144 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

covered with this vile concatenation of straight lines:* unless indeed it be employed as a foil to a true ornament, which it may, perhaps, sometimes with advantage; or excessively small, as it occurs on coins, the harshness of its arrangement being less perceived.

§ 5. Often in association with this horrible design we find, in Greek works, one which is as beautiful as this is painful-that egg and dart moulding,¹ whose perfection, in its place and way, has never been surpassed. And why is this? Simply because the form of which it is chiefly composed is one not only familiar to us in the soft housing of the bird’s nest, but happens to be that of nearly every pebble that rolls and murmurs under the surf of the sea, on all its endless shore. And that with a peculiar² accuracy; for the mass which bears the light in this moulding is not in good Greek work, as in the frieze of the Erechtheum, merely of the shape of an egg. It is flattened on the upper surface, with a delicacy and keen sense of variety in the curve which it is impossible too highly to praise, attaining exactly that flattened, imperfect oval, which, in nine cases out of ten, will be the form of the pebble lifted at random from the rolled beach. Leave out this flatness, and the moulding is vulgar instantly. It is singular also that the insertion of this rounded form in the hollowed recess has a painted type in the plumage of the Argus pheasant,³ the eyes of whose feathers are so shaded as exactly to represent an oval form placed in a hollow.

§ 6. It will evidently follow, upon our application of this test of natural resemblance, that we shall at once conclude

* All this is true; but I had not enough observed when I wrote, the use of the Greek fret in contrast to curved forms; as especially on vases, and in the borders of drapery itself. The use of it large, as on the base of Sanmicheli’s otherwise very noble design of the Casa Grimani,4 is always a sign of failing instinct for beauty. [1880.]

¹ [For this pattern, see E. T. Cook’s Handbook to the ... British Museum, 1903, p. 197.]

² [The MS. has “peculiar, and, I grieve to say, usually unfollowed, accuracy.”]

³ [A genus of pheasants, natives of Asia, of which one species (A. giganteus) is as large as a turkey.]

⁴ [For this palace, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 1.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]