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The road led me through a little village where there was an old Romanesque church. There were numerous archivolts over the broad portal, and above these was a horizontal dog's-tooth moulding with grotesque heads at intervals; but time had effaced most of the carving.
It has a mean little house built into its northwest corner, a crude and ugly clock-face stuck unmeaningly on its façade, and a general air of dilapidation, with respect to the statues originally contained in its archivolts and niches, which, to say the least, is not creditable to those who have been responsible for its care.
And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones jasper and porphyry and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss" the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these another range of glittering pinnacles, mixt with white arches edged with scarlet flowers a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St.
The voussoirs, thinking their great adversary utterly defeated, are at no trouble to show themselves; visible enough in both the upper and under archivolts, they are content to wait the time when, as might have been hoped, they should receive a new decoration peculiar to themselves. § XI. In this state of paralysis, or expectation, their flank is turned by an insidious chamfer.
The fragment of one of its archivolts, given at the bottom of the opposite Plate, is not to illustrate the thing itself, but to illustrate the impossibility of illustration. SECTION XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger scale; and yet even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp folds and points of the marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness.
In every building of which we possess either the remains or the figured representation the archivolts rest upon thick and solid walls. Under these conditions the vault was supreme in certain parts of the building. Its use was there so constant as to have almost the character of an unvarying law.
Several small windows high in the nave walls still retain the slabs pierced with ninth-century patterns, and two unbroken ciborium or baptistery archivolts still exist, one in the courtyard of the Beata Vergine della Miscricordia, and the other in the Piazza S. Giovanni, where it is made up into a little shrine with two fourteenth-century caps, and a Renaissance pediment with two uprights of a chancel of Lombard work, with three furrowed scrolls and crosses of the usual Syrian derivation.
Here we have a large central portal, and on each side of it, what the architectural design supposes to be a smaller one, but which in reality is only a sham doorway. The slender columns of the jambs, and the archivolts filled in with little figures, sacred, fantastic, and grotesque, are there, as in connection with the central arch; but all this has only an ornamental purpose.
The Church of Notre Dame du Puy, built upon a height, as the word puy implies, is likewise interesting only in respect of details, such as the sculptured archivolts of the portal and the fourteenth-century rose-window.
The rains would soon convert cracks into gaping breaches, and at the end of a few years, every storm would bring down a part of the roof. A century would be enough to destroy the vaults, and with them the upper parts of the walls to which they were closely allied by the skill of the constructor. The disappearance of the archivolts and the great heaps of débris are thus accounted for.
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