394 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

every large building in London, more especially in the bridges; and, as if in pure spite at the treatment they had received from the archivolt, they are now not content with vigorously showing their lateral joints, but shape themselves into right-angled steps at their heads, cutting to pieces their limiting line, which otherwise would have had sympathy with that of the arch, and fitting themselves to their new friend, the Renaissance Ruled Copy-book wall. It had been better they had died ten times over, in their own ancient cause, than thus prolonged their existence.

§ 13. We bid them farewell in their dishonour, to return to our victorious chamfer. It had not, we said, obtained so easy a conquest, unless by the help of certain forms of the grouped shaft. The chamfer was quite enough to decorate the archivolts, if there were no more than two; but if, as above noticed in § 3, the archivolt was very deep, and composed of a succession of such steps, the multitude of chamferings were felt to be weak and insipid, and instead of dealing with the outside edges of the archivolts, the group was softened by introducing solid shafts in their dark inner angles. This, the manliest and best condition of the early Northern jamb and archivolt, is represented in section at Fig. 12 of Plate 2; and its simplest aspect in Plate 5, from the Broletto of Como,-an interesting example, because there the voussoirs, being in the midst of their above-described Southern contest with the architrave, were better prepared for the flank attack upon them by the shaft and chamfer, and make a noble resistance, with the help of colour, in which even the solid angle between the shafts gets slightly worsted, and cut across in several places, like General Zach’s column at Marengo.¹

¹ [Zach was second in command under Melas, the Austrian General. He was sent forward and drove the French forces back, until the reserve under Desaix (see Vol. I. p. 526) appeared on the field. Desaix himself fell dead at the first fire, but the French line continued to advance while the cavalry took Zach’s column in the flank; by this unexpected attack his troops were broken and compelled to surrender. Ruskin’s interest in Napoleon’s Italian campaigns dates back to early days: see in the Poems (Vol. II.) “The Battle of Montenotte” and “The Alps seen from Marengo.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]