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rude, but full of spirit; the opposite spandrils have different,
though balanced, ornaments very inaccurately adjusted, each
rosette or star (as the five-rayed figure, now quite defaced, in the
upper portion appears to have been) cut on its own block of stone
and fitted in with small nicety, especially illustrating the point I
have above insisted upon—the architect's utter neglect of the
forms of intermediate stone, at this early period.

The arcade, of which a single arch and shaft are given on the
left, forms the flank of the door; three outer shafts bearing three
orders within the spandril which I have drawn, and each of these
shafts carried over an inner arcade, decorated above with quatre-
foils, cut concave and filled with leaves, the whole disposition ex-
quisitely picturesque and full of strange play of light and shade.

For some time the penetrative ornaments, if so they may be for
convenience called, maintained their bold and independent cha-
racter. Then they multiplied and enlarged, becoming shallower as
they did so; then they began to run together, one swallowing up,
or hanging on to, another, like bubbles in expiring foam—fig. 4.
from a spandril at Bayeux, looks as if it had been blown from a
pipe; finally, they lost their individual character altogether, and
the eye was made to rest on the separating lines of tracery, as we
saw before in the window; and then came the great change and
the fall of the Gothic power.

XXI. Figs. 2. and 3., the one a quadrant of the star window
of the little chapel close to St. Anastasia at Verona, and the other
a very singular example from the church of the Eremitani at
Padua, compared with fig. 5., one of the ornaments of the transept
towers of Rouen, show the closely correspondent conditions of the
early Northern and Southern Gothic.¹⁰ But, as we have said, the
Italian architects, not being embarrassed for decoration of wall
surface, and not being obliged, like the Northmen, to multiply
their penetrations, held to the system for some time longer; and
while they increased the refinement of the ornament, kept the
purity of the plan. That refinement of ornament was their weak
point however, and opened the way for the renaissance attack.
They fell, like the old Romans, by their luxury, except in the

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separate instance of the magnificent school of Venice. That
architecture began with the luxuriance in which all others expired:
it founded itself on the Byzantine mosaic and fretwork; and laying
aside its ornaments, one by one, while it fixed its forms by laws
more and more severe, stood forth, at last, a model of domestic
Gothic, so grand, so complete, so nobly systematised, that, to my
mind, there never existed an architecture with so stern a claim to
our reverence. I do not except even the Greek Doric: the Doric
had cast nothing away; the fourteenth century Venetian had cast
away, one by one, for a succession of centuries, every splendour
that art and wealth could give it. It had laid down its crown and
its jewels, its gold and its colour, like a king disrobing; it had
resigned its exertion, like an athlete reposing; once capricious and
fantastic, it had bound itself by laws inviolable and serene as those
of Nature herself. It retained nothing but its beauty and its
power; both the highest, but both restrained. The Doric flutings
were of irregular number—the Venetian mouldings were unchange-
able. The Doric manner of ornament admitted no temptation; it
was the fasting of an anchorite—the Venetian ornament embraced,
while it governed, all vegetable and animal forms; it was the
temperance of a man, the command of Adam over creation. I do
not know so magnificent a marking of human authority as the
iron grasp of the Venetian over his own exuberance of imagination;
the calm and solemn restraint with which, his mind filled with
thoughts of flowing leafage and fiery life, he gives those thoughts
expression for an instant, and then withdraws within those massy
bars and levelled cusps of stone.¹¹

And his power to do this depended altogether on his retaining
the forms of the shadows in his sight. Far from carrying the eye
to the ornaments, upon the stone, he abandoned these latter one by
one; and while his mouldings received the most shapely order and
symmetry, closely correspondent with that of the Rouen tracery,
compare Plates IV. and VIII., he kept the cusps within them per-
fectly flat, decorated, if at all, with a trefoil (Palazzo Foscari), or
fillet (Doge's Palace) just traceable and no more, so that the
quatrefoil, cut as sharply through them as if it had been struck

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out by a stamp, told upon the eye, with all its four black leaves,
miles away. No knots of flowerwork, no ornaments of any kind,
were suffered to interfere with the purity of its form: the cusp is
usually quite sharp; but slightly truncated in the Palazzo Foscari,
and charged with a simple ball in that of the Doge; and the glass
of the window, where there was any, was, as we have seen, thrown
back behind the stone-work, that no flashes of light might interfere
with its depth. Corrupted forms, like those of the Casa d'Oro and
Palazzo Pisani, and several others, only serve to show the majesty
of the common design.

XXII. Such are the principal circumstances traceable in the
treatment of the two kinds of masses of light and darkness, in the
hands of the earlier architects; gradation in the one, flatness in
the other, and breadth in both, being the qualities sought and ex-
hibited by every possible expedient, up to the period when, as we
have before stated, the line was substituted for the mass, as the
means of division of surface. Enough has been said to illustrate
this, as regards tracery; but a word or two is still necessary
respecting the mouldings.

Those of the earlier times were, in the plurality of instances,
composed of alternate square and cylindrical shafts, variously
associated and proportioned. Where concave cuttings occur, as in
the beautiful west doors of Bayeux, they are between cylindrical
shafts, which they throw out into broad light. The eye in all
cases dwells on broad surfaces, and commonly upon few. In
course of time, a low ridgy process is seen emerging along
the outer edge of the cylindrical shaft, forming a line of light
upon it and destroying its gradation. Hardly traceable at
first, (as on the alternate rolls of the north door of Rouen,)
it grows and pushes out as gradually as a budding plant: sharp
at first on the edge; but, becoming prominent, it receives
a truncation, and becomes a definite fillet on the face of the roll.
Not yet to be checked, it pushes forward until the roll itself
becomes subordinate to it, and is finally lost in a slight swell
upon its sides, while the concavities have all the time been
deepening and enlarging behind it, until, from a succession of

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square or cylindrical masses, the whole moulding has become a
series of *concavities* edged by delicate fillets, upon which, (sharp
*lines* of light, observe,) the eye exclusively rests. While this
has been taking place, a similar, though less total, change has
affected the flowerwork itself. In Plate I. fig. 2. (a), I have given
two from the transepts of Rouen. It will be observed how abso-
lutely the eye rests on the forms of the leaves, and on the three
berries in the angle, being in light exactly what the trefoil is in
darkness. These mouldings nearly adhere to the stone; and are
very slightly, though sharply, undercut. In process of time, the
attention of the architect, instead of resting on the leaves,
went to the *stalks*. These latter were elongated (b, from the
south door of St. Lo;) and to exhibit them better, the deep con-
cavity was cut behind, so as to throw them out in lines of light.
The system was carried out into continually increasing intricacy,
until, in the transepts of Beauvais, we have brackets and flam-
boyant traceries, composed of twigs without any leaves at all.
This, however, is a partial, though a sufficiently characteristic,
caprice, the leaf being never generally banished, and in the
mouldings round those same doors, beautifully managed, but
itself rendered liny by bold marking of its ribs and veins, and
by turning up, and crisping its edges, large intermediate spaces
being always left to be occupied by intertwining stems, (c,
from Caudebec). The trefoil of light formed by berries or acorns,
though diminished in value, was never lost up to the last period
of living Gothic.

XXIII. It is interesting to follow into its many ramifications,
the influence of the corrupting principle; but we have seen enough
of it to enable us to draw our practical conclusion—a conclusion
a thousand times felt and reiterated in the experience and advice
of every practised artist, but never often enough repeated, never
profoundly enough felt. Of composition and invention much has
been written, it seems to me vainly, for men cannot be taught to
compose or to invent; of these, the highest elements of Power in
architecture, I do not, therefore, speak; nor, here, of that peculiar
restraint in the imitation of natural forms, which constitutes the

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dignity of even the most luxuriant work of the great periods. Of this restraint, I shall say a word or two in the next Chapter; pressing now only the conclusion, as practically useful as it is certain, that the relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses, than on any other attribute of their design: mass of everything, of bulk, of light, of darkness, of colour, not mere sum of any of these, but breadth of them; not broken light, nor scattered darkness, nor divided weight, but solid stone, broad sunshine, starless shade. Time would fail me altogether, if I attempted to follow out the range of the principle; there is not a feature, however apparently trifling, to which it cannot give power. The wooden fillings of belfry lights, necessary to protect their interiors from rain, are in England usually divided into a number of neatly executed cross-bars, like those of Venetian blinds, which, of course, become as conspicuous in their sharpness as they are uninteresting in their precise carpentry, multiplying, moreover, the horizontal lines which directly contradict those of the architecture. Abroad, such necessities are met by three or four downright penthouse roofs, reaching each from within the window to the outside shafts of its mouldings; instead of the horrible row of ruled lines, the space is thus divided into four or five grand masses of shadow with grey slopes of roof above, bent or yielding into all kinds of delicious swells and curves, and covered with warm tones of moss and lichen. Very often the thing is more delightful than the stone-work itself, and all because it is broad, dark, and simple. It matters not how clumsy, how common, the means are, that get weight and shadow—sloping roof, jutting porch, projecting balcony, hollow niche, massy gargoyle, frowning parapet; get but gloom and simplicity, and all good things will follow in their place and time; do but design with the owl's eyes first, and you will gain the falcon's afterwards.

XXIV. I am grieved to have to insist upon what seems so simple: it looks trite and common-place when it is written, but pardon me this: for it is anything but an accepted or understood principle in practice, and the less excusably forgotten, because

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it is, of all the great and true laws of art, the easiest to obey. The executive facility of complying with its demands cannot be too earnestly, too frankly, asserted. There are not five men in the kingdom who could compose, not twenty who could cut, the foliage with which the windows of Or San Michele are adorned; but there is many a village clergyman who could invent and dispose its black openings, and not a village mason who could not cut them. Lay a few clover or woodroof leaves on white paper, and a little alteration in their positions will suggest figures which, cut boldly through a slab of marble, would be worth more window traceries than an architect could draw in a summer's day. But I know not how it is, unless that our English hearts have more oak than stone in them, and have more filial sympathy with acorns than Alps; but all that we do is small and mean, if not worse—thin, and wasted, and unsubstantial. It is not modern work only; we have built like frogs and mice since the thirteenth century (except only in our castles). What a contrast between the pitiful little pigeon-holes which stand for doors in the east front of Salisbury, looking like the entrances to a beehive or a wasp's nest, and the soaring arches and kingly crowning of the gates of Abbeville, Rouen, and Rheims, or the rock-hewn piers of Chartres, or the dark and vaulted porches and writhed pillars of Verona! Of domestic architecture what need is there to speak? How small, how cramped, how poor, how miserable in its petty neatness is our best! how beneath the mark of attack, and the level of contempt, that which is common with us! What a strange sense of formalised deformity, of shrivelled precision, of starved accuracy, of minute misanthropy have we, as we leave even the rude streets of Picardy for the market towns of Kent! Until that street architecture of ours is bettered, until we give it some size and boldness, until we give our windows recess, and our walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our architects for their feebleness in more important work; their eyes are inured to narrowness and slightness: can we expect them at a word to conceive and deal with breadth and solidity? They ought not to live in our cities; there is that

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in their miserable walls which bricks up to death men's imagi-
nations, as surely as ever perished forsworn nun. An architect
should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our
hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a
buttress, and what by a dome. There was something in the old
power of architecture, which it had from the recluse more than
from the citizen. The buildings of which I have spoken with
chief praise, rose, indeed, out of the war of the piazza, and above
the fury of the populace: and Heaven forbid that for such cause
we should ever have to lay a larger stone, or rivet a firmer bar,
in our England! But we have other sources of power, in the
imagery of our iron coasts and azure hills; of power more pure,
nor less serene, than that of the hermit spirit which once lighted
with white lines of cloisters the glades of the Alpine pine, and
raised into ordered spires the wild rocks of the Norman sea;
which gave to the temple gate the depth and darkness of
Elijah's Horeb cave; and lifted, out of the populous city, grey
cliffs of lonely stone, into the midst of sailing birds and silent
air.

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I. It was stated, in the outset of the preceding Chapter, that the value of architecture depended on two distinct characters: the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation. I have endeavoured to show in what manner its majesty was attributable to a sympathy with the effort and trouble of human life (a sympathy as distinctly perceived in the gloom and mystery of form, as it is in the melancholy tones of sounds). I desire now to trace that happier element of its excellence, consisting in a noble rendering of images of Beauty, derived chiefly from the external appearances of organic nature.

It is irrelevant to our present purpose to enter into any inquiry respecting the essential causes of impressions of beauty. I have partly expressed my thoughts on this matter in a previous work, and I hope to develope them hereafter. But since all such inquiries can only be founded on the ordinary understanding of what is meant by the term Beauty, and since they presume that the feeling of mankind on this subject is universal and instinctive, I shall base my present investigation on this assumption; and only asserting that to be beautiful which I believe will be granted me to be so without dispute, I would endeavour shortly to trace the manner in which this element of delight is to be best engrafted upon architectural design, what are the purest sources from which it is to be derived, and what the errors to be avoided in its pursuit.

II. It will be thought that I have somewhat rashly limited the elements of architectural beauty to imitative forms. I do not mean to assert that every happy arrangement of line is

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directly suggested by a natural object; but that all beautiful
lines are adaptations of those which are commonest in the
external creation; that in proportion to the richness of their
association, the resemblance to natural work, as a type and help,
must be more closely attempted, and more clearly seen; and that
beyond a certain point, and that a very low one, man cannot
advance in the invention of beauty, without directly imitating
natural form. Thus, in the Doric temple the triglyph and
cornice are unimitative; or imitative only of artificial cuttings
of wood. No one would call these members beautiful. Their
influence over us is in their severity and simplicity. The fluting
of the column, which I doubt not was the Greek symbol of the
bark of the tree, was imitative in its origin, and feebly resembled
many canaliculated organic structures. Beauty is instantly felt
in it, but of a low order. The decoration proper was sought
in the true forms of organic life, and those chiefly human.
Again: the Doric capital was unimitative; but all the beauty
it had was dependent on the precision of its ovolo, a natural
curve of the most frequent occurrence. The Ionic capital, (to
my mind, as an architectural invention, exceedingly base,) never-
theless depended for all the beauty that it had on its adoption
of a spiral line, perhaps the commonest of all that characterise
the inferior orders of animal organism and habitation. Farther
progress could not be made without a direct imitation of the
acanthus leaf.

Again: the Romanesque arch is beautiful as an abstract line.
Its type is always before us in that of the apparent vault of
heaven, and horizon of the earth. The cylindrical pillar is
always beautiful, for God has so moulded the stem of every
tree that is pleasant to the eyes. The pointed arch is beautiful;
it is the termination of every leaf that shakes in summer wind,
and its most fortunate associations are directly borrowed from
the trefoiled grass of the field, or from the stars of its flowers.
Farther than this, man's invention could not reach without
frank imitation. His next step was to gather the flowers them-
selves, and wreathe them in his capitals.

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III. Now, I would insist especially on the fact, of which I
doubt not that farther illustrations will occur to the mind of every
reader, that all most lovely forms and thoughts are directly taken
from natural objects; because I would fain be allowed to assume
also the converse of this, namely, that forms which are *not* taken
from natural objects *must* be ugly. I know this is a bold assump-
tion; but as I have not space to reason out the points wherein
essential beauty of form consists, that being far too serious a work
to be undertaken in a bye way, I have no other resource than
to use this accidental mark or test of beauty, of whose truth the
considerations which I hope hereafter to lay before the reader may
assure him. I say an accidental mark, since forms are not beauti-
ful *because* they are copied from Nature; only it is out of the power
of man to conceive beauty without her aid. I believe the reader
will grant me this, even from the examples above advanced; the
degree of confidence with which it is granted must attach also to
his acceptance of the conclusions which will follow from it; but
if it be granted frankly, it will enable me to determine a matter
of very essential importance, namely, what *is* or is *not* ornament.
For there are many forms of so called decoration in architecture,
habitual, and received, therefore, with approval, or at all events
without any venture at expression of dislike, which I have no
hesitation in asserting to be not ornament at all, but to be ugly
things, the expense of which ought in truth to be set down in the
architect's contract, as "For Monstrification." I believe that we
regard these customary deformities with a savage complacency,
as an Indian does his flesh patterns and paint (all nations being
in certain degrees and senses savage). I believe that I can prove
them to be monstrous, and I hope hereafter to do so conclusively;
but, meantime, I can allege in defence of my persuasion nothing
but this fact of their being unnatural, to which the reader must
attach such weight as he thinks it deserves. There is, however,
a peculiar difficulty in using this proof; it requires the writer to
assume, very impertinently, that nothing is natural but what he
has seen or supposes to exist. I would not do this; for I suppose
there is no conceivable form or grouping of forms but in some

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part of the universe an example of it may be found. But I think I am justified in considering those forms to be most natural which are most frequent; or, rather, that on the shapes which in the everyday world are familiar to the eyes of men, God has stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man's nature to love; while in certain exceptional forms He has shown that the adoption of the others was not a matter of necessity, but part of the adjusted harmony of creation. I believe that thus we may reason from Frequency to Beauty, and *vice versa*; that, knowing a thing to be frequent, we may assume it to be beautiful; and assume that which is most frequent to be most beautiful: I mean, of course, *visibly* frequent; for the forms of things which are hidden in caverns of the earth, or in the anatomy of animal frames, are evidently not intended by their Maker to bear the habitual gaze of man. And, again, by frequency I mean that limited and isolated frequency which is characteristic of all perfection; not mere multitude: as a rose is a common flower, but yet there are not so many roses on the tree as there are leaves. In this respect Nature is sparing of her highest, and lavish of her less, beauty; but I call the flower as frequent as the leaf, because, each in its allotted quantity, where the one is, there will ordinarily be the other.

IV. The first so-called ornament, then, which I would attack is that Greek fret, now, I believe, usually known by the Italian name Guilloche, which is exactly a case in point. It so happens that in crystals of bismuth, formed by the unagitated cooling of the melted metal, there occurs a natural resemblance of it almost perfect. But crystals of bismuth not only are of unusual occurrence in every-day life, but their form is, as far as I know, unique among minerals; and not only unique, but only attainable by an artificial process, the metal itself never being found pure. I do not remember any other substance or arrangement which presents a resemblance to this Greek ornament; and I think that I may trust my remembrance as including most of the arrangements which occur in the outward forms of common and familiar things. On this ground, then, I allege that ornament

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to be ugly; or, in the literal sense of the word, monstrous; differ-
ent from anything which it is the nature of man to admire: and
I think an uncarved fillet or plinth infinitely preferable to one
covered with this vile concatenation of straight lines: unless indeed
it be employed as a foil to a true ornament, which it may, perhaps,
sometimes with advantage; or excessively small, as it occurs on
coins, the harshness of its arrangement being less perceived.

V. Often in association with this horrible design we find, in
Greek works, one which is as beautiful as this is painful—that egg
and dart moulding, whose perfection, in its place and way, has
never been surpassed. And why is this? Simply because the
form of which it is chiefly composed is one not only familiar to
us in the soft housing of the bird's nest, but happens to be that of
nearly every pebble that rolls and murmurs under the surf of the
sea, on all its endless shore. And that with a peculiar accuracy;
for the mass which bears the light in this moulding is *not* in good
Greek work, as in the frieze of the Erechtheum, merely of the shape
of an egg. It is *flattened* on the upper surface, with a delicacy and
keen sense of variety in the curve which it is impossible too highly
to praise, attaining exactly that flattened, imperfect oval, which, in
nine cases out of ten, will be the form of the pebble lifted at random
from the rolled beach. Leave out this flatness, and the moulding
is vulgar instantly. It is singular also that the insertion of this
rounded form in the hollowed recess has a *painted* type in the
plumage of the Argus pheasant, the eyes of whose feathers are so
shaded as exactly to represent an oval form placed in a hollow.

