I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 33

Renaissance, in being on a very large scale; and it still retains one pure Gothic character, which adds not a little to its nobleness, that of perpetual variety. There is hardly one window of it, or one panel, that is like another; and this continual change so increases its apparent size by confusing

group of regularly designed parts, but one mighty wall, variously pierced and panelled, and its divisions are so irregular, so small and so multitudinous in proportion to its mass, that it is utterly impossible to contemplate it as divided, and very nearly impossible either to analyse or describe the method of its division. The eye is led from one part to another, or rather receives all at once; and it requires considerable effort to fix the mind on any separate part of it, or find the key to anything like an intelligible symmetry among the perpetual varieties of its composition. At last, however, one begins to perceive that it is in reality divided into four stories, each with entablatures, but grouped two and two; the second and fourth having bold projecting bracket cornices; while the water story and third story have only richly moulded cornices without brackets, but the cornice course of the third story is bolder than that of the first, and the bracket cornice of the fourth-the true roof cornice-is still more markedly bolder than the bracket cornice of the second, so that the energy or value of the respective cornices is to the eye in alternating proportion, approximating to some such ratio as this--5:7:: 6:9.

“The frieze of the entablatures is quite plain in the water and third stories, but in the first story it has a course of porphyry medallions.

“The panels ... [of the lower courses] are square ... the word suggests the idea of them most clearly to the mind of the general reader. But none of them are accurately square. The barred windows are three or four inches higher than they are broad ...; the plain panels are never three the same, varying from broad oblongs to narrow uprights, with every conceivable difference of intermediate size, and all irregularly disposed, so that it would take two or three days’ work to measure and draw them accurately to scale, the crosses in the upper course extending or contracting themselves according to the variable size of the panels of the upper course their crosses where they should come by the apparent rule, but three of these are left plain, as if by accident; neither are all the panels of the lower course pierced with windows where there should be windows by the rule, but three of them are filled up, and have got the crosses which one misses from the course above. I call them crosses, because they have exactly the effect upon the eye of crosses in low relief inserted into the recess of the panel. But the Renaissance architect had no sacred intention, the ornament is formed merely by four smaller panellings, of which the external mouldings are missed by the eye, in the depth of the recess, while the cross bars are clearly seen, and are still farther energized by small flattened bosses like nail heads at the centre and extremities....

“This series of panellings, complex and variable as it is, had been thought too monotonous to be continued along the whole length of the building. The foundation is three times broken by doorways; first ... [near] its northern extremity, by a single door ...; then ... by the four arches which form the principal water entrance of the palace, and finally, [some] feet farther on, by two arches of similar design which give entrance....

“The first small door, above mentioned, is as high in the jambs as the course of chequered pattern, round-arch headed, and flanked by pilasters

XI. C

[Version 0.04: March 2008]