Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/175

Rh extremities, and small connecting ones in the centre, because it is not easy then to make the centre dominant. The bird or moth may indeed have wide wings, because the size of the wing does not give supremacy to the wing. The head and life are the mighty things, and the plumes, however wide, are subordinate. In fine west fronts with a pediment and two towers, the centre is always the principal mass, both in bulk and interest (as having the main gateway), and the towers are subordinated to it, as an animal's horns are to its head. The moment the towers rise so high as to overpower the body and centre, and become themselves the principal masses, they will destroy the proportion, unless they are made unequal, and one of them the leading feature of the cathedral, as at Antwerp and Strasburg. But the purer method is to keep them down in due relation to the centre, and to throw up the pediment into a steep connecting mass, drawing the eye to it by rich tracery. This is nobly done in St Wulfran of Abbeville, and attempted partly at Rouen, though that west front is made up of so many unfinished and supervening designs that it is impossible to guess the real intention of any one of its builders.

XXVII. This rule of supremacy applies to the smallest as well as to leading features: it is interestingly seen in the arrangement of all good mouldings. I have given one, on Plate X, from Rouen Cathedral; that of the tracery before distinguished as a type of the noblest manner of Northern Gothic (Chap. II, § XXII). It is a tracery of three orders, of which the first is divided into a leaf moulding, fig. 4, and b in the section, and a plain roll, also seen in fig. 4, c, in the section; these two divisions surround the entire window or panelling, and are carried by two-face shafts of corresponding sections. The second and third orders are plain rolls following the line of the tracery; four divisions of moulding in all: of these four, the leaf moulding is, as seen in the sections.