雙語+MP3|美國學(xué)生藝術(shù)史82 打破陳規(guī)

 
什么！我已經(jīng)提過它們了？是的。我剛剛提到了。好了，無論怎樣，我絕對不會再多說了。就介紹到這里吧！ 
82 BREAKING RULES打破陳規(guī)
 
HAVE you ever gotten tired of being good? Have you ever felt like throwing an inkwell through the window at school or standing on your head when the teacher asked you a question in arithmetic? Have you ever wanted to whistle out loud in church just because everything was so quiet and solemn and you knew you shouldn’t? 
The trouble with doing any of these things is that afterward you generally wish you hadn’t. It’s not much fun being punished. I found that out, myself, almost every time I tried not being good. 
The architects of Italy, after about two hundred years of Renaissance buildings, were like that. They seemed to be tired of being good and obeying all the rules for beautiful Renaissance buildings. The rules “cramped their style.” In the strict Renaissance architecture almost every part of the building had to be based on some idea from the ancient Romans. The new kind of architecture grew out of the Renaissance architecture, but it tried to break the rules. It was called Baroque architecture. I can’t tell you for sure how the word “Baroque” started, but people say it came from a Portuguese word for a badly shaped pearl. 
Baroque architecture has been punished, not by getting a spanking but by being held up as a bad example ever since. It has really been punished too much, for some Baroque buildings are very fine and very beautiful. The worst Baroque buildings are terrible. They broke too many rules, like a bully in school. But the best Baroque buildings are not bad at all. They broke just enough rules to be interesting—just as a boy who is sometimes bad is more interesting than a goody-goody. 
Buildings in the Baroque style are generally very well planned. They fit the place where they are built. They seem to go well with the scenery around them. The trouble with them is that they look too proud, too crowded with decoration, as if they were trying to show off. They are covered, inside and out, with queer columns and statues and scrolls and twists and fancy marble slabs. They make you think of a very, very fancy birthday cake with icing frills and curlicues all over it. 
This Baroque architecture began in Italy. It became the chief architecture of the seventeenth century in that country. And in Italy stands one of the most beautiful of all Baroque buildings. It is a church built beside the Grand Canal in Venice. This church was built for a very special reason. That frightful disease called the plague had killed about a third of all the people in Venice. Sixty thousand people had died. Then the plague stopped. The people who were left alive were so thankful for being spared, that they built the beautiful Baroque church as a monument of thanksgiving. They named it (of course in Italian) the church of Saint Mary of Good Health. Everybody calls it by its Italian name, so you will have to try to learn Saint Mary of Good Health in Italian— Santa Maria della Salute. See if you can pronounce it like this: San’tah Ma-ree’ah del’lah Sah-lou’tay. 
Santa Maria della Salute is in the form of a Greek cross. It has a big dome over the central part and a small dome over the chancel. The buttresses for the dome are shaped like rolls of ribbon. 
Notice how crowded with statues and with these rolls the church seems to be. But also notice the beautiful flight of steps that leads down toward the canal. The church makes one of the most beautiful sights in Venice as you look at it across the water. 
 
No.82-1　SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE（威尼斯安康圣母院） 
This fancy Baroque architecture spread all over Italy and into Spain and Portugal. In Spain a few of the Baroque churches are so crowded with decoration and seem to be showing off so much that you might think they were designed by crazy people. Other Spanish Baroque buildings are quite beautiful, although they would be ugly in a country where the sunlight wasn’t so bright. The brighter the light, the more decoration a building seems to be able to stand. 
Now that we have reached Spain, we come to the people who used Baroque architecture all over the world. In the Roman Catholic Church a body of men like the monks of the Middle Ages was formed to spread the Catholic religion. The men who belonged to this body were called Jesuits. The Jesuits built churches wherever they went, and usually they built their churches in the Baroque style. 
In this seventeenth century, the kingdom of Spain was very powerful. The Spaniards had gone exploring. They had taken, in the name of their king, most of South America and a great deal of North America, too. Wherever the Spanish explorers went, the Jesuits soon followed, preaching Christianity to the Indians, founding Indian schools, and building churches. Soon there were more Baroque churches in the Americas than in all of Spain. 
These Jesuit churches were so well built that most of them are still standing in spite of earthquakes, revolutions, and neglect. You can imagine what a hard job the Jesuits had. First they had to learn the Indian language or teach the Indians Spanish. They had to show the Indians how to build the stone buildings, often in the hottest kind of hot countries. Yet before the buildings could be built, the land had to be cleared and the stones dug out of the quarries. 
 
No.82-2　CATHEDRAL IN MEXICO CITY（墨西哥城大教堂） 
Photograph by Ewing Galloway 
The picture shows you the great cathedral at Mexico City. It doesn’t look much like the Santa Maria della Salute, does it? But it, too, is Baroque in style. You can see how much decoration there is on it. 
Baroque architecture was used also in Germany. Some of it came to France, but very little was ever used in England. If you will remember the seventeenth century, Spain and Portugal and their colonies, and Italy and Germany, you will have in your mind the time and places where this queer, gay Baroque style was most used.