ision of design in its moldings which
we believe to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another and a
barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern Gothic wrought out
with diamond-shaped penetrations inclosed in squares; at Bergamo
another, remarkable for the same square penetrations of its rich and
daring foliation;--while at Monza and Carrara the square is adopted as
the leading form of decoration on the west fronts, and a grotesque
expression results--barbarous still;--which, however, in the latter
duomo is associated with the arcade of slender niches--the translation
of the Romanesque arcade into pointed work, which forms the second
perfect order of Italian Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well
developed in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della Spina
at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished by the extreme purity and
severity of its ruling lines, owing to the distance of the centers of
circles from which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet a more
noble school--and passes through the richer decoration of Padua and
Vicenza to the full magnificence of the Venetian--distinguished by the
introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency or effeminacy, and by
the breadth and decision of moldings as severely determined in all
examples of the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.

43. All these groups are separated by distinctions clear and bold--and
many of them by that broadest of all distinctions which lies between
disorganization and consistency--accumulation and adaptation, experiment
and design;--yet to all one or two principles are common, which again
divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic--and whose
importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general
description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical
principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already
alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate
neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble
throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the
admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is
always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of
preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it
are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age
hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never
foul no