§ XXII. 2. Forms of Earth (Crystals). It may be asked why I do not say

rocks or mountains? Simply, because the nobility of these depends,

first, on their scale, and, secondly, on accident. Their scale cannot be

represented, nor their accident systematised. No sculptor can in the

least imitate the peculiar character of accidental fracture: he can obey

or exhibit the laws of nature, but he cannot copy the felicity of her

fancies, nor follow the steps of her fury. The very glory of a mountain

is in the revolutions which raised it into power, and the forces which

are striking it into ruin. But we want no cold and careful imitation of

catastrophe; no calculated mockery of convulsion; no delicate

recommendation of ruin. We are to follow the labor of Nature, but not

her disturbance; to imitate what she has deliberately ordained,[64] not

what she has violently suffered, or strangely permitted. The only uses,

therefore, of rock form which are wise in the architect, are its actual

introduction (by leaving untouched such blocks as are meant for rough

service), and that noble use of the general examples of mountain

structure of which I have often heretofore spoken. Imitations of rock

form have, for the most part, been confined to periods of degraded

feeling and to architectural toys or pieces of dramatic effect,--the

Calvaries and holy sepulchres of Romanism, or the grottoes and fountains

of English gardens. They were, however, not unfrequent in mediæval

bas-reliefs; very curiously and elaborately treated by Ghiberti on the

doors of Florence, and in religious sculpture necessarily introduced

wherever the life of the anchorite was to be expressed. They were rarely

introduced as of ornamental character, but for particular service and

expression; we shall see an interesting example in the Ducal Palace at

Venice.

§ XXIII. But against crystalline form, which is the completely

systematised natural structure of the earth, none of these objections

hold good, and, accordingly, it is an endless element of decoration,

where higher conditions of structure cannot be represented. The

four-sided pyramid, perhaps the most frequent of all natural crystals,

is called in architecture a dogtooth; its use is quite limitless, and

always beautiful: the cube and rhomb are almost equally frequent in

chequers and dentils: and all mouldings of the middle Gothic are little

more than representations of the canaliculated crystals of the beryl,

and such other minerals:

§ XXIV. Not knowingly. I do not suppose a single hint was ever actually

taken from mineral form; not even by the Arabs in their stalactite

pendants and vaults: all that I mean to allege is, that beautiful

ornament, wherever found, or however invented, is always either an

intentional or unintentional copy of some constant natural form; and

that in this particular instance, the pleasure we have in these

geometrical figures of our own invention, is dependent for all its

acuteness on the natural tendency impressed on us by our Creator to love

the forms into which the earth He gave us to tread, and out of which He

formed our bodies, knit itself as it was separated from the deep.

§ XXV. 3. Forms of Water (Waves).

The reasons which prevent rocks from being used for ornament repress

still more forcibly the portraiture of the sea. Yet the constant

necessity of introducing some representation of water in order to

explain the scene of events, or as a sacred symbol, has forced the

sculptors of all ages to the invention of some type or letter for it, if

not an actual imitation. We find every degree of conventionalism or of

naturalism in these types, the earlier being, for the most part,

thoughtful symbols; the latter, awkward attempts at portraiture.[65] The

most conventional of all types is the Egyptian zigzag, preserved in the

astronomical sign of Aquarius; but every nation, with any capacities of

thought, has given, in some of its work, the same great definition of

open water, as "an undulatory thing with fish in it." I say _open_

water, because inland nations have a totally different conception of the

element. Imagine for an instant the different feelings of an husbandman

whose hut is built by the Rhine or the Po, and who sees, day by day,

the same giddy succession of silent power, the same opaque, thick,

whirling, irresistible labyrinth of rushing lines and twisted eddies,

coiling themselves into serpentine race by the reedy banks, in omne

volubilis ævum,--and the image of the sea in the mind of the fisher upon

the rocks of Ithaca, or by the Straits of Sicily, who sees how, day by

day, the morning winds come coursing to the shore, every breath of them

with a green wave rearing before it; clear, crisp, ringing, merry-minded

waves, that fall over and over each other, laughing like children as

they near the beach, and at last clash themselves all into dust of

crystal over the dazzling sweeps of sand. Fancy the difference of the

image of water in those two minds, and then compare the sculpture of the

coiling eddies of the Tigris and its reedy branches in those slabs of

Nineveh, with the crested curls of the Greek sea on the coins of

Camerina or Tarentum. But both agree in the undulatory lines, either of

the currents or the surface, and in the introduction of fish as

explanatory of the meaning of those lines (so also the Egyptians in

their frescoes, with most elaborate realisation of the fish). There is a

very curious instance on a Greek mirror in the British Museum,

representing Orion on the Sea; and multitudes of examples with dolphins

on the Greek vases: the type is preserved without alteration in mediæval

painting and sculpture. The sea in that Greek mirror (at least 400

B.C.), in the mosaics of Torcello and St. Mark's, on the font of St.

Frediano at Lucca, on the gate of the fortress of St. Michael's Mount in

Normandy, on the Bayeux tapestry, and on the capitals of the Ducal

Palace at Venice (under Arion on his Dolphin), is represented in a

manner absolutely identical. Giotto, in the frescoes of Avignon, has,

with his usual strong feeling for naturalism, given the best example I

remember, in painting, of the unity of the conventional system with

direct imitation, and that both in sea and river; giving in pure blue

color the coiling whirlpool of the stream, and the curled crest of the

breaker. But in all early sculptural examples, both imitation and

decorative effect are subordinate to easily understood symbolical

language; the undulatory lines are often valuable as an enrichment of

surface, but are rarely of any studied gracefulness. One of the best

examples I know of their expressive arrangement is around some figures

in a spandril at Bourges, representing figures sinking in deep sea (the

deluge): the waved lines yield beneath the bodies and wildly lave the

edge of the moulding, two birds, as if to mark the reverse of all order

of nature, lowest of all sunk in the depth of them. In later times of

debasement, water began to be represented with its waves, foam, etc., as

on the Vendramin tomb at Venice, above cited; but even there, without

any definite ornamental purpose, the sculptor meant partly to explain a

story, partly to display dexterity of chiselling, but not to produce

beautiful forms pleasant to the eye. The imitation is vapid and joyless,

and it has often been matter of surprise to me that sculptors, so fond

of exhibiting their skill, should have suffered this imitation to fall

so short, and remain so cold,--should not have taken more pains to curl

the waves clearly, to edge them sharply, and to express, by drill-holes

or other artifices, the character of foam. I think in one of the Antwerp

churches something of this kind is done in wood, but in general it is

rare.

§ XXVI. 4. Forms of Fire (Flames and Rays). If neither the sea nor the

rock can be imagined, still less the devouring fire. It has been

symbolised by radiation both in painting and sculpture, for the most

part in the latter very unsuccessfully. It was suggested to me, not long

ago,[66] that zigzag decorations of Norman architects were typical of

light springing from the half-set orb of the sun; the resemblance to the

ordinary sun type is indeed remarkable, but I believe accidental. I

shall give you, in my large plates, two curious instances of radiation

in brick ornament above arches, but I think these also without any very

luminous intention. The imitations of fire in the torches of Cupids and

genii, and burning in tops of urns, which attest and represent the

mephitic inspirations of the seventeenth century in most London

churches, and in monuments all over civilised Europe, together with the

gilded rays of Romanist altars, may be left to such mercy as the reader

is inclined to show them.

§ XXVII. 5. Forms of Air (Clouds). Hardly more manageable than flames,

and of no ornamental use, their majesty being in scale and color, and

inimitable in marble. They are lightly traced in much of the cinque

cento sculpture; very boldly and grandly in the strange Last Judgment in

the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen, described in the "Seven Lamps." But

the most elaborate imitations are altogether of recent date, arranged in

concretions like flattened sacks, forty or fifty feet above the altars

of continental churches, mixed with the gilded truncheons intended for

sunbeams above alluded to.

§ XXVIII. 6. Shells. I place these lowest in the scale (after inorganic

forms) as being moulds or coats of organism; not themselves organic. The

sense of this, and of their being mere emptiness and deserted houses,

must always prevent them, however beautiful in their lines, from being

largely used in ornamentation. It is better to take the line and leave

the shell. One form, indeed, that of the cockle, has been in all ages

used as the decoration of half domes, which were named conchas from

their shell form: and I believe the wrinkled lip of the cockle, so used,

to have been the origin, in some parts of Europe at least, of the

exuberant foliation of the round arch. The scallop also is a pretty

radiant form, and mingles well with other symbols when it is needed. The

crab is always as delightful as a grotesque, for here we suppose the

beast inside the shell; and he sustains his part in a lively manner

among the other signs of the zodiac, with the scorpion; or scattered

upon sculptured shores, as beside the Bronze Boar of Florence. We shall

find him in a basket at Venice, at the base of one of the Piazzetta

shafts.

§ XXIX. 7. Fish. These, as beautiful in their forms as they are familiar

to our sight, while their interest is increased by their symbolic

meaning, are of great value as material of ornament. Love of the

picturesque has generally induced a choice of some supple form with

scaly body and lashing tail, but the simplest fish form is largely

employed in mediæval work. We shall find the plain oval body and sharp

head of the Thunny constantly at Venice; and the fish used in the

expression of sea-water, or water generally, are always plain bodied

creatures in the best mediæval sculpture. The Greek type of the dolphin,

however, sometimes but slightly exaggerated from the real outline of the

Delphinus Delphis,[67] is one of the most picturesque of animal forms;

and the action of its slow revolving plunge is admirably caught upon the

surface sea represented in Greek vases.

§ XXX. 8. Reptiles and Insects. The forms of the serpent and lizard

exhibit almost every element of beauty and horror in strange

combination; the horror, which in an imitation is felt only as a

pleasurable excitement, has rendered them favorite subjects in all

periods of art; and the unity of both lizard and serpent in the ideal

dragon, the most picturesque and powerful of all animal forms, and of

peculiar symbolical interest to the Christian mind, is perhaps the

principal of all the materials of mediæval picturesque sculpture. By the

best sculptors it is always used with this symbolic meaning, by the

cinque cento sculptors as an ornament merely. The best and most natural

representations of mere viper or snake are to be found interlaced among

their confused groups of meaningless objects. The real power and horror

of the snake-head has, however, been rarely reached. I shall give one

example from Verona of the twelfth century.

Other less powerful reptile forms are not unfrequent. Small frogs,

lizards, and snails almost always enliven the foregrounds and leafage of

good sculpture. The tortoise is less usually employed in groups. Beetles

are chiefly mystic and colossal. Various insects, like everything else

in the world, occur in cinque cento work; grasshoppers most frequently.

We shall see on the Ducal Palace at Venice an interesting use of the

bee.

