PREFACE

TO

THE FIRST EDITION.

THE memoranda which form the basis of the following Essay
have been thrown together during the preparation of one of the
sections of the third volume of "Modern Painters."* I once
thought of giving them a more expanded form; but their utility,
such as it may be, would probably be diminished by farther
delay in their publication, more than it would be increased by
greater care in their arrangement. Obtained in every case by
personal observation, there may be among them some details
valuable even to the experienced architect; but with respect to
the opinions founded upon them I must be prepared to bear
the charge of impertinence which can hardly but attach to the
writer who assumes a dogmatical tone in speaking of an art he

* The inordinate delay in the appearance of that supplementary volume has, indeed, been chiefly owing to the necessity under which the writer felt himself, of obtaining as many memoranda as possible of mediæval buildings in Italy and Normandy, now in process of destruction, before that destruction should be consummated by the Restorer, or Revolutionist. His whole time has been lately occupied in taking drawings from one side of buildings, of which masons were knocking down the other; nor can he yet pledge himself to any time for the publication of the conclusion of "Modern Painters;" he can only promise that its delay shall not be owing to any indolence on his part.

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PREFACE TO

has never practised. There are, however, cases in which men
feel too keenly to be silent, and perhaps too strongly to be wrong;
I have been forced into this impertinence; and have suffered
too much from the destruction or neglect of the architecture I
best loved, and from the erection of that which I cannot love,
to reason cautiously respecting the modesty of my opposition
to the principles which have induced the scorn of the one, or
directed the design of the other. And I have been the less
careful to modify the confidence of my statements of principles,
because, in the midst of the opposition and uncertainty of our
architectural systems, it seems to me that there is something
grateful in any *positive* opinion, though in many points wrong,
as even weeds are useful that grow on a bank of sand.

Every apology is, however, due to the reader for the hasty
and imperfect execution of the plates. Having much more
serious work in hand, and desiring merely to render them illus-
trative of my meaning, I have sometimes very completely
failed even of that humble aim; and the text, being generally
written before the illustration was completed, sometimes naïvely
describes as sublime or beautiful, features which the plate re-
presents by a blot. I shall be grateful if the reader will in such
cases refer the expressions of praise to the Architecture, and not
to the illustration.

So far, however, as their coarseness and rudeness admit, the
plates are valuable; being either copies of memoranda made
upon the spot, or (Plates IX. and XI.) enlarged and adapted
from Daguerreotypes, taken under my own superintendence.
Unfortunately, the great distance from the ground of the window
which is the subject of Plate IX. renders even the Daguerreotype
indistinct; and I cannot answer for the accuracy of any of the
mosaic details, more especially of those surrounding the window,
which I rather imagine, in the original, to be sculptured in

THE FIRST EDITION.

vii

relief. The general proportions are, however, studiously preserved; the spirals of the shafts are counted, and the effect of the whole is as near that of the thing itself, as is necessary for the purposes of illustration for which the plate is given. For the accuracy of the rest I can answer, even to the cracks in the stones, and the number of them; and though the looseness of the drawing, and the picturesque character which is necessarily given by an endeavour to draw old buildings as they actually appear, may perhaps diminish their credit for architectural veracity, they will do so unjustly.

The system of lettering adopted in the few instances in which sections have been given, appears somewhat obscure in the references, but it is convenient upon the whole. The line which marks the direction of any section is noted, if the section be symmetrical, by a single letter, as *a*; and the section itself by the same letter with a line over it, — *ā*. But if the section be unsymmetrical, its direction is noted by two letters, *a*. *a*₂, at its extremities; and the actual section by the same letters with lines over them, *ā*. *ā*₂, at the correspondent extremities.

The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small number of buildings to which reference has been made. But it is to be remembered that the following chapters pretend only to be a statement of principles, illustrated each by one or two examples; not an Essay on European architecture; and those examples I have generally taken either from the buildings which I love best, or from the schools of architecture which, it appeared to me, have been less carefully described than they deserved. I could as fully, though not with the accuracy and certainty derived from personal observation, have illustrated the principles subsequently advanced, from the architecture of Egypt, India, or Spain, as from that to which the reader will find his attention chiefly directed, the Italian Romanesque and Gothic. But my affections, as well as

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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

my experience, led me to that line of richly varied and magnificently intellectual schools, which reaches, like a high watershed of Christian architecture, from the Adriatic to the Northumbrian seas, bordered by the impure schools of Spain on the one hand, and of Germany on the other: and as culminating points and centres of this chain, I have considered, first, the cities of the Val d'Arno, as representing the Italian Romanesque and pure Italian Gothic; Venice and Verona as representing the Italian Gothic coloured by Byzantine elements; and Rouen, with the associated Norman cities, Caen, Bayeux, and Coutances, as representing the entire range of Northern architecture from the Romanesque to Flamboyant.

I could have wished to have given more examples from our early English Gothic; but I have always found it impossible to work in the cold interiors of our cathedrals; while the daily services, lamps, and fumigation of those upon the Continent, render them perfectly safe. In the course of last summer I undertook a pilgrimage to the English Shrines, and began with Salisbury, where the consequence of a few days' work was a state of weakened health, which I may be permitted to name among the causes of the slightness and imperfection of the present Essay.

PREFACE

TO

THE SECOND EDITION.

SINCE the publication of the first edition of this work, the pur-
suit of the enquiries I then proposed to myself has enabled me
to speak with certainty upon some subjects which at the time
when the following pages were first arranged, I was obliged to
approach with hesitation.

I have not, however, except in unimportant particulars, altered
the body of the text, or added to it. I would only request the
reader not to regard it as a complete exponent of the views I
am at present engaged in advocating, but rather as an intro-
duction to the more considered and careful statements of those
views given in the "Stones of Venice," and in my Lectures de-
livered at Edinburgh.

I cannot, however, allow this work to pass a second time
through the press, without stating in its preface the most
important of all the ultimate principles which I have been able
subsequently to ascertain.

I found, after carefully investigating the character of the
emotions which were generally felt by well-educated people
respecting various forms of good architecture, that these emotions
might be separated into four general heads: —

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PREFACE TO

1. Sentimental Admiration.—The kind of feeling which most travellers experience on first entering a cathedral by torchlight, and hearing a chant from concealed choristers; or in visiting a ruined abbey by moonlight, or any building with which interesting associations are connected, at any time when they can hardly see it.

2. Proud Admiration.—The delight which most worldly people take in showy, large, or complete buildings, for the sake of the importance which such buildings confer on themselves, as their possessors, or admirers.

3. Workmanly Admiration.—The delight of seeing good and neat masonry, together with that belonging to incipient developments of taste; as, for instance, a perception of proportion in lines, masses, and mouldings.

4. Artistical and rational Admiration.—The delight taken in reading the sculpture or painting on walls, capitals, friezes, &c.

Of these four kinds of feeling I found, on farther inquiry, that the first, or sentimental kind, was instinctive and simple; excitable in nearly all persons, by a certain amount of darkness and slow music in a minor key. That it had good uses, and was of a dignified character in some minds; but that on the whole it was apt to rest in theatrical effect, and to be as well satisfied with the incantation scene in "Robert le Diable," provided there were enough gauze and feux-follets, as by the Cathedral of Rheims. That it might generally be appealed to with advantage as a judge of the relative impressiveness of two styles of art, but was wholly unable to distinguish truth from affectation in the style it preferred. Even in its highest manifestation, in the great mind of Scott, while it indeed led him to lay his scenes in Melrose Abbey and Glasgow Cathedral, rather than in St. Paul's or St. Peter's, it did not enable him to see the difference between true Gothic at Glasgow, and false Gothic at Abbots-

THE SECOND EDITION.

xi

ford. As a critical faculty, I found it was hardly to be taken into consideration in any reasoning on the higher merits of architecture.

2. Proud Admiration.—This kind of applause, so far from being courted, I found ought altogether to be deprecated by the noble architect, and that no building could be really admirable which was not admirable to the poor. So that there was an essential baseness in the Renaissance (i. e. the modern Italian and Greek style), and an essential nobleness in the Gothic, consisting simply in the pride of the one, and the humility of the other. I found the love of largeness, and especially of symmetry, invariably associated with vulgarity and narrowness of mind, so that the person most intimately acquainted with the mind of the monarch to whom the Renaissance architecture owed its principal impulse, describing his principles of religion, states that he “was shocked to be told that Jesus Christ spoke the language of the humble and the poor;” and, describing his taste in architecture, says that he “thought of nothing but grandeur, magnificence, and symmetry.”*

3. Workmanly Admiration. — This, of course, though right within certain limits, is wholly uncritical, being as easily satisfied with the worst as with the best building, so that the mortar be laid smoothly. As to the feeling with which it is usually united, namely, a delight in the intelligent observance of the proportions of masses, it is good in all the affairs of life, whether regulating the disposition of dishes at a dinner table†, of ornaments on a dress, or of pillars in a portico. But it no more constitutes

* Madame de Maintenon, quoted in Quarterly Review, March, 1855, pp. 423—428. She says, afterwards, “He prefers to endure all the draughts from the doors, in order that they may be opposite one another — you must perish in symmetry.”

† “At the château of Madame V., the white-headed butler begged madame to apologise for the central flower-basket on the table: ‘He had not had time to study the composition.’” — Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories,” lett. 44.

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the true power of an architect, than the possession of a good ear for metre constitutes a poet; and every building whose excellence consists merely in the proportion of masses is to be considered as nothing more than an architectural doggrel, or rhyming exercise.

4. Artistical and rational Admiration. — I found, finally, that this, the only admiration worth having, attached itself wholly to the meaning of the sculpture and colour on the building. That it was very regardless of general form and size; but intensely observant of the statuary, floral mouldings, mosaics, and other decorations. Upon which, little by little, it gradually became manifest to me that the sculpture and painting were, in fact, the all in all of the thing to be done; that these, which I had long been in the careless habit of thinking subordinate to the architecture, were in fact the entire masters of the architecture; and that the architect who was not a sculptor or a painter, was nothing better than a frame-maker on a large scale. Having once got this clue to the truth, every question about architecture immediately settled itself without farther difficulty. I saw that the idea of an independent architectural profession was a mere modern fallacy, the thought of which had never so much as entered the heads of the great nations of earlier times; but that it had always, till lately, been understood, that in order to have a Parthenon, one had to get a preliminary Phidias; and to have a Cathedral of Florence, a preliminary Giotto; and to have even a Saint Peter's at Rome, a preliminary Michael Angelo. And as, with this new light, I examined the nobler examples of our Gothic cathedrals, it became apparent to me that the master workman must have been the person who carved the bas-reliefs in the porches; that to him all others must have been subordinate, and by him all the rest of the cathedral essentially arranged; but that in fact the whole company of builders, always large, were more or less divided into two great flocks of stone-layers, and

THE SECOND EDITION.

xiii

sculptors; and that the number of sculptors was so great, and their average talent so considerable, that it would no more have been thought necessary to state respecting the master builder that he could carve a statue, than that he could measure an angle, or strike a curve.*

If the reader will think over this statement carefully he will find that it is indeed true, and a key to many things. The fact is, there are only two fine arts possible to the human race, sculpture and painting. What we call architecture is only the association of these in noble masses, or the placing them in fit places. All architecture other than this is, in fact, mere *building*; and though it may sometimes be graceful, as in the groinings of an abbey roof; or sublime, as in the battlements of a border tower; there is, in such examples of it, no more exertion of the powers of high art, than in the gracefulness of a well-ordered chamber, or the nobleness of a well-built ship of war.

All high art consists in the carving or painting natural objects, chiefly figures: it has always subject and meaning, never consisting solely in arrangement of lines, or even of colours. It always paints or carves something that it sees or believes in; nothing ideal or uncredited. For the most part, it paints and carves the men and things that are visible around it. And as soon as we possess a body of sculptors able, and willing, and having leave from the English public, to carve on the façades of our cathedrals portraits of the living bishops, deans, canons, and choristers, who are to minister in the said cathedrals; and on the façades of our public buildings, portraits of the men

* The name by which the architect of Cologne Cathedral is designated in the contracts for the work, is "magister lapicida," the "master stone-cutter;" and I believe this was the usual Latin term throughout the middle ages. The architect of the fourteenth century portions of Notre-Dame, Paris, is styled in French, merely "premier masson."

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chiefly moving or acting in the same; and on our buildings,
generally, the birds and flowers which are singing and budding
in the fields around them, we shall have a school of English
architecture. Not till then.

This general principle being understood, there is, I think,
nothing in the text which I may not leave in the form in
which it was originally written, without further comment, except
only the expression of doubt (p. 192.) as to the style which
ought, at present, to be consistently adopted by our architects. I
have now no doubt that the only style proper for modern northern
work, is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century, as exem-
plified, in England, pre-eminently by the cathedrals of Lincoln
and Wells, and, in France, by those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres,
Rheims, and Bourges, and by the transepts of that of Rouen.

I must here also deprecate an idea which is often taken up
by hasty readers of the "Stones of Venice;" namely, that I
suppose Venetian architecture the most noble of the schools
of Gothic. I have great respect for Venetian Gothic, but only
as one among many early schools. My reason for devoting so
much time to Venice, was not that her architecture is the best in
existence, but that it exemplifies, in the smallest compass, the
most interesting facts of architectural history. The Gothic of
Verona is far nobler than that of Venice; and that of Florence
nobler than that of Verona. For our own immediate purposes
that of Notre-Dame of Paris is noblest of all; and the greatest
service which can at present be rendered to architecture, is the
careful delineation of the details of the cathedrals above named,
by means of photography. I would particularly desire to direct
the attention of amateur photographers to this task; earnestly
requesting them to bear in mind that while a photograph of land-
scape is merely an amusing toy, one of early architecture is a
precious historical document; and that this architecture should

THE SECOND EDITION.

XV

be taken, not merely when it presents itself under picturesque
general forms, but stone by stone, and sculpture by sculpture;
seizing every opportunity afforded by scaffolding to approach it
closely, and putting the camera in any position that will command
the sculpture, wholly without regard to the resultant distortions
of the vertical lines; such distortion can always be allowed for,
if once the details are completely obtained.

It would be still more patriotic in lovers of architecture to
obtain casts of the sculptures of the thirteenth century, wherever
an opportunity occurs, and to place them where they would be
easily accessible to the ordinary workman. The Architectural
Museum at Westminster is one of the institutions which it ap-
pears to me most desirable to enrich in this manner.

I have only to add that the Plates of the present Volume
have been carefully re-etched by Mr. Cuff, retaining, as far as
possible, the appearance of the original sketches, but remedying
the defects which resulted in the first edition from my careless
etching. Of the subject of the 9th Plate I prepared a new
drawing, which has been admirably engraved by Mr. Armytage.
The lettering, and other references, will, I hope, be found more
intelligible throughout.

LIST OF PLATES.

PLATE

<table><tbody><tr><td>I. Ornaments from Rouen, St. Lo, and Venice</td><td>to face page</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>II. Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy</td><td>-</td><td>48</td></tr><tr><td>III. Traceries from Caen, Bayeux, Rouen, and Beauvais</td><td>-</td><td>53</td></tr><tr><td>IV. Intersectional Mouldings</td><td>-</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>V. Capital from the Lower Arcade of the Doge's Palace, Venice</td><td>-</td><td>81</td></tr><tr><td>VI. Arch from the Façade of the Church of San Michele at Lucca</td><td>-</td><td>84</td></tr><tr><td>VII. Pierced Ornaments from Lisieux, Bayeux, Verona, and Padua</td><td>-</td><td>87</td></tr><tr><td>VIII. Window from the Ca' Foscari, Venice</td><td>-</td><td>88</td></tr><tr><td>IX. Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto, at Florence</td><td>-</td><td>Title page</td></tr><tr><td>X. Traceries and Mouldings from Rouen and Salisbury</td><td>-</td><td>page 116</td></tr><tr><td>XI. Balcony in the Campo St. Benedetto, Venice</td><td>-</td><td>125</td></tr><tr><td>XII. Fragments from Abbeville, Lucca, Venice, and Pisa</td><td>-</td><td>143</td></tr><tr><td>XIII. Portions of an Arcade on the South Side of the Cathedral of Ferrara</td><td>-</td><td>155</td></tr><tr><td>XIV. Sculptures from the Cathedral of Rouen</td><td>-</td><td>160</td></tr></tbody></table>

a

THE

SEVEN LAMPS

OF

ARCHITECTURE.

INTRODUCTORY.

SOME years ago, in conversation with an artist whose works, perhaps, alone, in the present day, unite perfection of drawing with resplendence of colour, the writer made some inquiry respecting the general means by which this latter quality was most easily to be attained. The reply was as concise as it was comprehensive —"Know what you have to do, and do it"—comprehensive, not only as regarded the branch of art to which it temporarily applied, but as expressing the great principle of success in every direction of human effort; for I believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves. And this is the more cautiously to be remembered; because, while a man's sense and conscience, aided

B

2

INTRODUCTORY.

by Revelation, are always enough, if earnestly directed, to enable
him to discover what is right, neither his sense, nor conscience,
nor feeling is ever enough, because they are not intended, to
determine for him what is possible. He knows neither his own
strength nor that of his fellows, neither the exact dependence to
be placed on his allies nor resistance to be expected from his oppo-
nents. These are questions respecting which passion may warp his
conclusions, and ignorance must limit them; but it is his own fault
if either interfere with the apprehension of duty, or the acknow-
ledgment of right. And, as far as I have taken cognizance of
the causes of the many failures to which the efforts of intelligent
men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to
me more largely to spring from this single error than from all
others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort in-
explicable relations of capability, chance, resistance, and incon-
venience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede,
the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor
is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our
powers should reconcile us too easily to our short comings, and
even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural
utmost is in itself well, or, in other words, that the necessity of
offences renders them inoffensive.

What is true of human polity seems to me not less so of the
distinctively political art of Architecture. I have long felt con-
vinced of the necessity, in order to its progress, of some determined
effort to extricate from the confused mass of partial traditions
and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during
imperfect or restricted practice, those large principles of right
which are applicable to every stage and style of it. Uniting
the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity
does soul and body, it shows the same infirmly balanced liability
to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the
interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity
of the reflective element. This tendency, like every other form
of materialism, is increasing with the advance of the age; and
the only laws which resist it, based upon partial precedents, and

INTRODUCTORY.

3

already regarded with disrespect as decrepit, if not with defiance
as tyrannical, are evidently inapplicable to the new forms and
functions of the art, which the necessities of the day demand.
How many these necessities may become, cannot be conjectured;
they rise, strange and impatient, out of every modern shadow
of change. How far it may be possible to meet them without a
sacrifice of the essential characters of architectural art, cannot
be determined by specific calculation or observance. There is no
law, no principle, based on past practice, which may not be
overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new condition, or
the invention of a new material; and the most rational, if not the
only, mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all
that is systematic and consistent in our practice, or of ancient
authority in our judgment, is to cease, for a little while, our
endeavours to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses,
restraints, or requirements; and endeavour to determine, as the
guides of every effort, some constant, general, and irrefragable laws
of right—laws, which based upon man's nature, not upon his
knowledge, may possess so far the unchangeableness of the one,
as that neither the increase nor imperfection of the other may be
able to assault or invalidate them.

