represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side-posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay, are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the Lecture. I must dwell on some points of it now.
286. Look back to Section 175 in "Aratra Pentelici," giving statement of the four kinds of relief in sculpture. The uppermost of these plinths is of the kind I have called 'round relief;' you might strike it out on a coin. The lower is 'foliate relief;' it looks almost as if the figures had been cut out of one layer of marble, and laid against another behind it.
The uppermost, at the distance of my diagram, or in nature itself, would scarcely be distinguished at a careless glance from an egg-and-arrow moulding. You could not have a more simple or forcible illustration of my statement (§§ 20, 21) in the first chapter of "Aratra,"
