ning ornament of
foliage or animals, like a classical frieze, and continuous round the
arch. In fact, the contest between the adversaries may be seen running
through all the early architecture of Italy: success inclining sometimes
to the one, sometimes to the other, and various kinds of truce or
reconciliation being effected between them: sometimes merely formal,
sometimes honest and affectionate, but with no regular succession in
time. The greatest victory of the voussoir is to annihilate the cornice,
and receive an ornament of its own outline, and entirely limited by its
own joints: and yet this may be seen in the very early apse of Murano.

Sec. VII. The most usual condition, however, is that unity of the two
members above described, Sec. V., and which may be generally represented
by the archivolt section _a_, Fig. LXX.; and from this descend a family of
Gothic archivolts of the highest importance. For the cornice, thus
attached to the arch, suffers exactly the same changes as the level
cornice, or capital; receives, in due time, its elaborate ogee profile
and leaf ornaments, like Fig. 8 or 9 of Plate XV.; and, when the shaft
loses its shape, and is lost in the later Gothic jamb, the archivolt has
influence enough to introduce this ogee profile in the jamb also,
through the banded impost: and we immediately find ourselves involved in
deep successions of ogee mouldings in sides of doors and windows, which
never would have been thought of, but for the obstinate resistance of
the classical architrave to the attempts of the voussoir at its
degradation or banishment.

[Illustration: Fig. LXX.]

Sec. VIII. This, then, will be the first great head under which we shall
in future find it convenient to arrange a large number of archivolt
decorations. It is the distinctively Southern and Byzantine form, and
typically represented by the section _a_, of Fig. LXX.; and it is
susceptible of almost every species of surface ornament, respecting
which only this general law may be asserted: that, while the outside or
vertical surface may properly be decorated, and yet the soffit or under
surface left plain, the soffit is never to be decorated, and the outer
surface left plain. Much beautiful sculpture is, in the best Byzantine
buildings, half lost by being put under soffits; but the eye is led to
discover it, and even to demand it, by the rich chasing of the outside
of the voussoirs. It would have been an hypocrisy to carve them
ext