ncisco de Colonia. It
might have stood in Florence, and most of it might have been set against
a Tuscan church at the height of the Renaissance. There is everywhere an
overabundance of luxurious detail and rich carving. Between the
entablatures and columns stand favorite saints. The Virgin and Child are
adored by a very well-fed, fat-jowled bishop and musical angels. In one
of the panels the sword is about to descend on the neck of the kneeling
Saint John. In another, some unfortunate person has been squeezed into a
hot cauldron too small for his naked body, while bellows are applied to
the fagots underneath it and hot tar is poured on his head. While the
whole work is thoroughly Renaissance, there is here and there a curious
Gothic feeling to it, from which the carvers, surrounded and inspired by
so much of the earlier art, seem to have been unable to free themselves.
This appears in the figure ornamentation in the archivolts around the
circular-headed opening, the angel heads that cut it as it were into
cusps and the treatment and feeling of some of the figures in the larger
panels.

The exterior of Santa Maria is very remarkable. It is a wonderful
history of late Gothic and early Renaissance carving. The only clearing
whence any freedom of view and perspective may be had is to the west, in
front of the late fifteenth-century spires, but wherever one stands,
whether in the narrow alleys to the southeast, or above, or below in the
sloping city, the three great masses that rise above the cathedral roof,
of spires, cimborio, and the Constable's Lantern, dominate majestically
all around them. If one stands at the northeast, above the terraces
that descend to the Pellejeria door, each of the three successive series
of spires that rise one above the other far to the westward might be the
steeple of its own mighty church. The two nearest are composed of an
infinite number of finely crocketed turrets, tied together by a sober,
Renaissance bulk; that furthest off shoots its twin spires in Gothic
nervousness airily and unchecked into the sky, showing the blue of the
heavens through its flimsy fabric. Between them, tying the huge bulk
together, stretch the buttresses, the sinews and muscles of the
organism, far less marked and apparent, however, than is ordinarily the
case. At various stages above and around, crowning and banding towers,
chapels, apse, naves, and transepts, run the many balconies. They are
Renaissance in form, b