Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/126

92 and I insist on the broad character of their arrangement the more earnestly, because, afterwards modified by greater skill in its management, it became characteristic of the richest pieces of Gothic design. The capital, given in Plate V, is of the noblest period of the Venetian Gothic; and it is interesting to see the play of leafage so luxuriant, absolutely subordinated to the breadth of two masses of light and shade. What is done by the Venetian architect, with a power as irresistible as that of the waves of his surrounding sea, is done by the masters of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less expressing their assent to the same great law. The ice spiculæ of the North, and its broken sunshine, seem to have image in, and influence on the work; and the leaves which, under the Italian's hand, roll, and flow, and bow down over their black shadows, as in the weariness of noon-day heat, are, in the North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the edges, and sparkling as if with dew. But the rounding of the ruling form is not less sought and felt. In the lower part of Plate I is the finial of the pediment given in Plate II, from the cathedral of St Lo. It is exactly similar in feeling to the Byzantine capital, being rounded under the abacus by four branches of thistle-leaves, whose stems, springing from the angles, bend outwards and fall back to the head, throwing their jaggy spines down upon the full light, forming two sharp quartre-foils. I could not get near enough to this finial to see with what degree of delicacy the spines were cut; but I have sketched a natural group of thistle-leaves beside it, that the reader may compare the types, and see with what mastery they are subjected to the broad form of the whole. The small capital from Coutances Plate XIII, fig 4, which is of earlier date, is of simpler elements, and exhibits the principle still more clearly; but the St Lo finial is only one of a thousand instances which might be gathered even from the fully developed