344 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

North door of the west front of Rouen;¹ a lizard pausing and curling himself round a little in the angle; one expects him the next instant to lash round the shaft and vanish; and we may with advantage compare this base with those of the Renaissance Scuolo di San Rocco* at Venice, in which the architect, imitating the mediæval bases, which he did not understand, has put an elephant, four inches high, in the same position.

§ 19. I have not in this chapter spoken at all of the profiles which are given in Northern architecture to the projections of the lower members of the base b and c in Fig. 2, nor of the methods in which both these, and the rolls of the mouldings in Plate 10 are decorated, especially in Roman architecture, with superadded chainwork or chasing of various patterns. Of the first I have not spoken, because I shall have no occasion to allude to them in the following essay; nor, of the second, because I consider them barbarisms. Decorated rolls, and decorated ogee profiles, such for instance, as the base of the Arc de I’Etoile, at Paris,² are among the richest and farthest refinements of decorative appliances: and they ought always to be reserved for jambs, cornices, and archivolts; if you begin with them in the base, you have no power of refining your decoration as you ascend, and, which is still worse, you put your most delicate work on the jutting portions of the foundation,-the very portions which are most exposed to abrasion. The best expression of a base is that of stern endurance,-the look of being able to bear roughing; or, if the whole building is so delicate that no one can be expected to treat even its base with unkindness, † then at least the expression of quiet, prefatory

* I have put in Appendix 24, “Renaissance Bases,” my memorandum written respecting this building on the spot [p. 471]. But the reader had better delay referring to it until we have completed our examination of ornaments in shafts and capitals. † Appendix 25: “Romanist Decoration of Bases” [p. 471].

¹ [See also Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 216.]

² [Completed in 1836 from designs by Chalgrin.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]