Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/349

Rh light was fatal. Notwithstanding the beauty of the glass itself, which seems to have been executed at Lubeck, 1434, from Italian designs, it is so completely out of place that it only produces irritation instead of admiration, and has certainly utterly destroyed the effect and meaning; of the interior it was intended to adorn.

Externally the façade was never finished, and we can only fancy

what was intended from the analogy of Siena and Orvieto. The flanks of the nave are without buttresses or pinnacles, and, with only a few insignificant windows, would be painfully flat except for a veneer of colored marbles disposed in panels over the whole surface. For an interior or a pavement such a mode of decoration is admissible; but it is so unconstructive, so evidently a mere decoration, that it gives a weakness to the whole, and a most unsatisfactory appearance to so large a building. This is much less apparent at the east end, where the outline is so broken, and the main lines of the construction so plainly marked, that the mere filling-in is comparatively unimportant. This is the most meritorious part of the church, and so far as it was carried up according to the original design, is extremely beautiful. Even the plainness and flatness of the nave serve as a foil to set off the varying outline of the choir. Above the line of the cornice of the side-aisles there is nothing that can be said to belong to the original design except the first division of the drum of the dome, which follows the lines of the clerestory. It has long been a question what Arnolfo originally intended, and especially how he meant to cover the great octagonal space in the centre. All knowledge of his intentions seems to have been lost within a century after his death ; at least, in the accounts of the proceedings of the commission which resulted in the adoption of Brunelleschi's design for the dome, no reference is made to any original design as then existing, and no one appears to have