106 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

have to express and apply a principle, which I believe the reader will at once grant,-that features necessary to express security to the imagination are often as essential parts of good architecture as those required for security itself. It was said that the wall base was the foot or paw of the wall.¹ Exactly in the same way, and with clearer analogy, the pier base is the foot or paw of the pier. Let us, then, take a hint from nature. A foot has two offices, to bear up, and to hold firm. As far as it has to bear up, it is uncloven, with slight projection,-look at an elephant’s (the Doric base of animality);* but as far as it has to hold firm, it is divided and clawed, with wide projections,-look at an eagle’s.

§ 10. Now observe. In proportion to the massiness of the column, we require its foot to express merely the power of bearing up; in fact, it can do without a foot, like the Squire in Chevy Chase,² if the ground only be hard enough. But if the column be slender, and look as if it might lose its balance, we require it to look as if it had hold of the ground, or the ground hold of it, it does not matter which,-some expression of claw, prop, or socket.³ Now let us go back to Fig. 11, and take up one of the bases there, in the state in which we left it. We may leave out the two lower steps (with which we have nothing more to do, as they have become the united floor or foundation of the whole), and, for the sake of greater clearness, I shall not draw the bricks in the shaft, nor the flat stone which carries them, though the reader is to suppose them remaining as drawn in Fig. 11; but I shall only draw the shaft and its two essential members of base, X b and Y b, as explained at p. 93: and now, expressing the rounding of these members on a somewhat larger scale, we have the profile

* Appendix 17: “Answer to Mr. Garbett” [p. 450].

¹ [Ch. iv. § 3, p. 80.]

² [“For Wetharryngton my heart was wo,

That ever he slayne shulde be;

For when both his leggis were hewyan in to,

He knyled and fought on hys knee.”]

³ [Ruskin did not, it may be observed, extend this principle to furniture: see below, ch. xx. § 32, p. 279, and compare Seven Lamps, ch. i. (Vol. VIII. p. 38 n.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]