"Acanthus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Even the gigantic columns of the great hypaethral hall at Karnac are only a stupendous exaggeration of the same stalk and flower motive. From these were derived the forms of the early Greek column—soon enriched by substituting the Acanthus for the Lotus, but often ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... inert, languid and luxurious, rather, and explored to the full the happiness of stretching. Round about her were huddled the drowsy boys; on the slopes of the steep place where she lay she could see the goats browsing on lentisk and juniper, acanthus, bramble, mountain-ash. Misty on the blue plain lay Padua, a sleeping city, white and violet—remote now and in every sense below her and her concerns. The sky was without cloud, very pale still, glowing white at the edge; the sun not yet out of the sea. The freshness of the air fanned ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the usual Lombard grotesques—two sea-monsters, biting each other; harpy-birds; a dragon with a twisted tail; little men grinning and squatting in adaptation to coigns and angles of the windows. The toothed and chevron patterns of the north are quaintly blent with rude acanthus scrolls and classical egg-mouldings. Over the western porch is a Gothic rose window. Altogether this church must be reckoned one of the most curious specimens of that hybrid architecture, fusing and appropriating different manners, which perplexes the student in Central Italy. It ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... elongated and its natural heaviness diminished under a crown of slender columns with a miter ornament, which girds it midway with its delicate promenade. On the two sides of the great door two Corinthian columns are enveloped with luxurious foliage, calyxes and twining or blooming acanthus; and from the threshold we see the church with its files of intersecting columns, its alternate courses of black and white marble and its multitude of slender and brilliant forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... which it is made, is oftentimes of great importance by comparison with its shape, fashion, or mode. It is of value in your eyes to know whether your family plate is in substance of gold or of silver; but whether such a vessel is round or square, ornamented with a wreath of acanthus or ivy, supported by tigers or by fawns, may be a trivial consideration, or even worse; for the fashion of your plate, after it has once become obsolete, may count against you for so much loss as something that will cost a good deal of money to alter. Here, then, is another ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sent Achates in haste to the ships, that he might fetch Ascanius to the feast. Also he bade that the boy should bring with him gifts of such things as they had saved from the ruins of Troy,—a mantle stiff with broidery of gold and a veil bordered with yellow acanthus, which the fair Helen had taken with her, flying from her home; but Leda, her mother, had given them to Helen; a sceptre likewise which Ilione, first-born of the daughters of Priam, had carried, and a necklace of pearls and a double ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... plinths, and with capitals that, as I came nearer, I perceived to be more ornamental and more fantastically graceful that Egyptian architecture allows. As the Corinthian capital mimics the leaf of the acanthus, so the capitals of these columns imitated the foliage of the vegetation neighbouring them, some aloe-like, some fern-like. And now there came out of this building a form—human;—was it human? It stood on the broad way and looked around, beheld me and approached. It came within a ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... this first island was all he could afford time for; and after the first exquisite impression of the white beach, and the blue curve of the bay sparkling in the sunshine, and the soft prismatic colours of the acanthus beneath the green wall of the woods had been savoured and enjoyed, he was anxious to push on to the rich lands of the Orient of which he believed this island to be ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... an olde fashioned iagged leaf-worke, lying a long vnder the backe of the Coppisse, and of the same mettall. Vpon euery corner of the Plynth, from the Coronice downeward, there was a foote lyke a Harpies, with an excellent conuersion and turning vppon eyther sides of the leaues of Acanthus. ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... improvidence. This garment must be constructed without buttons or button-holes, and confined at the waist with cable-like bell-ropes and tassels. This elegant deshabille had its origin (like the Corinthian capital from the Acanthus) in accident. A set of massive window-curtains having been carelessly thrown over a lay figure, or tailor's torso, in Nugee's studio, in St. James's-street, suggested to the luxuriant mind of the Adonisian D'Orsay, this beautiful combination of costume and upholstery. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... and in that case is Justitia Adhatoda, a straggling shrub common over the whole of India [very unlike the Rat-vasha-ke-dhan] and which was in the Sanscrit as it is in the native pharmacopoeias. It is not a kind of rice, but belongs to the natural order of Acanthaceae (the family to which Acanthus and Thunbergia belong)." This night-growing rice may be compared to the day-growing rice in paragraph 2, p. 288, of the ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... attitudes and gestures borrowed from the frescoes of the necropolis and the tombs of Egypt. It is from Egypt also that Greece took, while diminishing their huge size, its Doric and Ionic orders and its Corinthian capital, in which the acanthus takes the place ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... which, like the others, are cut out of the rock, and, like them too, have Grecian ornaments. There is one large cave; the front has a handsome entablature, the upper part ornamented with alternate circular garlands, bunches of grapes, and an ornament of acanthus leaves; the lower with a rich band of foliage ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... flat carving, especially in the interlace and acanthus of Ravenna, was accomplished by commencing with a series of drilled holes, which were afterwards channelled into each other and formed patterns. When the subsequent finish is not particularly delicate, it is quite easy to detect these symmetrical holes, but the effect, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison |
