The interior of San Lorenzo is lofty and spacious. The nave and aisles
alone measure about 150 feet by 90, and there are spacious transepts,
choir, and chapels. The columns are circular, and have capitals so badly
carved that it is somewhat difficult to say whether they have shells or
tufts of foliage for enrichment. Very small circular windows in the
clerestory, and a groined roof, complete the design. The best portion of
the exterior is, I think, the elevation of the bays of the nave aisles.
Here there are two simple trefoiled lancets with a shallow buttress
between them, and a circular window above in each bay. This design is
refreshingly pure and simple. The steeple is on the east side of the
north transept. It is of six stages in height, the stages being marked
by slightly sunk panels, and corbel-tables under string-courses, which
are formed by a pattern in the bricks, not by any projecting moulding,
so that the straight outline of the steeple is not broken. The result is
not particularly good.
Santa Corona has, like the other churches, a single gable in front of
the nave and aisles, with a western doorway and a large circular window
above. I have a recollection of it as of one of the most ungainly of
fronts. The campanile here is much like that of San Lorenzo, but has a
low octagonal belfry-stage finished with a small circular brick spire.
Santa Corona may well be more visited, for a picture by John Bellini
than for its own merits. This is a picture over one of the altars in the
north aisle representing the Baptism of Our Lord--one so quiet and
beautiful in colour, so dignified and solemn in its design, that it is
impossible to admire it too much. Behind the group of angels who hold
Our Lord’s garments, is a mountain landscape such as one sees from
Vicenza. It is a sublime work. The marble reredos is coeval with the
picture: it is furnished with two low screen walls right and left of the
altar, a common and proper arrangement for its protection when, as here,
the altar stands in the aisle itself and not in a chapel.
I did not find any other church worth noticing, and soon made my way to
the Palazzo della Ragione. The great feature of this building is the
enormous hall, no less than 72 feet wide inside, and covered with a
great arched timber roof boarded on the under side, and divided into
vertical panels by bold ribs painted black and white. This roof is held
together by two tiers of iron ties, and being arched and boarded at the
end as well as at the sides, has somewhat the look of the inverted hull
of a great ship. The effect is imposing, though at the same time it is
somewhat gloomy, owing to the absence of all high light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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