§ XLV. I shall not here farther exemplify the conditions of the
treatment of the spur, because I am afraid of confusing the reader's
mind, and diminishing the distinctness of his conception of the
differences between the two great orders, which it has been my principal
object to develope throughout this chapter. If all my readers lived in
London, I could at once fix this difference in their minds by a simple,
yet somewhat curious illustration. In many parts of the west end of
London, as, for instance, at the corners of Belgrave Square, and the
north side of Grosvenor Square, the Corinthian capitals of newly-built
houses are put into cages of wire. The wire cage is the exact form of
the typical capital of the convex school; the Corinthian capital,
within, is a finished and highly decorated example of the concave. The
space between the cage and capital is the limit of ornamentation.
§ XLVI. Those of my readers, however, to whom this illustration is
inaccessible, must be content with the two profiles, 13 and 14, on Plate
XV. If they will glance along the line of sections from 1 to 6, they
will see that the profile 13 is their final development, with a
superadded cornice for its abacus. It is taken from a capital in a very
important ruin of a palace, near the Rialto of Venice, and hereafter to
be described; the projection, outside of its principal curve, is the
profile of its _superadded_ leaf ornamentation; it may be taken as one
of the simplest, yet a perfect type of the concave group.
§ XLVII. The profile 14 is that of the capital of the main shaft of the
northern portico of St. Mark's, the most finished example I ever met
with of the convex family, to which, in spite of the central inward bend
of its profile, it is marked as distinctly belonging, by the bold convex
curve at its root, springing from the shaft in the line of the Christian
Doric cornice, and exactly reversing the structure of the other profile,
which rises from the shaft, like a palm leaf from its stem. Farther, in
the profile 13, the innermost line is that of the bell; but in the
profile 14, the outermost line is that of the bell, and the inner line
is the limit of the incisions of the chisel, in undercutting a
reticulated veil of ornament, surrounding a flower like a lily; most
ingeniously, and, I hope, justly, conjectured by the Marchese Selvatico
to have been intended for an imitation of the capitals of the temple of
Solomon, which Hiram made, with "nets of checker work, and wreaths of
chain work for the chapiters that were on the top of the pillars ... and
the chapiters that were upon the top of the pillars were of lily work in
the porch." (1 Kings, vii. 17, 19.)
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