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Title: The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (of 3),

Author: John Ruskin

Release date: December 31, 2009 [eBook #30755]

Language: English

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Volume I

Volume III

Library Edition

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

JOHN RUSKIN

STONES OF VENICE
Volumes I-II

NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK CHICAGO

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

JOHN RUSKIN

VOLUME VIII

STONES OF VENICE

VOLUME II

THE

STONES OF VENICE
VOLUME II.

THE SEA STORIES

ADVERTISEMENT.

It was originally intended that this Work should consist of two volumes only;
the subject has extended to three. The second volume, however, will conclude the
account of the ancient architecture of Venice. The third will embrace the Early, the
Roman, and the Grotesque Renaissance; and an Index, which, as it gives, in
alphabetical order, a brief account of all the buildings in Venice, or references to
the places where they are mentioned in the text, will be found a convenient guide
for the traveller. In order to make it more serviceable, I have introduced some
notices of the pictures which I think most interesting in the various churches, and
in the Scuola di San Rocco.

CONTENTS.

FIRST, OR BYZANTINE, PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.
page

The Throne, 1
CHAPTER II.
Torcello, 11
CHAPTER III.
Murano, 27
CHAPTER IV.
St. Mark’s, 57
CHAPTER V.
Byzantine Palaces, 118

SECOND, OR GOTHIC, PERIOD.

CHAPTER VI.
The Nature of Gothic, 151
CHAPTER VII.
Gothic Palaces, 231
CHAPTER VIII.
The Ducal Palace, 281

APPENDIX.

1. The Gondolier’s Cry, 375
2. Our Lady of Salvation, 378
3. Tides of Venice and Measures at Torcello, 378
4. Date of the Duomo of Torcello, 380
5. Modern Pulpits, 380
6. Apse of Murano, 382
7. Early Venetian Dress, 383

8. Inscriptions at Murano, 384
9. Shafts of St. Mark’s, 384
10. Proper Sense of the Word Idolatry, 388
11. Situations of Byzantine Palaces, 391
12. Modern Paintings on Glass, 394

LIST OF PLATES.

Facing Page

Plate 1. Plans of Torcello and Murano, 14
" 2. The Acanthus of Torcello, 15
" 3. Inlaid Bands of Murano, 40
" 4. Sculptures of Murano, 42
" 5. Archivolt in the Duomo of Murano, 45
" 6. The Vine, Free and in Service, 96
" 7. Byzantine Capitals—Convex Group, 131
" 8. Byzantine Capitals—Concave Group, 132
" 9. Lily Capital of St. Mark’s, 136
" 10. The Four Venetian Flower Order, 137
" 11. Byzantine Sculptures, 138
" 12. Linear and Surface Gothic, 224
" 13. Balconies, 247
" 14. The Orders of Venetian Arches, 248
" 15. Windows of the Second Order, 254
" 16. Windows of the Fourth Order, 257
" 17. Windows of the Early Gothic Palaces, 259

" 18. Windows of the Fifth Order, 266
" 19. Leafage of the Vine Angle, 308
" 20. Leafage of the Venetian Capitals, 368

THE

STONES OF VENICE.

FIRST, OR BYZANTINE, PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.

THE THRONE.

§ I. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance
could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly
by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay,
and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest,
scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-
for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers
of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful
pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not
always, or to all men, an equivalent,—in those days, I say, when there was
something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by
the traveller than that which, as I endeavored to describe in the close of the last
chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was
generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its
buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but
this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the
strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep
sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the
shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling

lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed
separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the
advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose
bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as
bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa,
but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a
strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished
gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly
named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast
which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored
line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its
northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids,
balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of
inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole
horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its
clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore,
and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon
its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred
clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until
the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the
campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the
waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at
last, when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was
entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between
two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller’s sight opened
the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its black boat moored at the
portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement
which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the
extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly
forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate,
so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when

first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier’s cry, “Ah!
Stalí,”1 struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty
cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water
followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat’s side; and when at
last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of
the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our
Lady of Salvation,2 it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced
by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the
darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had
owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive;
that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state,
rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or
merciless,—Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,—had been won
to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that
beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as
well as of the sea.

