Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 21, 2024
The gable above the portico has an enormous wheel-window of sixteen divisions, which had a door beneath it. The nave is 19 ft. 6 in. broad. Its piers vary in width, and the round-arched arcade is irregular in its spacing. The north aisle is broader than the south. The piers and arches are unmoulded; the arches have two orders, carved imposts, and a very small base.
The original wheel-window of the façade is in the Museo Lapidario, just below the cathedral, where a good many well-heads of Venetian type are also preserved, and a few fragments of eighth and ninth-century carving, as well as the usual antique columns, bases, and inscriptions, one expects to find.
The designs are nonsensical, he declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir, under the coloured light of the great wheel-window.
Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches; it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning.
The central portion has a restored wheel-window with radiating colonnettes and round arches, and above it in the gable is another with cusped tracery of a later date; round this an arcading ramps as at the end of the aisles, and the lower rose is flanked by arcading in two stages arched only in the upper one.
Every sort of ornament that could be thought of seems to have been crammed into the cathedral in one place or another: gilding, frescos, pictures; a roof of blue, spangled with golden stars; a magnificent wheel-window of old painted glass over the entrance, and another at the opposite end of the cathedral; statues, some of marble, others of gilded bronze; pulpits of carved marble; a gilded organ; a cornice of marble busts of the popes, extending round the entire church; a pavement, covered all over with a strange kind of mosaic work in various marbles, wrought into marble pictures of sacred subjects; immense clustered pillars supporting the round arches that divide the nave from the side aisles; a clere-story of windows within pointed arches; it seemed as if the spectator were reading an antique volume written in black-letter of a small character, but conveying a high and solemn meaning.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking