Vestments

VESTMENTS. - The practice of facing wall structures with marble or stucco was already widespread in classical antiquity and was immediately adopted by Christianity.

There is evidence of marble facings in Christian places of worship as early as the 3rd century (the papal cubiculum in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus); later, with the triumph of the Church, marble, specially worked or more frequently taken from other monuments, was often used as a facing in the interior of sacred buildings, while on the exterior it was limited to the decoration of individual architectural elements.

In the Constantinian era the practice was introduced of encrusting walls with inlays of polychrome marbles, not only with architectural compartments and with ornaments, but with complex figurations; the greatest example is the civil basilica of Junius Bassus (317), known through the drawings of G. da Sangallo and of whose ornaments fragments remain in the Capitoline Museum. This technique was used in religious buildings of the second half of the 4th century (the Ursian Basilica of Ravenna and the primitive Ambrosian Basilica of Milan), insofar as can be inferred from the descriptions and the few surviving remains, reducing the ornaments to simple symbolic representations; finally in the 5th century it is reduced to geometric motifs, exploiting the polychromy of the materials (St. Sabina in Rome). The tendency toward decorative abstraction is accentuated in Byzantine architecture (St. Vitale of Ravenna, the cathedral of Parenzo); later this technique, while in Italy it gives way to pictorial decoration, develops and perfects itself in the East, reaching its highest expression in St. Sophia of Constantinople.

In Romanesque architecture, on the model of St. John of Florence, marble r. is limited to only two colors, with the aim of enhancing spatial relationships, sometimes feigning architectural motifs: the most notable example is in the basilica of St. Miniato al Monte, where the decoration articulates the spatial rhythm of the facade. In Sicily too the marble r., associated however with terracotta, helps to give prominence to the architectural lines (bell tower of the Martorana, cathedral of Monreale). In Gothic architecture, on the other hand, marble r. generally has no relationship with the structural organism (side of the cathedral of Perugia, St. Maria di Collemaggio at L'Aquila, St. Maria Novella of Florence).

In the early Lombard Renaissance too the inlaid r. present a purely decorative character independent of the architecture (e.g., the Certosa of Pavia, where the white of Candoglia, the red of Valcamonica, the green of Cira are combined; the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo in white, red and yellow); but at Venice in St. Maria dei Miracoli the Lombard workshops once again give marble r. an architectural value, making this church perhaps the most typical example of the Renaissance. Later there appears a search for effects of funereal gravity in the calculated setting of porphyry mirrors within white frames between black small columns, in the Gondi chapel at St. Maria Novella by G. da Sangallo. At the beginning of the 16th century every search for coloristic effects on the exterior of churches disappears; the projects of marble r. for facades left rough by previous eras stop at their beginnings, so foreign are they to the new taste (St. Petronio of Bologna, cathedral of Reggio Emilia). The Baroque too excludes polychromy in facades, while it accentuates in the interior the splendor of colored marbles, no longer in minute designs, but with applications over vast surfaces (St. Maria della Vittoria, Gesù e Maria in Rome, Corpus Domini and S. Lorenzo in Turin; S. Filippo Neri in Naples).

The conception of the chapel as an architectural organism in its own right makes it possible to limit the marble r. to one or a few areas of the church: the first examples date back to the beginning of the 16th century (Chigi chapel in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome) and reach in the following century the greatest decorative richness in the chapel of the Princes attached to S. Lorenzo in Florence, entirely faced with rare marbles, hardstones, gems and gilded bronzes, with effects of great splendor, but of mediocre taste; of greater elegance is the chapel of the Monte di Pietà in Rome, sumptuously faced with precious marbles, alabasters, Sicilian jasper. A typical expression of the late Baroque is seen in the Cybo chapel in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, where the polychromy imparts a character of severity, while in the chapel of the Holy Shroud in the cathedral of Turin an even more solemn sense derives from the use in the wall r. of black marble alone. The predilection accorded in the 18th century to stucco limits the practice of marble r. in central and northern Italy; while in the southern part of the peninsula and in Sicily its use continues very intensively until the end of the century. The last great application of marble in the r. of churches is found in the nave of the Gesù in Rome from the beginning of the 19th century. In the same century, however, it was adopted in the completion of facades left in the rough, using marbles of colors harmonizing with the rest of the building. Thus for the cathedral of Florence there were used: Carrara marble, green of Prato and red of Maremma; for that of Grosseto: alternating bands of white marble and red of Gualdana; for S. Croce in Florence only Carrara marble.

In our century marble r. are generally limited to individual chapels, such as that of the Sacrament in S. Carlo al Corso in Rome, redone for the sacerdotal jubilee of Pius XI, and the other, even more recent, of S. Andrea delle Fratte, also in Rome; an example of the extension of the marble r. to the entire interior of a church is found, again in Rome, in the S.ma Addolorata.

Quite rare is the use of wood as a r. of walls: a characteristic example is the hall of the Collegio della Mercanzia in Perugia, decorated with geometric motifs. Sometimes, on the other hand, the r. extends only over limited stretches of wall, especially above the choir (SS. Severino and Sossio in Naples, cathedral of Pisa). Even rarer for r. of walls is the use of leather, of Oriental derivation, sometimes employed in the 17th century in the interiors of civil buildings, and entirely excluded from religious ones. - See plate LVI.

Mario Zocca