ou will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much
the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San
Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a
lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall,
anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the
sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed
of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall
are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow
degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here
(Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a
scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close,
in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information,
that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and
this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a
cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of
the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is
intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged
boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it
be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their
crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.

23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface
decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any
architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the
sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door
panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and
the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a
piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal
day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred
different ways, without diminishing their stability; and the pillars
would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved
animals.

24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false
theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so
pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from
the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should
never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly
exhibited and enforced; in this very