DECORATION XXI. TREATMENT OF ORNAMENT 305

need-the hungering of David.¹ How eagerly this special infringement of a general law was sometimes sought by the mediæval workman, I shall be frequently able to point out to the reader; but I remember just now a most curious instance, in an archivolt of a house in the Corte del Remer, close to the Rialto, at Venice.² It is composed of a wreath of flower-work-a constant Byzantine design-with an animal in each coil; the whole enclosed between two fillets. Each animal, leaping or eating, scratching or biting, is kept nevertheless strictly within its coil, and between the fillets. Not the shake of an ear, not the tip of a tail, overpasses this appointed line, through a series of some five-and-twenty or thirty animals; until, on a sudden, and by mutual consent, two little beasts (not looking, for the rest, more rampant than the others), one on each side, lay their small paws across the enclosing fillet at exactly the same point of its course, and thus break the continuity of its line. Two ears of corn or leaves, do the same thing in the mouldings round the northern door of the Baptistery at Florence.

§ 32. Observe, however, and this is of the utmost possible importance, that the value of this type does not consist in the mere shutting of the ornament into a certain space, but in the acknowledgment by the ornament of the fitness of the limitation;-of its own perfect willingness to submit to it; nay, of a predisposition in itself to fall into the ordained form, without any direct expression of the command to do so; an anticipation of the authority, and an instant and willing submission to it, in every fibre and spray; not merely willing, but happy submission, as being pleased rather than vexed to have so beautiful a law suggested to it, and one which to follow is so justly in accordance with its own nature. You must not cut out a branch of hawthorn as it grows, and rule

¹ [1 Samuel xxi. 3-6; Luke vi. 3, 4.]

² [The house is drawn in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vii. § 27, though not in sufficient detail to illustrate the point here made. It was noted by Ruskin in the diary: “an interruption so small, the paws being not the 150th part of [reference to diagram], that the eye does not perceive it-it seems purposeless, and yet it is delightful.”]

IX U

[Version 0.04: March 2008]