VII. GOTHIC PALACES 303

in the finished example given in Plate 19 of the first volume, and there selected in preference to other examples of archivolt decoration, because furnishing a complete type of the master school from which the Venetian Gothic was derived.

§ 37. The arch from St. Fermo, however, fig. 4, Plate 17, corresponds more closely, in its entire simplicity, with the little windows from the Campiello San Rocco; and with the type 5 set beside it in Plate 17, from a very ancient house in the Corte del Forno at Santa Marina¹ (all in brick); while the upper examples, 1 and 2, show the use of the flat but highly enriched architrave, for the connection of which with Byzantine work see the final Appendix, Vol. III., under the head “Archivolt.” These windows (figs. 1 and 2, Plate 17) are from a narrow alley in a part of Venice now exclusively inhabited by the lower orders, close to the Arsenal;* they are entirely wrought in brick, with exquisite mouldings, not cast, but moulded in the clay by the hand, so that there is not one piece of the arch like another; the pilasters and shafts being, as usual, of stone.

§ 38. And here let me pause for a moment, to note what one should have thought was well enough known in England,-yet I could not perhaps touch upon anything less considered,-the real use of brick. Our fields of good clay were never given us to be made into oblong morsels of one size. They were given us that we might play with them, and that men who could not handle a chisel, might knead out of them some expression of human thought. In the ancient architecture of the clay districts of Italy, every possible adaptation of the material is found exemplified; from the coarsest and most brittle kinds, used in the mass of the structure, to bricks for arches and plinths, cast in

* If the traveller desire to find them (and they are worth seeking), let him row from the Fondamenta S. Biagio down the Rio della Tana; and look, on his right, for a low house with windows in it like those in the woodcut No. 31, above, p. 298. Let him go in at the door of the portico in the middle of this house, and he will find himself in a small alley, with the windows in question on each side of him.

¹ [The name of a parish; the church was pulled down in 1820.]

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