[Illustration: 44.--NORTH TRANSEPT, CATHEDRAL, CREMONA. Page 266.]
former. The filling-in of stilted round-arched windows with ogee pointed
tracery and much delicate cusping gives the south transept a singularly
Eastern look, and it is impossible not to feel that some such influence
has been exercized throughout its design. It would indeed be most
interesting to find out what this was, but I am not aware that there is
likely to be any clue to it. The date of the work is in all probability
somewhere about the latter part of the fourteenth century. The detail
and management of the whole of the brickwork are exceedingly delicate
and effective, surpassing in their way anything I have yet seen.
[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--CREMONA CATHEDRAL.]
The putlog-holes are left unfilled, as they almost always are in Italy.
The only stone used is in the doorway and the window-shafts, and these
last are almost always coupled in depth. The windows are elaborately
moulded, and courses of chevrons, quatrefoils, and other ornaments are
introduced occasionally as a relief to what might otherwise be the
tedious succession of mouldings which are necessarily rather similar.
The cusping of brick arches is always managed in the same way; the
bricks all radiate with the arch (not from the centre of the cusp), and
look as though they might have been built, allowing plenty of length of
brick for the cusps, and then cut to the proper outline, the edges of
the cusps being almost invariably left square. Some of the terra-cotta
arch ornaments and diapers are exceedingly good of their kind. The most
remarkable feature, however, about these transepts is the prodigiously
heavy open arcade which runs up the gables under the eaves-cornice--so
heavy and so rude-looking, that, taken by itself, it would probably be
put down as being of much earlier date than it really is. The façade
finishes with three heavy pinnacles arcaded all round, and finished with
conical caps.
To the north transept very nearly the same description would apply, save
that the doorway is much finer, and entirely of marble.[62] It is part
of the original Lombard church, and has no doubt been taken down and
rebuilt where we now see it. The tracery of the rose windows is all
finished in brick, and the detail generally is better and more delicate
in its character than that of the south transept. In both the bricks are
all of a pale red colour, and no dark bricks are anywhere used.
[Illustration: ROSE WINDOW--CREMONA CATHEDRAL.]
The baptistery--which, as has been said, stands south-west of the
Duomo--is entered by a doorway with a projecting porch, whose shafts
rest on the backs of animals. It is
[Illustration: 45.--PALACE OF THE JURISCONSULTS, CREMONA. Page 269.]
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