Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/90

60 of intersectional mouldings, which, on account of its great importance, and for the sake of the general reader, I may, perhaps, be pardoned for explaining elementarily

XXI. I must, in the first place, however, refer to Professor Willis's account of the origin of tracery, given in the sixth chapter of his Architecture of the Middle Ages; since the publication of which I have been not a little amazed to hear of any attempts made to resuscitate the inexcusably absurd theory of its derivation from imitated vegetable form—inexcusably, I say, because the smallest acquaintance with early Gothic architecture would have informed the supporters of that theory of the simple fact that, exactly in proportion to the antiquity of the work, the imitation of such organic forms is less, and in the earliest examples does not exist at all. There cannot be the shadow of a question, in the mind of a person familiarized with any single series of consecutive examples, that tracery arose from the gradual enlargement of the penetrations of the shield of stone which, usually supported by a central pillar, occupied the head of early windows. Professor Willis, perhaps, confines his observations somewhat too absolutely to the double sub-arch. I have given, in Plate VII, fig 2, an interesting case of rude penetration of a high and simply trefoiled shield, from the church of the Eremitani at Padua. But the more frequent and typical form is that of the double sub-arch, decorated with various piercings of the space between it and the superior arch; with a simple trefoil under a round arch, in the Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen (Plate III, fig. 1); with a very beautifully proportioned quatrefoil, in the triforium of Eu, and that of the choir of Lisieux; with quatrefoils, sixfoils, and septfoils, in the transept towers of Rouen (Plate III, fig. 2); with a trefoil awkwardly, and very small quatrefoil above, at Coutances (Plate III, fig. 3): then, with multiplications of the same figures, pointed or round, giving very clumsy shapes of the