y to
produce a perfect piece of sculpture, and if a well cut group of flowers
or animals were indeed an ornament wherever it might be placed, the work
of the architect would be comparatively easy. Sculpture and architecture
would become separate arts; and the architect would order so many pieces
of such subject and size as he needed, without troubling himself with
any questions but those of disposition and proportion. But this is not
so. _No perfect piece either of painting or sculpture is an
architectural ornament at all_, except in that vague sense in which any
beautiful thing is said to ornament the place it is in. Thus we say that
pictures ornament a room; but we should not thank an architect who told
us that his design, to be complete, required a Titian to be put in one
corner of it, and a Velasquez in the other; and it is just as
unreasonable to call perfect sculpture, niched in, or encrusted on a
building, a portion of the ornament of that building, as it would be to
hang pictures by the way of ornament on the outside of it. It is very
possible that the sculptured work may be harmoniously associated with
the building, or the building executed with reference to it; but in this
latter case the architecture is subordinate to the sculpture, as in the
Medicean chapel, and I believe also in the Parthenon. And so far from
the perfection of the work conducing to its ornamental purpose, we may
say, with entire security, that its perfection, in some degree, unfits
it for its purpose, and that no absolutely complete sculpture can be
decoratively right. We have a familiar instance in the flower-work of
St. Paul's, which is probably, in the abstract, as perfect flower
sculpture as could be produced at the time; and which is just as
rational an ornament of the building as so many valuable Van Huysums,
framed and glazed and hung up over each window.

Sec. IV. The especial condition of true ornament is, that it be beautiful
in its place, and nowhere else, and that it aid the effect of every
portion of the building over which it has influence; that it does not,
by its richness, make other parts bald, or, by its delicacy, make other
parts coarse. Every one of its qualities has reference to its place and
use: _and it is fitted for its service by what would be faults and
deficiencies if it had no especial duty_. Ornament, the servant, is
often formal, where sculpture, the master, would have been free; the
servant is often silent whe