DECORATION XXV. THE BASE 345

simplicity. The angle spur may receive such decoration as we have seen, because it is one of the most important features in the whole building; and the eye is always so attracted to it that it cannot be in rich architecture left altogether blank; the eye is stayed upon it by its position, but glides, and ought to glide, along the basic rolls to take measurement of their length: and even with all this added fitness, the ornament of the basic spur is best, in the long run, when it is boldest and simplest. The base above described, § 18, as the most beautiful I ever saw, was not for that reason the best I ever saw; beautiful in its place, in a quiet corner of a Baptistery sheeted with jasper and alabaster, it would have been utterly wrong, nay, even offensive, if used in sterner work, or repeated along a whole colonnade. The base No. 10 of Plate 12 is the richest with which I was ever perfectly satisfied for general service: and the basic spurs of the building which I have named as the best Gothic monument in the world, (p. 177), have no ornament upon them whatever. The adaptation, therefore, of rich cornice and roll mouldings to the level and ordinary lines of bases, whether of walls or shafts, I hold to be one of the worst barbarisms which the Roman and Renaissance architects ever committed: and that nothing can afterwards redeem the effeminacy and vulgarity of the buildings in which it prominently takes place.

§ 20. I have also passed over, without present notice, the fantastic bases formed by couchant animals, which sustain many Lombardic shafts. The pillars they support have independent bases of the ordinary kind; and the animal form beneath is less to be considered as a true base (though often exquisitely combined with it, as in the shaft on the south-west angle of the cathedral of Genoa¹) than as a piece of sculpture, otherwise necessary to the nobility of the building, and deriving its value from its special positive fulfilment of expressional

¹ [This (as Ruskin notes in his diary) is “a detached shaft carried on a lion, with an elaborately sculptured bracket above”; for other notes on the cathedral of Genoa, see above, p. 298 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]