Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/171

Rh forms with the pseudo-classic elements ingrafted on them. A prominent feature of the Lombard Romanesque architecture is the diminutive open arcade. This feature is extensively employed in the mediasval portions of the church to which this façade is the western enclosure, and it is reproduced, with neo-classic modifications, at the top of each of the two principal stages into which the façade is divided. The arches are here carried on small piers, and are framed with diminutive pilasters and entablatures. The portal has a pair of free-standing Corinthian columns on each side, bearing a ressaut of an entablature which spans the opening, and from these ressauts an arch is sprung with spandrels in relief crowned with a classic cornice. In each one of the other bays of the ground story a rectangular window, with classic mouldings and a cornice of classic profile, is subdivided in the mediæval manner with two small arches on a central column and jamb shafts. These last have a tapering form, with a profusion of carved ornament in high relief, and are like the shafts of candelabra (Fig. 78). The mediæval feature of a large circular opening over the central portal is enclosed within a rectangle surmounted by an entablature and a classic pediment, while this compound is flanked on either side by a pair of arches opening beneath a larger arch. To all this mixture of Romanesque and neo-classic features a pseudo-Gothic character is superadded by statues set in niches of the buttresses, and spiky pinnacles over the lateral bays. The details of this overelaborate composition, the work of several successive architects, have no merit in themselves, and the work as a whole is trivial and unmeaning.

Among the monuments of the early Renaissance in Milan are several of importance, and of these the church and sacristy