§ XXXI. 9. Branches and stems of Trees. I arrange these under a separate

head; because, while the forms of leafage belong to all architecture,

and ought to be employed in it always, those of the branch and stem

belong to a peculiar imitative and luxuriant architecture, and are only

applicable at times. Pagan sculptors seem to have perceived little

beauty in the stems of trees; they were little else than timber to them;

and they preferred the rigid and monstrous triglyph, or the fluted

column, to a broken bough or gnarled trunk. But with Christian knowledge

came a peculiar regard for the forms of vegetation, from the root

upwards. The actual representation of the entire trees required in many

scripture subjects,--as in the most frequent of Old Testament subjects,

the Fall; and again in the Drunkenness of Noah, the Garden Agony, and

many others, familiarised the sculptors of bas-relief to the beauty of

forms before unknown; while the symbolical name given to Christ by the

Prophets, "the Branch," and the frequent expressions referring to this

image throughout every scriptural description of conversion, gave an

especial interest to the Christian mind to this portion of vegetative

structure. For some time, nevertheless, the sculpture of trees was

confined to bas-relief; but it at last affected even the treatment of

the main shafts in Lombard Gothic buildings,--as in the western façade

of Genoa, where two of the shafts are represented as gnarled trunks: and

as bas-relief itself became more boldly introduced, so did tree

sculpture, until we find the writhed and knotted stems of the vine and

fig used for angle shafts on the Doge's Palace, and entire oaks and

appletrees forming, roots and all, the principal decorative sculptures

of the Scala tombs at Verona. It was then discovered to be more easy to

carve branches than leaves and, much helped by the frequent employment

in later Gothic of the "Tree of Jesse," for traceries and other

purposes, the system reached full developement in a perfect thicket of

twigs, which form the richest portion of the decoration of the porches

of Beauvais. It had now been carried to its richest extreme: men

wearied of it and abandoned it, and like all other natural and beautiful

things, it was ostracised by the mob of Renaissance architects. But it

is interesting to observe how the human mind, in its acceptance of this

feature of ornament, proceeded from the ground, and followed, as it

were, the natural growth of the tree. It began with the rude and solid

trunk, as at Genoa; then the branches shot out, and became loaded

leaves; autumn came, the leaves were shed, and the eye was directed to

the extremities of the delicate branches;--the Renaissance frosts came,

and all perished.

§ XXXII. 10. Foliage, Flowers, and Fruit. It is necessary to consider

these as separated from the stems; not only, as above noted, because

their separate use marks another school of architecture, but because

they are the only organic structures which are capable of being so

treated, and intended to be so, without strong effort of imagination. To

pull animals to pieces, and use their paws for feet of furniture, or

their heads for terminations of rods and shafts, is _usually_ the

characteristic of feelingless schools; the greatest men like their

animals whole. The head may, indeed, be so managed as to look emergent

from the stone, rather than fastened to it; and wherever there is

throughout the architecture any expression of sternness or severity

(severity in its literal sense, as in Romans, XI. 22), such divisions of

the living form may be permitted; still, you cannot cut an animal to

pieces as you can gather a flower or a leaf. These were intended for our

gathering, and for our constant delight: wherever men exist in a

perfectly civilised and healthy state, they have vegetation around them;

wherever their state approaches that of innocence or perfectness, it

approaches that of Paradise,--it is a dressing of garden. And,

therefore, where nothing else can be used for ornament, vegetation may;

vegetation in any form, however fragmentary, however abstracted. A

single leaf laid upon the angle of a stone, or the mere form or

frame-work of the leaf drawn upon it, or the mere shadow and ghost of

the leaf,--the hollow "foil" cut out of it,--possesses a charm which

nothing else can replace; a charm not exciting, nor demanding laborious

thought or sympathy, but perfectly simple, peaceful, and satisfying.

§ XXXIII. The full recognition of leaf forms, as the general source of

subordinate decoration, is one of the chief characteristics of Christian

architecture; but the two _roots_ of leaf ornament are the Greek

acanthus, and the Egyptian lotus.[68] The dry land and the river thus

each contributed their part; and all the florid capitals of the richest

Northern Gothic on the one hand, and the arrowy lines of the severe

Lombardic capitals on the other, are founded on these two gifts of the

dust of Greece and the waves of the Nile. The leaf which is, I believe,

called the Persepolitan water-leaf, is to be associated with the lotus

flower and stem, as the origin of our noblest types of simple capital;

and it is to be noted that the florid leaves of the dry land are used

most by the Northern architects, while the water leaves are gathered for

their ornaments by the parched builders of the Desert.

§ XXXIV. Fruit is, for the most part, more valuable in color than form;

nothing is more beautiful as a subject of sculpture on a tree; but,

gathered and put in baskets, it is quite possible to have too much of

it. We shall find it so used very dextrously on the Ducal Palace of

Venice, there with a meaning which rendered it right necessary; but the

Renaissance architects address themselves to spectators who care for

nothing but feasting, and suppose that clusters of pears and pineapples

are visions of which their imagination can never weary, and above which

it will never care to rise. I am no advocate for image worship, as I

believe the reader will elsewhere sufficiently find; but I am very sure

that the Protestantism of London would have found itself quite as secure

in a cathedral decorated with statues of good men, as in one hung round

with bunches of ribston pippins.

§ XXXV. 11. Birds. The perfect and simple grace of bird form, in

general, has rendered it a favorite subject with early sculptors, and

with those schools which loved form more than action; but the difficulty

of expressing action, where the muscular markings are concealed, has

limited the use of it in later art. Half the ornament, at least, in

Byzantine architecture, and a third of that of Lombardic, is composed of

birds, either pecking at fruit or flowers, or standing on either side of

a flower or vase, or alone, as generally the symbolical peacock. But how

much of our general sense of grace or power of motion, of serenity,

peacefulness, and spirituality, we owe to these creatures, it is

impossible to conceive; their wings supplying us with almost the only

means of representation of spiritual motion which we possess, and with

an ornamental form of which the eye is never weary, however

meaninglessly or endlessly repeated; whether in utter isolation, or

associated with the bodies of the lizard, the horse, the lion, or the

man. The heads of the birds of prey are always beautiful, and used as

the richest ornaments in all ages.

§ XXXVI. 12. Quadrupeds and Men. Of quadrupeds the horse has received an

elevation into the primal rank of sculptural subject, owing to his

association with men. The full value of other quadruped forms has hardly

been perceived, or worked for, in late sculpture; and the want of

science is more felt in these subjects than in any other branches of

early work. The greatest richness of quadruped ornament is found in the

hunting sculpture of the Lombards; but rudely treated (the most noble

examples of treatment being the lions of Egypt, the Ninevite bulls, and

the mediæval griffins). Quadrupeds of course form the noblest subjects

of ornament next to the human form; this latter, the chief subject of

sculpture, being sometimes the end of architecture rather than its

decoration.

We have thus completed the list of the materials of architectural

decoration, and the reader may be assured that no effort has ever been

successful to draw elements of beauty from any other sources than

these. Such an effort was once resolutely made. It was contrary to the

religion of the Arab to introduce any animal form into his ornament; but

although all the radiance of color, all the refinements of proportion,

and all the intricacies of geometrical design were open to him, he could

not produce any noble work without an _abstraction_ of the forms of

leafage, to be used in his capitals, and made the ground plan of his

chased ornament. But I have above noted that coloring is an entirely

distinct and independent art; and in the "Seven Lamps" we saw that this

art had most power when practised in arrangements of simple geometrical

form: the Arab, therefore, lay under no disadvantage in coloring, and he

had all the noble elements of constructive and proportional beauty at

his command: he might not imitate the sea-shell, but he could build the

dome. The imitation of radiance by the variegated voussoir, the

expression of the sweep of the desert by the barred red lines upon the

wall, the starred inshedding of light through his vaulted roof, and all

the endless fantasy of abstract line,[69] were still in the power of his

ardent and fantastic spirit. Much he achieved; and yet in the effort of

his overtaxed invention, restrained from its proper food, he made his

architecture a glittering vacillation of undisciplined enchantment, and

left the lustre of its edifices to wither like a startling dream, whose

beauty we may indeed feel, and whose instruction we may receive, but

must smile at its inconsistency, and mourn over its evanescence.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] The admiration of Canova I hold to be one of the most deadly

symptoms in the civilisation of the upper classes in the present

century.

[64] Thus above, I adduced for the architect's imitation the

appointed stories and beds of the Matterhorn, not its irregular

forms of crag or fissure.

[65] Appendix 21, "Ancient Representations of Water."

[66] By the friend to whom I owe Appendix 21.

[67] One is glad to hear from Cuvier, that though dolphins in general

are "les plus carnassiers, et proportion gardée avec leur taille,

les plus cruels de l'ordre;" yet that in the Delphinus Delphis,

"tout l'organisation de son cerveau annonce _qu'il ne doit pas être

dépourvu de la docilité_ qu'ils (les anciens) lui attribuaient."

[68] Vide Wilkinson, vol. v., woodcut No. 478, fig. 8. The tamarisk

appears afterwards to have given the idea of a subdivision of leaf

more pure and quaint than that of the acanthus. Of late our

botanists have discovered, in the "Victoria regia" (supposing its

blossom reversed), another strangely beautiful type of what we may

perhaps hereafter find it convenient to call _Lily_ capitals.

[69] Appendix 22, "Arabian Ornamentation."

CHAPTER XXI.

TREATMENT OF ORNAMENT.

§ I. We now know where we are to look for subjects of decoration. The

next question is, as the reader must remember, how to treat or express

these subjects.

There are evidently two branches of treatment: the first being the

expression, or rendering to the eye and mind, of the thing itself; and

the second, the arrangement of the thing so expressed: both of these

being quite distinct from the placing of the ornament in proper parts of

the building. For instance, suppose we take a vine-leaf for our subject.

The first question is, how to cut the vine-leaf? Shall we cut its ribs

and notches on the edge, or only its general outline? and so on. Then,

how to arrange the vine-leaves when we have them; whether symmetrically,

or at random; or unsymmetrically, yet within certain limits? All these I

call questions of treatment. Then, whether the vine-leaves so arranged

are to be set on the capital of a pillar or on its shaft, I call a

question of place.

§ II. So, then, the questions of mere treatment are twofold, how to

express, and how to arrange. And expression is to the mind or the sight.

Therefore, the inquiry becomes really threefold:--

1. How ornament is to be expressed with reference to the mind.

2. How ornament is to be arranged with reference to the sight.

3. How ornament is to be arranged with reference to both.

§ III. (1.) How is ornament to be treated with reference to the mind?

If, to produce a good or beautiful ornament, it were only necessary to

produce a perfect piece of sculpture, and if a well cut group of flowers

or animals were indeed an ornament wherever it might be placed, the work

of the architect would be comparatively easy. Sculpture and architecture

would become separate arts; and the architect would order so many pieces

of such subject and size as he needed, without troubling himself with

any questions but those of disposition and proportion. But this is not

so. _No perfect piece either of painting or sculpture is an

architectural ornament at all_, except in that vague sense in which any

beautiful thing is said to ornament the place it is in. Thus we say that

pictures ornament a room; but we should not thank an architect who told

us that his design, to be complete, required a Titian to be put in one

corner of it, and a Velasquez in the other; and it is just as

unreasonable to call perfect sculpture, niched in, or encrusted on a

building, a portion of the ornament of that building, as it would be to

hang pictures by the way of ornament on the outside of it. It is very

possible that the sculptured work may be harmoniously associated with

the building, or the building executed with reference to it; but in this

latter case the architecture is subordinate to the sculpture, as in the

Medicean chapel, and I believe also in the Parthenon. And so far from

the perfection of the work conducing to its ornamental purpose, we may

say, with entire security, that its perfection, in some degree, unfits

it for its purpose, and that no absolutely complete sculpture can be

decoratively right. We have a familiar instance in the flower-work of

St. Paul's, which is probably, in the abstract, as perfect flower

sculpture as could be produced at the time; and which is just as

rational an ornament of the building as so many valuable Van Huysums,

framed and glazed and hung up over each window.

