The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini

A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance

Adrian Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351748575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This title was first published in 2002. Adrian Stokes was a British painter and writer whose books on art have been allowed to go out of print despite their impact on Modernist culture. This new edition of The Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini presents the original texts of 1932 and 1934 and furnishes them with introductions by David Carrier and Stephen Kite that will help readers grasp the structure and significance of what have become Stokes' most widely cited and influential books. Written as parts of an incomplete trilogy, The Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini mark a crossroad in the transition from late Victorian to Modernist conceptions of art, especially sculpture and architecture. Stokes continued, even expanded, John Ruskin's and Walter Pater's belief that art is essential to the individual's proper psychological development but wove their teaching into a new aesthetic shaped by his experience of psychoanalysis and recent innovations in literature, dance, and the visual arts. This volume will be of interest to those concerned with art criticism, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, as well as the art and architecture of the Renaissance and Modern periods. Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation in memory of David Sylvester.

Part One
Stone and Water

Stephen Kite

Chapter One
STONE AND WATER

Stephen Kite

I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is habitual. Every Venetian generation handles the Istrian stone of which Venice is made. Venetian sculpture proceeds now, not by chisel and hammer, but under the hands, the feet, under the very breath of each inhabitant and of a few cats, dogs and vermin. See the nobs upon the ponte della Paglia, how fine their polish, how constantly renewed is their hand-finish.

Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture. People touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made magnificent by perennial touching. For the hand explores, all unconsciously to reveal, to magnify an existent form. Perfect sculpture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your hand to enhance them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the weather, records on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate, simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive touching has communicated. This is not peculiar to Venice nor to Italy. Almost every-where man has recorded his feelings in stone. To the designed shape of some piece, almost everywhere usage has sometimes added an aesthetic meaning that corresponds to no conscious aesthetic aim. But it is in Italy and other Mediterranean countries that we take real courage from such evidence of solid or objectified feelings, quite apart from the fact that these are the countries of marble, of well-heads and fountains, of assignation or lounging beneath arcades and porticoes, of huge stone palaces and massive cornices where pigeons tramp their red feet. We are prepared to enjoy stone in the south. For, as we come to the southern light of the Mediterranean, we enter regions of coherence and of settled forms. The piecemeal of our lives now offers some mass, the many heads of discontent are less devious in their looks. When we stand in the piazzas of southern towns, it is as if a band had struck up; for when grouped at home about our native bandstand we have noticed the feeble public park to attain a certain definiteness. Similarly we are prepared in the southern light to admire the evidence of Italian living concreted and objectified in stone.

But exhilaration gained from stone is a vastly different encouragement from the one that music may afford. It is an opposite encouragement. Or rather it is something more than the bestowal of a tempo on things. For tempo, the life-process itself, attains concreteness as stone. In Venice the world is stone. There, in stone, to which each changing light is gloss, the human process shines clear and quasi-permanent. There, the lives of generations have made exteriors, acceptable between sky and water, marbles inhabited by emotion, feelings turned to marble.

Without a visit to Venice you may hardly envisage stone as so capable to hold firm the flux of feelings. Stone sculpture apart, stone is more often conceived in the north as simply rock-like. And who will love the homogeneous marble sheets in the halls of Lyons’ Corner Houses? No hands will attempt to evoke from them a gradual life. For nowhere upon them is the human impress. Few hands have touched them, or an instrument held in the hand. They were sliced from their blocks by impervious machines. They have been shifted and hauled like so many girders. They are illumined in their hues beneath the light; yet they are adamant.

In writing now of Venice, I have not in mind Venetian sculpture nor marble palaces reflecting the waters between them. I refer to the less signal yet vast outlay there of the salt-white Istrian stone, every bit of it used; to bridge-banisters and fondamenta-posts made smooth and electric by swift or groping hands and by the sudden sprawls of children; to great lintels seared like eaten wood above storehouse doorways on the Giudecca; to the gleaming stanchion on the quay in front of the Salute, a stanchion whose squat cylindrical form is made all the more trenchant by the deep spiral groove carved by the repeated pull of ropes; to vaster stanchions on the Zattere, lying as long and white and muffled as polar bears… . Stone enshrines all usage and all fantasies. They are given height, width, and breadth, solidity. Life in Venice is outward, enshrined in gleaming white Istrian. Each shrine is actuality beneath the exploring hand, is steadfast to the eye. Such perpetuation, such instantaneous and solid showing of a long-gathered momentum, gives the courage to create in art as in life. For living is externalization, throwing an inner ferment outward into definite act and thought. Visual art is the clearest mirror of this aim.The painter’s fantasies become material, become canvas and paint. Stone the solid, yet the habitat of soft light like the glow of flesh, is the material, so I shall maintain, that inspires all the visual arts. Marble statues of the gods are the gods themselves. For they are objects as if alive which enjoy complete outwardness.

b S.R.

