Italian brickwork is remarkable as being almost always executed with nothing but red bricks, with occasional but rare use of stonework; the bricks for the ordinary walling are generally rather larger than ours, in no way superior in their quality, and always built coarsely with a wide joint of mortar. Those used for windows, doorways, and generally where they were required to attract attention and to be ornamental, were made of much finer clay and moulded with the greatest care and skill. The transepts and campanile of Cremona Cathedral are instances of red brick used without any intermixture of stone save in the shafts of the windows, and their effect is certainly very grand. The mouldings are elaborate, and the way in which cusping is formed singularly successful. This, it must be observed, was not usually done by means of bricks moulded in the form of a cusp, but with ordinary bricks, built with the same radiating lines as those of the arch to which they belonged, and cut and rubbed to the necessary outline. Sometimes, as, e.g., in the windows at Mantua,[88] which are some of the very best I have ever seen, the points of the cusps and key-stones of the arches are formed in pieces of stone, the alternation of which with the deep-red hue of the bricks produces the most satisfactory effect of colour. This sort of treatment is common at Brescia, Verona, Mantua, and Venice, but unknown at Cremona. [Illustration: WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT, CREMONA CATHEDRAL.] In nearly all cases where brick is used for tracery, it is in the shape of plate-tracery. The tympanum of the arch is filled in with a mass of brickwork, through which are pierced the arches over the several lights of the window, and these are supported on marble or stone shafts with carved capitals, instead of monials:[89] and above these sometimes, as in the windows of Sant’Andrea, Mantua, are three cusped circles; sometimes, as in the palace at Mantua, only one cusped circle; or else, as in a beautiful example at Cremona, the plain brick tympanum is relieved by the introduction of a panel of terra-cotta, bearing the cross on a shield, whilst round its outer circumference delicately treated though large cusping defines the outline of the arch.[90] [Illustration: DETAIL OF WINDOW-JAMB--CREMONA.]