eing
able to bear roughing; or, if the whole building is so delicate that no
one can be expected to treat even its base with unkindness,[80] then at
least the expression of quiet, prefatory simplicity. The angle spur may
receive such decoration as we have seen, because it is one of the most
important features in the whole building; and the eye is always so
attracted to it that it cannot be in rich architecture left altogether
blank; the eye is stayed upon it by its position, but glides, and ought
to glide, along the basic rolls to take measurement of their length: and
even with all this added fitness, the ornament of the basic spur is
best, in the long run, when it is boldest and simplest. The base above
described, Sec. XVIII., as the most beautiful I ever saw, was not for that
reason the best I ever saw: beautiful in its place, in a quiet corner of
a Baptistery sheeted with jasper and alabaster, it would have been
utterly wrong, nay, even offensive, if used in sterner work, or repeated
along a whole colonnade. The base No. 10 of Plate XII. is the richest
with which I was ever perfectly satisfied for general service; and the
basic spurs of the building which I have named as the best Gothic
monument in the world (p. 141), have no ornament upon them whatever. The
adaptation, therefore, of rich cornice and roll mouldings to the level
and ordinary lines of bases, whether of walls or shafts, I hold to be
one of the worst barbarisms which the Roman and Renaissance architects
ever committed; and that nothing can afterwards redeem the effeminacy
and vulgarity of the buildings in which it prominently takes place.

Sec. XX. I have also passed over, without present notice, the fantastic
bases formed by couchant animals, which sustain many Lombardic shafts.
The pillars they support have independent bases of the ordinary kind;
and the animal form beneath is less to be considered as a true base
(though often exquisitely combined with it, as in the shaft on the
south-west angle of the cathedral of Genoa) than as a piece of
sculpture, otherwise necessary to the nobility of the building, and
deriving its value from its special positive fulfilment of expressional
purposes, with which we have here no concern. As the embodiment of a
wild superstition, and the representation of supernatural powers, their
appeal to the imagination sets at utter defiance all judgment based on
ordinary canons of law; and the magnificence of their treatment aton