§ IV. The especial condition of true ornament is, that it be beautiful

in its place, and nowhere else, and that it aid the effect of every

portion of the building over which it has influence; that it does not,

by its richness, make other parts bald, or, by its delicacy, make other

parts coarse. Every one of its qualities has reference to its place and

use: _and it is fitted for its service by what would be faults and

deficiencies if it had no especial duty_. Ornament, the servant, is

often formal, where sculpture, the master, would have been free; the

servant is often silent where the master would have been eloquent; or

hurried, where the master would have been serene.

§ V. How far this subordination is in different situations to be

expressed, or how far it may be surrendered, and ornament, the servant,

be permitted to have independent will; and by what means the

subordination is best to be expressed when it is required, are by far

the most difficult questions I have ever tried to work out respecting

any branch of art; for, in many of the examples to which I look as

authoritative in their majesty of effect, it is almost impossible to say

whether the abstraction or imperfection of the sculpture was owing to

the choice, or the incapacity of the workman; and, if to the latter, how

far the result of fortunate incapacity can be imitated by prudent

self-restraint. The reader, I think, will understand this at once by

considering the effect of the illuminations of an old missal. In their

bold rejection of all principles of perspective, light and shade, and

drawing, they are infinitely more ornamental to the page, owing to the

vivid opposition of their bright colors and quaint lines, than if they

had been drawn by Da Vinci himself: and so the Arena chapel is far more

brightly _decorated_ by the archaic frescoes of Giotti, than the Stanze

of the Vatican are by those of Raffaelle. But how far it is possible to

recur to such archaicism, or to make up for it by any voluntary

abandonment of power, I cannot as yet venture in any wise to determine.

§ VI. So, on the other hand, in many instances of finished work in which

I find most to regret or to reprobate, I can hardly distinguish what is

erroneous in principle from what is vulgar in execution. For instance,

in most Romanesque churches of Italy, the porches are guarded by

gigantic animals, lions or griffins, of admirable severity of design;

yet, in many cases, of so rude workmanship, that it can hardly be

determined how much of this severity was intentional,--how much

involuntary: in the cathedral of Genoa two modern lions have, in

imitation of this ancient custom, been placed on the steps of its west

front; and the Italian sculptor, thinking himself a marvellous great man

because he knew what lions were really like, has copied them, in the

menagerie, with great success, and produced two hairy and well-whiskered

beasts, as like to real lions as he could possibly cut them. One wishes

them back in the menagerie for his pains; but it is impossible to say

how far the offence of their presence is owing to the mere stupidity and

vulgarity of the sculpture, and how far we might have been delighted

with a realisation, carried to nearly the same length by Ghiberti or

Michael Angelo. (I say _nearly_, because neither Ghiberti nor Michael

Angelo would ever have attempted, or permitted, entire realisation, even

in independent sculpture.)

§ VII. In spite of these embarrassments, however, some few certainties

may be marked in the treatment of past architecture, and secure

conclusions deduced for future practice. There is first, for instance,

the assuredly intended and resolute abstraction of the Ninevite and

Egyptian sculptors. The men who cut those granite lions in the Egyptian

room of the British Museum, and who carved the calm faces of those

Ninevite kings, knew much more, both of lions and kings, than they chose

to express. Then there is the Greek system, in which the human sculpture

is perfect, the architecture and animal sculpture is subordinate to it,

and the architectural ornament severely subordinated to this again, so

as to be composed of little more than abstract lines: and, finally,

there is the peculiarly mediæval system, in which the inferior details

are carried to as great or greater imitative perfection as the higher

sculpture; and the subordination is chiefly effected by symmetries of

arrangement, and quaintnesses of treatment, respecting which it is

difficult to say how far they resulted from intention, and how far from

incapacity.

§ VIII. Now of these systems, the Ninevite and Egyptian are altogether

opposed to modern habits of thought and action; they are sculptures

evidently executed under absolute authorities, physical and mental, such

as cannot at present exist. The Greek system presupposes the possession

of a Phidias; it is ridiculous to talk of building in the Greek manner;

you may build a Greek shell or box, such as the Greek intended to

contain sculpture, but you have not the sculpture to put in it. Find

your Phidias first, and your new Phidias will very soon settle all your

architectural difficulties in very unexpected ways indeed; but until you

find him, do not think yourselves architects while you go on copying

those poor subordinations, and secondary and tertiary orders of

ornament, which the Greek put on the shell of his sculpture. Some of

them, beads, and dentils, and such like, are as good as they can be for

their work, and you may use them for subordinate work still; but they

are nothing to be proud of, especially when you did not invent them: and

others of them are mistakes and impertinences in the Greek himself, such

as his so-called honeysuckle ornaments and others, in which there is a

starched and dull suggestion of vegetable form, and yet no real

resemblance nor life, for the conditions of them result from his own

conceit of himself, and ignorance of the physical sciences, and want of

relish for common nature, and vain fancy that he could improve

everything he touched, and that he honored it by taking it into his

service: by freedom from which conceits the true Christian architecture

is distinguished--not by points to its arches.

§ IX. There remains, therefore, only the mediæval system, in which I

think, generally, more completion is permitted (though this often

because more was possible) in the inferior than in the higher portions

of ornamental subject. Leaves, and birds, and lizards are realised, or

nearly so; men and quadrupeds formalised. For observe, the smaller and

inferior subject remains subordinate, however richly finished; but the

human sculpture can only be subordinate by being imperfect. The

realisation is, however, in all cases, dangerous except under most

skilful management, and the abstraction, if true and noble, is almost

always more delightful.[70]

[Illustration: Plate VIII.

DECORATION BY DISKS.

PALAZZO DEI BADOARI PARTECIPAZZI.]

§ X. What, then, is noble abstraction? It is taking first the essential

elements of the thing to be represented, then the rest in the order of

importance (so that wherever we pause we shall always have obtained more

than we leave behind), and using any expedient to impress what we want

upon the mind, without caring about the mere literal accuracy of such

expedient. Suppose, for instance, we have to represent a peacock: now a

peacock has a graceful neck, so has a swan; it has a high crest, so has

a cockatoo; it has a long tail, so has a bird of Paradise. But the whole

spirit and power of peacock is in those eyes of the tail. It is true,

the argus pheasant, and one or two more birds, have something like them,

but nothing for a moment comparable to them in brilliancy: express the

gleaming of the blue eyes through the plumage, and you have nearly all

you want of peacock, but without this, nothing; and yet those eyes are

not in relief; a rigidly _true_ sculpture of a peacock's form could have

no eyes,--nothing but feathers. Here, then, enters the stratagem of

sculpture; you _must_ cut the eyes in relief, somehow or another; see

how it is done in the peacock on the opposite page; it is so done by

nearly all the Byzantine sculptors: this particular peacock is meant to

be seen at some distance (how far off I know not, for it is an

interpolation in the building where it occurs, of which more hereafter),

but at all events at a distance of thirty or forty feet; I have put it

close to you that you may see plainly the rude rings and rods which

stand for the eyes and quills, but at the just distance their effect is

perfect.

§ XI. And the simplicity of the means here employed may help us, both to

some clear understanding of the spirit of Ninevite and Egyptian work,

and to some perception of the kind of enfantillage or archaicism to

which it may be possible, even in days of advanced science, legitimately

to return. The architect has no right, as we said before, to require of

us a picture of Titian's in order to complete his design; neither has he

the right to calculate on the co-operation of perfect sculptors, in

subordinate capacities. Far from this; his business is to dispense with

such aid altogether, and to devise such a system of ornament as shall be

capable of execution by uninventive and even unintelligent workmen; for

supposing that he required noble sculpture for his ornament, how far

would this at once limit the number and the scale of possible buildings?

Architecture is the work of nations; but we cannot have nations of great

sculptors. Every house in every street of every city ought to be good

architecture, but we cannot have Flaxman or Thorwaldsen at work upon it:

nor, even if we chose only to devote ourselves to our public buildings,

could the mass and majesty of them be great, if we required all to be

executed by great men; greatness is not to be had in the required

quantity. Giotto may design a campanile, but he cannot carve it; he can

only carve one or two of the bas-reliefs at the base of it. And with

every increase of your fastidiousness in the execution of your ornament,

you diminish the possible number and grandeur of your buildings. Do not

think you can educate your workmen, or that the demand for perfection

will increase the supply: educated imbecility and finessed foolishness

are the worst of all imbecilities and foolishnesses; and there is no

free-trade measure, which will ever lower the price of brains,--there is

no California of common sense. Exactly in the degree in which you

require your decoration to be wrought by thoughtful men, you diminish

the extent and number of architectural works. Your business as an

architect, is to calculate only on the co-operation of inferior men, to

think for them, and to indicate for them such expressions of your

thoughts as the weakest capacity can comprehend and the feeblest hand

can execute. This is the definition of the purest architectural

abstractions. They are the deep and laborious thoughts of the greatest

men, put into such easy letters that they can be written by the

simplest. _They are expressions of the mind of manhood by the hands of

childhood._

§ XII. And now suppose one of those old Ninevite or Egyptian builders,

with a couple of thousand men--mud-bred, onion-eating creatures--under

him, to be set to work, like so many ants, on his temple sculptures.

What is he to do with them? He can put them through a granitic exercise

of current hand; he can teach them all how to curl hair thoroughly into

croche-coeurs, as you teach a bench of school-boys how to shape

pothooks; he can teach them all how to draw long eyes and straight

noses, and how to copy accurately certain well-defined lines. Then he

fits his own great design to their capacities; he takes out of king, or

lion, or god, as much as was expressible by croche-coeurs and granitic

pothooks; he throws this into noble forms of his own imagining, and

having mapped out their lines so that there can be no possibility of

error, sets his two thousand men to work upon them, with a will, and so

many onions a day.

§ XIII. I said those times cannot now return. We have, with

Christianity, recognised the individual value of every soul; and there

is no intelligence so feeble but that its single ray may in some sort

contribute to the general light. This is the glory of Gothic

architecture, that every jot and tittle, every point and niche of it,

affords room, fuel, and focus for individual fire. But you cease to

acknowledge this, and you refuse to accept the help of the lesser mind,

if you require the work to be all executed in a great manner. Your

business is to think out all of it nobly, to dictate the expression of

it as far as your dictation can assist the less elevated intelligence:

then to leave this, aided and taught as far as may be, to its own simple

act and effort; and to rejoice in its simplicity if not in its power,

and in its vitality if not in its science.

§ XIV. We have, then, three orders of ornament, classed according to the

degrees of correspondence of the executive and conceptive minds. We have

the servile ornament, in which the executive is absolutely subjected to

the inventive,--the ornament of the great Eastern nations, more

especially Hamite, and all pre-Christian, yet thoroughly noble in its

submissiveness. Then we have the mediæval system, in which the mind of

the inferior workman is recognised, and has full room for action, but is

guided and ennobled by the ruling mind. This is the truly Christian and

only perfect system. Finally, we have ornaments expressing the endeavor

to equalise the executive and inventive,--endeavor which is Renaissance

and revolutionary, and destructive of all noble architecture.

§ XV. Thus far, then, of the incompleteness or simplicity of execution

necessary in architectural ornament, as referred to the mind. Next we

have to consider that which is required when it is referred to the

sight, and the various modifications of treatment which are rendered

necessary by the variation of its distance from the eye. I say

necessary: not merely expedient or economical. It is foolish to carve

what is to be seen forty feet off with the delicacy which the eye

demands within two yards; not merely because such delicacy is lost in

the distance, but because it is a great deal worse than lost:--the

delicate work has actually worse effect in the distance than rough work.