§ II. And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the face of
the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on Venice than the five
hundred that preceded them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can
now be seen no more, or seen only by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing
on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in
desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn
away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut his eyes to
the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts
the great charities of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no
power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is
ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so
surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there must be no
permission during the task which is before us. The impotent feelings of romance,
so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the
remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers;

and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them
as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are
fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the
objects to which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction
and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream
which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name
is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that
“Bridge of Sighs,” which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great
merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with
breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his
great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after
Faliero’s death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely
altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or Francis
Foscari could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his
galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter’s
favorite subject, the novelist’s favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the
steps of the Church of La Salute,—the mighty Doges would not know in what
spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great
city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their grey hairs had been brought
down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their Venice lie hidden behind
the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in
many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow
waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon
prevail over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth, and
restore out of them some faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a thousand-
fold than that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor
by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts,
contending against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that its
wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after
frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless
tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long denied
her dominion.

§ III. When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop formed by
the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the great basin of
Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself causes a vast difference
in the character of the distribution of its débris on its opposite sides. The rock
fragments and sediment which the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into
the plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to appear
from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the southern side
of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apennines, meet
concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; every
fragment which thunder breaks out of their battlements, and every grain of dust
which the summer rain washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue
sweep of the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky
barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which continually
depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of the ruins of ages.

§ IV. I will not tax the reader’s faith in modern science by insisting on the
singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many centuries
to have taken place steadily and continually; the main fact with which we have to
do is the gradual transport, by the Po and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses
of the finer sediment to the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most
strikingly expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part
of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick; and was
curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown up
four or five feet high round every field, to check the Austrian cavalry in the battle
under the walls of Verona. The finer dust among which these pebbles are
dispersed is taken up by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow,
so that, however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the
foot of the great chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay before they
reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown down as they
enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the eastern coast of Italy. The
powerful stream of the Po of course builds forward the fastest; on each side of it,

north and south, there is a tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less
liable to rapid change than the delta of the central river. In one of these tracts is
built Ravenna, and in the other Venice.

§ V. What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this great belt of
sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place to inquire. It is enough for us
to know that from the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at
a variable distance of from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of
sand, divided into long islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this
bank and the true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighborhood of Venice, by
the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot or a foot and a half, and
nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but divided by an intricate network of
narrow and winding channels, from which the sea never retires. In some places,
according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets,
consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built
upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not
reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter
among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of
these, increased in importance by the confluence of several large river channels
towards one of the openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a
crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which appear to the
north and south of this central cluster, have at different periods been also thickly
inhabited, and now bear, according to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or
isolated convents and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly
waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.

§ VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying
considerably with the seasons3); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause
continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a reflux
which frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land is visible for many
miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned
with towers or gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide,

between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and
the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic,
but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city’s having been
built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its true position is partly, yet
not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water
channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge
sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that
flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow
sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty
inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the
complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of
gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its
associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and
sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels,
seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the
heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear
sea water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the
ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the
banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain
sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this
day, when every plot of higher ground bears some fragment of fair building: but,
in order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening
the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy
plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that still
extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the islands that are
near; and so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are
withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness
beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful
silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds
flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in
some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by
man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the
sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the

princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws
that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange preparation
had been made for the things which no human imagination could have foretold,
and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated
or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had
deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have
reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all
the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been
exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no
tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would
have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the
tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the
doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is sometimes
a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting foot upon the lower and
slippery steps: and the highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow
the entrance halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the
flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a
treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for
the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away
with. The streets of the city would have been widened, its network of canals filled
up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.

§ VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this
faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic conception of it
which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than
counterbalanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at once of the
inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago,
we had been permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid
rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the
lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the
purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid
waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have
known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and

objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are
all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were
stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter
grass among their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and the only
preparation possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden
clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-
surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in worldwide
pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the burning heart of her
Fortitude and Splendor.

1 Appendix 1, “The Gondolier’s Cry.”

2 Appendix 2, “Our Lady of Salvation.”

3 Appendix 3, “Tides of Venice.”

CHAPTER II.

TORCELLO.

§ I. Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city
rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit
themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless
mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these
inlets, after winding for some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots
of sunburnt weeds whitened with webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant
pool beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On this
mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which
if we ascend towards evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of its
ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from it one of

the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. Far as the eye can reach, a
waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen grey; not like our northern moors with
their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the
corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming
hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor
coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm
sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom. To the very horizon,
on the north-east; but, to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land
along the border of it, and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains,
touched with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at
momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bars of sand; to the south, the
widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they
reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the
same field which sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings, two
of them little larger than cottages (though built of stone, and one adorned by a
quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more
than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable church with
nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see little but the long central
ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing mass
from the green field beneath and grey moor beyond. There are no living creatures
near the buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie
like a little company of ships becalmed on a far-away sea.

