Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/185

Rh diminutive groined vault. In San Salvatore the solids are greatly reduced in volume, and are faced with neo-classic pilasters, above which the pier is solid, and is faced with an entablature surmounted by an attic from which the vaulting springs. The use of an attic in an interior, and especially as a support for vaulting, is one of those architectural aberrations with which the Renaissance has made us familiar. I know not when or where it first occurred, but there can be few earlier instances than this. It was not seldom introduced by the architects of the later Renaissance, and, as we shall see, by Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's cathedral. It is worthy of notice that the system of San Salvatore is that of the church of St. Mark modified by lightening the piers in the way that we have seen, and by the application of neo-classic details.

The nearly contemporaneous church of S. Fantino has the same general character, except that groined vaulting takes the place of domes on pendentives in all but the easternmost compartment of the nave, and the attic story is omitted.

No work of the early Renaissance in north Italy exhibits more refinement in its details than the small church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the design of which is ascribed to Pietro Lombardo (Fig. 89). The plan is a simple rectangle with a rectangular sanctuary. The plain walls of the nave are covered with a round timber roof, and the sanctuary has a small dome on pendentives. The interior is richly incrusted with marble and relief carvings of the utmost delicacy, and of unusual beauty of design. The walls of the exterior are divided into two stages by superimposed orders of pilasters on podiums. The pilasters of the upper order carry archivolts instead of an entablature, thus recalling the mediæval Lombard blind arcade, and the walls above this are crowned with an entablature. Over the portal a curved pediment is set against the entablature of the lower order, and the whole façade is crowned with a