This is a fact well known to painters, and, for the most part,

acknowledged by the critics of painters, namely, that there is a certain

distance for which a picture is painted; and that the finish, which is

delightful if that distance be small, is actually injurious if the

distance be great: and, moreover, that there is a particular method of

handling which none but consummate artists reach, which has its effects

at the intended distance, and is altogether hieroglyphical and

unintelligible at any other. This, I say, is acknowledged in painting,

but it is not practically acknowledged in architecture; nor until my

attention was especially directed to it, had I myself any idea of the

care with which this great question was studied by the mediæval

architects. On my first careful examination of the capitals of the upper

arcade of the Ducal Palace at Venice, I was induced, by their singular

inferiority of workmanship, to suppose them posterior to those of the

lower arcade. It was not till I discovered that some of those which I

thought the worst above, were the best when seen from below, that I

obtained the key to this marvellous system of adaptation; a system

which I afterwards found carried out in every building of the great

times which I had opportunity of examining.

§ XVI. There are two distinct modes in which this adaptation is

effected. In the first, the same designs which are delicately worked

when near the eye, are rudely cut, and have far fewer details when they

are removed from it. In this method it is not always easy to distinguish

economy from skill, or slovenliness from science. But, in the second

method, a different design is adopted, composed of fewer parts and of

simpler lines, and this is cut with exquisite precision. This is of

course the higher method, and the more satisfactory proof of purpose;

but an equal degree of imperfection is found in both kinds when they are

seen close; in the first, a bald execution of a perfect design; the

second, a baldness of design with perfect execution. And in these very

imperfections lies the admirableness of the ornament.

§ XVII. It may be asked whether, in advocating this adaptation to the

distance of the eye, I obey my adopted rule of observance of natural

law. Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far

away? Nay, not so. Look at the clouds, and watch the delicate sculpture

of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent

rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away; they were shaped for

their place, high above your head; approach them, and they fuse into

vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look

at the crest of the Alp, from the far-away plains over which its light

is cast, whence human souls have communion with it by their myriads. The

child looks up to it in the dawn, and the husbandman in the burden and

heat of the day, and the old man in the going down of the sun, and it is

to them all as the celestial city on the world's horizon; dyed with the

depth of heaven, and clothed with the calm of eternity. There was it

set, for holy dominion, by Him who marked for the sun his journey, and

bade the moon know her going down. It was built for its place in the

far-off sky; approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away

about its foundations, and the tide of human life, shallowed upon the

vast aërial shore, is at last met by the Eternal "Here shall thy waves

be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness; its

purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fretwork saddened

into wasting snow, the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the ashes

of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

Nor in such instances as these alone, though strangely enough, the

discrepancy between apparent and actual beauty is greater in proportion

to the unapproachableness of the object, is the law observed. For every

distance from the eye there is a peculiar kind of beauty, or a different

system of lines of form; the sight of that beauty is reserved for that

distance, and for that alone. If you approach nearer, that kind of

beauty is lost, and another succeeds, to be disorganised and reduced to

strange and incomprehensible means and appliances in its turn. If you

desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain,

you must not ascend upon its sides. All is there disorder and accident,

or seems so; sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither;

ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground; fallen

fragments, toppling one over another into more helpless fall. Retire

from it, and, as your eye commands it more and more, as you see the

ruined mountain world with a wider glance, behold! dim sympathies begin

to busy themselves in the disjointed mass; line binds itself into

stealthy fellowship with line; group by group, the helpless fragments

gather themselves into ordered companies; new captains of hosts and

masses of battalions become visible, one by one, and far away answers of

foot to foot, and of bone to bone, until the powerless chaos is seen

risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap

could now be spared from the mystic whole.

§ XVIII. Now it is indeed true that where nature loses one kind of

beauty, as you approach it, she substitutes another; this is worthy of

her infinite power: and, as we shall see, art can sometimes follow her

even in doing this; but all I insist upon at present is, that the

several effects of nature are each worked with means referred to a

particular distance, and producing their effect at that distance only.

Take a singular and marked instance: When the sun rises behind a ridge

of pines, and those pines are seen from a distance of a mile or two,

against his light, the whole form of the tree, trunk, branches, and all,

becomes one frostwork of intensely brilliant silver, which is relieved

against the clear sky like a burning fringe, for some distance on either

side of the sun.[71] Now suppose that a person who had never seen pines

were, for the first time in his life, to see them under this strange

aspect, and, reasoning as to the means by which such effect could be

produced, laboriously to approach the eastern ridge, how would he be

amazed to find that the fiery spectres had been produced by trees with

swarthy and grey trunks, and dark green leaves! We, in our simplicity,

if we had been required to produce such an appearance, should have built

up trees of chased silver, with trunks of glass, and then been

grievously amazed to find that, at two miles off, neither silver nor

glass were any more visible; but nature knew better, and prepared for

her fairy work with the strong branches and dark leaves, in her own

mysterious way.

§ XIX. Now this is exactly what you have to do with your good ornament.

It may be that it is capable of being approached, as well as likely to

be seen far away, and then it ought to have microscopic qualities, as

the pine leaves have, which will bear approach. But your calculation of

its purpose is for a glory to be produced at a given distance; it may be

here, or may be there, but it is a _given_ distance; and the excellence

of the ornament depends upon its fitting that distance, and being seen

better there than anywhere else, and having a particular function and

form which it can only discharge and assume there. You are never to say

that ornament has great merit because "you cannot see the beauty of it

here;" but, it has great merit because "you _can_ see its beauty _here

only_." And to give it this merit is just about as difficult a task as I

could well set you. I have above noted the two ways in which it is done:

the one, being merely rough cutting, may be passed over; the other,

which is scientific alteration of design, falls, itself, into two great

branches, Simplification and Emphasis.

A word or two is necessary on each of these heads.

§ XX. When an ornamental work is intended to be seen near, if its

composition be indeed fine, the subdued and delicate portions of the

design lead to, and unite, the energetic parts, and those energetic

parts form with the rest a whole, in which their own immediate relations

to each other are not perceived. Remove this design to a distance, and

the connecting delicacies vanish, the energies alone remain, now either

disconnected altogether, or assuming with each other new relations,

which, not having been intended by the designer, will probably be

painful. There is a like, and a more palpable, effect, in the retirement

of a band of music in which the instruments are of very unequal powers;

the fluting and fifeing expire, the drumming remains, and that in a

painful arrangement, as demanding something which is unheard. In like

manner, as the designer at arm's length removes or elevates his work,

fine gradations, and roundings, and incidents, vanish, and a totally

unexpected arrangement is established between the remainder of the

markings, certainly confused, and in all probability painful.

§ XXI. The art of architectural design is therefore, first, the

preparation for this beforehand, the rejection of all the delicate

passages as worse than useless, and the fixing the thought upon the

arrangement of the features which will remain visible far away. Nor does

this always imply a diminution of resource; for, while it may be assumed

as a law that fine modulation of surface in light becomes quickly

invisible as the object retires, there are a softness and mystery given

to the harder markings, which enable them to be safely used as media of

expression. There is an exquisite example of this use, in the head of

the Adam of the Ducal Palace. It is only at the height of 17 or 18 feet

above the eye; nevertheless, the sculptor felt it was no use to trouble

himself about drawing the corners of the mouth, or the lines of the

lips, delicately, at that distance; his object has been to mark them

clearly, and to prevent accidental shadows from concealing them, or

altering their expression. The lips are cut thin and sharp, so that

their line cannot be mistaken, and a good deep drill-hole struck into

the angle of the mouth; the eye is anxious and questioning, and one is

surprised, from below, to perceive a kind of darkness in the iris of it,

neither like color, nor like a circular furrow. The expedient can only

be discovered by ascending to the level of the head; it is one which

would have been quite inadmissible except in distant work, six

drill-holes cut into the iris, round a central one for the pupil.

§ XXII. By just calculation, like this, of the means at our disposal, by

beautiful arrangement of the prominent features, and by choice of

different subjects for different places, choosing the broadest forms for

the farthest distance, it is possible to give the impression, not only

of perfection, but of an exquisite delicacy, to the most distant

ornament. And this is the true sign of the right having been done, and

the utmost possible power attained:--The spectator should be satisfied

to stay in his place, feeling the decoration, wherever it may be,

equally rich, full, and lovely: not desiring to climb the steeples in

order to examine it, but sure that he has it all, where he is. Perhaps

the capitals of the cathedral of Genoa are the best instances of

absolute perfection in this kind: seen from below, they appear as rich

as the frosted silver of the Strada degli Orefici; and the nearer you

approach them, the less delicate they seem.

§ XXIII. This is, however, not the only mode, though the best, in which

ornament is adapted for distance. The other is emphasis,--the unnatural

insisting upon explanatory lines, where the subject would otherwise

become unintelligible. It is to be remembered that, by a deep and narrow

incision, an architect has the power, at least in sunshine, of drawing a

black line on stone, just as vigorously as it can be drawn with chalk on

grey paper; and that he may thus, wherever and in the degree that he

chooses, substitute _chalk sketching_ for sculpture. They are curiously

mingled by the Romans. The bas-reliefs of the Arc d'Orange are small,

and would be confused, though in bold relief, if they depended for

intelligibility on the relief only; but each figure is outlined by a

strong _incision_ at its edge into the background, and all the ornaments

on the armor are simply drawn with incised lines, and not cut out at

all. A similar use of lines is made by the Gothic nations in all their

early sculpture, and with delicious effect. Now, to draw a mere

pattern--as, for instance, the bearings of a shield--with these simple

incisions, would, I suppose, occupy an able sculptor twenty minutes or

half an hour; and the pattern is then clearly seen, under all

circumstances of light and shade; there can be no mistake about it, and

no missing it. To carve out the bearings in due and finished relief

would occupy a long summer's day, and the results would be feeble and

indecipherable in the best lights, and in some lights totally and

hopelessly invisible, ignored, non-existant. Now the Renaissance

architects, and our modern ones, despise the simple expedient of the

rough Roman or barbarian. They do not care to be understood. They care

only to speak finely, and be thought great orators, if one could only

hear them. So I leave you to choose between the old men, who took

minutes to tell things plainly, and the modern men, who take days to

tell them unintelligibly.

§ XXIV. All expedients of this kind, both of simplification and energy,

for the expression of details at a distance where their actual forms

would have been invisible, but more especially this linear method, I

shall call Proutism; for the greatest master of the art in modern times

has been Samuel Prout. He actually takes up buildings of the later times

in which the ornament has been too refined for its place, and

translates it into the energised linear ornament of earlier art: and to

this power of taking the life and essence of decoration, and putting it

into a perfectly intelligible form, when its own fulness would have been

confused, is owing the especial power of his drawings. Nothing can be

more closely analogous than the method with which an old Lombard uses

his chisel, and that with which Prout uses the reed-pen; and we shall

see presently farther correspondence in their feeling about the

enrichment of luminous surfaces.

§ XXV. Now, all that has been hitherto said refers to ornament whose

distance is fixed, or nearly so; as when it is at any considerable

height from the ground, supposing the spectator to desire to see it, and

to get as near it as he can. But the distance of ornament is never fixed

to the _general_ spectator. The tower of a cathedral is bound to look

well, ten miles off, or five miles, or half a mile, or within fifty

yards. The ornaments of its top have fixed distances, compared with

those of its base; but quite unfixed distances in their relation to the

great world: and the ornaments of the base have no fixed distance at

all. They are bound to look well from the other side of the cathedral

close, and to look equally well, or better, as we enter the cathedral

door. How are we to manage this?

