230 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

the ends off the uppermost, and the fourth into three pieces (as also at A). In the fourth place, you found (§ 9) that you were never to run a vertical bar into the arch head; so you run them all into it (as at B, Fig. 46): and this last arrangement will be useful in two ways, for it will not only expose both the bars and the archivolt to an apparent probability of every species of dislocation at any moment, but it will provide you with two pleasing interstices at the flanks, in the shape of carving knives, a, b, which, by throwing

across the curves c, d, you may easily multiply into four; and these, as you can put nothing into their sharp tops, will afford you a more than usually rational excuse for a little bit of Germanism, in filling them with arches upside down, e, f. You will now have left at your disposal two and forty similar interstices, which, for the sake of variety, you will proceed to fill with two and forty similar arches: and, as you were told that the moment a bar received an arch heading, it was to be treated as a shaft and capitalled, you will take care to give your bars no capitals nor bases, but to run bars, foliations and all, well into each other,

[Version 0.04: March 2008]