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The church is a square, flat-roofed eastern-looking building, in the inside tastefully painted in imitation of panels of Cipollino marble; and on the neat pulpit is carved the symbol of the Scotch Church, the burning bush and its motto, nowhere surely more appropriate than in the place where the Christian faith has been subjected to the flames of pagan and papal persecution for eighteen hundred years, and has emerged purer and stronger.
The columns are antique, but of varied material cipollino, white and black and white-veined marble, and granite; and there is one of a rosy and white breccia. The caps vary both in design and size, and have been repaired with stucco. Some of them are decadent Roman and the rest Byzantine: the bases are hidden by a square wooden boxing. The eleven arches of the nave arcade are round.
They opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault.
Line after line of pleasant undulation ripples on the smooth polished marble as the sea ebbs and flows through the narrow streets of the city. In the churches and palaces of Rome specimens of all the varieties of cipollino may be found, taken from the old ruins, for the marble is not now worked in the ancient quarries.
They are micaceous strata; and thus the true cipollino is a mixture of talcose schist with white saccharoidal marble, and may be said to form a transition link between marble and common stone. It belongs to the Dolomitic group of rocks, which forms so large a part of the romantic scenery of South-Eastern Europe, and yields all over the world some of the best and most ornamental building-stones.
The cathedral is a basilica with nave and aisles. The main apse is octagonal outside and semicircular within; the apse to the north aisle also exists; that of the south aisle has been replaced by a square chapel. The nave arcade consists of six bays of round arches, resting on five pairs of columns which, though they are made up with plaster and painted, are probably antique, since the caps differ enormously in height and column and cap frequently do not fit. Some of the capitals might be late Roman, but most of them are very rude imitations. Super-abaci are used. The ciborium is hexagonal and rests on six columns of Greek cipollino, with the top and bottom mouldings worked on them; the caps are Byzantine of the sixth or seventh century, but without super-abaci. The front arches have huge Renaissance swags in the spandrils and a moulded cornice with classic enrichments; at the back are three ninth-century panels with arch and spandril in one piece, carved with ornament similar to that on the baptistery of Calixtus at Cividale; the pyramidal roof terminates in a carved finial. The greater part of the building is of the thirteenth century. The church, having become ruinous in 1237, was restored in 1287, and again in 1438 and 1490. It is now the chief parish church of the diocese of Veglia. The west door belongs to the last restoration; in the tympanum is a poorly carved Piet
Intermediate between the white marbles used for external architecture and the coloured marbles used for internal decoration, and forming the link between them, is the variety called by the Italians cipollino, or onion-stone. Its classical name is Marmor Carystium, from Carystos, a town of Euboea, mentioned by Homer, situated on the south coast of the island at the foot of Mount Oche.
The introduction of Christianity was marked by the rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St.
There seems to have been no great religious intolerance in those days. They showed me a gold coin of the Emperor Gordian the same who built the amphitheatre of El-Djem which was found here, as well as some lamps and sculptured fragments of stone. Bruce speaks of cipollino columns; they are still to be seen, if you care to look for them, split up, since his time, to mend walls and doorsteps.
Of marbles I have found cipollino, pavonazzetto, giallo and rosso antico, but no harder materials such as porphyry or serpentine. This, and the fact that the mosaics are pure white, suggests that the houses here must have dated, at latest, from Augustan times.
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