VI. It will evidently follow, upon our application of this test of
natural resemblance, that we shall at once conclude that all per-
fectly beautiful forms must be composed of curves; since there is
hardly any common natural form in which it is possible to
discover a straight line. Nevertheless, Architecture, having
necessarily to deal with straight lines essential to its purposes in
many instances and to the expression of its power in others, must
frequently be content with that measure of beauty which is consis-
tent with such primal forms; and we may presume that utmost
measure of beauty to have been attained when the arrangements

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of such lines are consistent with the most frequent natural groupings of them we can discover, although, to find right lines in nature at all, we may be compelled to do violence to her finished work, break through the sculptured and coloured surfaces of her crags, and examine the processes of their crystallisation.

VII. I have just convicted the Greek fret of ugliness, because it has no precedent to allege for its arrangement except an artificial form of a rare metal. Let us bring into court an ornament of the Lombard architects, Plate XII. fig. 7., as exclusively composed of right lines as the other, only, observe, with the noble element of shadow added. This ornament, taken from the front of the Cathedral of Pisa, is universal throughout the Lombard churches of Pisa, Lucca, Pistoja, and Florence; and it will be a grave stain upon them if it cannot be defended. Its first apology for itself, made in a hurry, sounds marvellously like the Greek one, and highly dubious. It says that its terminal contour is the very image of a carefully prepared artificial crystal of common salt. Salt being, however, a substance considerably more familiar to us than bismuth, the chances are somewhat in favour of the accused Lombard ornament already. But it has more to say for itself, and more to the purpose; namely, that its main outline is one not only of natural crystallisation, but among the very first and commonest of crystalline forms, being the primal condition of the occurrence of the oxides of iron, copper, and tin, of the sulphurets of iron and lead, of fluor spar, &c.; and that those projecting forms in its surface represent the conditions of structure which effect the change into another relative and equally common crystalline form, the cube. This is quite enough. We may rest assured it is as good a combination of such simple right lines as can be put together, and gracefully fitted for every place in which such lines are necessary.

VIII. The next ornament whose cause I would try is that of our Tudor work, the portcullis. Reticulation is common enough in natural form, and very beautiful; but it is either of the most delicate and gauzy texture, or of variously sized meshes and undulating lines. There is no family relation

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between portcullis and cobwebs or beetles' wings; something like it, perhaps, may be found in some kinds of crocodile armour and on the backs of the Northern divers, but always beautifully varied in size of mesh. There is a dignity in the thing itself, if its size were exhibited, and the shade given through its bars; but even these merits are taken away in the Tudor diminution of it, set on a solid surface. It has not a single syllable, I believe, to say in its defence. It is another monster, absolutely and unmitigatedly frightful. All that carving on Henry the Seventh's Chapel simply deforms the stones of it.

In the same clause with the portcullis, we may condemn all heraldic decoration, so far as beauty is its object. Its pride and significance have their proper place, fitly occurring in prominent parts of the building, as over its gates; and allowably in places where its legendry may be plainly read, as in painted windows, bosses of ceilings, &c. And sometimes, of course, the forms which it presents may be beautiful, as of animals, or simple symbols like the fleur-de-lis; but, for the most part, heraldic similitudes and arrangements are so professedly and pointedly unnatural, that it would be difficult to invent anything uglier; and the use of them as a repeated decoration will utterly destroy both the power and beauty of any building. Common sense and courtesy also forbid their repetition. It is right to tell those who enter your doors that you are such a one, and of such a rank; but to tell it to them again and again, wherever they turn, becomes soon impertinence, and at last folly. Let, therefore, the entire bearings occur in few places, and these not considered as an ornament, but as an inscription; and for frequent appliance, let any single and fair symbol be chosen out of them. Thus we may multiply as much as we choose the French or the Florentine lily, or the English rose; but we must not multiply a King's arms.

IX. It will also follow, from these considerations, that if any one part of heraldic decoration be worse than another, it is the motto; since, of all things unlike nature, the forms of letters are, perhaps, the most so. Even graphic tellurium and felspar

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look, at their clearest, anything but legible. All letters are,
therefore, to be considered as frightful things, and to be endured
only upon occasion; that is to say, in places where the sense of
the inscription is of more importance than external ornament.
Inscriptions in churches, in rooms, and on pictures, are often
desirable, but they are not to be considered as architectural or
pictorial ornaments: they are, on the contrary, obstinate offences
to the eye, not to be suffered except when their intellectual office
introduces them. Place them, therefore, where they will be
read, and there only; and let them be plainly written, and not
turned upside down, nor wrong end first. It is an ill sacrifice
to beauty to make that illegible whose only merit is in its sense.
Write it as you would speak it, simply; and do not draw the eye
to it when it would fain rest elsewhere, nor recommend your
sentence by anything but a little openness of place and archi-
tectural silence about it. Write the Commandments on the
church walls where they may be plainly seen, but do not put a
dash and a tail to every letter; and remember that you are an
architect, not a writing master.

X. Inscriptions appear sometimes to be introduced for the
sake of the scroll on which they are written; and in late and
modern painted glass, as well as in architecture, these scrolls are
flourished and turned hither and thither as if they were orna-
mental. Ribands occur frequently in arabesques,—in some of a
high order, too,—tying up flowers, or flitting in and out among
the fixed forms. Is there anything like ribands in nature? It
might be thought that grass and seaweed afforded apologetic
types. They do not. There is a wide difference between their
structure and that of a riband. They have a skeleton, an
anatomy, a central rib, or fibre, or framework of some kind or
another, which has a beginning and an end, a root and head,
and whose make and strength affect every direction of their
motion, and every line of their form. The loosest weed that
drifts and waves under the heaving of the sea, or hangs heavily
on the brown and slippery shore, has a marked strength, struc-
ture, elasticity, gradation of substance; its extremities are more

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finely fibred than its centre, its centre than its root: every fork
of its ramification is measured and proportioned; every wave of
its languid lines is lovely. It has its allotted size, and place, and
function; it is a specific creature. What is there like this in a
riband? It has no structure: it is a succession of cut threads
all alike; it has no skeleton, no make, no form, no size, no will
of its own. You cut it and crush it into what you will. It has
no strength, no languor. It cannot fall into a single graceful
form. It cannot wave, in the true sense, but only flutter: it
cannot bend, in the true sense, but only turn and be wrinkled.
It is a vile thing; it spoils all that is near its wretched film of
an existence. Never use it. Let the flowers come loose if they
cannot keep together without being tied; leave the sentence un-
written if you cannot write it on a tablet or book, or plain roll
of paper. I know what authority there is against me. I re-
member the scrolls of Perugino's angels, and the ribands of
Raphael's arabesques and of Ghiberti's glorious bronze flowers:
no matter; they are every one of them vices and uglinesses.
Raphael usually felt this, and used an honest and rational tablet,
as in the Madonna di Fuligno. I do not say there is any type
of such tablets in nature, but all the difference lies in the fact
that the tablet is not considered as an ornament, and the riband,
or flying scroll, is. The tablet, as in Albert Durer's Adam and
Eve, is introduced for the sake of the writing, understood and
allowed as an ugly but necessary interruption. The scroll is ex-
tended as an ornamental form, which it is not, nor ever can be.

XI. But it will be said that all this want of organisation and
form might be affirmed of drapery also, and that this latter is a
noble subject of sculpture. By no means. When was drapery a
subject of sculpture by itself, except in the form of a handker-
chief on urns in the seventeenth century and in some of the baser
scenic Italian decorations? Drapery, as such, is always ignoble;
it becomes a subject of interest only by the colours it bears, and
the impressions which it receives from some foreign form or
force. All noble draperies, either in painting or sculpture
(colour and texture being at present out of our consideration),

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have, so far as they are anything more than necessities, one of
two great functions: they are the exponents of motion and of
gravitation. They are the most valuable means of expressing
past as well as present motion in the figure, and they are almost
the only means of indicating to the eye the force of gravity
which resists such motion. The Greeks used drapery in sculp-
ture for the most part as an ugly necessity, but availed them-
selves of it gladly in all representation of action, exaggerating
the arrangements of it which express lightness in the material,
and follow gesture in the person. The Christian Sculptors,
caring little for the body, or disliking it, and depending exclu-
sively on the countenance, received drapery at first contentedly
as a veil, but soon perceived a capacity of expression in it which
the Greek had not seen or had despised. The principal element
of this expression was the entire removal of agitation from what
was so pre-eminently capable of being agitated. It fell from
their human forms plumb down, sweeping the ground heavily,
and concealing the feet; while the Greek drapery was often
blown away from the thigh. The thick and coarse stuffs of
the monkish dresses, so absolutely opposed to the thin and gauzy
web of antique material, suggested simplicity of division as well
as weight of fall. There was no crushing nor subdividing them.
And thus the drapery gradually came to represent the spirit of
repose as it before had of motion, repose saintly and severe.
The wind had no power upon the garment, as the passion none
upon the soul; and the motion of the figure only bent into a
softer line the stillness of the falling veil, followed by it like a
slow cloud by drooping rain: only in links of lighter undulation
it followed the dances of the angels.

Thus treated, drapery is indeed noble; but it is as an exponent
of other and higher things. As that of gravitation, it has especial
majesty, being literally the only means we have of fully repre-
senting this mysterious natural force of earth (for falling water
is less passive and less defined in its lines). So, again, in sails it
is beautiful because it receives the forms of solid curved surface,
and expresses the force of another invisible element. But

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drapery trusted to its own merits, and given for its own sake,—
drapery like that of Carlo Dolci and the Caraccis,—is always base.

XII. Closely connected with the abuse of scrolls and bands, is
that of garlands and festoons of flowers as an architectural decora-
tion, for unnatural arrangements are just as ugly as unnatural
forms; and architecture, in borrowing the objects of Nature, is
bound to place them, as far as may be in her power, in such asso-
ciations as may befit and express their origin. She is not to
imitate directly the natural arrangement; she is not to carve
irregular stems of ivy up her columns to account for the leaves at
the top, but she is nevertheless to place her most exuberant vege-
table ornament just where Nature would have placed it, and to
give some indication of that radical and connected structure
which Nature would have given it. Thus the Corinthian capital
is beautiful, because it expands under the abacus just as Nature
would have expanded it; and because it looks as if the leaves
had one root, though that root is unseen. And the flamboyant
leaf mouldings are beautiful, because they nestle and run up the
hollows, and fill the angles, and clasp the shafts which natural
leaves would have delighted to fill and to clasp. They are no
mere cast of natural leaves: they are counted, orderly, and archi-
tectural: but they are naturally, and therefore beautifully, placed.

XIII. Now I do not mean to say that Nature never uses
festoons: she loves them, and uses them lavishly; and though she
does so only in those places of excessive luxuriance wherein it
seems to me that architectural types should seldom be sought, yet
a falling tendril or pendent bough might, if managed with freedom
and grace, be well introduced into luxuriant decoration (or if
not, it is not their want of beauty, but of architectural fitness,
which incapacitates them for such uses). But what resemblance
to such example can we trace in a mass of all manner of fruit and
flowers, tied heavily into a long bunch, thickest in the middle, and
pinned up by both ends against a dead wall? For it is strange that
the wildest and most fanciful of the builders of truly luxuriant
architecture never ventured, so far as I know, even a pendent
tendril; while the severest masters of the revived Greek permitted

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this extraordinary piece of luscious ugliness to be fastened in the
middle of their blank surfaces. So surely as this arrangement is
adopted, the whole value of the flowerwork is lost. Who among
the crowds that gaze upon the building ever pause to admire the
flowerwork of St. Paul's? It is as careful and as rich as it can
be, yet it adds no delightfulness to the edifice. It is no part of
it. It is an ugly excrescence. We always conceive the building
without it, and should be happier if our conception were not dis-
turbed by its presence. It makes the rest of the architecture
look poverty-stricken, instead of sublime; and yet it is never
enjoyed itself. Had it been put, where it ought, into the capitals,
it would have been beheld with never-ceasing delight. I do not
mean that it could have been so in the present building, for such
kind of architecture has no business with rich ornament in any
place; but that if those groups of flowers had been put into
natural places in an edifice of another style, their value would
have been felt as vividly as now their uselessness. What applies
to festoons is still more sternly true of garlands. A garland is
meant to be seen upon a head. There it is beautiful, because we
suppose it newly gathered and joyfully worn. But it is not
meant to be hung upon a wall. If you want a circular ornament,
put a flat circle of coloured marble, as in the Casa Dario and
other such palaces at Venice; or put a star, or a medallion, or if
you want a ring, put a solid one, but do not carve the images of
garlands, looking as if they had been used in the last procession,
and been hung up to dry and serve next time withered. Why
not also carve pegs, and hats upon them?

XIV. One of the worst enemies of modern Gothic architecture,
though seemingly an unimportant feature, is an excrescence, as
offensive by its poverty as the garland by its profusion, the
dripstone in the shape of the handle of a chest of drawers, which
is used over the square-headed windows of what we call Eliza-
bethan buildings. In the last Chapter, it will be remembered
that the square form was shown to be that of pre-eminent Power,
and to be properly adapted and limited to the exhibition of space
or surface. Hence, when the window is to be an exponent of

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power, as for instance in those by M. Angelo in the lower story
of the Palazzo Ricardi at Florence, the square head is the most
noble form they can assume; but then either their space must be
unbroken, and their associated mouldings the most severe, or else
the square must be used as a final outline, and is chiefly to be
associated with forms of tracery, in which the relative form of
power, the circle, is predominant, as in Venetian, and Florentine,
and Pisan Gothic. But if you break upon your terminal square,
or if you cut its lines off at the top and turn them outwards, you
have lost its unity and space. It is an including form no longer,
but an added, isolated line, and the ugliest possible. Look abroad
into the landscape, and see if you can discover any one so bent
and fragmentary as that of this strange windlass-looking drip-
stone. You cannot. It is a monster. It unites every element
of ugliness, its line is harshly broken in itself, and unconnected
with every other; it has no harmony either with structure or
decoration, it has no architectural support, it looks glued to the
wall, and the only pleasant property it has, is the appearance of
some likelihood of its dropping off.

I might proceed, but the task is a weary one, and I think I have
named those false forms of decoration which are most dangerous
in our modern architecture as being legal and accepted. The
barbarisms of individual fancy are as countless as they are con-
temptible; they neither admit attack nor are worth it; but these
above named are countenanced, some by the practice of antiquity,
all by high authority: they have depressed the proudest, and
contaminated the purest schools, and are so established in recent
practice that I write rather for the barren satisfaction of bearing
witness against them, than with hope of inducing any serious
convictions to their prejudice.

XV. Thus far of what is *not* ornament. What ornament is,
will without difficulty be determined by the application of the
same test. It must consist of such studious arrangements of form
as are imitative or suggestive of those which are commonest among
natural existences, that being of course the noblest ornament
which represents the highest orders of existence. Imitated

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flowers are nobler than imitated stones, imitated animals, than
flowers; imitated human form, of all animal forms the noblest.
But all are combined in the richest ornamental work; and the
rock, the fountain, the flowing river with its pebbled bed, the sea,
the clouds of Heaven, the herb of the field, the fruit-tree bearing
fruit, the creeping thing, the bird, the beast, the man, and the
angel, mingle their fair forms on the bronze of Ghiberti.

Everything being then ornamental that is imitative, I would
ask the reader's attention to a few general considerations, all
that can here be offered relating to so vast a subject; which, for
convenience sake, may be classed under the three heads of
inquiry:—What is the right place for architectural ornament?
What is the peculiar treatment of ornament which renders it
architectural? and what is the right use of colour as associated
with architectural imitative form?

XVI. What is the place for ornament? Consider first that
the characters of natural objects which the architect can represent
are few and abstract. The greater part of those delights by
which Nature recommends herself to man at all times, cannot be
conveyed by him into his imitative work. He cannot make his
grass green and cool and good to rest upon, which in nature is
its chief use to man; nor can he make his flowers tender and full
of colour and of scent, which in nature are their chief powers of
giving joy. Those qualities which alone he can secure are certain
severe characters of form, such as men only see in nature on
deliberate examination, and by the full and set appliance of sight
and thought: a man must lie down on the bank of grass on his
breast and set himself to watch and penetrate the intertwining of
it, before he finds that which is good to be gathered by the
architect. So then while Nature is at all times pleasant to us,
and while the sight and sense of her work may mingle happily
with all our thoughts, and labours, and times of existence, that
image of her which the architect carries away represents what we
can only perceive in her by direct intellectual exertion, and
demands from us, wherever it appears, an intellectual exertion of
a similar kind in order to understand it and feel it. It is the

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written or sealed impression of a thing sought out, it is the shaped
result of inquiry and bodily expression of thought.

XVII. Now let us consider for an instant what would be the
effect of continually repeating an expression of a beautiful thought
to any other of the senses at times when the mind could not
address that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that in
time of serious occupation, of stern business, a companion should
repeat in our ears continually some favourite passage of poetry,
over and over again all day long. We should not only soon be
utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but that sound would
at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear that
the entire meaning of the passage would be dead to us, and it
would ever thenceforward require some effort to fix and recover
it. The music of it would not meanwhile have aided the business
in hand, while its own delightfulness would thenceforward be in
a measure destroyed. It is the same with every other form of
definite thought. If you violently present its expression to the
senses, at times when the mind is otherwise engaged, that expres-
sion will be ineffective at the time, and will have its sharpness
and clearness destroyed for ever. Much more if you present it
to the mind at times when it is painfully affected or disturbed,
or if you associate the expression of pleasant thought with incon-
gruous circumstances, you will affect that expression thence-
forward with a painful colour for ever.

XVIII. Apply this to expressions of thought received by the
eye. Remember that the eye is at your mercy more than the ear.
"The eye, it cannot choose but see." Its nerve is not so easily
numbed as that of the ear, and it is often busied in tracing and
watching forms when the ear is at rest. Now if you present
lovely forms to it when it cannot call the mind to help it in its
work, and among objects of vulgar use and unhappy position, you
will neither please the eye nor elevate the vulgar object. But
you will fill and weary the eye with the beautiful form, and you
will infect that form itself with the vulgarity of the thing to
which you have violently attached it. It will never be of much
use to you any more; you have killed, or defiled it; its fresh-

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ness and purity are gone. You will have to pass it through the
fire of much thought before you will cleanse it, and warm it with
much love before it will revive.

