§ VIII. There is, of course, much rich tabernacle work which will not come literally under this head, much which is straggling or flat in its plan, connecting itself gradually with the ordinary forms of independent shrines and tombs; but the general idea of all tabernacle work is marked in the common phrase of a "niche," that is to say a hollow intended for a statue, and crowned by a canopy; and this niche decoration only reaches its full development when the Flamboyant hollows are cut deepest, and when the manner and spirit of sculpture had so much lost their purity and intensity that it became desirable to draw the eye away from the statue to its covering, so that at last the canopy became the more important of the two, and is itself so beautiful that we are often contented with architecture from which profanity has struck the statues, if only the canopies are left; and consequently, in our modern ingenuity, even set up canopies where we have no intention of setting statues.
§ IX. It is a pity that thus we have no really noble example of the effect of the statue in the recesses of architecture: for the Flamboyant recess was not so much a preparation for it as a gulf which swallowed it up. When statues were most earnestly designed, they were thrust forward in all kinds of places, often in front of the pillars, as at Amiens, awkwardly enough, but with manly respect to the purpose of the figures. The Flamboyant hollows yawned at their sides, the statues fell back into them, and nearly disappeared, and a flash of flame in the shape of a canopy rose as they expired.
§ X. I do not feel myself capable at present of speaking with perfect justice of this niche ornament of the north, my late studies in Italy having somewhat destroyed my sympathies with it. But I once loved it intensely, and will not say anything to depreciate it now, save only this, that while I have studied long at Abbeville, without in the least finding that it made me care less for Verona, I never remained long in Verona without feeling some doubt of the nobility of Abbeville.
§ XI. Recess decoration by leaf mouldings is constantly and beautifully associated in the north with niche decoration, but requires no special notice, the recess in such cases being used merely to give value to the leafage by its gloom, and the difference between such conditions and those of the south being merely that in the one the leaves are laid across a hollow, and in the other over a solid surface; but in neither of the schools exclusively so, each in some degree intermingling the method of the other.