former. The filling-in of stilted round-arched windows with ogee pointed tracery and much delicate cusping gives the south transept a singularly Eastern look, and it is impossible not to feel that some such influence has been exercized throughout its design. It would indeed be most interesting to find out what this was, but I am not aware that there is likely to be any clue to it. The date of the work is in all probability somewhere about the latter part of the fourteenth century. The detail and management of the whole of the brickwork are exceedingly delicate and effective, surpassing in their way anything I have yet seen.
The putlog-holes are left unfilled, as they almost always are in Italy. The only stone used is in the doorway and the window-shafts, and these last are almost always coupled in depth. The windows are elaborately moulded, and courses of chevrons, quatrefoils, and other ornaments are introduced occasionally as a relief to what might otherwise be the tedious succession of mouldings which are necessarily rather similar. The cusping of brick arches is always managed in the same way; the bricks all radiate with the arch (not from the centre of the cusp), and look as though they might have been built, allowing plenty of length of brick for the cusps, and then cut to the proper outline, the edges of the cusps being almost invariably left square. Some of the terra-cotta arch ornaments and diapers are exceedingly good of their kind. The most remarkable feature, however, about these transepts is the prodigiously heavy open arcade which runs up the gables under the eaves-cornice—so heavy and so rude-looking, that, taken by itself, it would probably be put down as being of much earlier date than it really is. The façade finishes with three heavy pinnacles arcaded all round, and finished with conical caps.
To the north transept very nearly the same description would apply, save that the doorway is much finer, and entirely of marble.[62] It is part of the original Lombard church, and has no doubt been taken down and rebuilt where we now see it. The tracery of the rose windows is all finished in brick, and the detail generally is better and more delicate in its character than that of the south transept. In both the bricks are all of a pale red colour, and no dark bricks are anywhere used.