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§ I. We enter now on the second division of our subject. We have no more to do with heavy stones and hard lines; we are going to be happy: to look round in the world and discover (in a serious manner always, however, and under a sense of responsibility) what we like best in it, and to enjoy the same at our leisure: to gather it, examine it, fasten all we can of it into imperishable forms, and put it where we may see it for ever.

This is to decorate architecture.

§ II. There are, therefore, three steps in the process: first, to find out in a grave manner what we like best; secondly, to put as much of this as we can (which is little enough) into form; thirdly, to put this formed abstraction into a proper place.

And we have now, therefore, to make these three inquiries in succession: first, what we like, or what is the right material of ornament; then how we are to present it, or its right treatment; then, where we are to put it, or its right place. I think I can answer that first inquiry in this Chapter, the second inquiry in the next Chapter, and the third I shall answer in a more diffusive manner, by taking up in succession the several parts of architecture above distinguished, and rapidly noting the kind of ornament fittest for each.

§ III. I said in chapter II. § XIV., that all noble ornamentation was the expression of man’s delight in God’s work. This implied that there was an ignoble ornamentation, which was the expression of man’s delight in his own. There is such a school, chiefly degraded classic and Renaissance, in which the ornament is composed of imitations of tilings made by man. I think, before inquiring what we like best of God’s work, we had better get rid of all this imitation of man’s, and be quite sure we do not like that.

§ IV. We shall rapidly glance, then, at the material of decoration hence derived. And now I cannot, as I before have done respecting construction, convince the reader of one thing being wrong, and another right. I have confessed as much again and again; I am now only to make appeal to him, and cross-question him, whether he really does like things or not. If he likes the ornament on the base of the column of the Place Vendôme, composed of Wellington boots and laced frock coats, I cannot help it; I can only say I differ from him, and don’t like it. And if, therefore, I speak dictatorially, and say this is base, or degraded, or ugly, I mean, only that I believe men of the longest experience in the matter would either think it so, or would be prevented from thinking it so only by some morbid condition of their minds; and I believe that the reader, if he examine himself candidly, will usually agree in my statements.

§ V. The subjects of ornament found in man’s work may properly fall into four heads: 1. Instruments of art, agriculture, and war; armor, and dress; 2. Drapery; 3. Shipping; 4. Architecture itself.

1. Instruments, armor, and dress.

The custom of raising trophies on pillars, and of dedicating arms in temples, appears to have first suggested the idea of employing them as the subjects of sculptural ornament: thenceforward, this abuse has been chiefly characteristic of classical architecture, whether true or Renaissance. Armor is a noble thing in its proper service and subordination to the body; so is an animal’s hide on its back; but a heap of cast skins, or of shed armor, is alike unworthy of all regard or imitation. We owe much true sublimity, and more of delightful picturesqueness, to the introduction of armor both in painting and sculpture: in poetry it is better still—Homer’s undressed Achilles is less grand than his crested and shielded Achilles, though Phidias would rather have had him naked; in all mediæval painting, arms, like all other parts of costume, are treated with exquisite care and delight; in the designs of Leonardo, Raffaelle, and Perugino, the armor sometimes becomes almost too conspicuous from the rich and endless invention bestowed upon it; while Titian and Rubens seek in its flash what the Milanese and Perugian sought in its form, sometimes subordinating heroism to the light of the steel, while the great designers wearied themselves in its elaborate fancy.

But all this labor was given to the living, not the dead armor; to the shell with its animal in it, not the cast shell of the beach; and even so, it was introduced more sparingly by the good sculptors than the good painters; for the former felt, and with justice, that the painter had the power of conquering the over prominence of costume by the expression and color of the countenance, and that by the darkness of the eye, and glow of the cheek, he could always conquer the gloom and the flash of the mail; but they could hardly, by any boldness or energy of the marble features, conquer the forwardness and conspicuousness of the sharp armorial forms. Their armed figures were therefore almost always subordinate, their principal figures draped or naked, and their choice of subject was much influenced by this feeling of necessity. But the Renaissance sculptors displayed the love of a Camilla for the mere crest and plume. Paltry and false alike in every feeling of their narrowed minds, they attached themselves, not only to costume without the person, but to the pettiest details of the costume itself. They could not describe Achilles, but they could describe his shield; a shield like those of dedicated spoil, without a handle, never to be waved in the face of war. And then we have helmets and lances, banners and swords, sometimes with men to hold them, sometimes without; but always chiselled with a tailor-like love of the chasing or the embroidery—show helmets of the stage, no Vulcan work on them, no heavy hammer strokes, no Etna fire in the metal of them, nothing but pasteboard crests and high feathers. And these, cast together in disorderly heaps, or grinning vacantly over keystones, form one of the leading decorations of Renaissance architecture, and that one of the best; for helmets and lances, however loosely laid, are better than violins, and pipes, and books of music, which were another of the Palladian and Sansovinian sources of ornament. Supported by ancient authority, the abuse soon became a matter of pride, and since it was easy to copy a heap of cast clothes, but difficult to manage an arranged design of human figures, the indolence of architects came to the aid of their affectation, until by the moderns we find the practice carried out to its most interesting results, and, as above noted, a large pair of boots occupying the principal place in the bas-reliefs on the base of the Colonne Vendôme.

