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Freeman Edward Augustus
Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice

Such is the church of Parenzo, and at Parenzo the church is the main thing. As we pass away, and catch the last traces of the church of Euphrasius rising above the little peninsular city, our thoughts fly back to the other side of the Hadriatic, and it seems as if the men who came to fetch the great stone from Istria to Ravenna had left one of the noblest basilicas of their own city behind them on the Istrian shore.

POLA

1875 – 1881

After Parenzo the most obvious stopping-place on the Istrian shore will be Pola; and at Pola the main objects of interest for the historical student will be classed in an order of merit exactly opposite to those which he has seen at Parenzo. At Parenzo the main attraction is the great basilica, none the less attractive as being a monument of early opposition to the claims of the Roman see. Beside this ecclesiastical treasure the remains of the Parentine colony are felt to be quite secondary. At Pola things are the other way; the monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica, though not without a certain special interest, comes long after them. The character of the place is fixed by the first sight of it; we see the present and we see the more distant past; the Austrian navy is to be seen, and the amphitheatre is to be seen. But intermediate times have little to show; if the duomo strikes the eye at all, it strikes it only by the extreme ugliness of its outside, nor is there anything very taking, nothing like the picturesque castle of Pirano, in the works which occupy the site of the colonial capitol. The duomo should not be forgotten; even the church of Saint Francis is worth a glance; but it is in the remains of the Roman colony, in the amphitheatre, the arches, the temples, the fragments preserved in that temple which serves, as at Nîmes, for a museum, that the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies.

There is no need to go into the mythical history of the place. Tales about Thracians and Argonauts need not be seriously discussed at this time of day. Nor can there be any need to show that the name Pola is not a contraction of Pietas Julia. Save for the slight accidental likeness of letters, so to say is about as reasonable as to say that London is a corruption of Augusta, or Jerusalem of Ælia. In all these cases the older, native, familiar, name outlived the later, foreign, official, name. When we have thoroughly cleared up the origin of the Illyrians and the old Veneti, we may know something of the earliest inhabitants of Pola, and possibly of the origin of its name. But the known history of Pola begins with the Roman conquest of Istria in 178 B.C. The town became a Roman colony and a flourishing seat of commerce. Its action on the republican side in the civil war brought on it the vengeance of the second Cæsar. But the destroyer became the restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of its greatness, far surpassed the extent either of the elder or the younger Pola. Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of the Carolingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or strengthened. But in the history of their dynasty the name of the city chiefly stands out as the chosen place for the execution of princes whom it was convenient to put out of the way. Here Crispus died at the bidding of Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius. Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants. In the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the same character which has come back to it in our own times; it was there that Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and less prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy. But, after the break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of mediæval Pola is but a history of decline. It was, in the geography of Dante, the furthest city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its own neighbourhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante sang. Tossed to and fro between the temporal and spiritual lords who claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the dissensions of aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens, Pola found rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of Saint Mark in 1331. Since then, till its new birth in our own times, Pola has been a falling city. Like the other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to Austria, from Austria to France, from France to Austria again. It is under its newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh life, and the haven whence Belisarius sailed forth has again become a haven in more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united Austrian and Hungarian realm.

PORTA GEMINA, POLA.