XIX. Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the
present day, a law of simple common sense,—not to decorate
things belonging to purposes of active and occupied life. Wher-
ever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is
beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any more
than you may mix play. Work first, and then rest. Work first,
and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind
ledgers in enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured flails: nor
put bas-reliefs on millstones. What! it will be asked, are we in
the habit of doing so? Even so; always and everywhere. The
most familiar position of Greek mouldings is in these days on
shop fronts. There is not a tradesman's sign nor shelf nor
counter in all the streets of all our cities, which has not upon it
ornaments which were invented to adorn temples and beautify
king's palaces. There is not the smallest advantage in them where
they are. Absolutely valueless—utterly without the power of
giving pleasure, they only satiate the eye, and vulgarise their own
forms. Many of these are in themselves thoroughly good copies of
fine things, which things themselves we shall never, in conse-
quence, enjoy any more. Many a pretty beading and graceful
bracket there is in wood or stucco above our grocers' and cheese-
mongers' and hosiers' shops: how is it that the tradesmen cannot
understand that custom is to be had only by selling good tea and
cheese and cloth, and that people come to them for their honesty,
and their readiness, and their right wares, and not because they
have Greek cornices over their windows, or their names in large
gilt letters on their house fronts? How pleasurable it would be
to have the power of going through the streets of London, pulling
down those brackets and friezes and large names, restoring to the
tradesmen the capital they had spent in architecture, and putting
them on honest and equal terms, each with his name in black
letters over his door, not shouted down the street from the upper
stories, and each with a plain wooden shop casement, with small

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panes in it that people would not think of breaking in order to be
sent to prison! How much better for them would it be—how
much happier, how much wiser, to put their trust upon their own
truth and industry, and not on the idiocy of their customers. It
is curious, and it says little for our national probity on the one
hand, or prudence on the other, to see the whole system of our
street decoration based on the idea that people must be baited to
a shop as moths are to a candle.

XX. But it will be said that much of the best wooden decora-
tion of the middle ages was in shop fronts. No; it was in *house*
fronts, of which the shop was a part, and received its natural and
consistent portion of the ornament. In those days men lived, and
intended to live *by* their shops, and over them, all their days.
They were contented with them and happy in them: they were
their palaces and castles. They gave them therefore such decora-
tion as made themselves happy in their own habitation, and they
gave it for their own sake. The upper stories were always the
richest, and the shop was decorated chiefly about the door, which
belonged to the house more than to it. And when our tradesmen
settle to their shops in the same way, and form no plans respect-
ing future villa architecture, let their whole houses be decorated,
and their shops too, but with a national and domestic decoration.
(I shall speak more of this point in the sixth Chapter.) However,
our cities are for the most part too large to admit of contented
dwelling in them throughout life; and I do not say there is harm
in our present system of separating the shop from the dwelling-
house; only where they are so separated, let us remember that
the only reason for shop decoration is removed, and see that the
decoration be removed also.

XXI. Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present
day is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now, if there be
any place in the world in which people are deprived of that
portion of temper and discretion which are necessary to the con-
templation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of dis-
comfort, and the only charity that the builder can extend to us
is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it.

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The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable. No one would travel in that manner who could help it—who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges, instead of through tunnels and between banks: at least those who would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need consult it at the station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind. Carry him safely, dismiss him soon: he will thank you for nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavour to do so. There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the way, take them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for safety and speed. Give large salaries to efficient servants, large prices to good manufacturers, large wages to able workmen; let the iron be tough, and the brickwork solid, and the carriages strong. The time is perhaps not distant when these first necessities may not be easily met: and to increase expense in any other direction is madness. Better bury gold in the embankments, than put it in ornaments on the stations. Will a single traveller be willing to pay an increased fare on the South Western, because the columns of the terminus are covered with patterns from Nineveh?—he will only care less for the Ninevite ivories in the British Museum: or on the North Western, because there are old English-looking spandrils to the roof of the station at Crewe?—he will only have less pleasure in their prototypes at Crewe House. Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.

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XXII. It is not however only in these marked situations that the abuse of which I speak takes place. There is hardly, at present, an application of ornamental work, which is not in some sort liable to blame of the same kind. We have a bad habit of trying to disguise disagreeable necessities by some form of sudden decoration, which is, in all other places, associated with such necessities. I will name only one instance, that to which I have alluded before—the roses which conceal the ventilators in the flat roofs of our chapels. Many of those roses are of very beautiful design, borrowed from fine works: all their grace and finish are invisible when they are so placed, but their general form is afterwards associated with the ugly buildings in which they constantly occur; and all the beautiful roses of the early French and English Gothic, especially such elaborate ones as those of the triforium of Coutances, are in consequence deprived of their pleasurable influence: and this without our having accomplished the smallest good by the use we have made of the dishonoured form. Not a single person in the congregation ever receives one ray of pleasure from those roof roses; they are regarded with mere indifference, or lost in the general impression of harsh emptiness.

XXIII. Must not beauty, then, it will be asked, be sought for in the forms which we associate with our every-day life? Yes, if you do it consistently, and in places where it can be calmly seen; but not if you use the beautiful form only as a mask and covering of the proper conditions and uses of things, nor if you thrust it into the places set apart for toil. Put it in the drawing-room, not into the workshop; put it upon domestic furniture, not upon tools of handicraft. All men have sense of what is right in this matter, if they would only use and apply that sense; every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure, if he would only ask for it when it does so, and not allow it to be forced upon him when he does not want it. Ask any one of the passengers over London Bridge at this instant whether he cares about the forms of the bronze leaves on its lamps, and he will tell you, No. Modify these forms of leaves to a less scale, and put them on his

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milk-jug at breakfast, and ask him whether he likes them, and he will tell you, Yes. People have no need of teaching if they could only think and speak truth, and ask for what they like and want, and for nothing else: nor can a right disposition of beauty be ever arrived at except by this common sense, and allowance for the circumstances of the time and place. It does not follow, because bronze leafage is in bad taste on the lamps of London Bridge, that it would be so on those of the Ponte della Trinita; nor, because it would be a folly to decorate the house fronts of Gracechurch Street, that it would be equally so to adorn those of some quiet provincial town. The question of greatest external or internal decoration depends entirely on the conditions of probable repose. It was a wise feeling which made the streets of Venice so rich in external ornament, for there is no couch of rest like the gondola. So, again, there is no subject of street ornament so wisely chosen as the fountain, where it is a fountain of use; for it is just there that perhaps the happiest pause takes place in the labour of the day, when the pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the bearer is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the forehead, and the uprightness of the form declined against the marble ledge, and the sound of the kind word or light laugh mixes with the trickle of the falling water, heard shriller and shriller as the pitcher fills. What pause is so sweet as that—so full of the depth of ancient days, so softened with the calm of pastoral solitude ?

XXIV. II. Thus far, then, of the place for beauty. We were next to inquire into the characters which fitted it peculiarly for architectural appliance, and into the principles of choice and of arrangement which best regulate the imitation of natural forms in which it consists. The full answering of these questions would be a treatise on the art of design: I intend only to say a few words respecting the two conditions of that art which are essentially architectural,—Proportion and Abstraction. Neither of these qualities is necessary, to the same extent, in other fields of design. The sense of proportion is, by the landscape painter, frequently sacrificed to character and accident; the power of

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abstraction to that of complete realisation. The flowers of his foreground must often be unmeasured in their quantity, loose in their arrangement: what is calculated, either in quantity or disposition, must be artfully concealed. That calculation is by the architect to be prominently exhibited. So the abstraction of few characteristics out of many, is shown only in the painter's sketch; in his finished work it is concealed or lost in completion. Architecture, on the contrary, delights in Abstraction and fears to complete her forms. Proportion and Abstraction, then, are the two especial marks of architectural design as distinguished from all other. Sculpture must have them in inferior degrees; leaning, on the one hand, to an architectural manner, when it is usually greatest (becoming, indeed, a part of Architecture), and, on the other, to a pictorial manner, when it is apt to lose its dignity, and sink into mere ingenious carving.

XXV. Now, of Proportion so much has been written, that I believe the only facts which are of practical use have been overwhelmed and kept out of sight by vain accumulations of particular instances and estimates. Proportions are as infinite (and that in all kinds of things, as severally in colours, lines, shades, lights, and forms) as possible airs in music: and it is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works, as it would be to teach him to compose melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's Adelaide or Mozart's Requiem. The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance. But there are one or two general laws which can be told: they are of no use, indeed, except as preventives of gross mistake, but they are so far worth telling and remembering; and the more so because, in the discussion of the subtle laws of proportion (which will never be either numbered or known), architects are perpetually forgetting and transgressing the very simplest of its necessities.

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XXVI. Of which the first is, that wherever Proportion exists at all, one member of the composition must be either larger than, or in some way supreme over, the rest. There is no proportion between equal things. They can have symmetry only, and symmetry without proportion is not composition. It is necessary to perfect beauty, but it is the least necessary of its elements, nor of course is there any difficulty in obtaining it. Any succession of equal things is agreeable; but to compose is to arrange unequal things, and the first thing to be done in beginning a composition is to determine which is to be the principal thing. I believe that all that has been written and taught about proportion, put together, is not to the architect worth the single rule, well enforced, "Have one large thing and several smaller things, or one principal thing and several inferior things, and bind them well together." Sometimes there may be a regular gradation, as between the heights of stories in good designs for houses; sometimes a monarch with a lowly train, as in the spire with its pinnacles: the varieties of arrangement are infinite, but the law is universal—have one thing above the rest, either by size, or office, or interest. Don't put the pinnacles without the spire. What a host of ugly church towers have we in England, with pinnacles at the corners, and none in the middle! How many buildings like King's College Chapel at Cambridge, looking like tables upside down, with their four legs in the air! What! it will be said, have not beasts four legs? Yes, but legs of different shapes, and with a head between them. So they have a pair of ears: and perhaps a pair of horns: but not at both ends. Knock down a couple of pinnacles at either end in King's College Chapel, and you will have a kind of proportion instantly. So in a cathedral you may have one tower in the centre, and two at the west end; or two at the west end only, though a worse arrangement: but you must not have two at the west and two at the east end, unless you have some central member to connect them; and even then, buildings are generally bad which have large balancing features at the extremities, and small connecting ones in the centre, because it is not easy then to make the centre

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dominant. The bird or moth may indeed have wide wings, because the size of the wing does not give supremacy to the wing. The head and life are the mighty things, and the plumes, however wide, are subordinate. In fine west fronts with a pediment and two towers, the centre is always the principal mass, both in bulk and interest (as having the main gateway), and the towers are subordinated to it, as an animal's horns are to its head. The moment the towers rise so high as to overpower the body and centre, and become themselves the principal masses, they will destroy the proportion, unless they are made unequal, and one of them the leading feature of the cathedral, as at Antwerp and Strasburg. But the purer method is to keep them down in due relation to the centre, and to throw up the pediment into a steep connecting mass, drawing the eye to it by rich tracery. This is nobly done in St. Wulfran of Abbeville, and attempted partly at Rouen, though that west front is made up of so many unfinished and supervening designs that it is impossible to guess the real intention of any one of its builders.

XXVII. This rule of supremacy applies to the smallest as well as to leading features: it is interestingly seen in the arrangement of all good mouldings. I have given one, on the opposite page, from Rouen Cathedral; that of the tracery before distinguished as a type of the noblest manner of Northern Gothic (Chap. II. § XXII.). It is a tracery of three orders, of which the first is divided into a leaf moulding, fig. 4. and b in the section, and a plain roll, also seen in fig. 4. c in the section; these two divisions surround the entire window or panelling, and are carried by two-face shafts of corresponding sections. The second and third orders are plain rolls following the line of the tracery; four divisions of moulding in all: of these four, the leaf moulding is, as seen in the sections, much the largest; next to it the outer roll; then, by an exquisite alternation, the innermost roll (e), in order that it may not be lost in the recess, and the intermediate (d), the smallest. Each roll has its own shaft and capital; and the two smaller, which in effect upon the eye, owing to the retirement of the innermost, are nearly equal, have smaller capitals than the two

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larger, lifted a little to bring them to the same level. The wall in
the trefoiled lights is curved, as from *e* to *f* in the section; but in the
quatrefoil it is flat, only thrown back to the full depth of the recess
below so as to get a sharp shadow instead of a soft one, the mould-
ings falling back to it in nearly a vertical curve behind the roll *e*.
This could not, however, be managed with the simpler mouldings of
the smaller quatrefoil above, whose half section is given from *g* to
*g*₂; but the architect was evidently fretted by the heavy look of
its circular foils as opposed to the light spring of the arches
below: so he threw its cusps obliquely clear from the wall, as
seen in fig. 2., attached to it where they meet the circle, but with
their finials pushed out from their natural level (*h*, in the section)
to that of the first order (*g*₂), and supported by stone props
behind, as seen in the profile, fig. 2., which I got from the corre-
spondent panel on the buttress face (fig. 1. being on its side), and
of which the lower cusps, being broken away, show the remnant
of one of their props projecting from the wall. The oblique
curve thus obtained in the profile is of singular grace. Take it
all in all, I have never met with a more exquisite piece of varied,
yet severe, proportion and general arrangement (though all the
windows of the period are fine, and especially delightful in the
subordinate proportioning of the smaller capitals to the smaller
shafts). The only fault it has is the inevitable misarrangement of
the central shafts; for the enlargement of the inner roll, though
beautiful in the group of four divisions at the side, causes, in
the triple central shaft, the very awkwardness of heavy lateral
members which has just been in most instances condemned. In
the windows of the choir, and in most of the period, this difficulty
is avoided by making the fourth order a fillet which only follows
the foliation, while the three outermost are nearly in arithmetical
progression of size, and the central triple shaft has of course the
largest roll in front. The moulding of the Palazzo Foscari (Plate
VIII., and Plate IV. fig. 8.) is, for so simple a group, the
grandest in effect I have ever seen: it is composed of a large roll
with two subordinates.

XXVIII. It is of course impossible to enter into details of

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instances belonging to so intricate a division of our subject, in the
compass of a general essay. I can but rapidly name the chief
conditions of right. Another of these is the connection of
Symmetry with horizontal, and of Proportion with vertical,
division. Evidently there is in symmetry a sense not merely of
equality, but of balance: now a thing cannot be balanced by
another on the top of it, though it may by one at the side of it.
Hence, while it is not only allowable, but often necessary, to
divide buildings, or parts of them, horizontally into halves, thirds,
or other equal parts, all vertical divisions of this kind are
utterly wrong; worst into half, next worst in the regular num-
bers which more betray the equality. I should have thought
this almost the first principle of proportion which a young
architect was taught: and yet I remember an important building,
recently erected in England, in which the columns are cut in half
by the projecting architraves of the central windows; and it is
quite usual to see the spires of modern Gothic churches divided
by a band of ornament half way up. In all fine spires there are
two bands and three parts, as at Salisbury. The ornamented
portion of the tower is there cut in half, and allowably, because
the spire forms the third mass to which the other two are subor-
dinate: two stories are also equal in Giotto's campanile, but
dominant over smaller divisions below, and subordinated to the
noble third above. Even this arrangement is difficult to treat;
and it is usually safer to increase or diminish the height of the
divisions regularly as they rise, as in the Doge's Palace, whose
three divisions are in a bold geometrical progression: or, in
towers, to get an alternate proportion between the body, the
belfry, and the crown, as in the campanile of St. Mark's. But, at
all events, get rid of equality; leave that to children and their
card houses: the laws of nature and the reason of man are alike
against it, in arts, as in politics. There is but one thoroughly
ugly tower in Italy that I know of, and that is so because it is
divided into vertical equal parts: the tower of Pisa.¹²

XXIX. One more principle of Proportion I have to name,
equally simple, equally neglected. Proportion is between three

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terms at least. Hence, as the pinnacles are not enough without the spire, so neither the spire without the pinnacles. All men feel this, and usually express their feeling by saying that the pinnacles conceal the junction of the spire and tower. This is one reason; but a more influential one is, that the pinnacles furnish the third term to the spire and tower. So that it is not enough, in order to secure proportion, to divide a building unequally; it must be divided into at least three parts; it may be into more (and in details with advantage), but on a large scale I find three is about the best number of parts in elevation, and five in horizontal extent, with freedom of increase to five in the one case and seven in the other; but not to more without confusion (in architecture, that is to say; for in organic structure the numbers cannot be limited). I purpose, in the course of works which are in preparation, to give copious illustrations of this subject, but I will take at present only one instance of vertical proportion, from the flower stem of the common water plantain, *Alisma Plantago*. Fig. 5. Plate XII. is a reduced profile of one side of a plant gathered at random; it is seen to have five masts, of which, however, the uppermost is a mere shoot, and we can consider only their relations up to the fourth. Their lengths are measured on the line AB, which is the actual length of the lowest mast ab, AC=b c, AD cd, = and AE = de. If the reader will take the trouble to measure these lengths and compare them he will find that, within half a line, the uppermost, AE = 5/9 of AD, AD = 6/9 of AC, and AC = 7/9 of AB; a most subtle diminishing proportion. From each of the joints spring three major and three minor branches, each between each; but the major branches, at any joint, are placed over the minor branches at the joint below, by the curious arrangement of the joint itself—the stem is bluntly triangular; fig. 6. shows the section of any joint. The outer darkened triangle is the section of the lower stem; the inner, left light, of the upper stem; and the three main branches spring from the ledges left by the recession. Thus the stems diminish in diameter just as they diminish in height. The main branches (falsely placed in the profile over each other to show

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their relations) have respectively seven, six, five, four, and three
arm-bones, like the masts of the stem; these divisions being
proportioned in the same subtle manner. From the joints of these,
it seems to be the *plan* of the plant that three major and three
minor branches should again spring, bearing the flowers: but, in
these infinitely complicated members, vegetative nature admits
much variety; in the plant from which these measures were
taken, the full complement appeared only at one of the secondary
joints.

The leaf of this plant has five ribs on each side, as its flower
generally five masts, arranged with the most exquisite grace of
curve; but of lateral proportion I shall rather take illustrations
from architecture: the reader will find several in the accounts of
the Duomo of Pisa and St. Mark's at Venice, in Chap. V. §§ XIV.
—XVI. I give these arrangements merely as illustrations, not
as precedents: all beautiful proportions are unique, they are
not general formulæ.

XXX. The other condition of architectural treatment which
we proposed to notice was the abstraction of imitated form. But
there is a peculiar difficulty in touching within these narrow
limits on such a subject as this, because the abstraction of which
we find examples in existing art, is partly involuntary; and it is
a matter of much nicety to determine where it begins to be pur-
posed. In the progress of national as well as of individual mind,
the first attempts at imitation are always abstract and incom-
plete. Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute
completion usually its decline; whence absolute completion of
imitative form is often supposed to be in itself wrong. But it
is not wrong always, only dangerous. Let us endeavour briefly
to ascertain wherein its danger consists, and wherein its dignity.

