A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, Volume 1

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John Murray, 1865
 

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Pagina 174 - And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon's wisdom, and the house that he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cup-bearers, and his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.
Pagina 108 - No language can convey an idea of its beauty, and no artist has yet been able to reproduce its form so as to convey to those who have not seen it an idea of its grandeur. The mass of its central piers, illumined by a flood of light from the clerestory, and the smaller pillars of the wings gradually fading into obscurity, are so arranged and lighted as to convey an idea of infinite space ; at the same time, the beauty and massiveness of the forms, and the brilliancy of their coloured decorations,...
Pagina 82 - Syene — a distance of 500 miles — polished like glass, and so fitted that the joints can hardly be detected. Nothing can be more wonderful than the extraordinary amount of knowledge displayed in the construction of the discharging chambers over the roof of the principal apartment, in the alignment of the sloping galleries, in the provision of ventilating shafts, and in all the wonderful contrivances of the structure. All these, too, are carried out with such precision that, notwithstanding the...
Pagina 126 - Taken altogether, we may perhaps safely assert that the Egyptians were the most essentially a building people of all those we are acquainted with, and the most generally successful in all they attempted in this way. The Greeks, it is true, surpassed them in refinement and beauty of detail, and in the class of sculpture with which they ornamented their buildings, while the Gothic architects far excelled them in constructive cleverness ; but with these exceptions no other styles can be put in competition...
Pagina 287 - It possesses moreover one other element of architectural sublimity in having a single window, and that placed high up in the building. I know of no other temples which possess this feature except the great rock-cut Buddhist basilicas of India. In them the light is introduced even more artistically than here : but, nevertheless, that one great eye opening upon heaven is by far the noblest conception for lighting a building to be found in Europe.
Pagina 470 - ... and consequently a low clerestory. But before it was rebuilt in the end of the 12th, or beginning of the 13th century, the mania for painted glass had seized on the French architects, and all architectural propriety was sacrificed to this mode of decoration. In the present instance we cannot help contrasting the solid grandeur of the basement with the lean and attenuated forms of the superstructure, although this attenuation was in other examples carried to a still greater extent afterwards.
Pagina 62 - The true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is perhaps not too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame.
Pagina 225 - ... their best, days. In Greece the order does not appear to have been introduced, or at least generally used, before the age of Alexander the Great; the oldest authentic example, and also one of the most beautiful, being the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (BC 335), which, notwithstanding the smallness of its dimensions, is one of the most beautiful works of art of the merely ornamental class to be found in any part of the world.
Pagina 46 - ... world's surface ; — everywhere underlying all the others, and affording their disintegrated materials to form the more recent strata that now overlie and frequently obliterate them, — in appearance at least. In the old world the Typical Turanians were the Egyptians ; in the modern the Chinese and Japanese ; — and to these we are perhaps justified in adding the Mexicans.
Pagina 126 - Gothic architects far excelled them in constructive cleverness ; but besides these no other style can be put in competition with them. At the same time, neither Grecian nor Gothic architects understood more perfectly all the gradations of art, and the exact character that should be given to every form and every detail.

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