There are, perhaps, no such laws peculiar to any one art. Their
range necessarily includes the entire horizon of man's action.
But they have modified forms and operations belonging to each
of his pursuits, and the extent of their authority cannot surely
be considered as a diminution of its weight. Those peculiar
aspects of them which belong to the first of the arts, I have
endeavoured to trace in the following pages; and since, if truly
stated, they must necessarily be, not only safeguards against
every form of error, but sources of every measure of success, I
do not think that I claim too much for them in calling them the
Lamps of Architecture, nor that it is indolence, in endeavouring
to ascertain the true nature and nobility of their fire, to refuse
to enter into any curious or special questioning of the innu-
merable hindrances by which their light has been too often
distorted or overpowered.

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4

INTRODUCTORY.

Had this farther examination been attempted, the work would
have become certainly more invidious, and perhaps less useful, as
liable to errors which are avoided by the present simplicity of its
plan. Simple though it be, its extent is too great to admit of any
adequate accomplishment, unless by a devotion of time which the
writer did not feel justified in withdrawing from branches of
inquiry in which the prosecution of works already undertaken
has engaged him. Both arrangement and nomenclature are those
of convenience rather than of system; the one is arbitrary and
the other illogical: nor is it pretended that all, or even the
greater number of, the principles necessary to the well being
of the art, are included in the inquiry. Many, however, of
considerable importance will be found to develope themselves
incidentally from those more specially brought forward.

Graver apology is necessary for an apparently graver fault.
It has been just said, that there is no branch of human work
whose constant laws have not close analogy with those which
govern every other mode of man's exertion. But, more than
this, exactly as we reduce to greater simplicity and surety any
one group of these practical laws, we shall find them passing
the mere condition of connection or analogy, and becoming the
actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty
laws which govern the moral world. However mean or incon-
siderable the act, there is something in the well doing of it,
which has fellowship with the noblest forms of manly virtue;
and the truth, decision, and temperance, which we reverently
regard as honourable conditions of the spiritual being, have a
representative or derivative influence over the works of the hand,
the movements of the frame, and the action of the intellect.

And as thus every action, down even to the drawing of a line
or utterance of a syllable, is capable of a peculiar dignity in the
manner of it, which we sometimes express by saying it is truly
done (as a line or tone is true), so also it is capable of dignity
still higher in the motive of it. For there is no action so slight,
nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled
therefore; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions

INTRODUCTORY.

5

may help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God. Hence George Herbert—

"A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and the action fine."

Therefore, in the pressing or recommending of any act or manner of acting, we have choice of two separate lines of argument: one based on representation of the expediency or inherent value of the work, which is often small, and always disputable; the other based on proofs of its relations to the higher orders of human virtue, and of its acceptableness, so far as it goes, to Him who is the origin of virtue. The former is commonly the more persuasive method, the latter assuredly the more conclusive; only it is liable to give offence, as if there were irreverence in adducing considerations so weighty in treating subjects of small temporal importance. I believe, however, that no error is more thoughtless than this. We treat God with irreverence by banishing Him from our thoughts, not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot be troubled with small things. There is nothing so small but that we may honour God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands; and what is true of the Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use it most reverently when most habitually: our insolence is in ever acting without reference to it, our true honouring of it is in its universal application. I have been blamed for the familiar introduction of its sacred words. I am grieved to have given pain by so doing; but my excuse must be my wish that those words were made the ground of every argument and the test of every action. We have them not often enough on our lips, nor deeply enough in our memories, nor loyally enough in our lives. The snow, the vapour, and the stormy wind fulfil His word. Are our acts and thoughts lighter and wilder than these—that we should forget it?

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6

INTRODUCTORY.

I have therefore ventured, at the risk of giving to some passages
the appearance of irreverence, to take the higher line of argument
wherever it appeared clearly traceable: and this, I would ask the
reader especially to observe, not merely because I think it the
best mode of reaching ultimate truth, still less because I think
the subject of more importance than many others; but because
every subject should surely, at a period like the present, be taken
up in this spirit, or not at all. The aspect of the years that
approach us is as solemn as it is full of mystery; and the weight
of evil against which we have to contend, is increasing like the
letting out of water. It is no time for the idleness of metaphysics,
or the entertainment of the arts. The blasphemies of the earth
are sounding louder, and its miseries heaped heavier every day;
and if, in the midst of the exertion which every good man is called
upon to put forth for their repression or relief, it is lawful to ask
for a thought, for a moment, for a lifting of the finger, in any
direction but that of the immediate and overwhelming need, it is
at least incumbent upon us to approach the questions in which
we would engage him, in the spirit which has become the habit
of his mind, and in the hope that neither his zeal nor his usefulness
may be checked by the withdrawal of an hour, which has shown
him how even those things which seemed mechanical, indifferent,
or contemptible, depend for their perfection upon the acknowledg-
ment of the sacred principles of faith, truth, and obedience, for
which it has become the occupation of his life to contend.

7

# CHAPTER I.

## THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

I. ARCHITECTURE is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building.

To build,—literally, to confirm,—is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building. That one edifice stands, another floats, and another is suspended on iron springs, makes no difference in the nature of the art, if so it may be called, of building or edification. The persons who profess that art, are severally builders, ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their work may justify; but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of what it erects; and it is no more architecture which raises a church, or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a required number of persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is architecture which makes a carriage commodious, or a ship swift. I do not, of course, mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately, applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture); but in that sense architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the confusion which would arise, and has often arisen, from extending principles which belong altogether to building, into the sphere of architecture proper.

Let us, therefore, at once confine the name to that art which,

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taking up and admitting, as conditions of its working, the neces-
sities and common uses of the building, impresses on its form
certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unneces-
sary. Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws architectural
which determine the height of a breastwork or the position of a
bastion. But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an
unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, *that* is Architecture. It
would be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or machi-
colations architectural features, so long as they consist only of an
advanced gallery supported on projecting masses, with open
intervals beneath for offence. But if these projecting masses be
carved beneath into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the
headings of the intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless,
*that* is Architecture. It may not be always easy to draw the line
so sharply, because there are few buildings which have not some
pretence or colour of being architectural; neither can there be
any architecture which is not based on building, nor any good
architecture which is not based on good building; but it is per-
fectly easy, and very necessary, to keep the ideas distinct, and to
understand fully that Architecture concerns itself only with those
characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common
use. I say common; because a building raised to the honour of
God, or in memory of men, has surely a use to which its architec-
tural adornment fits it; but not a use which limits, by any
inevitable necessities, its plan or details.

II. Architecture proper, then, naturally arranges itself under
five heads :—

Devotional; including all buildings raised for God's service or
honour.

Memorial; including both monuments and tombs.

Civil; including every edifice raised by nations or societies, for
purposes of common business or pleasure.

Military; including all private and public architecture of
defence.

Domestic; including every rank and kind of dwelling-place.
Now, of the principles which I would endeavour to develope,

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while all must be, as I have said, applicable to every stage
and style of the art, some, and especially those which are ex-
citing rather than directing, have necessarily fuller reference to
one kind of building than another; and among these I would
place first that spirit which, having influence in all, has
nevertheless such especial reference to devotional and memorial
architecture—the spirit which offers for such work precious things,
simply because they are precious; not as being necessary to the
building, but as an offering, surrendering, and sacrifice of what
is to ourselves desirable. It seems to me, not only that this
feeling is in most cases wholly wanting in those who forward the
devotional buildings of the present day; but that it would even
be regarded as a dangerous, or perhaps criminal principle by
many among us. I have not space to enter into dispute of all
the various objections which may be urged against it—they are
many and specious; but I may, perhaps, ask the reader's patience
while I set down those simple reasons which cause me to believe
it a good and just feeling, and as well-pleasing to God and
honourable in men, as it is beyond all dispute necessary to the
production of any great work in the kind with which we are at
present concerned.

III. Now, first, to define this Lamp, or Spirit, of Sacrifice,
clearly. I have said that it prompts us to the offering of precious
things, merely because they are precious, not because they are
useful, or necessary. It is a spirit, for instance, which of two
marbles, equally beautiful, applicable and durable, would choose
the more costly, because it was so, and of two kinds of decoration,
equally effective, would choose the more elaborate because it was
so, in order that it might in the same compass present more cost
and more thought. It is therefore most unreasoning and enthu-
siastic, and perhaps best negatively defined, as the opposite of
the prevalent feeling of modern times, which desires to produce
the largest results at the least cost.

Of this feeling, then, there are two distinct forms: the first,
the wish to exercise self-denial for the sake of self-discipline
merely, a wish acted upon in the abandonment of things loved or

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desired, there being no direct call or purpose to be answered by
so doing; and the second, the desire to honour or please some one
else by the costliness of the sacrifice. The practice is, in the
first case, either private or public; but most frequently, and
perhaps most properly, private; while, in the latter case, the act
is commonly, and with greatest advantage, public. Now, it cannot
but at first appear futile to assert the expediency of self-denial for
its own sake, when, for so many sakes, it is every day necessary
to a far greater degree than any of us practise it. But I believe
it is just because we do not enough acknowledge or contemplate
it as a good in itself, that we are apt to fail in its duties when
they become imperative, and to calculate, with some partiality,
whether the good proposed to others measures or warrants the
amount of grievance to ourselves, instead of accepting with
gladness the opportunity of sacrifice as a personal advantage.
Be this as it may, it is not necessary to insist upon the matter
here; since there are always higher and more useful channels of
self-sacrifice, for those who choose to practise it, than any
connected with the arts.

While in its second branch, that which is especially concerned
with the arts, the justice of the feeling is still more doubtful; it
depends on our answer to the broad question, can the Deity be
indeed honoured by the presentation to Him of any material
objects of value, or by any direction of zeal or wisdom which
is not immediately beneficial to men?

For, observe, it is not now the question whether the fairness
and majesty of a building may or may not answer any moral
purpose; it is not the result of labour in any sort of which we
are speaking, but the bare and mere costliness—the substance
and labour and time themselves: are these, we ask, independently
of their result, acceptable offerings to God, and considered by
Him as doing Him honour? So long as we refer this question to
the decision of feeling, or of conscience, or of reason merely, it
will be contradictorily or imperfectly answered; it admits of
entire answer only when we have met another and a far different
question, whether the Bible be indeed one book or two, and

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whether the character of God revealed in the Old Testament be
other than His character revealed in the New.

IV. Now, it is a most secure truth, that, although the particular ordinances divinely appointed for special purposes at any given period of man's history, may be by the same divine authority abrogated at another, it is impossible that any character of God, appealed to or described in any ordinance past or present, can ever be changed, or understood as changed, by the abrogation of that ordinance. God is one and the same, and is pleased or displeased by the same things for ever, although one part of His pleasure may be expressed at one time rather than another, and although the mode in which His pleasure is to be consulted may be by Him graciously modified to the circumstances of men. Thus, for instance, it was necessary that, in order to the understanding by man of the scheme of Redemption, that scheme should be foreshown from the beginning by the type of bloody sacrifice. But God had no more pleasure in such sacrifice in the time of Moses than He has now; He never accepted, as a propitiation for sin, any sacrifice but the single one in prospective: and that we may not entertain any shadow of doubt on this subject, the worthlessness of all other sacrifice than this is proclaimed at the very time when typical sacrifice was most imperatively demanded. God was a spirit, and could be worshipped only in spirit and in truth, as singly and exclusively when every day brought its claim of typical and material service or offering, as now when He asks for none but that of the heart.

So, therefore, it is a most safe and sure principle that, if in
the manner of performing any rite at any time, circumstances
can be traced which we are either told, or may legitimately
conclude, *pleased* God at that time, those same circumstances
will please Him at all times, in the performance of all rites or
offices to which they may be attached in like manner; unless
it has been afterwards revealed that, for some special purpose,
it is now His will that such circumstances should be withdrawn.
And this argument will have all the more force if it can be
shown that such conditions were not essential to the completeness

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of the rite in its human uses and bearings, and only were added
to it as being in themselves pleasing to God.

V. Now, was it necessary to the completeness, as a type, of the
Levitical sacrifice, or to its utility as an explanation of divine
purposes, that it should cost any thing to the person in whose
behalf it was offered? On the contrary, the sacrifice which it
foreshowed, was to be God's free gift; and the cost of, or
difficulty of obtaining, the sacrificial type, could only render that
type in a measure obscure, and less expressive of the offering
which God would in the end provide for all men. Yet this
costliness was generally a condition of the acceptableness of the
sacrifice. "Neither will I offer unto the Lord my God of that
which doth cost me nothing."* That costliness, therefore, must
be an acceptable condition in all human offerings at all times;
for if it was pleasing to God once, it must please Him always,
unless directly forbidden by Him afterwards, which it has never
been.

Again, was it necessary to the typical perfection of the Levitical
offering, that it should be the best of the flock? Doubtless, the
spotlessness of the sacrifice renders it more expressive to the
Christian mind; but was it because so expressive that it was
actually, and in so many words, demanded by God? Not at all.
It was demanded by Him expressly on the same grounds on
which an earthly governour would demand it, as a testimony of
respect. "Offer it now unto thy governour."† And the less
valuable offering was rejected, not because it did not image
Christ, nor fulfil the purposes of sacrifice, but because it indicated
a feeling that would grudge the best of its possessions to Him
who gave them; and because it was a bold dishonouring of God
in the sight of man. Whence it may be infallibly concluded,
that in whatever offerings we may now see reason to present
unto God (I say not what these may be), a condition of their
acceptableness will be now, as it was then, that they should be
the best of their kind.

* 2 Sam. xxiv. 24. Deut. xvi. 16, 17.

† Mal. i. 8.

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VI. But farther, was it necessary to the carrying out of the Mosaical system, that there should be either art or splendour in the form or services of the tabernacle or temple? Was it necessary to the perfection of any one of their typical offices, that there should be that hanging of blue, and purple, and scarlet? those taches of brass and sockets of silver? that working in cedar and overlaying with gold? One thing at least is evident: there was a deep and awful danger in it; a danger that the God whom they so worshipped, might be associated in the minds of the serfs of Egypt with the gods to whom they had seen similar gifts offered and similar honours paid. The probability, in our times, of fellowship with the feelings of the idolatrous Romanist is absolutely as nothing, compared with the danger to the Israelite of a sympathy with the idolatrous Egyptian¹; no speculative, no unproved danger; but proved fatally by their fall during a month's abandonment to their own will; a fall into the most servile idolatry; yet marked by such offerings to their idol as their leader was, in the close sequel, instructed to bid them offer to God. This danger was imminent, perpetual, and of the most awful kind: it was the one against which God made provision, not only by commandments, by threatenings, by promises, the most urgent, repeated, and impressive; but by temporary ordinances of a severity so terrible as almost to dim for a time, in the eyes of His people, His attribute of mercy. The principal object of every instituted law of that Theocracy, of every judgment sent forth in its vindication, was to mark to the people His hatred of idolatry; a hatred written under their advancing steps, in the blood of the Canaanite, and more sternly still in the darkness of their own desolation, when the children and the sucklings swooned in the streets of Jerusalem, and the lion tracked his prey in the dust of Samaria.* Yet, against this mortal danger, provision was not made in one way, (to man's thoughts the simplest, the most natural, the most

* Lam. ii. 11. 2 Kings, xvii. 25.

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effective,) by withdrawing from the worship of the Divine Being whatever could delight the sense, or shape the imagination, or limit the idea of Deity to place. This one way God refused, demanding for Himself such honours, and accepting for Himself such local dwelling, as had been paid and dedicated to idol gods by heathen worshippers; and for what reason? Was the glory of the tabernacle necessary to set forth or image his divine glory to the minds of His people? What! purple or scarlet necessary, to the people who had seen the great river of Egypt run scarlet to the sea, under His condemnation? What! golden lamp and cherub necessary, for those who had seen the fires of heaven falling like a mantle on Mount Sinai, and its golden courts opened to receive their mortal lawgiver? What! silver clasp and fillet necessary, when they had seen the silver waves of the Red Sea clasp in their arched hollows the corpses of the horse and his rider? Nay—not so. There was but one reason, and that an eternal one; that as the covenant that He made with men was accompanied with some external sign of its continuance, and of His remembrance of it, so the acceptance of that covenant might be marked and signified by men, in some external sign of their love and obedience, and surrender of themselves and theirs to His will; and that their gratitude to Him and continual remembrance of Him, might have at once their expression and their enduring testimony in the presentation to Him, not only of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not only of the fruits of the earth and the tithe of time, but of all treasures of wisdom and beauty; of the thought that invents, and the hand that labours; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone; of the strength of iron, and of the light of gold.

And let us not now lose sight of this broad and unabrogated principle—I might say, incapable of being abrogated, so long as men shall receive earthly gifts from God. Of all that they have his tithe must be rendered to Him, or in so far and in so much He is forgotten: of the skill and of the treasure, of the strength and of the mind, of the time and of the toil, offering must be made reverently; and if there be any difference between

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the Levitical and the Christian offering, it is that the latter may
be just so much the wider in its range as it is less typical
in its meaning, as it is thankful instead of sacrificial. There
can be no excuse accepted because the Deity does not now
visibly dwell in His temple; if He is invisible it is only through
our failing faith: nor any excuse because other calls are more
immediate or more sacred; this ought to be done, and not the
other left undone. Yet this objection, as frequent as feeble,
must be more specifically answered.

VII. It has been said—it ought always to be said, for it is true,
—that a better and more honourable offering is made to our Master
in ministry to the poor, in extending the knowledge of His name,
in the practice of the virtues by which that name is hallowed,
than in material presents to His temple. Assuredly it is so: woe
to all who think that any other kind or manner of offering may
in any wise take the place of these! Do the people need place to
pray, and calls to hear His word? Then it is no time for smooth-
ing pillars or carving pulpits; let us have enough first of walls
and roofs. Do the people need teaching from house to house,
and bread from day to day? Then they are deacons and ministers
we want, not architects. I insist on this, I plead for this; but
let us examine ourselves, and see if this be indeed the reason for
our backwardness in the lesser work. The question is not be-
tween God's house and His poor: it is not between God's house
and His Gospel. It is between God's house and ours. Have we
no tesselated colours on our floors? no frescoed fancies on our
roofs? no niched statuary in our corridors? no gilded furniture
in our chambers? no costly stones in our cabinets? Has even
the tithe of these been offered? They are, or they ought to be,
the signs that enough has been devoted to the great purposes of
human stewardship, and that there remains to us what we can
spend in luxury; but there is a greater and prouder luxury than
this selfish one—that of bringing a portion of such things as these
into sacred service, and presenting them for a memorial* that our

* Num. xxxi. 54. Psa. lxxvi. 11.

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pleasure as well as our toil has been hallowed by the remem-
brance of Him who gave both the strength and the reward.
And until this has been done, I do not see how such possessions
can be retained in happiness. I do not understand the feeling
which would arch our own gates and pave our own thresholds,
and leave the church with its narrow door and foot-worn sill; the
feeling which enriches our own chambers with all manner of cost-
liness, and endures the bare wall and mean compass of the temple.
There is seldom even so severe a choice to be made, seldom so
much self-denial to be exercised. There are isolated cases, in
which men's happiness and mental activity depend upon a certain
degree of luxury in their houses; but then this is true luxury,
felt and tasted, and profited by. In the plurality of instances
nothing of the kind is attempted, nor can be enjoyed; men's
average resources cannot reach it; and that which they can reach,
gives them no pleasure, and might be spared. It will be seen, in
the course of the following chapters, that I am no advocate for
meanness of private habitation. I would fain introduce into it
all magnificence, care, and beauty, where they are possible;
but I would not have that useless expense in unnoticed fineries or
formalities; cornicing of ceilings and graining of doors, and
fringing of curtains, and thousands such; things which have
become foolishly and apathetically habitual—things on whose
common appliance hang whole trades, to which there never yet
belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real pleasure, or becom-
ing of the remotest or most contemptible use—things which
cause half the expense of life, and destroy more than half its com-
fort, manliness, respectability, freshness, and facility. I speak
from experience: I know what it is to live in a cottage with a
deal floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate; and I know it to
be in many respects healthier and happier than living between a
Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished
fender. I do not say that such things have not their place and
propriety; but I say this, emphatically, that the tenth part of the
expense which is sacrificed in domestic vanities, if not absolutely
and meaninglessly lost in domestic discomforts and incumbrances,

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would, if collectively offered and wisely employed, build a marble church for every town in England; such a church as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways and walks, and as it would bring the light into the eyes to see from afar, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs.

