. Letters of an architect, from France, Italy, and Greece. our lower stories appearing above the roof of the church,are plain octagons, with unequal faces, with a row of ornamental intersect-ing arches to each cornice, and a shaft or bead at each angle, which inter-rupts all the cornices. There is a little window in the lowest but one, butit appears to have been broken through at a later period; the fourth hason each face, a window divided into two parts by a little column, andeach part finishes in a small semicircular arch. This sort of arrangementoccurs in the early architecture of France, o
. Letters of an architect, from France, Italy, and Greece. our lower stories appearing above the roof of the church,are plain octagons, with unequal faces, with a row of ornamental intersect-ing arches to each cornice, and a shaft or bead at each angle, which inter-rupts all the cornices. There is a little window in the lowest but one, butit appears to have been broken through at a later period; the fourth hason each face, a window divided into two parts by a little column, andeach part finishes in a small semicircular arch. This sort of arrangementoccurs in the early architecture of France, of the eleventh, and perhaps ofpart of the twelfth century, but I think not later. In the fifth story, theangular shafts receive their capitals, and unite with other shafts on thefaces of the octagon to support a series of little arches ; but as theangular shafts intersect the little cornices of each story, and consequentlypass beyond the upright of the plain faces, while the intermediateshafts are within that line, the latter are broken into two IRON TIES. 211 one projecting before the other. Over this are two stories, rathersmaller than those below, and forming an equal sided octagon; and aboveall is a spire, cut to indicate scales or shingles, terminating in a globe, anda little winged figure supporting a weathercock. I have*dwelt morefully on these details, because they so strongly distinguish the Lombardbuildings, from similar edifices of the same period in France or England;and because also they shew the necessity of a new system of dates, whenwe would determine the epoch of a building by the peculiarities of its ar-chitecture. Though built in the fourteenth century, it exhibits more ofwhat we call Norman than of the Gothic ; and perhaps the Italians neverentirely abandoned that mode of building for any consistent style, till therestoration of the Roman architecture in the fifteenth century, underBrunelleschi. There are several steeples at Milan of this sort, but
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Keywords: ., bookauthorwoodsjoseph1, bookcentury1800, booksubjectarchitecture