§ XXVI. As nature manages it. I said above, § XVII., that for every

distance from the eye there was a different system of form in all

natural objects: this is to be so then in architecture. The lesser

ornament is to be grafted on the greater, and third or fourth orders of

ornaments upon this again, as need may be, until we reach the limits of

possible sight; each order of ornament being adapted for a different

distance: first, for example, the great masses,--the buttresses and

stories and black windows and broad cornices of the tower, which give it

make, and organism, as it rises over the horizon, half a score of miles

away: then the traceries and shafts and pinnacles, which give it

richness as we approach: then the niches and statues and knobs and

flowers, which we can only see when we stand beneath it. At this third

order of ornament, we may pause, in the upper portions; but on the

roofs of the niches, and the robes of the statues, and the rolls of the

mouldings, comes a fourth order of ornament, as delicate as the eye can

follow, when any of these features may be approached.

§ XXVII. All good ornamentation is thus arborescent, as it were, one

class of it branching out of another and sustained by it; and its

nobility consists in this, that whatever order or class of it we may be

contemplating, we shall find it subordinated to a greater, simpler, and

more powerful; and if we then contemplate the greater order, we shall

find it again subordinated to a greater still; until the greatest can

only be quite grasped by retiring to the limits of distance commanding

it.

And if this subordination be not complete, the ornament is bad: if the

figurings and chasings and borderings of a dress be not subordinated to

the folds of it,--if the folds are not subordinate to the action and

mass of the figure,--if this action and mass not to the divisions of the

recesses and shafts among which it stands,--if these not to the shadows

of the great arches and buttresses of the whole building, in each case

there is error; much more if all be contending with each other and

striving for attention at the same time.

§ XXVIII. It is nevertheless evident, that, however perfect this

distribution, there cannot be orders adapted to _every_ distance of the

spectator. Between the ranks of ornament there must always be a bold

separation; and there must be many intermediate distances, where we are

too far off to see the lesser rank clearly, and yet too near to grasp

the next higher rank wholly: and at all these distances the spectator

will feel himself ill-placed, and will desire to go nearer or farther

away. This must be the case in all noble work, natural or artificial. It

is exactly the same with respect to Rouen cathedral or the Mont Blanc.

We like to see them from the other side of the Seine, or of the lake of

Geneva; from the Marché aux Fleurs, or the Valley of Chamouni; from the

parapets of the apse, or the crags of the Montagne de la Côte: but there

are intermediate distances which dissatisfy us in either case, and from

which one is in haste either to advance or to retire.

§ XXIX. Directly opposed to this ordered, disciplined, well officered

and variously ranked ornament, this type of divine, and therefore of all

good human government, is the democratic ornament, in which all is

equally influential, and has equal office and authority; that is to say,

none of it any office nor authority, but a life of continual struggle

for independence and notoriety, or of gambling for chance regards. The

English perpendicular work is by far the worst of this kind that I know;

its main idea, or decimal fraction of an idea, being to cover its walls

with dull, successive, eternity of reticulation, to fill with equal

foils the equal interstices between the equal bars, and charge the

interminable blanks with statues and rosettes, invisible at a distance,

and uninteresting near.

The early Lombardic, Veronese, and Norman work is the exact reverse of

this; being divided first into large masses, and these masses covered

with minute chasing and surface work, which fill them with interest, and

yet do not disturb nor divide their greatness. The lights are kept broad

and bright, and yet are found on near approach to be charged with

intricate design. This, again, is a part of the great system of

treatment which I shall hereafter call "Proutism;" much of what is

thought mannerism and imperfection in Prout's work, being the result of

his determined resolution that minor details shall never break up his

large masses of light.

§ XXX. Such are the main principles to be observed in the adaptation of

ornament to the sight. We have lastly to inquire by what method, and in

what quantities, the ornament, thus adapted to mental contemplation, and

prepared for its physical position, may most wisely be arranged. I think

the method ought first to be considered, and the quantity last; for the

advisable quantity depends upon the method.

§ XXXI. It was said above, that the proper treatment or arrangement of

ornament was that which expressed the laws and ways of Deity. Now, the

subordination of visible orders to each other, just noted, is one

expression of these. But there may also--must also--be a subordination

and obedience of the parts of each order to some visible law, out of

itself, but having reference to itself only (not to any upper order):

some law which shall not oppress, but guide, limit, and sustain.

In the tenth chapter of the second volume of "Modern Painters," the

reader will find that I traced one part of the beauty of God's creation

to the expression of a _self_-restrained liberty: that is to say, the

image of that perfection of _divine_ action, which, though free to work

in arbitrary methods, works always in consistent methods, called by us

Laws.

Now, correspondingly, we find that when these natural objects are to

become subjects of the art of man, their perfect treatment is an image

of the perfection of _human_ action: a voluntary submission to divine

law.

It was suggested to me but lately by the friend to whose originality of

thought I have before expressed my obligations, Mr. Newton, that the

Greek pediment, with its enclosed sculptures, represented to the Greek

mind the law of Fate, confining human action within limits not to be

overpassed. I do not believe the Greeks ever distinctly thought of this;

but the instinct of all the human race, since the world began, agrees in

some expression of such limitation as one of the first necessities of

good ornament.[72] And this expression is heightened, rather than

diminished, when some portion of the design slightly breaks the law to

which the rest is subjected; it is like expressing the use of miracles

in the divine government; or, perhaps, in slighter degrees, the relaxing

of a law, generally imperative, in compliance with some more imperative

need--the hungering of David. How eagerly this special infringement of a

general law was sometimes sought by the mediæval workmen, I shall be

frequently able to point out to the reader; but I remember just now a

most curious instance, in an archivolt of a house in the Corte del Remer

close to the Rialto at Venice. It is composed of a wreath of

flower-work--a constant Byzantine design--with an animal in each coil;

the whole enclosed between two fillets. Each animal, leaping or eating,

scratching or biting, is kept nevertheless strictly within its coil, and

between the fillets. Not the shake of an ear, not the tip of a tail,

overpasses this appointed line, through a series of some five-and-twenty

or thirty animals; until, on a sudden, and by mutual consent, two little

beasts (not looking, for the rest, more rampant than the others), one on

each side, lay their small paws across the enclosing fillet at exactly

the same point of its course, and thus break the continuity of its line.

Two ears of corn, or leaves, do the same thing in the mouldings round

the northern door of the Baptistery at Florence.

§ XXXII. Observe, however, and this is of the utmost possible

importance, that the value of this type does not consist in the mere

shutting of the ornament into a certain space, but in the acknowledgment

_by_ the ornament of the fitness of the limitation--of its own perfect

willingness to submit to it; nay, of a predisposition in itself to fall

into the ordained form, without any direct expression of the command to

do so; an anticipation of the authority, and an instant and willing

submission to it, in every fibre and spray: not merely _willing_, but

_happy_ submission, as being pleased rather than vexed to have so

beautiful a law suggested to it, and one which to follow is so justly in

accordance with its own nature. You must not cut out a branch of

hawthorn as it grows, and rule a triangle round it, and suppose that it

is then submitted to law. Not a bit of it. It is only put in a cage, and

will look as if it must get out, for its life, or wither in the

confinement. But the spirit of triangle must be put into the hawthorn.

It must suck in isoscelesism with its sap. Thorn and blossom, leaf and

spray, must grow with an awful sense of triangular necessity upon them,

for the guidance of which they are to be thankful, and to grow all the

stronger and more gloriously. And though there may be a transgression

here and there, and an adaptation to some other need, or a reaching

forth to some other end greater even than the triangle, yet this liberty

is to be always accepted under a solemn sense of special permission; and

when the full form is reached and the entire submission expressed, and

every blossom has a thrilling sense of its responsibility down into its

tiniest stamen, you may take your terminal line away if you will. No

need for it any more. The commandment is written on the heart of the

thing.

§ XXXIII. Then, besides this obedience to external law, there is the

obedience to internal headship, which constitutes the unity of ornament,

of which I think enough has been said for my present purpose in the

chapter on Unity in the second vol. of "Modern Painters." But I hardly

know whether to arrange as an expression of a divine law, or a

representation of a physical fact, the alternation of shade with light

which, in equal succession, forms one of the chief elements of

_continuous_ ornament, and in some peculiar ones, such as dentils and

billet mouldings, is the source of their only charm. The opposition of

good and evil, the antagonism of the entire human system (so ably worked

out by Lord Lindsay), the alternation of labor with rest, the mingling

of life with death, or the actual physical fact of the division of light

from darkness, and of the falling and rising of night and day, are all

typified or represented by these chains of shade and light of which the

eye never wearies, though their true meaning may never occur to the

thoughts.

§ XXXIV. The next question respecting the arrangement of ornament is one

closely connected also with its quantity. The system of creation is one

in which "God's creatures leap not, but express a feast, where all the

guests sit close, and nothing wants." It is also a feast, where there is

nothing redundant. So, then, in distributing our ornament, there must

never be any sense of gap or blank, neither any sense of there being a

single member, or fragment of a member, which could be spared. Whatever

has nothing to do, whatever could go without being missed, is not

ornament; it is deformity and encumbrance. Away with it. And, on the

other hand, care must be taken either to diffuse the ornament which we

permit, in due relation over the whole building, or so to concentrate

it, as never to leave a sense of its having got into knots, and curdled

upon some points, and left the rest of the building whey. It is very

difficult to give the rules, or analyse the feelings, which should

direct us in this matter: for some shafts may be carved and others left

unfinished, and that with advantage; some windows may be jewelled like

Aladdin's, and one left plain, and still with advantage; the door or

doors, or a single turret, or the whole western façade of a church, or

the apse or transept, may be made special subjects of decoration, and

the rest left plain, and still sometimes with advantage. But in all such

cases there is either sign of that feeling which I advocated in the

First Chapter of the "Seven Lamps," the desire of rather doing some

portion of the building as we would have it, and leaving the rest plain,

than doing the whole imperfectly; or else there is choice made of some

important feature, to which, as more honorable than the rest, the

decoration is confined. The evil is when, without system, and without

preference of the nobler members, the ornament alternates between sickly

luxuriance and sudden blankness. In many of our Scotch and English

abbeys, especially Melrose, this is painfully felt; but the worst

instance I have ever seen is the window in the side of the arch under

the Wellington statue, next St. George's Hospital. In the first place, a

window has no business there at all; in the second, the bars of the

window are not the proper place for decoration, especially _wavy_

decoration, which one instantly fancies of cast iron; in the third, the

richness of the ornament is a mere patch and eruption upon the wall, and

one hardly knows whether to be most irritated at the affectation of

severity in the rest, or at the vain luxuriance of the dissolute

parallelogram.

§ XXXV. Finally, as regards quantity of ornament I have already said,

again and again, you cannot have too much if it be good; that is, if it

be thoroughly united and harmonised by the laws hitherto insisted upon.

But you may easily have too much if you have more than you have sense to

manage. For with every added order of ornament increases the difficulty

of discipline. It is exactly the same as in war: you cannot, as an

abstract law, have too many soldiers, but you may easily have more than

the country is able to sustain, or than your generalship is competent

to command. And every regiment which you cannot manage will, on the day

of battle, be in your way, and encumber the movements it is not in

disposition to sustain.

§ XXXVI. As an architect, therefore, you are modestly to measure your

capacity of governing ornament. Remember, its essence,--its being

ornament at all, consists in its being governed. Lose your authority

over it, let it command you, or lead you, or dictate to you in any wise,

and it is an offence, an incumbrance, and a dishonor. And it is always

ready to do this; wild to get the bit in its teeth, and rush forth on

its own devices. Measure, therefore, your strength; and as long as there

is no chance of mutiny, add soldier to soldier, battalion to battalion;

but be assured that all are heartily in the cause, and that there is not

one of whose position you are ignorant, or whose service you could

spare.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Vide "Seven Lamps," Chap. IV. § 34.