VIII. I have said for every town: I do not want a marble church for every village; nay, I do not want marble churches at all for their own sake, but for the sake of the spirit that would build them. The church has no need of any visible splendours; her power is independent of them, her purity is in some degree opposed to them. The simplicity of a pastoral sanctuary is lovelier than the majesty of an urban temple; and it may be more than questioned whether, to the people, such majesty has ever been the source of any increase of effective piety; but to the builders it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.² And see how much more charity the full understanding of this might admit, among classes of men of naturally opposite feelings; and how much more nobleness in the work. There is no need to offend by importunate, self-proclaimant splendour. Your gift may be given in an unpresuming way. Cut one or two shafts out of a porphyry whose preciousness those only would know who would desire it to be so used; add another month's labour to the under-cutting of a few capitals, whose delicacy will not be seen nor loved by one beholder of ten thousand; see that the simplest masonry of the edifice be perfect and substantial; and to those who regard such things, their witness will be clear and impressive; to those who regard them not, all will at least be inoffensive. But do not think the feeling itself a folly, or the act itself useless. Of what use was that dearly bought water of the well of Bethlehem with which the king of Israel slaked the dust of Adullam? yet was it not thus better than if he had drunk it? Of what use was that passionate act of Christian sacrifice, against which, first uttered by the false tongue, the very objection we would now conquer took a sullen tone for

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ever?* So also let us not ask of what use our offering is to the church: it is at least better for us than if it had been retained for ourselves. It may be better for others also: there is, at any rate, a chance of this; though we must always fearfully and widely shun the thought that the magnificence of the temple can materially add to the efficiency of the worship or to the power of the ministry. Whatever we do, or whatever we offer, let it not interfere with the simplicity of the one, or abate, as if replacing, the zeal of the other. That is the abuse and fallacy of Romanism, by which the true spirit of Christian offering is directly contradicted. The treatment of the Papists' temple is eminently exhibitory; it is surface work throughout; and the danger and evil of their church decoration altogether, lie, not in its reality—not in the true wealth and art of which the lower people are never cognizant—but in its tinsel and glitter, in the gilding of the shrine and painting of the image, in embroidery of dingy robes and crowding of imitated gems; all this being frequently thrust forward to the concealment of what is really good or great in their buildings.³ Of an offering of gratitude which is neither to be exhibited nor rewarded, which is neither to win praise nor purchase salvation, the Romanist (as such) has no conception.

IX. While, however, I would especially deprecate the imputation of any other acceptableness or usefulness to the gift itself than that which it receives from the spirit of its presentation, it may be well to observe, that there is a lower advantage which never fails to accompany a dutiful observance of any right abstract principle. While the first fruits of his possessions were required from the Israelite as a testimony of fidelity, the payment of those first fruits was nevertheless rewarded, and that connectedly and specifically, by the increase of those possessions. Wealth, and length of days, and peace, were the promised and experienced rewards of his offering, though they were not to be the objects of it. The tithe paid into the storehouse, was the express condition of the blessing which there should not be room enough to receive. And it will be thus always: God never forgets any work or labour of

* John xii. 5.

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love; and whatever it may be of which the first and best portions
or powers have been presented to Him, He will multiply and in-
crease sevenfold. Therefore, though it may not be necessarily the
interest of religion to admit the service of the arts, the arts will
never flourish until they have been primarily devoted to that service
—devoted, both by architect and employer; by the one in scrupu-
lous, earnest, affectionate design¹; by the other in expenditure
at least more frank, at least less calculating, than that which he
would admit in the indulgence of his own private feelings. Let
this principle be but once fairly acknowledged among us; and
however it may be chilled and repressed in practice, however
feeble may be its real influence, however the sacredness of it may
be diminished by counter-workings of vanity and self-interest, yet
its mere acknowledgment would bring a reward; and with our
present accumulation of means and of intellect, there would be
such an impulse and vitality given to art as it has not felt since
the thirteenth century. And I do not assert this as other than a
natural consequence: I should, indeed, expect a larger measure of
every great and spiritual faculty to be always given where those
faculties had been wisely and religiously employed; but the im-
pulse to which I refer, would be, humanly speaking, certain; and
would naturally result from obedience to the two great conditions
enforced by the Spirit of Sacrifice, first, that we should in every
thing do our best; and, secondly, that we should consider in-
crease of apparent labour as an increase of beauty in the building.
A few practical deductions from these two conditions, and I
have done.

X. For the first : it is alone enough to secure success, and it is
for want of observing it that we continually fail. We are none of
us so good architects as to be able to work habitually beneath our
strength; and yet there is not a building that I know of, lately
raised, wherein it is not sufficiently evident that neither architect
nor builder has done his best. It is the especial characteristic
of modern work. All old work nearly has been hard work. It
may be the hard work of children, of barbarians, of rustics; but
it is always their utmost. Ours has as constantly the look of

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money's worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we
can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions; never of a fair
putting forth of our strength. Let us have done with this kind
of work at once: cast off every temptation to it: do not let us
degrade ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over
our short comings; let us confess our poverty or our parsimony,
but not belie our human intellect. It is not even a question of
how much we are to do, but of how it is to be done; it is not a
question of doing more, but of doing better. Do not let us boss
our roofs with wretched, half-worked, blunt-edged rosettes; do not
let us flank our gates with rigid imitations of mediæval statuary.
Such things are mere insults to common sense, and only unfit us
for feeling the nobility of their prototypes. We have so much,
suppose, to be spent in decoration; let us go to the Flaxman of his
time, whoever he may be; and bid him carve for us a single statue,
frieze, or capital, or as many as we can afford, compelling upon
him the one condition, that they shall be the best he can do; place
them where they will be of most value, and be content. Our
other capitals may be mere blocks, and our other niches empty.
No matter: better our work unfinished than all bad. It may be
that we do not desire ornament of so high an order: choose, then,
a less developed style, as also, if you will, rougher material; the
law which we are enforcing requires only that what we pretend
to do and to give, shall both be the best of their kind; choose,
therefore, the Norman hatchet work, instead of the Flaxman frieze
and statue, but let it be the best hatchet work; and if you cannot
afford marble, use Caen stone, but from the best bed; and if not
stone, brick, but the best brick; preferring always what is good
of a lower order of work or material, to what is bad of a higher;
for this is not only the way to improve every kind of work, and
to put every kind of material to better use; but it is more honest
and unpretending, and is in harmony with other just, upright,
and manly principles, whose range we shall have presently to
take into consideration.

XI. The other condition which we had to notice, was the value
of the appearance of labour upon architecture. I have spoken of

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this before*; and it is, indeed, one of the most frequent sources of pleasure which belong to the art, always, however, within certain somewhat remarkable limits. For it does not at first appear easily to be explained why labour, as represented by materials of value, should, without sense of wrong or error, bear being wasted; while the waste of actual workmanship is always painful, so soon as it is apparent. But so it is, that, while precious materials may, with a certain profusion and negligence, be employed for the magnificence of what is seldom seen, the work of man cannot be carelessly and idly bestowed, without an immediate sense of wrong; as if the strength of the living creature were never intended by its Maker to be sacrificed in vain, though it is well for us sometimes to part with what we esteem precious of substance, as showing that in such service it becomes but dross and dust. And in the nice balance between the straitening of effort or enthusiasm on the one hand, and vainly casting it away upon the other, there are more questions than can be met by any but very just and watchful feeling. In general it is less the mere loss of labour that offends us, than the lack of judgment implied by such loss; so that if men confessedly work for work's sake, and it does not appear that they are ignorant where or how to make their labour tell, we shall not be grossly offended. On the contrary, we shall be pleased if the work be lost in carrying out a principle, or in avoiding a deception. It, indeed, is a law properly belonging to another part of our subject, but it may be allowably stated here, that, whenever, by the construction of a building, some parts of it are hidden from the eye which are the continuation of others bearing some consistent ornament, it is not well that the ornament should cease in the parts concealed; credit is given for it, and it should not be deceptively withdrawn: as, for instance, in the sculpture of the backs of the statues of a temple pediment; never, perhaps, to be seen, but yet not lawfully to be left unfinished. And so in the working out of ornaments in dark or concealed places, in which it is best to err on the side

* Mod. Painters, Part I. Sec. 1. Chap. 3.

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of completion; and in the carrying round of string courses, and other such continuous work; not but that they may stop sometimes, on the point of going into some palpably impenetrable recess, but then let them stop boldly and markedly, on some distinct terminal ornament, and never be supposed to exist where they do not. The arches of the towers which flank the transepts of Rouen Cathedral have rosette ornaments on their spandrils, on the three visible sides; none on the side towards the roof. The right of this is rather a nice point for question.

XII. Visibility, however, we must remember, depends, not only on situation, but on distance; and there is no way in which work is more painfully and unwisely lost than in its over delicacy on parts distant from the eye. Here, again, the principle of honesty must govern our treatment: we must not work any kind of ornament which is, perhaps, to cover the whole building (or at least to occur on all parts of it) delicately where it is near the eye, and rudely where it is removed from it. That is trickery and dishonesty. Consider, first, what kinds of ornaments will tell in the distance and what near, and so distribute them, keeping such as by their nature are delicate, down near the eye, and throwing the bold and rough kinds of work to the top; and if there be any kind which is to be both near and far off, take care that it be as boldly and rudely wrought where it is well seen as where it is distant, so that the spectator may know exactly what it is, and what it is worth. Thus chequered patterns, and in general such ornaments as common workmen can execute, may extend over the whole building; but bas-reliefs, and fine niches and capitals, should be kept down; and the common sense of this will always give a building dignity, even though there be some abruptness or awkwardness in the resulting arrangements. Thus at San Zeno at Verona, the bas-reliefs, full of incident and interest, are confined to a parallelogram of the front, reaching to the height of the capitals of the columns of the porch. Above these, we find a simple, though most lovely, little arcade; and above that, only blank wall, with square face shafts. The whole effect is tenfold grander and better than if the entire façade had been covered with bad work, and

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may serve for an example of the way to place little where we
cannot afford much. So, again, the transept gates of Rouen* are
covered with delicate bas-reliefs (of which I shall speak at greater
length presently) up to about once and a half a man's height; and
above that come the usual and more visible statues and niches.
So in the campanile at Florence, the circuit of bas-reliefs is on its
lowest story; above that come its statues; and above them all is
pattern mosaic, and twisted columns, exquisitely finished, like all
Italian work of the time, but still, in the eye of the Florentine,
rough and commonplace by comparison with the bas-reliefs. So
generally the most delicate niche work and best mouldings of the
French Gothic are in gates and low windows well within sight;
although, it being the very spirit of that style to trust to its
exuberance for effect, there is occasionally a burst upwards and
blossoming unrestrainably to the sky, as in the pediment of the
west front of Rouen, and in the recess of the rose window behind
it, where there are some most elaborate flower-mouldings, all but
invisible from below, and only adding a general enrichment to
the deep shadows that relieve the shafts of the advanced pediment.
It is observable, however, that this very work is bad flamboyant,
and has corrupt renaissance characters in its detail as well as use;
while in the earlier and grander north and south gates, there
is a very noble proportioning of the work to the distance, the
niches and statues which crown the northern one, at a height
of about one hundred feet from the ground, being alike colossal
and simple; visibly so from below, so as to induce no deception,
and yet honestly and well finished above, and all that they are
expected to be; the features very beautiful, full of expression,
and as delicately wrought as any work of the period.

XIII. It is to be remembered, however, that while the ornaments
in every fine ancient building, without exception so far as I am
aware, are most delicate at the base, they are often in greater
effective *quantity* on the upper parts. In high towers this is
perfectly natural and right, the solidity of the foundation being as

* Henceforward, for the sake of convenience, when I name any cathedral town in this manner, let me be understood to speak of its cathedral church.

c 4

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necessary as the division and penetration of the superstructure;
hence the lighter work and richly pierced crowns of late Gothic
towers. The campanile of Giotto at Florence already alluded to,
is an exquisite instance of the union of the two principles, delicate
bas-reliefs adorning its massy foundation, while the open tracery
of the upper windows attracts the eye by its slender intricacy,
and a rich cornice crowns the whole. In such truly fine cases
of this disposition the upper work is effective by its quantity and
intricacy only, as the lower portions by delicacy; so also in the
Tour de Beurre at Rouen, where, however, the detail is massy
throughout, subdividing into rich meshes as it ascends. In the
bodies of buildings the principle is less safe, but its discussion
is not connected with our present subject.

XIV. Finally, work may be wasted by being too good for its
material, or too fine to bear exposure; and this, generally a
characteristic of late, especially of renaissance, work, is perhaps
the worst fault of all. I do not know any thing more painful
or pitiful than the kind of ivory carving with which the Certosa
of Pavia, and part of the Colleone sepulchral chapel at Bergamo,
and other such buildings, are incrusted, of which it is not pos-
sible so much as to think without exhaustion; and a heavy
sense of the misery it would be, to be forced to look at it all.
And this is not from the quantity of it, nor because it is bad
work—much of it is inventive and able; but because it looks
as if it were only fit to be put in inlaid cabinets and velveted
caskets, and as if it could not bear one drifting shower or
gnawing frost. We are afraid for it, anxious about it, and
tormented by it; and we feel that a massy shaft and a bold
shadow would be worth it all. Nevertheless, even in cases like
these, much depends on the accomplishment of the great ends
of decoration. If the ornament does its duty—if it is ornament,
and its points of shade and light tell in the general effect, we
shall not be offended by finding that the sculptor in his fulness
of fancy has chosen to give much more than these mere points
of light, and has composed them of groups of figures. But
if the ornament does not answer its purpose, if it have no distant,

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no truly decorative power; if, generally seen, it be a mere incrustation and meaningless roughness, we shall only be charmed by finding when we look close, that the incrustation has cost years of labour, and has millions of figures and histories in it; and would be the better of being seen through a Stanhope lens. Hence the greatness of the northern Gothic as contrasted with the latest Italian. It reaches nearly the same extreme of detail; but it never loses sight of its architectural purpose, never fails in its decorative power; not a leaflet in it but speaks, and speaks far off too; and so long as this be the case, there is no limit to the luxuriance in which such work may legitimately and nobly be bestowed.

XV. No limit: it is one of the affectations of architects to speak of overcharged ornament. Ornament cannot be overcharged if it be good, and is always overcharged when it is bad. I have given, on the opposite page (fig. 1.), one of the smallest niches of the central gate of Rouen. That gate I suppose to be the most exquisite piece of pure flamboyant work existing; for though I have spoken of the upper portions, especially the receding window, as degenerate, the gate itself is of a purer period, and has hardly any renaissance taint. There are four strings of these niches (each with two figures beneath it) round the porch, from the ground to the top of the arch, with three intermediate rows of larger niches, far more elaborate; besides the six principal canopies of each outer pier. The total number of the subordinate niches alone, each worked like that in the plate, and each with a different pattern of traceries in each compartment, is one hundred and seventy-six.⁴ Yet in all this ornament there is not one cusp, one finial, that is useless—not a stroke of the chisel is in vain; the grace and luxuriance of it all are visible—sensible rather—even to the uninquiring eye; and all its minuteness does not diminish the majesty, while it increases the mystery, of the noble and unbroken vault. It is not less the boast of some styles that they can bear ornament, than of others that they can do without it; but we do not often enough reflect that those very styles, of so haughty simplicity, owe part of their pleasure-

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bleness to contrast, and would be wearisome if universal. They
are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far
happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of
variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts
of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depth of
midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close
leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry
light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and dia-
demed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of
the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the builders
sacrificed, has passed away—all their living interests, and aims,
and achievements. We know not for what they laboured, and
we see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority,
happiness—all have departed, though bought by many a bitter
sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the
earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps
of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the
grave their powers, their honours, and their errors; but they have
left us their adoration.

27

## CHAP. II.

### THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

I. THERE is a marked likeness between the virtue of man and the enlightenment of the globe he inhabits—the same diminishing gradation in vigour up to the limits of their domains, the same essential separation from their contraries—the same twilight at the meeting of the two: a something wider than the line where the world rolls into night, that strange twilight of the virtues; that dusky debateable land, wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temperance becomes severity, and justice becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each and all vanish into gloom.

Nevertheless, with the greater number of them, though their dimness increases gradually, we may mark the moment of their sunset; and, happily, may turn the shadow back by the way by which it had gone down: but for one, the line of the horizon is irregular and undefined; and this, too, the very equator and girdle of them all—Truth; that only one of which there are no degrees, but breaks and rents continually; that pillar of the earth, yet a cloudy pillar; that golden and narrow line, which the very powers and virtues that lean upon it bend, which policy and prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy modify, which courage overshadows with his shield, imagination covers with her wings, and charity dims with her tears. How difficult must the maintenance of that authority be, which, while it has to restrain the hostility of all the worst principles of man, has also to restrain the disorders of his best—which is continually assaulted by the one and betrayed by the other, and which regards with the same severity the lightest and the boldest violations of its law! There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the

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estimate of wisdom; but truth forgives no insult, and endures no
stain.

We do not enough consider this; nor enough dread the slight
and continual occasions of offence against her. We are too much
in the habit of looking at falsehood in its darkest associations,
and through the colour of its worst purposes. That indignation
which we profess to feel at deceit absolute, is indeed only at deceit
malicious. We resent calumny, hypocrisy, and treachery, because
they harm us, not because they are untrue. Take the detraction
and the mischief from the untruth, and we are little offended by
it; turn it into praise, and we may be pleased with it. And yet it
is not calumny nor treachery that does the largest sum of mis-
chief in the world; they are continually crushed, and are felt only
in being conquered. But it is the glistening and softly spoken
lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the
provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partizan, the
merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to him-
self, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which
we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug
a well in a desert; happy, that the thirst for truth still remains
with us, even when we have wilfully left the fountains of it.

