284 10. FINAL APPENDIX VI. TRACERIES

range of the leaves of a Byzantine capital unwrapped, and formed into a continuous line. I had prepared a large mass of materials for the illustration of these cornices, and the Gothic ones connected with them; but found the subject would take up another volume, and was forced, for the present, to abandon it.¹ The lower series of profiles, 7 to 12 in Plate 15, Vol. I., shows how the leaf-ornament is laid on the simple early cornices.

(vi.) TRACERIES

We have only one subject more to examine, the character of the early and late tracery bars.

The reader may perhaps have been surprised at the small attention given to traceries in the course of the preceding volumes: but the reason is, that there are no complicated traceries at Venice belonging to the good Gothic time, with the single exception of those of the Casa Cicogna;² and the magnificent arcades of the Ducal Palace Gothic are so simple as to require little explanation.

There are, however, two curious circumstances in the later traceries; the first, that they are universally considered by the builder (as the old Byzantines considered sculptured surfaces of stone) as material out of which a certain portion is to be cut, to fill his window. A fine Northern Gothic tracery is a complete and systematic arrangement of arches and foliation, adjusted to the form of the window; but a Venetian tracery is a piece of a larger composition, cut to the shape of the window. In the Porta della Carta, in the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, in the Casa Bernardo on the Grand Canal, in the old Church of the Misericordia, and wherever else there are rich traceries in Venice, it will always be found that a certain arrangement of quatrefoils and other figures has been planned as if it were to extend indefinitely into miles of arcade; and out of this colossal piece of marble lace, a piece in the shape of a window is cut, mercilessly and fearlessly; whatever fragments and odd shapes of interstice, remnants of this or that figure of the divided foliation, may occur at the edge of the window, it matters not; all are cut across, and shut in by the great outer archivolt.

It is very curious to find the Venetians treating what in other countries became of so great individual importance, merely as a kind of diaper ground, like that of their chequered colours on the walls. There is great grandeur in the idea, though the system of their traceries was spoilt by it: but they always treated their buildings as masses of colour rather than of line; and the great traceries of the Ducal Palace itself are not spared any more than those of the minor palaces. They are cut off at the flanks in the middle of their quatrefoils, and the terminal mouldings take up part of the breadth of the poor half of a quatrefoil at the extremity.

One other circumstance is notable also. In good Northern Gothic the tracery bars are of a constant profile, the same on both sides; and if the plan of the tracery leaves any interstices so small that there is not room for the full profile of the tracery bar all round them, those interstices are entirely closed, the tracery bars being supposed to have met each other. But in Venice, if an

¹ [This further material, again, was never published.]

² [See Vol. X. p. 309.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]