§ II. Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the
lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there are a
multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of clustered
palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the southern sky.

Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood,—Torcello
and Venice.

Thirteen hundred years ago, the grey moorland looked as it does this day, and
the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening; but on
the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and

the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their
ridges of sand. The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the
multitude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the
paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they left; the
mower’s scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of the city that they
built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending up their scent into the night
air, the only incense that fills the temple of their ancient worship. Let us go down
into that little space of meadow land.

§ III. The inlet which runs nearest to the base of the campanile is not that by
which Torcello is commonly approached. Another, somewhat broader, and
overhung by alder copse, winds out of the main channel of the lagoon up to the
very edge of the little meadow which was once the Piazza of the city, and there,
stayed by a few grey stones which present some semblance of a quay, forms its
boundary at one extremity. Hardly larger than an ordinary English farmyard, and
roughly enclosed on each side by broken palings and hedges of honeysuckle and
briar, the narrow field retires from the water’s edge, traversed by a scarcely
traceable footpath, for some forty or fifty paces, and then expanding into the form
of a small square, with buildings on three sides of it, the fourth being that which
opens to the water. Two of these, that on our left and that in front of us as we
approach from the canal, are so small that they might well be taken for the out-
houses of the farm, though the first is a conventual building, and the other aspires
to the title of the “Palazzo publico,” both dating as far back as the beginning of the
fourteenth century; the third, the octagonal church of Santa Fosca, is far more
ancient than either, yet hardly on a larger scale. Though the pillars of the portico
which surrounds it are of pure Greek marble, and their capitals are enriched with
delicate sculpture, they, and the arches they sustain, together only raise the roof to
the height of a cattle-shed; and the first strong impression which the spectator
receives from the whole scene is, that whatever sin it may have been which has on
this spot been visited with so utter a desolation, it could not at least have been
ambition. Nor will this impression be diminished as we approach, or enter, the
larger church to which the whole group of building is subordinate. It has evidently

been built by men in flight and distress,4 who sought in the hurried erection of
their island church such a shelter for their earnest and sorrowful worship as, on the
one hand, could not attract the eyes of their enemies by its splendor, and yet, on
the other, might not awaken too bitter feelings by its contrast with the churches
which they had seen destroyed. There is visible everywhere a simple and tender
effort to recover some of the form of the temples which they had loved, and to do
honor to God by that which they were erecting, while distress and humiliation
prevented the desire, and prudence precluded the admission, either of luxury of
ornament or magnificence of plan. The exterior is absolutely devoid of decoration,
with the exception only of the western entrance and the lateral door, of which the
former has carved sideposts and architrave, and the latter, crosses of rich
sculpture; while the massy stone shutters of the windows, turning on huge rings of
stone, which answer the double purpose of stanchions and brackets, cause the
whole building rather to resemble a refuge from Alpine storm than the cathedral of
a populous city; and, internally, the two solemn mosaics of the eastern and
western extremities,—one representing the Last Judgment, the other the Madonna,
her tears falling as her hands are raised to bless,—and the noble range of pillars
which enclose the space between, terminated by the high throne for the pastor and
the semicircular raised seats for the superior clergy, are expressive at once of the
deep sorrow and the sacred courage of men who had no home left them upon
earth, but who looked for one to come, of men “persecuted but not forsaken, cast
down but not destroyed.”

§ IV. I am not aware of any other early church in Italy which has this peculiar
expression in so marked a degree; and it is so consistent with all that Christian
architecture ought to express in every age (for the actual condition of the exiles
who built the cathedral of Torcello is exactly typical of the spiritual condition
which every Christian ought to recognize in himself, a state of homelessness on
earth, except so far as he can make the Most High his habitation), that I would
rather fix the mind of the reader on this general character than on the separate
details, however interesting, of the architecture itself. I shall therefore examine
these only so far as is necessary to give a clear idea of the means by which the
peculiar expression of the building is attained.

I.

PLANS OF TORCELLO AND MURANO.

§ V. On the opposite page, the uppermost figure, 1, is a rude plan of the church.
I do not answer for the thickness and external disposition of the walls, which are
not to our present purpose, and which I have not carefully examined; but the
interior arrangement is given with sufficient accuracy. The church is built on the
usual plan of the Basilica5 that is to say, its body divided into a nave and aisles by

two rows of massive shafts, the roof of the nave being raised high above the aisles
by walls sustained on two ranks of pillars, and pierced with small arched
windows. At Torcello the aisles are also lighted in the same manner, and the nave
is nearly twice their breadth.6

II.

