United States or Latvia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The exterior offers an imposing and picturesque ensemble, with its crocketed spire rising some two hundred and fifty or more feet above the roof-tops of the ancient city. Nearer inspection shows a certain incoherence of construction, particularly in reference to the evidences of garish crudities in the work done under Robert I. in 1031-76, in contrast to the later pointed work.
Further off, a conspicuous object was the elegant crocketed spire of one of the beautiful Lincolnshire churches, standing high, as if inviting those who were dismayed to come and save themselves in the air from the dangers of the waters. Oliver wondered whether any sufferers were now watching the sunrise from the long ridge of the church-roof, or from the windows of the spire.
It is of three lights, with flowing tracery at the head, and with small cusped and crocketed arches thrown across each light at varying levels. There are niches on the jambs, and the outer moulding is carried round the window head in broken curves, after the manner of Resende's house at Evora.
As has been said, the triforium is merely a prolongation of the lights of the clerestory window. These lights are five in number. The division between clerestory and triforium is marked by a band of stone ornamented with quatrefoils. Below this is a cusped arch in each light of the triforium with a crocketed gable ending in a finial above it.
There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting before I re- turned to the station, and which, with its fine Romanesque sideportal and its pointed and crocketed Gothic spire, is as curious as it need be, in view of its tradition.
The buttresses have offset string courses, and square crocketed pinnacles just as at Batalha; there has even been an attempt to copy the parapet, though only the trefoil corbel table is really like the model, for the parapet itself is solid with a cresting of rather clumsy fleurs-de-lis.
Round each of the two entrances runs a band of renaissance carving, and the flat reliefs in the divided tympanum are rather like some that may be seen in France, but otherwise the detail is all Gothic. Twisted shafts bearing the corbels, elaborate canopies, crocketed finials, all are rather Gothic than Manoelino.
The richly crocketed gables, the flying buttresses and pinnacles which run half way up this spire, while they adorn it, seem to stunt the profile and rob it of its towering altitude, just as is the case with the western spires of St. Ouen. Yet this northern tower is considerably higher than the ancient one at the south, being 374 feet high, while the more ancient spire is only 348.
Either corner of the choir contains a staircase, and is strengthened by a pair of massive buttresses and crowned by an octagonal turret with a conical stone cap and a finial. These buttresses have a projection of 8 feet, rise to the top of the aisles, and are surmounted by gables with finials, and at the north corner the gables and the coping of the aisle are crocketed.
The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, like the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging to the hillside and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorl above whorl for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward in the spring; and now and then a whole bough breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire on the same tree this surely was the form which the medieval architect seized, to clothe with it the sides and roof of the stone mountain which he had built; piling up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the angles; that, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea culminated in that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be completed, will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs, surrounded by three enormous pines.
Word Of The Day