CHAPTER II

LATRATOR ANUBIS

14. I SAID¹ these pillars were the most beautiful known to me:-but you must understand this saying to be of the whole pillar-group of base, shaft, and capital-not only of their shafts.

You know so much of architecture, perhaps, as that an “order” of it is the system, connecting a shaft with its capital and cornice.² And you can surely feel so much of architecture, as that, if you took the heads off these pillars, and set the granite shaft simply upright on the pavement, they would perhaps remind you of ninepins, or rolling-pins, but would in no wise contribute either to respectful memory of the Doge Michael, or to the beauty of the Piazzetta.

Their beauty, which has been so long instinctively felt by artists, consists then first in the proportion, and then in the propriety of their several parts. Do not confuse proportion with propriety. An elephant is as properly made as a stag; but he is not so gracefully proportioned. In fine architecture, and all other fine arts, grace and propriety meet.

15. I will take the fitness first. You see that both these pillars have wide bases of successive steps.* You can feel that these would be “improper” round the pillars of an arcade in which people walked, because they would be in the way. But they are proper here, because they

* Restored,-but they always must have had them, in some such proportion.

¹ [See above, § 2, p. 207.]

² [See Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. pp. 34, 379).]

219

[Version 0.04: March 2008]