CH. III THE LAMP OF POWER 125

destroyed the Gothic tracery. This change, however, we shall better comprehend after we have glanced at the chief conditions of arrangement of the second kind of mass; that which is flat, and of shadow only.

§ 18. We have noted above how the wall surface, composed of rich materials, and covered with costly work, in modes which we shall examine in the next Chapter, became a subject of peculiar interest to the Christian architects.¹ Its broad flat lights could only be made valuable by points or masses of energetic shadow, which were obtained by the Romanesque architect by means of ranges of recessed arcade, in the management of which, however, though all the effect depends upon the shadow so obtained, the eye is still, as in classical architecture, caused to dwell upon the projecting columns, capitals, and wall, as in Plate VI.² But with the enlargement of the window, which, in the Lombard and Romanesque churches, is usually little more than an arched slit, came the conception of the simpler mode of decoration,

¹ [The subject of this paragraph is further dealt with in an unpublished passage:-

“The architectural decoration of any space depends of course broadly on the introduction of shade into it, if it be light, and of light if it be shadowed. Given a space of wall to be ornamented within and without the respective necessities are both met by simple penetrations or holes, which, seen from within, are forms of light, and from without are forms of shade. These forms of shade necessary in the actual window, were taken up by the early Gothic architects as features of wall decoration: and many surfaces which it was prepared to render interesting were covered with arrangements of starry or circular forms, cut so deep into the stone as in most lights to seem a broad, if not total interior shade. Where it was possible, as in raised screens of stone, these forms were generally cut through, so as to tell as masses of vigorous dark on the light surfaces, but whether so cut or not, the design and arrangement was based on the form of the spaces so cut out, usually trefoils or quatrefoils, variously grouped and considered, and in more elaborate instances becoming wheel or star windows, the idea being always of dark and beautiful forms placed on a white ground, like clover leaves or woodroof leaves laid on paper, no attention whatever being paid to the shapes of the intermediate light surfaces. The two pediments of the west front of Bayeux (PI.-) and the door of Lisieux (Pl.-) will give a perfect idea of the system, and the proneness for shade in the latter by making the quatrefoils concave is very remarkable.”

The Bayeux illustration is not given; but that of Lisieux will be found in Pl. VII. fig. 1.]

² [With which plate, compare No. 21 in Stones of Venice, vol. i., and see in that vol., ch. xxvii. § 16.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]