It would be well if moralists less frequently confused the
greatness of a sin with its unpardonableness. The two characters
are altogether distinct. The greatness of a fault depends partly
on the nature of the person against whom it is committed, partly
upon the extent of its consequences. Its pardonableness depends,
humanly speaking, on the degree of temptation to it. One
class of circumstances determines the weight of the attaching
punishment; the other, the claim to remission of punishment: and
since it is not always easy for men to estimate the relative weight,
nor always possible for them to know the relative consequences,
of crime, it is usually wise in them to quit the care of such nice
measurements, and to look to the other and clearer condition of
culpability, esteeming those faults worst which are committed
under least temptation. I do not mean to diminish the blame
of the injurious and malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate

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falsity; yet it seems to me, that the shortest way to check the
darker forms of deceit is to set watch more scrupulous against
those which have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, with the
current of our life. Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of
one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as
unintended. Cast them all aside: they may be light and accidental;
but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, for all that;
and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them,
without over care as to which is largest or blackest. Speaking
truth is like writing fair, and comes only by practice; it is less
a matter of will than of habit, and I doubt if any occasion can
be trivial which permits the practice and formation of such a
habit. To speak and act truth with constancy and precision
is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meritorious, as to speak it
under intimidation or penalty; and it is a strange thought how
many men there are, as I trust, who would hold to it at the cost
of fortune or life, for one who would hold to it at the cost
of a little daily trouble. And seeing that of all sin there is, per-
haps, no one more flatly opposite to the Almighty, no one more
"wanting the good of virtue and of being," than this of lying,
it is surely a strange insolence to fall into the foulness of it on
light or on no temptation, and surely becoming an honourable
man to resolve, that, whatever semblances or fallacies the neces-
sary course of his life may compel him to bear or to believe, none
shall disturb the serenity of his voluntary actions, nor diminish
the reality of his chosen delights.

II. If this be just and wise for truth's sake, much more is it
necessary for the sake of the delights over which she has influence.
For, as I advocated the expression of the Spirit of Sacrifice in
the acts and pleasures of men, not as if thereby those acts could
further the cause of religion, but because most assuredly they
might therein be infinitely ennobled themselves, so I would
have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth clear in the hearts of our
artists and handicraftsmen, not as if the truthful practice of
handicrafts could far advance the cause of truth, but because I
would fain see the handicrafts themselves urged by the spurs

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of chivalry: and it is, indeed, marvellous to see what power and universality there are in this single principle, and how in the consulting or forgetting of it lies half the dignity or decline of every art and act of man. I have before endeavoured to show its range and power in painting; and I believe a volume, instead of a chapter, might be written on its authority over all that is great in architecture. But I must be content with the force of few and familiar instances, believing that the occasions of its manifestation may be more easily discovered by a desire to be true, than embraced by an analysis of truth.

Only it is very necessary in the outset to mark clearly wherein consists the essence of fallacy as distinguished from supposition.

III. For it might be at first thought that the whole kingdom of imagination was one of deception also. Not so: the action of the imagination is a voluntary summoning of the conceptions of things absent or impossible; and the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them as such, i. e. in the knowledge of their actual absence or impossibility at the moment of their apparent presence or reality. When the imagination deceives, it becomes madness. It is a noble faculty so long as it confesses its own ideality; when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All the difference lies in the fact of the confession, in there being no deception. It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we should be able to invent and to behold what is not; and to our rank as moral creatures, that we should know and confess at the same time that it is not.

IV. Again, it might be thought, and has been thought, that the whole art of painting is nothing else than an endeavour to deceive. Not so: it is, on the contrary, a statement of certain facts, in the clearest possible way. For instance: I desire to give an account of a mountain or of a rock; I begin by telling its shape. But words will not do this distinctly, and I draw its shape, and say, "This was its shape." Next: I would fain represent its colour; but words will not do this either, and I dye the paper, and say, "This was its colour." Such a process may

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31

be carried on until the scene appears to exist, and a high pleasure
may be taken in its apparent existence. This is a communicated
act of imagination, but no lie. The lie can consist only in an
assertion of its existence (which is never for one instant made,
implied, or believed), or else in false statements of forms and
colours (which are, indeed, made and believed to our great loss,
continually). And observe, also, that so degrading a thing is
deception in even the approach and appearance of it, that all
painting which even reaches the mark of apparent realisation, is
degraded in so doing. I have enough insisted on this point in
another place.

V. The violations of truth, which dishonour poetry and
painting, are thus for the most part confined to the treatment of
their subjects. But in architecture another and a less subtle,
more contemptible, violation of truth is possible; a direct falsity
of assertion respecting the nature of material, or the quantity
of labour. And this is, in the full sense of the word, wrong;
it is as truly deserving of reprobation as any other moral
delinquency; it is unworthy alike of architects and of nations;
and it has been a sign, wherever it has widely and with toleration
existed, of a singular debasement of the arts; that it is not a
sign of worse than this, of a general want of severe probity, can
be accounted for only by our knowledge of the strange separation
which has for some centuries existed between the arts and all
other subjects of human intellect, as matters of conscience. This
withdrawal of conscientiousness from among the faculties con-
cerned with art, while it has destroyed the arts themselves, has
also rendered in a measure nugatory the evidence which other-
wise they might have presented respecting the character of the
respective nations among whom they have been cultivated;
otherwise, it might appear more than strange that a nation so
distinguished for its general uprightness and faith as the English,
should admit in their architecture more of pretence, concealment,
and deceit, than any other of this or of past time.

They are admitted in thoughtlessness, but with fatal effect upon
the art in which they are practised. If there were no other causes

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for the failures which of late have marked every great occasion
for architectural exertion, these petty dishonesties would be
enough to account for all. It is the first step, and not the least,
towards greatness to do away with these; the first, because
so evidently and easily in our power. We may not be able to
command good, or beautiful, or inventive architecture; but we
*can* command an honest architecture: the meagreness of poverty
may be pardoned, the sternness of utility respected; but what is
there but scorn for the meanness of deception?

VI. Architectural Deceits are broadly to be considered under three heads:—

1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other
than the true one; as in pendants of late Gothic roofs.

2nd. The painting of surfaces to represent some other material
than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of
wood), or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament
upon them.

3rd. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind.

Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture will be noble
exactly in the degree in which all these false expedients are
avoided. Nevertheless, there are certain degrees of them, which,
owing to their frequent usage, or to other causes, have so far
lost the nature of deceit as to be admissible; as, for instance,
gilding, which is in architecture no deceit, because it is therein
not understood for gold; while in jewellery it is a deceit, because
it is so understood, and therefore altogether to be reprehended.
So that there arise, in the application of the strict rules of
right, many exceptions and niceties of conscience; which let us as
briefly as possible examine.

VII. 1st. Structural Deceits. I have limited these to the de-
termined and purposed suggestion of a mode of support other
than the true one. The architect is not *bound* to exhibit
structure; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, any
more than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the human
frame conceal much of its anatomy; nevertheless, that building
will generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers

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the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does,
although from a careless observer they may be concealed. In
the vaulting of a Gothic roof it is no deceit to throw the strength
into the ribs of it, and make the intermediate vault a mere
shell. Such a structure would be presumed by an intelligent
observer, the first time he saw such a roof; and the beauty of its
traceries would be enhanced to him if they confessed and followed
the lines of its main strength. If, however, the intermediate
shell were made of wood instead of stone, and whitewashed to
look like the rest,— this would, of course, be direct deceit, and
altogether unpardonable.

There, is, however, a certain deception necessarily occurring in
Gothic architecture, which relates, not to the points, but to the
manner, of support. The resemblance in its shafts and ribs to
the external relations of stems and branches, which has been the
ground of so much foolish speculation, necessarily induces in the
mind of the spectator a sense or belief of a correspondent internal
structure; that is to say, of a fibrous and continuous strength
from the root into the limbs, and an elasticity communicated
upwards, sufficient for the support of the ramified portions. The
idea of the real conditions, of a great weight of ceiling thrown
upon certain narrow, jointed lines, which have a tendency partly
to be crushed, and partly to separate and be pushed outwards, is
with difficulty received; and the more so when the pillars would
be, if unassisted, too slight for the weight, and are supported by
external flying buttresses, as in the apse of Beauvais, and other
such achievements of the bolder Gothic. Now, there is a nice
question of conscience in this, which we shall hardly settle but by
considering that, when the mind is informed beyond the possibility
of mistake as to the true nature of things, the affecting it with a
contrary impression, however distinct, is no dishonesty, but,
on the contrary, a legitimate appeal to the imagination. For
instance, the greater part of the happiness which we have in
contemplating clouds, results from the impression of their having
massive, luminous, warm, and mountain-like surfaces; and our
delight in the sky frequently depends upon our considering it as

D

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a blue vault. But, if we choose, we may know the contrary, in
both instances; and easily ascertain the cloud to be a damp fog, or
a drift of snow flakes; and the sky to be a lightless abyss. There
is, therefore, no dishonesty, while there is much delight, in the
irresistibly contrary impression. In the same way, so long as we
see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of
support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than
regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were
fibre in its shafts and life in its branches. Nor is even the conceal-
ment of the support of the external buttress reprehensible, so long
as the pillars are not sensibly inadequate to their duty. For the
weight of a roof is a circumstance of which the spectator gene-
rally has no idea, and the provisions for it, consequently, cir-
cumstances whose necessity or adaptation he could not under-
stand. It is no deceit, therefore, when the weight to be borne
is necessarily unknown, to conceal also the means of bearing it,
leaving only to be perceived so much of the support as is
indeed adequate to the weight supposed. For the shafts do,
indeed, bear as much as they are ever imagined to bear, and the
system of added support is no more, as a matter of conscience, to
be exhibited, than, in the human or any other form, mechanical
provisions for those functions which are themselves unperceived.

But the moment that the conditions of weight are compre-
hended, both truth and feeling require that the conditions of
support should be also comprehended. Nothing can be worse,
either as judged by the taste or the conscience, than affectedly
inadequate supports — suspensions in air, and other such tricks
and vanities. Mr. Hope wisely reprehends, for this reason, the
arrangement of the main piers of St. Sophia at Constantinople.
King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is a piece of architectural jug-
gling, if possible still more to be condemned, because less sublime.

VIII. With deceptive concealments of structure are to be
classed, though still more blameable, deceptive assumptions of it,
—the introduction of members which should have, or profess
to have, a duty, and have none. One of the most general
instances of this will be found in the form of the flying buttress

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35

in late Gothic. The use of that member is, of course, to convey
support from one pier to another when the plan of the building
renders it necessary or desirable that the supporting masses
should be divided into groups; the most frequent necessity of
this kind arising from the intermediate range of chapels or
aisles between the nave or choir walls and their supporting
piers. The natural, healthy, and beautiful arrangement is that
of a steeply sloping bar of stone, sustained by an arch with
its spandril carried farthest down on the lowest side, and
dying into the vertical of the outer pier; that pier being, of
course, not square, but rather a piece of wall set at right angles
to the supported walls, and, if need be, crowned by a pinnacle
to give it greater weight. The whole arrangement is exquisitely
carried out in the choir of Beauvais. In later Gothic the pin-
nacle became gradually a decorative member, and was used in all
places merely for the sake of its beauty. There is no objection
to this; it is just as lawful to build a pinnacle for its beauty
as a tower; but also the buttress became a decorative member;
and was used, first, where it was not wanted, and, secondly, in
forms in which it could be of no use, becoming a mere tie, not
between the pier and wall, but between the wall and the top of
the decorative pinnacle, thus attaching itself to the very point
where its thrust, if it made any, could not be resisted. The most
flagrant instance of this barbarism that I remember, (though it
prevails partially in all the spires of the Netherlands,) is the
lantern of St. Ouen at Rouen, where the pierced buttress, having
an ogee curve, looks about as much calculated to bear a thrust as
a switch of willow; and the pinnacles, huge and richly decorated,
have evidently no work to do whatsoever, but stand round the
central tower, like four idle servants, as they are — heraldic sup-
porters, that central tower being merely a hollow crown, which
needs no more buttressing than a basket does. In fact, I do not
know any thing more strange or unwise than the praise lavished
upon this lantern; it is one of the basest pieces of Gothic in
Europe; its flamboyant traceries of the last and most degraded
forms⁵; and its entire plan and decoration resembling, and deserving

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little more credit than, the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate
confectionary. There are hardly any of the magnificent and serene
methods of construction in the early Gothic, which have not, in the
course of time, been gradually thinned and pared away into these
skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their lines truly follow
the structure of the original masses, have an interest like that of
the fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance has
been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as well as ema-
ciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things
that were; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost
was to the armed and living frame; and the very winds that
whistle through the threads of them, are to the diapasoned echoes
of the ancient walls, as to the voice of the man was the pining of
the spectre.⁶

IX. Perhaps the most fruitful source of these kinds of cor-
ruption which we have to guard against in recent times, is
one which, nevertheless, comes in a "questionable shape," and of
which it is not easy to determine the proper laws and limits; I
mean the use of iron. The definition of the art of architecture,
given in the first Chapter, is independent of its materials:
Nevertheless, that art having been, up to the beginning of the
present century, practised for the most part in clay, stone, or
wood, it has resulted that the sense of proportion and the laws of
structure have been based, the one altogether, the other in great
part, on the necessities consequent on the employment of those
materials; and that the entire or principal employment of metallic
framework would, therefore, be generally felt as a departure from
the first principles of the art. Abstractedly there appears no
reason why iron should not be used as well as wood; and the
time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws
will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
But I believe that the tendency of all present sympathy and
association is to limit the idea of architecture to non-metallic
work; and that not without reason. For architecture being in
its perfection the earliest, as in its elements it is necessarily the
first, of arts, will always precede, in any barbarous nation, the

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37

possession of the science necessary either for the obtaining or
the management of iron. Its first existence and its earliest laws
must, therefore, depend upon the use of materials accessible in
quantity, and on the surface of the earth; that is to say, clay,
wood, or stone: and as I think it cannot but be generally felt
that one of the chief dignities of architecture is its historical use;
and since the latter is partly dependent on consistency of style,
it will be felt right to retain as far as may be, even in periods
of more advanced science, the materials and principles of earlier
ages.

X. But whether this be granted me or not, the fact is, that every idea respecting size, proportion, decoration, or construction, on which we are at present in the habit of acting or judging, depends on presupposition of such materials: and as I both feel myself unable to escape the influence of these prejudices, and believe that my readers will be equally so, it may be perhaps permitted to me to assume that true architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material⁷, and that such works as the cast-iron central spire of Rouen Cathedral, or the iron roofs and pillars of our railway stations, and of some of our churches, are not architecture at all. Yet it is evident that metals may, and sometimes must, enter into the construction to a certain extent, as nails in wooden architecture, and therefore as legitimately rivets and solderings in stone; neither can we well deny to the Gothic architect the power of supporting statues, pinnacles, or traceries by iron bars; and if we grant this, I do not see how we can help allowing Brunelleschi his iron chain around the dome of Florence, or the builders of Salisbury their elaborate iron binding of the central tower.⁸ If, however, we would not fall into the old sophistry of the grains of corn and the heap, we must find a rule which may enable us to stop somewhere. This rule is, I think, that metals may be used as a *cement*, but not as a *support*. For as cements of other kinds are often so strong that the stones may easier be broken than separated, and the wall becomes a solid mass, without for that reason losing the character of architecture, there is no reason why, when a nation

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has obtained the knowledge and practice of iron work, metal rods or rivets should not be used in the place of cement, and establish the same or a greater strength and adherence, without in any wise inducing departure from the types and system of architecture before established; nor does it make any difference except as to sightliness, whether the metal bands or rods so employed, be in the body of the wall or on its exterior, or set as stays and cross-bands; so only that the use of them be always and distinctly one which might be superseded by mere strength of cement; as for instance if a pinnacle or mullion be propped or tied by an iron band, it is evident that the iron only prevents the separation of the stones by lateral force, which the cement would have done, had it been strong enough. But the moment that the iron in the least degree takes the place of the stone, and acts by its resistance to crushing, and bears superincumbent weight, or if it acts by its own weight as a counterpoise, and so supersedes the use of pinnacles or buttresses in resisting a lateral thrust, or if, in the form of a rod or girder, it is used to do what wooden beams would have done as well, that instant the building ceases, so far as such applications of metal extend, to be true architecture.

XI. The limit, however, thus determined, is an ultimate one, and it is well in all things to be cautious how we approach the utmost limit of lawfulness; so that, although the employment of metal within this limit cannot be considered as destroying the very being and nature of architecture, it will, if extravagant and frequent, derogate from the dignity of the work, as well as (which is especially to our present point) from its honesty. For although the spectator is not informed as to the quantity or strength of the cement employed, he will generally conceive the stones of the building to be separable; and his estimate of the skill of the architect will be based in great measure on his supposition of this condition, and of the difficulties attendant upon it: so that it is always more honourable, and it has a tendency to render the style of architecture both more masculine and more scientific, to employ stone and mortar simply as such, and to

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do as much as possible with their mere weight and strength, and
rather sometimes to forego a grace, or to confess a weakness,
than attain the one, or conceal the other, by means verging upon
dishonesty.

Nevertheless, where the design is of such delicacy and slight-
ness as, in some parts of very fair and finished edifices, it is
desirable that it should be; and where both its completion and
security are in a measure dependent on the use of metal, let not
such use be reprehended; so only that as much is done as may be,
by good mortar and good masonry; and no slovenly workmanship
admitted through confidence in the iron helps; for it is in this
license as in that of wine, a man may use it for his infirmities,
but not for his nourishment.

XII. And, in order to avoid an over use of this liberty, it
would be well to consider what application may be conveniently
made of the dovetailing and various adjusting of stones; for when
any artifice is necessary to help the mortar, certainly this ought
to come before the use of metal, for it is both safer and more honest.
I cannot see that any objection can be made to the fitting of the
stones in any shapes the architect pleases; for although it would
not be desirable to see buildings put together like Chinese puzzles,
there must always be a check upon such an abuse of the practice in
its difficulty; nor is it necessary that it should be always exhibited,
so that it be understood by the spectator as an admitted help, and
that no principal stones are introduced in positions apparently
impossible for them to retain, although a riddle here and there, in
unimportant features, may sometimes serve to draw the eye to
the masonry, and make it interesting, as well as to give a delight-
ful sense of a kind of necromantic power in the architect. There
is a pretty one in the lintel of the lateral door of the cathedral of
Prato (Plate IV. fig. 4.); where the maintenance of the visibly
separate stones, alternate marble and serpentine, cannot be under-
stood until their cross-cutting is seen below. Each block is, of
course, of the form given in fig. 5.

XIII. Lastly, before leaving the subject of structural deceits, I
would remind the architect who thinks that I am unnecessarily

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and narrowly limiting his resources or his art, that the highest
greatness and the highest wisdom are shown, the first by a noble
submission to, the second by a thoughtful providence for, certain
voluntarily admitted restraints. Nothing is more evident than
this, in that supreme government which is the example, as it is
the centre, of all others. The Divine Wisdom is, and can be, shown
to us only in its meeting and contending with the difficulties which
are voluntarily, and for the sake of that contest, admitted by the
Divine Omnipotence: and these difficulties, observe, occur in the
form of natural laws or ordinances, which might, at many times
and in countless ways, be infringed with apparent advantage, but
which are never infringed, whatever costly arrangements or adap-
tations their observance may necessitate for the accomplishment of
given purposes. The example most apposite to our present subject
is the structure of the bones of animals. No reason can be given,
I believe, why the system of the higher animals should not have
been made capable, as that of the *Infusoria* is, of secreting flint,
instead of phosphate of lime, or, more naturally still, carbon; so
framing the bones of adamant at once. The elephant or rhinoceros,
had the earthy part of their bones been made of diamond, might
have been as agile and light as grasshoppers, and other animals
might have been framed, far more magnificently colossal than any
that walk the earth. In other worlds we may, perhaps, see such
creations; a creation for every element, and elements infinite.
But the architecture of animals *here* is appointed by God to be a
marble architecture, not a flint nor adamant architecture; and
all manner of expedients are adopted to attain the utmost degree
of strength and size possible under that great limitation. The
jaw of the ichthyosaurus is pieced and riveted, the leg of the
megatherium is a foot thick, and the head of the mylodon has a
double skull; we, in our wisdom, should, doubtless, have given the
lizard a steel jaw, and the mylodon a cast-iron headpiece, and for-
gotten the great principle to which all creation bears witness,
that order and system are nobler things than power. But God
shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authori-
tative perfection, but even the perfection of Obedience—an

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obedience to His own laws: and in the cumbrous movement of
those unwieldiest of His creatures, we are reminded, even in His
divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human
 creature; "that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not."

