Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/410

394 with almost identical dimensions and design (Woodcut No. 329), is cold, scattered, and unmeaning, because but a structural skeleton of St. Mark's, without its adornments. The interior of the 13th-century Gothic church is beautiful, even when whitewashed; but these early attempts had not yet reached that balance between construction and ornament which is necessary to real architectural effect. The same is true of the exterior; if stripped of its ornament and erected in plain stone it would hardly be tolerable, and the mixture of florid 14th-century foliage and bad Italian Gothic details with

the older work would be all but unendurable. But marble, mosaic, sculpture, and the all-hallowing touch of age, and association, disarm the critic, and force him to worship when his reason tells him he ought to blame.

Much as St. Mark's must have been admired in the days of its freshness, the Gothic feeling seems to have been so strong in Northern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries as to prevent its being used as a model. The one prominent exception is San Antonio, Padua (1237-1307), which is evidently a copy of St. Mark's, but with so much Gothic design mixed up with it as to spoil both, Length was sought to be lobtained by  using seven domes instead of five, and running an aisle round the apse. The side-aisles were covered with intersecting vaults, and pointed arches were occasionally introduced when circular would have harmonized better with the general design.

Externally the enveloping porch was omitted—not even the Pisan modification of it introduced, though it might have been employed with the happiest effect. The consequence of all this jumble is that San Antonio is externally one of the most unsatisfactory churches in Europe, though possessing a quaint Oriental look from the grouping of its dome with the minaret-like spires which adorn it. The inside is not so bad, though a roof of only five bays over a quasi-Gothic church