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Updated: May 9, 2025
At the entrance came the giant basins for holy water with their boy-angels as chubby as Cupids; then the nave, vaulted and decorated with sunken coffers; then the four cyclopean buttress-piers upholding the dome, and then again the transepts and apsis, each as large as one of our churches.
He devoted a great part of his private fortune, which was large, to the work. He began with the transepts. This is in itself sufficient to shew that there was a choir in use. The regular practice, when a wholly new church was to be built, was to commence at the east end. The lower part of both transepts is Simeon's work.
The church is in the shape of a cross; and at the end of each of the transepts, is a rich altar, with statuary, in the style of art usual about a century ago. The pews made of dark mahogany or walnut tree, much after the English fashion, but lower and more tasteful are placed on each side of the nave, or entering; with ample space between them.
The church deserves a few words, as it is a veritable cathedral as to size and grandeur. The choir is immensely lofty, and constructed of granite most elaborately wrought in the later Gothic or flamboyant style. The nave and transepts are in the old Romanesque style, with solid pillars and low round arches.
It is a small building having a low central tower without transepts. A small S. chantry projects from the nave. Features to be noted are: the Norm, doorway mentioned above, a little to the right of main entrance. The capitals are richly carved, and support an arch ornamented with deeply cut chevron and grotesque bird's beak mouldings.
What the church of S. Petronio at Bologna would have been, if it had been completed on the scale contemplated, can hardly be imagined. As it stands, it is immense, and coldly bare in its immensity. Yet the present church is but the nave of a temple designed with transepts and choir. The length was to have been 800 feet, the width of the transepts 625, the dome 183 feet in diameter.
Six or eight elms, their long bending boughs clothed with thick, clinging leafage, mingle their tops, forming a sort of vaulted roof, such as at the intersection of nave and transepts occurs in every Gothic church which has no central tower. More exquisite curves, better studies for a healthy-minded and original architect, could hardly be found.
"He edits the CATHEDRAL MONTHLY," said her hostess, "and he's enormously learned about memorial brasses and transepts and the influence of Byzantine worship on modern liturgy, and all those sort of things. Perhaps he is just a little bit heavy and immersed in one range of subjects, but it takes all sorts to make a good house-party, you know. You don't find him TOO dull, do you?"
The crowd flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.
The extreme length of the cathedral is 556 feet; the breadth of the transepts being 217 feet, and as the nave is entered the majestic proportions of the great church will be at once appreciated. Particular notice should be taken of the black font brought from Tournai; it has the story of St. Nicholas carved upon it.
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