In Venice, even pain has its god-like compass. Masks of toothache, masks of suffering, snow-white, incorrigible, overhanging dark waters, these great stone heads line the base of the palazzo Pesaro on the side canal. The gondolier who enters from the Grand Canal will need to use the masks to correct his black boat. He thus polishes one or two heads, damps the swollen cheek of another, strikes a hollow roaring mouth. The cries from canal and from calli, new noises that are caught to the clammy, still livid recesses of the stone, released old and thin and ominous as echo, are as sustenance to these perennial faces….

That a stone face representing Vice or toothache should be an assistance in navigation, that misery should be exemplified as solid, attaining beauty in completeness, lends to all phenomena, even the least welcome, an almost positive zest. And see how these stones make permanent drama of the sky’s shifting materials!Istrian marble blackens in the shade, is snow or salt-white where exposed to the sun. Light and shade are thus recorded, abstracted, intensified, solidified. Matter is dramatized in stone, huge stonework palaces rebutting the waters.

No: it is the sea that thus stands petrified, sharp and continuous till up near the sky. For this Istrian stone seems compact of salt’s bright yet shaggy crystals. Air eats into it, the brightness remains. Amid the sea Venice is built from the essence of the sea. Over the Adriatic, mounted upon churches and palaces, a thousand statues posture, distilled agleam from the whirls and liquid tresses of the Adriatic over which they are presiding. They stand white against the sky, one with a banner, another with a broken column in her hands.

Yet this whiteness as of salt is not dazzling. On the contrary, though here the sea is petrified, it still is ruffled or is cut into successive cylinders and pillars. Istrian stone has always been hammered. It is a convention of its use which probably arose in the construction of bridges and water stairs. For this hammering, which makes the smallest surface a microcosm of the larger growths in light and shade, prevents the stone from being slippery. So, we are reminded of the substances that batten on slippery rocks and roughen them, shells with crusted grooves, or hard sponges. When such thoughts are uppermost, Istrian stone itself, Venice herself, is an incrustation.

Or again at night, Istrian is lace. The Baroque fronts are like giant fretworks that stiffen the brighter stars. Lace, in fact, has always been an industry in Venice, though more particularly at Chioggia where they have woven it large and coarse.

Again, if in fantasy the stones of Venice appear as the waves’ petrification, then Venetian glass, compost of Venetian sand and water, expresses the taut curvature of the cold under-sea, the slow, oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly translucent water.

If we would understand a visual art, we ourselves must cherish some fantasy of the material that stimulated the artist, and ourselves feel some emotional reason why his imagination chose, when choice was not altogether impelled by practical, technical and social considerations, to employ one material rather than another. Poets alone are trustworthy interpreters. They alone possess the insight with which to re-create subjectively the unconscious fantasies that are general.

Agostino di Duccio’s reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini (which provide the majority of the illustrations¹ in this book), so far as they reflect, and even concentrate, the common Mediterranean fantasies of stone and water, for their interpretation require an account of Mediterranean geography and the dependent scope of Mediterranean visual art seen as a whole.

An invocation of Venice has been my prologue. For the Venetian stones and waters are the Mediterranean essence: how strongly Mediterranean is this essence, you may judge from any port or harbour in the world. For, wherever it may be, the stone jetties and circumvented waters that make a port are reminders of the Mediterranean scene.

Even the port of London has its Mediterranean aspect, where at Wapping or Limehouse the stout warehouses are steeped in the river. The Genoa-like passages between them are narrow and tall: at their ends you emerge into the light and into the open, discover an array of steps, or a quay that locks the river in a seething stone or brick embrace. The stones retain an equal warmth if the sun is out, an equal radiance that contrasts with the polyp-like elongations and contractions of the water’s glassiness.

The water never palls against the stone: the radiant causeway swarms. Water and builded stone vivify the one the other; they are at peace. The certainty of man-placed stones contracts the ocean’s awfulness. In the port, it is as if the seas had been sifted and winnowed: upon the tall mole we can admit and gaze at their depth. Nothing is kinder to the ephemeral movements, the ephemeral reflections, refractions and shadows of water than the even-lighted masonry; no material less stalwart would provide such vivid opportunities to the water’s reflective tricks.

Amid the hurly-burly of the port there exists the wideness of all space in miniature, the Mediterranean spaciousness or distinctness. In the harbour world of stone and water—this open, flat, world of different levels— there exist the broad angles which airs and winds caress, there exist the means of promenade, of conversation, of taking the evening leisurely: there are stanchions and rails and other significant shapes, stations for human attitude: there exists the scenery for gesture. Acoustic is plain in echo. Without mutual interruption, sounds glide to and fro like gulls. Bells from the towers of the upper town, or from a church reached by steps from the quay, plumb with their peals the harbour’s breadth and depth.

However great its merchandise, the port is a haven, a repose, a measurer of passing things. The sun moves round, warming in turn those mammoth recording dials, the moles and quays, which the well-travelled waters lap. The scene is animated but steadfast. At night the waters are the dial. They show a shimmering rod or a hesitant patch of light. We can hardly discern the quays: we hear against them the home waters as they weigh us down carefully with the heavy finery of sleep.

