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The buildings in question are distinguished chiefly by the important part played in their construction by the vault and the dome resting upon pendentives; certain constructive processes, too, are to be found in them which had never, so far as we can tell, been known or practised in the East.
Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a gigantic piece of cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at various degrees of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside down; yet these figures, which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing only in themselves, and not in relation to their position.
A cornice ran round the apartment, either above or below the pendentives, or sometimes both above and below. The domes were pierced by a number of small holes, which admitted some light, and the upper part of the walls between the pendentives was also pierced by windows. There are no passages or corridors in the Sassanian palaces. The rooms for the most part open one into the other.
"The dome is lighted by forty small windows, which pierce it immediately above the cornice which crowns its pendentives, and which, by subdividing its lower part into narrow piers, increases the feeling of its being supported by its own buoyancy.
In some of these bosses the figures are five feet long. There are also good foliage bosses against the walls between the pendentives. The westernmost pendentive on either side rests on a Perpendicular corbel carved with delicate foliage. The general arrangements of the presbytery have been much changed since the middle ages.
The general appearance of the church is thoroughly consistent throughout, and the octagon lantern, with its arcades, galleries, and pendentives, all open to the church, forms a magnificent feature. It is evidently the feature of which Coutances was specially proud; it is repeated, at a becoming distance, in the other two churches of the city, as well as elsewhere in the diocese.
Four great columns support a cupola in front of the presbytery, by means of four round arches, pendentives, and a drum, round which is an arcade of sixteen stilted round arches with foliated caps and prominently projecting abaci, which it is thought may belong to the original building, though the cupola itself is later.
The vault stood, and he had his own face carved on one of the pendentives, thus forming a statuette which is by no means one of the least beautiful in that splendid building, all the more to be admired, to my thinking, on account of its being absolutely untouched by the barbarous hand of the restorer.
Something similar occurs in the Byzantine dome on pendentives, only instead of supporting the horizontal weight of a gallery or a vault, the triangular pendentives meet the outward thrust of a superposed dome.
Mosaics line the arches of the nave and the pendentives, and form the flooring; and in the midst of this richness of colour the grey pillars rise, one after the other in long, shadowy perspective, like the trees of a stately grove.
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