CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 153

upon a wall. If you want a circular ornament, put a flat circle of coloured marble, as in the Casa Dario¹ and other such palaces at Venice; or put a star, or a medallion, or if you want a ring, put a solid one, but do not carve the images of garlands, looking as if they had been used in the last procession, and been hung up to dry and serve next time withered. Why not also carve pegs, and hats upon them?

§ 14. One of the worst enemies of modern Gothic architecture, though seemingly an unimportant feature, is an excrescence, as offensive by its poverty as the garland by its profusion, the dripstone in the shape of the handle of a chest of drawers, which is used over the square-headed windows of what we call Elizabethan buildings. In the last chapter, it will be remembered that the square form was shown to be that of pre-eminent Power,² and to be properly adapted and limited to the exhibition of space or surface. Hence, when the window is to be an exponent of power,³ as for instance in those by M. Angelo in the lower storey of the Palazzo Riccardi at Florence,⁴ the square head is the most noble form they can assume; but then either their space must be unbroken, and their associated mouldings the most severe, or else the square must be used as a final outline, and is chiefly to be associated with forms of tracery, in which the relative form of power, the circle, is predominant, as in Venetian, and Florentine, and Pisan Gothic. But if you break upon your terminal square, or if you cut its lines off at the top and turn them outwards, you have lost its unity and space.⁵ It is an including form no longer, but an added, isolated line, and the ugliest possible. Look abroad into the landscape,

¹ [See Plate 1 in Stones of Venice, vol. i.]

² [See above, p. 110.]

³ [For a passage on windows as expressive of various feelings, see The Poetry of Architecture, § 180, Vol. I. p. 137.]

⁴ [The Palace itself, begun in 1430, for Cosimo de’Medici, is from the designs of Michelozzo. The windows of the ground floor by Michael Angelo are curious as being the first example of a window-sill supported by consoles, an invention of that great architect.]

⁵ [The MS. reads: “and turn out their toes, you have lost unity and power and space.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]