280 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

The dry land and the river thus each contributed their part; and all the florid capitals of the richest Northern Gothic on the one hand, and the arrowy lines of the severe Lombardic capitals on the other, are founded on these two gifts of the dust of Greece and the waves of the Nile. The leaf which is, I believe, called the Persepolitan water-leaf, is to be associated with the lotus-flower and stem, as the origin of our noblest types of simple capital; and it is to be noted that the florid leaves of the dry land are used most by the Northern architects, while the water leaves are gathered for their ornaments by the parched builders of the Desert.

§ 34. Fruit is, for the most part, more valuable in colour than form; nothing is more beautiful as a subject of sculpture on a tree; but, gathered and put in baskets, it is quite possible to have too much of it. We shall find it so used very dexterously on the Ducal Palace of Venice, there with a meaning which rendered it right and necessary;¹ but the Renaissance architects address themselves to spectators who care for nothing but feasting, and suppose that clusters of pears and pine-apples are visions of which their imagination can never weary, and above which it will never care to rise. I am no advocate for image-worship, as I believe the reader will elsewhere sufficiently find;² but I am very sure that the Protestantism of London would have found itself quite as secure in a cathedral decorated with statues of good men, as in one hung round with bunches of ribston pippins.³

§ 35. (11.) Birds. The perfect and simple grace of bird form, in general, has rendered it a favourite subject with early sculptors, and with those schools which loved form

than that of the acanthus. Of late our botanists have discovered, in the ‘Victoria regia’ (supposing its blossom reversed), another strangely beautiful type of what we may perhaps hereafter find it convenient to call Lily capitals.⁴

¹ [On Capital 27: see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 125.]

² [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. iii. § 40; ch. iv. § 62, and appendix 10.]

³ [For another criticism of the fruit and flower decoration of St. Paul’s, see Seven Lamps, ch. iv. § 13, Vol. VIII. p. 152, and below, p. 284.]

⁴ [See below, ch. xxvii. § 48, p. 387.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]