XIV. 2nd. Surface Deceits. These may be generally defined
as the inducing the supposition of some form of material which
does not actually exist; as commonly in the painting of wood
to represent marble, or in the painting of ornaments in decep-
tive relief, &c. But we must be careful to observe, that the evil
of them consists always in definitely attempted deception, and
that it is a matter of some nicety to mark the point where
deception begins or ends.

Thus, for instance, the roof of Milan Cathedral is seemingly
covered with elaborate fan tracery, forcibly enough painted to
enable it, in its dark and removed position, to deceive a careless
observer. This is, of course, gross degradation; it destroys much
of the dignity even of the rest of the building, and is in the very
strongest terms to be reprehended.

The roof of the Sistine Chapel has much architectural design in
grisaille mingled with the figures of its frescoes; and the effect is
increase of dignity.

In what lies the distinctive character ?

In two points, principally :— The first, that the architecture is
so closely associated with the figures, and has so grand fellowship
with them in its forms and cast shadows, that both are at once
felt to be of a piece; and as the figures must necessarily be
painted, the architecture is known to be so too. There is thus no
deception.

The second, that so great a painter as Michael Angelo would
always stop short, in such minor parts of his design, of the degree
of vulgar force which would be necessary to induce the supposition
of their reality; and, strangely as it may sound, would never
paint badly enough to deceive.

But though right and wrong are thus found broadly opposed in
works severally so mean and so mighty as the roof of Milan and
that of the Sistine, there are works neither so great nor so mean,

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in which the limits of right are vaguely defined, and will need
some care to determine; care only, however, to apply accurately
the broad principle with which we set out, that no form nor
material is to be *deceptively* represented.

XV. Evidently, then, painting, confessedly such, is no deception;
it does not assert any material whatever. Whether it be on wood
or on stone, or, as will naturally be supposed, on plaster, does
not matter. Whatever the material, good painting makes it more
precious; nor can it ever be said to deceive respecting the ground
of which it gives us no information. To cover brick with plaster,
and this plaster with fresco, is, therefore, perfectly legitimate; and
as desirable a mode of decoration, as it is constant in the great
periods. Verona and Venice are now seen deprived of more than
half their former splendour; it depended far more on their frescoes
than their marbles. The plaster, in this case, is to be considered
as the gesso ground on panel or canvass. But to cover brick
with cement, and to divide this cement with joints that it may
look like stone, is to tell a falsehood; and is just as contemptible
a procedure as the other is noble.

It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint everything?
So long as the painting is confessed — yes; but if, even in the
slightest degree, the sense of it be lost, and the thing painted be
supposed real — no. Let us take a few instances. In the Campo
Santo at Pisa, each fresco is surrounded with a border composed
of flat coloured patterns of great elegance — no part of it in at-
tempted relief. The certainty of flat surface being thus secured,
the figures, though the size of life, do not deceive, and the artist
thenceforward is at liberty to put forth his whole power, and to
lead us through fields, and groves, and depths of pleasant land-
scape, and soothe us with the sweet clearness of far off sky, and
yet never lose the severity of his primal purpose of architectural
decoration.

In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at Parma, the
trellises of vine shadow the walls, as if with an actual arbour;
and the groups of children, peeping through the oval openings,
luscious in colour and faint in light, may well be expected every

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instant to break through, or hide behind the covert. The grace
of their attitudes, and the evident greatness of the whole work,
mark that it is painting, and barely redeem it from the charge
of falsehood; but even so saved, it is utterly unworthy to take
a place among noble or legitimate architectural decoration.

In the cupola of the duomo of Parma the same painter has
represented the Assumption with so much deceptive power, that
he has made a dome of some thirty feet diameter look like a
cloud-wrapt opening in the seventh heaven, crowded with a rushing
sea of angels. Is this wrong? Not so: for the subject at once
precludes the possibility of deception. We might have taken the
vines for a veritable pergola, and the children for its haunting
ragazzi; but we know the stayed clouds and moveless angels
must be man's work; let him put his utmost strength to it, and
welcome; he can enchant us, but cannot betray.

We may thus apply the rule to the highest, as well as the
art of daily occurrence, always remembering that more is to be
forgiven to the great painter than to the mere decorative work-
man; and this especially, because the former, even in deceptive
portions, will not trick us so grossly; as we have just seen in
Correggio, where a worse painter would have made the thing look
like life at once. There is, however, in room, villa, or garden
decoration, some fitting admission of trickeries of this kind, as of
pictured landscapes at the extremities of alleys and arcades,
and ceilings like skies, or painted with prolongations upwards of
the architecture of the walls, which things have sometimes a
certain luxury and pleasureableness in places meant for idleness,
and are innocent enough as long as they are regarded as mere toys.

XVI. Touching the false representation of material, the question
is infinitely more simple, and the law more sweeping; all such
imitations are utterly base and inadmissible. It is melancholy
to think of the time and expense lost in marbling the shop fronts
of London alone, and of the waste of our resources in absolute
vanities, in things about which no mortal cares, by which no eye
is ever arrested, unless painfully, and which do not add one whit
to comfort, or cleanliness, or even to that great object of commer-

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cial art—conspicuousness. But in architecture of a higher rank,
how much more is it to be condemned! I have made it a rule in
the present work not to blame specifically; but I may, perhaps,
be permitted, while I express my sincere admiration of the very
noble entrance and general architecture of the British Museum,
to express also my regret that the noble granite foundation of the
staircase should be mocked at its landing by an imitation, the
more blameable because tolerably successful. The only effect of
it is to cast a suspicion upon the true stones below, and upon
every bit of granite afterwards encountered. One feels a doubt,
after it, of the honesty of Memnon himself. But even this, how-
ever derogatory to the noble architecture around it, is less painful
than the want of feeling with which, in our cheap modern churches,
we suffer the wall decorator to erect about the altar frameworks
and pediments daubed with mottled colour, and to dye in the
same fashion such skeletons or caricatures of columns as may
emerge above the pews: this is not merely bad taste; it is no
unimportant or excusable error which brings even these shadows
of vanity and falsehood into the house of prayer. The first con-
dition which just feeling requires in church furniture is, that it
should be simple and unaffected, not fictitious nor tawdry. It
may not be in our power to make it beautiful, but let it at least
be pure; and if we cannot permit much to the architect, do not
let us permit anything to the upholsterer; if we keep to solid stone
and solid wood, whitewashed, if we like, for cleanliness' sake, (for
whitewash has so often been used as the dress of noble things that
it has thence received a kind of nobility itself,) it must be a bad
design indeed, which is grossly offensive. I recollect no instance of
a want of sacred character, or of any marked and painful ugliness,
in the simplest or the most awkwardly built village church, where
stone and wood were roughly and nakedly used, and the windows
latticed with white glass. But the smoothly stuccoed walls, the
flat roofs with ventilator ornaments, the barred windows with
jaundiced borders and dead ground square panes, the gilded or
bronzed wood, the painted iron, the wretched upholstery of
curtains and cushions, and pew heads, and altar railings, and

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Birmingham metal candlesticks, and, above all, the green and yellow sickness of the false marble — disguises all, observe; falsehoods all—who are they who like these things? who defend them? who do them? I have never spoken to any one who *did* like them, though to many who thought them matters of no consequence. Perhaps not to religion; (though I cannot but believe that there are many to whom, as to myself, such things are serious obstacles to the repose of mind and temper which should precede devotional exercises;) but to the general tone of our judgment and feeling —yes; for assuredly we shall regard, with tolerance, if not with affection, whatever forms of material things we have been in the habit of associating with our worship, and be little prepared to detect or blame hypocrisy, meanness, and disguise in other kinds of decoration, when we suffer objects belonging to the most solemn of all services to be tricked out in a fashion so fictitious and unseemly.

XVII. Painting, however, is not the only mode in which material may be concealed, or rather simulated; for merely to conceal is, as we have seen, no wrong. Whitewash, for instance, though often (by no means always) to be regretted as a concealment, is not to be blamed as a falsity. It shows itself for what it is, and asserts nothing of what is beneath it. Gilding has become, from its frequent use, equally innocent. It is understood for what it is, a film merely, and is, therefore, allowable to any extent: I do not say expedient: it is one of the most abused means of magnificence we possess, and I much doubt whether any use we ever make of it, balances that loss of pleasure, which, from the frequent sight and perpetual suspicion of it, we suffer in the contemplation of any thing that is verily of gold. I think gold was meant to be seldom seen, and to be admired as a precious thing; and I sometimes wish that truth should so far literally prevail as that all should be gold that glittered, or rather that nothing should glitter that was not gold. Nevertheless, Nature herself does not dispense with such semblance, but uses light for it; and I have too great a love for old and saintly art to part with its burnished field, or radiant nimbus;

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only it should be used with respect, and to express magnificence, or sacredness, and not in lavish vanity, or in sign painting. Of its expedience, however, any more than of that of colour, it is not here the place to speak; we are endeavouring to determine what is lawful, not what is desirable. Of other and less common modes of disguising surface, as of powder of lapis lazuli, or mosaic imitations of coloured stones, I need hardly speak. The rule will apply to all alike, that whatever is pretended, is wrong; commonly enforced also by the exceeding ugliness and insufficient appearance of such methods, as lately in the style of renovation by which half the houses in Venice have been defaced, the brick covered first with stucco, and this painted with zigzag veins in imitation of alabaster. But there is one more form of architectural fiction, which is so constant in the great periods that it needs respectful judgment. I mean the facing of brick with precious stone.

XVIII. It is well known, that what is meant by a church's being built of marble is, in nearly all cases, only that a veneering of marble has been fastened on the rough brick wall, built with certain projections to receive it; and that what appear to be massy stones, are nothing more than external slabs.

Now, it is evident, that, in this case, the question of right is on the same ground as in that of gilding. If it be clearly understood that a marble facing does not pretend or imply a marble wall, there is no harm in it; and as it is also evident that, when very precious stones are used, as jaspers and serpintines, it must become, not only an extravagant and vain increase of expense, but sometimes an actual impossibility, to obtain mass of them enough to build with, there is no resource but this of veneering; nor is there any thing to be alleged against it on the head of durability, such work having been by experience found to last as long, and in as perfect condition, as any kind of masonry. It is, therefore, to be considered as simply an art of mosaic on a large scale, the ground being of brick, or any other material; and when lovely stones are to be obtained, it is a manner which should be thoroughly understood, and often

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practised. Nevertheless, as we esteem the shaft of a column
more highly for its being of a single block, and as we do not
regret the loss of substance and value which there is in things
of solid gold, silver, agate, or ivory; so I think that walls them-
selves may be regarded with a more just complacency if they
are known to be all of noble substance; and that rightly weighing
the demands of the two principles of which we have hitherto
spoken—Sacrifice and Truth, we should sometimes rather spare
external ornament than diminish the unseen value and consistency
of what we do; and I believe that a better manner of design,
and a more careful and studious, if less abundant, decoration
would follow, upon the consciousness of thoroughness in the
substance. And, indeed, this is to be remembered, with respect
to all the points we have examined; that while we have traced
the limits of license, we have not fixed those of that high rectitude
which refuses license. It is thus true that there is no falsity,
and much beauty, in the use of external colour, and that it is
lawful to paint either pictures or patterns on whatever surfaces
may seem to need enrichment. But it is not less true, that such
practices are essentially unarchitectural; and while we cannot say
that there is actual danger in an over use of them, seeing that
they have been *always* used most lavishly in the times of most
noble art, yet they divide the work into two parts and kinds,
one of less durability than the other, which dies away from it
in process of ages, and leaves it, unless it have noble qualities
of its own, naked and bare. That enduring noblesse I should,
therefore, call truly architectural; and it is not until this has
been secured, that the accessory power of painting may be called
in, for the delight of the immediate time; nor this, as I think,
until every resource of a more stable kind has been exhausted.
The true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and
I would fain see these taken advantage of to the full. Every
variety of hue, from pale yellow to purple, passing through
orange, red, and brown, is entirely at our command; nearly every
kind of green and grey is also attainable; and with these, and pure
white, what harmonies might we not achieve? Of stained and

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variegated stone, the quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable;
were brighter colours are required, let glass, and gold protected
by glass, be used in mosaic—a kind of work as durable as the
solid stone, and incapable of losing its lustre by time—and let
the painter's work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner
chamber. This is the true and faithful way of building; where
this cannot be, the device of external colouring may, indeed, be
employed without dishonour; but it must be with the warning
reflection, that a time will come when such aids must pass away,
and when the building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying
the death of the dolphin. Better the less bright, more enduring
fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato, and the
mosaics of St. Mark's, are more warmly filled, and more brightly
touched, by every return of morning and evening rays; while the
hues of our cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud;
and the temples whose azure and purple once flamed above the
Grecian promontories, stand in their faded whiteness, like snows
which the sunset has left cold.

XIX. The last form of fallacy which it will be remembered we
had to deprecate, was the substitution of cast or machine work
for that of the hand, generally expressible as Operative Deceit.

There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice:
one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work; the other,
that it is dishonest. Of its badness I shall speak in another place,
that being evidently no efficient reason against its use when other
cannot be had. Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is
of the grossest kind, is, I think, a sufficient reason to determine
absolute and unconditional rejection of it.

Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two entirely
distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty
of its forms, which, for the present, we will suppose to be the same
whether they come from the hand or the machine; the other, the
sense of human labour and care spent upon it. How great this
latter influence we may perhaps judge, by considering that there
is not a cluster of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin which has
not a beauty in all respects *nearly* equal, and, in some, immea-

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surably superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its
stones: and that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of
its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass
beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate;
of its admirableness, though a millionfold less admirable; results
from our consciousness of its being the work of poor, clumsy,
toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends on our discover-
ing in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and heart-
breakings—of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success: all this can
be traced by a practised eye; but, granting it even obscure, it
is presumed or understood; and in that is the worth of the thing,
just as much as the worth of any thing else we call precious.
The worth of a diamond is simply the understanding of the time
it must take to look for it before it is found; and the worth of
an ornament is the time it must take before it can be cut. It has
an intrinsic value besides, which the diamond has not; (for a
diamond has no more real beauty than a piece of glass;) but I do
not speak of that at present; I place the two on the same ground;
and I suppose that hand-wrought ornament can no more be
generally known from machine work, than a diamond can be
known from paste; nay, that the latter may deceive, for a moment,
the mason's, as the other the jeweller's, eye; and that it can
be detected only by the closest examination. Yet exactly as
a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a
builder of honour disdain false ornaments. The using of them
is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use that
which pretends to a worth which it has not; which pretends to
have cost, and to be, what it did not, and is not; it is an impos-
tion, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to
the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the
wall, rather; you have not paid for it, you have no business with
it, you do not want it. Nobody wants ornaments in this world,
but every body wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever
were fancied, are not worth a lie. Leave your walls as bare as a
planed board, or build them of baked mud and chopped straw,
if need be; but do not rough-cast them with falsehood.

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This, then, being our general law, and I hold it for a more imperative one than any other I have asserted; and this kind of dishonesty the meanest, as the least necessary; for ornament is an extravagant and inessential thing; and therefore, if fallacious, utterly base—this, I say, being our general law, there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions respecting particular substances and their uses.

XX. Thus in the use of brick: since that is known to be originally moulded, there is no reason why it should not be moulded into diverse forms. It will never be supposed to have been cut, and, therefore, will cause no deception; it will have only the credit it deserves. In flat countries, far from any quarry of stone, cast brick may be legitimately, and most successfully, used in decoration, and that elaborate, and even refined. The brick mouldings of the Palazzo Pepoli at Bologna, and those which run round the market-place of Vercelli, are among the richest in Italy. So also, tile and porcelain work, of which the former is grotesquely, but successfully, employed in the domestic architecture of France, coloured tiles being inserted in the diamond spaces between the crossing timbers; and the latter admirably in Tuscany, in external bas-reliefs, by the Robbia family, in which works, while we cannot but sometimes regret the useless and ill-arranged colours, we would by no means blame the employment of a material which, whatever its defects, excels every other in permanence, and, perhaps, requires even greater skill in its management than marble. For it is not the material, but the absence of the human labour, which makes the thing worthless; and a piece of terra cotta, or of plaster of Paris, which has been wrought by the human hand, is worth all the stone in Carrara, cut by machinery. It is, indeed, possible, and even usual, for men to sink into machines themselves, so that even hand-work has all the characters of mechanism; of the difference between living and dead hand-work I shall speak presently; all that I ask at present is, what it is always in our power to secure—the confession of what we have done, and what we have given; so that when we use stone at all, since all stone is naturally supposed to be carved by hand, we must not carve it

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by machinery; neither must we use any artificial stone cast
into shape, nor any stucco ornaments of the colour of stone, or
which might in any wise be mistaken for it, as the stucco mould-
ings in the cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, which cast
a shame and suspicion over every part of the building. But for
ductile and fusible materials, as clay, iron, and bronze, since
these will usually be supposed to have been cast or stamped, it
is at our pleasure to employ them as we will; remembering that
they become precious, or otherwise, just in proportion to the
hand-work upon them, or to the clearness of their reception of the
hand-work of their mould. But I believe no cause to have been
more active in the degradation of our national feeling for beauty
than the constant use of cast-iron ornaments. The common
iron work of the middle ages was as simple as it was effective, com-
posed of leafage cut flat out of sheet iron, and twisted at the work-
man's will. No ornaments, on the contrary, are so cold, clumsy,
and vulgar, so essentially incapable of a fine line or shadow, as
those of cast-iron; and while, on the score of truth, we can hardly
allege any thing against them, since they are always distinguish-
able, at a glance, from wrought and hammered work, and stand
only for what they are, yet I feel very strongly that there is no
hope of the progress of the arts of any nation which indulges in
these vulgar and cheap substitutes for real decoration. Their
inefficiency and paltriness I shall endeavour to show more con-
clusively in another place; enforcing only, at present, the general
conclusion that, if even honest or allowable, they are things in
which we can never take just pride or pleasure, and must never
be employed in any place wherein they might either themselves
obtain the credit of being other and better than they are, or be
associated with the thoroughly downright work to which it
would be a disgrace to be found in their company.

