Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/473

 THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 423 that of England and northwestern France during the Romanesque period. There is no English cathedral which has come down essentially unaltered from that Norman time, but there are many which in greater or less archlt ecture part are Norman in character, especially Durham, Norwich, Peterborough, Ely, and Winchester. The Norman churches usually had two square towers at either side of the west front, a comparatively low and heavy square tower or lan- tern over the crossing of nave and transepts, and a round apse at the east end. Although originally not vaulted, their [interiors were nevertheless very impressive from the length pf the nave, the height of its side walls, and the regular and rhythmic succession of massive piers or huge round pillars and of arches which composed those walls. In respect to brnamentation, however, the Norman work is rather rough. [Their sculpture was mainly geometrical, consisting of saw- adge teeth or zigzag and spiral grooves cut in pillars or irches, and often hewn with an axe. When they attempted 1 few animal or human or angelic figures, in the semicircular space above a door in an archway or on the sides of a mas- sive baptismal font that one might well mistake for a horse- trough, the work was generally crude and indistinct. Our discussion of Romanesque architecture omitted, with
 * he exception of Normandy and Flanders, the provinces of

iiorthern and east central France, because here Northern n especial experimentation was going on which ^ en £ h of 'esulted, in the twelfth century, in the creation Gothic France were rather backward in the Romanesque period, but they were to take the lead in the production of the new ■tyle, just as from the neighborhood of Paris and the royal
 * )f the Gothic style. Champagne and the lie de architecture
 * ourt came the dialect that was to become the French lan-

his style of architecture by Italians of the Renaissance )eriod in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who had no ympathy with any but classical buildings, and who, be- ause a good deal of the perverted Gothic architecture in heir own Italy had come to them by way of Germany, con-
 * uage. The misleading name, " Gothic," was foisted upon