[71] Shakspeare and Wordsworth (I think they only) have noticed this,

Shakspeare, in Richard II.:--

"But when, from under this terrestrial ball,

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines."

And Wordsworth, in one of his minor poems, on leaving Italy:

"My thoughts become bright like yon edging of pines

On the steep's lofty verge--how it blackened the air!

But, touched from behind by the sun, it now shines

With threads that seem part of his own silver hair."

[72] Some valuable remarks on this subject will be found in a notice

of the "Seven Lamps" in the British Quarterly for August, 1849. I

think, however, the writer attaches too great importance to one out

of many ornamental necessities.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE ANGLE.

§ I. We have now examined the treatment and specific kinds of ornament

at our command. We have lastly to note the fittest places for their

disposal. Not but that all kinds of ornament are used in all places; but

there are some parts of the building, which, without ornament, are more

painful than others, and some which wear ornament more gracefully than

others; so that, although an able architect will always be finding out

some new and unexpected modes of decoration, and fitting his ornament

into wonderful places where it is least expected, there are,

nevertheless, one or two general laws which may be noted respecting

every one of the parts of a building, laws not (except a few) imperative

like those of construction, but yet generally expedient, and good to be

understood, if it were only that we might enjoy the brilliant methods in

which they are sometimes broken. I shall note, however, only a few of

the simplest; to trace them into their ramifications, and class in due

order the known or possible methods of decoration for each part of a

building, would alone require a large volume, and be, I think, a

somewhat useless work; for there is often a high pleasure in the very

unexpectedness of the ornament, which would be destroyed by too

elaborate an arrangement of its kinds.

§ II. I think that the reader must, by this time, so thoroughly

understand the connection of the parts of a building, that I may class

together, in treating of decoration, several parts which I kept separate

in speaking of construction. Thus I shall put under one head (A) the

base of the wall and of the shaft; then (B) the wall veil and shaft

itself; then (C) the cornice and capital; then (D) the jamb and

archivolt, including the arches both over shafts and apertures, and the

jambs of apertures, which are closely connected with their archivolts;

finally (E) the roof, including the real roof, and the minor roofs or

gables of pinnacles and arches. I think, under these divisions, all may

be arranged which is necessary to be generally stated; for tracery

decorations or aperture fillings are but smaller forms of application of

the arch, and the cusps are merely smaller spandrils, while buttresses

have, as far as I know, no specific ornament. The best are those which

have least; and the little they have resolves itself into pinnacles,

which are common to other portions of the building, or into small

shafts, arches, and niches, of still more general applicability. We

shall therefore have only five divisions to examine in succession, from

foundation to roof.

[Illustration: Fig. LI.]

§ III. But in the decoration of these several parts, certain minor

conditions of ornament occur which are of perfectly general application.

For instance, whether, in archivolts, jambs, or buttresses, or in square

piers, or at the extremity of the entire building, we necessarily have

the awkward (moral or architectural) feature, the _corner_. How to turn

a corner gracefully becomes, therefore, a perfectly general question; to

be examined without reference to any particular part of the edifice.

§ IV. Again, the furrows and ridges by which bars of parallel light and

shade are obtained, whether these are employed in arches, or jambs, or

bases, or cornices, must of necessity present one or more of six forms:

square projection, _a_ (Fig. LI.), or square recess, _b_, sharp

projection, _c_, or sharp recess, _d_, curved projection, _e_, or curved

recess, _f_. What odd curves the projection or recess may assume, or how

these different conditions may be mixed and run into one another, is

not our present business. We note only the six distinct kinds or types.

Now, when these ridges or furrows are on a small scale they often

themselves constitute all the ornament required for larger features, and

are left smooth cut; but on a very large scale they are apt to become

insipid, and they require a sub-ornament of their own, the consideration

of which is, of course, in great part, general, and irrespective of the

place held by the mouldings in the building itself: which consideration

I think we had better undertake first of all.

§ V. But before we come to particular examination of these minor forms,

let us see how far we can simplify it. Look back to Fig. LI., above.

There are distinguished in it six forms of moulding. Of these, _c_ is

nothing but a small corner; but, for convenience sake, it is better to

call it an edge, and to consider its decoration together with that of

the member _a_, which is called a fillet; while _e_, which I shall call

a roll (because I do not choose to assume that it shall be only of the

semicircular section here given), is also best considered together with

its relative recess, _f_; and because the shape of a recess is of no

great consequence, I shall class all the three recesses together, and we

shall thus have only three subjects for separate consideration:--

1. The Angle.

2. The Edge and Fillet.

3. The Roll and Recess.

§ VI. There are two other general forms which may probably occur to the

reader's mind, namely, the ridge (as of a roof), which is a corner laid

on its back, or sloping,--a supine corner, decorated in a very different

manner from a stiff upright corner: and the point, which is a

concentrated corner, and has wonderfully elaborate decorations all to

its insignificant self, finials, and spikes, and I know not what more.

But both these conditions are so closely connected with roofs (even the

cusp finial being a kind of pendant to a small roof), that I think it

better to class them and their ornament under the head of roof

decoration, together with the whole tribe of crockets and bosses; so

that we shall be here concerned only with the three subjects above

distinguished: and, first, the corner or Angle.

§ VII. The mathematician knows there are many kinds of angles; but the

one we have principally to deal with now, is that which the reader may

very easily conceive as the corner of a square house, or square

anything. It is of course the one of most frequent occurrence; and its

treatment, once understood, may, with slight modification, be referred

to other corners, sharper or blunter, or with curved sides.

§ VIII. Evidently the first and roughest idea which would occur to any

one who found a corner troublesome, would be to cut it off. This is a

very summary and tyrannical proceeding, somewhat barbarous, yet

advisable if nothing else can be done: an amputated corner is said to be

chamfered. It can, however, evidently be cut off in three ways: 1. with

a concave cut, _a_; 2. with a straight cut, _b_; 3. with a convex cut,

_c_, Fig. LII.

[Illustration: Fig. LII.]

The first two methods, the most violent and summary, have the apparent

disadvantage that we get by them,--two corners instead of one; much

milder corners, however, and with a different light and shade between

them; so that both methods are often very expedient. You may see the

straight chamfer (_b_) on most lamp posts, and pillars at railway

stations, it being the easiest to cut: the concave chamfer requires more

care, and occurs generally in well-finished but simple architecture--very

beautifully in the small arches of the Broletto of Como, Plate V.; and

the straight chamfer in architecture of every kind, very constantly in

Norman cornices and arches, as in Fig. 2, Plate IV., at Sens.

§ IX. The third, or convex chamfer, as it is the gentlest mode of

treatment, so (as in medicine and morals) it is very generally the best.

For while the two other methods produce two corners instead of one, this

gentle chamfer does verily get rid of the corner altogether, and

substitutes a soft curve in its place.

[Illustration: Fig. LIII.]

But it has, in the form above given, this grave disadvantage, that it

looks as if the corner had been rubbed or worn off, blunted by time and

weather, and in want of sharpening again. A great deal often depends,

and in such a case as this, everything depends, on the _Voluntariness_

of the ornament. The work of time is beautiful on surfaces, but not on

edges intended to be sharp. Even if we needed them blunt, we should not

like them blunt on compulsion; so, to show that the bluntness is our own

ordaining, we will put a slight incised line to mark off the rounding,

and show that it goes no farther than we choose. We shall thus have the

section _a_, Fig. LIII.; and this mode of turning an angle is one of the

very best ever invented. By enlarging and deepening the incision, we get

in succession the forms _b_, _c_, _d_; and by describing a small equal

arc on each of the sloping lines of these figures, we get _e_, _f_, _g_,

_h_.

§ X. I do not know whether these mouldings are called by architects

chamfers or beads; but I think _bead_ a bad word for a continuous

moulding, and the proper sense of the word chamfer is fixed by Spenser

as descriptive not merely of truncation, but of trench or furrow:--

"Tho gin you, fond flies, the cold to scorn,

And, crowing in pipes made of green corn,

You thinken to be lords of the year;

But eft when ye count you freed from fear,

Comes the breme winter with chamfred brows,

Full of wrinkles and frosty furrows."

So I shall call the above mouldings beaded chamfers, when there is any

chance of confusion with the plain chamfer, _a_, or _b_, of Fig. LII.:

and when there is no such chance, I shall use the word chamfer only.

§ XI. Of those above given, _b_ is the constant chamfer of Venice, and

_a_ of Verona: _a_ being the grandest and best, and having a peculiar

precision and quaintness of effect about it. I found it twice in Venice,

used on the sharp angle, as at _a_ and _b_, Fig. LIV., _a_ being from

the angle of a house on the Rio San Zulian, and _b_ from the windows of

the church of San Stefano.

[Illustration: Fig. LIV.]

§ XII. There is, however, evidently another variety of the chamfers, _f_

and _g_, Fig. LIII., formed by an unbroken curve instead of two curves,

as _c_, Fig. LIV.; and when this, or the chamfer _d_, Fig. LIII., is

large, it is impossible to say whether they have been devised from the

incised angle, or from small shafts set in a nook, as at _e_, Fig. LIV.,

or in the hollow of the curved chamfer, as _d_, Fig. LIV. In general,

however, the shallow chamfers, _a_, _b_, _e_, and _f_, Fig. LIII., are

peculiar to southern work; and may be assumed to have been derived from

the incised angle, while the deep chamfers, _c_, _d_, _g_, _h_, are

characteristic of northern work, and may be partly derived or imitated

from the angle shaft; while, with the usual extravagance of the northern

architects, they are cut deeper and deeper until we arrive at the

condition _f_, Fig. LIV., which is the favorite chamfer at Bourges and

Bayeux, and in other good French work.

I have placed in the Appendix[73] a figure belonging to this subject,

but which cannot interest the general reader, showing the number of

possible chamfers with a roll moulding of given size.

§ XIII. If we take the plain chamfer, _b_, of Fig. LII., on a large

scale, as at _a_, Fig. LV., and bead both its edges, cutting away the

parts there shaded, we shall have a form much used in richly decorated

Gothic, both in England and Italy. It might be more simply described as

the chamfer _a_ of Fig. LII., with an incision on each edge; but the

part here shaded is often worked into ornamental forms, not being

entirely cut away.

[Illustration: Fig. LV.]

§ XIV. Many other mouldings, which at first sight appear very elaborate,

are nothing more than a chamfer, with a series of small echoes of it on

each side, dying away with a ripple on the surface of the wall, as in

_b_, Fig. LV., from Coutances (observe, here the white part is the solid

stone, the shade is cut away).

Chamfers of this kind are used on a small scale and in delicate work:

the coarse chamfers are found on all scales: _f_ and _g_, Fig. LIII., in

Venice, form the great angles of almost every Gothic palace; the roll

being a foot or a foot and a half round, and treated as a shaft, with a

capital and fresh base at every story, while the stones of which it is

composed form alternate quoins in the brickwork beyond the chamfer

curve. I need hardly say how much nobler this arrangement is than a

common quoined angle; it gives a finish to the aspect of the whole pile

attainable in no other way. And thus much may serve concerning angle

decoration by chamfer.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] Appendix 23: "Varieties of Chamfer."

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE EDGE AND FILLET.

