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Updated: June 28, 2025
The largest buildings in the place are the convent and the barracks; the latter of these presents an exceedingly ridiculous appearance; fragments of ancient pillars, statues, friezes, etc. having been collected from all sides, and put together to form a modern building according to Turkish notions of taste.
In places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost diaphanous in the air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a world-wide tempest.
This reredos is three divisions in height and five in width each division, except the two lower in the centre where there is a niche for the image of the Virgin, containing a large picture. The divisions are separated perpendicularly by a series of Gothic pinnacles, and horizontally by a band of Gothic tabernacle work at the bottom, and above by beautifully carved early renaissance friezes.
Entablatures with ornamental friezes divide each story, while at the top the centre is raised to admit of an arch, an arrangement probably copied from João de Ruão's altar-piece. In the half-story at the bottom are half-figures of the twelve Apostles, four under each of the square panels at the sides, and one between each pair of pilasters.
We have gone back for a moment to that poetical style which perpetually reminds us of the sculptured friezes of Greek art, severe in outline, immensely adroit and learned in execution, but a little chilly and colourless except in the hands of its greatest masters.
Twelve pillars make its ribs, the spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, while on top rest more friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences of all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable. To begin to tell the details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible.
A gulf separates these works from the friezes of the Parthenon and the Mausoleum. Whereas relief-sculpture in the classical period abjured backgrounds and picturesque accessories, we find here a highly pictorial treatment. Above, at the right, is a hut or stall, from whose open door a dog is just coming out; at the left is an oak tree.
Friezes and plastic cornices are somewhat on the wane, in smaller houses at least; though, of course, they will never go out of use altogether. This plaster effect is less expensive than 40-cent burlap or ordinary white calcimine or paper. The picture molding may be at the bottom of the cornice. Ceilings and friezes of ivory or light yellow are usually in good taste.
During the twenty years that the Moro reigned as Regent and Duke in Milan, the new apse built in Bramante's classical style, the central cupola, and the beautiful cloisters with their slender marble shafts and dark red terra-cotta friezes of angel-heads, all rose into being.
When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous masks laughing in the shop fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious mad; it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious porticos, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas; of which the angles and gable-ends writhe and twist like the yet dangerous remains of ancient and malignant beasts.
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