Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy. George Edmund Street
VERONA. Page 84.
and then entirely with brick, pierced with only one or two small openings, and terminating with a simple belfry-stage; the belfry windows, with their arches formed without mouldings, and with the sharp edges only of brick and stone used alternately, are divided into three lights by shafts of shining marble; the shafts, being coupled one behind the other, give strength with great lightness, and are very striking in their effect. These windows have, too, remarkably large balconies, but without balustrading of any kind. The upper and octangular stage of the campanile is comparatively modern, but rather improves the whole effect than otherwise.
I could hardly tear myself away from this noble work; but much more was to be seen, so I dallied not long before I set forth on a journey of discovery, giving myself up gladly to sketching and ecclesiology.
The hotels in Verona are both of them near Sta. Anastasia, and at the eastern end of the long and at first narrow and picturesque Corso. The Adige separates the city from its eastern suburb, and from the hills crowned by the Castel San Felice and the picturesquely stepped city walls. Its yellow waves wash with an angry rush the foundations of the houses which overhang it all along its course, but the only views of it are to be obtained from the bridges, and from the open space near the Castel Vecchio. At the extreme north-western angle of the town stands the church of San Zenone. One soon finds one’s self constantly on the Corso, and to the north of this lie the cathedral, Sta. Eufemia, the Castel Vecchio, and San Zenone, whilst to the south of it are the tombs of the Scaligers, San Fermo Maggiore, the Roman Amphitheatre, and the Palazzo Publico. Without further attempt to describe the map let us visit the buildings, of which the list I have given, though by no means exhaustive, includes the finest.
The Veronese architects in the Middle Ages were certainly some of the best in Italy. San Zenone is by very much the finest church of its kind that I know; Sta. Anastasia is on the whole one of the best churches of a later date; and San Fermo Maggiore affords some of the best detail of brickwork, and the tombs of the Scaligers the best examples of monuments in all Italy.
The first thing seen on turning out of the hotel is the west front of the church of Sta. Anastasia, looking so beautiful at the end of the narrow street, whose dark shade contrasts with the bright sunshine which plays upon its lofty arched marble doorway and frescoed tympanum, and lights up by some kind of magic the rough brickwork with which the unfinished church has been left so brightly, that, as you gaze, thoughts pass across your mind of portions of some lovely painting or some sweeter dream; you feel as though Fra Angelico might have painted such a door in a Paradise, and as though it were too fair to be real. There, however, it is, rich and delicate in colour, shining with all the delicate tints of the marbles of Verona, pure and simple in its softly-shadowed mouldings, beautiful in its proportions, and on a nearer approach revealing through the dark shade of its opening, and over and beyond the people who early and late throng in and out, the vague and misty forms of the solemn interior.
Sta. Anastasia is one of the most complete and representative pointed churches in the North of Italy, and deserves, therefore, a rather detailed description. Its date is about 1260 to 1290. The ground-plan is very simple—a nave of six bays, then one which is the crossing of the transepts, a very short choir of one bay finished with an apse and two chapels on the east side of each transept. The nave aisles fire narrow, and the whole design is characterized by intense simplicity of detail and arrangement. The width of the nave, and the height of the columns and arches, give, on entering, an idea of vast space and size. The columns are very simple, cylindrical in section, and support arches built of brick, and only chamfered at the edge; from the caps of the columns flat pilasters run up to the commencement of the groining, and above the nave arcades there are two small circular openings, one in the place of a triforium, opening into the roof of the aisle, the other above it and larger, filled in with plate tracery in stone, and forming the clerestory.
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