rhaps conclude, from what
was advanced in the Fifth Chapter, that there is one kind of decoration
which will, indeed, naturally follow on its construction. For it is
perfectly natural that the different kinds of stone used in its
successive courses should be of different colors; and there are many
associations and analogies which metaphysically justify the introduction
of horizontal bands of color, or of light and shade. They are, in the
first place, a kind of expression of the growth or age of the wall, like
the rings in the wood of a tree; then they are a farther symbol of the
alternation of light and darkness, which was above noted as the source
of the charm of many inferior mouldings: again, they are valuable as an
expression of horizontal space to the imagination, space of which the
conception is opposed, and gives more effect by its opposition, to the
enclosing power of the wall itself (this I spoke of as probably the
great charm of these horizontal bars to the Arabian mind): and again
they are valuable in their suggestion of the natural courses of rocks,
and beds of the earth itself. And to all these powerful imaginative
reasons we have to add the merely ocular charm of interlineal opposition
of color; a charm so great, that all the best colorists, without a
single exception, depend upon it for the most piquant of their pictorial
effects, some vigorous mass of alternate stripes or bars of color being
made central in all their richest arrangements. The whole system of
Tintoret's great picture of the Miracle of St. Mark is poised on the
bars of blue, which cross the white turban of the executioner.

[Illustration: Plate XIII.
WALL VEIL DECORATIONS.]

Sec. II. There are, therefore, no ornaments more deeply suggestive in
their simplicity than these alternate bars of horizontal colors; nor do
I know any buildings more noble than those of the Pisan Romanesque, in
which they are habitually employed; and certainly none so graceful, so
attractive, so enduringly delightful in their nobleness. Yet, of this
pure and graceful ornamentation, Professor Willis says, "a practice more
destructive of architectural grandeur can hardly be conceived:" and
modern architects have substituted for it the ingenious ornament of
which the reader has had one specimen above, Fig. III., p. 61, and with
which half the large buildings in London are disfigured, or else
traversed by mere straight lines, as, for instance, the back of