Such are, I believe, the three principal kinds of fallacy by which
architecture is liable to be corrupted; there are, however, other
and more subtile forms of it, against which it is less easy to guard
by definite law, than by the watchfulness of a manly and unaf-

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fected spirit. For, as it has been above noticed, there are certain
kinds of deception which extend to impressions and ideas only; of
which some are, indeed, of a noble use, as that above referred to,
the arborescent look of lofty Gothic aisles; but of which the most
part have so much of legerdemain and trickery about them, that
they will lower any style in which they considerably prevail; and
they are likely to prevail when once they are admitted, being apt
to catch the fancy alike of uninventive architects and feelingless
spectators; just as mean and shallow minds are, in other matters,
delighted with the sense of over-reaching, or tickled with the con-
ceit of detecting the intention to over-reach: and when subtleties
of this kind are accompanied by the display of such dexterous
stone-cutting, or architectural sleight of hand, as may become,
even by itself, a subject of admiration, it is a great chance if the
pursuit of them do not gradually draw us away from all regard
and care for the nobler character of the art, and end in its total
paralysis or extinction. And against this there is no guarding,
but by stern disdain of all display of dexterity and ingenious
device, and by putting the whole force of our fancy into the
arrangement of masses and forms, caring no more how these
masses and forms are wrought out, than a great painter cares
which way his pencil strikes. It would be easy to give many
instances of the danger of these tricks and vanities; but I shall
confine myself to the examination of one which has, as I think,
been the cause of the fall of Gothic Architecture throughout
Europe. I mean the system of intersectional mouldings, which,
on account of its great importance, and for the sake of the general
reader, I may, perhaps, be pardoned for explaining elementarily.

XXI. I must, in the first place, however, refer to Professor
Willis's account of the origin of tracery, given in the sixth
chapter of his Architecture of the Middle Ages; since the pub-
lication of which I have been not a little amazed to hear of any
attempts made to resuscitate the inexcusably absurd theory of
its derivation from imitated vegetable form—inexcusably, I say,
because the smallest acquaintance with early Gothic architecture
would have informed the supporters of that theory of the simple

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fact, that, exactly in proportion to the antiquity of the work, the
imitation of such organic forms is less, and in the earliest examples
does not exist at all. There cannot be the shadow of a question,
in the mind of a person familiarised with any single series of con-
secutive examples, that tracery arose from the gradual enlarge-
ment of the penetrations of the shield of stone which, usually
supported by a central pillar, occupied the head of early windows.
Professor Willis, perhaps, confines his observations somewhat too
absolutely to the double sub-arch. I have given, in Plate VII. fig. 2.,
an interesting case of rude penetration of a high and simply
trefoiled shield, from the church of the Eremitani at Padua. But
the more frequent and typical form is that of the double sub-arch,
decorated with various piercings of the space between it and the
superior arch; with a simple trefoil under a round arch, in the
Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen⁹ (Plate III. fig. 1.); with a very beauti-
fully proportioned quatrefoil, in the triforium of Eu, and that of
the choir of Lisieux; with quatrefoils, sixfoils, and septfoils, in
the transept towers of Rouen, (Plate III. fig. 2.); with a trefoil
awkwardly, and very small quatrefoil above, at Coutances,
(Plate III. fig. 3.): then, with multiplications of the same
figures, pointed or round, giving very clumsy shapes of the inter-
mediate stone, (fig. 4., from one of the nave chapels of Rouen,
fig. 5., from one of the nave chapels of Bayeux,) and finally, by
thinning out the stony ribs, reaching conditions like that of the
glorious typical form of the clerestory of the apse of Beauvais,
(fig. 6.).

XXII. Now, it will be noticed that, during the whole of this
process, the attention is kept fixed on the forms of the penetrations,
that is to say, of the lights as seen from the interior, not of the
intermediate stone. All the grace of the window is in the outline
of its light; and I have drawn all these traceries as seen from
within, in order to show the effect of the light thus treated,
at first in far off and separate stars, and then gradually en-
larging, approaching, until they come and stand over us, as
it were, filling the whole space with their effulgence. And
it is in this pause of the star, that we have the great, pure, and

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perfect form of French Gothic; it was at the instant when the
rudeness of the intermediate space had been finally conquered,
when the light had expanded to its fullest, and yet had not lost its
radiant unity, principality, and visible first causing of the whole,
that we have the most exquisite feeling and most faultless judg-
ments in the management alike of the tracery and decorations.
I have given, in Plate X., an exquisite example of it, from a panel
decoration of the buttresses of the north door of Rouen; and in
order that the reader may understand what truly fine Gothic
work is, and how nobly it unites fantasy and law, as well as for
our immediate purpose, it will be well that he should examine its
sections and mouldings in detail (they are described in the fourth
Chapter, § xxvii.), and that the more carefully, because this design
belongs to a period in which the most important change took place
in the spirit of Gothic architecture, which, perhaps, ever resulted
from the natural progress of any art. That tracery marks a pause
between the laying aside of one great ruling principle, and the
taking up of another; a pause as marked, as clear, as conspicuous
to the distant view of after times, as to the distant glance of the
traveller is the culminating ridge of the mountain chain over which
he has passed. It was the great watershed of Gothic art. Before
it, all had been ascent; after it, all was decline; both, indeed, by
winding paths and varied slopes; both interrupted, like the gradual
rise and fall of the passes of the Alps, by great mountain outliers,
isolated or branching from the central chain, and by retrograde
or parallel directions of the valleys of access. But the track of
the human mind is traceable up to that glorious ridge, in a con-
tinuous line, and thence downwards. Like a silver zone—

“Flung about carelessly, it shines afar,
Catching the eye in many a broken link,
In many a turn and traverse, as it glides.
And oft above, and oft below appears—
* * * * * to him who journeys up,
As though it were another.”

And at that point, and that instant, reaching the place that was

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55

nearest heaven, the builders looked back, for the last time, to the
way by which they had come, and the scenes through which their
early course had passed. They turned away from them and their
morning light, and descended towards a new horizon, for a time
in the warmth of western sun, but plunging with every forward
step into more cold and melancholy shade.

XXIII. The change of which I speak, is expressible in few
words; but one more important, more radically influential, could
not be. It was the substitution of the *line* for the *mass*, as the
element of decoration.

We have seen the mode in which the openings or penetration
of the window expanded, until what were, at first, awkward forms
of intermediate stone, became delicate lines of tracery; and I
have been careful in pointing out the peculiar attention bestowed
on the proportion and decoration of the mouldings of the window
at Rouen, in Plate X., as compared with earlier mouldings, be-
cause that beauty and care are singularly significant. They mark
that the traceries had *caught the eye* of the architect. Up to that
time, up to the very last instant in which the reduction and
thinning of the intervening stone was consummated, his eye had
been on the openings only, on the stars of light. He did not
care about the stone; a rude border of moulding was all he
needed, it was the penetrating shape which he was watching.
But when that shape had received its last possible expansion,
and when the stone-work became an arrangement of graceful
and parallel lines, that arrangement, like some form in a picture,
unseen and accidentally developed, struck suddenly, inevitably,
on the sight. It had literally not been seen before. It flashed
out in an instant, as an independent form. It became a feature
of the work. The architect took it under his care, thought over
it, and distributed its members as we see.

Now, the great pause was at the moment when the space and
the dividing stone-work were both equally considered. It did
not last fifty years. The forms of the tracery were seized with
a childish delight in the novel source of beauty; and the inter-
vening space was cast aside, as an element of decoration, for

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ever. I have confined myself, in following this change, to the window, as the feature in which it is clearest. But the transition is the same in every member of architecture; and its importance can hardly be understood, unless we take the pains to trace it in the universality of which illustrations, irrelevant to our present purpose, will be found in the third Chapter. I pursue here the question of truth, relating to the treatment of the mouldings.

XXIV. The reader will observe that, up to the last expansion of the penetrations, the stone-work was necessarily considered, as it actually is, *stiff*, and unyielding. It was so, also, during the pause of which I have spoken, when the forms of the tracery were still severe and pure; delicate indeed, but perfectly firm.

At the close of the period of pause, the first sign of serious change was like a low breeze, passing through the emaciated tracery, and making it tremble. It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted by the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. Reduced to the slenderness of threads, it began to be considered as possessing also their flexibility. The architect was pleased with this his new fancy, and set himself to carry it out; and in a little time, the bars of tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they had been woven together like a net. This was a change which sacrificed a great principle of truth; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities of the material; and, however delightful its results in their first developments, it was ultimately ruinous.

For, observe the difference between the supposition of ductility, and that of elastic structure noticed above in the resemblance to tree form. That resemblance was not sought, but necessary; it resulted from the natural conditions of strength in the pier or trunk, and slenderness in the ribs or branches, while many of the other suggested conditions of resemblance were perfectly true. A tree branch, though in a certain sense flexible, is not ductile; it is as firm in its own form as the rib of stone; both of them will yield up to certain limits, both of them breaking when those limits are exceeded; while the tree trunk will bend no more than the stone pillar. But when the tracery is assumed to be

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57

as yielding as a silken cord; when the whole fragility, elasticity, and weight of the material are to the eye, if not in terms, denied; when all the art of the architect is applied to disprove the first conditions of his working, and the first attributes of his materials; this is a deliberate treachery, only redeemed from the charge of direct falsehood by the visibility of the stone surface, and degrading all the traceries it affects exactly in the degree of its presence.

XXV. But the declining and morbid taste of the later architects, was not satisfied with thus much deception. They were delighted with the subtle charm they had created, and thought only of increasing its power. The next step was to consider and represent the tracery, as not only ductile, but penetrable; and when two mouldings met each other, to manage their intersection, so that one should appear to pass through the other, retaining its independence; or when two ran parallel to each other, to re-present the one as partly contained within the other, and partly apparent above it. This form of falsity was that which crushed the art. The flexible traceries were often beautiful, though they were ignoble; but the penetrated traceries, rendered, as they finally were, merely the means of exhibiting the dexterity of the stone-cutter, annihilated both the beauty and dignity of the Gothic types. A system so momentous in its consequences deserves some detailed examination.

XXVI. In the drawing of the shafts of the door at Lisieux, under the spandril, in Plate VII., the reader will see the mode of managing the intersection of similar mouldings, which was universal in the great periods. They melted into each other, and became one at point of the crossing, or of contact; and even the suggestion of so sharp intersection as this of Lisieux is usually avoided, (this design being, of course, only a pointed form of the earlier Norman arcade, in which the arches are interlaced, and lie each over the preceding, and under the following one, as in Anselm's tower at Canterbury,) since, in the plurality of designs, when mouldings meet each other, they coincide through some considerable portion of their curves, meeting by contact, rather than by intersection;

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and at the point of coincidence the section of each separate
moulding becomes common to the two thus melted into each
other. Thus, in the junction of the circles of the window of the
Palazzo Foscari, Plate VIII., given accurately in fig. 8. Plate IV.,
the section across the line *s*, is exactly the same as that across any
break of the separated moulding above, as *s*. It sometimes,
however, happens, that two different mouldings meet each other.
This was seldom permitted in the great periods, and, when it took
place, was most awkwardly managed. Fig. 1. Plate IV. gives the
junction of the mouldings of the gable and vertical, in the window
of the *spire* of Salisbury. That of the gable is composed of a
single, and that of the vertical of a double cavetto, decorated
with ball flowers; and the larger single moulding swallows up one
of the double ones, and pushes forward among the smaller balls
with the most blundering and clumsy simplicity. In comparing
the sections it is to be observed that, in the upper one, the line
*a* *b* represents an actual vertical in the plane of the window;
while, in the lower one, the line *e* *d* represents the horizontal,
in the plane of the window, indicated by the perspective
line *d* *e*.

XXVII. The very awkwardness with which such occurrences
of difficulty are met by the earlier builder, marks his dislike of the
system, and unwillingness to attract the eye to such arrangements.
There is another very clumsy one, in the junction of the upper-
and sub-arches of the triforium of Salisbury; but it is kept in the
shade, and all the prominent junctions are of mouldings like each
other, and managed with perfect simplicity. But so soon as the
attention of the builders became, as we have just seen, fixed upon
the lines of mouldings instead of the enclosed spaces, those lines
began to preserve an independent existence wherever they met;
and different mouldings were studiously associated, in order to
obtain variety of intersectional line. We must, however, do the
late builders the justice to note that, in one case, the habit grew
out of a feeling of proportion, more refined than that of earlier
workmen. It shows itself first in the bases of divided pillars, or
arch mouldings, whose smaller shafts had originally bases formed

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59

by the continued base of the central, or other larger, columns
with which they were grouped; but it being felt, when the eye of
the architect became fastidious, that the dimension of moulding
which was right for the base of a large shaft, was wrong for that
of a small one, each shaft had an independent base; at first, those of
the smaller died simply down on that of the larger; but when the
vertical sections of both became complicated, the bases of the smaller
shafts were considered to exist within those of the larger, and
the places of their emergence, on this supposition, were calculated
with the utmost nicety, and cut with singular precision; so that
an elaborate late base of a divided column, as, for instance, of those
in the nave of Abbeville, looks exactly as if its smaller shafts had
all been finished to the ground first, each with its complete and
intricate base, and then the comprehending base of the central
pier had been moulded over them in clay, leaving their points and
angles sticking out here and there, like the edges of sharp crystals
out of a nodule of earth. The exhibition of technical dexterity in
work of this kind, is often marvellous, the strangest possible shapes
of sections being calculated to a hair's breadth, and the occurrence
of the under and emergent forms being rendered, even in places
where they are so slight that they can hardly be detected but by
the touch. It is impossible to render a very elaborate example
of this kind intelligible, without some fifty measured sections; but
fig. 6. Plate IV. is a very interesting and simple one, from the west
gate of Rouen. It is part of the base of one of the narrow piers
between its principal niches. The square column k, having a
base with the profile $pr$, is supposed to contain within itself another
similar one, set diagonally, and lifted so far above the inclosing
one, as that the recessed part of its profile $\bar{p}\bar{r}$ shall fall behind
the projecting part of the outer one. The angle of its upper
portion exactly meets the plane of the side of the upper in-
closing shaft 4, and would, therefore, not be seen, unless two ver-
tical cuts were made to exhibit it, which form two dark lines
the whole way up the shaft. Two small pilasters are run, like
fastening stitches, through the junction, on the front of the shafts.
The sections $k, \bar{n}$, taken respectively at the levels $k, n$, will explain

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the hypothetical construction of the whole. Fig. 7. is a base, or
joint rather, (for passages of this form occur again and again, on
the shafts of flamboyant work,) of one of the smallest piers of the
pedestals which supported the lost statues of the porch; its section
below would be the same as $\bar{n}$, and its construction, after what has
been said of the other base, will be at once perceived.

XXVIII. There was, however, in this kind of involution, much
to be admired as well as reprehended; the proportions of quantities
were always as beautiful as they were intricate; and, though the
lines of intersection were harsh, they were exquisitely opposed to
the flower-work of the interposing mouldings. But the fancy did
not stop here; it rose from the bases into the arches; and there,
not finding room enough for its exhibition, it withdrew the
capitals from the heads even of cylindrical shafts, (we cannot but
admire, while we regret, the boldness of the men who could defy
the authority and custom of all the nations of the earth for a
space of some three thousand years,) in order that the arch
mouldings might appear to emerge from the pillar, as at its base
they had been lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of
the capital; then they ran the mouldings across and through
each other, at the point of the arch; and finally, not finding their
natural directions enough to furnish as many occasions of inter-
section as they wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off
their ends short, when they had passed the point of intersection.
Fig. 2. Plate IV., is part of a flying buttress from the apse of
St. Gervais at Falaise, in which the moulding whose section is rudely
given above at $\bar{f}$, (taken vertically through the point $f$,) is carried
thrice through itself, in the cross-bar and two arches; and the
flat fillet is cut off sharp at the end of the cross-bar, for the mere
pleasure of the truncation. Fig. 3. is half of the head of a door
in the Stadthaus of Sursee, in which the shaded part of the
section of the joint, $gg$, is that of the arch moulding, which is
three times reduplicated, and six times intersected by itself,
the ends being cut off when they become unmanageable. This
style is, indeed, earlier exaggerated in Switzerland and Germany,
owing to the imitation in stone of the dovetailing of wood, par-

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61

ticularly of the intersecting of beams at the angles of châlets;
but it only furnishes the more plain instance of the danger of
the fallacious system which, from the beginning, repressed the
German, and, in the end, ruined the French, Gothic. It would
be too painful a task to follow further the caricatures of form,
and eccentricities of treatment, which grew out of this single
abuse—the flattened arch, the shrunken pillar, the lifeless orna-
ment, the liny moulding, the distorted and extravagant foliation,
until the time came when, over these wrecks and remnants,
deprived of all unity and principle, rose the foul torrent of the
renaissance, and swept them all away. So fell the great dynasty
of mediæval architecture. It was because it had lost its own
strength, and disobeyed its own laws — because its order, and con-
sistency, and organisation, had been broken through—that it could
oppose no resistance to the rush of overwhelming innovation.
And this, observe, all because it had sacrificed a single truth.
From that one surrender of its integrity, from that one endeavour
to assume the semblance of what it was not, arose the multi-
tudinous forms of disease and decrepitude, which rotted away
the pillars of its supremacy. It was not because its time was
come; it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist,
or dreaded by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear
it might have survived, and lived; it would have stood forth in
stern comparison with the enervated sensuality of the renaissance;
it would have risen in renewed and purified honour, and with a
new soul, from the ashes into which it sank, giving up its glory,
as it had received it, for the honour of God—but its own truth
was gone, and it sank for ever. There was no wisdom nor
strength left in it, to raise it from the dust; and the error of zeal,
and the softness of luxury, smote it down and dissolved it away.
It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare
ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scattered stones.
Those rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea-winds
moan and murmur, strewing them joint by joint, and bone by
bone, along the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights
came once from houses of prayer—those grey arches and quiet

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aisles under which the sheep of our valleys feed and rest on the
turf that has buried their altars—those shapeless heaps, that are
not of the Earth, which lift our fields into strange and sudden
banks of flowers, and stay our mountain streams with stones that
are not their own, have other thoughts to ask from us than those
of mourning for the rage that despoiled, or the fear that forsook
them. It was not the robber, not the fanatic, not the blasphemer,
who sealed the destruction that they had wrought; the war, the
wrath, the terror, might have worked their worst, and the strong
walls would have risen, and the slight pillars would have started
again, from under the hand of the destroyer. But they could not
rise out of the ruins of their own violated truth.

63

## CHAP. III.

### THE LAMP OF POWER.

I. IN recalling the impressions we have received from the works of man, after a lapse of time long enough to involve in obscurity all but the most vivid, it often happens that we find a strange pre-eminence and durability in many upon whose strength we had little calculated, and that points of character which had escaped the detection of the judgment, become developed under the waste of memory; as veins of harder rock, whose places could not at first have been discovered by the eye, are left salient under the action of frosts and streams. The traveller who desires to correct the errors of his judgment, necessitated by inequalities of temper, infelicities of circumstance, and accidents of association, has no other resource than to wait for the calm verdict of interposing years; and to watch for the new arrangements of eminence and shape in the images which remain latest in his memory; as in the ebbing of a mountain lake, he would watch the varying outline of its successive shore, and trace, in the form of its departing waters, the true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the currents which had excavated, the deepest recesses of its primal bed.

In thus reverting to the memories of those works of architecture by which we have been most pleasurably impressed, it will generally happen that they fall into two broad classes: the one characterised by an exceeding preciousness and delicacy, to which we recur with a sense of affectionate admiration; and the other by a severe, and, in many cases mysterious, majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power. From about these

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THE LAMP OF POWER.

two groups, more or less harmonised by intermediate examples,
but always distinctively marked by features of beauty or of power,
there will be swept away, in multitudes, the memories of buildings,
perhaps, in their first address to our minds, of no inferior pre-
tension, but owing their impressiveness to characters of less en-
during nobility—to value of material, accumulation of ornament,
or ingenuity of mechanical construction. Especial interest may,
indeed, have been awakened by such circumstances, and the
memory may have been, consequently, rendered tenacious of par-
ticular parts or effects of the structure; but it will recall even
these only by an active effort, and then without emotion; while
in passive moments, and with thrilling influence, the images of
purer beauty, and of more spiritual power, will return in a fair and
solemn company; and while the pride of many a stately palace,
and the wealth of many a jewelled shrine, perish from our thoughts
in a dust of gold, there will rise, through their dimness, the white
image of some secluded marble chapel, by river or forest side,
with the fretted flower-work shrinking under its arches, as if under
vaults of late-fallen snow; or the vast weariness of some shadowy
wall whose separate stones are like mountain foundations, and yet
numberless.