§ VI. A less offensive, because singularly grotesque, example of the abuse at its height, occurs in the Hôtel des Invalides, where the dormer windows are suits of armor down to the bottom of the corselet, crowned by the helmet, and with the window in the middle of the breast.

Instruments of agriculture and the arts are of less frequent occurrence, except in hieroglyphics, and other work, where they are not employed as ornaments, but represented for the sake of accurate knowledge, or as symbols. Wherever they have purpose of this kind, they are of course perfectly right; but they are then part of the building’s conversation, not conducive to its beauty. The French have managed, with great dexterity, the representation of the machinery for the elevation of their Luxor obelisk, now sculptured on its base.

§ VII. 2. Drapery. I have already spoken of the error of introducing drapery, as such, for ornament, in the “Seven Lamps.” I may here note a curious instance of the abuse in the church of the Jesuiti at Venice (Renaissance). On first entering you suppose that the church, being in a poor quarter of the city, has been somewhat meanly decorated by heavy green and white curtains of an ordinary upholsterer’s pattern: on looking closer, they are discovered to be of marble, with the green pattern inlaid. Another remarkable instance is in a piece of not altogether unworthy architecture at Paris (Rue Rivoli), where the columns are supposed to be decorated with images of handkerchiefs tied in a stout knot round the middle of them. This shrewd invention bids fair to become a new order. Multitudes of massy curtains and various upholstery, more or less in imitation of that of the drawing-room, are carved and gilt, in wood or stone, about the altars and other theatrical portions of Romanist churches; but from these coarse and senseless vulgarities we may well turn, in all haste, to note, with respect as well as regret, one of the errors of the great school of Niccolo Pisano—an error so full of feeling as to be sometimes all but redeemed, and altogether forgiven—the sculpture, namely, of curtains around the recumbent statues upon tombs, curtains which angels are represented as withdrawing, to gaze upon the faces of those who are at rest. For some time the idea was simply and slightly expressed, and though there was always a painfulness in finding the shafts of stone, which were felt to be the real supporters of the canopy, represented as of yielding drapery, yet the beauty of the angelic figures, and the tenderness of the thought, disarmed all animadversion. But the scholars of the Pisani, as usual, caricatured when they were unable to invent; and the quiet curtained canopy became a huge marble tent, with a pole in the centre of it. Thus vulgarised, the idea itself soon disappeared, to make room for urns, torches, and weepers, and the other modern paraphernalia of the churchyard.

§ VIII. 3. Shipping. I have allowed this kind of subject to form a separate head, owing to the importance of rostra in Roman decoration, and to the continual occurrence of naval subjects in modern monumental bas-relief. Mr. Fergusson says, somewhat doubtfully, that he perceives a “kind of beauty” in a ship: I say, without any manner of doubt, that a ship is one of the loveliest things man ever made, and one of the noblest; nor do I know any lines, out of divine work, so lovely as those of the head of a ship, or even as the sweep of the timbers of a small boat, not a race boat, a mere floating chisel, but a broad, strong, sea boat, able to breast a wave and break it: and yet, with all this beauty, ships cannot be made subjects of sculpture. No one pauses in particular delight beneath the pediments of the Admiralty; nor does scenery of shipping ever become prominent in bas-relief without destroying it: witness the base of the Nelson pillar. It may be, and must be sometimes, introduced in severe subordination to the figure subject, but just enough to indicate the scene; sketched in the lightest lines on the background; never with any attempt at realisation, never with any equality to the force of the figures, unless the whole purpose of the subject be picturesque. I shall explain this exception presently, in speaking of imitative architecture.

