Another church has a Gothic brick front. The real roof is one of flat
pitch, spanning nave and aisles; but in the façade the central portion
is considerably higher than the sides, so as to give the idea of a
clerestory. This is a foolish sham, and unhappily only too common in
late Gothic work in Italy. The centre division of the front is divided
into three by pilasters, which are semicircular in plan. In the central
division are a door and a circular window, in each side division is a
pointed window, and a brick cornice finishes the gable, crowned with
five circular brick pinnacles.
Another church in Lodi has a very beautifully painted ceiling; this has
been engraved by Mr. Grüner, but unluckily I did not know of its
existence until I returned home; it seems to be an admirable piece of
colour, and to be well worth careful study.
There seemed to be nothing else worthy of notice in Lodi; but, as in
duty-bound we walked down to the bridge,--a rough, unstable-looking
wooden erection over the broad rapid Adda, with nothing about it to
recall to mind the great event in its history, its passage by Napoleon
in 1796.
We left very early in the morning for Pavia: our way led us through a
country most elaborately cultivated, and irrigated with a great display
of science and labour; every field seemed to have some two or three
streams running rapidly in different directions, and the grass
everywhere was most luxuriant. No view, however, was to be had on either
side, as the road found its way through a very flat line of country, and
all the hedges were lined with interminable rows of Lombardy poplars. It
was a country which would have done more good to the heart of a
Lincolnshire farmer than to that of an architect!
The only remarkable building passed on the road was a castle at
Sant’Angelo; a great brick building, with square towers set diagonally
at the angles. The walls were finished with a battlement of the Veronese
kind, and there were several very good early pointed brick windows with
brick monials in place of shafts. A campanile, detached near one angle,
has fine machicolations in stone, now, however, partly destroyed. The
effect of the whole building was very grand.
We soon reached Pavia, and were, as we expected to be, well rewarded by
its churches. The general aspect of the city is singular, owing to the
number of tall slender brick towers which seem to have formed a
necessary appendage to almost every house in the Middle Ages. They are
entirely without openings or ornaments of any kind beyond the
scaffold-holes, and one can compare them to nothing that I know so well
as to the great shot-tower at Waterloo Bridge, save that they are always
square and not circular.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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