Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/328

 SIO THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. which had to be raised above the lateral vaulting in order to receive sufficient light. The next step was to Bubstitute cross-vaulting for the barrel vault. One school of Romanesque architects stopped at one point of incomplete attainment of these ends, another at another. But it was in the progressive development of methods entailed by the endeavor to vault the nave perfectly that Romanesque was to reach its apotheosis in Gothic. Although the progress of Romanesque architecture came through the energies and growing experience of the northern peoples, the style was a continuance of as well as a departure from architectural forms existing in the western or eastern portions of what had been the Roman Empire. The point of departure was the Western antique Christian basilica, from which the Romanesque church took its general arrangement, its vaulted apse, and the arches connecting the piers which supported the nave. On the other hand, the mode of vaulting the naves was influenced rather by the East than by antique Roman principles. A spherical vault upon a square base was unknown in the West until it appeared in Romanesque churches at the crossing of the nave and transept ; nor did the Romans employ cross-vaults of stone. The presence of these forms in Romanesque churches betrays the influence of Byzantine and other oriental modes of building.^ Different oriental influences, operating 1 See Choisy, Histoire d* Architecture, II, pp. 134-138, 200-202, 240-257, for a statement of the sources and paths by which came the Eastern influences. Cf. also Hittorff. Architecture Moderne de la Sidle (1835).