THE ACANTHUS OF TORCELLO.

The capitals of all the great shafts are of white marble, and are among the best I
have ever seen, as examples of perfectly calculated effect from every touch of the
chisel. Mr. Hope calls them “indifferently imitated from the Corinthian:”7 but the
expression is as inaccurate as it is unjust; every one of them is different in design,
and their variations are as graceful as they are fanciful. I could not, except by an
elaborate drawing, give any idea of the sharp, dark, deep penetrations of the chisel
into their snowy marble, but a single example is given in the opposite plate, fig. 1,
of the nature of the changes effected in them from the Corinthian type. In this
capital, although a kind of acanthus (only with rounded lobes) is indeed used for
the upper range of leaves, the lower range is not acanthus at all, but a kind of vine,
or at least that species of plant which stands for vine in all early Lombardic and
Byzantine work (vide Vol. I. Appendix 8); the leaves are trefoiled, and the stalks
cut clear so that they might be grasped with the hand, and cast sharp dark
shadows, perpetually changing, across the bell of the capital behind them. I have
drawn one of these vine plants larger in fig. 2, that the reader may see how little
imitation of the Corinthian there is in them, and how boldly the stems of the
leaves are detached from the ground. But there is another circumstance in this
ornament still more noticeable. The band which encircles the shaft beneath the
spring of the leaves is copied from the common classical wreathed or braided
fillet, of which the reader may see examples on almost every building of any
pretensions in modern London. But the mediæval builders could not be content
with the dead and meaningless scroll: the Gothic energy and love of life, mingled
with the early Christian religious symbolism, were struggling daily into more
vigorous expression, and they turned the wreathed band into a serpent of three
times the length necessary to undulate round the shaft, which, knotting itself into a
triple chain, shows at one side of the shaft its tail and head, as if perpetually
gliding round it beneath the stalks of the vines. The vine, as is well known, was
one of the early symbols of Christ, and the serpent is here typical either of the
eternity of his dominion, or of the Satanic power subdued.

§ VI. Nor even when the builder confines himself to the
acanthus leaf (or to that representation of it, hereafter to be
more particularly examined, constant in Romanesque work)

Fig. 1. can his imagination allow him to rest content with its
accustomed position. In a common Corinthian capital the
leaves nod forward only, thrown out on every side from the bell which they
surround: but at the base of one of the capitals on the opposite side of the nave
from this of the vines,8 two leaves are introduced set with their sides outwards,
forming spirals by curling back, half-closed, in the position shown in fig. 4 in
Plate II., there represented as in a real acanthus leaf; for it will assist our future
inquiries into the ornamentation of capitals that the reader should be acquainted
with the form of the acanthus leaf itself. I have drawn it, therefore, in the two
positions, figs. 3 and 4 in Plate II.; while fig. 5 is the translation of the latter form
into marble by the sculptor of Torcello. It is not very like the acanthus, but much
liker than any Greek work; though still entirely conventional in its cinquefoiled
lobes. But these are disposed with the most graceful freedom of line, separated at
the roots by deep drill holes, which tell upon the eye far away like beads of jet;
and changed, before they become too crowded to be effective, into a vigorous and
simple zigzagged edge, which saves the designer some embarrassment in the
perspective of the terminating spiral. But his feeling of nature was greater than his
knowledge of perspective; and it is delightful to see how he has rooted the whole
leaf in the strong rounded under-stem, the indication of its closing with its face
inwards, and has thus given organization and elasticity to the lovely group of
spiral lines; a group of which, even in the lifeless sea-shell, we are never weary,
but which becomes yet more delightful when the ideas of elasticity and growth are
joined to the sweet succession of its involution.

§ VII. It is not, however, to be expected that either the mute language of early
Christianity (however important a part of the expression of the building at the time
of its erection), or the delicate fancies of the Gothic leafage springing into new
life, should be read, or perceived, by the passing traveller who has never been
taught to expect anything in architecture except five orders: yet he can hardly fail
to be struck by the simplicity and dignity of the great shafts themselves; by the
frank diffusion of light, which prevents their severity from becoming oppressive;
by the delicate forms and lovely carving of the pulpit and chancel screen; and,
above all, by the peculiar aspect of the eastern extremity of the church, which,

instead of being withdrawn, as in later cathedrals, into a chapel dedicated to the
Virgin, or contributing by the brilliancy of its windows to the splendor of the altar,
and theatrical effect of the ceremonies performed there, is a simple and stern
semicircular recess, filled beneath by three ranks of seats, raised one above the
other, for the bishop and presbyters, that they might watch as well as guide the
devotions of the people, and discharge literally in the daily service the functions of
bishops or overseers of the flock of God.

