Italian Gothic is almost entirely free from the
taint of this barbarism until the Renaissance period, when it becomes
rampant in the cathedral of Como and Certosa of Pavia; and at Venice we
find the Renaissance churches decorated with models of fortifications
like those in the Repository at Woolwich, or inlaid with mock arcades in
pseudo-perspective, copied from gardeners' paintings at the ends of
conservatories.

Sec. XV. I conclude, then, with the reader's leave, that all ornament
is base which takes for its subject human work, that it is utterly
base,--painful to every rightly-toned mind, without perhaps immediate
sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we _do_ think
of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a
miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our own wretched doings,
when we might have been looking at God's doings. And all noble ornament
is the exact reverse of this. It is the expression of man's delight in
God's work.

Sec. XVI. For observe, the function of ornament is to make you happy.
Now in what are you rightly happy? Not in thinking of what you have done
yourself; not in your own pride, not your own birth; not in your own
being, or your own will, but in looking at God; watching what He does,
what He is; and obeying His law, and yielding yourself to His will.

You are to be made happy by ornaments; therefore they must be the
expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings
of your own grandeur; not heraldries; not king's arms, nor any
creature's arms, but God's arm, seen in His work. Not manifestation of
your delight in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own
inventions; but in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;--not
Composite laws, nor Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the
Ten Commandments.

Sec. XVII. Then the proper material of ornament will be whatever God has
created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with
or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have,
first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then,
from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and
organic forms. We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds; and,
however absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the
ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is one so grand and simple
for arrangements of external appearances, that I shall here