Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/108

78 a specimen of the mixed Romanesque and Moorish styles, remarkable for exuberance of colour and richness of detail.

It would be impossible even to name the numerous churches of France belonging to this period (eleventh and twelfth centuries). One of the most interesting is that of Maguellonne, which has a remarkable doorway, in which the Classical, Moorish and Gothic styles are combined. A typical example of French Romanesque architecture is the church of St. Saturnin or St. Sernin at Toulouse. It has a nave and side-aisles, with an arcade above the latter. The choir, however, is of a form essentially French: instead of the simple semicircular apse of the Roman basilica, which was universally adopted in Germany and Lombardy, the French invented a chevet, which is an apse round which are clustered a group of chapels in place of a simple aisle. Canterbury and Westminster may be cited as English specimens of the chevet.

Normandy is rich in churches of this age. One of the finest is St. Stephen's at Caen (Fig. 39), erected by William the Conqueror, in 1066, to celebrate his conquest of England. It is now 364 feet long, the original apse having been converted into a chevet a century later. The western entrance is flanked by two towers, which subsequently became a distinctive and almost invariable feature of French churches.

Little is known of the history of mediæval architecture in Spain. A peculiarity of the Spanish churches consists in the fact that the building is often entered from the transepts instead of from the western end opposite to the choir, and the apse is not large enough to contain more