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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n door-way, with its broad high-stilted pointed arches supported on slendercolumns, exhibits some of the forms of the Saracenic arcades, and itscolumns themselves are old, one bearing an Arabic inscription. Butthe flanking towers and the low gable are anything but Saracenic,and the whole construction is doubtless three hundred years laterthan the church. The lower walls of the flank are the work ofFuga, but the high clerestory retains much of the beauty of formand material of the early construction; the wall being crossed bybands of various colored marbles, and crowned by a richly decoratedfrieze with an arched corbel-table, and a battlement which recallsthat of the ducal palace at Venice. In the square transept end, withits single window in the middle of a pointed blind arcade, as in allthe exterior to the eastward of it, there is less evidence of the re-storers hand, and the whole of the eastern end shows presumably theoriginal architecture. The three apses are surrounded by a blind
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Fig. 306. Palermo. Cathedral. 102 ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY interlacing- arcade, not on columns as at Cefalii, but with a broad,flat, decorated border carried all around each arch. Within thesharp pointed arches are lower and blunter blind arches, withoutopenings, but decorated with bands of marble inlay of great delicacyand beauty. Above the arcade is a most elaborate cornice, composedof bands of mosaic and a pointed arched corbel-table, the wholecrowned by a singular undulating battlement. This terminal orna-ment is repeated on the long rear wall of the tribunes, which riseswithout openings, high above the apses, above even the transept, andis decorated by a series of disconnected blind arches with borders ofmosaic. The east end is flanked by two tall and slender squaretowers, of which the lower portion continues the decoration of theapses, while the upper portion, divided into stages with coupledopenings under bearing arches, much in the Lombard manner, ap-pears to be of later date.^ (

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