132 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

giving it an exquisite spiral contour: the plan of their bases, with their plinth, is given at 2, Plate 2; and note it carefully, for it is an epitome of all that we observed above respecting the oblique and even square. It was asserted that the oblique belonged to the North, the even to the South: we have here the Northern Lombardic nation naturalised in Italy, and, behold, the oblique and even quatrefoil linked together; not confused, but actually linked by a bar of stone, as seen in Plate 17, under the capitals.

(4.) Next to these, observe the two groups of five shafts each 5 and 6, Plate 2, one oblique, the other even. Both are from upper storeys; the oblique one from the triforium of Salisbury: the even one from the upper range of shafts in the façade of St. Mark’s at Venice.*

§ 30. Around these central types are grouped, in Plate 2, four simple examples of the satellitic cluster all of the Northern Gothic; 4, from the cathedral of Amiens; 7, from that of Lyons (nave pier); 8, the same from Salisbury; 10, from the porch of Notre Dame, Dijon, having satellites of three magnitudes; 9 is one of the piers between the doors of the same church, with shafts of four magnitudes, and is an instance of the confusion of mind of the Northern architects between piers proper and jamb mouldings (noticed farther in the next chapter, § 31): for this fig. 9, which is an angle at the meeting of two jambs,

* The effect of this last is given in Plate VI. of the folio series.

are not now available.] The piece of architecture is in itself so interesting and bears so strangely on the subjects we have been inquiring into [i.e. in The Two Paths, § 171] that the reader will not find it a loss of time to pursue these details even for their own sake. The main point in the character of those two shafts is their subtlety of treatment in curvature, indicating a very highly trained and sensitive condition of mind in the designer. This is marked in nothing so much as in the reserve of curve in the twisted pillar, and that reserve is brought out in subservience to a curious idea of making one pillar literally the reverse or ‘reflection’ of the other, so that the eye shall take the kind of complemental pleasure in the reversed form which the ear does in an alternating passage of music....” Ruskin then goes on to explain his successive studies of the pillars.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]