DECORATION XX. MATERIAL OF ORNAMENT 271

unfrequent in mediĉval bas-reliefs; very curiously and elaborately treated by Ghiberti on the doors of Florence,¹ and in religious sculpture necessarily introduced wherever the life of the anchorite was to be expressed. They were rarely introduced as of ornamental character, but for particular service and expression; we shall see an interesting example in the Ducal Palace at Venice.²

§ 23. But against crystalline form, which is the completely systematised natural structure of the earth, none of these objections hold good, and, accordingly, it is an endless element of decoration, where higher conditions of structure cannot be represented. The four-sided pyramid, perhaps the most frequent of all natural crystals, is called in architecture a dog-tooth; its use is quite limitless, and always beautiful: the cube and rhomb are almost equally frequent in chequers and dentils; and all mouldings of the middle Gothic are little more than representations of the canaliculated crystals of the beryl, and such other minerals.

§ 24. Not knowingly. I do not suppose a single hint was ever actually taken from mineral form;³ not even by the Arabs in their stalactite pendants and vaults; all that I mean to allege is, that beautiful ornament, wherever found, or however invented, is always either an intentional or unintentional copy of some constant natural form; and that in this particular instance, the pleasure we have in these geometrical figures of our own invention, is dependent for all its acuteness on the natural tendency impressed on us by our Creator to love the forms into which the earth He gave us to tread, and out of which He formed our bodies, knit itself as it was separated from the deep.

§ 25. (3.) Forms of Water (Waves).

The reasons which prevent rocks from being used for

¹ [See above, p. 260 n.]

² [The reference seems to be to capital 19 (vol. ii. ch. vii. § 116), where the subject represented is the arts of sculpture and architecture, and the materials of those arts are accordingly introduced.]

³ [This qualification should be remembered in reading passages in the Seven Lamps which have sometimes been considered strained and fanciful in their connection of architectural forms with crystalline structure: see Vol. VIII. pp. 143, 145.]

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