II. LATRATOR ANUBIS 223

Piazzetta capitals. But you will come still nearer, if you make each of these simple corner-cuts into two narrower ones, thus bringing the lower portion of your bit of cheese into a twelve-sided figure. And you will see that each of these double-cut angles now has taken more or less the shape of a leaf, with its central rib at the angle. And if, further, with such sculpturesque and graphic talent as may be in you, you scratch out the real shape of a leaf at the edge of the cuts, and run furrows from its outer lobes to the middle,-behold, you have your Piazzetta capital. All but have it, I should say; only this “all but” is nearly all the good of it, which comes of the exceeding fineness with which the simple curves are drawn, and reconciled.

20. Nevertheless, you will have learned, if sagacious in such matters, by this quarter of an hour’s carving, so much of architectural art as will enable you to discern, and to enjoy the treatment of, all the twelfth and thirteenth century capitals in Venice, which, without exception, when of native cutting, are concave bells like this, with either a springing leaf, or a bending boss of stone which would become a leaf if it were furrowed, at the angles. But the fourteenth century brings a change.

Before I tell you what took place in the fourteenth century, you must cut yourself another cube of Gruyère cheese. You see that in the one you have made a capital of already, a good weight of cheese out of the cube has been cut away in tapering down those long-leaf corners. Suppose you try now to make a capital of it without cutting away so much cheese. If you begin half-way down the side, with a shorter but more curved cut, you may reduce the base to the same form, and-supposing you are working in marble instead of cheese-you have not only much less trouble, but you keep a much more solid block of stone to bear superincumbent weight.

21. Now you may go back to the Piazzetta, and thence proceeding, so as to get well in front of the Ducal Palace, look first to the Greek shaft capitals, and then to those of

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