§ I. The decoration of the angle by various forms of chamfer and bead,

as above described, is the quietest method we can employ; too quiet,

when great energy is to be given to the moulding, and impossible, when,

instead of a bold angle, we have to deal with a small projecting edge,

like _c_ in Fig. LI. In such cases we may employ a decoration, far ruder

and easier in its simplest conditions than the bead, far more effective

when not used in too great profusion; and of which the complete

developments are the source of mouldings at once the most picturesque

and most serviceable which the Gothic builders invented.

§ II. The gunwales of the Venetian heavy barges being liable to somewhat

rough collision with each other, and with the walls of the streets, are

generally protected by a piece of timber, which projects in the form of

the fillet, _a_, Fig. LI.; but which, like all other fillets, may, if we

so choose, be considered as composed of two angles or edges, which the

natural and most wholesome love of the Venetian boatmen for ornament,

otherwise strikingly evidenced by their painted sails and glittering

flag-vanes, will not suffer to remain wholly undecorated. The rough

service of these timbers, however, will not admit of rich ornament, and

the boatbuilder usually contents himself with cutting a series of

notches in each edge, one series alternating with the other, as

represented at 1, Plate IX.

§ III. In that simple ornament, not as confined to Venetian boats, but

as representative of a general human instinct to hack at an edge,

demonstrated by all school-boys and all idle possessors of penknives or

other cutting instruments on both sides of the Atlantic;--in that rude

Venetian gunwale, I say, is the germ of all the ornament which has

touched, with its rich successions of angular shadow, the portals and

archivolts of nearly every early building of importance, from the North

Cape to the Straits of Messina. Nor are the modifications of the first

suggestion intricate. All that is generic in their character may be seen

on Plate IX. at a glance.

[Illustration: Plate IX.

EDGE DECORATION.]

§ IV. Taking a piece of stone instead of timber, and enlarging the

notches, until they meet each other, we have the condition 2, which is a

moulding from the tomb of the Doge Andrea Dandolo, in St. Mark's. Now,

considering this moulding as composed of two decorated edges, each edge

will be reduced, by the meeting of the notches, to a series of

four-sided pyramids (as marked off by the dotted lines), which, the

notches here being shallow, will be shallow pyramids; but by deepening

the notches, we get them as at 3, with a profile _a_, more or less

steep. This moulding I shall always call "the plain dogtooth;" it is

used in profusion in the Venetian and Veronese Gothic, generally set

with its front to the spectator, as here at 3; but its effect may be

much varied by placing it obliquely (4, and profile as at _b_); or with

one side horizontal (5, and profile _c_). Of these three conditions, 3

and 5 are exactly the same in reality, only differently placed; but in 4

the pyramid is obtuse, and the inclination of its base variable, the

upper side of it being always kept vertical. It is comparatively rare.

Of the three, the last, 5, is far the most brilliant in effect, giving

in the distance a zigzag form to the high light on it, and a full sharp

shadow below. The use of this shadow is sufficiently seen by fig. 7 in

this plate (the arch on the left, the number beneath it), in which these

levelled dogteeth, with a small interval between each, are employed to

set off by their vigor the delicacy of floral ornament above. This arch

is the side of a niche from the tomb of Can Signorio della Scala, at

Verona; and the value, as well as the distant expression of its

dogtooth, may be seen by referring to Prout's beautiful drawing of this

tomb in his "Sketches in France and Italy." I have before observed

that this artist never fails of seizing the true and leading expression

of whatever he touches: he has made this ornament the leading feature of

the niche, expressing it, as in distance it is only expressible, by a

zigzag.

§ V. The reader may perhaps be surprised at my speaking so highly of

this drawing, if he take the pains to compare Prout's symbolism of the

work on the niche with the facts as they stand here in Plate IX. But the

truth is that Prout has rendered the effect of the monument on the mind

of the passer-by;--the effect it was intended to have on every man who

turned the corner of the street beneath it: and in this sense there is

actually more truth and likeness[74] in Prout's translation than in my

fac-simile, made diligently by peering into the details from a ladder. I

do not say that all the symbolism in Prout's Sketch is the best

possible; but it is the best which any architectural draughtsman has yet

invented; and in its application to special subjects it always shows

curious internal evidence that the sketch has been made on the spot, and

that the artist tried to draw what he saw, not to invent an attractive

subject. I shall notice other instances of this hereafter.

§ VI. The dogtooth, employed in this simple form, is, however, rather a

foil for other ornament, than itself a satisfactory or generally

available decoration. It is, however, easy to enrich it as we choose:

taking up its simple form at 3, and describing the arcs marked by the

dotted lines upon its sides, and cutting a small triangular cavity

between them, we shall leave its ridges somewhat rudely representative

of four leaves, as at 8, which is the section and front view of one of

the Venetian stone cornices described above, Chap. XIV., § IV., the

figure 8 being here put in the hollow of the gutter. The dogtooth is put

on the outer lower truncation, and is actually in position as fig. 5;

but being always looked up to, is to the spectator as 3, and always

rich and effective. The dogteeth are perhaps most frequently expanded

to the width of fig. 9.

§ VII. As in nearly all other ornaments previously described, so in

this,--we have only to deepen the Italian cutting, and we shall get the

Northern type. If we make the original pyramid somewhat steeper, and

instead of lightly incising, cut it through, so as to have the leaves

held only by their points to the base, we shall have the English

dogtooth; somewhat vulgar in its piquancy, when compared with French

mouldings of a similar kind.[75] It occurs, I think, on one house in

Venice, in the Campo St. Polo; but the ordinary moulding, with light

incisions, is frequent in archivolts and architraves, as well as in the

roof cornices.

§ VIII. This being the simplest treatment of the pyramid, fig. 10, from

the refectory of Wenlock Abbey, is an example of the simplest decoration

of the recesses or inward angles between the pyramids; that is to say,

of a simple hacked edge like one of those in fig. 2, the _cuts_ being

taken up and decorated instead of the _points_. Each is worked into a

small trefoiled arch, with an incision round it to mark its outline, and

another slight incision above, expressing the angle of the first

cutting. I said that the teeth in fig. 7 had in distance the effect of a

zigzag: in fig. 10 this zigzag effect is seized upon and developed, but

with the easiest and roughest work; the angular incision being a mere

limiting line, like that described in § IX. of the last chapter. But

hence the farther steps to every condition of Norman ornament are self

evident. I do not say that all of them arose from development of the

dogtooth in this manner, many being quite independent inventions and

uses of zigzag lines; still, they may all be referred to this simple

type as their root and representative, that is to say, the mere hack of

the Venetian gunwale, with a limiting line following the resultant

zigzag.

§ IX. Fig. 11 is a singular and much more artificial condition, cast in

brick, from the church of the Frari, and given here only for future

reference. Fig. 12, resulting from a fillet with the cuts on each of its

edges interrupted by a bar, is a frequent Venetian moulding, and of

great value; but the plain or leaved dogteeth have been the favorites,

and that to such a degree, that even the Renaissance architects took

them up; and the best bit of Renaissance design in Venice, the side of

the Ducal Palace next the Bridge of Sighs, owes great part of its

splendor to its foundation, faced with large flat dogteeth, each about a

foot wide in the base, with their points truncated, and alternating with

cavities which are their own negatives or casts.

§ X. One other form of the dogtooth is of great importance in northern

architecture, that produced by oblique cuts slightly curved, as in the

margin, Fig. LVI. It is susceptible of the most fantastic and endless

decoration; each of the resulting leaves being, in the early porches of

Rouen and Lisieux, hollowed out and worked into branching tracery: and

at Bourges, for distant effect, worked into plain leaves, or bold bony

processes with knobs at the points, and near the spectator, into

crouching demons and broad winged owls, and other fancies and

intricacies, innumerable and inexpressible.

[Illustration: Fig. LVI.]

§ XI. Thus much is enough to be noted respecting edge decoration. We

were next to consider the fillet. Professor Willis has noticed an

ornament, which he has called the Venetian dentil, "as the most

universal ornament in its own district that ever I met with;" but has

not noticed the reason for its frequency. It is nevertheless highly

interesting.

The whole early architecture of Venice is architecture of incrustation:

this has not been enough noticed in its peculiar relation to that of the

rest of Italy. There is, indeed, much incrusted architecture throughout

Italy, in elaborate ecclesiastical work, but there is more which is

frankly of brick, or thoroughly of stone. But the Venetian habitually

incrusted his work with nacre; he built his houses, even the meanest, as

if he had been a shell-fish,--roughly inside, mother-of-pearl on the

surface: he was content, perforce, to gather the clay of the Brenta

banks, and bake it into brick for his substance of wall; but he overlaid

it with the wealth of ocean, with the most precious foreign marbles. You

might fancy early Venice one wilderness of brick, which a petrifying sea

had beaten upon till it coated it with marble: at first a dark

city--washed white by the sea foam. And I told you before that it was

also a city of shafts and arches, and that its dwellings were raised

upon continuous arcades, among which the sea waves wandered. Hence the

thoughts of its builders were early and constantly directed to the

incrustation of arches.

[Illustration: Fig. LVII.]

§ XII. In Fig. LVII. I have given two of these Byzantine stilted arches:

the one on the right, _a_, as they now too often appear, in its bare

brickwork; that on the left, with its alabaster covering, literally

marble defensive armor, riveted together in pieces, which follow the

contours of the building. Now, on the wall, these pieces are mere flat

slabs cut to the arch outline; but under the soffit of the arch the

marble mail is curved, often cut singularly thin, like bent tiles, and

fitted together so that the pieces would sustain each other even without

rivets. It is of course desirable that this thin sub-arch of marble

should project enough to sustain the facing of the wall; and the reader

will see, in Fig. LVII., that its edge forms a kind of narrow band round

the arch (_b_), a band which the least enrichment would render a

valuable decorative feature. Now this band is, of course, if the

soffit-pieces project a little beyond the face of the wall-pieces, a

mere fillet, like the wooden gunwale in Plate IX.; and the question is,

how to enrich it most wisely. It might easily have been dogtoothed, but

the Byzantine architects had not invented the dogtooth, and would not

have used it here, if they had; for the dogtooth cannot be employed

alone, especially on so principal an angle as this of the main arches,

without giving to the whole building a peculiar look, which I can not

otherwise describe than as being to the eye, exactly what untempered

acid is to the tongue. The mere dogtooth is an _acid_ moulding, and can

only be used in certain mingling with others, to give them piquancy;

never alone. What, then, will be the next easiest method of giving

interest to the fillet?

[Illustration: Fig. LVIII.]

§ XIII. Simply to make the incisions square instead of sharp, and to

leave equal intervals of the square edge between them. Fig. LVIII. is

one of the curved pieces of arch armor, with its edge thus treated; one

side only being done at the bottom, to show the simplicity and ease of

the work. This ornament gives force and interest to the edge of the

arch, without in the least diminishing its quietness. Nothing was ever,

nor could be ever invented, fitter for its purpose, or more easily cut.

From the arch it therefore found its way into every position where the

edge of a piece of stone projected, and became, from its constancy of

occurrence in the latest Gothic as well as the earliest Byzantine, most

truly deserving of the name of the "Venetian Dentil." Its complete

intention is now, however, only to be seen in the pictures of Gentile

Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio; for, like most of the rest of the

mouldings of Venetian buildings, it was always either gilded or

painted--often both, gold being laid on the faces of the dentils, and

their recesses colored alternately red and blue.