That haven is indeed a noble one. Few sights are more striking than to see the huge mass of the amphitheatre at Pola seeming to rise at once out of the land-locked sea. As Pola is seen now, the amphitheatre is the one monument of its older days which strikes the eye in the general view, and which divides attention with signs that show how heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its new career. But in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which befitted its rank as a colony of Rome. The amphitheatre of course stood without the walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope of the hill which was crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern fortress rises above the Franciscan church. Parts of the Roman wall still stand; one of its gates is left; another has left a neighbour and a memory. At the north side of the capitol stands the Porta Gemina, leading from it to the amphitheatre. The outer gateway remains, a double gate-way, as its name implies, with three Corinthian half-columns between and on each side of the two arches. But here steps in a singular architectural peculiarity, one which reminds us that we are on the road to Spalato, and which already points to the arcades of Diocletian. The columns support an entablature with its frieze and cornice, but the architrave is wanting. Does not this show a lurking sign of what was coming, a lurking feeling that the arch itself was the true architrave? Be this as it may, there it stands, sinning, like so many other ancient works, against pedantic rules, but perhaps thereby winning its place in the great series of architectural strivings which the palace of Spalato shows us the crowning-point. The other arch, which is commonly known as Porta Aurea or Porta Aurata, conforms more nearly to ordinary rules. Here we have the arch with the coupled Corinthian columns on each side of it, supporting, as usual, their bit of broken entablature, and leaving room for a spandril filled in much the same fashion as in the arch of Severus at Rome. Compared with other arches of the same kind, this arch of Pola may certainly claim to rank amongst the most graceful of its class. With Trajan's arch at Ancona it can hardly be compared. That tallest and slenderest of monumental arches palpably stands on the haven to be looked at; while the arch of Pola, like its fellows at Rimini and Aosta, and like the arch of Drusus at Rome, is a real thoroughfare, which the citizens of Pietas Julia must have been in the daily habit of passing under. And, as compared with the arches of Rimini and Aosta, its design is perhaps the most pleasing of the three. Its proportions are better designed; the coupled columns on each side are more graceful than either the single columns at Rimini or the pair of columns which at Aosta are placed so much further apart. The idolater of minute rules will not be offended, as at Aosta, with Doric triglyphs placed over Corinthian capitals, and the lover of consistent design will not regret the absence of the sham pediment of Rimini. But it must be borne in mind that the arch of Pola did not originally stand alone, and that its usual name of Porta Aurea is a misnomer. It was built close against the golden gate of the city, whose name it has usurped. But it is, in truth, the family arch of the Sergii, raised in honour of one of that house by his wife Salvia Postuma. As such, it has a special interest in the local history of Pola. Ages afterwards, as late as the thirteenth century, Sergii appear again at Pola, as one of the chief families by whose dissensions the commonwealth was torn in pieces. If there is authentic evidence to connect these latter Sergii with the Sergii of the arch, and these again with the great Patrician gens which played such a part in the history of the Roman commonwealth, here would indeed be a pedigree before which that of the house of Paris itself might stand abashed.

A curious dialogue of the year 1600 is printed by Dr. Kandler in his little book, Cenni al Forrestiere che visita Pola, which, with a later little book, Pola und seine nächste Umgebung, by A. Gareis, form together a very sufficient guide for the visitor to Pola. From this evidence it is plain that, as late as the end of the sixteenth century, the ancient buildings of Pola were in a far more perfect state than they are now. Even late in the next century, in the days of Spon and Wheler, a great deal was standing that is no longer there. Wheler's view represents the city surrounded with walls, and with at least one gate. The amphitheatre stands without the wall; the arch of the Sergii stands within it; but the theatre must have utterly vanished, because in the references to the plan its name is given to the amphitheatre. And it must have been before this time that the amphitheatre had begun to be mutilated in order to supply materials for the fortress on the capitoline hill. Indeed it is even said that there was at one time a scheme for carrying off the amphitheatre bodily to Venice and setting it up on the Lido. This scheme, never carried out, almost beats one which actually was carried out, when the people of Jersey gave a cromlech as a mark of respect to a popular governor, by whom it was carried off and set up in his grounds in England. Of the two temples in the forum, that which is said to have been dedicated to Diana is utterly masked by the process which turned it into the palace of the Venetian governor. A decent Venetian arcade has supplanted its portico; but some of the original details can be made out on the other sides. But the temple of Augustus, the restorer of Pietas Julia, with its portico of unfluted Corinthian columns, still fittingly remains almost untouched. Fragments and remains of all dates are gathered together within and without the temple, and new stores are constantly brought to light in digging the foundations for the buildings of the growing town. But the chief wonder of Pola, after all, is its amphitheatre. Travellers are sometimes apt to complain, and that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheatres are very like one another. At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as the amphitheatre there has several marked peculiarities of its own. We do not pretend to expound all its details scientifically; but this we may say, that those who dispute – if the dispute still goes on – about various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will do well to go and look for some further lights in the amphitheatre of Pola. The outer range, which is wonderfully perfect, while the inner arrangements are fearfully ruined, consists, on the side towards the town, of two rows of arches, with a third story with square-headed openings above them. But the main peculiarity in the outside is to be found in four tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and Nîmes, signs of Saracenic occupation, but clearly parts of the original design. Many conjectures have been made about them; they look as if they were means of approach to the upper part of the building; but it is wisest not to be positive. But the main peculiarity of this amphitheatre is that it lies on the slope of a hill, which thus supplied a natural basement for the seats on one side only. But this same position swallowed up the lower arcade on this side, and it hindered the usual works underneath the seats from being carried into this part of the building. In the other part the traces of the underground arrangements are very clear, especially those which seem to have been meant for the naumachiæ. These we specially recommend to any disputants about the underground works of the Flavian amphitheatre.

