Again, This Apse And Ambulatory Are Not Perpendicular To The
Transept, But Set Askew, A Thing Known In Small Churches And Said To
Be A Symbol, But Surely Very Rare In Large Ones.
The western door is
purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round
door.
To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and
rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and
this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as
you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle.
Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor
Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy
windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This
some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his
wanderings.
The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches
are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our
cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just
quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and
different in this astonishing building.
I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the
north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must
excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I
could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples - there was
no other desk.
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