VII. GOTHIC PALACES 277

of smaller arches. The central group becomes the door or the middle light of the Gothic palace, and the wings break into its lateral windows.

§ 7. But the most essential difference in the entire arrangement, is the loss of the unity of conception which regulated Byzantine composition. How subtle the sense of gradation which disposed the magnitudes of the early palaces we have seen already, but I have not hitherto noticed that the Byzantine work was centralised in its ornamentation as much as in its proportions. Not only were the lateral capitals and archivolts kept comparatively plain, while the central ones were sculptured, but the midmost piece of sculpture, whatever it might be,-capital, inlaid circle, or architrave,-was always made superior to the rest. In the Fondaco de’Turchi, for instance,¹ the midmost capital of the upper arcade is the key to the whole group, larger and more studied than all the rest; and the lateral ones are so disposed as to answer each other on the opposite sides, thus, A being put for the central one,

F E B C A C B E F,

a sudden break of the system being admitted in one unique capital at the extremity of the series.

§ 8. Now, long after the Byzantine arcades had been contracted into windows, this system of centralisation was more or less maintained; and in all the early groups of windows of five lights the midmost capital is different from the two on each side of it, which always correspond. So strictly is this the case, that whenever the capitals of any group of windows are not centralised in this manner, but are either entirely like each other, or all different, so as to show no correspondence, it is a certain proof, even if no other should exist, of the comparative lateness of the building.

In every group of windows in Venice which I was able to examine, and which were centralised in this manner, I found evidence in their mouldings of their being anterior to the

¹ [See above, p. 148.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]