We find in the ornamental carving of the Renaissance not only a formal, and often a disjointed, scheme of composition, with artificial objects of no beauty or meaning introduced among elements derived from natural forms, but numerous instances occur where the design is made up entirely of such objects, as in a pilaster in the National Museum of Florence (Fig. 102). Such value as this design has lies wholly in its childish symmetry of arrangement of the ugly elements about an axis. It contains nothing else on which the eye can rest with pleasure. I think it may be taken as a true principle that architectural ornament cannot be good unless it be an expression of the kind of beauty that we find in organic nature. I do not say that the elements of such ornament must be directly, or consciously, drawn from nature; but every quality of line and surface that, in a healthy state of mind, we feel to be beautiful is exemplified in organic nature, so that however abstract or conventional a piece of good carving may be, its forms will have a correspondence with those of natural objects. [Illustration: FIG. 102.--Pilaster in the National Museum, Florence.] The finest forms that occur in the carvings of the Renaissance are those of foliation such as we have already noticed (p. 170). But even these are rarely of real excellence. An appreciation of the vital beauty of leafage has in general not been manifested by the Italians, whether ancient or modern. The leafage of Roman art is as inferior to Greek leafage as that of the Renaissance is to the foliation of the French Gothic carvers. Take, for instance, the crisp acanthus leaves of the capital from Epidaurus (_A_, Fig. 103) in the National Museum of Athens, with their strong nervous life notwithstanding their severely conventional treatment; or the leaf _B_ in the same figure, from another Greek capital in the same museum, with its spiky cusps and its exquisite systems of radiating lines--at once true to nature and effective as ornament; and compare with these any examples of Roman, or Græco-Roman, leafage, as _A_ and _B_ (Fig. 104). Observe in _A_, from a composite capital in the Naples Museum, the excessive convolution of the leaf ends, the obtuse rounded cusps, the lack of radial relationship in the lines of depression, and the unmodelled flatness of the surfaces between the furrows. And notice in _B_, from a Corinthian capital supposed to have belonged to the so-called Temple of Jupiter Stator, the immoderate and artificial undulations of line and surface. [Illustration: FIG. 103.--Greek leafage.] [Illustration: FIG. 104.--Roman leafage.]