§ IX. There is one piece of a ship’s fittings, however, which may be thought to have obtained acceptance as a constant element of architectural ornament—the cable: it is not, however, the cable itself, but its abstract form, a group of twisted lines (which a cable only exhibits in common with many natural objects), which is indeed beautiful as an ornament. Make the resemblance complete, give to the stone the threads and character of the cable, and you may, perhaps, regard the sculpture with curiosity, but never more with admiration. Consider the effect of the base of the statue of King William IV. at the end of London Bridge.

§ X. 4. Architecture itself. The erroneous use of armor, or dress, or instruments, or shipping, as decorative subject, is almost exclusively confined to bad architecture—Roman or Renaissance. But the false use of architecture itself, as an ornament of architecture, is conspicuous even in the mediæval work of the best times, and is a grievous fault in some of its noblest examples.

It is, therefore, of great importance to note exactly at what point this abuse begins, and in what it consists.

§ XI. In all bas-relief, architecture may be introduced as an explanation of the scene in which the figures act; but with more or less prominence in the inverse ratio of the importance of the figures.

The metaphysical reason of this is, that where the figures are of great value and beauty, the mind is supposed to be engaged wholly with them; and it is an impertinence to disturb its contemplation of them by any minor features whatever. As the figures become of less value, and are regarded with less intensity, accessory subjects may be introduced, such as the thoughts may have leisure for.

Thus, if the figures be as large as life, and complete statues, it is gross vulgarity to carve a temple above them, or distribute them over sculptured rocks, or lead them up steps into pyramids: I need hardly instance Canova’s works,63 and the Dutch pulpit groups, with fishermen, boats, and nets, in the midst of church naves.

If the figures be in bas-relief, though as large as life, the scene may be explained by lightly traced outlines: this is admirably done in the Ninevite marbles.

If the figures be in bas-relief, or even alto-relievo, but less than life, and if their purpose is rather to enrich a space and produce picturesque shadows, than to draw the thoughts entirely to themselves, the scenery in which they act may become prominent. The most exquisite examples of this treatment are the gates of Ghiberti. What would that Madonna of the Annunciation be, without the little shrine into which she shrinks back? But all mediæval work is full of delightful examples of the same kind of treatment: the gates of hell and of paradise are important pieces, both of explanation and effect, in all early representations of the last judgment, or of the descent into Hades. The keys of St. Peter, and the crushing flat of the devil under his own door, when it is beaten in, would hardly be understood without the respective gate-ways above. The best of all the later capitals of the Ducal Palace of Venice depends for great part of its value on the richness of a small campanile, which is pointed to proudly by a small emperor in a turned-up hat, who, the legend informs us, is “Numa Pompilio, imperador, edifichador di tempi e chiese.”

§ XII. Shipping may be introduced, or rich fancy of vestments, crowns, and ornaments, exactly on the same conditions as architecture; and if the reader will look back to my definition of the picturesque in the “Seven Lamps,” he will see why I said, above, that they might only be prominent when the purpose of the subject was partly picturesque; that is to say, when the mind is intended to derive part of its enjoyment from the parasitical qualities and accidents of the thing, not from the heart of the thing itself.

And thus, while we must regret the flapping sails in the death of Nelson in Trafalgar Square, we may yet most heartily enjoy the sculpture of a storm in one of the bas-reliefs of the tomb of St. Pietro Martire in the church of St. Eustorgio at Milan, where the grouping of the figures is most fancifully complicated by the undercut cordage of the vessel.

§ XIII. In all these instances, however, observe that the permission to represent the human work as an ornament, is conditional on its being necessary to the representation of a scene, or explanation of an action. On no terms whatever could any such subject be independently admissible.

Observe, therefore, the use of manufacture as ornament is—

1. With heroic figure sculpture, not admissible at all.

2. With picturesque figure sculpture, admissible in the degree of its picturesqueness.

3. Without figure sculpture, not admissible at all.

So also in painting: Michael Angelo, in the Sistine Chapel, would not have willingly painted a dress of figured damask or of watered satin; his was heroic painting, not admitting accessories.

Tintoret, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, and Vandyck, would be very sorry to part with their figured stuffs and lustrous silks; and sorry, observe, exactly in the degree of their picturesque feeling. Should not we also be sorry to have Bishop Ambrose without his vest, in that picture of the National Gallery?

But I think Vandyck would not have liked, on the other hand, the vest without the bishop. I much doubt if Titian or Veronese would have enjoyed going into Waterloo House, and making studies of dresses upon the counter.

