outside chapels and sacristies of later time, a simple parallelogram about two hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, which width is divided into a broad nave and two much narrower aisles. And therefore a single glance reveals the whole structural character and the whole architectural design of the church. Three parallel halls divided by two rows of columns; the central hall (the nave) rising much higher than the roofs on either side, and showing, therefore, a broad space of wall towards the interior; and, towards the exterior, a wall less high by the vertical height of the aisle-roof. This great wall surface will be certain to have windows in it, because that is the obvious way of lighting the nave: then the roofs either finished within by a flat ceiling, as in the present instance, or showing the timbers of the roof, with only such decoration as color and a little very simple carving may supply. This type of building endured through the whole epoch of what we call the Middle Ages, and has never been wholly abandoned since. Our larger churches are close studies of it.
Substitute a series of equal arches for the straight horizontal lintels which stretch from column to column and carry the clearstory[36] wall, and you have the very root of the Western Romanesque, and of its higher development in the Gothic style. (See Chapter IV.) Basilicas contemporaneous, or nearly so, with S. Maria Maggiore are often so built, with round arches sprung from column to column; and if we take a church of a much later period of central Italy we find often the basilica type in its simplicity—developed and made more complex only in detail. [Plate XVI] gives the interior of the church of San Miniato al Monte outside the walls of Florence. The noticeable peculiarity in this is the change of the arcade, supporting the clearstory wall, from a single uniform line of equal columns supporting equal arches, to a more organized structure of two great piers with two responds[37] and in each of the three spaces so left, two columns with three round arches. This system is found in churches as early as Santa Agnese outside the walls of Rome, and was never abandoned. To satisfy in some way the instinctive desire of the builders for a more complex plan than the perfectly unbroken nave and aisles, there was introduced the wall supported on a great round arch, which, as seen in [Plate XVI], spans the nave at two points in its length and may be thought to stiffen the otherwise long and unbuttressed clearstory wall. The painted decoration of the timbers of this roof of San Miniato is very attractive, the color effect is more elaborate than the photograph can show: it is really a very beautiful thing: and it is rare in Europe to find an open timber roof treated so frankly as a thing susceptible of adornment. In other ways it is curious to see the way in which the poverty and lack of skill of the tenth century men alter the style of design from the huge Roman way of doing things. Lightness has to be substituted for ponderous masses; the walls are as thin as would stand alone and fairly steady: only the columns, taken from antique structures, can be thought capable of bearing more weight than is laid upon them; the decoration is by means of a marble inlay of large and bold design on the walls and of minute pattern in the pulpit, the altar rail and the like, and, in the half dome over the apse,[38] a mosaic picture of sacred significance—Christ with the emblems of the four evangelists and with the Virgin and San Miniato the patron of the church. In these mosaics and inlays there is to be noted a great interest in abstract patterns; a characteristic of Asiatic art, but unfrequent in Greek or in Roman art as we know it. Basilicas of the fifth century and of the sixth century at Ravenna (S. Apollinare