The Roman antiquities of Pola are thus its chief attraction, and they are enough to give Pietas Julia a high place among Roman colonies. But the ecclesiastical side of the city must not be wholly forgotten. The duomo, if a small matter after that of Parenzo, if absolutely unsightly as seen from without, is not without its importance. It may briefly be described as a church of the fifteenth century, built on the lines of an ancient basilica, some parts of whose materials have been used up again. There is, we believe, no kind of doubt as to the date, and we do not see why Mr. Neale should have wondered at Murray's Handbook for assigning the building to the time to which it really belongs. No one could surely have placed a church with pointed arches, and with capitals of the kind so common in Venetian buildings, more than a century or two earlier. There is indeed an inscription built into the south wall which has a special interest from another point of view, but which, one would have thought, could hardly have led any one to mistake the date of the existing church. It records the building of the church by Bishop Handegis in 857, "Regnante Ludowico Imperatore Augusto in Italia." The minute accuracy of the phrase – "the Emperor Lewis being King in Italy" – is in itself something amazing; and this inscription shares the interest which attaches to any memorial of that gallant prince, the most truly Roman Emperor of his line. And it is something to mark that the stonecutter doubted between "Lodowico" and "Ludowico," and wrote both letters, one over the other. But the inscription of course refers to a reconstruction some hundred years earlier than the time when the church took its present shape. Yet these basilican churches were so constantly reconstructed over and over again, and largely out of the same materials, that the building of the fifteenth century may very well reproduce the general effect, both of the building of the eighth and of the far earlier church, parts of which have lived on through both recastings.

The ten arches on each side of the Polan basilica are all pointed, but the width of the arches differs. Some of them are only just pointed, and it is only in the most eastern pair of arches that the pointed form comes out at all prominently. For here the arches are the narrowest of the series, and the columns the slightest, that on the south side being banded. The arch of triumph, which is round, looks very much as if it had been preserved from the earlier church; and such is clearly the case with two columns and one capital, whose classical Corinthian foliage stands in marked contrast with the Venetian imitations on each side of it. The church, on the whole, though not striking after such a marvel as Parenzo, is really one of high interest, as an example of the way in which the general effect of an early building was sometimes reproduced at a very late time. Still at Pola, among such wealth of earlier remains, it is quite secondary, and its beauties are, even more than is usual in churches of its type, altogether confined to the inside. The campanile is modern and worthless, and the outside of the church itself is disfigured, after the usual fashion of Italian ugliness, with stable-windows and the like. Yet even they are better than the red rags of Trieste and Zara within.

Such is Pola, another step on the road to the birthplace of true grace and harmony in the building art. Yet, among the straits and islands of the Dalmatian coast, there is more than one spot at which the traveller bound for Spalato must stop. The first and most famous one is the city where Venetians and Crusaders once stopped with such deadly effect on that voyage which was to have led them to Jerusalem, but which did lead them only to New Rome. After the glimpses of Istria taken at Parenzo and Pola, the first glimpse, not of Dalmatia itself, but of the half-Italian cities which fringe its coast, may well be taken at Zara.

ZARA

1875 – 1877 – 1881

The name of Zara is familiar to every one who has read the history of the Fourth Crusade, and its fate in the Fourth Crusade is undoubtedly the one point in its history which makes Zara stand out prominently before the eyes of the world. Of all the possessions of Venice along this coast, it is the one whose connexion with Venice is stamped for ever on the pages of universal history. Those who know nothing else of Zara, who perhaps know nothing at all of the other cities, at least know that, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the possession of Zara was claimed by Venice, and that the claim of Venice was made good by the help of warriors of the Cross who thus turned aside from their course, not for the last time, to wield their arms against a Christian city. It is as Zara that the city is famous, because it is as Zara that its name appears in the pages of the great English teller of the tale. And perhaps those who may casually light on some mention of the city by any of its earlier names may not at once recognize Zara under the form either of Jadera or of Diadora. One is curious to know how a city which under the first Augustus became a Roman colony by the name of Jadera had, in the time of his orthodox successors in the tenth century, changed its name into anything with such a heathenish sound as Diadora. Yet such was its name in the days of Constantine Porphyrogenitus; and the Imperial historian does not make matters much clearer when he tells us that the true Roman name of the city was "Jam erat," implying that the city so called was older than Rome. Let us quote him in his own Greek, if only to show how oddly his Latin words look in their Greek dress.

Τὸ κάστρον τῶν Διαδώρων καλεῖται τῇ Ῥωμαίων διαλέκτῳ ἰὰμ ἔρατ, ὅπερ ἑρμηνεύεται ἀπάρτι ἦτον· δηλονότι ὅτε ἡ Ῥώμη ἐκτίσθη, προεκτισμένον ἦν τὸ τοιοῦτον κάστρον. ἔστι δὲ τὸ κάστρον μέγα· ἡ δὲ κοινὴ συνήθεια καλεῖ αὐτὸ Διάδωρα.

