Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
Austria -- Description and travel; Germany -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
Five bell-towers, built half into the wall and separated by tall
ogive-windows now partly blocked up, repeated, with variations, the
façade I have just described. Brick rosettes exhibited their curious
designs, spreading with square stitches, so to speak, like patterns for
worsted work. At the base of the somber edifice a pretty little lodge,
of the Renaissance, built as an afterthought, gave entrance to an
exterior staircase going up along the wall diagonally to a sort of
mirador, or overhanging look-out, in exquisite taste. Graceful little
statues of Faith and Justice, elegantly draped, decorated the portico.
The staircase, resting on arches which widened as it rose higher, was
ornamented with grotesque masks and caryatides. The mirador, placed
above the arched doorway opening upon the market-place, was crowned with
a recessed and voluted pediment, where a figure of Themis held in one
hand balances, and in the other a sword, not forgetting to give her
drapery, at the same time, a coquettish puff. An odd order formed of
fluted pilasters fashioned like pedestals and supporting busts,
separated the windows of this aërial cage. Consoles with fantastic masks
completed the elegant ornamentation, over which Time had passed his
thumb just enough to give to the carved stone that bloom which nothing
can imitate....
The Marienkirche, which stands, as I have said, behind the Stadt-haus,
is well worth a visit. Its two towers are 408 feet in height; a very
elaborate belfry rises from the roof at the point of intersection of the
transept. The towers of Lübeck have the peculiarity, every one of them,
of being out of the perpendicular, leaning perceptibly to the right or
left, but without disquieting the eye, like the tower of Asinelli at
Bologna, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Seen two or three miles away,
these towers, drunk and staggering, with their pointed caps that seem to
nod at the horizon, present a droll and hilarious silhouette.
On entering the church, the first curious object that meets the eye is
a copy of the Todtentanz, or Dance of Death, of the cemetery at Bâsle. I
do not need to describe it in detail. The Middle Ages were never tired
of composing variations upon this dismal theme. The most conspicuous of
them are brought together in this lugubrious painting, which covers all
the walls of one chapel. From the Pope and the Emperor to the infant in
his cradle, each human being in his turn enters upon the dance with the
inevitable terror. But death is not depicted as a skeleton, white,
polished, cleaned, articulated with copper wire like the skeleton of an
anatomical cabinet: that would be too ornamental for the vulgar crowd.
He appears as a dead body in a more or less advanced state of
decomposition, with all the horrid secrets of the tomb carefully
revealed....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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