§ VIII. Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession; and first
(for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this
church, its luminousness. This perhaps strikes the traveller more from its contrast
with the excessive gloom of the Church of St. Mark’s; but it is remarkable when
we compare the Cathedral of Torcello with any of the contemporary basilicas in
South Italy or Lombardic churches in the North. St. Ambrogio at Milan, St.
Michele at Pavia, St. Zeno at Verona, St. Frediano at Lucca, St. Miniato at
Florence, are all like sepulchral caverns compared with Torcello, where the
slightest details of the sculptures and mosaics are visible, even when twilight is
deepening. And there is something especially touching in our finding the sunshine
thus freely admitted into a church built by men in sorrow. They did not need the
darkness; they could not perhaps bear it. There was fear and depression upon them
enough, without a material gloom. They sought for comfort in their religion, for
tangible hopes and promises, not for threatenings or mysteries; and though the
subjects chosen for the mosaics on the walls are of the most solemn character,
there are no artificial shadows cast upon them, nor dark colors used in them: all is
fair and bright, and intended evidently to be regarded in hopefulness, and not with
terror.

§ IX. For observe this choice of subjects. It is indeed possible that the walls of
the nave and aisles, which are now whitewashed, may have been covered with
fresco or mosaic, and thus have supplied a series of subjects, on the choice of
which we cannot speculate. I do not, however, find record of the destruction of
any such works; and I am rather inclined to believe that at any rate the central
division of the building was originally decorated, as it is now, simply by mosaics
representing Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles, at one extremity, and Christ

coming to judgment at the other. And if so, I repeat, observe the significance of
this choice. Most other early churches are covered with imagery sufficiently
suggestive of the vivid interest of the builders in the history and occupations of
the world. Symbols or representations of political events, portraits of living
persons, and sculptures of satirical, grotesque, or trivial subjects are of constant
occurrence, mingled with the more strictly appointed representations of scriptural
or ecclesiastical history; but at Torcello even these usual, and one should have
thought almost necessary, successions of Bible events do not appear. The mind of
the worshipper was fixed entirely upon two great facts, to him the most precious
of all facts,—the present mercy of Christ to His Church, and His future coming to
judge the world. That Christ’s mercy was, at this period, supposed chiefly to be
attainable through the pleading of the Virgin, and that therefore beneath the figure
of the Redeemer is seen that of the weeping Madonna in the act of intercession,
may indeed be matter of sorrow to the Protestant beholder, but ought not to blind
him to the earnestness and singleness of the faith with which these men sought
their sea-solitudes; not in hope of founding new dynasties, or entering upon new
epochs of prosperity, but only to humble themselves before God, and to pray that
in His infinite mercy He would hasten the time when the sea should give up the
dead which were in it, and Death and Hell give up the dead which were in them,
and when they might enter into the better kingdom, “where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest.”

§ X. Nor were the strength and elasticity of their minds, even in the least
matters, diminished by thus looking forward to the close of all things. On the
contrary, nothing is more remarkable than the finish and beauty of all the portions
of the building, which seem to have been actually executed for the place they
occupy in the present structure. The rudest are those which they brought with
them from the mainland; the best and most beautiful, those which appear to have
been carved for their island church: of these, the new capitals already noticed, and
the exquisite panel ornaments of the chancel screen, are the most conspicuous; the
latter form a low wall across the church between the six small shafts whose places
are seen in the plan, and serve to enclose a space raised two steps above the level
of the nave, destined for the singers, and indicated also in the plan by an open line

a b c d. The bas-reliefs on this low screen are groups of peacocks and lions, two
face to face on each panel, rich and fantastic beyond description, though not
expressive of very accurate knowledge either of leonine or pavonine forms. And it
is not until we pass to the back of the stair of the pulpit, which is connected with
the northern extremity of this screen, that we find evidence of the haste with
which the church was constructed.

