Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/314

Rh effectiveness, to avoid all that is incompatible, was not generally in the Anglo-Norman genius. When he did not conventionalise artificially the island sculptor copied nature too closely, as, at a later period, in the over-naturalistic carvings of the Chapter-house of Southwell. I must not, however, seem to affirm that the foliate sculpture of early pointed architecture in England was always devoid of the expression of natural beauty. At first it had a great deal of such expression. The ornament, for instance, of the capital, Fig. 140, p. 225, is, notwithstanding the artificial peculiarities which I have criticised, exquisite in expression of the spiral twist characteristic of living vegetation, of the springing leaf outlines, as they follow each other around the bell, and bend gracefully against the moulding of the abacus. There are many other beautiful varieties of ornament on the capitals of the early choir and transept of Lincoln in which an equal feeling for nature is manifest; but this feeling does not long survive in the schools of England, and its expression, even in the best examples, is always joined with those artificial peculiarities just noticed.

After the first quarter of the thirteenth century artificial characteristics become more conspicuous, and expression of beauty caught from nature is less apparent. A good illustration of the first steps of change is afforded by the leafage of the capitals of the triforium of the nave of the