ates
at Florence, are models of bronze treatment.

(B.) When metal is beaten thin, it becomes what is technically called
"plate," (the _flattened_ thing) and may be treated advisably in two
ways; one, by beating it out into bosses, the other by cutting it into
strips and ramifications. The vast schools of goldsmith's work and of
iron decoration, founded on these two principles, have had the most
powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of
the simplest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment
of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used
to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive
style of iron-work, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the
bending down of the several portions. The ordinary domestic window
balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribands of iron, bent into curves as
studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by
their own terminations in spiral volutes.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.]

All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible in any
school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfection of form due
to a permanent substance; and the continual sight of it is destructive
of the faculty of taste: but metal stamped with precision, as in coins,
is to sculpture what engraving is to painting.

158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools: one in
very hard material; one in very soft, and one in that of centrally
useful consistence.

A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in
shallow relief, or in broad contours; deep cutting in hard material is
inadmissible, and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem
engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honour and
service of sculpture.

B. The virtue of work in soft material is deep cutting, with studiously
graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater
number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive
chalk; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part,
induced by the facility of obtaining contrast of black space, undercut,
with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods--the
lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the
habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however,
I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on architecture. To-day,
I shall limit