XXXI. I have said that all art is abstract in its beginnings;
that is to say, it expresses only a small number of the qualities
of the thing represented. Curved and complex lines are repre-
sented by straight and simple ones; interior markings of forms
are few, and much is symbolical and conventional. There is a
resemblance between the work of a great nation, in this phase,

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and the work of childhood and ignorance, which, in the mind of
a careless observer, might attach something like ridicule to it.
The form of a tree on the Ninevite sculptures is much like that
which, some twenty years ago, was familiar upon samplers; and
the types of the face and figure in early Italian art are susceptible
of easy caricature. On the signs which separate the infancy of
magnificent manhood from every other, I do not pause to insist
(they consist entirely in the choice of the symbol and of the fea-
tures abstracted); but I pass to the next stage of art, a condition
of strength in which the abstraction which was begun in incapab-
ility is continued in free will. This is the case, however, in
pure sculpture and painting, as well as in architecture; and we
have nothing to do but with that greater severity of manner
which fits either to be associated with the more realist art. I
believe it properly consists only in a due expression of their
subordination, an expression varying according to their place
and office. The question is first to be clearly determined whether
the architecture is a frame for the sculpture, or the sculpture an
ornament of the architecture. If the latter, then the first office
of that sculpture is not to represent the things it imitates, but
to gather out of them those arrangements of form which shall
be pleasing to the eye in their intended places. So soon as
agreeable lines and points of shade have been added to the
mouldings which were meagre, or to the lights which were unre-
lieved, the architectural work of the imitation is accomplished;
and how far it shall be wrought towards completeness or not,
will depend upon its place, and upon other various circumstances.
If, in its particular use or position, it is symmetrically arranged,
there is, of course, an instant indication of architectural sub-
jection. But symmetry is not abstraction. Leaves may be
carved in the most regular order, and yet be meanly imitative;
or, on the other hand, they may be thrown wild and loose, and
yet be highly architectural in their separate treatment. Nothing
can be less symmetrical than the group of leaves which joins the
two columns in Plate XIII.; yet, since nothing of the leaf character
is given but what is necessary for the bare suggestion of its image

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and the attainment of the lines desired, their treatment is highly abstract. It shows that the workman only wanted so much of the leaf as he supposed good for his architecture, and would allow no more; and how much is to be supposed good, depends, as I have said, much more on place and circumstance than on general laws. I know that this is not usually thought, and that many good architects would insist on abstraction in all cases: the question is so wide and so difficult that I express my opinion upon it most diffidently; but my own feeling is, that a purely abstract manner, like that of our earliest English work, does not afford room for the perfection of beautiful form, and that its severity is wearisome after the eye has been long accustomed to it. I have not done justice to the Salisbury dog-tooth moulding, of which the effect is sketched in fig. 5., Plate X., but I have done more justice to it nevertheless than to the beautiful French one above it; and I do not think that any candid reader would deny that, piquant and spirited as is that from Salisbury, the Rouen moulding is, in every respect, nobler. It will be observed that its symmetry is more complicated, the leafage being divided into double groups of two lobes each, each lobe of different structure. With exquisite feeling, one of these double groups is alternately omitted on the other side of the moulding (not seen in the Plate, but occupying the cavetto of the section), thus giving a playful lightness to the whole; and if the reader will allow for a beauty in the flow of the curved outlines (especially on the angle), of which he cannot in the least judge from my rude drawing, he will not, I think, expect easily to find a nobler instance of decoracion adapted to the severest mouldings.

Now it will be observed, that there is in its treatment a high degree of abstraction, though not so conventional as that of Salisbury: that is to say, the leaves have little more than their flow and outline represented; they are hardly undercut, but their edges are connected by a gentle and most studied curve with the stone behind; they have no serrations, no veinings, no rib or stalk on the angle, only an incision gracefully made towards their extremities, indicative of the central rib and depression. The

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whole style of the abstraction shows that the architect could, if
he had chosen, have carried the imitation much farther, but stayed
at this point of his own free will; and what he has done is also
so perfect in its kind, that I feel disposed to accept his authority
without question, so far as I can gather it from his works, on
the whole subject of abstraction.

XXXII. Happily his opinion is frankly expressed. This
moulding is on the lateral buttress, and on a level with the top
of the north gate: it cannot therefore be closely seen except from
the wooden stairs of the belfry; it is not intended to be so seen,
but calculated for a distance of, at least, forty to fifty feet from the
eye. In the vault of the gate itself, half as near again, there are
three rows of mouldings, as I think, by the same designer, at all
events part of the same plan. One of them is given in Plate I.
fig. 2. a. It will be seen that the abstraction is here infinitely
less; the ivy leaves have stalks and associated fruit, and a rib
for each lobe, and are so far undercut as to detach their forms
from the stone; while in the vine-leaf moulding above, of the
same period, from the south gate, serration appears added to other
purely imitative characters. Finally, in the animals which form
the ornaments of the portion of the gate which is close to the
eye, abstraction nearly vanishes into perfect sculpture.

XXXIII. Nearness to the eye, however, is not the only cir-
cumstance which influences architectural abstraction. These
very animals are not merely better cut because close to the eye;
they are put close to the eye that they may, without indiscretion,
be better cut, on the noble principle, first, I think, clearly enun-
ciated by Sir Charles Eastlake, that the closest imitation shall be
of the noblest object. Farther, since the wildness and manner of
growth of vegetation render a bonâ fide imitation of it impossible
in sculpture—since its members must be reduced in number,
ordered in direction, and cut away from their roots, even under the
most earnestly imitative treatment,—it becomes a point, as I think,
of good judgment, to proportion the completeness of execution
of parts to the formality of the whole; and since five or six leaves
must stand for a tree, to let also five or six touches stand for a

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leaf. But since the animal generally admits of perfect outline—
since its form is detached, and may be fully represented, its
sculpture may be more complete and faithful in all its parts.
And this principle will be actually found, I believe, to guide the
old workmen. If the animal form be in a gargoyle, incomplete,
and coming out of a block of stone, or if a head only, as for a
boss or other such partial use, its sculpture will be highly ab-
stract. But if it be an entire animal, as a lizard, or a bird, or a
squirrel, peeping among leafage, its sculpture will be much farther
carried, and I think, if small, near the eye, and worked in a fine
material, may rightly be carried to the utmost possible completion.
Surely we cannot wish a less finish bestowed on those which
animate the mouldings of the South door of the cathedral of
Florence; nor desire that the birds in the capitals of the Doge's
palace should be stripped of a single plume.

XXXIV. Under these limitations, then, I think that perfect
sculpture may be made a part of the severest architecture; but
this perfection was said in the outset to be dangerous. It is
so in the highest degree; for the moment the architect allows
himself to dwell on the imitated portions, there is a chance of his
losing sight of the duty of his ornament, of its business as a part
of the composition, and sacrificing its points of shade and effect
to the delight of delicate carving. And then he is lost. His
architecture has become a mere framework for the setting of
delicate sculpture, which had better be all taken down and put
into cabinets. It is well, therefore, that the young architect
should be taught to think of imitative ornament as of the
extreme of grace in language; not to be regarded at first, not to
be obtained at the cost of purpose, meaning, force or conciseness,
yet, indeed, a perfection—the least of all perfections, and yet
the crowning one of all—one which by itself, and regarded in
itself, is an architectural coxcombry, but is yet the sign of the
most highly-trained mind and power when it is associated with
others. It is a safe manner, as I think, to design all things at
first in severe abstraction, and to be prepared, if need were, to
carry them out in that form; then to mark the parts where high

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finish would be admissible, to complete these always with stern
reference to their general effect, and then connect them by a
graduated scale of abstraction with the rest. And there is one
safeguard against danger in this process on which I would finally
insist. Never imitate anything but natural forms, and those the
noblest, in the completed parts. The degradation of the cinque
cento manner of decoration was not owing to its naturalism, to
its faithfulness of imitation, but to its imitation of ugly, i. e.
unnatural things. So long as it restrained itself to sculpture of
animals and flowers, it remained noble. The balcony, on the
opposite page, from a house in the Campo St. Benedetto at
Venice, shows one of the earliest occurrences of the cinque cento
arabesque, and a fragment of the pattern is given in Plate XII.
fig. 8. It is but the arresting upon the stone work of a stem
or two of the living flowers, which are rarely wanting in the
window above (and which, by the by, the French and Italian
peasantry often trellis with exquisite taste about their case-
ments). This arabesque, relieved as it is in darkness from the
white stone by the stain of time, is surely both beautiful and
pure; and as long as the renaissance ornament remained in such
forms it may be beheld with unreserved admiration. But the
moment that unnatural objects were associated with these, and
armour, and musical instruments, and wild meaningless scrolls
and curled shields, and other such fancies, became principal in its
subjects, its doom was sealed, and with it that of the architecture
of the world.

XXXV. III. Our final inquiry was to be into the use of
colour as associated with architectural ornament.

I do not feel able to speak with any confidence respecting the
touching of *sculpture* with colour. I would only note one point,
that sculpture is the representation of an idea, while architecture
is itself a real thing. The idea may, as I think, be left colourless,
and coloured by the beholder's mind: but a reality ought to
have reality in all its attributes: its colour should be as fixed as
its form. I cannot, therefore, consider architecture as in any
wise perfect without colour. Farther, as I have above noticed, I

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think the colours of architecture should be those of natural stones;
partly because more durable, but also because more perfect and
graceful. For to conquer the harshness and deadness of tones
laid upon stone or on gesso, needs the management and discretion
of a true painter; and on this co-operation we must not calculate
in laying down rules for general practice. If Tintoret or Gior-
gione are at hand, and ask us for a wall to paint, we will alter
our whole design for their sake, and become their servants; but
we must, as architects, expect the aid of the common workman
only; and the laying of colour by a mechanical hand, and its
toning under a vulgar eye, are far more offensive than rudeness
in cutting the stone. The latter is imperfection only; the former
deadness or discordance. At the best, such colour is so inferior
to the lovely and mellow hues of the natural stone, that it is
wise to sacrifice some of the intricacy of design, if by so doing
we may employ the nobler material. And if, as we looked to
Nature for instruction respecting form, we look to her also to
learn the management of colour, we shall, perhaps, find that
this sacrifice of intricacy is for other causes expedient.

XXXVI. First, then, I think that in making this reference we
are to consider our building as a kind of organised creature; in
colouring which we must look to the single and separately
organised creatures of Nature, not to her landscape combinations.
Our building, if it is well composed, is one thing, and is to be
coloured as Nature would colour one thing—a shell, a flower, or
an animal; not as she colours groups of things.

And the first broad conclusion we shall deduce from observance
of natural colour in such cases will be, that it never follows
form, but is arranged on an entirely separate system. What
mysterious connection there may be between the shape of the spots
on an animal's skin and its anatomical system, I do not know,
nor even if such a connection has in anywise been traced: but to
the eye the systems are entirely separate, and in many cases that
of colour is accidentally variable. The stripes of a zebra do not
follow the lines of its body or limbs, still less the spots of a
leopard. In the plumage of birds, each feather bears a part of the

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pattern which is arbitrarily carried over the body, having indeed certain graceful harmonies with the form, diminishing or enlarging in directions which sometimes follow, but also not unfrequently oppose, the directions of its muscular lines. Whatever harmonies there may be, are distinctly like those of two separate musical parts, coinciding here and there only—never discordant, but essentially different. I hold this, then, for the first great principle of architectural colour. Let it be visibly independent of form. Never paint a column with vertical lines, but always cross it.¹³ Never give separate mouldings separate colours (I know this is heresy, but I never shrink from any conclusions, however contrary to human authority, to which I am led by observance of natural principles); and in sculptured ornaments do not paint the leaves or figures (I cannot help the Elgin frieze) of one colour and their ground of another, but vary both the ground and the figures with the same harmony. Notice how Nature does it in a variegated flower; not one leaf red and another white, but a point of red and a zone of white, or whatever it may be, to each. In certain places you may run your two systems closer, and here and there let them be parallel for a note or two, but see that the colours and the forms coincide only as two orders of mouldings do; the same for an instant, but each holding its own course. So single members may sometimes have single colours: as a bird's head is sometimes of one colour and its shoulders another, you may make your capital one colour and your shaft another; but in general the best place for colour is on broad surfaces, not on the points of interest in form. An animal is mottled on its breast and back, rarely on its paws or about its eyes; so put your variegation boldly on the flat wall and broad shaft, but be shy of it in the capital and moulding; in all cases it is a safe rule to simplify colour when form is rich, and *vice versa*; and I think it would be well in general to carve all capitals and graceful ornaments in white marble, and so leave them.

XXXVII. Independence then being first secured, what kind of limiting outlines shall we adopt for the system of colour itself?

I am quite sure that any person familiar with natural objects

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will never be surprised at any appearance of care or finish in them. That is the condition of the Universe. But there is cause both for surprise and inquiry whenever we see anything like carelessness or incompletion: that is not a common condition; it must be one appointed for some singular purpose. I believe that such surprise will be forcibly felt by any one who, after studying carefully the lines of some variegated organic form, will set himself to copy with similar diligence those of its colours. The boundaries of the forms he will assuredly, whatever the object, have found drawn with a delicacy and precision which no human hand can follow. Those of its colours he will find in many cases, though governed always by a certain rude symmetry, yet irregular, blotched, imperfect, liable to all kinds of accidents and awkwardnesses. Look at the tracery of the lines on a camp shell, and see how oddly and awkwardly its tents are pitched. It is not indeed always so: there is occasionally, as in the eye of the peacock's plume, an apparent precision, but still a precision far inferior to that of the drawing of the filaments which bear that lovely stain; and in the plurality of cases a degree of looseness and variation, and, still more singularly, of harshness and violence in arrangement, is admitted in colour which would be monstrous in form. Observe the difference in the precision of a fish's scales and of the spots on them.

XXXVIII. Now, why it should be that colour is best seen under these circumstances I will not here endeavour to determine; nor whether the lesson we are to learn from it be that it is God's will that all manner of delights should never be combined in one thing. But the fact is certain, that colour is always by Him arranged in these simple or rude forms, and as certain that, therefore, it must be best seen in them, and that we shall never mend by refining its arrangements. Experience teaches us the same thing. Infinite nonsense has been written about the union of perfect colour with perfect form. They never will, never can be united. Colour, to be perfect, *must* have a soft outline or a simple one: it cannot have a refined one; and you will never produce a good painted window with good figure-drawing in it.

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You will lose perfection of colour as you give perfection of line.
Try to put in order and form the colours of a piece of opal.

XXXIX. I conclude, then, that all arrangements of colour, for
its own sake, in graceful forms, are barbarous; and that, to paint
a colour pattern with the lovely lines of a Greek leaf moulding, is
an utterly savage procedure. I cannot find anything in natural
colour like this: it is not in the bond. I find it in all natural
form—never in natural colour. If, then, our architectural colour
is to be beautiful as its form was, by being imitative, we are limited
to these conditions—to simple masses of it, to zones, as in the
rainbow and the zebra; cloudings and flamings, as in marble
shells and plumage, or spots of various shapes and dimensions.
All these conditions are susceptible of various degrees of sharpness
and delicacy, and of complication in arrangement. The zone may
become a delicate line, and arrange itself in chequers and zig-zags.
The flaming may be more or less defined, as on a tulip leaf, and
may at last be represented by a triangle of colour, and arrange
itself in stars or other shapes; the spot may be also graduated into
a stain, or defined into a square or circle. The most exquisite
harmonies may be composed of these simple elements: some soft
and full, of flushed and melting spaces of colour; others piquant
and sparkling, or deep and rich, formed of close groups of the
fiery fragments: perfect and lovely proportion may be exhibited
in the relation of their quantities, infinite invention in their dis-
position: but, in all cases, their shape will be effective only as
it determines their quantity, and regulates their operation on each
other; points or edges of one being introduced between breadths
of others, and so on. Triangular and barred forms are therefore
convenient, or others the simplest possible; leaving the pleasure
of the spectator to be taken in the colour, and in that only.
Curved outlines, especially if refined, deaden the colour, and con-
fuse the mind. Even in figure painting the greatest colourists have
either melted their outline away, as often Correggio and Rubens;
or purposely made their masses of ungainly shape, as Titian; or
placed their brightest hues in costume, where they could get quaint
patterns, as Veronese, and especially Angelico, with whom, how-

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ever, the absolute virtue of colour is secondary to grace of line. Hence, he never uses the blended hues of Correggio, like those on the wing of the little Cupid, in the "Venus and Mercury," but always the severest type—the peacock plume. Any of these men would have looked with infinite disgust upon the leafage and scroll-work which form the ground of colour in our modern painted windows, and yet all whom I have named were much infected with the love of renaissance designs. We must also allow for the freedom of the painter's subject, and looseness of his associated lines; a pattern being severe in a picture, which is over luxurious upon a building. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to be over quaint or angular in architectural colouring; and thus many dispositions which I have had occasion to reprobate in form, are, in colour, the best that can be invented. I have always, for instance, spoken with contempt of the Tudor style, for this reason, that, having surrendered all pretence to spaciousness and breadth,—having divided its surfaces by an infinite number of lines, it yet sacrifices the only characters which can make lines beautiful; sacrifices all the variety and grace which long atoned for the caprice of the Flamboyant, and adopts, for its leading feature, an entanglement of cross bars and verticals, showing about as much invention or skill of design as the reticulation of the bricklayer's sieve. Yet this very reticulation would in colour be highly beautiful; and all the heraldry, and other features which, in form, are monstrous, may be delightful as themes of colour (so long as there are no fluttering or over-twisted lines in them); and this observe, because, when coloured, they take the place of a mere pattern, and the resemblance to nature, which could not be found in their sculptured forms, is found in their piquant variegation of other surfaces. There is a beautiful and bright bit of wall painting behind the Duomo of Verona, composed of coats of arms, whose bearings are balls of gold set in bars of green (altered blue?) and white, with cardinal's hats in alternate squares. This is of course, however, fit only for domestic work. The front of the Doge's palace at Venice is the purest and most chaste model that I can name (but one) of the fit application of colour to public

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buildings. The sculpture and mouldings are all white; but the
wall surface is chequered with marble blocks of pale rose, the
chequers being in no wise harmonized, or fitted to the forms of
the windows; but looking as if the surface had been completed
first, and the windows cut out of it. In Plate XII. fig. 2. the
reader will see two of the patterns used in green and white, on
the columns of San Michele of Lucca; every column having a
different design. Both are beautiful, but the upper one certainly
the best. Yet in sculpture its lines would have been perfectly
barbarous, and those even of the lower not enough refined.

XL. Restraining ourselves, therefore, to the use of such simple
patterns, so far forth as our colour is subordinate either to archi-
tectural structure, or sculptural form, we have yet one more
manner of ornamentation to add to our general means of effect,
monochrom design, the intermediate condition between colouring
and carving. The relations of the entire system of architectural
decoration may then be thus expressed :

1. Organic form dominant. True, independent sculpture, and alto-relievo; rich capitals, and mouldings; to be elaborate in completion of form, not abstract, and either to be left in pure white marble, or most cautiously touched with colour in points and borders only, in a system *not* concurrent with their forms.

2. Organic form sub-dominant. Basso-relievo or intaglio. To be more abstract in proportion to the reduction of depth; to be also more rigid and simple in contour; to be touched with colour more boldly and in an increased degree, exactly in proportion to the reduced depth and fulness of form, but still in a system non-concurrent with their forms.

3. Organic form abstracted to outline. Monochrom design, still farther reduced to simplicity of contour, and therefore admitting for the first time the colour to be concurrent with its outlines; that is to say, as its name imports, the entire figure to be detached in one colour from a ground of another.

4. Organic forms entirely lost. Geometrical patterns or variable cloudings in the most vivid colour.

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On the opposite side of this scale, ascending from the colour pattern, I would place the various forms of painting which may be associated with architecture: primarily, and as most fit for such purpose, the mosaic, highly abstract in treatment, and introducing brilliant colour in masses; the Madonna of Torcello being, as I think, the noblest type of the manner, and the Baptistery of Parma the richest: next, the purely decorative fresco, like that of the Arena Chapel; finally, the fresco becoming principal, as in the Vatican and Sistine. But I cannot, with any safety, follow the principles of abstraction in this pictorial ornament; since the noblest examples of it appear to me to owe their architectural applicability to their archaic manner; and I think that the abstraction and admirable simplicity which render them fit media of the most splendid colouring, cannot be recovered by a voluntary condescension. The Byzantines themselves would not I think, if they could have drawn the figure better, have used it for a colour decoration; and that use, as peculiar to a condition of childhood, however noble and full of promise, cannot be included among those modes of adornment which are now legitimate or even possible. There is a difficulty in the management of the painted window for the same reason, which has not yet been met, and we must conquer that first, before we can venture to consider the wall as a painted window on a large scale. Pictorial subject, without such abstraction, becomes necessarily principal, or, at all events, ceases to be the architect's concern; its plan must be left to the painter after the completion of the building, as in the works of Veronese and Giorgione on the palaces of Venice.

