Identifier: historyofarchit02cumm (find matches)
Title: A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Cummings, Charles Amos, 1833-1905
Subjects: Architecture
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin and company
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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covered by a sharplypointed gable. In the upper stage, a delicate open gallery is carriedquite around the building, composed of small pointed and cuspedarches on slender columns, covered by gables. The angles of theoctagon are marked by square buttresses crowned by decoratedpinnacles above the cornice, where an inner wall, set somewhatback from the face of the building, has similar treatment at theangles. From the upper cornice rises a sharp octagonal roof crownedby a lantern. The walls are of marble, with thin courses of a darkgray stone at inter-vals. The little build-ing has a simplicity,repose, and elegancewhich make it one ofthe most interestingexamples of the Ital-ian Gothic. (Fig.371.) Speaking gener-ally, it may be saidthat in Tuscany, thesame feeling for broaddecorative forms andcolor effects whichdistinguished theTuscan or CentralRomanesque fromthe Romanesque ofL o m b a r d y — whichmade San Miniatoor the cathedral ofPisa or the greatchurches of Luccadiffer so widely from
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Fig. 371. Pistoia. Baptistery. the contemporary churches of Pavia or Padua or Milan — survivedthrough the Gothic period, and appears in most of the characteristicwork of the time. Yet this feeling was not allowed to affect theinteriors, which, even in the greatest examples, as Santa Croce and 204 architecturp: in italy the cathedral of Florence, remained as cold and bare as the severestof the Romanesque churches, and with much less of variety and in-terest than these. In SantaCroce, indeed, all decoration,vv^hether interior or exterior,was put out of the questionby the conditions of the prob-lem which the architect hadto solve, which was to pro-duce the largest possiblechurch at the smallest possi-ble cost. The earlier churchwas a small building belong-ing to the Frati Minori, orFranciscans, who, being oneof the great preaching orders,desired before the end of thethirteenth century a churchin Florence in which a greatcongregation could be assem-bled. The new church wasbegun in 1295,

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