426 APPENDIX, 7, 8

buildings of the sixteenth century. I defer the discussion of the question at present,¹ but have, I believe, sufficient reason for assuming the Ca’ Dario to have been built about 1486, and the Ca’ Trevisan not much later.

7. P. 35.-VARIETIES OF THE ORDERS

Of these phantasms and grotesques, one of some general importance is that commonly called Ionic, of which the idea was taken (Vitruvius says) from a woman’s hair, curled;² but its lateral processes look more like rams’ horns: be that as it may, it is a mere piece of agreeable extravagance, and if, instead of rams’ horns, you put ibex horns, or cows’ horns, or an ass’s head at once, you will have ibex orders, or ass orders, or any number of other orders, one for every head or horn. You may have heard of another order, the Composite, which is Ionic and Corinthian mixed, and is one of the worst of ten thousand forms referable to the Corinthian as their head: it may be described as a spoiled Corinthian. And you may have also heard of another order, called Tuscan (which is no order at all, but a spoiled Doric): and of another called Roman Doric, which is Doric more spoiled, both which are simply among the most stupid variations ever invented upon forms already known. I find also in a French pamphlet upon architecture,* as applied to shops and dwelling-houses, a sixth order, the “Ordre Francais,” at least as good as any of the three last, and to be hailed with acclamation, considering whence it comes, there being usually more tendency on the other side of the Channel to the confusion of “orders” than their multiplication: but the reader will find in the end that there are in very deed only two orders, of which the Greek, Doric, and Corinthian are the first examples, and they not perfect, nor in anywise sufficiently representative of the vast families to which they belong; but being the first and the best known, they may properly be considered as the types of the rest. The essential distinctions of the two great orders he will find explained in §§ 35 and 36 of Chap. XXVII., and in the passages there referred to; but I should rather desire that these passages might be read in the order in which they occur.

8. PP. 38, 187.-THE NORTHERN ENERGY

I have sketched above, in the First Chapter, the great events of architectural history in the simplest and fewest words I could; but this indraught of the Lombard energies upon the Byzantine rest, like a wild north wind

* L’Artiste en Bâtiments, par Louis Berthaux: Dijon, 1847. My printer writes at the side of the page a note, which I insert with thanks:-“This is not the first attempt at a French order. The writer has a treatise by Sebastian Le Clerc, a great man in his generation, which contains a Roman order, a Spanish order, which the inventor appears to think very grand, and a new French order nationalised by the Gallic cock crowing and clapping its wings in the capital.”

¹ [The question is discussed later in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. Appendix 4.]

² [Vitruvius (bk. iv. ch. i.) says that the Ionic order was modelled on the female figure. “They also added volutes to its capital, like graceful curling hair hanging on each side, and the front they ornamented with cymatia and festoons in the place of hair. On the shafts they sunk channels which bear a resemblance to the folds of a matronly garment.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]