§ XIV. So, therefore, finally, neither architecture nor any other human work is admissible as an ornament, except in subordination to figure subject. And this law is grossly and painfully violated by those curious examples of Gothic, both early and late, in the north, (but late, I think, exclusively, in Italy,) in which the minor features of the architecture were composed of small models of the larger: examples which led the way to a series of abuses materially affecting the life, strength, and nobleness of the Northern Gothic—abuses which no Ninevite, nor Egyptian, nor Greek, nor Byzantine, nor Italian of the earlier ages would have endured for an instant, and which strike me with renewed surprise whenever I pass beneath a portal of thirteenth century Northern Gothic, associated as they are with manifestations of exquisite feeling and power in other directions. The porches of Bourges, Amiens, Notre Dame of Paris, and Notre Dame of Dijon, may be noted as conspicuous in error: small models of feudal towers with diminutive windows and battlements, of cathedral spires with scaly pinnacles, mixed with temple pediments and nondescript edifices of every kind, are crowded together over the recess of the niche into a confused fool’s cap for the saint below. Italian Gothic is almost entirely free from the taint of this barbarism until the Renaissance period, when it becomes rampant in the cathedral of Como and Certosa of Pavia; and at Venice we find the Renaissance churches decorated with models of fortifications like those in the Repository at Woolwich, or inlaid with mock arcades in pseudo-perspective, copied from gardeners’ paintings at the ends of conservatories.

§ XV. I conclude, then, with the reader’s leave, that all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work, that it is utterly base—painful to every rightly-toned mind, without perhaps immediate sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we do think of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our own wretched doings, when we might have been looking at God’s doings. And all noble ornament is the exact reverse of this. It is the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.

§ XVI. For observe, the function of ornament is to make you happy. Now in what are you rightly happy? Not in thinking of what you have done yourself; not in your own pride, not your own birth; not in your own being, or your own will, but in looking at God; watching what He does, what He is; and obeying His law, and yielding yourself to His will.

You are to be made happy by ornaments; therefore they must be the expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings of your own grandeur; not heraldries; not king’s arms, nor any creature’s arms, but God’s arm, seen in His work. Not manifestation of your delight in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own inventions; but in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;—not Composite laws, nor Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the Ten Commandments.

§ XVII. Then the proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and organic forms. We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds; and, however absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is one so grand and simple for arrangements of external appearances, that I shall here follow it; noticing first, after abstract lines, the imitable forms of the four elements, of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, and then those of animal organisms. It may be convenient to the reader to have the order stated in a clear succession at first, thus:—

1. Abstract lines.

2. Forms of Earth (Crystals).

3. Forms of Water (Waves).

4. Forms of Fire (Flames and Rays).

5. Forms of Air (Clouds).

6. (Organic forms.) Shells.

7. Fish.

8. Reptiles and insects.

9. Vegetation (A.) Stems and Trunks.

10. Vegetation (B.) Foliage.

11. Birds.

12. Mammalian animals and Man.

It may be objected that clouds are a form of moisture, not of air. They are, however, a perfect expression of aërial states and currents, and may sufficiently well stand for the element they move in. And I have put vegetation apparently somewhat out of its place, owing to its vast importance as a means of decoration, and its constant association with birds and men.

§ XVIII. 1. Abstract lines. I have not with lines named also shades and colors, for this evident reason, that there are no such things as abstract shadows, irrespective of the forms which exhibit them, and distinguished in their own nature from each other; and that the arrangement of shadows, in greater or less quantity, or in certain harmonical successions, is an affair of treatment, not of selection. And when we use abstract colors, we are in fact using a part of nature herself—using a quality of her light, correspondent with that of the air, to carry sound; and the arrangement of color in harmonious masses is again a matter of treatment, not selection. Yet even in this separate art of coloring, as referred to architecture, it is very notable that the best tints are always those of natural stones. These can hardly be wrong; I think I never yet saw an offensive introduction of the natural colors of marble and precious stones, unless in small mosaics, and in one or two glaring instances of the resolute determination to produce something ugly at any cost. On the other hand, I have most assuredly never yet seen a painted building, ancient or modern, which seemed to me quite right.

