Architecture
The exterior of the building is notable for its use of layered stonework of contrasting colours: white Calissane limestone is alternated with layers of green, Golfalina stone in a style reminiscent of Florence. Inside the upper church, no expense was spared to provide a worthy setting for the veneration of the Virgin. Of particular note is the use of a variety of coloured marbles and polychrome pictorial mosaics. Access to the building is gained from a plaza 100 feet (35m) wide leading to a drawbridge. From this one one may either directly enter the crypt or climb a stairway to the entrance porch of the upper church. The building can be seen as a succession of spaces: the porch and bell tower, a nave flanked by side vaults, the transept, dome, choir and apse.
Read more about this topic: Notre-Dame De La Garde
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (18741936)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad winds night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)