THE STONES OF VENICE

DECORATION

274

seldom more than an inch or an inch and a half long:the fully developed dentil of the later Gothic is often asmuch as four or five in length, by one and a half inbreadth); but they are all somewhat rare, compared tothe true or armour dentil, above described. On the otherhand, there are one or two unique conditions, which willbe noted in the buildings where they occur. 1 The DucalPalace furnishes three anomalies in the arch, dogtooth, anddentil: it has a hyperbolic arch, as noted above, Chap. X.,§15; it has a double-fanged dogtooth in the rings of thespiral shafts on its angles ; and, finally, it has a dentil withconcave sides, of which the section and two of the blocks,real size, 2 are given in Plate 14 . The labour of obtainingthis difficult profile has, however, been thrown away; forthe effect of the dentil at ten feet distance is exactly thesame as that of the usual form: and the reader mayconsider the dogtooth and dentil in that Plate as fairlyrepresenting the common use of them in the VenetianGothic.

§ 16. I am aware of no other form of fillet decorationrequiring notice: in the Northern Gothic the fillet isemployed chiefly to give severity or flatness to mouldingssupposed to be too much rounded, and is therefore gene-rally plain. It is itself an ugly moulding, and, when thusemployed, is merely a foil for others, of which, however, itat last usurped the place, and became one of the mostpainful features in the debased Gothic both of Italy andthe North.

1 As, however, we shall not probably be led either to Bergamo orBologna , I may mention here a curiously rich use of the dentil, entirelycovering the foliation and tracery of a niche on the outside of theduomo of Bergamo ; and a roll, entirely encrusted, as the handle of amace often is with nails, with massy dogteeth or nail-heads, on the doorof the Pepoli palace of Bologna .

2 [In original edition only ; reduced for this.]