Not very far to the east of Piacenza is Asti, a dull city, distinguished, however, by some remarkable features in its churches. The most important of these are the Cathedral and San Secondo. They are extremely similar in general design: they have naves with short choirs, transepts, low octagonal vaulted lanterns over the crossing, and apsidal chapels in front of the transept gables, and at San Secondo to the several bays of the aisle. Their towers are on the east side of the transepts. The peculiar feature of their detail is the very elaborate way in which brick and stone are counterchanged in the jambs and arches of windows and doorways. The moulded members of a jamb are alternately of brick and stone, and in each course stone comes above the brick of the courses below. San Secondo cannot, I think, be earlier than circa 1400, but at first sight looks like a building of 1200. The cathedral is probably somewhat though not very much earlier. Its plan was evidently derived from that of the cathedral at Piacenza. Its proportions are bad, and it is only redeemed by the picturesqueness of some of its details. Another church has an octagonal campanile; and another, one of sixteen sides. This is of brick, except the upper stage, which is coursed in brick and stone. Its sixteen sides have alternately a window and a shaft running up to the cornice, and in the stage below it there are eight windows below the shafted sides of the belfry. The composition of this tower is certainly very good. Another fine lofty tower with bold cornice and Ghibelline parapet recalls the Veronese towers to mind, and there are besides not a few remains of medieval domestic work, so that a day may be well spent at Asti by an architect. CHAPTER XII. "Launce! by mine honesty, welcome to Milan." Milan: the Cathedral-Sant' Ambrogio-Sant' Eustorgio-Sta. Maria delle Grazie - Certosa of Chiaravalle thedral -- Novara - Vercelli - Monza: the CaThe Broletto-Sta. Maria in Strada- Como: the BrolettoThe Cathedral. MILAN is better known to the generality of English travellers than, perhaps, any other city south of the Alps; and its older portions afford a fair idea of some of the most salient points of Italian manners and customs, whilst its new and much-vaunted arcades and streets seem to be not only so cosmopolitan as to be un-Italian, but so bald and poor in design as to be repulsive wherever they are! Its narrow busy streets, though they are wanting indeed in the arcading so characteristic of very many other towns we had passed through, have that peculiar charm which life and bustle always give to strange places; the crowds of foot-passengers threading the narrow ways, with no protection from the omnibuses and carts which jostle against them, are full of animation, and lively and picturesque in their costumes. Elbowing our way between them, we soon found ourselves in a piazza, with the Duomo rising before us in all the magnificence of its white marble walls. If it be indeed true that it was designed by a German,' there is on the outside even more cause for astonishment at his work than if it had been the work of an Italian. The west front is quite modern, but the rest of the exterior, all in its original state, is as little German in its character as any building I have ever seen, and-shall I add it?—as little really grand as a work of art. I had just caught a glimpse of its general outline and effect by the bright moonlight, on the evening of my arrival, with the music of an Austrian band sounding pleasantly in my ears, and, thus seen, there was certainly something wild and striking in its effect. I saw the brilliantly light colour of the white marble in the full brightness of the moon, and little of the poverty of moulding, or the heaviness of traceries, or the preposterous tenuity of pinnacles, which daylight revealed, to the destruction of any belief I might still have in its beauty; and the more I examined it in detail the less satisfactory did it appear; for neither in its general mass, nor in its detail, does it bear examination. Its walls are panelled all over, the panelling having a peculiarly painful kind of pendulous, unsupported, and unconstructional character, and the stringcourses are marked by a continuous trefoil arcading on their under side, which recalls the frequent Italian string-courses. It is commonly said to have been designed by Heinrich von Gmünden in 1387; but in a most interesting note at p. 116 of Italian Sculptors,' Mr. Perkins gives the evidence for and against the claim of a German to be the architect of this cathedral. He believes that there is no longer any reasonable doubt that the first architect was Marco Frisone da Campione. Heinrich Adler von Gmünden, who has commonly been stated to be the architect, did not come to Milan until five years after the foundation of the church. Marco da Campione died in 1390; and the church was ready for divine service in 1395. The criticisms I have made in the text appear to me to be equally applicable to an Italian architect trained in Germany, or to a German working in Italy; and if Marco da Campione was the architect, one is compelled, by the logic of the building itself, to say that either he had studied north of the Alps with a view to perfecting his design, or that he depended very largely on the help given him by such men as Henry of Gmunden, whom he had called in to his assistance. in brick. The buttresses are bold in their formation and scale, but poor and weak-looking in their design, and finish XXX GROUND-PLAN-MILAN CATHEDRAL at the top with pinnacles, whose thin outline, seen against the deep blue sky, is painfully bad and unsatisfying. The panelling of the walls is continued up to their whole height without any decided line of parapet or cornice, and finishes in a rough serrated line of small gables, which is particularly restless and wanting in repose. Great flying buttresses span the aisles, and then in the clerestory is repeated exactly what we have already seen below, the same panelling, the same parapet, and the same light pinnacles; the windows, however, are here very small and insignificant, whilst those in the aisles are remarkable for their large size and for the singular traceries with which they are filled. All the lower windows are transomed with a line of tracery, surmounted in each light by a crocketed canopy running up into the light above. In the apse this tracery fills the four outer lights only on each side of the two centre lights, the others being continued without interruption to the sill; and in these windows it is remarkable that each light is subdivided with a small monial below this band of tracery. Altogether, an effect of a prodigious number and repetition of vertical lines is produced, and yet, notwithstanding this, the effect of the entire building is decidedly rather horizontal and depressing than the contrary; this is not more owing to the absence of all visible roofing than to the way in which the parapets, with their irregular gabled outline, attract the eye to a markedly horizontal feature. Upon the whole, therefore, the exterior is in no respect more Italian than it is German in its style; it belongs to no school, and has no fellows: from the beginning it has been an exotic, and to the end of time will probably remain so, without a follower or an imitator in the singular development of which it is the only example; and there does appear, if we consider the matter, to be some intrinsic probability that such a building must have been designed by a foreigner rather than by a native. It has, in fact, all |