Yet the name of the colony of Augustus lived on through these strange changes and stranger etymologies, and even in the narrative of the Crusade it appears as Jadres in the text of Villehardouin.

The history of the city in the intermediate ages is the usual history of the towns on the Dalmatian coast. They all for a while keep on their formal allegiance to the Eastern Empire, sometimes being really its subjects, sometimes being practically independent, sometimes tributary to the neighbouring Slaves. Still, under all changes, they clave to the character of Roman cities, just as they still remain seats of Italian influence in a Slavonic land. Then came a second time of confusion, in which Zara and her sister cities are tossed to and fro between another set of contending disputants. The Eastern Empire hardly keeps even a nominal claim to the Dalmatian towns; the Slavonic settlements have grown into regular kingdoms; Hungary on one side, Venice on the other, are claiming the dominion of the Dalmatian coast. The history of Zara now consists of conquests and reconquests between the Republic of Saint Mark and the Hungarian and Croatian kings. The one moment when Zara stands out in general history is the famous time when one of the Venetian reconquests was made by the combined arms of the Republic and the Frank Crusaders. The tale is a strange episode in a greater episode – the episode of the conquest of the New Rome by the united powers which first tried their 'prentice hand on Zara. But the siege, as described by the Marshal of Champagne and the many writers who have followed him, is not easy to understand, except by those who have either seen the place itself or have maps before them such as are not easily to be had. Like so many other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, Zara stands on a narrow peninsula, lying east and west. It has on its north side an inlet of the sea, which forms its harbour; to the south is the main sea, or, more strictly, the channel of Zara lying between the Dalmatian coast and the barren islands which at this point lie off it. Villehardouin describes the port as being guarded by a chain, which was broken by the galleys of the Crusaders. They presently landed on the opposite coast, so as to have the haven between them and the town ("et descendirent à terre, si que di porz fu entr' aus et la ville"). That is to say, they landed on the mainland north of the haven. The Frank army then besieged the city by land – that is, from the isthmus on the east, and perhaps also from the shore of the haven; while the Venetians, though their ships anchored in the haven ("le port ou les nés estoient"), made their assault on the side of the open sea ("devers la mer"). On the spot, or in reading the narrative of Villehardouin by the light of remembrance of the spot, the description becomes perfectly clear.

Zara still keeps its peninsular site, and the traveller, as he draws near, still marks the fortifications, old and new, the many towers, no one of which so predominates over its fellows as to make itself the chief object in the view. Either however the modern Venetian and Austrian fortifications of Zara are less formidable, in appearance at least, than those which the Crusaders found there, or else they seemed more terrible to those who had actually to undertake the business of attacking them. Villehardouin had never seen such high walls and towers, nor, though he had just come from Venice, could he conceive a city fairer or more rich. The pilgrims were amazed at the sight, and wondered how they could ever become masters of such a place, unless God specially put it into their hands. The modern traveller, as he draws nearer, soon sees the signs of the success which the pilgrims so little hoped for. He sees the badge of Venetian rule over the water-gate, and most likely he little suspects that the outer arch, of manifest Venetian date, masks a plain Roman arch which is to be seen on the inner side. There is another large Venetian gate towards the inlet; and the traveller who at Zara first lands on Dalmatian ground will find on landing much to remind him that Dalmatian ground once was Venetian ground. The streets are narrow and paved; they are not quite as narrow as in Venice, nor is the passage of horses and all that horses draw so absolutely unknown as it is in Venice. Still the subject city comes near enough to its mistress to remind us under whose dominion Zara stayed for so many ages. And the traveller who begins his Dalmatian studies at Zara will perhaps think Dalmatia is not so strange and out-of-the-way a land as he had fancied before going thither. He may be tempted to look on Zara simply as an Italian town, and to say that an Italian town east of the Hadriatic is not very unlike an Italian town on the other side. This feeling, not wholly true even at Zara, will become more and more untrue as the traveller makes his way further along the coast. Each town, as he goes on, will become less Italian and more Slavonic. In street architecture Zara certainly stands behind some of the other Dalmatian towns. We see fewer of those windows of Venetian and Veronese type which in some places meet us in almost every house. The Roman remains are not very extensive. We have said that Jadera still keeps a Roman arch under a Venetian mask. That arch keeps its pilasters and its inscription, but the statues which, according to that inscription, once crowned it, have given way to another inscription of Venetian times. Besides the Porta Marina, two other visible memorials of earlier days still exist in the form of two ancient columns standing solitary, one near the church of Saint Simeon, presently to be spoken of, the other in the herb-market between the duomo and the haven. But the main interest of Zara, apart from its general and special history, and apart from the feeling of freshness in treading a land so famous and so little known, is undoubtedly to be found in its ecclesiastical buildings.

