f a new and mixed
form like the new and mixed civilization of which it is the offspring.
You feel power and invention in it with a touch of quaintness and fancy.
Walls of enormous grandeur are developed or expanded without the few
windows in them happening to impair their massiveness or diminish their
strength. There are no flying buttresses; they are self-sustaining.
Marble panels, alternately yellow and black, cover them with a
glittering marquetry, and curves of arches let into their masses seem to
be the bones of a robust skeleton beneath the skin.

The Latin cross, which the edifice figures, contracts at the top, and
the chancel and transepts bubble out into rotundities and projections,
in petty domes behind the church in order to accompany the grand dome
which ascends above the choir, and which, the work of Brunnelleschi,
newer and yet more antique than that of St. Peter, lifts in the air to
an astonishing height its elongated form, its octagonal sides and its
pointed lantern. But how can the physiognomy of a church be conveyed by
words? It has one nevertheless; all its portions appearing together are
combined in one chord and in one effect. If you examine the plans and
old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony
of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these
Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian
columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; of this
assemblage of all forms, pointed, swelling, angular, oblong, circular
and octagonal. Greek and Latin antiquity, the Byzantine and Saracenic
Orient, the Germanic and Italian middle-age, the entire past, shattered,
amalgamated and transformed, seems to have been melted over anew in the
human furnace in order to flow out in fresh forms in the hands of the
new genius of Giotto, Arnolfo, Brunnelleschi and Dante.

Here the work is unfinished, and the success is not complete. The facade
has not been constructed; all that we see of it is a great naked,
scarified wall similar to a leper's plaster.[31] There is no light
within. A line of small round bays and a few windows fill the immensity
of the edifice with a gray illumination; it is bare, and the
argillaceous tone in which it is painted depresses the eye with its wan
monotony. A "Pieta" by Michael Angelo and a few statues seem like
spectres; the bas-reliefs are only vague confusion. The architect,
hesitating between medieval and