DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.7186#0025
Plate i.
SANTA EUFEMIA, AT PA VIA.
S the present work aims at supplying architects and manufacturers,
students- and amateurs, with a series of specimens of terra-cotta,
commencing with simple and proceeding to more elaborate forms,
and gives examples from the remotest date down to the latest mediaeval
period, it seems well to devote our first plate to the representation of the apse
of the Church of Santa Eufemia, Pavia, of which the architecture is both
the oldest (I assign it to the eleventh century) and the simplest. Of this style,
known throughout Italy as the Gothic-Lombard, the name seems to me in-
correct and merely local. The style has its own exclusive characteristics, is
referable to the dark ages and the mediaeval period, and reached its full
development merely in the valley of the Po; and as I hold the principles of
this architectural school to have been imported from the East by Constantino-
politan (Byzantine) artists, then modified according to the fashion or fancy of
the architects who established themselves here, and lastly cultivated and reduced
to system by their disciples, so to my thinking this style should rather be
named the Byzantine-Lombard. We know that the early Christians aimed
at imparting to their churches and other buildings a character unlike that of
the Pagan temples; and thus they evolved a system of architectural decoration
which accorded with the religious ideas and gravely simple rites of those times ;
the Ecclesiastical services then observed in the valley of the Po (Lombardy)
being fashioned according to the Greek model, of which a proof survives in
the famous Ambrosian ritual; all which bears out my theory that this archi-
tectural style was based on notions imported from Greece in the Middle Ages.
It is usual in Italy to call the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the epoch
of the Renaissance; a term applied in France to the sixteenth century. It
SANTA EUFEMIA, AT PA VIA.
S the present work aims at supplying architects and manufacturers,
students- and amateurs, with a series of specimens of terra-cotta,
commencing with simple and proceeding to more elaborate forms,
and gives examples from the remotest date down to the latest mediaeval
period, it seems well to devote our first plate to the representation of the apse
of the Church of Santa Eufemia, Pavia, of which the architecture is both
the oldest (I assign it to the eleventh century) and the simplest. Of this style,
known throughout Italy as the Gothic-Lombard, the name seems to me in-
correct and merely local. The style has its own exclusive characteristics, is
referable to the dark ages and the mediaeval period, and reached its full
development merely in the valley of the Po; and as I hold the principles of
this architectural school to have been imported from the East by Constantino-
politan (Byzantine) artists, then modified according to the fashion or fancy of
the architects who established themselves here, and lastly cultivated and reduced
to system by their disciples, so to my thinking this style should rather be
named the Byzantine-Lombard. We know that the early Christians aimed
at imparting to their churches and other buildings a character unlike that of
the Pagan temples; and thus they evolved a system of architectural decoration
which accorded with the religious ideas and gravely simple rites of those times ;
the Ecclesiastical services then observed in the valley of the Po (Lombardy)
being fashioned according to the Greek model, of which a proof survives in
the famous Ambrosian ritual; all which bears out my theory that this archi-
tectural style was based on notions imported from Greece in the Middle Ages.
It is usual in Italy to call the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the epoch
of the Renaissance; a term applied in France to the sixteenth century. It