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The Christian Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman; mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of sacred symbols. He retains the dome, and adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.
What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth century a long stone gallery or cloister repeated in two stories, with the interstices of its carven lattice now glazed, but with its long, low, narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque with its flags worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals?
At Trofa there is a pair of tombs on each side of the chancel, round-arched, with pilasters and with heads in the spandrils, and covered with arabesques. Each pair is practically alike except that the tombs on the north side, being placed closer together leave no room for a central pilaster and have small shafts instead of panelled jambs, and that the pair on the south have pediments.
There is one subject from the life of S. Mark. Two kinds of intonaco are used, one hard and white, the other grey and sandier. The roof is a wagon vault pierced with cross-vaults, but not truly quadripartite, and the caps a curious combination of badly cut foliage and scrolls and round-arched arcading. Iron grilles of 1500 isolate the space within the columns where the sarcophagus stands.
All these figures have large heads, especially those standing under the round-arched arcade, with alternate twisted and ringed colonnettes. The lid has repoussé subjects upon all four surfaces: 1. Christ enthroned, blessing and holding a book, with the monograms IC and XC; in the corners the lion and eagle with books. 2. S. John with the eagle and monogram IONS. 3.
On the river front a lofty pedimental-roofed portico centrally located and supported by six great smooth pillars is of distinctly southern aspect. Another round-arched doorway flanked by two round-topped windows opens directly into an oval-shaped ballroom.
One after another several carriages dismissed their occupants with slams that carried far and wide on the crisp air of the early December evening, and a variety of muffled figures toiled up the broad granite steps and disappeared in the maw of the cavernous round-arched entrance-porch.
The first, second, and third bays from the east side of the transept have still the round-arched windows of the twelfth century set in the walling of the same date. But it should be noted that part of the window in the first bay was rebuilt after 1861. The fourth and fifth bays have pointed windows, carved capitals, and angle-shafts.
The Ornaments throughout the whole of the Christian round-arched period are a very interesting subject of study, and will repay close attention. In the basilican style mouldings occur but seldom: where met with, they are all of the profiles common in Roman architecture, but often rudely and clumsily worked.
The #North Transept# has on its west side two of the old twelfth-century round-arched windows, and opposite are the two large round-arched openings into the library and the chamber above it. The vaulting of this transept is not the same in detail as that to the south of the choir, and is rather earlier in the type of its mouldings.
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