Another great, but more subtle secret is in the _in_equality and
immeasurability of the curved lines; and the hiding of the form by the
colour.
To begin, the room, I said, is fifty-seven feet wide, and only thirty-two
deep. It is thus nearly one-third larger in the direction across the line
of entrance, which gives to every arch, pointed and round, throughout the
roof, a different spring from its neighbours.
The vaulting ribs have the simplest of all profiles--that of a
chamfered beam. I call it simpler than even that of a square beam; for
in barking a log you cheaply get your chamfer, and nobody cares whether
the level is alike on each side: but you must take a larger tree, and
use much more work to get a square. And it is the same with stone.
And this profile is--fix the conditions of it, therefore, in your
mind,--venerable in the history of mankind as the origin of all Gothic
tracery-mouldings; venerable in the history of the Christian Church as
that of the roof ribs, both of the lower church of Assisi, bearing the
scroll of the precepts of St. Francis, and here at Florence, bearing
the scroll of the faith of St. Dominic. If you cut it out in paper, and
cut the corners off farther and farther, at every cut, you will produce
a sharper profile of rib, connected in architectural use with
differently treated styles. But the entirely venerable form is the
massive one in which the angle of the beam is merely, as it were,
secured and completed in stability by removing its too sharp edge.
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