“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 195

arch above it with a more removed centre, and placing the voussoirs at an acute angle to the curve, we have the truly noble form of domestic Gothic, which-more or less enriched by mouldings and adorned by penetration, more or less open of the space between the including and inferior arches-was immediately adopted in almost all the proudest palaces of North Italy-in the Brolettos of Como, Bergamo, Modena, and Siena-in the palace of the Scaligers at Verona-of the Gambacorti at Pisa-of Paolo Guinigi at Lucca¹-besides inferior buildings innumerable:-nor is there any form of civil Gothic except the Venetian, which can be for a moment compared with it in simplicity or power. The latest is that most vicious and barbarous style of which the richest types are the lateral porches and upper pinnacles of the Cathedral of Como, and the whole of the Certosa of Pavia:²-characterised by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a small scale by way of pinnacles and niches; the substitution of candelabra for columns; and the covering of the surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject, in high relief and daring perspective, and finished with delicacy which rather would demand preservation in a cabinet, and exhibition under a lens, than admit of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye, and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is worse than valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness and rustication. But between these two extremes are varieties nearly countless-some of them both strange and bold, owing to the brilliant colour and firm texture of the accessible materials, and the desire of the builders to crowd the greatest expression of value into the smallest space.

27. Thus it is in the promontories of serpentine which meet with their polished and gloomy green the sweep of the

¹ [The arches of the Broletto of Como are drawn in Plate 5 of Stones of Venice, vol. i.]

² [Compare on the Certosa, Seven Lamps, ch. i. (Vol. VIII. p. 50 and n.), and on the Cathedral of Como, Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xx. (Vol. IX. p. 263 and n.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]