198 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

sky; while again the fineness of material both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the climate was calculated to exhibit.

29. All these influences working together, and with them that of classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly unrecognised in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess little more than picturesque vigour or ingenious intricacy. The oak leaves and acorns of the Beauvais mouldings are superbly wreathed,¹ but rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character, and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern door of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves, each leaf modulated as if dew had just dried from off it-yet each alike, so as to secure the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment. But the Gothic fulness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a bird, moth, serpent, snail-all different, and each wrought to the very life-panting-plumy-writhing-glittering-full of breath and power. This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North.

30. One other distinction we must notice, in the treatment of the Niche and its accessories. In Northern

¹ [For these sculptures at Beauvais, see Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xx. (Vol. IX. p. 278); on the contrast here drawn between Northern and Italian Gothic generally, see Vol. IX. p. 208 and n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]