In the treatment of mouldings the Italian Gothic work is quite peculiar. An Italian architect would have been surprized, could he have seen the dark and piquant recesses of the mouldings in which his Northern brethren in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so much delighted. He rarely, if ever, indulged in a deep hollow, but made a point rather of shewing the hard sharp outline of the square edges of his stones or bricks, relieved only by the interposition of simple round members, alternated with flat hollows; his mouldings, even when designed for such grand works as the Ducal Palace, being bald and crude in design, though they conduced no doubt to that breadth of effect to which he always desired that everything should be sacrificed. There is but little skill shewn in the way in which their contours are drawn, and the carelessness with which they are fitted to the size of the capital that carries them is a constant source of disgust to any one who has been trained by the study of the exquisite English mouldings of the same period. The architectural carving was designed with the same idea; for when it was introduced elsewhere than in the capitals of columns, it was always very flat and delicate, severe in outline, and not much relieved, and often very decided in its direct imitation of nature. This, however, is mainly seen in the earliest examples, for I am bound to say that later Italians never rivalled the Byzantine capitals of S. Mark’s, or some of those in the early church of San Zenone, Verona. Indeed, as time wore on, the carving in Italian buildings became steadily worse and worse. Most of the later Venetian capitals are bad in their outline, confused and purposeless in all their lines, and shew no sense of that vigorous petrifaction of the elements of natural growth and form, which was so sensitively felt and expressed by French and English artists. [Illustration: CORNICE--SAN FRANCESCO, BRESCIA.] And, next, we come to the cornice, the feature which above all others must most startle men who, for the first time, make acquaintance with Italian work, and which most recalls in its idea its Classic prototype; for, though its treatment in detail is as unlike that of the ancients as it can well be, it is, nevertheless, so decidedly marked and so prominent a feature (crowning not only the summits of walls, but even running up the gables, and returning round buttresses), that it is impossible not to regard it as another evidence of admiration for, and imitation of, earlier work.