ry examples of the treatment
of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used
to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive
style of ironwork, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the
bending down of the severed portions. The ordinary domestic window
balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribbons of iron, bent into curves as
studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by
their own terminations in spiral volutes.

All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible in any
school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfection of form due
to a permanent substance; and the continual sight of it is destructive
of the faculty of taste: but metal stamped with precision, as in coins,
is to sculpture what engraving is to painting.

158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools: one in
very hard material; one in very soft; and one in that of centrally
useful consistence.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.]

A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in
shallow relief, or in broad contours: deep cutting in hard material is
inadmissible; and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem
engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honor and
service of sculpture.

B. The virtue of work in soft material is deep cutting, with studiously
graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater
number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive
chalk; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part,
induced by the facility of obtaining contrast of black space, undercut,
with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods--the
lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the
habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however,
I must reserve for illustration in my Lectures on Architecture. To-day,
I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural
structure in the best material,--that is to say, in crystalline marble,
neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard
enough to resist his will.

159. C. By the true 'Providence' of Nature, the rock which is thus
submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colors, and
in others blanched into the fairest absence of color that can be found
to give harmony to inlaying, or dignity to form. The possession by the
Greeks of the