in Classe and S. Apollinare Nuovo), of those and later centuries in Rome, of the eighth century at Parenzo in Istria, of the tenth century at Lucca (San Frediano) of the twelfth century in Palermo and Monreale in Sicily, and others, still exist with their main characteristics unchanged. They retain the simpler plan of rows of columns of uniform size and placed uniformly. Another whole family of churches are of the San Miniato type: the length of the nave divided into three or four greater bays,[39] subdivided into minor bays. Such are the famous churches of San Zeno at Verona, and of San Michele at Pavia and Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan (see [Plate XVII]): but these two last named churches have vaulted roofs of stone. [Plate XVIII] gives the exterior of Gross St. Martin at Cologne and the interior of the cathedral of Tournai in Belgium, interesting in the highest degree as showing plainly how the Northern builders were not content with the simple programme of the Italians—an interior upon which all pains were lavished while the exterior was left to come as it might, a mere brick box with the round-headed windows cut plainly through the wall. These builders of French Flanders in the eleventh century made the exterior of their church effective by the process of building four square towers of very simple design, involving no sort of complexity in their construction, and grouping these towers at the four corners of a larger and lower central mass also of tower-like aspect, while to the westward stretched the long nave pierced with a series of precisely similar round arches, above and below, with long roofs of uniform section, and all this brought sharply up against the great rising mass of the towers from which again three semicircular apses went off to the east, the north and the south. In this way an external architectural effect was produced far more elaborate than anything that the Italians of that time had imagined. As the church of Tournai now stands, a late Gothic chancel has replaced the old eastern apse: it is easy, however, to restore mentally the original exterior of the church, and, if it were more difficult, the contemplation of other Romanesque churches, especially in Germany, would provide us with the material necessary. [Plate XIX] shows from the east end the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, and it is easy to imagine the three apses of somewhat different design grouped about the central and dominating mass of the Flemish church. This church at Cologne has two nearly round towers connecting the apses and seems to have had four such towers originally, or in the first design, with one square tower in the middle of the west front. The church of St. Martin in the same place (p. 77; [Plate XVIII]) differs from these and from most Romanesque churches in having a very noble central tower, one of the finest productions of the Northern Romanesque.
It is evident that the admiration which we give to even the most important of these churches is a different thing from that which the great monuments of antiquity compel. The construction of the mediæval churches is as complex as that of the greatest Roman monuments; this coming from a necessity of providing interiors relatively larger than those of the Roman imperial epoch. The builders even of the twelfth century, and even in the most nearly well governed countries of Europe, had but limited resources. No king, no great noble controlling a province, no bishop, no convent, however rich, could dispose of resources for one instant comparable to those of a Roman pro-consul in even a small town of the empire. The mediæval men had to get as much building as they could for their money. If they built their walls thick, as they seem to the modern traveller, this was because they were unable to get good masons. A stone wall may be carried up forty feet high with a thickness of only three feet, even when pierced with windows, if you have good workmen in your employ and fairly good
