DECORATION XXVI. WALL VEIL AND SHAFT 357

wrapping fleeces about them, as at the entrance of Burlington House, in Piccadilly;¹ or tying drapery round them in knots, as in the new buildings above noticed (Chap. XX., § 7), at Paris. But, within the limits thus defined, there is no feature capable of richer decoration than the shaft; the most beautiful examples of all I have seen, are the slender pillars, encrusted with arabesques, which flank the portals of the Baptistery and Duomo at Pisa, and some others of the Pisan and Lucchese churches; but the varieties of sculpture and inlaying, with which the small Romanesque shafts, whether Italian or Northern, are adorned when they occupy important positions, are quite endless, and nearly all admirable. Mr. Digby Wyatt has given a beautiful example of inlaid work so employed, from the cloisters of the Lateran, in his work on early mosaic;² an example which unites the surface decoration of the shaft with the adoption of the spiral contour. This latter is often all the decoration which is needed, and none can be more beautiful; it has been spoken against, like many other good and lovely things, because it has been too often used in extravagant degrees, like the well-known twisting of the pillars in Raffaelle’s “Beautiful gate.”³ But that extravagant condition was a Renaissance barbarism: the old Romanesque builders kept their spirals slight and pure; often, as in the example from St. Zeno, in Plate 17, giving only half a turn from the base of the shaft to its head, and nearly always observing what I hold to be an imperative law, that no twisted shaft shall be single, but composed of at least two distinct members, twined with each other. I suppose they followed their own right feeling in doing this, and had never studied natural shafts; but the type they might have followed was caught by one of the few great painters who were not affected by the evil influence of the fifteenth century, Benozzo Gozzoli, who,

¹ [The reference is to Old Burlington House (built 1695-1743), which was bought by Government in 1854. The present façade of the building is new.]

² [For a note on this work, see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 177 n.]

³ [In the cartoon of “Peter and John healing the Lame Man,” now in the Victoria and Albert (South Kensington) Museum.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]