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Updated: June 17, 2025
However, he conducted them through a still more beautiful court, lined with brilliant mosaics in the spandrels of the exquisite arches supported on slender shining marble columns. Mr. Thompson's English coat and hearty English face looked incongruous, as at sight of the blue and white uniform he came forward with all the hospitable courtesy due to a post-captain.
The rise being considerable, high wingwalls and deep spandrels were requisite; but the weight of the structure was much lightened by the expedient which he adopted of perforating the wings, and building a number of longitudinal walls in the spandrels, instead of filling them with earth or inferior masonry, as had until then been the ordinary practice.
There was to be a sort of arched and columned court under a vast prismatic skylight; lunettes, spandrels, friezes and the like were to abound; and the opportunities for interior decoration were to be lavish, limitless. Now these lunettes and spandrels were the things that were making all the trouble.
On the base of the staircase were sculptures in a single line the lion and bull in either spandrel and between the spandrels eighteen colossal guardsmen, nine facing either way towards a central inscription, which was repeated in other languages on slabs placed between the guardsmen and the bulls.
These spandrels, by Frederick G. R. Roth, are interesting artistically, not only for the eager sweep and sense of bigness not usual in the narrow scope of a spandrel, but especially for their warm decorative value to the wall surface and the aspiring way in which they follow the rising line of the archway over which they are placed. The spandrels are made in very vigorous low relief.
The main arches in the two bays are not pointed, but round, like those in the nave and choir; but, unlike the latter, they have deeply cut mouldings in three orders. The triforium arcade above, on the north and south sides, has moulded and carved details of a similar character. Some of the beautifully carved figure-work still remains in the spandrels between the subsidiary pointed arches.
The spandrels of the nave arcades are covered over with a diaper work of half a dozen or more different patterns, some of them scaly, some representing interwoven basket-work, while others are composed simply of a series of circles, joined together with lines. There are curious little panels in each of these spandrels that are carved with the most quaint and curious devices.
Its commanding features, the Triumphal Arches and the magnificent flanking colonnades are most Roman in spirit, their Italian decoration appearing in the medallions and spandrels of the arches, the garlands hung along the entablature of the colonnade, and the interior adornment of the vaulted corridors.
But they both went on standing close to one another, companioned only by the strange sculptured creatures which grinned down from the spandrels of the arches above.
The sculpture here consists of the series of four nude male figures on the column drums, and spandrels for the main and minor doorways, and a widely different group, "The Genius of Creation," before the main western portal. All but the latter group represent "Types of Power."
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