Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/216

174 it may be taken as a true principle that architectural ornament cannot be good unless it be an expression of the kind of beauty that we find in organic nature. I do not say that the elements of such ornament must be directly, or consciously, drawn from nature; but every quality of line and surface that, in a healthy state of mind, we feel to be beautiful is exemplified in organic nature, so that however abstract or conventional a piece of good carving may be, its forms will have a correspondence with those of natural objects.

The finest forms that occur in the carvings of the Renaissance are those of folation such as we have already noticed (p. 170). But even these are rarely of real excellence. An appreciation of the vital beauty of leafage has in general not been manifested by the Italians, whether ancient or modern. The leafage of Roman art is as inferior to Greek leafage as that of the Renaissance is to the foliation of the French Gothic carvers. Take, for instance, the crisp acanthus leaves of the capital from Epidaurus (A, Fig. 103) in the National Museum of Athens, with their strong nervous life notwithstanding their severely conventional treatment; or the leaf B in the same figure, from another Greek capital in the same museum, with its spiky cusps and its exquisite systems of radiating lines—at once true to nature and effective as ornament; and compare with these any examples of Roman, or Græco-Roman,