XLI. Pure architectural decoration, then, may be considered as limited to the four kinds above specified; of which each glides almost imperceptibly into the other. Thus, the Elgin frieze is a monochrom in a state of transition to sculpture, retaining, as I think, the half-cast skin too long. Of pure monochrom, I have given an example in Plate VI., from the noble front of St. Michele of Lucca. It contains forty such arches, all covered with equally elaborate ornaments, entirely drawn by cutting out their ground to about the depth of an inch in the flat white marble, and filling the spaces with pieces of green serpentine; a most elaborate mode

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of sculpture, requiring excessive care and precision in the fitting
of the edges, and of course double work, the same line needing
to be cut both in the marble and serpentine. The excessive sim-
plicity of the forms will be at once perceived; the eyes of the
figures or animals, for instance, being indicated only by a round
dot, formed by a little inlet circle of serpentine, about half an
inch over: but, though simple, they admit often much grace of
curvature, as in the neck of the bird seen above the right-hand
pillar.¹⁴ The pieces of serpentine have fallen out in many places,
giving the black shadows, as seen under the horseman's arm and
bird's neck, and in the semi-circular line round the arch, once
filled with some pattern. It would have illustrated my point
better to have restored the lost portions, but I always draw a
thing exactly as it is, hating restoration of any kind; and I would
especially direct the reader's attention to the completion of the
forms in the *sculptured* ornament of the marble cornices, as op-
posed to the abstraction of the monochrom figures, of the ball
and cross patterns between the arches, and of the triangular orna-
ment round the arch on the left.

XLII. I have an intense love for these monochrom figures,
owing to their wonderful life and spirit in all the works on
which I have found them; nevertheless, I believe that the ex-
cessive degree of abstraction which they imply necessitates our
placing them in the rank of a progressive or imperfect art, and
that a perfect building should rather be composed of the highest
sculpture, (organic form dominant and sub-dominant,) associated
with pattern colours on the flat or broad surfaces. And we find,
in fact, that the cathedral of Pisa, which is a higher type than
that of Lucca, exactly follows this condition, the colour being put
in geometrical patterns on its surfaces, and animal forms and
lovely leafage used in the sculptured cornices and pillars. And
I think that the grace of the carved forms is best seen when it is
thus boldly opposed to severe traceries of colour, while the colour
itself is, as we have seen, always most piquant when it is put into
sharp and angular arrangements. Thus the sculpture is approved
and set off by the colour, and the colour seen to the best advan-

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tage in its opposition both to the whiteness and the grace of the
carved marble.

XLIII. In the course of this and the preceding Chapters, I have
now separately enumerated most of the conditions of Power and
Beauty, which, in the outset, I stated to be the grounds of the
deepest impressions with which architecture could affect the
human mind; but I would ask permission to recapitulate them,
in order to see if there be any building which I may offer as an
example of the unison, in such manner as is possible, of them all.
Glancing back, then, to the beginning of the third Chapter, and
introducing in their place the conditions incidentally determined
in the two previous sections, we shall have the following list of
noble characters:

Considerable size, exhibited by simple terminal lines (Chap. III.
§ 6.). Projection towards the top (§ 7.). Breadth of flat surface
(§ 8). Square compartments of that surface (§ 9.). Varied and
visible masonry (§ 11.). Vigorous depth of shadow (§ 13.),
exhibited especially by pierced traceries (§ 18.). Varied pro-
portion in ascent (Chap. IV. § 28.). Lateral symmetry (§ 28.).
Sculpture most delicate at the base (Chap. I. § 12.). Enriched
quantity of ornament at the top (§ 13.). Sculpture abstract in
inferior ornaments and mouldings (Chap. IV. § 31.), complete in
animal forms (§ 33.). Both to be executed in white marble
(§ 40.). Vivid colour introduced in flat geometrical patterns
(§ 39.), and obtained by the use of naturally coloured stone (§ 35.).

These characteristics occur more or less in different buildings,
some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in
their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I
know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto
at Florence. The drawing of the tracery of its upper story,
which heads this chapter, rude as it is, will nevertheless give the
reader some better conception of that tower's magnificence than
the thin outlines in which it is usually pourtrayed. In its first
appeal to the stranger's eye there is something unpleasing; a
mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with over minute-
ness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other
consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy, I used to

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despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished.
But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon
it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not
soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savage-
ness of the Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the
first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed
strange, if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those
grey walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren
rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-
grained shafts, and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament
than the martins' nests in the height of them, and that bright,
smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and
fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight
shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the Eastern
sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a
morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell. And if this be, as I
believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there
not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of
him who raised it ? I said that the Power of human mind had its
growth in the Wilderness; much more must the love and the
conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen
to be, at the best, a faded image of God's daily work, and an
arrested ray of some star of creation, be given chiefly in the
places which He has gladdened by planting there the fir tree and
the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far
away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise
that headstone of Beauty above her towers of watch and war.
Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with
which he filled the heart of Italy; ask those who followed him
what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his
labours, and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God
had verily poured out upon this His servant no common nor
restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he was indeed a king
among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon
his crown was that of David's:—" I took thee from the sheep-
cote, and from following the sheep."

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## CHAP. V.

### THE LAMP OF LIFE.

I. AMONG the countless analogies by which the nature and relations of the human soul are illustrated in the material creation, none are more striking than the impressions inseparably connected with the active and dormant states of matter. I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, that no inconsiderable part of the essential characters of Beauty depended on the expression of vital energy in organic things, or on the subjection to such energy, of things naturally passive and powerless. I need not here repeat, of what was then advanced, more than the statement which I believe will meet with general acceptance, that things in other respects alike, as in their substance, or uses, or outward forms, are noble or ignoble in proportion to the fulness of the life which either they themselves enjoy, or of whose action they bear the evidence, as sea sands are made beautiful by their bearing the seal of the motion of the waters. And this is especially true of all objects which bear upon them the impress of the highest order of creative life, that is to say, of the mind of man: they become noble or ignoble in proportion to the amount of the energy of that mind which has visibly been employed upon them. But most peculiarly and imperatively does the rule hold with respect to the creations of Architecture, which being properly capable of no other life than this, and being not essentially composed of things pleasant in themselves,—as music of sweet sounds, or painting of fair colours, but of inert substance,—depend, for their dignity and pleasurableness in the utmost degree, upon the vivid expression of the intellectual life which has been concerned in their production.

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II. Now in all other kind of energies except that of man's
mind, there is no question as to what is life, and what is not.
Vital sensibility, whether vegetable or animal, may, indeed, be
reduced to so great feebleness, as to render its existence a matter
of question, but when it is evident at all, it is evident as such:
there is no mistaking any imitation or pretence of it for the life
itself; no mechanism nor galvanism can take its place; nor is any
resemblance of it so striking as to involve even hesitation in the
judgment; although many occur which the human imagination
takes pleasure in exalting, without for an instant losing sight of
the real nature of the dead things it animates; but rejoicing
rather in its own excessive life, which puts gesture into clouds,
and joy into waves, and voices into rocks.

III. But when we begin to be concerned with the energies
of man, we find ourselves instantly dealing with a double
 creature. Most part of his being seems to have a fictitious
counterpart, which it is at his peril if he do not cast off and
deny. Thus he has a true and false (otherwise called a living
and dead, or a feigned or unfeigned) faith. He has a true
and a false hope, a true and a false charity, and, finally, a true
and a false life. His true life is like that of lower organic
beings, the independent force by which he moulds and governs
external things; it is a force of assimilation which converts
everything around him into food, or into instruments; and
which, however humbly or obediently it may listen to or follow
the guidance of superior intelligence, never forfeits its own
authority as a judging principle, as a will capable either of
obeying or rebelling. His false life is, indeed, but one of the
conditions of death or stupor, but it acts, even when it cannot
be said to animate, and is not always easily known from the true.
It is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass
much of our time in the world; that life in which we do what
we have not purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and
assent to what we do not understand; that life which is over-
laid by the weight of things external to it, and is moulded by
them, instead of assimilating them; that, which instead of

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growing and blossoming under any wholesome dew, is crystal-
lised over with it, as with hoar-frost, and becomes to the true
life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration
of thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy,
which can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and
broken to bits, if it stand in our way. All men are liable to
be in some degree frost-bitten in this sort; all are partly en-
cumbered and crusted over with idle matter; only, if they have
real life in them, they are always breaking this bark away in
noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips upon the
birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength. But,
with all the efforts that the best men make, much of their
being passes in a kind of dream, in which they indeed move,
and play their parts sufficiently, to the eyes of their fellow
dreamers, but have no clear consciousness of what is around
them, or within them; blind to the one, insensible to the other,
υωθροι. I would not press the definition into its darker application
to the dull heart and heavy ear; I have to do with it only as
it refers to the too frequent condition of natural existence,
whether of nations or individuals, settling commonly upon them
in proportion to their age. The life of a nation is usually, like
the flow of a lava stream, first bright and fierce, then languid
and covered, at last advancing only by the tumbling over and
over of its frozen blocks. And that last condition is a sad one
to look upon. All the steps are marked most clearly in the
arts, and in Architecture more than in any other; for it, being
especially dependent, as we have just said, on the warmth of
the true life, is also peculiarly sensible of the hemlock cold
of the false: and I do not know anything more oppressive, when
the mind is once awakened to its characteristics, than the aspect
of a dead architecture. The feebleness of childhood is full of
promise and of interest,—the struggle of imperfect knowledge
full of energy and continuity,—but to see impotence and rigidity
settling upon the form of the developed man; to see the types
which once had the die of thought struck fresh upon them,
worn flat by over use; to see the shell of the living creature

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in its adult form, when its colours are faded, and its inhabitant
perished,—this is a sight more humiliating, more melancholy,
than the vanishing of all knowledge, and the return to con-
fessed and helpless infancy.

Nay, it is to be wished that such return were always possible.
There would be hope if we could change palsy into puerility; but
I know not how far we can become children again, and renew
our lost life. The stirring which has taken place in our architec-
tural aims and interests within these few years, is thought by
many to be full of promise: I trust it is, but it has a sickly look
to me. I cannot tell whether it be indeed a springing of seed or
a shaking among bones; and I do not think the time will be lost
which I ask the reader to spend in the inquiry, how far all that
we have hitherto ascertained or conjectured to be best in prin-
ciple, may be formally practised without the spirit or the vitality
which alone could give it influence, value, or delightfulness.

IV. Now, in the first place—and this is rather an important
point—it is no sign of deadness in a present art that it borrows
or imitates, but only if it borrows without paying interest, or if
it imitates without choice. The art of a great nation, which is
developed without any acquaintance with nobler examples than
its own early efforts furnish, exhibits always the most consistent
and comprehensible growth, and perhaps is regarded usually as
peculiarly venerable in its self-origination. But there is some-
thing to my mind more majestic yet in the life of an architecture
like that of the Lombards, rude and infantine in itself, and sur-
rounded by fragments of a nobler art of which it is quick in
admiration and ready in imitation, and yet so strong in its own
new instincts that it re-constructs and re-arranges every frag-
ment that it copies or borrows into harmony with its own
thoughts,—a harmony at first disjointed and awkward, but com-
pleted in the end, and fused into perfect organisation; all the
borrowed elements being subordinated to its own primal, un-
changed, life. I do not know any sensation more exquisite
than the discovering of the evidence of this magnificent struggle
into independent existence; the detection of the borrowed

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thoughts, nay, the finding of the actual blocks and stones carved
by other hands and in other ages, wrought into the new walls,
with a new expression and purpose given to them, like the blocks
of unsubdued rocks (to go back to our former simile) which we
find in the heart of the lava current, great witnesses to the power
which has fused all but those calcined fragments into the mass
of its homogeneous fire.

V. It will be asked, How is imitation to be rendered healthy
and vital? Unhappily, while it is easy to enumerate the signs of
life, it is impossible to define or to communicate life; and while
every intelligent writer on Art has insisted on the difference be-
tween the copying found in an advancing or recedent period, none
have been able to communicate, in the slightest degree, the force
of vitality to the copyist over whom they might have influence.
Yet it is at least interesting, if not profitable, to note that two very
distinguishing characters of vital imitation are, its Frankness and
its Audacity: its Frankness is especially singular; there is never
any effort to conceal the degree of the sources of its borrowing.
Raffaelle carries off a whole figure from Masaccio, or borrows an
entire composition from Perugino, with as much tranquillity and
simplicity of innocence as a young Spartan pickpocket; and the
architect of a Romanesque basilica gathered his columns and
capitals where he could find them, as an ant picks up sticks.
There is at least a presumption, when we find this frank accept-
ance, that there is a sense within the mind of power capable of
transforming and renewing whatever it adopts; and too conscious,
too exalted, to fear the accusation of plagiarism,—too certain that
it can prove, and has proved, its independence, to be afraid of
expressing its homage to what it admires in the most open and
indubitable way; and the necessary consequence of this sense of
power is the other sign I have named—the Audacity of treat-
ment when it finds treatment necessary, the unhesitating and
sweeping sacrifice of precedent where precedent becomes inconve-
nient. For instance, in the characteristic forms of Italian Roman-
esque, in which the hypaethral portion of the heathen temple was
replaced by the towering nave, and where, in consequence, the

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pediment of the west front became divided into three portions, of which the central one, like the apex of a ridge of sloping strata lifted by a sudden fault, was broken away from and raised above the wings; there remained at the extremities of the aisles two triangular fragments of pediment, which could not now be filled by any of the modes of decoration adapted for the unbroken space; and the difficulty became greater, when the central portion of the front was occupied by columnar ranges, which could not, without painful abruptness, terminate short of the extremities of the wings. I know not what expedient would have been adopted by architects who had much respect for precedent, under such circumstances, but it certainly would not have been that of the Pisan, —to continue the range of columns into the pedimental space, shortening them to its extremity until the shaft of the last column vanished altogether, and there remained only its capital resting in the angle on its basic plinth. I raise no question at present whether this arrangement be graceful or otherwise; I allege it only as an instance of a boldness almost without a parallel, casting aside every received principle that stood in its way, and struggling through every discordance and difficulty to the fulfilment of its own instincts.

VI. Frankness, however, is in itself no excuse for repetition, nor Audacity for innovation, when the one is indolent and the other unwise. Nobler and surer signs of vitality must be sought, —signs independent alike of the decorative or original character of the style, and constant in every style that is determinedly progressive.

Of these, one of the most important I believe to be a certain neglect or contempt of refinement in execution, or, at all events, a visible subordination of execution to conception, commonly involuntary, but not unfrequently intentional. This is a point, however, on which, while I speak confidently, I must at the same time speak reservedly and carefully, as there would otherwise be much chance of my being dangerously misunderstood. It has been truly observed, and well stated, by Lord Lindsay, that the best designers of Italy were also the most careful in their

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workmanship; and that the stability and finish of their masonry,
mosaic, or other work whatsoever, were always perfect in propor-
tion to the apparent improbability of the great designers con-
descending to the care of details among us so despised. Not only
do I fully admit and re-assert this most important fact, but I
would insist upon perfect and most delicate finish in its right place,
as a characteristic of all the highest schools of architecture, as
much as it is of those of painting. But on the other hand, as
perfect finish belongs to the perfected art, a progressive finish
belongs to progressive art; and I do not think that any more
fatal sign of a stupor or numbness settling upon that unde-
veloped art could possibly be detected, than that it had been
taken aback by its own execution, and that the workmanship had
gone ahead of the design; while, even in my admission of absolute
finish in the right place, as an attribute of the perfected school, I
must reserve to myself the right of answering in my own way
the two very important questions—what *is* finish? and what *is* its
right place?

VII. But in illustrating either of these points, we must re-
member that the correspondence of workmanship with thought is,
in existent examples, interfered with by the adoption of the designs
of an advanced period by the workmen of a rude one. All the
beginnings of Christian architecture are of this kind, and the
necessary consequence is of course an increase of the visible
interval between the power of realisation and the beauty of the
idea. We have at first an imitation, almost savage in its rudeness,
of a classical design; as the art advances, the design is modified
by a mixture of Gothic grotesqueness, and the execution more
complete, until a harmony is established between the two, in
which balance they advance to new perfection. Now during the
whole period in which the ground is being recovered, there will
be found in the living architecture marks, not to be mistaken, of
intense impatience; a struggle towards something unattained,
which causes all minor points of handling to be neglected; and a
restless disdain of all qualities which appear either to confess
contentment, or to require a time and care which might be better

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spent. And, exactly as a good and earnest student of drawing will not lose time in ruling lines or finishing backgrounds about studies which, while they have answered his immediate purpose, he knows to be imperfect and inferior to what he will do hereafter,—so the vigour of a true school of early architecture, which is either working under the influence of high example or which is itself in a state of rapid development, is very curiously traceable, among other signs, in the contempt of exact symmetry and measurement, which in dead architecture are the most painful necessities.

VIII. In Plate XII. fig. 1. I have given a most singular instance both of rude execution and defied symmetry, in the little pillar and spandril from a panel decoration under the pulpit of St. Mark's at Venice. The imperfection (not merely simplicity, but actual rudeness and ugliness) of the leaf ornament will strike the eye at once: this is general in works of the time, but it is not so common to find a capital which has been so carelessly cut; its imperfect volutes being pushed up one side far higher than on the other, and contracted on that side, an additional drill hole being put in to fill the space; besides this, the member a, of the mouldings, is a roll where it follows the arch, and a flat fillet at a; the one being slurred into the other at the angle b, and finally stopped short altogether at the other side by the most uncourteous and remorseless interference of the outer moulding: and in spite of all this, the grace, proportion, and feeling of the whole arrangement are so great, that, in its place, it leaves nothing to be desired; all the science and symmetry in the world could not be at it. In fig. 4. I have endeavoured to give some idea of the execution of the subordinate portions of a much higher work, the pulpit of St. Andrea at Pistoja, by Nicolo Pisano. It is covered with figure sculptures, executed with great care and delicacy; but when the sculptor came to the simple arch mouldings, he did not choose to draw the eye to them by over precision of work or over sharpness of shadow. The section adopted, k, m, is peculiarly simple, and so slight and obtuse in its recessions as never to produce a sharp line; and it is worked with what at first appears

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slovenliness, but is in fact sculptural *sketching*; exactly correspondent to a painter's light execution of a background: the lines appear and disappear again, are sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, sometimes quite broken off; and the recession of the cusp joins that of the external arch at *n*, in the most fearless defiance of all mathematical laws of curvilinear contact.

