278 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

Branch,”¹ and the frequent expressions referring to this image throughout every scriptural description of conversion, gave an especial interest in the Christian mind to this portion of vegetative structure. For some time, nevertheless, the sculpture of trees was confined to bas-relief; but it at last affected even the treatment of the main shafts in Lombard Gothic buildings,-as in the western façade of Genoa, where two of the shafts are represented as gnarled trunks:² and as bas-relief itself became more boldly introduced, so did tree sculpture, until we find the writhed and knotted stems of the vine and fig used for angle shafts on the Doge’s Palace,³ and entire oaks and apple-trees forming, roots and all, the principal decorative sculptures of the Scala tombs at Verona. It was then discovered to be more easy to carve branches than leaves; and, much helped by the frequent employment in later Gothic of the “Tree of Jesse” for traceries and other purposes, the system reached full development in a perfect thicket of twigs, which form the richest portion of the decoration of the porches of Beauvais. It had now been carried to its richest extreme; men wearied of it and abandoned it, and, like all other natural and beautiful things, it was ostracised by the mob of Renaissance architects. But it is interesting to observe how the human mind, in its acceptance of this feature of ornament, proceeded from the ground, and followed as it were, the natural growth of the tree. It began with the rude and solid trunk, as at Genoa; then the branches shot out, and became loaded with leaves; autumn came, the leaves were shed, and the eye was directed to the extremities of the delicate branches;-the Renaissance frosts came, and all perished.⁴

§ 32. (10.) Foliage, Flowers, and Fruit. It is necessary

¹ [E.g., Isaiah xi. 1; Jeremiah xxiii. 5; Zechariah iii. 8.]

² [Ruskin studied the architecture of Genoa in March 1850. He notes in his diary:-

“these branched stems of the west front as one of the earliest occurrences of Gothic imitative vegetation subdued into architectural severity, i.e., the shaft or foliation composed of tree stems instead of the tree introduced as such as in Scala monuments. The practice is a bad one.”]

³ [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 37, and Plate 20.]

⁴ [See Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. i. § 23.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]