II. Now, the difference between these two orders of building
is not merely that which there is in nature between things beau-
tiful and sublime. It is, also, the difference between what is
derivative and original in man's work; for whatever is in archi-
tecture fair or beautiful, is imitated from natural forms; and
what is not so derived, but depends for its dignity upon arrange-
ment and government received from human mind, becomes the
expression of the power of that mind, and receives a sublimity
high in proportion to the power expressed. All building, there-
fore, shows man either as gathering or governing; and the secrets
of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rule.
These are the two great intellectual Lamps of Architecture; the
one consisting in a just and humble veneration for the works of
God upon the earth, and the other in an understanding of the
dominion over those works which has been vested in man.

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65

III. Besides this expression of living authority and power, there
is, however, a sympathy in the forms of noble building, with what
is most sublime in natural things; and it is the governing Power
directed by this sympathy, whose operation I shall at present
endeavour to trace, abandoning all inquiry into the more abstract
fields of Invention: for this latter faculty, and the questions of
proportion and arrangement connected with its discussion, can
only be rightly examined in a general view of all the arts; but
its sympathy, in architecture, with the vast controlling powers of
Nature herself, is special, and may shortly be considered; and that
with the more advantage, that it has, of late, been little felt or
regarded by architects. I have seen, in recent efforts, much
contest between two schools, one affecting originality, and the
other legality—many attempts at beauty of design—many
ingenious adaptations of construction; but I have never seen
any aim at the expression of abstract power; never any appear-
ance of a consciousness that, in this primal art of man, there
is room for the marking of his relations with the mightiest,
as well as the fairest, works of God; and that those works them-
selves have been permitted, by their Master and his, to receive an
added glory from their association with earnest efforts of human
thought. In the edifices of Man there should be found reverent
worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the
pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue—which
gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to
every pulse that agitates animal organisation,— but of that also
which reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren
precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy
cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky; for these,
and other glories more than these, refuse not to connect them-
selves, in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand; the grey
cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some Cyclopean
waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory
arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of
fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain
has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is

F

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cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and
of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in
their mortality.

IV. Let us, then, see what is this power and majesty, which
Nature herself does not disdain to accept from the works of man;
and what that sublimity in the masses built up by his coralline-
like energy, which is honourable, even when transferred by
association to the dateless hills, which it needed earthquakes to
lift, and deluges to mould.

And, first, of mere size: It might not be thought possible to
emulate the sublimity of natural objects in this respect; nor would
it be, if the architect contended with them in pitched battle. It
would not be well to build pyramids in the valley of Chamouni;
and St. Peter's, among its many other errors, counts for not the
least injurious its position on the slope of an inconsiderable hill.
But imagine it placed on the plain of Marengo, or like the
Superga of Turin, or like La Salute at Venice! The fact is, that
the apprehension of the size of natural objects, as well as of
architecture, depends more on fortunate excitement of the ima-
gination than on measurements by the eye; and the architect has
a peculiar advantage in being able to press close upon the sight
such magnitude as he can command. There are few rocks, even
among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall as high as the choir
of Beauvais; and if we secure a good precipice of wall, or a sheer
and unbroken flank of tower, and place them where there are no
enormous natural features to oppose them, we shall feel in them
no want of sublimity of size. And it may be matter of encourage-
ment in this respect, though one also of regret, to observe how
much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than nature crushes
human power. It does not need much to humiliate a mountain.
A hut will sometimes do it; I never look up to the Col de Balme
from Chamouni, without a violent feeling of provocation against
its hospitable little cabin, whose bright white walls form a visibly
four-square spot on the green ridge, and entirely destroy all idea
of its elevation. A single villa will often mar a whole landscape,
and dethrone a dynasty of hills; and the acropolis of Athens,

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Parthenon and all, has, I believe, been dwarfed into a model by
the palace lately built beneath it. The fact is, that hills are not
so high as we fancy them, and, when to the actual impression of
no mean comparative size, is added the sense of the toil of manly
hand and thought, a sublimity is reached, which nothing but
gross error in arrangement of its parts can destroy.

V. While, therefore, it is not to be supposed that mere size
will ennoble a mean design, yet every increase of magnitude will
bestow upon it a certain degree of nobleness: so that it is well
to determine at first, whether the building is to be markedly
beautiful, or markedly sublime; and if the latter, not to be with-
held by respect to smaller parts from reaching largeness of scale;
provided only, that it be evidently in the architect's power to
reach at least that degree of magnitude which is the lowest at
which sublimity begins, rudely definable as that which will make
a living figure look less than life beside it. It is the misfortune
of most of our modern buildings that we would fain have an
universal excellence in them; and so part of the funds must go in
painting, part in gilding, part in fitting up, part in painted
windows, part in small steeples, part in ornaments here and there;
and neither the windows, nor the steeple, nor the ornaments, are
worth their materials. For there is a crust about the impressible
part of men's minds, which must be pierced through before they
can be touched to the quick; and though we may prick at it and
scratch it in a thousand separate places, we might as well have
let it alone if we do not come through somewhere with a deep
thrust: and if we can give such a thrust anywhere, there is no
need of another; it need not be even so "wide as a church door,"
so that it be enough. And mere weight will do this; it is a
clumsy way of doing it, but an effectual one, too; and the apathy
which cannot be pierced through by a small steeple, nor shone
through by a small window, can be broken through in a moment
by the mere weight of a great wall. Let, therefore, the architect
who has not large resources, choose his point of attack first, and,
if he choose size, let him abandon decoration; for, unless they are
concentrated, and numerous enough to make their concentration

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conspicuous, all his ornaments together will not be worth one huge stone. And the choice must be a decided one, without compromise. It must be no question whether his capitals would not look better with a little carving — let him leave them huge as blocks; or whether his arches should not have richer architraves — let him throw them a foot higher, if he can; a yard more across the nave will be worth more to him than a tesselated pavement; and another fathom of outer wall, than an army of pinnacles. The limitation of size must be only in the uses of the building, or in the ground at his disposal.

VI. That limitation, however, being by such circumstances determined, by what means, it is to be next asked, may the actual magnitude be best displayed; since it is seldom, perhaps never, that a building of any pretension to size looks so large as it is. The appearance of a figure in any distant, more especially in any upper, parts of it will almost always prove that we have underestimated the magnitude of those parts.

It has often been observed that a building, in order to show its magnitude, must be seen all at once;—it would, perhaps, be better to say, must be bounded as much as possible by continuous lines, and that its extreme points should be seen all at once; or we may state, in simpler terms still, that it must have one visible bounding line from top to bottom, and from end to end. This bounding line from top to bottom may either be inclined inwards, and the mass therefore, pyramidal; or vertical, and the mass form one grand cliff; or inclined outwards, as in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, in a sort, in the Greek temple, and in all buildings with heavy cornices or heads. Now, in all these cases, if the bounding line be violently broken; if the cornice project, or the upper portion of the pyramid recede, too violently, majesty will be lost; not because the building cannot be seen all at once,— for in the case of a heavy cornice no part of it is necessarily concealed—but because the continuity of its terminal line is broken, and the *length of that line*, therefore, cannot be estimated. But the error is, of course, more fatal when much of the building is also concealed; as in the well-known case of the recession of the dome of

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St. Peter's, and from the greater number of points of view, in churches whose highest portions, whether dome or tower, are over their cross. Thus there is only one point from which the size of the Cathedral of Florence is felt; and that is from the corner of the Via de' Balestrieri, opposite the south-east angle, where it happens that the dome is seen rising instantly above the apse and transepts. In all cases in which the tower is over the cross, the grandeur and height of the tower itself are lost, because there is but one line down which the eye can trace the whole height, and that is in the inner angle of the cross, not easily discerned. Hence, while, in symmetry and feeling, such designs may often have pre-eminence, yet, where the height of the tower itself is to be made apparent, it must be at the west end, or, better still, detached as a campanile. Imagine the loss to the Lombard churches if their campaniles were carried only to their present height over their crosses; or to the Cathedral of Rouen, if the Tour de Beurre were made central, in the place of its present debased spire!

VII. Whether, therefore, we have to do with tower or wall there must be one bounding line from base to coping; and I am much inclined, myself, to love the true vertical, or the vertical, with a solemn frown of projection, (not a scowl,) as in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. This character is always given to rocks by the poets; with slight foundation indeed, real rocks being little given to overhanging—but with excellent judgment; for the sense of threatening conveyed by this form is a nobler character than that of mere size. And, in buildings, this threatening should be somewhat carried down into their mass. A mere projecting shelf is not enough; the whole wall must, Jupiter like, nod as well as frown. Hence, I think the propped machicolations of the Palazzo Vecchio and Duomo of Florence far grander headings than any form of Greek cornice. Sometimes the projection may be thrown lower, as in the Doge's palace of Venice, where the chief appearance of it is above the second arcade; or it may become a grand swell from the ground, as the head of a ship of the line rises from the sea. This is very nobly attained by the

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projection of the niches in the third story of the Tour de Beurre
at Rouen.

VIII. What is needful in the setting forth of magnitude in
height, is right also in the marking it in area — let it be gathered
well together. It is especially to be noted with respect to the
Palazzo Vecchio and other mighty buildings of its order, how
mistakenly it has been stated that dimension, in order to become
impressive, should be expanded either in height or length, but
not equally: whereas, rather it will be found that those buildings
seem on the whole the vastest which have been gathered up into
a mighty square, and which look as if they had been measured
by the angel's rod, “the length, and the breadth, and the height
of it are equal;” and herein something is to be taken notice of,
which I believe not to be sufficiently, if at all, considered among
our architects.

Of the many broad divisions under which architecture may be
considered, none appear to me more significant than that into
buildings whose interest is in their walls, and those whose interest
is in the lines dividing their walls. In the Greek temple the wall
is as nothing; the entire interest is in the detached columns and
the frieze they bear; in French Flamboyant, and in our detestable
Perpendicular, the object is to get rid of the wall surface, and
keep the eye altogether on tracery of line: in Romanesque
work and Egyptian, the wall is a confessed and honoured member,
and the light is often allowed to fall on large areas of it, variously
decorated. Now, both these principles are admitted by Nature,
the one in her woods and thickets, the other in her plains,
and cliffs, and waters; but the latter is pre-eminently the principle
of power, and, in some sense, of beauty also. For, whatever
infinity of fair form there may be in the maze of the forest, there
is a fairer, as I think, in the surface of the quiet lake; and I hardly
know that association of shaft or tracery, for which I would
exchange the warm sleep of sunshine on some smooth, broad,
human-like front of marble. Nevertheless, if breadth is to be
beautiful, its substance must in some sort be beautiful; and we
must not hastily condemn the exclusive resting of the northern

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architects in divided lines, until at least we have remembered
the difference between a blank surface of Caen stone, and one
mixed from Genoa and Carrara, of serpentine with snow: but
as regards abstract power and awfulness, there is no question;
without breadth of surface it is in vain to seek them, and it
matters little, so that the surface be wide, bold, and unbroken,
whether it be of brick or of jasper; the light of heaven upon it,
and the weight of earth in it, are all we need: for it is singular
how forgetful the mind may become both of material and work-
manship, if only it have space enough over which to range, and
to remind it, however feebly, of the joy that it has in contem-
plating the flatness and sweep of great plains and broad seas.
And it is a noble thing for men to do this with their cut stone
or moulded clay, and to make the face of a wall look infinite, and
its edge against the sky like an horizon: or even if less than
this be reached, it is still delightful to mark the play of passing
light on its broad surface, and to see by how many artifices and
gradations of tinting and shadow, time and storm will set their
wild signatures upon it; and how in the rising or declining of the
day the unbroken twilight rests long and luridly on its high
lineless forehead, and fades away untraceably down its tiers of
confused and countless stone.

IX. This, then, being, as I think, one of the peculiar elements
of sublime architecture, it may be easily seen how necessarily
consequent upon the love of it will be the choice of a form
approaching to the square for the main outline.

For, in whatever direction the building is contracted, in that
direction the eye will be drawn to its terminal lines; and the
sense of surface will only be at its fullest when those lines are
removed, in every direction, as far as possible. Thus the square
and circle are pre-eminently the areas of power among those
bounded by purely straight or curved lines; and these, with
their relative solids, the cube and sphere, and relative solids of
progression, (as in the investigation of the laws of proportion
I shall call those masses which are generated by the progression
of an area of given form along a line in a given direction,) the

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square and cylindrical column, are the elements of utmost power
in all architectural arrangements. On the other hand, grace
and perfect proportion require an elongation in some one di-
rection: and a sense of power may be communicated to this form
of magnitude by a continuous series of any marked features,
such as the eye may be unable to number; while yet we feel,
from their boldness, decision, and simplicity, that it is indeed
their multitude which has embarrassed us, not any confusion
or indistinctness of form. This expedient of continued series
forms the sublimity of arcades and aisles, of all ranges of
columns, and, on a smaller scale, of those Greek mouldings,
of which, repeated as they now are in all the meanest and most
familiar forms of our furniture, it is impossible altogether to
weary. Now, it is evident that the architect has choice of two
types of form, each properly associated with its own kind of
interest or decoration: the square, or greatest area, to be chosen
especially when the *surface* is to be the subject of thought; and
the elongated area, when the *divisions* of the surface are to be
subjects of thought. Both these orders of form, as I think nearly
every other source of power and beauty, are marvellously united
in that building which I fear to weary the reader by bringing
forward too frequently, as a model of all perfection—the Doge’s
palace at Venice: its general arrangement, a hollow square; its
principal façade, an oblong, elongated to the eye by a range of
thirty-four small arches, and thirty-five columns, while it is sepa-
rated by a richly canopied window in the centre, into two massive
divisions, whose height and length are nearly as four to five; the
arcades which give it length being confined to the lower stories,
and the upper, between its broad windows, left a mighty surface of
smooth marble, chequered with blocks of alternate rose-colour and
white. It would be impossible, I believe, to invent a more magni-
ficent arrangement of all that is in building most dignified and
most fair.

X. In the Lombard Romanesque, the two principles are more
fused into each other, as most characteristically in the cathedral
of Pisa: length of proportion, exhibited by an arcade of twenty-

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one arches above, and fifteen below, at the side of the nave; bold
square proportion in the front; that front divided into arcades,
placed one above the other, the lowest with its pillars engaged, of
seven arches, the four uppermost thrown out boldly from the
receding wall, and casting deep shadows; the first, above the
basement, of nineteen arches; the second, of twenty-one; the third
and fourth of eight each; sixty-three arches in all; all *circular*
headed, all with cylindrical shafts, and the lowest with *square*
panellings, set diagonally under their semicircles, an universal
ornament in this style (Plate XII. fig. 7.); the apse a semi-
circle, with a semidome for its roof, and three ranges of circular
arches for its exterior ornament; in the interior of the nave, a
range of circular arches below a circular-arched triforium, and a
vast flat *surface*, observe, of wall decorated with striped marble
above; the whole arrangement (not a peculiar one, but charac-
teristic of every church of the period; and, to my feeling, the
most majestic; not perhaps the fairest, but the mightiest type of
form which the mind of man has ever conceived) based exclusively
on associations of the circle and the square.

I am now, however, trenching upon ground which I desire to
reserve for more careful examination, in connection with other
æsthetic questions: but I believe the examples I have given will
justify my vindication of the square form from the reprobation
which has been lightly thrown upon it; nor might this be done
for it only as a ruling outline, but as occurring constantly in the
best mosaics, and in a thousand forms of minor decoration, which
I cannot now examine; my chief assertion of its majesty being
always as it is an exponent of space and surface, and therefore
to be chosen, either to rule in their outlines, or to adorn by masses
of light and shade those portions of buildings in which surface is
to be rendered precious or honourable.

XI. Thus far, then, of general forms, and of the modes in
which the scale of architecture is best to be exhibited. Let us
next consider the manifestations of power which belong to its
details and lesser divisions.

The first division we have to regard, is the inevitable one of

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masonry. It is true that this division may, by great art, be concealed; but I think it unwise (as well as dishonest) to do so; for this reason, that there is a very noble character always to be obtained by the opposition of large stones to divided masonry, as by shafts and columns of one piece, or massy lintels and architraves, to wall work of bricks or smaller stones; and there is a certain organisation in the management of such parts, like that of the continuous bones of the skeleton, opposed to the vertebræ, which it is not well to surrender. I hold, therefore, that, for this and other reasons, the masonry of a building is to be shown: and also that, with certain rare exceptions, (as in the cases of chapels and shrines of most finished workmanship,) the smaller the building, the more necessary it is that its masonry should be bold, and *vice versa*. For if a building be under the mark of average magnitude, it is not in our power to increase its apparent size (too easily measurable) by any proportionate diminution in the scale of its masonry. But it may be often in our power to give it a certain nobility by building it of massy stones, or, at all events, introducing such into its make. Thus it is impossible that there should ever be majesty in a cottage built of brick; but there is a marked element of sublimity in the rude and irregular piling of the rocky walls of the mountain cottages of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. Their size is not one whit diminished, though four or five stones reach at their angles from the ground to the eaves, or though a native rock happen to project conveniently, and to be built into the framework of the wall. On the other hand, after a building has once reached the mark of majestic size, it matters, indeed, comparatively little whether its masonry be large or small, but if it be altogether large, it will sometimes diminish the magnitude for want of a measure; if altogether small, it will suggest ideas of poverty in material, or deficiency in mechanical resource, besides interfering in many cases with the lines of the design, and delicacy of the workmanship. A very unhappy instance of such interference exists in the façade of the church of St. Madeleine at Paris, where the columns being built of very small stones of nearly equal size

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with visible joints, look as if they were covered with a close
trellis. So, then, that masonry will be generally the most magni-
ficent which, without the use of materials systematically small
or large, accommodates itself, naturally and frankly, to the con-
ditions and structure of its work, and displays alike its power of
dealing with the vastest masses, and of accomplishing its purpose
with the smallest, sometimes heaping rock upon rock with Titanic
commandment, and anon binding the dusty remnants and edgy
splinters into springing vaults and swelling domes. And if the
nobility of this confessed and natural masonry were more com-
monly felt, we should not lose the dignity of it by smoothing
surfaces and fitting joints. The sums which we waste in chiselling
and polishing stones which would have been better left as they
came from the quarry, would often raise a building a story
higher. Only in this there is to be a certain respect for material
also: for if we build in marble, or in any limestone, the known
ease of the workmanship will make its absence seem slovenly;
it will be well to take advantage of the stone's softness, and to
make the design delicate and dependent upon smoothness of
chiselled surfaces: but if we build in granite or lava, it is a folly,
in most cases, to cast away the labour necessary to smooth it; it
is wiser to make the design granitic itself, and to leave the
blocks rudely squared. I do not deny a certain splendour and
sense of power in the smoothing of granite, and in the entire
subduing of its iron resistance to the human supremacy. But
in most cases I believe, the labour and time necessary to do this,
would be better spent in another way; and that to raise a building
to a height of a hundred feet with rough blocks, is better than
to raise it to seventy with smooth ones. There is also a magni-
ficence in the natural cleavage of the stone to which the art
must indeed be great that pretends to be equivalent; and a stern
expression of brotherhood with the mountain heart from which
it has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering obedience to the
rule and measure of men. His eye must be delicate indeed, who
would desire to see the Pitti palace polished.

