CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 149

than its root: every fork of its ramification is measured and proportioned; every wave of its languid lines is lovely. It has its allotted size, and place, and function; it is a specific creature. What is there like this in a riband? It has no structure: it is a succession of cut threads all alike; it has no skeleton, no make, no form, no size, no will of its own. You cut it and crush it into what you will. It has no strength, no languor. It cannot fall into a single graceful form. It cannot wave, in the true sense, but only flutter: it cannot bend, in the true sense, but only turn and be wrinkled. It is a vile thing; it spoils all that is near its wretched film of an existence.¹ Never use it. Let the flowers come loose if they cannot keep together without being tied; leave the sentence unwritten if you cannot write it on a tablet or book, or plain roll of paper.² I know what authority there is against me. I remember the scrolls of Perugino’s angels, and the ribands of Raphael’s arabesques and of Ghiberti’s glorious bronze flowers:³ no matter; they are every one of them vices and uglinesses. Raphael usually felt this, and used an honest and rational tablet, as in the Madonna di Foligno.⁴ I do not say there is any type of such tablets in nature, but all the difference lies in the fact that the tablet is not considered as an ornament, and the riband, or flying scroll, is. The tablet, as in Albert Dürer’s Adam and Eve,⁵ is introduced for the sake of the writing, understood and allowed as an ugly but necessary interruption. The scroll is extended as an ornamental form, which it is not, nor ever can be.*

* I had never, at this period, seen any of Sandro Botticelli’s scroll work:⁶ but even in him, its use is part of the affectations of his day,-affectation itself becoming lovely in him, without justifying it in his neighbours. [1880.]

¹ [The MS. reads: “It is a vile thing, a contemptible and abominable thing; it spoils all that is near its insipid, wretched, faded film of an existence.”]

² [The MS. adds, “which last has always an associative sublimity. I know what I am condemning. I remember...”]

³ [On the bronze doors of the Baptistery at Florence: the “gates of Paradise,” Michael Angelo called them.]

⁴ [In the Vatican Gallery, Rome: painted 1512.]

⁵ [For a further account of the tablet in this engraving, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 51.]

⁶ [Beautiful examples of it occur in “The Nativity” in the National Gallery, No. 1034.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]