362 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

bolder bend, giving it a sudden turn inwards (as in the Corinthian a nod outwards), as the reader may see in the capital of the Parthenon in the British Museum,¹ where the lower limb of the curve is all but a right line.* But these Doric and Corinthian lines are mere varieties of the great families which are represented by the central lines a and c, including not only the Doric capital, but all the small cornices formed by a slight increase of the curve of c, which are of so frequent occurrence in Greek ornaments.

§ 8. d is the Christian Doric, which I said (Chap. I., § 20) was invented to replace the antique; it is the representative of the great Byzantine and Norman families of convex cornice and capital, and, next to the profile a, the most important of the four, being the best profile for the convex capital, as a is for the concave; a being the best expression of an elastic line inserted vertically in the shaft, and d of an elastic line inserted horizontally and rising to meet vertical pressure.

If the reader will glance at the arrangements of boughs of trees, he will find them commonly dividing into these two families, a and d: they rise out of the trunk and nod from it as at a, or they spring with sudden curvature out from it, and rise into sympathy with it, as at d; but they only accidentally display tendencies to the lines b or c. Boughs which fall as they spring from the tree also describe the curve d in the plurality of instances, but reversed in arrangement; their junction with the stem being at the top of it, their sprays bending out into rounder curvature.

§ 9. These then being the two primal groups, we have next to note the combined group, formed by the concave and convex lines joined in various proportions of curvature, so as to form together the reversed or ogee curve,

* In very early Doric it was an absolute right line; and that capital is therefore derived from the pure cornice root, represented by the dotted line.

¹ [No. 380 in the Catalogue of Sculpture, vol. i.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]