christian West and the dogmatic errors of the Christian East. Once more, in the next age, we find Bari looking across the sea to its old lord, and chastised by the Sicilian king for its disloyalty. Add that Bari, before all saints, still honours St. Nicolas of the Lykian Myra, and keeps his relics sacred, we are told, from Turkish desecration by the craft of merchants of her own city. Altogether Bari seems, at least in its history, as much Greek as Italian or Norman. It would seem neither unnatural nor unpleasant if Greek were still the tongue of the seafaring folk of Bari, much as a Norman in his own land often carries an air about him which would make Danish seem a much more natural speech for him than French.
But the great buildings of Bari belong to that mixed Norman and Italian style of which we have already seen something at Bitonto. The architectural attractions of the city are chiefly to be found in two great churches and one smaller one. The castle, standing by the sea, should have its landward side walked round, and the walk will reveal much of picturesque outline and a little of good detail. But it is the churches, above all the great abbey of St. Nicolas, which are the glory of Bari. They all lie in the old town by the sea, the old town of narrow and crooked streets, in which it does not much matter which way you go; you are sure to come either to the castle or to one of the churches before very long. Very different are things in the new town, which we may rejoice in as we look at it as a sign of Bari's abiding or renewed prosperity, but which can raise no feelings of pleasure on any other ground. Its streets, crossing each other at right angles, are indeed carefully dedicated to the worthies of Bari; but, unless we can always remember which of several perhaps not very familiar worthies watches over each of several angles which are exactly alike, it is easy to take a wrong turn and to put oneself under the care of Andrew of Bari when we ought rather to be commending ourselves to Robert. And under either protection we yearn in the wide straight streets for some physical shelter from the Apulian sun, and wonder why modern Rome, modern Athens, and modern Bari should have so much less common sense than Bologna, Padua, and Corfu had in days long past. Still, amid this rectangular labyrinth the sea is a help on one side, while on another the tall tower of the metropolitan church of St. Sabinus beckons us into the older streets, whose narrowness and crookedness at least supply shade. That tower, one of the tallest and stateliest of Italy, we naturally assume to be a detached campanile, without a fellow and standing apart from its confederate buildings, church and baptistery. So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the duomo the great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen, must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we should perhaps have to go as far as Angoulême for a single tower of equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades, are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that function – in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of the pachydermata are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter carnivora. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches, and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?
When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone must have taken place not very long after the original building. The original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto – three arches from columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still be drunk. In the duomo the under-church has been restored out of all ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture.
As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari, one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not only the mighty King of Poland, but Grand-Duke of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Mazovia, and Samogitia. Yet we might have lighted on Slavonic associations earlier on the road. There is a strange record of a Bulgarian settlement in the parts of Beneventum; but that would take us yet further afield: it was before Bulgarians became Slavonic. But what are we to say to the Samnite Schiavia which sheltered Anselm?
The journey is done —
"Brundisium longæ finis cartæque viæque."
Otranto lies yet further; but Otranto, yet more notably than Bari, comes within the Venetian Notitia. So does Brundisium, city of the stag's horn, of the haven so aptly called, if we only knew in what tongue it is that Brentesium has that meaning. But we are tempted to regret that Brindisi and not Otranto is the point for which Hadria has to be crossed. Brindisi has no moral claim. We cannot look thence, as we can from Otranto, upon the mountains of still enslaved Epeiros; no one is tempted even to dream that he looks on free Corfu or on the lesser satellite that stands in front as its outpost.