240 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

ornamental: there is true sublimity in the lines and the chiaroscuro of these masses, but it is, as regards the creature represented, parasitical and therefore picturesque.¹ In the same sense we may understand the application of the term to modern animal painting, distinguished as it has been by peculiar attention to the colours, lustre, and texture of skin; nor is it in art alone that the definition will hold. In animals themselves, when their sublimity depends upon their muscular forms or motions, or necessary and principal attributes, as perhaps more than all others in the horse, we do not call them picturesque, but consider them as peculiarly fit to be associated with pure historical subject. Exactly in proportion as their character of sublimity passes into excrescences;-into mane and beard as in the lion, into horns as in the stag, into shaggy hide as in the instance above given of the ass colt,² into variegation as in the zebra, or into plumage,-they become picturesque, and are so in art exactly in proportion to the prominence of these excrescential characters. It may be often most expedient that they should be prominent; often there is in them the highest degree of majesty, as in those of the leopard and boar; and in the hands of men like Tintoret and Rubens, such attributes become means of deepening the very highest and most ideal impressions. But the picturesque direction of their thoughts is always distinctly recognisable, as clinging to the surface, to the less essential character, and as developing out of this a sublimity different from that of the creature itself; a sublimity which is, in a sort, common to all the objects of creation, and the same in its constituent elements, whether it be sought in the clefts and folds of shaggy hair, or in the chasms and rents of rocks, or in the hanging of thickets or hill sides, or in the alternations of gaiety and gloom in the variegation of the shell, the plume, or the cloud.

§ 16. Now, to return to our immediate subject, it so happens that, in architecture, the superinduced and accidental beauty is most commonly inconsistent with the preservation

¹ [For other references to the treatment of hair in art, see Vol. IV. p. 328.]

² [See above, § 11, p. 236.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]