George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers — John Shaqi
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
Meanwhile he had planned the companion volume on central and southern
Italy, to which he refers in the preface. It is a sad pity he could
not have found the time nor the heart to write this, for with it in
mind he pushed as far in 1873 as Ancona, Lucera and Benevento. The MS.
notebook, I fear, has perished which should have gone with a square
thick book of sketches more than usually stimulating and lovely. The
choir of the S. Chapelle at Chambéry shows the way he went; then plans
of S. Ciriaco, at Ancona, the crossing and dome seen from the nave, the
south porch, the eastern and western apses, with a tenderly faithful
drawing of the innumerably-arcaded front of S. Maria, imply the kind
of close study that culminates in a book. Had he but followed up his
observations there and elsewhere, at Lucera for instance, where he
recorded not only the cathedral and the castles, but a whole group of
churches and a cluster of castles that front the Adriatic coast thence
southward; or at Foggia, where, with a sketch of the façade of the
cathedral and a separate study of the most characteristic Pisan and
Pistojan traits he fairly underlined the relation and suggested Troja
to a surprising degree;--had he merely knotted up the syllogisms that
he laid out ready on the page, and written his Q. E. D., then, beyond
a question, from his intimate knowledge of the Royal Domain he would
have made out and declared, here as in Spain, the determining influence
of northern France, and anticipated the thesis of M. Bertaux. That
would have been such another triumph as the Spanish volume, for English
intelligence and English taste. But in these Christmas holidays of 1873
he snatched, as the train passed, a castle at Recanati and a portal at
Giulianuova, then from Foggia made a great leap to Salerno, and ended
for the nonce with careful detailed drawings of the ambons and towers
throughout the wonderful Salernitan group, at Amalfi and Ravello and
Scala.
Year after year he went back to the south-west coast in winter; in
1874, after his wife’s death, spending Christmas with her father as
usual, going down by the Riviera and coming back by Florence and the
Brenner. It is this year, I fancy, that we may thank for a record of
Spoleto cathedral before the restorers had it, for a series of notes in
the Umbrian towns, and for another series of the churches of Asti.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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