262 THE STONES OF VENICE

one ascending to the point of junction, the other declining from it, but, at first, not in any marked degree, and only showing the characters which justify its being above called, generically, ignoble, as its declension reaches steeper slope.

§ 101. Of these two great schools, the first uses foliation only in large and simple masses, and covers the minor members, cusps, etc., of that foliation with various sculpture. The latter decorates foliation itself with minor foliation, and breaks its traceries into endless and lace-like subdivision of tracery.

A few instances will explain the difference clearly. Fig. 2, Plate 12, represents half of an eight-foiled aperture from Salisbury;¹ where the element of foliation is employed in the larger disposition of the starry form; but in the decoration of the cusp it has entirely disappeared, and the ornament is floral.

But in fig. 1, which is part of a fringe round one of the later windows in Rouen Cathedral, the foliation is first carried boldly round the arch, and then each cusp of it divided into other forms of foliation. The two larger canopies of niches below, figs. 5 and 6, are respectively those seen at the flanks of the two uppermost examples of gabled Gothic in Fig. 10, p. 251. Those examples were there chosen in order also to illustrate the distinction in the character of ornamentation which we are at present examining; and if the reader will look back to them, and compare their methods of treatment, he will at once be enabled to fix that distinction clearly in his mind. He will observe that in the uppermost the element of foliation is scrupulously confined to the bearing arches of the gable, and of the lateral niches, so that, on any given side of the monument, only three foliated arches are discernible. All the rest of the ornamentation is “bossy sculpture,”² set on the broad marble surface. On the point of the gable are set the shield

¹ [For another reference to this window, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. i. § 14.]

² [Paradise Lost, i. 716; see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 118, where the passage is given in a note.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]