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The round-headed arch widening outwards, its numerous archivolts and mouldings, the slender columns of the deeply-recessed jambs, the storied capitals with their rudely-proportioned but expressive little figures, and the row of uncouth bracket-heads over the crowning archivolt, represent the best art of the eleventh century.
The chamfer was quite enough to decorate the archivolts, if there were no more than two; but if, as above noticed in § III., the archivolt was very deep, and composed of a succession of such steps, the multitude of chamferings were felt to be weak and insipid, and instead of dealing with the outside edges of the archivolts, the group was softened by introducing solid shafts in their dark inner angles.
Their great size, their rich and varied ornamentation, the important figures in high relief with which the walls about them were adorned, the solemn tints of bronze lighted up here and there by the glory of gold, the lively colours of the enamelled bricks that formed their archivolts, and finally the contrast between the bare and gleaming walls on either side and their depths of shadow all these combined to give accent to the doorways and to afford that relief to the monotony of the walls of which they stood in so great a need.
At the foundation, it was kneeling as if crushed by prayer, with the Romanesque chapels of the nave, and with the round arched windows, plain, unornamented, except by slender columns under the archivolts.
The nave entrance has two columns on each side supporting archivolts, and upon the capitals of these columns are carved figures of the quaintest Romanesque character, illustrating Biblical subjects. The nave has an aisle on each side scarcely four feet wide, and most of the separating columns are out of the perpendicular. The capitals here are wrought with acanthus-leaves or little figures.
Decorated rolls and decorated ogee profiles, such, for instance, as the base of the Arc de l'Etoile at Paris, are among the richest and farthest refinements of decorative appliances; and they ought always to be reserved for jambs, cornices, and archivolts: if you begin with them in the base, you have no power of refining your decorations as you ascend, and, which is still worse, you put your most delicate work on the jutting portions of the foundation, the very portions which are most exposed to abrasion.
The nave is five bays long, the arcade is round-arched with pretty caps and ornamented archivolts, and the floor is paved with red and white marble in chequers. The holy-water basins are simple, and the columns of the ciborium rest on two red marble caps of the fourteenth century upside down, one base of the same and one of the Lombardi period, showing the use of older material.
§ III. In that simple ornament, not as confined to Venetian boats, but as representative of a general human instinct to hack at an edge, demonstrated by all school-boys and all idle possessors of penknives or other cutting instruments on both sides of the Atlantic; in that rude Venetian gunwale, I say, is the germ of all the ornament which has touched, with its rich successions of angular shadow, the portals and archivolts of nearly every early building of importance, from the North Cape to the Straits of Messina.
When upright, they are in appearance, if not in fact, small shafts; and are a kind of bent shaft, even when used in archivolts and traceries; when horizontal, they confuse themselves with cornices, and are, in fact, generally to be considered as the best means of drawing an architectural line in any direction, the soft curve of their side obtaining some shadow at nearly all times of the day, and that more tender and grateful to the eye than can be obtained either by an incision or by any other form of projection.
And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss" the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers a confusion of delight, amid which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St.
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