DECORATION XX. MATERIAL OF ORNAMENT 277

all the materials of mediæval picturesque sculpture. By the best sculptors it is always used with this symbolic meaning, by the cinque cento sculptors as an ornament merely. The best and most natural representations of mere viper or snake are to be found interlaced among their confused groups of meaningless objects. The real power and horror of the snake-head has, however, been rarely reached. I shall give one example from Verona of the twelfth century.¹

Other less powerful reptile forms are not unfrequent. Small frogs, lizards, and snails almost always enliven the foregrounds and leafage of good sculpture. The tortoise is less usually employed in groups. Beetles are chiefly mystic and colossal. Various insects, like everything else in the world, occur in cinque cento work; grasshoppers most frequently. We shall see on the Ducal Palace at Venice an interesting use of the bee.²

§ 31. (9.) Branches and stems of Trees. I arrange these under a separate head: because, while the forms of leafage belong to all architecture, and ought to be employed in it always, those of the branch and stem belong to a peculiarly imitative and luxuriant architecture, and are only applicable at times. Pagan sculptors seem to have perceived little beauty in the stems of trees; they were little else than timber to them; and they preferred the rigid and monstrous triglyph, or the fluted column, to a broken bough or gnarled trunk. But with Christian knowledge came a peculiar regard for the forms of vegetation, from the root upwards. The actual representation of entire trees required in many Scripture subjects,-as in the most frequent of Old Testament subjects, the Fall; and again in the Drunkenness of Noah, the Garden Agony, and many others, familiarised the sculptors of bas-relief to the beauty of forms before unknown; while the symbolical name given to Christ by the Prophets, “the

¹ [The promised illustration (perhaps intended to be placed in the Examples) was not given; but for a further reference, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 69.]

² [The reference is to Capital 20 on the Ducal Palace; see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 118, and Plate 1 in Examples of Venetian Architecture.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]