274 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

understood symbolical language; the undulatory lines are often valuable as an enrichment of surface, but are rarely of any studied gracefulness. One of the best examples I know of their expressive arrangement is around some figures in a spandril at Bourges, representing figures sinking in deep sea (the deluge): the waved lines yield beneath the bodies and wildly lave the edge of the moulding, two birds, as if to mark the reverse of all order of nature, lowest of all sunk in the depth of them. In later times of debasement, water began to be represented with its waves, foam, etc., as on the Vendramin tomb at Venice, above cited;¹ but even there, without any definite ornamental purpose, the sculptor meant partly to explain a story, partly to display dexterity of chiselling, but not to produce beautiful forms, pleasant to the eye. The imitation is vapid and joyless, and it has often been matter of surprise to me that sculptors, so fond of exhibiting their skill, should have suffered this imitation to fall so short, and remain so cold,-should not have taken more pains to curl the waves clearly, to edge them sharply, and to express, by drillholes or other artifices, the character of foam. I think in one of the Antwerp churches something of this kind is done in wood, but in general it is rare.

§ 26. (4.) Forms of Fire (Flames and Rays). If neither the sea nor the rock can be imaged, still less the devouring fire. It has been symbolised by radiation both in painting and sculpture, for the most part in the latter very unsuccessfully. It was suggested to me, not long ago,* that the zigzag decorations of Norman architects were typical of light springing from the half-set orb of the sun; the resemblance to the ordinary sun type is indeed remarkable, but I believe accidental.² I shall give, in my large plates,³ two curious instances

* By the friend to whom I owe Appendix 21. [Sir Charles Newton.]

¹ [See ch. i. § 42, p. 49.]

² [See further on this subject note to ch. xxiii. § 8, p. 322, below; and cf. ch. xxviii. § 14, p. 395.]

³ [The reference is to Plates 12 and 13 in the Examples of the Architecture of Venice (Vol. XI.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]