XII. Next to those of the masonry, we have to consider the

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divisions of the design itself. Those divisions are necessarily,
either into masses of light and shade, or else by traced lines;
which latter must be, indeed, themselves produced by incisions or
projections which, in some lights, cast a certain breadth of shade,
but which may, nevertheless, if finely enough cut, be always true
lines, in distant effect. I call, for instance, such panelling as that
of Henry the Seventh's chapel, pure linear division.

Now, it does not seem to me sufficiently recollected, that a wall
surface is to an architect simply what a white canvass is to a
painter, with this only difference, that the wall has already a
sublimity in its height, substance, and other characters already
considered, on which it is more dangerous to break than to touch
with shade the canvass surface. And, for my own part, I think
a smooth, broad, freshly laid surface of gesso a fairer thing than
most pictures I see painted on it; much more, a noble surface of
stone than most architectural features which it is caused to
assume. But however this may be, the canvass and wall are
supposed to be given, and it is our craft to divide them.

And the principles on which this division is to be made, are, as
regards relation of quantities, the same in architecture as in
painting, or indeed in any other art whatsoever, only the painter
is by his varied subject partly permitted, partly compelled, to
dispense with the symmetry of architectural light and shade, and
to adopt arrangements apparently free and accidental. So that
in modes of grouping there is much difference (though no oppo-
sition) between the two arts; but in rules of quantity, both are
alike, so far forth as their commands of means are alike. For
the architect not being able to secure always the same depth or
decision of shadow, nor to add to its sadness by colour, (because
even when colour is employed, it cannot follow the moving
shade,) is compelled to make many allowances, and avail himself
of many contrivances, which the painter needs neither consider
nor employ.

XIII. Of these limitations the first consequence is, that positive
shade is a more necessary and more sublime thing in an architect's
hands than in a painter's. For the latter being able to temper his

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light with an under tone throughout, and to make it delightful
with sweet colour, or awful with lurid colour, and to represent
distance, and air, and sun, by the depth of it, and fill its whole space
with expression, can deal with an enormous, nay, almost with an
universal, extent of it, and the best painters most delight in such
extent; but as light, with the architect, is nearly always liable to
become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface,
his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades.
So that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be
said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or
intenseness) of its shadow; and it seems to me, that the reality of
its works, and the use and influence they have in the daily life of
men, (as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing
to do but in times of rest or of pleasure,) require of it that it
should express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of dark-
ness as great as there is in human life: and that as the great poem
and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their
masses of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a
continuance of lyric sprightliness, but must be often serious, and
sometimes melancholy, else they do not express the truth of this
wild world of ours; so there must be, in this magnificently human
art of architecture, some equivalent expression for the trouble and
wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery: and this it can only
give by depth or diffusion of gloom, by the frown upon its front,
and the shadow of its recess. So that Rembrandtism is a noble
manner in architecture, though a false one in painting; and I do
not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had
mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its
surface. And among the first habits that a young architect should
learn, is that of thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its
miserable liny skeleton; but conceiving it as it will be when the
dawn lights it, and the dusk leaves it; when its stones will be
hot, and its crannies cool; when the lizards will bask on the one,
and the birds build in the other. Let him design with the sense
of cold and heat upon him; let him cut out the shadows, as men
dig wells in unwatered plains; and lead along the lights, as a

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founder does his hot metal; let him keep the full command of both,
and see that he knows how they fall, and where they fade. His
paper lines and proportions are of no value: all that he has to do
must be done by spaces of light and darkness; and his business is
to see that the one is broad and bold enough not to be swallowed
up by twilight, and the other deep enough not to be dried like a
shallow pool by a noon-day sun.

And, that this may be, the first necessity is that the quantities
of shade or light, whatever they may be, shall be thrown into
masses, either of something like equal weight, or else large masses
of the one relieved with small of the other; but masses of one or
other kind there must be. No design that is divided at all, and
yet not divided into masses, can ever be of the smallest value:
this great law respecting breadth, precisely the same in archi-
tecture and painting, is so important, that the examination of its
two principal applications will include most of the conditions of
majestic design on which I would at present insist.

XIV. Painters are in the habit of speaking loosely of masses
of light and shade, meaning thereby any large spaces of either.
Nevertheless, it is convenient sometimes to restrict the term
"mass" to the portions to which proper form belongs, and to
call the field on which such forms are traced, interval. Thus, in
foliage with projecting boughs or stems, we have masses of light,
with intervals of shade; and, in light skies with dark clouds upon
them, masses of shade, with intervals of light.

This distinction is, in architecture, still more necessary; for
there are two marked styles dependent upon it: one in which the
forms are drawn with light upon darkness, as in Greek sculpture
and pillars; the other in which they are drawn with darkness
upon light, as in early Gothic foliation. Now, it is not in the
designer's power determinately to vary degrees and places of
darkness, but it is altogether in his power to vary in determined
directions his degrees of light. Hence the use of the dark mass
characterises, generally, a trenchant style of design, in which the
darks and lights are both flat, and terminated by sharp edges;
while the use of the light mass is in the same way associated with

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a softened and full manner of design, in which the darks are much
warmed by reflected lights, and the lights are rounded and melt
into them. The term applied by Milton to Doric bas-relief —
“bossy,” is, as is generally the case with Milton’s epithets, the
most comprehensive and expressive of this manner, which the
English language contains; while the term which specifically de-
scribes the chief member of early Gothic decoration, feuille, foil
or leaf, is equally significative of a flat space of shade.

XV. We shall shortly consider the actual modes in which these
two kinds of mass have been treated. And, first, of the light, or
rounded, mass. The modes in which relief was secured for the
more projecting forms of bas-relief, by the Greeks, have been too
well described by Sir Charles Eastlake * to need recapitulation; the
conclusion which forces itself upon us from the facts he has re-
marked, being one on which I shall have occasion farther to insist
presently, that the Greek workman cared for shadow only as a
dark field wherefrom his light figure or design might be intel-
ligibly detached: his attention was concentrated on the one aim
at readableness, and clearness of accent; and all composition, all
harmony, nay, the very vitality and energy of separate groups
were, when necessary, sacrificed to plain speaking. Nor was
there any predilection for one kind of form rather than another.
Rounded forms were, in the columns and principal decorative
members, adopted, not for their own sake, but as characteristic of
the things represented. They were beautifully rounded, because
the Greek habitually did well what he had to do, not because he
loved roundness more than squareness; severely rectilinear forms
were associated with the curved ones in the cornice and triglyph,
and the mass of the pillar was divided by a fluting, which, in
distant effect, destroyed much of its breadth. What power of
light these primal arrangements left, was diminished in successive
refinements and additions of ornament; and continued to diminish
through Roman work, until the confirmation of the circular arch
as a decorative feature. Its lovely and simple line taught the

* Literature of the Fine Arts.—Essay on Bas-relief.

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eye to ask for a similar boundary of solid form; the dome
followed, and necessarily the decorative masses were thence-
forward managed with reference to, and in sympathy with, the
chief feature of the building. Hence arose, among the Byzantine
architects, a system of ornament, entirely restrained within the
superficies of curvilinear masses, on which the light fell with as
unbroken gradation as on a dome or column, while the illumined
surface was nevertheless cut into details of singular and most
ingenious intricacy. Something is, of course, to be allowed for
the less dexterity of the workmen; it being easier to cut down
into a solid block, than to arrange the projecting portions of leaf
on the Greek capital: such leafy capitals are nevertheless executed
by the Byzantines with skill enough to show that their preference
of the massive form was by no means compulsory, nor can I
think it unwise. On the contrary, while the arrangements of
*line* are far more artful in the Greek capital, the Byzantine light
and shade are as incontestably more grand and masculine, based
on that quality of pure gradation, which nearly all natural objects
possess, and the attainment of which is, in fact, the first and
most palpable purpose in natural arrangements of grand form.
The rolling heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and
multiplied by wreaths, yet gathering them all into its broad, tor-
rid, and towering zone, and its midnight darkness opposite; the
scarcely less majestic heave of the mountain side, all torn and
traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock, yet never losing
the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy decline; and the
head of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf and bough,
yet terminated against the sky by a true line, and rounded by a
green horizon, which, multiplied in the distant forest, makes it
look bossy from above; all these mark, for a great and honoured
law, that diffusion of light for which the Byzantine ornaments
were designed; and show us that those builders had truer sym-
pathy with what God made majestic, than the self-contemplating
and self-contented Greek. I know that they are barbaric in
comparison; but there is a power in their barbarism of sterner
tone, a power not sophistic nor penetrative, but embracing and

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mysterious; a power faithful more than thoughtful, which conceived and felt more than it created; a power that neither comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams and winds; and which could not rest in the expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth itself.

XVI. I have endeavoured to give some idea of one of the hollow balls of stone which, surrounded by flowing leafage, occur in varied succession on the architrave of the central gate of St. Mark's at Venice, in Plate I. fig. 3. It seems to me singularly beautiful in its unity of lightness, and delicacy of detail, with breadth of light. It looks as if its leaves had been sensitive, and had risen and shut themselves into a bud at some sudden touch, and would presently fall back again into their wild flow. The cornices of San Michele of Lucca, seen above and below the arch, in Plate VI., show the effect of heavy leafage and thick stems arranged on a surface whose curve is a simple quadrant, the light dying from off them as it turns. It would be difficult, as I think, to invent any thing more noble: and I insist on the broad character of their arrangement the more earnestly, because, afterwards modified by greater skill in its management, it became characteristic of the richest pieces of Gothic design. The capital, given in Plate V., is of the noblest period of the Venetian Gothic; and it is interesting to see the play of leafage so luxuriant, absolutely subordinated to the breadth of two masses of light and shade. What is done by the Venetian architect, with a power as irresistible as that of the waves of his surrounding sea, is done by the masters of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less expressing their assent to the same great law. The ice spiculæ of the North, and its broken sunshine, seem to have image in, and influence on the work; and the leaves which, under the Italian's hand, roll, and flow, and bow down over their black shadows, as in the weariness of noon-day heat,

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are, in the North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the edges, and sparkling as if with dew. But the rounding of the ruling form is not less sought and felt. In the lower part of Plate I. is the finial of the pediment given in Plate II., from the cathedral of St. Lo. It is exactly similar in feeling to the Byzantine capital, being rounded under the abacus by four branches of thistle-leaves, whose stems, springing from the angles, bend outwards and fall back to the head, throwing their jaggy spines down upon the full light, forming two sharp quatrefoils. I could not get near enough to this finial to see with what degree of delicacy the spines were cut; but I have sketched a natural group of thistle-leaves beside it, that the reader may compare the types, and see with what mastery they are subjected to the broad form of the whole. The small capital from Coutances, Plate XIII., fig. 4., which is of earlier date, is of simpler elements, and exhibits the principle still more clearly; but the St. Lo finial is only one of a thousand instances which might be gathered even from the fully developed flamboyant, the feeling of breadth being retained in minor ornaments, long after it had been lost in the main design, and sometimes capriciously renewing itself throughout, as in the cylindrical niches and pedestals which enrich the porches of Caudebec and Rouen. Fig. 1. Plate I. is the simplest of those of Rouen; in the more elaborate there are four projecting sides, divided by buttresses into eight rounded compartments of tracery; even the whole bulk of the outer pier is treated with the same feeling; and though composed partly of concave recesses, partly of square shafts, partly of statues and tabernacle work, arranges itself as a whole into one richly rounded tower.

XVII. I cannot here enter into the curious questions connected with the management of larger curved surfaces; into the causes of the difference in proportion necessary to be observed between round and square towers; nor into the reasons why a column or ball may be richly ornamented, while surface decoration would be inexpedient on masses like the Castle of St. Angelo, the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or the dome of St. Peter's. But what has

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been above said of the desirableness of serenity in plane surfaces,
applies still more forcibly to those which are curved; and it is to
be remembered that we are, at present, considering how this
serenity and power may be carried into minor divisions, not how
the ornamental character of the lower form may, upon occasion,
be permitted to fret the calmness of the higher. Nor, though
the instances we have examined are of globular or cylindrical
masses chiefly, is it to be thought that breadth can only be
secured by such alone: many of the noblest forms are of subdued
curvature, sometimes hardly visible; but curvature of some degree
there must be, in order to secure any measure of grandeur
in a small mass of light. One of the most marked distinctions
between one artist and another, in the point of skill, will be
found in their relative delicacy of perception of rounded surface;
the full power of expressing the perspective, foreshortening and
various undulation of such surface is, perhaps, the last and most
difficult attainment of the hand and eye. For instance: there is,
perhaps, no tree which has baffled the landscape painter more
than the common black spruce fir. It is rare that we see any
representation of it other than caricature. It is conceived as
if it grew in one plane, or as a section of a tree, with a set of
boughs symmetrically dependent on opposite sides. It is thought
formal, unmanageable, and ugly. It would be so, if it grew as
it is drawn. But the Power of the tree is not in that chandelier-
like section. It is in the dark, flat, solid tables of leafage, which
it holds out on its strong arms, curved slightly over them like
shields, and spreading towards the extremity like a hand. It is
vain to endeavour to paint the sharp, grassy, intricate leafage,
until this ruling form has been secured; and in the boughs that
approach the spectator, the foreshortening of it is like that of
a wide hill country, ridge just rising over ridge in successive
distances; and the finger-like extremities, foreshortened to absolute
bluntness, require a delicacy in the rendering of them like
that of the drawing of the hand of the Magdalene upon the vase
in Mr. Rogers's Titian. Get but the back of that foliage, and
you have the tree; but I cannot name the artist who has

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thoroughly felt it. So, in all drawing and sculpture, it is the
power of rounding, softly and perfectly, every inferior mass which
preserves the serenity, as it follows the truth, of Nature, and which
demands the highest knowledge and skill from the workman. A
noble design may always be told by the back of a single leaf, and
it was the sacrifice of this breadth and refinement of surface for
sharp edges and extravagant undercutting, which destroyed the
Gothic mouldings, as the substitution of the line for the light
destroyed the Gothic tracery. This change, however, we shall
better comprehend after we have glanced at the chief conditions
of arrangement of the second kind of mass; that which is flat,
and of shadow only.

XVIII. We have noted above how the wall surface, composed
of rich materials, and covered with costly work, in modes which
we shall examine in the next Chapter, became a subject of peculiar
interest to the Christian architects. Its broad flat lights could
only be made valuable by points or masses of energetic shadow,
which were obtained by the Romanesque architect by means of
ranges of recessed arcade, in the management of which, however,
though all the effect depends upon the shadow so obtained, the
eye is still, as in classical architecture, caused to dwell upon the
projecting columns, capitals, and wall, as in Plate VI. But with
the enlargement of the window, which, in the Lombard and Roma-
nesque churches, is usually little more than an arched slit, came
the conception of the simpler mode of decoration, by penetrations
which, seen from within, are forms of light, and, from without,
are forms of shade. In Italian traceries the eye is exclusively
fixed upon the dark forms of the penetrations, and the whole
proportion and power of the design are caused to depend upon
them. The intermediate spaces are, indeed, in the most perfect
early examples, filled with elaborate ornament; but this ornament
was so subdued as never to disturb the simplicity and force of
the dark masses; and in many instances is entirely wanting.
The composition of the whole depends on the proportioning and
shaping of the darks; and it is impossible that any thing can be
more exquisite than their placing in the head window of the

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Giotto campanile, Plate IX., or the Church of Or San Michele. So entirely does the effect depend upon them, that it is quite useless to draw Italian tracery in outline; if with any intention of rendering its effect, it is better to mark the black spots, and let the rest alone. Of course, when it is desired to obtain an accurate rendering of the design, its lines and mouldings are enough; but it often happens that works on architecture are of little use, because they afford the reader no means of judging of the effective intention of the arrangements which they state. No person, looking at an architectural drawing of the richly foliaged cusps and intervals of Or San Michele, would understand that all this sculpture was extraneous, was a mere added grace, and had nothing to do with the real anatomy of the work, and that by a few bold cuttings through a slab of stone he might reach the main effect of it all, at once. I have, therefore, in the plate of the design of Giotto, endeavoured especially to mark these points of *purpose*; there, as in every other instance, black shadows of a graceful form lying on the white surface of the stone, like dark leaves laid upon snow. Hence, as before observed, the universal name of foil applied to such ornaments.

XIX. In order to the obtaining their full effect, it is evident that much caution is necessary in the management of the glass. In the finest instances, the traceries are open lights, either in towers, as in this design of Giotto's, or in external arcades like that of the Campo Santo at Pisa or the Doge's Palace at Venice; and it is thus only that their full beauty is shown. In domestic buildings, or in windows of churches necessarily glazed, the glass was usually withdrawn entirely behind the traceries. Those of the Cathedral of Florence stand quite clear of it, casting their shadows in well detached lines, so as in most lights to give the appearance of a double tracery. In those few instances in which the glass was set in the tracery itself, as in Or San Michele, the effect of the latter is half destroyed: perhaps the especial attention paid by Orgagna to his surface ornament, was connected with the intention of so glazing them. It is singular to see, in late architecture, the glass, which tormented the bolder architects, considered

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as a valuable means of making the lines of tracery more slender;
as in the smallest intervals of the windows of Merton College,
Oxford, where the glass is advanced about two inches from the
centre of the tracery bar, (that in the larger spaces being in the
middle, as usual,) in order to prevent the depth of shadow from
farther diminishing the apparent interval. Much of the lightness
of the effect of the traceries is owing to this seemingly unimportant
arrangement. But, generally speaking, glass spoils all traceries;
and it is much to be wished that it should be kept well within
them, when it cannot be dispensed with, and that the most careful
and beautiful designs should be reserved for situations where
no glass would be needed.

XX. The method of decoration by shadow was, as far as we
have hitherto traced it, common to the northern and southern
Gothic. But in the carrying out of the system they instantly
diverged. Having marble at his command, and classical decoration
in his sight, the southern architect was able to carve the inter-
mediate spaces with exquisite leafage, or to vary his wall surface
with inlaid stones. The northern architect neither knew the an-
cient work, nor possessed the delicate material; and he had no
resource but to cover his walls with holes, cut into foiled shapes
like those of the windows. This he did, often with great clum-
siness, but always with a vigorous sense of composition, and
always, observe, depending on the *shadows* for effect. Where the
wall was thick and could not be cut through, and the foilings
were large, those shadows did not fill the entire space; but the
form was, nevertheless, drawn on the eye by means of them, and
when it was possible, they were cut clear through, as in raised
screens of pediment, like those of the west front of Bayeux; cut
so deep in every case, as to secure, in all but a direct low front
light, great breadth of shadow.

The spandril, given at the top of Plate VII., is from the south-
western entrance of the Cathedral of Lisieux; one of the most
quaint and interesting doors in Normandy, probably soon to be
lost for ever, by the continuance of the masonic operations which
have already destroyed the northern tower. Its work is altogether