IX. There is something very delightful in this bold expression of the mind of the great master. I do not say that it is the "perfect work" of patience, but I think that impatience is a glorious character in an advancing school: and I love the Romanesque and early Gothic especially, because they afford so much room for it; accidental carelessnesses of measurement or of execution being mingled undistinguishably with the purposed departures from symmetrical regularity, and the luxuriousness of perpetually variable fancy, which are eminently characteristic of both styles. How great, how frequent they are, and how brightly the severity of architectural law is relieved by their grace and suddenness, has not, I think, been enough observed; still less, the unequal measurements of even important features professing to be absolutely symmetrical. I am not so familiar with modern practice as to speak with confidence respecting its ordinary precision; but I imagine that the following measures of the western front of the cathedral of Pisa, would be looked upon by present architects as very blundering approximations. That front is divided into seven arched compartments, of which the second, fourth or central, and sixth contain doors; the seven are in a most subtle alternating proportion; the central being the largest, next to it the second and sixth, then the first and seventh, lastly the third and fifth. By this arrangement, of course, these three pairs should be equal; and they are so to the eye, but I found their actual measures to be the following, taken from pillar to pillar, in Italian braccia, palmi (four inches each), and inches:—

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<table><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th>Braccia.</th><th>Palmi.</th><th>Inches.</th><th>Total in<br>Inches.</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1. Central door</td><td></td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>192</td></tr><tr><td>2. Northern door</td><td></td><td>6</td><td>3</td><td>1 1/2</td><td>157 1/2</td></tr><tr><td>3. Southern door</td><td></td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>3</td><td>163</td></tr><tr><td>4. Extreme northern space</td><td></td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>3 1/2</td><td>143 1/2</td></tr><tr><td>5. Extreme southern space</td><td></td><td>6</td><td>1</td><td>0 1/2</td><td>148 1/2</td></tr><tr><td>6. Northern intervals between the doors</td><td></td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>129</td></tr><tr><td>7. Southern intervals between the doors</td><td></td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>1 1/2</td><td>129 1/2</td></tr></tbody></table>

There is thus a difference, severally, between 2, 3 and 4, 5, of five inches and a half in the one case, and five inches in the other.

X. This, however, may perhaps be partly attributable to some accommodation of the accidental distortions which evidently took place in the walls of the cathedral during their building, as much as in those of the campanile. To my mind, those of the Duomo are far the more wonderful of the two: I do not believe that a single pillar of its walls is absolutely vertical: the pavement rises and falls to different heights, or rather the plinth of the walls sinks into it continually to different depths, the whole west front literally overhangs, (I have not plumbed it; but the inclination may be seen by the eye, by bringing it into visual contact with the upright pilasters of the Campo Santo :) and a most extraordinary distortion in the masonry of the southern wall shows that this inclination had begun when the first story was built. The cornice above the first arcade of that wall touches the tops of eleven out of its fifteen arches; but it suddenly leaves the tops of the four westernmost; the arches nodding westward and sinking into the ground, while the cornice rises (or seems to rise), leaving at any rate, whether by the rise of the one or the fall of the other, an interval of more than two feet between it and the top of the western arch, filled by added courses of masonry. There is another very curious evidence of this struggle of the architect with his yielding wall in the columns of the main entrance. (These notices are perhaps somewhat irrelevant to our immediate subject, but they appear to me highly interesting; and they, at all events, prove one of the points

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on which I would insist,—how much of imperfection and variety
in things professing to be symmetrical the eyes of those eager
builders could endure: they looked to loveliness in detail, to
nobility in the whole, never to petty measurements.) Those
columns of the principal entrance are among the loveliest in
Italy; cylindrical, and decorated with a rich arabesque of sculp-
tured foliage, which at the base extends nearly all round them,
up to the black pilaster in which they are lightly engaged: but
the shield of foliage, bounded by a severe line, narrows to their
tops, where it covers their frontal segment only; thus giving,
when laterally seen, a terminal line sloping boldly outwards,
which, as I think, was meant to conceal the accidental leaning of
the western walls, and, by its exaggerated inclination in the same
direction, to throw them by comparison into a seeming vertical.

XI. There is another very curious instance of distortion above
the central door of the west front. All the intervals between the
seven arches are filled with black marble, each containing in its
centre a white parallelogram filled with animal mosaics, and the
whole surmounted by a broad white band, which, generally, does
not touch the parallelogram below. But the parallelogram on
the north of the central arch has been forced into an oblique
position, and touches the white band; and, as if the architect was
determined to show that he did not care whether it did or not,
the white band suddenly gets thicker at that place, and remains
so over the next two arches. And these differences are the more
curious because the workmanship of them all is most finished and
masterly, and the distorted stones are fitted with as much neat-
ness as if they tallied to a hair's breadth. There is no look of
slurring or blundering about it; it is all coolly filled in, as if the
builder had no sense of anything being wrong or extraordinary;
I only wish we had a little of his impudence.

XII. Still, the reader will say that all these variations are
probably dependent more on the bad foundation than on the
architect's feeling. Not so the exquisite delicacies of change in
the proportions and dimensions of the apparently symmetrical
arcades of the west front. It will be remembered that I said

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the tower of Pisa was the only ugly tower in Italy, because its
tiers were equal, or nearly so, in height; a fault this, so contrary
to the spirit of the builders of the time, that it can be considered
only as an unlucky caprice. Perhaps the general aspect of the
west front of the cathedral may then have occurred to the
reader's mind, as seemingly another contradiction of the rule I
had advanced. It would not have been so, however, even had
its four upper arcades been actually equal; as they are sub-
ordinated to the great seven-arched lower story, in the manner
before noticed respecting the spire of Salisbury, and as is
actually the case in the Duomo of Lucca and Tower of Pistoja.
But the Pisan front is far more subtly proportioned. Not one of
its four arcades is of like height with another. The highest is
the third, counting upwards; and they diminish in nearly arith-
metical proportion alternately; in the order 3rd, 1st, 2nd, 4th.
The inequalities in their arches are not less remarkable: they at
first strike the eye as all equal; but there is a grace about them
which equality never obtained: on closer observation, it is per-
ceived that in the first row of nineteen arches, eighteen are equal,
and the central one larger than the rest; in the second arcade, the
nine central arches stand over the nine below, having, like them, the
ninth central one largest. But on their flanks, where is the slope
of the shoulder-like pediment, the arches vanish, and a wedge-
shaped frieze takes their place, tapering outwards, in order to
allow the columns to be carried to the extremity of the pediment;
and here, where the heights of the shafts are so fast shortened,
they are set thicker; five shafts, or rather four and a capital,
above, to four of the arcade below, giving twenty-one intervals
instead of nineteen. In the next or third arcade,—which, re-
member, is the highest,—eight arches, all equal, are given in the
space of the nine below, so that there is now a central shaft
instead of a central arch, and the span of the arches is increased
in proportion to their increased height. Finally, in the upper-
most arcade, which is the lowest of all, the arches, the same in
number as those below, are narrower than any of the façade; the
whole eight going very nearly above the six below them, while

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the terminal arches of the lower arcade are surmounted by flanking masses of decorated wall with projecting figures.

XIII. Now I call that Living Architecture. There is sensation in every inch of it, and an accommodation to every architectural necessity, with a determined variation in arrangement, which is exactly like the related proportions and provisions in the structure of organic form. I have not space to examine the still lovelier proportioning of the external shafts of the apse of this marvellous building. I prefer, lest the reader should think it a peculiar example, to state the structure of another church, the most graceful and grand piece of Romanesque work, as a fragment, in north Italy, that of San Giovanni Evangelista, at Pistoja.

The side of that church has three stories of arcade, diminishing in height in bold geometrical proportion, while the arches, for the most part, increase in number in arithmetical, i. e. two in the second arcade, and three in the third, to one in the first. Lest, however, this arrangement should be too formal, of the fourteen arches in the lowest series, that which contains the door is made larger than the rest, and is not in the middle, but the sixth from the West, leaving five on one side and eight on the other. Farther: this lowest arcade is terminated by broad flat pilasters, about half the width of its arches; but the arcade above is continuous; only the two extreme arches at the west end are made larger than all the rest, and instead of coming, as they should, into the space of the lower extreme arch, take in both it and its broad pilaster. Even this, however, was not out of order enough to satisfy the architect's eye; for there were still two arches above to each single one below: so, at the east end, where there were more arches, and the eye might be more easily cheated, what does he do but *narrow* the two extreme *lower* arches by half a braccio; while he at the same time slightly enlarged the upper ones, so as to get only seventeen upper to nine lower, instead of eighteen to nine. The eye is thus thoroughly confused, and the whole building thrown into one mass, by the curious variations in the adjustments of the superimposed shafts, not one of which is

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either exactly in, or positively out of, its place; and, to get this managed the more cunningly, there is from an inch to an inch and a half of gradual gain in the space of the four eastern arches, besides the confessed half braccio. Their measures, counting from the east, I found as follows:—

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Braccia.</th><th>Palmi.</th><th>Inches.</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1st</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>2nd</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>3rd</td><td>3</td><td>3</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>4th</td><td>3</td><td>3</td><td>3½</td></tr></tbody></table>

The upper arcade is managed on the same principle: it looks at first as if there were three arches to each under pair; but there are, in reality, only thirty-eight (or thirty-seven, I am not quite certain of this number) to the twenty-seven below; and the columns get into all manner of relative positions. Even then, the builder was not satisfied, but must needs carry the irregularity into the spring of the arches, and actually, while the general effect is of a symmetrical arcade, there is not one of the arches the same in height as another; their tops undulate all along the wall like waves along a harbour quay, some nearly touching the string course above, and others falling from it as much as five or six inches.

XIV. Let us next examine the plan of the west front of St. Mark's at Venice, which, though in many respects imperfect, is in its proportions, and as a piece of rich and fantastic colour, as lovely a dream as ever filled human imagination. It may, perhaps, however, interest the reader to hear one opposite opinion upon this subject; and after what has been urged in the preceding pages respecting proportion in general, more especially respecting the wrongness of balanced cathedral towers and other regular designs, together with my frequent references to the Doge's palace, and campanile of St. Mark's, as models of perfection, and my praise of the former especially as projecting above its second arcade, the following extracts from the journal of Wood the architect, written on his arrival at Venice, may have a pleasing

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freshness in them, and may show that I have not been stating
principles altogether trite or accepted.

"The strange looking church, and the great ugly campanile,
could not be mistaken. The exterior of this church surprises you
by its extreme ugliness, more than by any thing else."

"The Ducal Palace is even more ugly than any thing I have
previously mentioned. Considered in detail, I can imagine no
alteration to make it tolerable; but if this lofty wall had been
set back behind the two stories of little arches, it would have been
a very noble production."

After more observations on "a certain justness of proportion,"
and on the appearance of riches and power in the church, to
which he ascribes a pleasing effect, he goes on: "Some persons
are of opinion that irregularity is a necessary part of its ex-
cellence. I am decidedly of a contrary opinion, and am con-
vinced that a regular design of the same sort would be far
superior. Let an oblong of good architecture, but not very
showy, conduct to a fine cathedral, which should appear between
two lofty towers and have two obelisks in front, and on each side
of this cathedral let other squares partially open into the first,
and one of these extend down to a harbour or sea shore, and
you would have a scene which might challenge any thing in
existence."

Why Mr. Wood was unable to enjoy the colour of St. Mark's,
or perceive the majesty of the Ducal palace, the reader will see
after reading the two following extracts regarding the Caracci
and Michael Angelo.

"The pictures here (Bologna) are to my taste far preferable
to those of Venice, for if the Venetian school surpass in colouring
and, perhaps, in composition, the Bolognese is decidedly superior
in drawing and expression, and the Caraccis shine here like
Gods."

"What is it that is so much admired in this artist (M.
Angelo)? Some contend for a grandeur of composition in the
lines and disposition of the figures; this, I confess, I do not
comprehend; yet, while I acknowledge the beauty of certain forms

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and proportions in architecture, I cannot consistently deny that similar merits may exist in painting, though I am unfortunately unable to appreciate them."

I think these passages very valuable, as showing the effect of a contracted knowledge and false taste in painting upon an architect's understanding of his own art; and especially with what curious notions, or lack of notions, about proportion, that art has been sometimes practised. For Mr. Wood is by no means unintelligent in his observations generally, and his criticisms on classical art are often most valuable. But those who love Titian better than the Caracci, and who see something to admire in Michael Angelo, will, perhaps, be willing to proceed with me to a charitable examination of St. Mark's. For, although the present course of European events affords us some chance of seeing the changes proposed by Mr. Wood carried into execution, we may still esteem ourselves fortunate in having first known how it was left by the builders of the eleventh century.

XV. The entire front is composed of an upper and lower series of arches, enclosing spaces of wall decorated with mosaic, and supported on ranges of shafts of which, in the lower series of arches, there is an upper range superimposed on a lower. Thus we have five vertical divisions of the façade; i. e. two tiers of shafts, and the arched wall they bear, below; one tier of shafts, and the arched wall they bear, above. In order, however, to bind the two main divisions together, the central lower arch (the main entrance) rises above the level of the gallery and balustrade which crown the lateral arches.

The proportioning of the columns and walls of the lower story is so lovely and so varied, that it would need pages of description before it could be fully understood; but it may be generally stated thus: The height of the lower shafts, upper shafts, and wall, being severally expressed by *a*, *b*, and *c*, then *a*: *c*::*c*: *b* (*a* being the highest); and diameter of shaft *b* is generally to the diameter of shaft *a* as height *b* is to height *a*, or something less, allowing for the large plinth which diminishes the apparent height of the upper shaft: and when this is their proportion of width, one shaft above

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is put above one below, with sometimes another upper shaft inter-
posed: but in the extreme arches a single under shaft bears two
upper, proportioned as truly as the boughs of a tree; that is to
say, the diameter of each upper $= \frac{5}{3}$ of lower. There being thus
the three terms of proportion gained in the lower story, the upper,
while it is only divided into two main members, in order that the
whole height may not be divided into an even number, has the
third term added in its pinnacles. So far of the vertical division.
The lateral is still more subtle. There are seven arches in the
lower story; and, calling the central arch a, and counting to
the extremity, they diminish in the alternate order, a, c, b, d.
The upper story has five arches, and two added pinnacles; and
these diminish in *regular* order, the central being the largest, and
the outermost the least. Hence, while one proportion ascends,
another descends, like parts in music; and yet the pyramidal form
is secured for the whole, and, which was another great point of
attention, none of the shafts of the upper arches stand over those
of the lower.

XVI. It might have been thought that, by this plan, enough
variety had been secured, but the builder was not satisfied even
thus: for—and this is the point bearing on the present part of
our subject—always calling the central arch a, and the lateral
ones b and c in succession, the northern b and c are considerably
wider than southern b and c, but the southern d is as much wider
than the northern d, and lower beneath its cornice besides; and,
more than this, I hardly believe that one of the effectively sym-
metrical members of the façade is actually symmetrical with any
other. I regret that I cannot state the actual measures. I gave
up the taking them upon the spot, owing to their excessive com-
plexity, and the embarrassment caused by the yielding and sub-
sidence of the arches.

Do not let it be supposed that I imagine the Byzantine
workmen to have had these various principles in their minds
as they built. I believe they built altogether from feeling, and
that it was because they did so, that there is this marvellous
life, changefulness, and subtlety running through their every

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arrangement; and that we reason upon the lovely building as we should upon some fair growth of the trees of the earth, that know not their own beauty.

XVII. Perhaps, however, a stranger instance than any I have yet given, of the daring variation of pretended symmetry, is found in the front of the Cathedral of Bayeux. It consists of five arches with steep pediments, the outermost filled, the three central with doors; and they appear, at first, to diminish in regular proportion from the principal one in the centre. The two lateral doors are very curiously managed. The tympana of their arches are filled with bas-reliefs in four tiers; in the lowest tier there is in each a little temple or gate containing the principal figure (in that on the right, it is the gate of Hades with Lucifer). This little temple is carried, like a capital, by an isolated shaft which divides the whole arch at about ⅜ of its breadth, the larger portion outmost; and in that larger portion is the inner entrance door. This exact correspondence, in the treatment of both gates, might lead us to expect a correspondence in dimension. Not at all. The small inner northern entrance measures, in English feet and inches, 4 ft. 7 in. from jamb to jamb, and the southern, 5 ft. exactly. Five inches in five feet is a considerable variation. The outer northern porch measures, from face shaft to face shaft, 13 ft. 11 in., and the southern, 14 ft. 6 in.; giving a difference of 7 in. on 14½ ft. There are also variations in the pediment decorations not less extraordinary.

XVIII. I imagine I have given instances enough, though I could multiply them indefinitely, to prove that these variations are not mere blunders, nor carelessnesses, but the result of a fixed scorn, if not dislike, of accuracy in measurements; and, in most cases, I believe, of a determined resolution to work out an effective symmetry by variations as subtle as those of Nature. To what lengths this principle was sometimes carried, we shall see by the very singular management of the towers of Abbeville. I do not say it is right, still less that it is wrong, but it is a wonderful proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture;

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for, say what we will of it, that Flamboyant of France, however
morbid, was as vivid and intense in its animation as ever any
phase of mortal mind; and it would have lived till now, if it
had not taken to telling lies. I have before noticed the general
difficulty of managing even lateral division, when it is into
two equal parts, unless there be some third reconciling member.
I shall give, hereafter, more examples of the modes in which
this reconciliation is effected in towers with double lights: the
Abbeville architect put his sword to the knot perhaps rather
too sharply. Vexed by the want of unity between his two
windows, he literally laid their heads together, and so distorted
their ogee curves, as to leave only one of the trefoiled panels
above, on the inner side, and three on the outer side of each arch.
The arrangement is given in Plate XII., fig. 3. Associated with
the various undulation of flamboyant curves below, it is in the
real tower hardly observed, while it binds it into one mass in
general effect. Granting it, however, to be ugly and wrong, I
like sins of the kind, for the sake of the courage it requires
to commit them. In Plate II. (part of a small chapel attached to
the West front of the Cathedral of St. Lo), the reader will see an
instance, from the same architecture, of a violation of its own
principles for the sake of a peculiar meaning. If there be any
one feature which the flamboyant architect loved to decorate
richly, it was the niche—it was what the capital is to the Corin-
thian order; yet in the case before us there is an ugly beehive
put in the place of the principal niche of the arch. I am not sure
if I am right in my interpretation of its meaning, but I have
little doubt that two figures below, now broken away, once repre-
sented an Annunciation; and on another part of the same cathe-
dral, I find the descent of the Spirit, encompassed by rays of
light, represented very nearly in the form of the niche in question;
which appears, therefore, to be intended for a representation of
this effulgence, while at the same time it was made a canopy for
the delicate figures below. Whether this was its meaning or
not, it is remarkable as a daring departure from the common
habits of the time.

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XIX. Far more splendid is a license taken with the niche deco-
ration of the portal of St. Maclou at Rouen. The subject of the
tympanum bas-relief is the Last Judgment, and the sculpture of
the inferno side is carried out with a degree of power whose fear-
ful grotesqueness I can only describe as a mingling of the minds
of Orcagna and Hogarth. The demons are perhaps even more
awful than Orcagna's; and, in some of the expressions of debased
humanity in its utmost despair, the English painter is at least
equalled. Not less wild is the imagination which gives fury and
fear even to the placing of the figures. An evil angel, poised on
the wing, drives the condemned troops from before the Judgment
seat; with his left hand he drags behind him a cloud, which he is
spreading like a winding-sheet over them all; but they are urged
by him so furiously, that they are driven not merely to the
extreme limit of that scene, which the sculptor confined elsewhere
within the tympanum, but out of the tympanum and into the
niches of the arch; while the flames that follow them, bent by
the blast, as it seems, of the angel's wings, rush into the niches
also, and burst up through their tracery, the three lowermost
niches being represented as all on fire, while, instead of their
usual vaulted and ribbed ceiling, there is a demon in the roof of
each, with his wings folded over it, grinning down out of the black
shadow.

