draw Italian tracery in outline; if with any intention of rendering its
effect, it is better to mark the black spots, and let the rest alone. Of
course, when it is desired to obtain an accurate rendering of the
design, its lines and mouldings are enough; but it often happens that
works on architecture are of little use, because they afford the reader
no means of judging of the effective intention of the arrangements which
they state. No person, looking at an architectural drawing of the richly
foliaged cusps and intervals of Or San Michele, would understand that
all this sculpture was extraneous, was a mere added grace, and had
nothing to do with the real anatomy of the work, and that by a few bold
cuttings through a slab of stone he might reach the main effect of it
all at once. I have, therefore, in the plate of the design of Giotto,
endeavored especially to mark these points of _purpose_; there, as in
every other instance, black shadows of a graceful form lying on the
white surface of the stone, like dark leaves laid upon snow. Hence, as
before observed, the universal name of foil applied to such ornaments.
XIX. In order to the obtaining their full effect, it is evident that
much caution is necessary in the management of the glass. In the finest
instances, the traceries are open lights, either in towers, as in this
design of Giotto's or in external arcades like that of the Campo Santo
at Pisa or the Doge's palace at Venice; and it is thus only that their
full beauty is shown. In domestic buildings, or in windows of churches
necessarily glazed, the glass was usually withdrawn entirely behind the
traceries. Those of the Cathedral of Florence stand quite clear of it,
casting their shadows in well detached lines, so as in most lights to
give the appearance of a double tracery. In those few instances in which
the glass was set in the tracery itself, as in Or San Michele, the
effect of the latter is half destroyed: perhaps the especial attention
paid by Orgagna to his surface ornament, was connected with the
intention of so glazing them. It is singular to see, in late
architecture, the glass, which tormented the older architects,
considered as a valuable means of making the lines of tracery more
slender; as in the smallest intervals of the windows of Merton College,
Oxford, where the glass is advanced about two inches from the centre of
the tracery bar (that in the larger spaces being in the middle, as
usual), in order to prevent the depth of shadow from farther diminishing
the apparent interval. Much of the lightness of the effect of the
traceries is owing to this seemingly unimportant arrangement. But,
generally speaking, glass spoils all traceries; and it is much to be
wished that it should be kept well within them, when it cannot be
dispensed with, and that the most careful and beautiful designs should
be reserved for situations where no glass would be needed.
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