Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/182

 1 66 THESEUM, ERECHTHEUM, AND OTHER WORKS. We have in the Museum a length of richly carved jamb- mould. In the recent excavations other fragments were found under the eastern wall, and 21 pieces are now known, some of which clearly belonged to a lintel or lintels. It has been shown that they all belonged to two windows in the eastern wall of the cella, one on either side of the east door.* The order of the Erechtheum is extremely rich and refined. The slender fluted columns diminish in what Penrose says is " the most delicate line which had probably ever been applied in architecture," being about .02 in 21.12. There is a curious irregu- larity in the spacing of the palmette band relatively to the twenty-four flutes below on the shaft, there being eighteen palmettes, nine of each alternate pattern. The curious flat side to the angle volute at the Museum is, I suppose, the result of a repair. There are several such splicings even on the Museum fragments (see Cata- logue). The inner volutes of the angle capitals were mitred together, so as to show only two halves, and were plain {cf. Fig. IS 5). We also possess a slab of the lacunaria of this portico. Under the Parthenon I have ventured to suggest (p. 140) that the fragments of what appears to have been an acroterion may have belonged to the Erechtheum instead of to the Parthenon. In the Museum there is a fragment of a volute (No. 445) which has a double spiral like the portico capitals, but it is smaller in scale, and the eye is carved into a flower. It is figured by Inwood (plate 20), who describes it in his chapter on the Erechtheum as found in a wall in the lower city not far from the Erechtheum on the north side — that is under the Erech- theum. " It is an ancient copy of the capitals of the Erechtheum with a small additional projecting rose carved on the centre of Fig. 166. — The Erechtheum, Details.
 * Am. Jour. Archaol., 1906, and Fig. i6o.