United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The heart of Venice Old-fashioned music Teutonic invaders The honeymooners True republicanism A city of the poor The black shawls A brief triumph Red hair A band-night incident The pigeons of the Piazza The two Procuratie A royal palace The shopkeepers Florian's Great names Venetian restaurants Little fish The old campanile A noble resolve The new campanile The angel vane The rival campanili The welcome lift The bells Venice from the Campanile.
The songs of nightingales among acacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, mingle with the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people at their toil. Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopes sink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-like campanili.
For this city of mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but indestructible, of tottering campanili, of sumptuous splendour and incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and out of which we are come; the only monument that remains to us of those confused and half barbaric centuries which lie between Antiquity and the Middle Age.
On the contrary, our rapid flight over the Alps had intoxicated us with the sense of speed; and we were all excitedly for going on until we should reach the frontier. As pink dawn blossomed in the sky, like a heavenly orchard, and the mountain tops were beaten into copper, we glided along the edge of the lake, past picturesque villages and campanili, and cypress trees.
But when seen in the narrow precincts of a temple court, from whose floor they shot up into the blue sky overhead, surrounded by great columns and lofty gates, breaking the monotony of the heavy masses of masonry of which the Egyptian temples were composed, and acting the part which campanili and spires perform in modern churches, a standard of comparison was thus furnished which greatly enhanced their magnitude.
"How long a time shall we spend in Padua, Countess?" asked the Chauffeulier as we came within sight of a gateway, some domes and campanili. "Oh, don't let's make up our mind till we get there," replied Aunt Kathryn comfortably. "But we are there," said he. "In another minute the little men of the dazio will be tapping our bags as a doctor taps his patient's lungs." Padua!
It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone. The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine bottega, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the chapel of the Podest
Viewed from near the lake, and looking back on to the town, the number and variety of the Campanili, the flat-roofed houses scattered near the lake, and the hills covered with foliage, presented a most delightful scene.
The pyramidal façade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aërial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style.
As a general thing, I do not favor the fashion of attributing moral qualities to buildings; I shrink from talking about tender porticos and sincere campanili; but I find I cannot get on at all without imputing some sort of morality to Saint- Sernin. As it stands to-day, the church has been completely restored by Viollet-le-Duc.
Word Of The Day