ly as
so much fretted stone, in capitals and other pieces of minute detail,
the forms may be, and perhaps ought to be, elaborately imitative; and in
this respect again the capitals of St. Mark's church, and of the Doge's
palace at Venice may be an example to the architects of all the world,
in their boundless inventiveness, unfailing elegance, and elaborate
finish; there is more mind poured out in turning a single angle of that
church than would serve to build a modern cathedral;[72] and of the
careful finish of the work, this may serve for example, that one of the
capitals of the Doge's palace is formed of eight heads of different
animals, of which one is a bear's with a honeycomb in the mouth, whose
carved _cells_ are _hexagonal_.

Sec. 16. Abstraction necessary from imperfection of materials.

Sec. 17. Abstractions of things capable of varied accident are not
imaginative.

Sec. 18. Yet sometimes valuable.

So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and to
symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter at
length, referring to it only at present as one of the operations of
imagination contemplative; other abstractions there are which are
necessarily consequent on the imperfection of materials, as of the hair
in sculpture, which is necessarily treated in masses that are in no sort
imitative, but only stand for hair, and have the grace, flow, and
feeling of it without the texture or division, and other abstractions
there are in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the
matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in
mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy charioted
Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which the reader may oppose
to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe, and again the phantom
vignette of Turner already noticed; only such operations of the
imagination are to be held of lower kind and dangerous consequence, if
frequently trusted in, for those painters only have the right
imaginative power who can set the supernatural form before us fleshed
and boned like ourselves.[73] Other abstractions occur, frequently, of
things which have much accidental variety of form, as of waves, on Greek
sculptures in successive volutes, and of clouds often in supporting
volumes in the sacred pictures; but these I do not look upon as results
of imagination at all, but mere signs and letters; and whenever a very
h