What looks more apprehensive than the whiter stones before a storm, at the moment when the fall of livid ripplets against beach or mole is a distinct and almost shattering sound? This horizontal world of masonry and moving water is the ideal setting for the perpendicular rain and for the lightning. The storm passes, the dampened stones remain: even the waters are bemused and deaf to the wind. Ourselves along the wharves, perpendicular as the forest of masts upon the ships, appear intensely human: our houses stand up well above the port to which each alley leads.

Of such sort is the scenery of maritime commerce, the typical setting, we shall realize, of Mediterranean culture. For in the port we witness those elementary abstractions of visual experience which have always governed to a greater or lesser degree the Mediterranean conception of visual art. Here, in simplest form, are elements which provoke the aesthetic conception of space, here is the broad immovable masonry laid out on different levels, and betwixt these arms of stone, the moving waters. The smallest boat leaves a track on the water’s face: even a thrown pebble makes enlarging circles. These liquid movements enhance a thousandfold the solid radiance of the masonry. We come to see its stones as waywardness, as rhythm and movement, absorbed and transformed into a face of static substance; we see masonry as solid space, as an outwardness which symbolizes the sum of expression. In the clarid Mediterranean light which brings the distance near, which makes of the panorama and of all that happens there a single object, this order of stone is particularly impressive. But everywhere the light upon dressed stone shows evenly and thus recalls, when dramatized by the presence of deep yet domestic waters, the vivid outwardness of the Mediterranean scene.

This book is concerned with the imaginative meanings that we attach to stone and water in relation, so far as an emphasis put upon those meanings is essential to the interpretation of Agostino’s Tempio sculpture. By virtue of this approach we discover or re-discover Mediterranean art and life, the character of limestone, the differences between carving and modelling, ancient theories of the stars. Agostino’s sculpture makes cognate subjects of these.

They are never discursions. So far as this book has any aim wider than to interpret the Tempio reliefs, it is as a symptom of altered culture. Today, and not before, do we commence to emerge from the Stone Age: that is to say, for the first time on so vast a scale throughout Europe does hewn stone give place to plastic materials. An attitude to material, an attitude conceived in this book as being far more than the visual-aesthetic basis of Western civilization, can hardly survive long. The use in building of quarried stone must, we shall argue, increasingly diminish, and with it one nucleus of those dominant fantasies which have coloured the European perception of the visual world. In the work of men, manufacture, the process of fashioning or moulding, supersedes, wherever it is possible, the process of enhancing or carving material, the process that imitates those gradual natural forces that vivify and destroy Nature before our eyes. Hitherto there has always existed a ratio, full of cultural import, between carving and modelling, terms on which we thus bestow the widest application.

We emerge from the Stone Age: and perhaps the very perception of stone manifest in this book, rather than any argument adduced, proves this to be so. For what is dead or dying is more simply an object, and therefore easier to apprehend, than what is inextricably bound up with the very flow of life. Nothing in writing is easier than to raise the dead.

A Note of Specific Introduction

Those readers who are unacquainted with The Quattro Cento: a different conception of the Italian Renaissance¹ are not at a disadvantage in their reading of the present volume, the second of the series. The only matter that needs to be explained again is the use throughout this series of the expression ‘Quattro Cento’.² The reader is asked to bear in mind that ‘Quattro Cento’ art means 15th century Italian art in which fantasies connected with material (always in the last resort, stone), are directly and emphatically expressed. My present aim does not require me to assert once more the full distinction that this term is meant to imply, the distinction between Quattro Cento art and other 15th century Italian art, nor to recapitulate either the historical or aesthetic grounds on which it is based. The Tempio, a Quattro Cento building, is not, as in the previous volume, compared or contrasted with other contemporary buildings. I need, however, to preserve this label, if only in the interest of further volumes that are projected: and since the Tempio is a Quattro Cento building so-called, everything that follows should gradually re-create or reinforce this conception, Quattro Cento. The writer is a fool (no poet) who formulates a definition when his whole book is intended as such.

One other point. The present volume does not fulfil the promise made in The Quattro Cento to give a complete account of the Tempio. Chapter V, entitled The Tempio: first visit, is a description of that building as a whole: but it is cursory. This book claims to interpret fully a single aspect of the Tempio art, the one that is, perhaps, most significant. Agostino’s sculpture, the themes of ston...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I The Italian Scene Introductory Notes to Florence and Verona
• II Florence and Verona
• III Outline of the quattro Cento an Appendix to Florence and Verona
• Introduction to Stones of Rimini
• 1 Stone and Water
• 2 Stone and Clay
• 3 Stone, Water and Stars
• General Index
• Index of Architecture and Sculpture Described in the Book as ‘Quattro Cento’
• Index
• Suggested Further Reading: By Adrian Stokes: