ornament.

I cannot enter here into the question of the exact degree of severity
and abstraction necessary in the forms of living things architecturally
employed; my own feeling on the subject is, though I dare not lay it
down as a principle, (with the Parthenon pediment standing against me
like the shield of Ajax,) that no perfect representation of animal form
is right in architectural decoration. For my own part, I had much rather
see the metopes in the Elgin room of the British Museum, and the
Parthenon without them, than have them together, and I would not
surrender, in an architectural point of view, one mighty line of the
colossal, quiet, life-in-death statue mountains in Egypt with their
narrow fixed eyes and hands on their rocky limbs, nor one Romanesque
facade with its porphyry mosaic of indefinable monsters, nor one Gothic
moulding of rigid saints and grinning goblins, for ten Parthenons; and,
I believe, I could show some rational ground for this seeming barbarity
if this were the place to do so, but at present I can only ask the
reader to compare the effect of the so-called barbarous ancient mosaics
on the front of St. Mark's, as they have been recorded, happily, by the
faithfulness of the good Gentile Bellini, in one of his pictures now in
the Venice gallery, with the veritably barbarous pictorial substitutions
of the fifteenth century, (one only of the old mosaics remains, or did
remain till lately, over the northern door, but it is probably by this
time torn down by some of the Venetian committees of taste,) and also I
would have the old portions of the interior ceiling, or of the mosaics
of Murano and Torcello, and the glorious Cimabue mosaic of Pisa, and the
roof of the Baptistery at Parma, (that of the Florence Baptistery is a
bad example, owing to its crude whites and complicated mosaic of small
forms,) all of which are as barbarous as they can well be, in a certain
sense, but mighty in their barbarism, with any architectural decorations
whatsoever, consisting of professedly perfect animal forms, from the
vile frescoes of Federigo Zuccaro at Florence to the ceiling of the
Sistine, and again compare the professedly perfect sculpture of Milan
Cathedral with the statues of the porches of Chartres; only be it always
observed that it is not rudeness and ignorance of art, but
intellectually awful abstraction that I uphold, and also be it noted
that in all ornament, which takes place in the general effect mere