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Updated: August 26, 2024
The arch in the first bay has been built up, probably to strengthen the tower, and by the twelfth-century builders themselves, for the abacus-moulding of the capital is continued across the blocking wall. In the latter the fifteenth-century builders have made a small pointed doorway, which is now blocked but apparently once gave access from the top of the screen to a staircase in the north aisle.
It is a small window with a cusped head and a square label-mould above it. In the same area of walling there are shown the levels of the cut string-course that ran along under the sills of the twelfth-century aisle windows. It is the same string and at the same level as it appears upon the south-west angle of the transept and the south-west tower of the west front.
By this means, then, the original form and detail of the twelfth-century arches was preserved, so that the drawings representing the measured studies of the building, which were Sir Gilbert Scott's principal authority upon which to base his restoration of this portion of the tower, were made from work which had already been once rebuilt. But why was this part of the church rebuilt, and by whom?
The Rubens, carried away! The tapestries taken down! The cabinets, despoiled of their jewels! "And my Louis XVI candelabra! And the Regent chandelier!...And my twelfth-century Virgin!" He ran from one spot to another in wildest despair. He recalled the purchase price of each article, added up the figures, counted his losses, pell-mell, in confused words and unfinished phrases.
They saw a twelfth-century church which had gone through some changes and additions, and they also saw some considerable monastic buildings, of part of which, a vault with what seems to be a rather classical column, De Caumont gives a drawing. Here it is, if anywhere, that one would look for the earlier date of Romanesque. But all outside the church itself has perished.
From time to time a village, gray-walled, brown-roofed, broke the low helving shore of the lake, where the poplars rose and the vineyards spread with a monotony that somehow pleased; and at Nyon a twelfth-century castle, as noble as Chillon, offered the delight of its changing lines as the boat approached and passed.
But on the other hand we can point to six which between them covered a whole acre, and no one with the least acquaintance of mediæval municipal topography, no one, for instance, who knows the history of twelfth-century Paris, would allow one-sixth of an acre to a single average house within the walls of a town.
The church itself was erected to a suffragan of Santiago in 1441. The date of its erection is doubtful, some authors placing it in the twelfth and others in the thirteenth century. Street, whom we can take as an intelligent guide in these matters, calls it a twelfth-century church, contemporaneous with and perhaps even built by the same architect who built that of Santiago de Campostela.
The upper part of the central tower itself had been built perhaps during the second quarter of the fourteenth century or even earlier. Consequently it seems probable that the two towers which fell in 1210 were the original twelfth-century central tower and that of the same date to the south of the west front. In Speed's map of 1610 both the western towers are represented as having small spires.
Since, in the deciphering of such expressions of mankind's moods and intuitions, scientific investigation is scarcely more important than the moods and intuitions of the looker-on, it seems quite fitting that I should begin these suggestions about pre-Franciscan Italian art by saying that some years ago there met by accident in my mind a certain impression of Lombard twelfth-century art, and a certain anecdote of Lombard twelfth-century history.
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