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,
cheap oil paintings, 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 façade 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,
paintings for sale,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,
oil paintings for sale,and also be it noted that in all ornament, which
takes place in the general effect merely 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;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.
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