§ XI. The pulpit, however, is not among the least noticeable of its features. It is
sustained on the four small detached shafts marked at p in the plan, between the
two pillars at the north side of the screen; both pillars and pulpit studiously plain,
while the staircase which ascends to it is a compact mass of masonry (shaded in
the plan), faced by carved slabs of marble; the parapet of the staircase being also
formed of solid blocks like paving-stones, lightened by rich, but not deep, exterior
carving. Now these blocks, or at least those which adorn the staircase towards the
aisle, have been brought from the mainland; and, being of size and shape not
easily to be adjusted to the proportions of the stair, the architect has cut out of
them pieces of the size he needed, utterly regardless of the subject or symmetry of
the original design. The pulpit is not the only place where this rough procedure
has been permitted: at the lateral door of the church are two crosses, cut out of
slabs of marble, formerly covered with rich sculpture over their whole surfaces, of
which portions are left on the surface of the crosses; the lines of the original
design being, of course, just as arbitrarily cut by the incisions between the arms,
as the patterns upon a piece of silk which has been shaped anew. The fact is, that
in all early Romanesque work, large surfaces are covered with sculpture for the
sake of enrichment only; sculpture which indeed had always meaning, because it
was easier for the sculptor to work with some chain of thought to guide his chisel,
than without any; but it was not always intended, or at least not always hoped, that
this chain of thought might be traced by the spectator. All that was proposed
appears to have been the enrichment of surface, so as to make it delightful to the
eye; and this being once understood, a decorated piece of marble became to the
architect just what a piece of lace or embroidery is to a dressmaker, who takes of
it such portions as she may require, with little regard to the places where the
patterns are divided. And though it may appear, at first sight, that the procedure is

indicative of bluntness and rudeness of feeling, we may perceive, upon reflection,
that it may also indicate the redundance of power which sets little price upon its
own exertion. When a barbarous nation builds its fortress-walls out of fragments
of the refined architecture it has overthrown, we can read nothing but its
savageness in the vestiges of art which may thus chance to have been preserved;
but when the new work is equal, if not superior, in execution, to the pieces of the
older art which are associated with it, we may justly conclude that the rough
treatment to which the latter have been subjected is rather a sign of the hope of
doing better things, than of want of feeling for those already accomplished. And,
in general, this careless fitting of ornament is, in very truth, an evidence of life in
the school of builders, and of their making a due distinction between work which
is to be used for architectural effect, and work which is to possess an abstract
perfection; and it commonly shows also that the exertion of design is so easy to
them, and their fertility so inexhaustible, that they feel no remorse in using
somewhat injuriously what they can replace with so slight an effort.

§ XII. It appears however questionable in the present instance, whether, if the
marbles had not been carved to his hand, the architect would have taken the
trouble to enrich them. For the execution of the rest of the pulpit is studiously
simple, and it is in this respect that its design possesses, it seems to me, an interest
to the religious spectator greater than he will take in any other portion of the
building. It is supported, as I said, on a group of four slender shafts; itself of a
slightly oval form, extending nearly from one pillar of the nave to the next, so as
to give the preacher free room for the action of the entire person, which always
gives an unaffected impressiveness to the eloquence of the southern nations. In the
centre of its curved front, a small bracket and detached shaft sustain the projection
of a narrow marble desk (occupying the place of a cushion in a modern pulpit),
which is hollowed out into a shallow curve on the upper surface, leaving a ledge
at the bottom of the slab, so that a book laid upon it, or rather into it, settles itself
there, opening as if by instinct, but without the least chance of slipping to the side,
or in any way moving beneath the preacher’s hands.9 Six balls, or rather almonds,
of purple marble veined with white are set round the edge of the pulpit, and form
its only decoration. Perfectly graceful, but severe and almost cold in its simplicity,

built for permanence and service, so that no single member, no stone of it, could
be spared, and yet all are firm and uninjured as when they were first set together,
it stands in venerable contrast both with the fantastic pulpits of mediæval
cathedrals and with the rich furniture of those of our modern churches. It is worth
while pausing for a moment to consider how far the manner of decorating a pulpit
may have influence on the efficiency of its service, and whether our modern
treatment of this, to us all-important, feature of a church be the best possible.

§ XIII. When the sermon is good we need not much concern ourselves about the
form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot always be good; and I believe that the
temper in which the congregation set themselves to listen may be in some degree
modified by their perception of fitness or unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in
the disposition of the place appointed for the speaker,—not to the same degree,
but somewhat in the same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures
or expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe, therefore, in the
first place, that pulpits ought never to be highly decorated; the speaker is apt to
look mean or diminutive if the pulpit is either on a very large scale or covered
with splendid ornament, and if the interest of the sermon should flag the mind is
instantly tempted to wander. I have observed that in almost all cathedrals, when
the pulpits are peculiarly magnificent, sermons are not often preached from them;
but rather, and especially if for any important purpose, from some temporary
erection in other parts of the building: and though this may often be done because
the architect has consulted the effect upon the eye more than the convenience of
the ear in the placing of his larger pulpit, I think it also proceeds in some measure
from a natural dislike in the preacher to match himself with the magnificence of
the rostrum, lest the sermon should not be thought worthy of the place. Yet this
will rather hold of the colossal sculptures, and pyramids of fantastic tracery which
encumber the pulpits of Flemish and German churches, than of the delicate
mosaics and ivory-like carving of the Romanesque basilicas, for when the form is
kept simple, much loveliness of color and costliness of work may be introduced,
and yet the speaker not be thrown into the shade by them.

