6 THE STONES OF VENICE

it was dissatisfied, tried to retrace its steps, fell back first upon Byzantine types, and through them passed to the first Roman. But in thus retracing its steps, it does not recover its own lost energy. It revisits the places through which it had passed in the morning light, but it is now with wearied limbs, and under the gloomy shadows of evening.

§ 6. It has just been said that the two principal causes of natural decline in any school are over-luxuriance and overrefinement. The corrupt Gothic of Venice furnishes us with a curious instance of the one, and the corrupt Byzantine of the other. We shall examine them in succession.

Now, observe, first, I do not mean by luxuriance of ornament quantity of ornament.¹ In the best Gothic in the world there is hardly an inch of stone left unsculptured. But I mean that character of extravagance in the ornament itself which shows that it was addressed to jaded faculties; a violence and coarseness in curvature, a depth of shadow, a lusciousness in arrangement of line, evidently arising out of an incapability of feeling the true beauty of chaste form and restrained power. I do not know any character of design which may be more easily recognised at a glance than this over-lusciousness; and yet it seems to me that at the present day there is nothing so little understood as the essential difference between chasteness and extravagance, whether in colour, shade, or lines. We speak loosely and inaccurately of “overcharged” ornament, with an obscure feeling that there is indeed something in visible Form which is correspondent to Intemperance in moral habits; but without any distinct detection of the character which offends us, far less with any understanding of the most important lesson which there can be no doubt was intended to be conveyed by the universality of this ornamental law.

§ 7. In a word, then, the safeguard of highest beauty, in all visible work, is exactly that which is also the safe-guard of conduct in the soul,-Temperance, in the broadest

¹ [Compare Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 52.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]