§ XIX. Our first constituents of ornament will therefore be abstract lines, that is to say, the most frequent contours of natural objects, transferred to architectural forms when it is not right or possible to render such forms distinctly imitative. For instance, the line or curve of the edge of a leaf may be accurately given to the edge of a stone, without rendering the stone in the least like a leaf, or suggestive of a leaf; and this the more fully, because the lines of nature are alike in all her works; simpler or richer in combination, but the same in character; and when they are taken out of their combinations it is impossible to say from which of her works they have been borrowed, their universal property being that of ever-varying curvature in the most subtle and subdued transitions, with peculiar expressions of motion, elasticity, or dependence, which I have already insisted upon at some length in the chapters on typical beauty in “Modern Painters.” But, that the reader may here be able to compare them for himself as deduced from different sources, I have drawn, as accurately as I can, on the opposite plate, some ten or eleven lines from natural forms of very different substances and scale: the first, a b, is in the original, I think, the most beautiful simple curve I have ever seen in my life; it is a curve about three quarters of a mile long, formed by the surface of a small glacier of the second order, on a spur of the Aiguille de Blaitière (Chamouni). I have merely outlined the crags on the right of it, to show their sympathy and united action with the curve of the glacier, which is of course entirely dependent on their opposition to its descent; softened, however, into unity by the snow, which rarely melts on this high glacier surface.

The line d c is some mile and a half or two miles long; it is part of the flank of the chain of the Dent d’Oche above the lake of Geneva, one or two of the lines of the higher and more distant ranges being given in combination with it.

VII.

ABSTRACT LINES.

h is a line about four feet long, a branch of spruce fir. I have taken this tree because it is commonly supposed to be stiff and ungraceful; its outer sprays are, however, more noble in their sweep than almost any that I know: but this fragment is seen at great disadvantage, because placed upside down, in order that the reader may compare its curvatures with c d, e g, and i k, which are all mountain lines; e g, about five hundred feet of the southern edge of the Matterhorn; i k, the entire slope of the Aiguille Bouchard, from its summit into the valley of Chamouni, a line some three miles long; l m is the line of the side of a willow leaf traced by laying the leaf on the paper; n o, one of the innumerable groups of curves at the lip of a paper Nautilus; p, a spiral, traced on the paper round a Serpula; q r, the leaf of the Alisma Plantago with its interior ribs, real size; s t, the side of a bay-leaf; u w, of a salvia leaf; and it is to be carefully noted that these last curves, being never intended by nature to be seen singly, are more heavy and less agreeable than any of the others which would be seen as independent lines. But all agree in their character of changeful curvature, the mountain and glacier lines only excelling the rest in delicacy and richness of transition.

§ XX. Why lines of this kind are beautiful, I endeavored to show in the “Modern Painters;” but one point, there omitted, may be mentioned here—that almost all these lines are expressive of action of force of some kind, while the circle is a line of limitation or support. In leafage they mark the forces of its growth and expansion, but some among the most beautiful of them are described by bodies variously in motion, or subjected to force; as by projectiles in the air, by the particles of water in a gentle current, by planets in motion in an orbit, by their satellites, if the actual path of the satellite in space be considered instead of its relation to the planet; by boats, or birds, turning in the water or air, by clouds in various action upon the wind, by sails in the curvatures they assume under its force, and by thousands of other objects moving or bearing force. In the Alisma leaf, q r, the lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its point. Circular curves, on the contrary, are always, I think, curves of limitation or support; that is to say, curves of perfect rest. The cylindrical curve round the stem of a plant binds its fibres together; while the ascent of the stem is in lines of various curvature: so the curve of the horizon and of the apparent heaven, of the rainbow, etc.: and though the reader might imagine that the circular orbit of any moving body, or the curve described by a sling, was a curve of motion, he should observe that the circular character is given to the curve not by the motion, but by the confinement: the circle is the consequence not of the energy of the body, but of its being forbidden to leave the centre; and whenever the whirling or circular motion can be fully impressed on it we obtain instant balance and rest with respect to the centre of the circle.

Hence the peculiar fitness of the circular curve as a sign of rest, and security of support, in arches; while the other curves, belonging especially to action, are to be used in the more active architectural features—the hand and foot (the capital and base), and in all minor ornaments; more freely in proportion to their independence of structural conditions.

§ XXI. We need not, however, hope to be able to imitate, in general work, any of the subtly combined curvatures of nature’s highest designing: on the contrary, their extreme refinement renders them unfit for coarse service or material. Lines which are lovely in the pearly film of the Nautilus shell, are lost in the grey roughness of stone; and those which are sublime in the blue of far away hills, are weak in the substance of incumbent marble. Of all the graceful lines assembled on Plate VII., we shall do well to be content with two of the simplest. We shall take one mountain line (e g) and one leaf line (u w), or rather fragments of them, for we shall perhaps not want them all. I will mark off from u w the little bit x y, and from e g the piece e f; both which appear to me likely to be serviceable: and if hereafter we need the help of any abstract lines, we will see what we can do with these only.

§ 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.

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.”