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In these arches the lower order has exactly the same mouldings as in the western bays, and is of gritstone, while the upper order is of limestone, and has fillets upon the larger mouldings. It would seem, therefore, that the later builders have used the original archivolts again, and have merely added another order or orders over it.
Crowning the tympanum is Christ the Judge, flanked by angels, and by the Virgin and the Baptist kneeling in intercession while He shows His wounded hands. On the archivolts are, to the right of the spectator, demons and damned souls and quaint personifications of death: to his left the heavenly host, choirs of angels, seated prophets and doctors and the army of martyrs.
In this 'Judgment' Christ is standing in the midst of the Apostles, and the dead are rising from the tombs below. Fiends are pulling the wicked out of their coffins, and others are throwing the condemned into the wide-opened jaws of a frightful monster. Above are numerous figures separated by various mouldings forming archivolts.
In the lower compartment of the tympanum is figured the ark of the Covenant attended by prophets and kings; above, is the burial of the Virgin, and crowning all, Our Lady in glory. On the archivolts are angels, patriarchs, prophets, and kings.
The west and the south doors, which are almost exactly alike, except that the south door is surmounted by a gable, have three shafts on each side with early-looking capitals and plain moulded archivolts, and within these, jambs moulded at the angles bearing an inner order whose flat face is carved with a series of circles enclosing four and five-leaved flowers.
The façade, with its squat towers, exhibits no lofty aim, but when one looks at the tabernacle-work in the tympan of the divided portal, the capitals in the jambs and the mouldings of the archivolts, the elegant arcade above and the tracery of the great rose window, one feels that although the Pointed style could not yet embody its dream of beauty by means of the tower and spire, it was moving towards it through a maze of glorious ideas destined to become inseparable from the spirit of the perfect whole.
Then, in the recesses of these and of the archivolts alike, the niche and statue decoration develops itself; and the vaulted and cavernous apertures are covered with incrustations of fretwork, and with every various application of foliage to their fantastic mouldings.
Tayac and Les Eyzies form one very straggling commune, and the church where the slain men of Sarlat lie serves for the entire population. This edifice of the eleventh and twelfth centuries deserves a brief description. There is much grandeur in its vast, deeply-recessed Romanesque portal, with marble columns in the jambs and numerous archivolts.
§ XVIII. I have kept the inquiry into the proper ornament of the archivolt wholly free from all confusion with the questions of beauty in tracery; for, in fact, all tracery is a mere multiplication and entanglement of small archivolts, and its cusp ornament is a minor condition of that proper to the spandril.
Now here is a little church in Lucca, of which the lower half of the facade is of the twelfth century, and the top, built by the Florentines, in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur- de-lys, let into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts.
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