What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto.  Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the facade is more architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used.  What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture?  It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived.  On the other hand, the interior is noble.  The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony.  But the real attractions of the church are isolated details.  Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won.  The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work and mosaics of the facade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters—­these are the objects for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto.  On approaching a building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic architecture:  only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that epithet.  We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design.  Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of Milan.  Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different styles—­the pyramidal facade of Lombard architecture and the long thin lights of German Gothic, for example—­a clumsier misuse of ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave and aisles, could scarcely be imagined.  Yet no other church, perhaps, in Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy.  The splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in Christendom.