United States or Bhutan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The central portion has a restored wheel-window with radiating colonnettes and round arches, and above it in the gable is another with cusped tracery of a later date; round this an arcading ramps as at the end of the aisles, and the lower rose is flanked by arcading in two stages arched only in the upper one.
All this arrangement had been contrived before Niccola's time, and executed again and again. But behold! between the capitals of the pillars and the sculptured tablets there are interposed five cusped arches, the hollow beneath the pulpit showing dark through their foils. You have seen such cusped arches before, you think? Yes, gentlemen, you have; but the Pisans had not.
He looked up at the cusped and battlemented gateway opposite him, shifted his regard to the Eye, and shook his fist vindictively at the latter. "If ever I get hold of the chap that invented you...!" An ingenious imagination failing to suggest any form of torture commensurate with the crime, he relapsed into gloomy meditation.
The same may be said of the larger eight-light window in the central bay, but that there the tracery is even more elaborate and extravagant. The octagon above has buttresses with ordinary pinnacles at each corner, a parapet like that below, and flying buttresses, all pierced, cusped and crocketed like those at the west front.
Above the west door runs a projecting gallery whose parapet, like all the other parapets of the church, is defended by a close-set row of pointed battlements. Above the gallery is a large rose-window in which twelve spokes radiate from a cusped circle in the middle to the circumference, where the lights so formed are further enriched by cusped semicircles.
Word Of The Day