XX. I have, however, given enough instances of vitality shown
in mere daring, whether wise, as surely in this last instance, or
inexpedient; but, as a single example of the Vitality of Assimi-
lation, the faculty which turns to its purposes all material that
is submitted to it, I would refer the reader to the extraordinary
columns of the arcade on the south side of the Cathedral of
Ferrara. A single arch of it is given in Plate XIII. on the right.
Four such arches forming a group, there are interposed two pairs
of columns, as seen on the left of the same plate; and then come
another four arches. It is a long arcade of, I suppose, not less
than forty arches, perhaps of many more; and in the grace and
simplicity of its stilted Byzantine curves I hardly know its equal.
Its like, in fancy of column, I certainly do not know; there

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being hardly two correspondent, and the architect having been
ready, as it seems, to adopt ideas and resemblances from any sources
whatsoever. The vegetation growing up the two columns is fine,
though bizarre; the distorted pillars beside it suggest images of
less agreeable character; the serpentine arrangements founded on
the usual Byzantine double knot are generally graceful; but I was
puzzled to account for the excessively ugly type of the pillar, fig.
3., one of a group of four. It so happened, fortunately for me,
that there had been a fair in Ferrara; and, when I had finished
my sketch of the pillar, I had to get out of the way of some
merchants of miscellaneous wares, who were removing their stall.
It had been shaded by an awning supported by poles, which, in
order that the covering might be raised or lowered according to
the height of the sun, were composed of two separate pieces, fitted
to each other by a *rack*, in which I beheld the prototype of my
ugly pillar. It will not be thought, after what I have above said
of the inexpedience of imitating anything but natural form, that
I advance this architect's practice as altogether exemplary; yet
the humility is instructive, which condescended to such sources
for motives of thought, the boldness, which could depart so far
from all established types of form, and the life and feeling, which
out of an assemblage of such quaint and uncouth materials, could
produce an harmonious piece of ecclesiastical architecture.

XXI. I have dwelt, however, perhaps, too long upon that
form of vitality which is known almost as much by its errors
as by its atonements for them. We must briefly note the
operation of it, which is always right, and always necessary, upon
those lesser details, where it can neither be superseded by prece-
dents, nor repressed by proprieties.

I said, early in this essay, that hand-work might always be
known from machine-work; observing, however, at the same
time, that it was possible for men to turn themselves into
machines, and to reduce their labour to the machine level; but
so long as men work as men, putting their heart into what they
do, and doing their best, it matters not how bad workmen they
may be, there will be that in the handling which is above all

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price: it will be plainly seen that some places have been delighted
in more than others—that there have been a pause, and a care
about them; and then there will come careless bits, and fast bits;
and here the chisel will have struck hard, and there lightly, and
anon timidly; and if the man's mind as well as his heart went
with his work, all this will be in the right places, and each part
will set off the other; and the effect of the whole, as compared
with the same design cut by a machine or a lifeless hand,
will be like that of poetry well read and deeply felt to that of
the same verses jangled by rote. There are many to whom the
difference is imperceptible; but to those who love poetry it is
everything—they had rather not hear it at all, than hear it ill
read; and to those who love Architecture, the life and accent of
the hand are everything. They had rather not have ornament
at all, than see it ill cut—deadly cut, that is. I cannot too
often repeat, it is not coarse cutting, it is not blunt cutting, that
is necessarily bad; but it is cold cutting—the look of equal
trouble everywhere—the smooth, diffused tranquillity of heartless
pains—the regularity of a plough in a level field. The chill is
more likely, indeed, to show itself in finished work than in any
other—men cool and tire as they complete: and if completeness
is thought to be vested in polish, and to be attainable by help of
sand paper, we may as well give the work to the engine lathe at
once. But right finish is simply the full rendering of the intended
impression; and high finish is the rendering of a well intended
and vivid impression; and it is oftener got by rough than fine
handling. I am not sure whether it is frequently enough observed
that sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of any thing
in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the
true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.
The sculptor must paint with his chisel: half his touches are
not to realize, but to put power into, the form: they are touches
of light and shadow; and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not
to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light,
or a spot of darkness. In a coarse way, this kind of execution
is very marked in old French woodwork; the irises of the eyes

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of its chimeric monsters being cut boldly into holes, which,
variously placed, and always dark, give all kinds of strange and
startling expressions, averted and askance, to the fantastic coun-
tenances. Perhaps the highest examples of this kind of sculpture-
painting are the works of Mino da Fiesole; their best effects
being reached by strange angular, and seemingly rude, touches
of the chisel. The lips of one of the children on the tombs in
the church of the Badia, appear only half finished when they
are seen close; yet the expression is farther carried, and more
ineffable, than in any piece of marble I have ever seen, especially
considering its delicacy, and the softness of the child-features.
In a sterner kind, that of the statues in the sacristy of St.
Lorenzo equals it, and there again by incompletion. I know
no example of work in which the forms are absolutely true and
complete where such a result is attained; in Greek sculptures it
is not even attempted.

XXII. It is evident that, for architectural appliances, such masculine handling, likely as it must be to retain its effectiveness when higher finish would be injured by time, must always be the most expedient; and as it is impossible, even were it desirable, that the highest finish should be given to the quantity of work which covers a large building, it will be understood how precious the Intelligence must become, which renders incompletion itself a means of additional expression; and how great must be the difference, when the touches are rude and few, between those of a careless and those of a regardful mind. It is not easy to retain anything of their character in a copy; yet the reader will find one or two illustrative points in the examples, given in Plate XIV., from the bas-reliefs of the north door of Rouen Cathedral. There are three square pedestals under the three main niches on each side of it, and one in the centre; each of these being on two sides decorated with five quatrefoiled panels. There are thus seventy quatrefoils in the lower ornament of the gate alone, without counting those of the outer course round it, and of the pedestals outside: each quatrefoil is filled with a bas-relief, the whole reaching to something above a man's height. A modern architect

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would, of course, have made all the five quatrefoils of each
pedestal-side equal: not so the Mediæval. The general form
being apparently a quatrefoil composed of semicircles on the
sides of a square, it will be found on examination that none of
the arcs are semicircles, and none of the basic figures squares.
The latter are rhomboids, having their acute or obtuse angles
uppermost according to their larger or smaller size; and the arcs
upon their sides slide into such places as they can get in the
angles of the enclosing parallelogram, leaving intervals, at each
of the four angles, of various shapes, which are filled each by an
animal. The size of the whole panel being thus varied, the lowest
two of the five are tall, the next two short, and the uppermost
a little higher than the lowest; while in the course of bas-reliefs
which surrounds the gate, calling either of the lowest two (which
are equal) *a*, and either of the next two *b*, and the fifth and sixth
*c* and *d*, then *d* (the largest): *c*::*c*::*a*::*a*::*b*. It is won-
derful how much of the grace of the whole depends on these
variations.

XXIII. Each of the angles, it was said, is filled by an animal.
There are thus 70×4=280 animals, all different, in the mere
fillings of the intervals of the bas-reliefs. Three of these inter-
vals, with their beasts, actual size, the curves being traced upon
the stone, I have given in Plate XIV.

I say nothing of their general design, or of the lines of the
wings and scales, which are perhaps, unless in those of the
central dragon, not much above the usual commonplaces of good
ornamental work; but there is an evidence in the features of
thoughtfulness and fancy which is not common, at least now-a-
days. The upper creature on the left is biting something, the
form of which is hardly traceable in the defaced stone—but
biting he is; and the reader cannot but recognise in the pecu-
liarly reverted eye the expression which is never seen, as I think,
but in the eye of a dog gnawing something in jest, and pre-
paring to start away with it: the meaning of the glance, so far
as it can be marked by the mere incision of the chisel, will be
felt by comparing it with the eye of the couchant figure on the

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right, in its gloomy and angry brooding. The plan of this head,
and the nod of the cap over its brow, are fine; but there is a
little touch above the hand especially well meant: the fellow is
vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on
his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the
eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks wretchedly coarse,
when it is seen on a scale in which it is naturally compared with
delicate figure etchings; but considering it as a mere filling of
an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, and as one of
more than three hundred (for in my estimate I did not include
the outer pedestals), it proves very noble vitality in the art of
the time.

XXIV. I believe the right question to ask, respecting all orna-
ment, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver
happy while he was about it? It may be the hardest work
possible, and the harder because so much pleasure was taken in
it; but it must have been happy too, or it will not be living.
How much of the stone mason's toil this condition would exclude
I hardly venture to consider, but the condition is absolute.
There is a Gothic church lately built near Rouen, vile enough,
indeed, in its general composition, but excessively rich in detail;
many of the details are designed with taste, and all evidently by
a man who has studied old work closely. But it is all as dead as
leaves in December; there is not one tender touch, not one warm
stroke, on the whole façade. The men who did it hated it, and
were thankful when it was done. And so long as they do so they
are merely loading your walls with shapes of clay: the garlands
of everlastings in Père la Chaise are more cheerful ornaments.
You cannot get the feeling by paying for it—money will not buy
life. I am not sure even that you can get it by watching or
waiting for it. It is true that here and there a workman may be
found who has it in him, but he does not rest contented in the
inferior work—he struggles forward into an Academician; and
from the mass of available handicraftsmen the power is gone—how
recoverable I know not: this only I know, that all expense devoted
to sculptural ornament, in the present condition of that power,

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comes literally under the head of Sacrifice for the sacrifice's sake,
or worse. I believe the only manner of rich ornament that is
open to us is the geometrical colour-mosaic, and that much might
result from our strenuously taking up this mode of design. But,
at all events, one thing we have in our power—the doing without
machine ornament and cast-iron work. All the stamped metals,
and artificial stones, and imitation woods and bronzes, over the
invention of which we hear daily exultation—all the short, and
cheap, and easy ways of doing that whose difficulty is its honour—
are just so many new obstacles in our already encumbered road.
They will not make one of us happier or wiser—they will extend
neither the pride of judgment nor the privilege of enjoyment.
They will only make us shallower in our understandings, colder
in our hearts, and feebler in our wits. And most justly. For
we are not sent into this world to do any thing into which we
cannot put our hearts. We have certain work to do for our
bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for
our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done
by halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this
effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is
meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the
will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has
may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our
strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease
inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments
with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it
rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by
any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might,
give grinding organs to Heaven's angels, to make their music
easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and
sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the
few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life
must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time
and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the
height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the
blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel.

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CHAP. VI.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

I. AMONG the hours of his life to which the writer looks back
with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than
ordinary fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed,
now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken
masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above
the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which
has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the
Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be
manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in
the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of
those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted
and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their
strength is as yet restrained; and the far reaching ridges of
pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing
swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea.
And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony.
The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central
ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered
paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered
heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forests; no pale, defiled,
or furious rivers rend their rude and changeful ways among her
rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind
along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of
the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company
of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings
of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth
in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for
all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange

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shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood
anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulæ;
and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions
of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone
choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy
on the edges—ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and, ever and
anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places;
and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and
mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and
the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst
the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came
out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of
its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of
the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the opposite side
of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of lime-
stone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching
them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines
flickering upon his plumage from above; but with a fall of a
hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the
green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam
globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to
conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that
of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well
remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon
it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the
sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene
in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in
an instant lost their light, the river its music ¹⁵; the hills became
oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened
forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent
upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the
imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from
things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing.
Those ever springing flowers, and ever flowing streams had been
dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue;
and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening

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sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell east-
ward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of
Granson.

II. It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! —how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages.

III. It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.

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165

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathise in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering,—that this, with all the record it bare of them, and all of material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon—was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples—temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital—upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone—upon those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without

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difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar—not
merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely
with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful
foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be
deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native
ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are
the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent;
that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some
more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past
life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving
the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the
years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the
religion of home have ceased to be felt; and the crowded tenements
of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents
of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the
air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by
their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability
without the luxury of change.

IV. This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous,
infectious, and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men
do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a
sign that they have dishonoured both, and that they have never
acknowledged the true universality of that Christian worship
which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, of
the pagan. Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly
one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let men look to
it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It is not a
question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of intellectual
pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and with what
aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic buildings of
a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with
more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them
depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to
build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and
diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least
for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions,

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might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the
direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would
be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own
houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at
the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of
their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human
work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their
children what they had been, and from what, if so it had been
permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus
built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning
of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and
thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and
which invests with the dignity of contented manhood the narrow-
ness of worldly circumstance.

V. I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-pos-
session, this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of
the chief sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond
dispute as the very primal source of the great architecture of old
Italy and France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities
depends, not on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the che-
rished and exquisite decoration of even the smallest tenements
of their proud periods. The most elaborate piece of architecture
in Venice is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, con-
sisting of a ground floor with two stories above, three windows in
the first, and two in the second. Many of the most exquisite
buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger dimensions.
One of the most interesting pieces of fifteenth century architecture
in North Italy, is a small house in a back street, behind the
market-place of Vicenza; it bears date 1481, and the motto, *Il
n'est. rose. sans. épine.*; it has also only a ground floor and two
stories, with three windows in each, separated by rich flower-work,
and with balconies, supported, the central one by an eagle with
open wings, the lateral ones by winged griffins standing on cornu-
copiæ. The idea that a house must be large in order to be well
built, is altogether of modern growth, and is parallel with the

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rations afford means of expressing, either symbolically or literally,
all that need be known of national feeling or achievement. More
decoration will, indeed, be usually required than can take so ele-
vated a character; and much, even in the most thoughtful periods,
has been left to the freedom of fancy, or suffered to consist of mere
repetitions of some national bearing or symbol. It is, however,
generally unwise, even in mere surface ornament, to surrender the
power and privilege of variety which the spirit of Gothic archi-
tecture admits; much more in important features—capitals of
columns or bosses, and string-courses, as of course in all confessed
bas-reliefs. Better the rudest work that tells a story or records
a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be
a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some
intellectual intention. Actual representation of history has in
modern times been checked by a difficulty, mean indeed, but
steadfast; that of unmanageable costume: nevertheless, by a
sufficiently bold imaginative treatment, and frank use of symbols,
all such obstacles may be vanquished; not perhaps in the degree
necessary to produce sculpture in itself satisfactory, but at all
events so as to enable it to become a grand and expressive
element of architectural composition. Take, for example, the
management of the capitals of the ducal palace at Venice.
History, as such, was indeed entrusted to the painters of its
interior, but every capital of its arcades was filled with meaning.
The large one, the corner stone of the whole, next the entrance,
was devoted to the symbolisation of Abstract Justice; above it
is a sculpture of the Judgment of Solomon, remarkable for a
beautiful subjection in its treatment to its decorative purpose.
The figures, if the subject had been entirely composed of them,
would have awkwardly interrupted the line of the angle, and
diminished its apparent strength; and therefore in the midst of
them, entirely without relation to them, and indeed actually
between the executioner and interceding mother, there rises the
ribbed trunk of a massy tree, which supports and continues the
shaft of the angle, and whose leaves above overshadow and enrich
the whole. The capital below bears among its leafage a throned

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figure of Justice, Trajan doing justice to the widow, Aristotle "che die legge," and one or two other subjects now unintelligible from decay. The capitals next in order represent the virtues and vices in succession, as preservative or destructive of national peace and power, concluding with Faith, with the inscription "Fides optima in Deo est." A figure is seen on the opposite side of the capital, worshipping the sun. After these, one or two capitals are fancifully decorated with birds (Plate V.), and then come a series representing, first the various fruits, then the national costumes, and then the animals of the various countries subject to Venetian rule.

VIII. Now, not to speak of any more important public building, let us imagine our own India House adorned in this way, by historical or symbolical sculpture: massively built in the first place; then chased with bas-reliefs of our Indian battles, and fretted with carvings of Oriental foliage, or inlaid with Oriental stones; and the more important members of its decoration composed of groups of Indian life and landscape, and prominently expressing the phantasms of Hindoo worship in their subjection to the Cross. Would not one such work be better than a thousand histories? If, however, we have not the invention necessary for such efforts, or if, which is probably one of the most noble excuses we can offer for our deficiency in such matters, we have less pleasure in talking about ourselves, even in marble, than the Continental nations, at least we have no excuse for any want of care in the points which insure the building's endurance. And as this question is one of great interest in its relations to the choice of various modes of decoration, it will be necessary to enter into it at some length.

IX. The benevolent regards and purposes of men in masses seldom can be supposed to extend beyond their own generation. They may look to posterity as an audience, may hope for its attention, and labour for its praise: they may trust to its recognition of unacknowledged merit, and demand its justice for contemporary wrong. But all this is mere selfishness, and does not involve the slightest regard to, or consideration of, the in-

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171.

terest of those by whose numbers we would fain swell the circle
of our flatterers, and by whose authority we would gladly sup-
port our presently disputed claims. The idea of self-denial for
the sake of posterity, of practising present economy for the sake
of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants
may live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations
to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly
recognised motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our
duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the
range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only
the companions but the successors, of our pilgrimage. God has
lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as
much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are
already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no
right, by any thing that we do or neglect, to involve them in
unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in
our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of
the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion
to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the
fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off
we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the
witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich
will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those
that are with them as they can benefit those who come after
them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever
sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from
the grave.

X. Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect, for
futurity. Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all
true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is
the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all
other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his
Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may
not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build, let us think
that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for
present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will

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thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a
time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our
hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look
upon the labour and wrought substance of them, "See! this our
fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building
is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and
in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious
sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel
in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of
humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their
quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the
strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the
decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of
the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured
shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and fol-
lowing ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as
it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain
of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and
preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has
assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame,
and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been
witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of
death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the
natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so
much as these possess, of language and of life.

XI. For that period, then, we must build; not indeed, refusing
to ourselves the delight of present completion, nor hesitating to
follow such portions of character as may depend upon delicacy of
execution to the highest perfection of which they are capable,
even although we may know that in the course of years such
details must perish; but taking care that for work of this kind
we sacrifice no enduring quality, and that the building shall not
depend for its impressiveness upon any thing that is perishable.
This would, indeed, be the law of good composition under any
circumstances, the arrangement of the larger masses being always
a matter of greater importance than the treatment of the smaller;

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173

but in architecture there is much in that very treatment which
is skilful or otherwise in proportion to its just regard to the
probable effects of time: and (which is still more to be considered)
there is a beauty in those effects themselves, which nothing else
can replace, and which it is our wisdom to consult and to desire.
For though, hitherto, we have been speaking of the sentiment of
age only, there is an actual beauty in the marks of it, such and
so great as to have become not unfrequently the subject of
especial choice among certain schools of art, and to have im-
pressed upon those schools the character usually and loosely
expressed by the term "picturesque." It is of some importance
to our present purpose to determine the true meaning of this
expression, as it is now generally used; for there is a principle
to be developed from that use which, while it has occultly been
the ground of much that is true and just in our judgment of art,
has never been so far understood as to become definitely service-
able. Probably no word in the language, (exclusive of theolo-
gical expressions,) has been the subject of so frequent or so
prolonged dispute; yet none remain more vague in their accep-
tance, and it seems to me to be a matter of no small interest to
investigate the essence of that idea which all feel, and (to appear-
ance) with respect to similar things, and yet which every attempt
to define has, as I believe, ended either in mere enumeration of
the effects and objects to which the term has been attached, or
else in attempts at abstraction more palpably nugatory than any
which have disgraced metaphysical investigation on other subjects.
A recent critic on Art, for instance, has gravely advanced the
theory that the essence of the picturesque consists in the ex-
pression of "universal decay." It would be curious to see the
result of an attempt to illustrate this idea of the picturesque, in a
painting of dead flowers and decayed fruit; and equally curious to
trace the steps of any reasoning which, on such a theory, should
account for the picturesqueness of an ass colt as opposed to a
horse foal. But there is much excuse for even the most utter
failure in reasonings of this kind, since the subject is, indeed, one
of the most obscure of all that may legitimately be submitted to

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human reason; and the idea is itself so varied in the minds of different men, according to their subjects of study, that no definition can be expected to embrace more than a certain number of its infinitely multiplied forms.