§ XIV. But, in the second place, whatever ornaments we admit ought clearly to
be of a chaste, grave, and noble kind; and what furniture we employ, evidently

more for the honoring of God’s word than for the ease of the preacher. For there
are two ways of regarding a sermon, either as a human composition, or a Divine
message. If we look upon it entirely as the first, and require our clergymen to
finish it with their utmost care and learning, for our better delight whether of ear
or intellect, we shall necessarily be led to expect much formality and stateliness in
its delivery, and to think that all is not well if the pulpit have not a golden fringe
round it, and a goodly cushion in front of it, and if the sermon be not fairly written
in a black book, to be smoothed upon the cushion in a majestic manner before
beginning; all this we shall duly come to expect: but we shall at the same time
consider the treatise thus prepared as something to which it is our duty to listen
without restlessness for half an hour or three quarters, but which, when that duty
has been decorously performed, we may dismiss from our minds in happy
confidence of being provided with another when next it shall be necessary. But if
once we begin to regard the preacher, whatever his faults, as a man sent with a
message to us, which it is a matter of life or death whether we hear or refuse; if we
look upon him as set in charge over many spirits in danger of ruin, and having
allowed to him but an hour or two in the seven days to speak to them; if we make
some endeavor to conceive how precious these hours ought to be to him, a small
vantage on the side of God after his flock have been exposed for six days together
to the full weight of the world’s temptation, and he has been forced to watch the
thorn and the thistle springing in their hearts, and to see what wheat had been
scattered there snatched from the wayside by this wild bird and the other, and at
last, when breathless and weary with the week’s labor they give him this interval
of imperfect and languid hearing, he has but thirty minutes to get at the separate
hearts of a thousand men, to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame them
for all their sins, to warn them of all their dangers, to try by this way and that to
stir the hard fastenings of those doors where the Master himself has stood and
knocked yet none opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets where
Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded,—thirty
minutes to raise the dead in,—let us but once understand and feel this, and we
shall look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furniture about the place
from which the message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes
upon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains recorded in

condemnation, perhaps against the utterer and listener alike, but assuredly against
one of them. We shall not so easily bear with the silk and gold upon the seat of
judgment, nor with ornament of oratory in the mouth of the messenger: we shall
wish that his words may be simple, even when they are sweetest, and the place
from which he speaks like a marble rock in the desert, about which the people
have gathered in their thirst.

§ XV. But the severity which is so marked in the pulpit at Torcello is still more
striking in the raised seats and episcopal throne which occupy the curve of the
apse. The arrangement at first somewhat recalls to the mind that of the Roman
amphitheatres; the flight of steps which lead up to the central throne divides the
curve of the continuous steps or seats (it appears in the first three ranges
questionable which were intended, for they seem too high for the one, and too low
and close for the other), exactly as in an amphitheatre the stairs for access
intersect the sweeping ranges of seats. But in the very rudeness of this
arrangement, and especially in the want of all appliances of comfort (for the
whole is of marble, and the arms of the central throne are not for convenience, but
for distinction, and to separate it more conspicuously from the undivided seats),
there is a dignity which no furniture of stalls nor carving of canopies ever could
attain, and well worth the contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly
significative of an episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was
never disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter absence of
any expression either of pride or self-indulgence.

