Page:Cracow - Lepszy.djvu/94

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GOTHIC STYLE IN CRACOW ART
74

arrangement of clustered vaulting shafts, and below the windows the triforium with tracery.

A chancel-arch led from the body of the church to the choir,, which was narrowed in at the limiting line by two projecting pillars; thereby the arch, high as it is, is made to appear more lofty still.

The body of the church consists of four bays, which are separated from the side aisles by three pillars on each side. The outline of the pillars is the same as in the dome, a four-edged accretion being attached to the back of each pillar, and terminating above in a broad band which runs along the arch of the arcade. It is only near the turning point of the pillar arch that a richer ornamentation begins, which intersects the flat spaces of the pillars. The arrangement of the windows is the same as in the dome, only they have no niches here.

The vaultings, being cross-rib vaults, built by Master Werner, of Prague, in 1395, extend both over the nave and the side aisles. The garland of chapels, founded in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by rich patrician families such as the Salomons, the Turzos, the Szembeks, the Pernus, the Fogelweders, and in later times the Lesniowolskis, Boners, and others, have for the most part complicated network and stelliform vaultings, and the windows are decorated partly with tracery of late Gothic style, partly with vertical mullions.

The west front of the church would have looked very bare and monotonous indeed if it had not received additional and peculiar grace from the beautiful arrangement of the towers on both sides of the porch. Both towers, built of brick, are of square shape, and divided by cornices into stories, in which there are twofold windows with stone tracery. Only the northern tower, called St. Mary's, was entirely finished; it terminates in a slender octagon, surmounted by a lofty, fantastic spire, which, though somewhat resembling that of the Teyn Church at Prague, yet seems of independent and original construction (illustration 24). Eight graceful turrets surround the pyramidal spire in the middle, which wears a golden crown of the year 1666, dedicated to the