The pilgrimage church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, built over the oratory of St. Francis at Assisi, is a more extensive monument which was begun by Vignola in the year 1569. Though completed by other architects, and extensively restored in 1832, the building as it now stands is uniform in style throughout, and bears the marks of Vignola’s manner of design. It is cruciform in plan, with a long nave and aisles, and a square chapel opening out of each bay of each aisle. The nave and transept have barrel vaulting, a half-dome covers the apse, and a dome on a high drum resting on pendentives rises over the crossing. The aisles have domical groined vaulting with transverse ribs, and the side chapels have barrel vaults with their axes perpendicular to that of the nave. These chapels thus form abutments to the inner vaulting, so that no external buttresses are needed. The entire fabric is of brick, but the details, including the orders of the interior, of the west front, and of the drum, are wrought in stucco. For the interior the architect has employed a great order of Doric pilasters, a single pilaster on the face of each pier, and on the sides of the piers, under the aisle archivolts, he has placed pairs of smaller pilasters. The soffits of the archivolts are very wide, and have each a pair of salient sub-archivolts corresponding with the pilasters. It had been common for the architects of the Roman Renaissance to break the entablature into ressauts over the columns or pilasters of the orders when used in this way, as San Gallo had done in Montepulciano and Michael Angelo in St. Peter’s. But the effect of thus breaking the continuity of the cornice line is unpleasing, and Vignola has avoided it here by confining the ressaut to the architrave, frieze, and bed-mouldings, leaving the corona of the cornice unbroken as in Figure 47. The great piers of the crossing show the influence of St. Peter’s in being splayed, and the forms of the pendentives lose their spherical surfaces in being fitted to the straight line of the splay, as they do in St. Peter’s. The design of the façade expresses with unusual truthfulness the divisions of the interior, which are marked by pilasters like those of the great order within, and by an arch coinciding with the curve of the vaulting. [Illustration: FIG. 47.--Order of Santa Maria degli Angeli.] [Illustration: FIG. 48.--Plan of the Gesù.]