United States or Kiribati ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
§ XVII. The reader will observe that I call the arch mid-cusped, not when the cusped point is in the middle of the curve of the arch, but when it is in the middle of the side piece, and also that where the side pieces join the keystone there will be a change, perhaps somewhat abrupt, in the curvature. The Gothic arch of Venice is almost invariably up-cusped, as at k.
Above this group the spire is divided into three sections by two bands of diaper-work cut out of the stone surfaces as cusped quatrefoils; and from the base of the spire to its capstone there is a projecting rib on each angle between the several faces of the octagon.
These battlements are pierced with cusped circles, below them is a cornice ornamented with foliage. The buttresses of the aisles are decorated with gargoyles and crowned with pinnacles of a considerable size with crocketed spires and finials. The front of these pinnacles is ornamented with characteristic Perpendicular panelling.
The two small pointed windows below it are built up, as now the apartment they once lighted is a lumber-room, where the remnants of the old reredos are stored. The larger windows below are of the same date, nearly, as those two fifteenth-century ones in the north wall of the presbytery aisle. The east one has three and the west four lights, with cusped tracery in the heads.
The arch of the great east window is surrounded with panelling, each panel curiously broken at different heights by cusped arches. The aisle windows have ogee gables above them with finials, and immediately above them a band of panelling running right across the exterior buttresses. These buttresses are large, and capped with lofty spires.
Of these, the two which look south and west are like each other, and like the other of Dom João's time except that the arches are not cusped; that the outer frame is omitted and that the abaci are moulded in front as well as at the ends; but the third window looking north is rather different.
with richly cusped pointed arches. Instead of cutting out the cusps and filling the upper part with tracery, Matheus Fernandes has with extraordinary skill thrown a crested transome across the opening and below it woven together a veil of exquisitely carved branches, which, resting on a central shaft, half hide and half reveal the large marble fountain within.
There is a very handsome open parapet, adorned with ornaments and shields bearing letters or monograms. The parapet of quatrefoils, which runs round the sides of the transepts and choir, is not continued in the apse; an Early English parapet, with five circular medallions cusped, having been erected previously. The Decorated windows of the apse are particularly fine.
He says that it is merely the special application to the arch of the great ornamental system of foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cusped arch, or complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage. Not that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, "but to be invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had discovered in the leaf."
Probably the plan of the church, and perhaps the eastern chapel and lower part of the transept, are the work of Affonso Domingues, and all the peculiarities, the strange windows, the cusped arches, the English-looking pinnacles, as well as all the constructive skill, are due to Huguet his successor, who may perhaps have travelled in France and England, and had come back to Portugal with increased knowledge of how to build, but with a rather confused idea of the ornamental detail he had seen abroad.
Word Of The Day