§ XIV. Observe, however, that the reason above given for the

_universality_ of this ornament was by no means the reason of its

_invention_. The Venetian dentil is a particular application (consequent

on the incrusted character of Venetian architecture) of the general idea

of dentil, which had been originally given by the Greeks, and realised

both by them and by the Byzantines in many laborious forms, long before

there was need of them for arch armor; and the lower half of Plate IX.

will give some idea of the conditions which occur in the Romanesque of

Venice, distinctly derived from the classical dentil; and of the gradual

transition to the more convenient and simple type, the running-hand

dentil, which afterwards became the characteristic of Venetian Gothic.

No. 13[76] is the common dentiled cornice, which occurs repeatedly in

St. Mark's; and, as late as the thirteenth century, a reduplication of

it, forming the abaci of the capitals of the Piazzetta shafts. Fig. 15

is perhaps an earlier type; perhaps only one of more careless

workmanship, from a Byzantine ruin in the Rio di Ca' Foscari: and it is

interesting to compare it with fig. 14 from the Cathedral of Vienne, in

South France. Fig. 17, from St. Mark's, and 18, from the apse of Murano,

are two very early examples in which the future true Venetian dentil is

already developed in method of execution, though the object is still

only to imitate the classical one; and a rude imitation of the bead is

joined with it in fig. 17. No. 16 indicates two examples of experimental

forms: the uppermost from the tomb of Mastino della Scala, at Verona;

the lower from a door in Venice, I believe, of the thirteenth century:

19 is a more frequent arrangement, chiefly found in cast brick, and

connecting the dentils with the dogteeth: 20 is a form introduced richly

in the later Gothic, but of rare occurrence until the latter half of the

thirteenth century. I shall call it the _gabled_ dentil. It is found in

the greatest profusion in sepulchral Gothic, associated with several

slight variations from the usual dentil type, of which No. 21, from the

tomb of Pietro Cornaro, may serve as an example.

§ XV. All the forms given in Plate IX. are of not unfrequent occurrence:

varying much in size and depth, according to the expression of the work

in which they occur; generally increasing in size in late work (the

earliest dentils are seldom more than an inch or an inch and a half

long: the fully developed dentil of the later Gothic is often as much as

four or five in length, by one and a half in breadth); but they are all

somewhat rare, compared to the true or armor dentil, above described. On

the other hand, there are one or two unique conditions, which will be

noted in the buildings where they occur.[77] The Ducal Palace furnishes

three anomalies in the arch, dogtooth, and dentil: it has a hyperbolic

arch, as noted above, Chap. X., § XV.; it has a double-fanged dogtooth

in the rings of the spiral shafts on its angles; and, finally, it has a

dentil with concave sides, of which the section and two of the blocks,

real size, are given in Plate XIV. The labor of obtaining this difficult

profile has, however, been thrown away; for the effect of the dentil at

ten feet distance is exactly the same as that of the usual form: and the

reader may consider the dogtooth and dentil in that plate as fairly

representing the common use of them in the Venetian Gothic.

§ XVI. I am aware of no other form of fillet decoration requiring

notice: in the Northern Gothic, the fillet is employed chiefly to give

severity or flatness to mouldings supposed to be too much rounded, and

is therefore generally plain. It is itself an ugly moulding, and, when

thus employed, is merely a foil for others, of which, however, it at

last usurped the place, and became one of the most painful features in

the debased Gothic both of Italy and the North.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] I do not here speak of artistical merits, but the play of the

light among the lower shafts is also singularly beautiful in this

sketch of Prout's, and the character of the wild and broken leaves,

half dead, on the stone of the foreground.

[75] Vide the "Seven Lamps," p. 122.

[76] The sections of all the mouldings are given on the right of

each; the part which is constantly solid being shaded, and that

which is cut into dentils left.

[77] As, however, we shall not probably be led either to Bergamo or

Bologna, I may mention here a curiously rich use of the dentil,

entirely covering the foliation and tracery of a niche on the

outside of the duomo of Bergamo; and a roll, entirely incrusted, as

the handle of a mace often is with nails, with massy dogteeth or

nail-heads, on the door of the Pepoli palace of Bologna.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE ROLL AND RECESS.

§ I. I have classed these two means of architectural effect together,

because the one is in most cases the negative of the other, and is used

to relieve it exactly as shadow relieves light; recess alternating with

roll, not only in lateral, but in successive order; not merely side by

side with each other, but interrupted the one by the other in their own

lines. A recess itself has properly no decoration; but its depth gives

value to the decoration which flanks, encloses, or interrupts it, and

the form which interrupts it best is the roll.

§ II. I use the word roll generally for any mouldings which present to

the eye somewhat the appearance of being cylindrical, and look like

round rods. When upright, they are in appearance, if not in fact, small

shafts; and are a kind of bent shaft, even when used in archivolts and

traceries;--when horizontal, they confuse themselves with cornices, and

are, in fact, generally to be considered as the best means of drawing an

architectural line in any direction, the soft curve of their side

obtaining some shadow at nearly all times of the day, and that more

tender and grateful to the eye than can be obtained either by an

incision or by any other form of projection.

§ III. Their decorative power is, however, too slight for rich work, and

they frequently require, like the angle and the fillet, to be rendered

interesting by subdivision or minor ornament of their own. When the roll

is small, this is effected, exactly as in the case of the fillet, by

cutting pieces out of it; giving in the simplest results what is called

the Norman billet moulding: and when the cuts are given in couples, and

the pieces rounded into spheres and almonds, we have the ordinary Greek

bead, both of them too well known to require illustration. The Norman

billet we shall not meet with in Venice; the bead constantly occurs in

Byzantine, and of course in Renaissance work. In Plate IX., Fig. 17,

there is a remarkable example of its early treatment, where the cuts in

it are left sharp.

§ IV. But the roll, if it be of any size, deserves better treatment. Its

rounded surface is too beautiful to be cut away in notches; and it is

rather to be covered with flat chasing or inlaid patterns. Thus

ornamented, it gradually blends itself with the true shaft, both in the

Romanesque work of the North, and in the Italian connected schools; and

the patterns used for it are those used for shaft decoration in general.

§ V. But, as alternating with the recess, it has a decoration peculiar

to itself. We have often, in the preceding chapters, noted the fondness

of the Northern builders for deep shade and hollowness in their

mouldings; and in the second chapter of the "Seven Lamps," the changes

are described which reduced the massive roll mouldings of the early

Gothic to a series of recesses, separated by bars of light. The shape of

these recesses is at present a matter of no importance to us: it was,

indeed, endlessly varied; but needlessly, for the value of a recess is

in its darkness, and its darkness disguises its form. But it was not in

mere wanton indulgence of their love of shade that the Flamboyant

builders deepened the furrows of their mouldings: they had found a means

of decorating those furrows as rich as it was expressive, and the entire

frame-work of their architecture was designed with a view to the effect

of this decoration; where the ornament ceases, the frame-work is meagre

and mean: but the ornament is, in the best examples of the style,

unceasing.

§ VI. It is, in fact, an ornament formed by the ghosts or anatomies of

the old shafts, left in the furrows which had taken their place. Every

here and there, a fragment of a roll or shaft is left in the recess or

furrow: a billet-moulding on a huge scale, but a billet-moulding reduced

to a skeleton; for the fragments of roll are cut hollow, and worked into

mere entanglement of stony fibres, with the gloom of the recess shown

through them. These ghost rolls, forming sometimes pedestals, sometimes

canopies, sometimes covering the whole recess with an arch of tracery,

beneath which it runs like a tunnel, are the peculiar decorations of the

Flamboyant Gothic.

§ VII. Now observe, in all kinds of decoration, we must keep carefully

under separate heads, the consideration of the changes wrought in the

mere physical form, and in the intellectual purpose of ornament. The

relations of the canopy to the statue it shelters, are to be considered

altogether distinctly from those of the canopy to the building which it

decorates. In its earliest conditions the canopy is partly confused with

representations of miniature architecture: it is sometimes a small

temple or gateway, sometimes a honorary addition to the pomp of a saint,

a covering to his throne, or to his shrine; and this canopy is often

expressed in bas-relief (as in painting), without much reference to the

great requirements of the building. At other times it is a real

protection to the statue, and is enlarged into a complete pinnacle,

carried on proper shafts, and boldly roofed. But in the late northern

system the canopies are neither expressive nor protective. They are a

kind of stone lace-work, required for the ornamentation of the building,

for which the statues are often little more than an excuse, and of which

the physical character is, as above described, that of ghosts of

departed shafts.

§ VIII. There is, of course, much rich tabernacle work which will not

come literally under this head, much which is straggling or flat in its

plan, connecting itself gradually with the ordinary forms of independent

shrines and tombs; but the general idea of all tabernacle work is marked

in the common phrase of a "niche," that is to say a hollow intended for

a statue, and crowned by a canopy; and this niche decoration only

reaches its full development when the Flamboyant hollows are cut

deepest, and when the manner and spirit of sculpture had so much lost

their purity and intensity that it became desirable to draw the eye away

from the statue to its covering, so that at last the canopy became the

more important of the two, and is itself so beautiful that we are often

contented with architecture from which profanity has struck the statues,

if only the canopies are left; and consequently, in our modern

ingenuity, even set up canopies where we have no intention of setting

statues.

§ IX. It is a pity that thus we have no really noble example of the

effect of the statue in the recesses of architecture: for the Flamboyant

recess was not so much a preparation for it as a gulf which swallowed it

up. When statues were most earnestly designed, they were thrust forward

in all kinds of places, often in front of the pillars, as at Amiens,

awkwardly enough, but with manly respect to the purpose of the figures.

The Flamboyant hollows yawned at their sides, the statues fell back into

them, and nearly disappeared, and a flash of flame in the shape of a

canopy rose as they expired.

§ X. I do not feel myself capable at present of speaking with perfect

justice of this niche ornament of the north, my late studies in Italy

having somewhat destroyed my sympathies with it. But I once loved it

intensely, and will not say anything to depreciate it now, save only

this, that while I have studied long at Abbeville, without in the least

finding that it made me care less for Verona, I never remained long in

Verona without feeling some doubt of the nobility of Abbeville.

§ XI. Recess decoration by leaf mouldings is constantly and beautifully

associated in the north with niche decoration, but requires no special

notice, the recess in such cases being used merely to give value to the

leafage by its gloom, and the difference between such conditions and

those of the south being merely that in the one the leaves are laid

across a hollow, and in the other over a solid surface; but in neither

of the schools exclusively so, each in some degree intermingling the

method of the other.

§ XII. Finally the recess decoration by the ball flower is very definite

and characteristic, found, I believe, chiefly in English work. It

consists merely in leaving a small boss or sphere, fixed, as it were, at

intervals in the hollows; such bosses being afterwards carved into

roses, or other ornamental forms, and sometimes lifted quite up out of

the hollow, on projecting processes, like vertebræ, so as to make them

more conspicuous, as throughout the decoration of the cathedral of

Bourges.

The value of this ornament is chiefly in the _spotted_ character which

it gives to the lines of mouldings seen from a distance. It is very rich

and delightful when not used in excess; but it would satiate and weary

the eye if it were ever used in general architecture. The spire of

Salisbury, and of St. Mary's at Oxford, are agreeable as isolated

masses; but if an entire street were built with this spotty decoration

at every casement, we could not traverse it to the end without disgust.

It is only another example of the constant aim at piquancy of effect

which characterised the northern builders; an ingenious but somewhat

vulgar effort to give interest to their grey masses of coarse stone,

without overtaking their powers either of invention or execution. We

will thank them for it without blame or praise, and pass on.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE BASE.