DECORATION XXVI. WALL VEIL AND SHAFT 355

be assumed, for our present general purpose, that the mean standard would be of some twenty feet in height, by eight or nine in circumference; then this will be the size on which decoration is most difficult and dangerous: and shafts become more and more fit subjects for decoration, as they rise farther above or fall farther beneath it, until very small and very vast shafts will both be found to look blank unless they receive some chasing or imagery; blank, whether they support a chair or table on the one side, or sustain a village on the ridge of an Egyptian architrave on the other.

§ 16. Of the various ornamentation of colossal shafts, there are no examples so noble as the Egyptian; these the reader can study in Mr. Roberts’ work on Egypt¹ nearly as well, I imagine, as if he were beneath their shadow, one of their chief merits, as examples of method, being the perfect decision and visibility of their designs at the necessary distance: contrast with these the incrustations of bas-relief on the Trajan pillar,² much interfering with the smooth lines of the shaft, and yet themselves untraceable if not invisible.

§ 17. On shafts of middle size, the only ornament which has ever been accepted as right, is the Doric fluting, which, indeed, gave the effect of a succession of unequal lines of shade, but lost much of the repose of the cylindrical gradation. The Corinthian fluting, which is a mean multiplication and deepening of the Doric, with a square instead of a sharp ridge between each hollow, destroyed the serenity of the shaft altogether, and is always rigid and meagre. Both are, in fact, wrong, in principle; they are an elaborate weakening* of the shaft, exactly opposed (as above shown) to the

* Vide, however, their defence in the Essay above quoted, p. 335.³

¹ [Egypt and Nubia (letterpress by W. Brockendon), with drawings made on the spot by David Roberts, R.A.: 1846.]

² [The column of Trajan at Rome is 94 ft. high, and the bas-reliefs extend to the top; the reliefs which are 2 ft. high in the lower part increase to nearly 4 as they approach the summit. There is a copy of it, in two parts, in the Victoria and Albert (South Kensington) Museum.]

³ [The “Essay above quoted” is the review of the Seven Lamps in the British Quarterly (see pp. 304 n., 335 n.). For another reference to the Greek fluting of columns, see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. pp. 131, 139.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]