VJERZEHNHEELIGEN
confectionery, the layman will then look up and see on all sides
glittering decoration, surf and froth and rocket, and like it immensely.
But if he starts walking round, he will soon find himself in utter
confusion. What he has learned and so often seen of nave and aisle
and chancel seems of no value here. This confusion of the lay mind,
a keen thrill of the trained, is due to the ground plan, one of the
most ingenious pieces of architectural design ever conceived (figs.
71-73). The church, if one looks at it from outside, has apparently a
nave and aisles, and a centrally planned east end with polygonal
ends to transepts and choir. In fact the choir is an oval, the transepts
are circular, and the nave consists of two ovals following each other
so that the first, into which one enters immediately one has passed
the Borrominesque undulating front, is of the size of the choir
oval and the second considerably larger. It is here that the altar of
the fourteen saints stands. Here then is the spiritual centre of the
church. So there arises an antagonism of great poignancy between
what the exterior promises as the centre and what the interior reveals
to be the centre—namely between the crossing where nave and
transepts meet, and the centre of the principal oval. As for the aisles
they are nothing but spatial residues. Walking along them, one feels
painfully behind the scenes. What matters alone is the interaction
of the ovals. At vault height they are separated by transverse arches.
These however are not simple bands across from one arcade column
to the one opposite. They are three-dimensional, bowing to each
other, as the nodding arches had done on a small scale in thes I4th
century. This has the most exciting and baffling effect at the crossing.
Here in a church of the Gesu type—and Vierzehnheiligen appears
from outside to belong to this type—one would expect a dome, the
summit of the composition. Instead of that, there lies, as has been
said before, just at the centre of the crossing," the point where choir
oval and central oval meet. The two transverse arches struck from
the piers of the crossing bend, the western one eastward, the eastern
westward until they touch each other in exactly the same pkce as
the ovals, purposely emphasising the fact that, where a normal
Baroque church would have had the crest of the undulating move-
ment of the vaults, Vierzehnheiligen has a trough—a most effective
spatial counterpoint. Yet another spatial complication is incidentally
provided by the insertion of a second minor transept farther west
than the main one. Side altars are placed in it, just as altars stand
against the east end of the church and against the east piers of the
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