icturesque,
subjects even near. To show you what it is capable of, and what colored
sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have prepared the colored
relief of the John Dory[32] as a natural history drawing for distant
effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly--as ugly as any
creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier
things--peacocks and kingfishers, butterflies and flowers,--on grounds
of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect
you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than
what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if
you will look, after the Lecture, first at the mere white relief, and
then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of color, such as a
practiced workman could lay in a quarter of an hour,--the whole
forming, if well done, almost a deceptive image,--you will, at least,
have the range of power in Egyptian sculpture clearly expressed to you.

164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we
carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision
will interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of
beautiful things you must clear away the ground about it, at all events
for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains
possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then, for
the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline.
By taking, in this case, the simplest I can,--a circle,--I can clear the
head with little labor in the removal of surface round it; (see the
lower figure in Plate XI.)

165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-relief.
The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone which, however
you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach
the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and
defined by a depression round it; that depression being at first a mere
trench, then a moat of a certain width, of which the outer sloping bank
is in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally
salient portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal
construction of good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect protection to
its surface from any transverse blow, and a geometrically limited space
to be occupied by the design, into which it shall pleasantly (and as you
shall ultimately see, ingeniously,) contract itself