ft
ornaments of this noble church (another example of them is given in
Plate XII. of the "Seven Lamps"). The same rule would condemn the
Caryatid; which I entirely agree with Mr. Fergusson in thinking (both
for this and other reasons) one of the chief errors of the Greek
schools; and, more decisively still, the Renaissance inventions of shaft
ornament, almost too absurd and too monstrous to be seriously noticed,
which consist in leaving square blocks between the cylinder joints, as
in the portico of No. 1, Regent Street, and many other buildings in
London; or in rusticating portions of the shafts, or wrapping fleeces
about them, as at the entrance of Burlington House, in Piccadilly; or
tying drapery round them in knots, as in the new buildings above noticed
(Chap. 20, Sec. VII.), at Paris. But, within the limits thus defined,
there is no feature capable of richer decoration than the shaft; the
most beautiful examples of all I have seen, are the slender pillars,
encrusted with arabesques, which flank the portals of the Baptistery and
Duomo at Pisa, and some others of the Pisan and Lucchese churches; but
the varieties of sculpture and inlaying, with which the small
Romanesque shafts, whether Italian or Northern, are adorned when they
occupy important positions, are quite endless, and nearly all admirable.
Mr. Digby Wyatt has given a beautiful example of inlaid work so
employed, from the cloisters of the Lateran, in his work on early
mosaic; an example which unites the surface decoration of the shaft with
the adoption of the spiral contour. This latter is often all the
decoration which is needed, and none can be more beautiful; it has been
spoken against, like many other good and lovely things, because it has
been too often used in extravagant degrees, like the well-known twisting
of the pillars in Raffaelle's "Beautiful gate." But that extravagant
condition was a Renaissance barbarism: the old Romanesque builders kept
their spirals slight and pure; often, as in the example from St. Zeno,
in Plate XVII. below, giving only half a turn from the base of the shaft
to its head, and nearly always observing what I hold to be an imperative
law, that no twisted shaft shall be single, but composed of at least two
distinct members, twined with each other. I suppose they followed their
own right feeling in doing this, and had never studied natural shafts;
but the type they _might_ have followed was caught by one of the few
great painte