"To speak merely of a wall of slaty stone which gradually curves inwards gives but a very inadequate idea of the exquisite beauty of the stone and curve alike. There are no marks of tooling, but the evenness of the outer surface is perfection, and the curve, rounding to the entrance, is faultlessly constructed in Hogarth's line of beauty, known to architects as ogee."
— Algernon Gissing writing in 1924 about Belas Knap Long Barrow, a late Neolithic stone-chambered tomb-mound near Winchombe in Gloucestershire.
— Algernon Gissing writing in 1924 about Belas Knap Long Barrow, a late Neolithic stone-chambered tomb-mound near Winchombe in Gloucestershire.
Gissing references William Hogarth. In his 1753 book The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a view of fixing fluctuating ideas of taste, Hogarth briefly references the ogee, an ornament in architecture, as waving lines. He illustrates precise “line of beauty” with an illustration, indicating 4:
“Though all sorts of waving-lines are ornamental, when properly applied; yet, strialy speaking, there is but one precise line, properly to be called the line of beauty, which in the scale of them * (in Fig 49) is number 4 lines 5,6,7,by their bulging too much in their curvature becoming gross and clumsy; and, on the contrary, 3,2,1,as they straighten, becoming mean and poor.”
John Ruskin in 1851, however, opens wide the wide-open eye: "The varieties of the ogee curve are infinite."
"Serpentine" does, however, appear in Hogarth's volume dozens of times with positive acclaim, extending the curving line of beauty and becoming, as Ruskin observes, infinite.
The Neolithic builders may have understood how carefully placed stones embodied the infinite; the assured and precise S-curve of the wall Algernon Gissing admires: “the exquisite beauty of the stone and curve alike.”
— Ogee, or, in full, ogee curve: a shallow S-shaped or double curve. — Oxford English Dictionary
— Algernon Gissing, The Footpath Way in Gloucestershire (1924), p.47
— John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1851), I. x. 126
— William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a view of fixing fluctuating ideas of taste (1753), p.47
PHOTOS at Belas Knap, June 2023, Douglas Beauchamp. With convivial appreciation to Rodger Williams, a self-described Celt and a long-time resident of Gloucestershire, who led the way Belas Knap.
CODA
Why should high material development seem so inevitably to divorce us from the soul of beauty which pervades the natural universe? — Algernon Gissing, 1924
