Lees-Milne - Roman Mornings

ROMAN

MORNINGS

ROMAN

MORNINGS

JAMES LEES-MILNE

The tourists tell you all about these things,

and I am afraid of stumbling on their language

when I enumerate what is so well known.

P. B. SHELLEY

Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,

qua mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit,

cum repeto noctem, qua tot mihi cara reliqui,

labitur ex oculis nunc quoque gutta meis.

OVID

Copyright in the revised edition James Lees-Milne 1956 and 1988

All rights reserved.

First published in the United States of America in 1992 by

NEW AMSTERDAM BOOKS

171 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

by arrangement with William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd., London

First printing.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lees-Milne, James

Roman mornings / James Lees-Milne.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56131-011-1

1. ArchitectureItalyRome. 2. Rome (Italy)Buildings, structures, etc. I. Title.

NA1120.L38 1992

90-40415

720'.945'632dc20

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Cover painting, St. Peters from the Villa Barberini.

J.M.W. Turner, courtesy of The Tate Gallery, London/Art Resources, N.Y.

To

SACHEVERELL SITWELL

who looks at architecture

with the eye of a poet

WHEN at dusk the lanterns in the palace courtyards start glimmering and the church bells intoning those solemn, muffled notes that speak as though from the depths of the ocean, when the baroque folds of washing cease dripping over the narrow streets and the motor-tricycle drays, their parasols no longer sheltering mountains of violets and carnations but a stalk or two of either, snort their empty way homeward, when the smell of bleach and coffee gives place to that of fruit-rind and roasted chestnutsthat is the magical moment to wander about Rome. That is the moment to see the city of conflicting moods as it always has been and still is, hateful and holy, wicked and wise, pagan and papal, sometimes so beautiful that it is scarcely to be endured, and always quite inscrutable. That is the supreme moment to rhapsodize and pay homage, to make final assault upon the hidden secret of Romes eternal decay, and to be deliciously deceived.

The early morning on the other hand is more to our purpose, for it is not at all romantic. All the conclusions of the previous evening disintegrate under the glare of Roman realism in a shower of useless fragments, like cheap glass roughly handled. It is the time to understand that you were seduced the previous evening by fantasies and to face facts. They present this piece of advicethat only until midday are you sure of seeing the insides of monuments; some may, others will not, be open again later in the afternoon; and this perplexitythat there are so many guide books all saying the same things in slightly different ways, some concisely, others at length, that it is a devilish problem to decide which to buy. The safe course is to choose the fullest and most concise, the one that combines the most information with the minimum amount of commentary. If there are two qualities to be eschewed in a guide book they are insufficiency and opinion. The guide book which describes a monument as an edifice of the baroque period in the worst possible taste, or as a mediaeval structure noted for the purity of its proportions is to be avoided at all costs. What you need to be supplied with are simply bald data on which to build your own perfectly unbiased conclusions.

This small volume is in no sense a guide book; yet it is rather more factual than any guide book you will be able to buy. It can afford to be so because it only concerns itself with eight buildings in all. And since it is not a guide book it dares venture upon a few opinions.

Its purpose is quite straightforward. It deals with buildings representative of six phases in the architectural history of Rome. I am well aware that the phases I have chosen are somewhat random ones, and that there are others I have omitted altogether, like the Mannerist, of which Michelangelo was the shining exponent, and the Neo-classical, of which Valadier was a dim exponent. But the first phase did not put forth any immediate fruit in Rome after the death of Michelangelo, that solitary giant without a school, and the fruit of the second was not remarkable. None of my representative monuments is a ruin; for ruins are apt to display prettiness, picturesqueness and romance, qualities which evoke sentiments not concerned with a true judgment of architecture. Therefore I have deliberately chosen buildings in a fair state of preservation. Each of them, except possibly the representative of my last phase, is an architectural masterpiece which means something far beyond a mere building. That is the main distinction which interrelates them.

My monuments are accordingly creations of the best architects of their day. The names and personalities of the earlier architects are, unfortunately, either unknown or obscure. But there is one trait all these men from the ancient Roman myth Valerius of Ostia down to the rococo Salvi had in common, and that was a determination to remain traditional. They were steeped in the classical laws of architecture, to which they ostensibly adhered. And this is a primary reason why they were artists of power and originality. Their creations, as I shall try to show, are all archetypes, some, like the Pantheon and the Tempietto, more obviously so than the others. Indeed, individual features of these two temples are reflected upon buildings in practically every town of Europe, the Commonwealth and America. The influence of Rome upon the architecture of western civilization has always been more conspicuous than that of Athens.

The fact that my selection includes more religious than secular buildings is purely fortuitous. I do not prefer churches to palaces. But in Rome the first are more easily visited than the second. Besides only the first are representative of the three earliest phases which I have chosen to write about.

To judge architecture properly is scarcely less difficult than to create it. If you want corroboration of this statement consider the manifold standards of judgment which have been advanced, and discarded since the Renaissance. Consider some of the great scholars of the past, Serlio, Palladio, Frart, Winckelmann, Ruskin, who have devoted lifetimes to determining whether good architecture is dependent upon the orders, mathematics, harmonics, anatomy or sexual proprietyand all in vain. Each succeeding generation has ridiculed the standard set up with so much earnest conviction by its predecessor. Today we are overrun with architectural historians. The good ones outnumber the good architects, to such a pass has the practice of this noble art declined. Owing to easy travel and photography contemporary historians have amassed wider factual knowledge than their predecessors ever boasted, so that there is a consequent tendency to judge architecture by standards too exclusively academic. The erudition of the least pretentious architectural student is quite astounding. He will rattle off the dates of birth and death of all our leading native architects without a pause; and he will ascribe an eighteenth-century portico or cornice to any season of any year, provided of course that the architects and buildings are British, for those of the Continent do not yet interest him much. This is a pity because in England classical architecture, unlike Gothic, is rarely first-rate, when we measure it by the abundance of excellence in Italy and France.