XII. That peculiar character, however, which separates the picturesque from the characters of subject belonging to the higher walks of art (and this is all that it is necessary for our present purpose to define), may be shortly and decisively expressed. Picturesqueness, in this sense, is *Parasitical Sublimity*. Of course all sublimity, as well as all beauty is, in the simple etymological sense, picturesque, that is to say, fit to become the subject of a picture; and all sublimity is, even in the peculiar sense which I am endeavouring to develope, picturesque, as opposed to beauty; that is to say, there is more picturesqueness in the subject of Michael Angelo than of Perugino, in proportion to the prevalence of the sublime element over the beautiful. But that character, of which the extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be degrading to art, is *parasitical* sublimity; i. e., a sublimity dependent on the accidents, or on the least essential characters, of the objects to which it belongs; and the picturesque is *developed distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of thought of those points of character in which the sublimity is found*. Two ideas, therefore, are essential to picturesqueness, — the first, that of sublimity (for pure beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so only as the sublime element mixes with it), and the second, the subordinate or parasitical position of that sublimity. Of course, therefore, whatever characters of line or shade or expression are productive of sublimity, will become productive of picturesqueness: what these characters are I shall endeavour hereafter to show at length; but, among those which are generally acknowledged, I may name angular and broken lines, vigorous oppositions of light and shadow, and grave, deep, or boldly contrasted colour; and all these are in a still higher degree effective, when, by resemblance or association, they remind us of objects on which a true and essential sublimity exists, as of rocks or mountains, or stormy clouds or waves. Now if these characters, or

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any others of a higher and more abstract sublimity, be found in
the very heart and substance of what we contemplate, as the sub-
limity of Michael Angelo depends on the expression of mental
character in his figures far more than even on the noble lines of
their arrangement, the art which represents such characters cannot
be properly called picturesque: but, if they be found in the
accidental or external qualities, the distinctive picturesque will be
the result.

XIII. Thus, in the treatment of the features of the human face
by Francia or Angelico, the shadows are employed only to make
the contours of the features thoroughly felt; and to those features
themselves the mind of the observer is exclusively directed (that
is to say, to the essential characters of the thing represented).
All power and all sublimity rest on these; the shadows are used
only for the sake of the features. On the contrary, by Rembrandt,
Salvator, or Caravaggio, the features are used for the sake of the
shadows; and the attention is directed, and the power of the painter
addressed, to characters of accidental light and shade cast across or
around those features. In the case of Rembrandt there is often an
essential sublimity in invention and expression besides, and always
a high degree of it in the light and shade itself; but it is, for the
most part, parasitical or engrafted sublimity as regards the subject
of the painting, and, just so far, picturesque.

XIV. Again, in the management of the sculptures of the
Parthenon, shadow is frequently employed as a dark field on
which the forms are drawn. This is visibly the case in the
metopes, and must have been nearly as much so in the pediment.
But the use of that shadow is entirely to show the confines of
the figures; and it is to their lines, and not to the shapes of the
shadows behind them, that the art and the eye are addressed.
The figures themselves are conceived, as much as possible, in full
light, aided by bright reflections; they are drawn exactly as, on
vases, white figures on a dark ground; and the sculptors have
dispensed with, or even struggled to avoid, all shadows which
were not absolutely necessary to the explaining of the form. On
the contrary, in Gothic sculpture, the shadow becomes itself a

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subject of thought. It is considered as a dark colour, to be
arranged in certain agreeable masses; the figures are very fre-
quently made even subordinate to the placing of its divisions:
and their costume is enriched at the expense of the forms
underneath, in order to increase the complexity and variety of
the points of shade. There are thus, both in sculpture and
painting, two, in some sort, opposite schools, of which the one
follows for its subject the essential forms of things, and the
other the accidental lights and shades upon them. There are
various degrees of their contrariety: middle steps, as in the
works of Correggio, and all degrees of nobility and of degradation
in the several manners: but the one is always recognised as the
pure, and the other as the picturesque school. Portions of
picturesque treatment will be found in Greek work, and of pure
and unpicturesque in Gothic; and in both there are countless
instances, as pre-eminently in the works of Michael Angelo, in
which shadows become valuable as media of expression, and
therefore take rank among essential characteristics. Into these
multitudinous distinctions and exceptions I cannot now enter,
desiring only to prove the broad applicability of the general
definition.

XV. Again, the distinction will be found to exist, not only
between forms and shades as subjects of choice, but between
essential and inessential forms. One of the chief distinctions
between the dramatic and picturesque schools of sculpture is
found in the treatment of the hair. By the artists of the time
of Pericles it was considered as an excrescence¹⁶, indicated by
few and rude lines, and subordinated, in every particular, to the
principality of the features and person. How completely this
was an artistical, not a national idea, it is unnecessary to prove.
We need but remember the employment of the Lacedæmonians,
reported by the Persian spy on the evening before the battle of
Thermopylæ, or glance at any Homeric description of ideal form,
to see how purely *sculpturesque* was the law which reduced the
markings of the hair, lest, under the necessary disadvantages of
material, they should interfere with the distinctness of the per-

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sonal forms. On the contrary, in later sculpture, the hair receives almost the principal care of the workman; and, while the features and limbs are clumsily and bluntly executed, the hair is curled and twisted, cut into bold and shadowy projections, and arranged in masses elaborately ornamental: there is true sublimity in the lines and the chiaroscuro of these masses, but it is, as regards the creature represented, parasitical, and therefore picturesque. In the same sense we may understand the application of the term to modern animal painting, distinguished as it has been by peculiar attention to the colours, lustre, and texture of skin; nor is it in art alone that the definition will hold. In animals themselves, when their sublimity depends upon their muscular forms or motions, or necessary and principal attributes, as perhaps more than all others in the horse, we do not call them picturesque, but consider them as peculiarly fit to be associated with pure historical subject. Exactly in proportion as their character of sublimity passes into excrescences;—into mane and beard as in the lion, into horns as in the stag, into shaggy hide as in the instance above given of the ass colt, into variegation as in the zebra, or into plumage,—they become picturesque, and are so in art exactly in proportion to the prominence of these excrescential characters. It may often be most expedient that they should be prominent; often there is in them the highest degree of majesty, as in those of the leopard and boar; and in the hands of men like Tintoret and Rubens, such attributes become means of deepening the very highest and most ideal impressions. But the picturesque direction of their thoughts is always distinctly recognizable, as clinging to the surface, to the less essential character, and as developing out of this a sublimity different from that of the creature itself; a sublimity which is, in a sort, common to all the objects of creation, and the same in its constituent elements, whether it be sought in the clefts and folds of shaggy hair, or in the chasms and rents of rocks, or in the hanging of thickets or hill sides, or in the alternations of gaiety and gloom in the variegation of the shell, the plume, or the cloud.

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XVI. Now, to return to our immediate subject, it so happens that, in architecture, the superinduced and accidental beauty is most commonly inconsistent with the preservation of original character, and the picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and supposed to consist in decay. Whereas, even when so sought, it consists in the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation, which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature, and bestow upon it those circumstances of colour and form which are universally beloved by the eye of man. So far as this is done, to the extinction of the true characters of the architecture, it is picturesque, and the artist who looks to the stem of the ivy instead of the shaft of the pillar, is carrying out in more daring freedom the debased sculptor's choice of the hair instead of the countenance. But so far as it can be rendered consistent with the inherent character, the picturesque or extraneous sublimity of architecture has just this of nobler function in it than that of any other object whatsoever, that it is an exponent of age, of that in which, as has been said, the greatest glory of the building consists; and, therefore, the external signs of this glory, having power and purpose greater than any belonging to their mere sensible beauty, may be considered as taking rank among pure and essential characters; so essential to my mind, that I think a building cannot be considered as in its prime until four or five centuries have passed over it; and that the entire choice and arrangement of its details should have reference to their appearance after that period, so that none should be admitted which would suffer material injury either by the weather-staining, or the mechanical degradation which the lapse of such a period would necessitate.

XVII. It is not my purpose to enter into any of the questions which the application of this principle involves. They are of too great interest and complexity to be even touched upon within my present limits, but this is broadly to be noticed, that those styles of architecture which are picturesque in the sense above explained with respect to sculpture, that is to say, whose decoration depends on the arrangement of points of shade rather than on

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purity of outline, do not suffer, but commonly gain in richness of effect when their details are partly worn away; hence such styles, pre-eminently that of French Gothic, should always be adopted when the materials to be employed are liable to degradation, as brick, sandstone, or soft limestone; and styles in any degree dependent on purity of line, as the Italian Gothic, must be practised altogether in hard and undecomposing materials, granite, serpentine, or crystalline marbles. There can be no doubt that the nature of the accessible materials influenced the formation of both styles; and it should still more authoritatively determine our choice of either.

XVIII. It does not belong to my present plan to consider at length the second head of duty of which I have above spoken; the preservation of the architecture we possess: but a few words may be forgiven, as especially necessary in modern times. Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word *restoration* understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is *impossible*, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have above insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, never can be recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a new building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up, and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts. And as for direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can there be of surfaces that have been worn half an inch down? The whole finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone; if you attempt to restore that finish, you do it conjecturally; if you copy what is left, granting fidelity to be possible, (and what care, or watchfulness, or cost can secure it,) how is the new work better than the old? There was yet in the old *some* life, some mysterious suggestion of

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what it had been, and of what it had lost; some sweetness in the
gentle lines which rain and sun had wrought. There can be none
in the brute hardness of the new carving. Look at the animals
which I have given in Plate 14., as an instance of living work,
and suppose the markings of the scales and hair once worn away,
or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall ever restore them? The
first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and that again and again—
seen it on the Baptistery of Pisa, seen it on the Casa d'Oro at
Venice, seen it on the Cathedral of Lisieux,) is to dash the old
work to pieces; the second is usually to put up the cheapest and
basest imitation which can escape detection, but in all cases, how-
ever careful, and however laboured, an imitation still, a cold model
of such parts as can be modelled, with conjectural supplements;
and my experience has as yet furnished me with only one instance,
that of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, in which even this, the
utmost degree of fidelity which is possible, has been attained, or
even attempted.

XIX. Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a
Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building
as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of
the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with
what advantage I neither see nor care: but the old building is
destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had
sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has
been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of
re-built Milan. But, it is said, there may come a necessity for
restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and
understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction.
Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into
neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will;
but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place. And
look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may
prevent it. The principle of modern times, (a principle which,
I believe, at least in France, to be systematically acted on by the
masons, in order to find themselves work, as the abbey of St. Ouen
was pulled down by the magistrates of the town by way of giving

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work to some vagrants,) is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards. Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will still be born and pass away beneath its shadow. Its evil day must come at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.

XX. Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will not reach those who commit them, and yet, be it heard or not, I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in them: that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to throw down; but what other men gave their strength and wealth and life to accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death: still less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us only. It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject of sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted our present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to dispense with. That sorrow, that loss, we have no right to inflict. Did the cathedral of Avranches

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belong to the mob who destroyed it, any more than it did to us,
who walk in sorrow to and fro over its foundation? Neither does
any building whatever belong to those mobs who do violence to
it. For a mob it is, and must be always; it matters not whether
enraged, or in deliberate folly; whether countless, or sitting in
committees; the people who destroy anything causelessly are a
mob, and Architecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair
building is necessarily worth the ground it stands upon, and will
be so until Central Africa and America shall have become as
populous as Middlesex; nor is any cause whatever valid as a
ground for its destruction. If ever valid, certainly not now,
when the place both of the past and future is too much usurped
in our minds by the restless and discontented present. The very
quietness of nature is gradually withdrawn from us; thousands
who once in their necessarily prolonged travel were subjected
to an influence, from the silent sky and slumbering fields, more
effectual than known or confessed, now bear with them even there
the ceaseless fever of their life; and along the iron veins that
traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery
pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality
is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central
cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow
bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds
upon the city gates. The only influence which can in any wise
*there* take the place of that of the woods and fields, is the power of
ancient Architecture. Do not part with it for the sake of the
formal square, or of the fenced and planted walk, nor of the goodly
street nor opened quay. The pride of a city is not in these.
Leave them to the crowd; but remember that there will surely
be some within the circuit of the disquieted walls who would
ask for some other spots than these wherein to walk; for some
other forms to meet their sight familiarly: like him who sat so
often where the sun struck from the west, to watch the lines of
the dome of Florence drawn on the deep sky, or like those, his
Hosts, who could bear daily to behold, from their palace chambers,
the places where their fathers lay at rest, at the meeting of the
dark streets of Verona.

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## CHAP. VII.

### THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

I. IT has been my endeavour to show in the preceding pages how every form of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations. Once or twice in doing this, I have named a principle to which I would now assign a definite place among those which direct that embodiment; the last place, not only as that to which its own humility would incline, but rather as belonging to it in the aspect of the crowning grace of all the rest: that principle, I mean, to which Polity owes its stability, Life its happiness, Faith its acceptance, Creation its continuance, — Obedience.

Nor is it the least among the sources of more serious satisfaction which I have found in the pursuit of a subject that at first appeared to bear but slightly on the grave interests of mankind, that the conditions of material perfection which it leads me in conclusion to consider, furnish a strange proof how false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

In one of the noblest poems¹⁷ for its imagery and its music belonging to the recent school of our literature, the writer has sought in the aspect of inanimate nature the expression of that Liberty which, having once loved, he had seen among men in its true dyes of darkness. But with what strange fallacy of inter-

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pretation! since in one noble line of his invocation he has contradicted the assumptions of the rest, and acknowledged the presence of a subjection, surely not less severe because eternal. How could he otherwise? since if there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom, of the visible creation, that principle is not Liberty, but Law.

II. The enthusiast would reply that by Liberty he meant the Law of Liberty. Then why use the single and misunderstood word? If by liberty you mean chastisement of the passions, discipline of the intellect, subjection of the will; if you mean the fear of inflicting, the shame of committing, a wrong; if you mean respect for all who are in authority, and consideration for all who are in dependence; veneration for the good, mercy to the evil, sympathy with the weak; if you mean watchfulness over all thoughts, temperance in all pleasures, and perseverance in all toils; if you mean, in a word, that Service which is defined in the liturgy of the English church to be perfect Freedom, why do you name this by the same word by which the luxurious mean license, and the reckless mean change; by which the rogue means rapine, and the fool, equality; by which the proud mean anarchy, and the malignant mean violence? Call it by any name rather than this, but its best and truest, is Obedience. Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus, while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their Restraint. Compare a river that has burst its banks with one that is bound by them, and the clouds that are scattered over the face of the whole heaven with those that are marshalled into ranks and orders by its winds. So that though restraint, utter and unre-laxing, can never be comely, this is not because it is in itself an evil, but only because, when too great, it overpowers the nature of the thing restrained, and so counteracts the other laws of which that nature is itself composed. And the balance wherein consists

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the fairness of creation is between the laws of life and being in
the things governed, and the laws of general sway to which they
are subjected; and the suspension or infringement of either kind
of law, or, literally, disorder, is equivalent to, and synonymous
with, disease; while the increase of both honour and beauty is
habitually on the side of restraint (or the action of superior law)
rather than of character (or the action of inherent law). The
noblest word in the catalogue of social virtue is "Loyalty," and
the sweetest which men have learned in the pastures of the
wilderness is "Fold."

III. Nor is this all; but we may observe, that exactly in
proportion to the majesty of things in the scale of being, is the
completeness of their obedience to the laws that are set over them.
Gravitation is less quietly, less instantly obeyed by a grain of dust
than it is by the sun and moon; and the ocean falls and flows
under influences which the lake and river do not recognise. So
also in estimating the dignity of any action or occupation of men,
there is perhaps no better test than the question "are its laws
strait?" For their severity will probably be commensurate with
the greatness of the numbers whose labour it concentrates or
whose interest it concerns.

This severity must be singular, therefore, in the case of that
art, above all others, whose productions are the most vast and
the most common; which requires for its practice the co-
operation of bodies of men, and for its perfection the perse-
verance of successive generations. And, taking into account
also what we have before so often observed of Architecture, her
continual influence over the emotions of daily life, and her
realism, as opposed to the two sister arts which are in comparison
but the picturing of stories and of dreams, we might beforehand
expect that we should find her healthy state and action dependent
on far more severe laws than theirs: that the license which they
extend to the workings of individual mind would be withdrawn
by her; and that, in assertion of the relations which she holds with
all that is universally important to man, she would set forth, by
her own majestic subjection, some likeness of that on which man's

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social happiness and power depend. We might, therefore, without
the light of experience, conclude, that Architecture never could
flourish except when it was subjected to a national law as strict
and as minutely authoritative as the laws which regulate religion,
policy, and social relations; nay, even more authoritative than
these, because both capable of more enforcement, as over more
passive matter; and needing more enforcement, as the purest type
not of one law nor of another, but of the common authority of all.
But in this matter experience speaks more loudly than reason.
If there be any one condition which, in watching the progress of
architecture, we see distinct and general; if, amidst the counter-
evidence of success attending opposite accidents of character and
circumstance, any one conclusion may be constantly and indispu-
tably drawn, it is this; that the architecture of a nation is great
only when it is as universal and as established as its language; and
when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many
dialects. Other necessities are matters of doubt: nations have
been alike successful in their architecture in times of poverty and
of wealth; in times of war and of peace; in times of barbarism and
of refinement; under governments the most liberal or the most
arbitrary; but this one condition has been constant, this one
requirement clear in all places and at all times, that the work
shall be that of a school, that no individual caprice shall dispense
with, or materially vary, accepted types and customary decorations;
and that from the cottage to the palace, and from the chapel to
the basilica, and from the garden fence to the fortress wall,
every member and feature of the architecture of the nation shall
be as commonly current, as frankly accepted, as its language
or its coin.

IV. A day never passes without our hearing our English
architects called upon to be original, and to invent a new style:
about as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man
who has never had rags enough on his back to keep out cold, to
invent a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole coat
first, and let him concern himself about the fashion of it after-
wards. We want no new style of architecture. Who wants a

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new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. It is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman or Saxon, or Norman, or English laws. But it is of considerable importance that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another, and that code accepted and enforced from one side of the island to another, and not one law made ground of judgment at York and another in Exeter. And in like manner it does not matter one marble splinter whether we have an old or new architecture, but it matters everything whether we have an architecture truly so called or not; that is, whether an architecture whose laws might be taught at our schools from Cornwall to Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English grammar, or an architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or a parish school. There seems to me to be a wonderful misunderstanding among the majority of architects of the present day as to the very nature and meaning of Originality, and of all wherein it consists. Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colours, or new modes of using them. The chords of music, the harmonies of colour, the general principles of the arrangement of sculptural masses, have been determined long ago, and, in all probability, cannot be added to any more than they can be altered. Granting that they may be, such additions or alterations are much more the work of time and of multitudes than of individual inventors. We may have one Van Eyck, who will be known as the introducer of a new style once in ten centuries, but he himself will trace his invention to some accidental by-play or pursuit; and the use of that invention will depend altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of the period. Originality depends on nothing of the kind. A man who has the gift, will take up any style that is going, the style of his day, and will work in that, and be great in that, and make everything that he does in it look as fresh as if every thought of it had just come down from heaven. I do not say that he will