194 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the Swiss Urushorn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares, boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast-be one whit more soothing to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative faculties, than the successive arch, and visionary shaft, and dreamy vault, and crisped foliage, and colourless stone, of our own fair abbeys, chequered with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches, or seen far off, like clouds in the valley, risen out of the pause of its river. ¹

25. And with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the “Italian Gothic,” our author is again to be blamed for his loose assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, ² of this general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. It is true that so far as the church interiors are concerned, the system is nearly universal, and always bad; its characteristic features being arches of enormous span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three fillets, rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural connection with the column, and looking consequently as if they might be slipped up or down, and had been only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes of a festa. But the exteriors of Italian pointed buildings display variations of principle and transitions of type quite as bold as either the advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their forms, or the recoil from their latest to the cinquecento.

26. The first and grandest style resulted merely from the application of the pointed arch to the frequent Romanesque window, the large semicircular arch divided by three small ones. Pointing both the superior and inferior arches, and adding to the grace of the larger one by striking another

¹ [Compare the description of the English Abbeys in Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 99.]

² [The phrase “Italian Gothic” is used by Lord Lindsay (vol. ii. p. 39), who justifies his unfavourable opinion of it by reference to Gally Knight.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]