DECORATION XXIII. THE EDGE AND FILLET 327

they occur.* The Ducal Palace furnishes three anomalies in the arch, dogtooth, and dentil: it has a hyperbolic arch, as noted above, Chap. X., § 15; it has a double-fanged dogtooth in the rings of the spiral shafts on its angles; and, finally, it has a dentil with concave sides of which the section and two of the blocks, real size,¹ are given in Plate 14. The labour of obtaining this difficult profile has, however, been thrown away; for the effect of the dentil at ten feet distance is exactly the same as that of the usual form: and the reader may consider the dogtooth and dentil in that Plate as fairly representing the common use of them in the Venetian Gothic.

§ 16. I am aware of no other form of fillet decoration requiring notice: in the Northern Gothic the fillet is employed chiefly to give severity or flatness to mouldings supposed to be too much rounded, and is therefore generally plain. It is itself an ugly moulding, and, when thus employed, is merely a foil for others, of which, however, it at last usurped the place, and became one of the most painful features in the debased Gothic both of Italy and the North.

* As, however, we shall not probably be led either to Bergamo or Bologna, I may mention here a curiously rich use of the dentil, entirely covering the foliation and tracery of a niche on the outside of the duomo of Bergamo; and a roll, entirely encrusted, as the handle of a mace often is with nails, with massy dogteeth or nail-heads, on the door of the Pepoli palace of Bologna.2

¹ [i.e. in the original edition, and in subsequent editions of the same size; in this edition the scale is slightly reduced.]

² [See Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 84.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]