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VIII. THE REQUIEM 287
Christ in their midst on the keystone. No one would believe at first it was thirteenth-century work, so delicate and rich as it looks; nor is there anything else like it that I know, in Europe, of the date:-but pure thirteenthcentury work it is, of rarest chiselling. I have cast two of its balls with their surrounding leafage, for St. George’s Museum; the most instructive pieces of sculpture of all I can ever show there.1
100. Nor can you at all know how good it is, unless you will learn to draw: but some things concerning it may be seen, by attentive eyes, which are worth the dwelling upon.
You see, in the first place, that the outer foliage is all of one kind-pure Greek Acanthus,-not in the least transforming itself into ivy, or kale, or rose: trusting wholly for its beauty to the varied play of its own narrow and pointed lobes.
Narrow and pointed-but not jagged; for the jagged form of Acanthus, look at the two Jean d’Acre columns, and return to this-you will then feel why I call it pure; it is as nearly as possible the acanthus of early Corinth, only more flexible, and with more incipient blending of the character of the vine which is used for the central bosses. You see that each leaf of these last touches with its point a stellar knot of inwoven braid (compare the ornament round the low archivolt of the porch on your right below), the outer acanthus folding all in spiral whorls.
101. Now all thirteenth-century ornament of every nation runs much into spirals, and Irish and Scandinavian earlier decoration into little else. But these spirals are different from theirs. The Northern spiral is always elastic-like that of a watch-spring. The Greek spiral, drifted like that of a whirlpool, or whirlwind.2 It is always an eddy or vortex-not a living rod, like the point of a young fern.
1 [The casts are on the walls of the Mineral Room in the St. George’s Museum. Of one of the subjects Ruskin made a pencil study (at the Museum), here reproduced on Plate LVIII.: compare Fig. 3 on Plate I. in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Vol. VIII. pp. 52, 121).]
2 [Compare The Æsthetic and Mathematic Schools, § 9 (Vol. XXIII. p. 190).]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
