The interior of San Zenone, Verona, is lined with brick and stone, arranged just as it is outside, and the effect is most satisfactory; indeed, this and the interior of the baptistery at Cremona, still left in their original state, shew how noble an effect of colour may be given by brick internally, and how mistaken we are when we cover our walls with undecorated plaster. I have seen it maintained by men who possibly had never seen such old works as these in their old state, that such colour as this is savage and fit only for uncultivated men. If, however, there is refinement in whitewash or plaster, I am unable to see it, and I can see no more inconsistency in honestly shewing the real materials of the wall inside than in doing so outside. This at any rate is beyond all doubt what these old Italian architects did.
The east end of the church of the Frari at Venice is another example of coursing with stone.[97] There, however, the courses are far apart, and seem to be intended to define the lines of the springing of arches, of transomes, and the like; and this they do very satisfactorily. But, perhaps, the very best example of mixed stone and brick is that which we have in the window-heads of the church by the side of the Duomo at Verona,[98] in which the arrangement of the two colours is quite perfect. In this case the cusped head of the light is executed in stone, not in brick; and this is, I think, as a general rule, by far the better plan; for if an attempt is made to execute tracery in brick, we have the example of the Germans before our eyes as a warning. They rarely (S. Katharine, Lübeck, is almost a solitary exception) used stone in their window tracery; and as they never developed the kind of brick plate-tracery which is so characteristic of the best Italian work, they built windows which were either bald and ugly in their simplicity, or else, endeavouring to execute elaborate traceries by the use of bricks, moulded into the forms of component parts of tracery, they produced what are even more distasteful than any other kind of window; in part because they consist of an endless repetition of small reticulations, and in part because they lead naturally to the constant reproduction of the same window for economy’s sake.
