Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/100

68 The angle of its upper portion exactly meets the plane of the side of the upper inclosing shaft 4, and would, therefore, not be seen, unless two vertical cuts were made to exhibit it, which form two dark lines the whole way up the shaft. Two small pilasters are run, like fastening stitches, through the junction, on the front of the shafts. The sections $\overline{k}$, $\overline{u}$, taken respectively at the levels $\overline{k}$, n, will explain the hypothetical construction of the whole. Fig. 7 is a base, or joint rather (for passages of this form occur again and again, on the shafts of flamboyant work), of one of the smallest piers of the pedestals which supported the lost statues of the porch; its section below would be the same as n, and its construction, after what has been said of the other base, will be at once perceived.

XXVIII. There was, however, in this kind of involution, much to be admired as well as reprehended; the proportions of quantities were always as beautiful as they were intricate; and, though the lines of intersection were harsh, they were exquisitely opposed to the flower-work of the interposing mouldings. But the fancy did not stop here; it rose from the bases into the arches; and there, not finding room enough for its exhibition, it withdrew the capitals from the heads even of cylindrical shafts (we cannot but admire, while we regret, the boldness of the men who could defy the authority and custom of all the nations of the earth for a space of some three thousand years) in order that the arch mouldings might appear to emerge from the pillar, as at its base they had been lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of the capital; then they ran the mouldings across and through each other, at the point of the arch; and finally, not finding their natural directions enough to furnish as many occasions of intersection as they wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off their ends short, when they had passed the point of intersection. Fig. 2, Plate IV, is part of a flying buttress from the apse of St