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Updated: May 15, 2025
By the alteration of this weight, therefore, the architect has it in his power to relieve, and therefore alter, the forms of his capitals. By its various distribution on their centres or edges, the slope of their bells and thickness of abaci will be affected also; so that he has countless expedients at his command for the various treatment of his design.
Here, too, the proportions of the columns prove them to have been of wood. They do not rise above the entablature. The architrave rests upon them, and, as in Greece and Egypt, its immediate weight is borne by abaci.
Mark's; the shafts having been of different lengths, and neither, in all probability, originally intended for their present place, they have double abaci, of which the uppermost is the cornice running round the whole façade.
Still less can the temple have ever been overlaid with stucco; but that it was intended to do so, we may infer from the fact that the abaci of the capitals have projecting points probably for the purpose of holding the plaster. The whole is built of a limestone, very similar to the travertine; only it is now much fretted.
But now the southern one has abaci, capitals, angle-shafts, and base, which are thirteenth-century work, and the early label-mould has been changed. The other window shows partly what was once probably the character of both of them. But the greater part of this window was restored when the central tower and spire were rebuilt after 1861.
This with the drip-mould springs from a billet-moulded abacus resting on broad square piers. Of the two inner carved orders, the outer is covered on both faces with innumerable animals and birds, and the other with a delicate pattern of interlacing bands. These two spring from strange square abaci resting on the carved capitals of round shafts, two on each side.
The upper of these two windows is pointed, and has no label-mould. But the angle shafts that carry the arch have carved capitals and square-moulded abaci. Above the head of the pointed window the tower changes in character. The buttresses run up to the top as broad, flat surfaces, except that the northern one is slightly weathered twice.
Outside the most remarkable feature is the fine west door, with its eight shafts, four on each side, some round and some octagonal, the octagonal being enriched with an ornament like the English dog-tooth, with their finely carved cubical capitals and rich abaci, and with the four orders of mouldings, two of which are enriched with ball ornament.
Even at Amiens, amid all the splendours of its fully-developed geometrical windows, the pillars and arches, in their square abaci and even in the sections of their mouldings, have what an Englishman calls a Romanesque feeling still hanging about them. At Fécamp this is far stronger.
The capitals which are rather tall are carved with rather shallow leaves, but the most noticeable features are the huge square moulded abaci which are so large as to be more like those of the romanesque cloisters at Moissac or of Sta. Maria del Sar at Santiago than any fourteenth-century work.
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