DECORATION XXIV. THE ROLL AND RECESS 329

we have the ordinary Greek bead, both of them too well known to require illustration. The Norman billet we shall not meet with in Venice; the bead constantly occurs in Byzantine, and of course in Renaissance work. In Plate 9, fig. 17, there is a remarkable example of its early treatment, where the cuts in it are left sharp.

§ 4. But the roll, if it be of any size, deserves better treatment. Its rounded surface is too beautiful to be cut away in notches; and it is rather to be covered with flat chasing or inlaid patterns. Thus ornamented, it gradually blends itself with the true shaft, both in the Romanesque work of the North, and in the Italian connected schools; and the patterns used for it are those used for shaft decoration in general.

§ 5. But, as alternating with the recess, it has a decoration peculiar to itself. We have often, in the preceding chapters,¹ noted the fondness of the Northern builders for deep shade and hollowness in their mouldings; and in the second chapter of the Seven Lamps,² the changes are described which reduced the massive roll mouldings of the early Gothic to a series of recesses, separated by bars of light. The shape of these recesses is at present a matter of no importance to us: it was, indeed, endlessly varied; but needlessly, for the value of a recess is in its darkness, and its darkness disguises its form. But it was not in mere wanton indulgence of their love of shade that the Flamboyant builders deepened the furrows of their mouldings: they had found a means of decorating those furrows as rich as it was expressive, and the entire framework of their architecture was designed with a view to the effect of this decoration; where the ornament ceases, the framework is meagre and mean: but the ornament is, in the best examples of the style, unceasing.

§ 6. It is, in fact, an ornament formed by the ghosts or anatomies of the old shafts, left in the furrows which had taken their place. Every here and there, a fragment of a

¹ [See, e.g., ch. xxiii. § 7, p. 321.]

² [Vol. VIII. pp. 90 seq.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]