, and the
fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over its golden
paralysis.

Sec. XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to
the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab
was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship.
The Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.[20] The Arab
banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and
proclaimed from their minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they
came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava
stream: they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and
the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead
water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the
Roman wreck, is VENICE.

The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of
the world.

Sec. XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between
the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.

Sec. XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to mark
the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures were
developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the
distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian
Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and
well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;
mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered
with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of
sacred symbols.

The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the
Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly
introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts
and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and
writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,
and invents an orname