Explore "The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci" by Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Right above the scaffolding of the unfinished cathedral, up a narrow stair of rope to one of the slender pinnacles, not far from the principal tower, a certain young mason clomb, bearing a small statue of St. Catharine, to be fixed on the very top of the little spire. Around him rose a perfect forest of pinnacles, sharp-pointed like stalactites; spires, flying arches, stone lacework of unexampled flowers and foliage, prophets, martyrs, and angels, the grinning masks of devils, monstrous birds, sirens, harpies, dragons with scaly wings and gaping mouths, every sort of gargoyle at the terminals of the water-pipes. All was of marble very pure and white, upon which the shadows showed blue as smoke, the whole suggesting a winter wood clothed in sparkling frost. It was quiet, save that the swallows and swifts made joyous cries as they continually circled above and around the building. The hum of the crowd in the square reached the young mason like the low murmur of an ant-hill.
At times he fancied organ-notes and prayerful sighs rose from the interior of the temple as from the depth of its stony heart; and then it seemed as if the whole vast edifice breathed and grew and heaved to the sky like the eternal praise of the birth of Mary; like the glad hymn of all ages and of all peoples to the Immaculate Virgin.