Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/210

Rh lights, each with a circle above. There is one. such window in each bay of the aisles and of the clerestory. The vault of the apse has a Gothic character, but its ribs are stopped upon corbels, below which are plain walls pierced by tall mullioned lancets, one in each bay. Well-developed buttresses rise against the external angles of this apse, and the walls between them terminate in gables. The walls of the aisles and clerestory are furnished with the usual pilaster strips. The construction of Sta. Croce is thus of the simplest kind, involving few other principles than are exemplified in an ordinary barn. With exception of its apse there is nothing Gothic about it, and were it divested of its frescoes by Giotto and Gaddi—which indeed make it one of the most impressive interiors in Europe—it would become a singularly bald and uninteresting edifice.

The cathedrals of pointed design in Italy, no less than the monastic churches, show how little of Gothic spirit, or of sympathy with Gothic design, there was in the Italian genius. Of these cathedrals Siena and Orvieto are among the most important and characteristic. They differ little, however from other vaulted pointed buildings in Italy except in general proportions, and in their peculiar western façades which shall be noticed presently.

The great crowning monument of Italian pointed architecture is the Cathedral of Florence. In this building are exhibited at once most of the merits and the defects of the Italian style. Of the structure begun by Arnolfo at the close of the thirteenth century nothing remains externally visible. And even of the interior it is doubtful whether any part of his work was left after the remodelling to which the building was subjected in the fourteenth century. In plan this building consists of a nave and aisles, with apsidal projections north and south forming a kind of transept, an eastern apse, and a vast central octagonal space surrounded by these several parts. The piers, according to the usual custom in Italy, are so disposed as to divide the nave into square compartments, and the aisles into oblong ones. In elevation there are as usual but two stories, though the height of the central vault is but about ten feet less than that of Cologne. The pier arches are enormously high, reaching nearly to the great corbelled gallery which, like the little gallery in Sta.