. Letters of an architect, from France, Italy, and Greece. ed just at thepoint where it is most disagreeable; and as the columns of the porticocould not be seen as objects of any consequence, in comparison withthe church, till we were fairly among them; the false estimate usuallyformed of their magnitude would be avoided, and they would serve tocorrect our notions of the magnitude of the building, instead of helpingto mislead, as they do at present. This scheme is, I apprehend, aban-doned ; and we now from the bridge of St. Angelo see little but thedome itself, and after passing it, proceed al
. Letters of an architect, from France, Italy, and Greece. ed just at thepoint where it is most disagreeable; and as the columns of the porticocould not be seen as objects of any consequence, in comparison withthe church, till we were fairly among them; the false estimate usuallyformed of their magnitude would be avoided, and they would serve tocorrect our notions of the magnitude of the building, instead of helpingto mislead, as they do at present. This scheme is, I apprehend, aban-doned ; and we now from the bridge of St. Angelo see little but thedome itself, and after passing it, proceed along a dirty narrow street,whence we see nothing ; at last we catch a glimpse of part of the front,and at the same time, of the extremity of the circular colonnade. Lestyou should not have a plan at hand, I give you a little sketch of one: SAINT Peters. 369 (Fig. I.) a is the church, b b the galleries leading to it from the colonnades,cc the circular colonnades, d the obelisk, ee the two fountains, / the pointwhich first catches your eye on your Fig. 1. Fig. 2. On my first visit to St. Peters, the appearance of this point puzzledme extremely ; it appeared to be close against the church, while on theother hand, it seemed so near to the houses at the end of the street, thatI could not imagine any considerable space between them: I did notdoubt that I had taken the wrong road, and expected to find myselfclose to the church, missing the celebrated place and colonnades, in frontof it; at last, however, it opened upon me, and with great should have been more impressed if I had not heard so much of it;yet still it is a scene not to be forgotten; and perhaps it is not the lessstrongly fixed in the memory, because the overwhelming deformity ofthe facade, half destroys its power of pleasing. Yet here, with the wholebefore me, I should have formed a very false estimate of its magnitude;the columns of the colonnade are nearly five feet in diameter: had Ibeen asked
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Keywords: ., bookauthorwoodsjoseph1, bookcentury1800, booksubjectarchitecture
