THE REGIONAL SCHOOLS OF GERMANY
suspicious glamour and appears pure and sheer, great for its architec-
tural nobility and none other. There is something strikingly Roman
in this bareness. No wonder that the ground plan was re-invented in
almost identical form by the Italians of the Renaissance.
So* much of France. Germany could not do better than develop
th& theme set at Hildesheim, and the cathedrals and monastery
churches of the central Rhineland, notably Speier, Mainz, Worms
and Laaofe, make a splendid display of towers over their crossings
and staircase towers, of double transepts and double chancels in an
unending variety of proportion and detail (pi. xxi). The second
main school of German Romanesque architecture is that of Cologne.
Of the Saxon school something has already been said—the others
are more provincial. Cologne, until five years ago, possessed an
unrivalled number of churches dating back to the loth, nth,
I2th and early I3th centuries. Their loss is one of the most grievous
casualties of the war. Their hall-mark (since St. Mary in Capitol, conse-
crated in 1065) is a resolutely centralising scheme for the east ends,
a scheme in which both transepts and the chancel end in identical
apses. Oriental influence has been presumed. The exteriors were
as glorious and as varied as any higher up the Rhine.
North Italy has one church of the same type: S. Fedele at Como.
Some have tried to construct a dependence of Cologne on Como,
but it is now certain that if there is any relation it must have
operated the other way. In other respects the connections between
Lombardy and the Rhine are still controversial. Nobody can deny
them; but priority in types and motifs will scarcely ever be estab-
lished beyond doubt. The most likely answer to the question is that
along the routes of the Imperial campaigns into Italy there was a
continuous give and take of ideas and workmen. Probably Saxony
and the Rhine were leading to the end of the i ith century, and North
Italy in the I2th. At that time gangs of Lombard masons must have
travelled far and wide, just as they did again in the Baroque. We
find their traces in Alsace as well as in Sweden, and one man
from Como appears in Bavaria in 1133. The leitmotiv of thisLom-
bardo-Rhenish style is the dwarf-gallery, that is the decoration of
walls, and especially those of apses, high up under the eaves with
little arched colonnades.
In her ground plans North Italy was less enterprising. Some of the
most famous churches have not even a projecting transept, that is,
keep close to Early Christian traditions. This applies, for instance, to
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