The churches of Zara are certainly very much such churches as might be looked for in any Italian city of the same size. But they specially remind us of Lucca. The cathedral, now metropolitan, church of Saint Anastasia, has had its west front engraved in more than one book, from Sir Gardner Wilkinson downwards; it is a pity that local art has not been stirred up to produce some better memorial of this and the other buildings of Zara than the wretched little photographs which are all that is to be had on the spot. But perhaps not much in the way of art is to be looked for in a city where, as at Trieste and Ancona and Rome herself, it seems to be looked on as adding beauty to the inside of a church to swathe marble columns and Corinthian capitals in ugly wrappings of red cloth. This at least seems to be an innovation since the days of the Imperial topographer. Constantine speaks of the church of Saint Anastasia as being of oblong, that is, basilican, shape – δρομικός is his Greek word – with columns of green and white marble, enriched with much ancient woodwork, and having a tesselated pavement, which the Emperor, or those from whom he drew his report of Zara, looked on as wonderful. It is very likely that some of the columns which in the tenth century were clearly allowed to stand naked and to be seen have been used up again in the present church. This was built in the thirteenth century, after the destruction wrought in the Frank and Venetian capture, and it is said to have been consecrated in 1285. It is, on the whole, a witness to the way in which the Romanesque style so long stood its ground, though here and there is a touch of the coming pseudo-Gothic, and, what is far more interesting to note, here and there is a touch of the Romanesque forms of the lands beyond the Alps. The church is, in its architectural arrangements, a great and simple basilica; but, as might be expected from its date, it shows somewhat of that more elaborate way of treating exteriors which had grown up at Pisa and Lucca. The west front has surface arcades broken in upon by two wheel windows, the lower arcade with round, the upper with pointed, arches. Along the north aisle runs an open gallery, which, oddly enough, is not carried round the apse. The narrow windows below it are round in the eastern part, trefoiled in the western, showing a change of design as the work went on. Near the east end stands the unfinished campanile; a stage or two of good Romanesque design is all that is finished. The one perfect ancient tower in Zara is not that of the duomo.

On entering the church, we at once feel how much the building has suffered from puzzling and disfiguring modern changes. But this is not all; the general effect of the inside has been greatly altered by a change which we cannot bring ourselves wholly to condemn. The choir is lifted up above the crypt as at Saint Zeno and Saint Ambrose; the stone chair still remains in the apse; but the object which chiefly strikes the eye is one which is hardly in harmony with these. The choir is fitted up with a range of splendid cinque cento stalls – reminding one of King's College chapel or of Wimborne as it once was – placed in the position usual in Western churches. This last feature, grand in itself, takes away from the perfection of the basilican design, and carries us away into Northern lands.

Of the church which preceded the Venetian rebuilding, the church described by Constantine, little remains above ground, allowing of course for the great likelihood that the columns were used up again. There is nothing to which one is even tempted to give an early date, except some small and plain buildings clinging on to the north side of the choir, and containing the tomb of an early bishop. But in the crypt, though it has unluckily lost two of its ranges of columns, two rows, together with those of the apse, are left, columns with finished bases but with capitals which are perfectly rude, but whose shape would allow them to be carved into the most elaborate Byzantine forms. The main arcades of the church form a range of ten bays or five pair of arches, showing a most singular collection of shapes which are not often seen together. Some are simple Corinthian; in others Corinthian columns are clustered – after the example of Vespasian's temple at Brescia; others have twisted fluting; one pair has a section, differing in the two opposite columns, which might pass for genuine Northern work; while – here in Dalmatia in the thirteenth century – not a few shafts are crowned with our familiar Norman cushion capital. Yet the effect of the whole range would be undoubtedly fine, if we were only allowed to see it. The hideous red rags have covered even the four columns of the baldacchino, columns fluted and channelled in various ways and supporting pointed arches. They have also diligently swathed the floriated cornice above the arcade; in short, wherever there is any fine work, Jaderan taste seems at once to hide it; but nothing hides the clerestory with its stable windows or the flat plastered ceiling which crowns all. The triforium has an air of Jesuitry; but it seems to be genuine, only more or less plastered; six small arches, with channelled square piers, which would not look out of place at Rome, at Autun, or at Deerhurst, stand over each pair of arches. With all its original inconsistencies and its later changes, the duomo of Zara, if it were only stripped of its swaddling-clothes, would be no contemptible specimen of its own style.