Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/472

 422 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE times, groin-vaults made by the intersection of two round ones. The great and almost insurmountable difficulty was to roof the broad nave with a vault of stone and yet have windows to light the church in the very thick and solid walls necessary to resist the thrust of such a vault. Window openings, however, were now splayed or made with sloping sides so as to admit more light and prevent rainwater from settling, as it would on a flat window ledge. Southern France also showed progress in sculpture and ornamentation. At Poitiers and Angouleme are churches Progress in from this period whose facades are almost com- and^ma- pletely covered with sculptured figures and mentation terminate at either side in ornamental towers. Instead of the plain cubical capital so often found in Ro- manesque churches, all sorts of figures and designs are em- ployed upon the capitals of the columns, and the ends of the corbels are carved into grotesque human, animal, and im- aginary heads. We also discover first in southern France the treating together as a unified architectural composi- tion of the three front portals opening into nave and aisles respectively. In Germany the chief Romanesque structures were the great cathedrals of the Rhine cities and bishoprics, Speyer, Rhenish Worms, and Mainz. The interiors of these three Romanesque c h U rches average four hundred feet in length and one hundred feet in height of nave. At first they had flat wooden roofs, but were later vaulted. They have double choirs and a dome and two towers at either end of the building. These relieve the long, horizontal lines and bare expanse of slanting roof of nave and aisles and add a ver- tical or upward effect. We find the usual blind arcades and dwarf galleries. Similar in style to these Rhenish churches are the Romanesque portions of the cathedral at Tournai in Belgium, which did not receive a vaulted roof until the eighteenth century. Its four towers, however, instead of being in pairs at both ends are grouped together at the four corners of the crossing. By the expression "Norman architecture" is indicated