§ XVI. But there is one more circumstance which we ought to remember as
giving peculiar significance to the position which the episcopal throne occupies in
this island church, namely, that in the minds of all early Christians the Church
itself was most frequently symbolized under the image of a ship, of which the
bishop was the pilot. Consider the force which this symbol would assume in the
imaginations of men to whom the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in
the midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls
were saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as broad
as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who saw the actual and literal edifice
of the Church raised up, itself like an ark in the midst of the waters. No marvel if

with the surf of the Adriatic rolling between them and the shores of their birth,
from which they were separated for ever, they should have looked upon each other
as the disciples did when the storm came down on the Tiberias Lake, and have
yielded ready and loving obedience to those who ruled them in His name, who
had there rebuked the winds and commanded stillness to the sea. And if the
stranger would yet learn in what spirit it was that the dominion of Venice was
begun, and in what strength she went forth conquering and to conquer, let him not
seek to estimate the wealth of her arsenals or number of her armies, nor look upon
the pageantry of her palaces, nor enter into the secrets of her councils; but let him
ascend the highest tier of the stern ledges that sweep round the altar of Torcello,
and then, looking as the pilot did of old along the marble ribs of the goodly temple
ship, let him repeople its veined deck with the shadows of its dead mariners, and
strive to feel in himself the strength of heart that was kindled within them, when
first, after the pillars of it had settled in the sand, and the roof of it had been closed
against the angry sky that was still reddened by the fires of their homesteads,—
first, within the shelter of its knitted walls, amidst the murmur of the waste of
waves and the beating of the wings of the sea-birds round the rock that was
strange to them,—rose that ancient hymn, in the power of their gathered voices:

The sea is His, and He made it:
And His hands prepared the dry land.

4 Appendix 4, “Date of the Duomo of Torcello.”

5 For a full account of the form and symbolical meaning of the Basilica, see Lord Lindsay’s
“Christian Art,” vol. i. p. 12. It is much to be regretted that the Chevalier Bunsen’s work on the
Basilicas of Rome is not translated into English.

6 The measures are given in Appendix 3.

7 Hope’s “Historical Essay on Architecture” (third edition, 1840), chap. ix. p. 95. In other
respects Mr. Hope has done justice to this building, and to the style of the early Christian churches
in general.

8 A sketch has been given of this capital in my folio work.

9 Appendix 5, “Modern Pulpits.”

CHAPTER III.

MURANO.

§ I. The decay of the city of Venice is, in many respects, like that of an
outwearied and aged human frame; the cause of its decrepitude is indeed at the
heart, but the outward appearances of it are first at the extremities. In the centre of
the city there are still places where some evidence of vitality remains, and where,
with kind closing of the eyes to signs, too manifest even there, of distress and
declining fortune, the stranger may succeed in imagining, for a little while, what
must have been the aspect of Venice in her prime. But this lingering pulsation has
not force enough any more to penetrate into the suburbs and outskirts of the city;
the frost of death has there seized upon it irrevocably, and the grasp of mortal
disease is marked daily by the increasing breadth of its belt of ruin. Nowhere is
this seen more grievously than along the great north-eastern boundary, once
occupied by the smaller palaces of the Venetians, built for pleasure or repose; the
nobler piles along the grand canal being reserved for the pomp and business of
daily life. To such smaller palaces some garden ground was commonly attached,
opening to the water-side; and, in front of these villas and gardens, the lagoon was
wont to be covered in the evening by gondolas: the space of it between this part of
the city and the island group of Murano being to Venice, in her time of power,
what its parks are to London; only gondolas were used instead of carriages, and
the crowd of the population did not come out till towards sunset, and prolonged
their pleasures far into the night, company answering to company with alternate
singing.

§ II. If, knowing this custom of the Venetians, and with a vision in his mind of
summer palaces lining the shore, and myrtle gardens sloping to the sea, the
traveller now seeks this suburb of Venice, he will be strangely and sadly surprised
to find a new but perfectly desolate quay, about a mile in length, extending from
the arsenal to the Sacca della Misericordia, in front of a line of miserable houses
built in the course of the last sixty or eighty years, yet already tottering to their
ruin; and not less to find that the principal object in the view which these houses
(built partly in front and partly on the ruins of the ancient palaces) now command
is a dead brick wall, about a quarter of a mile across the water, interrupted only by
a kind of white lodge, the cheerfulness of which prospect is not enhanced by his
finding that this wall encloses the principal public cemetery of Venice. He may,
perhaps, marvel for a few moments at the singular taste of the old Venetians in
taking their pleasure under a churchyard wall: but, on further inquiry, he will find
that the building on the island, like those on the shore, is recent, that it stands on
the ruins of the Church of St. Cristoforo della Pace; and that with a singular,
because unintended, moral, the modern Venetians have replaced the Peace of the
Christ-bearer by the Peace of Death, and where they once went, as the sun set
daily, to their pleasure, now go, as the sun sets to each of them for ever, to their
graves.

§ III. Yet the power of Nature cannot be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty
altogether saddened by the misery, of man. The broad tides still ebb and flow
brightly about the island of the dead, and the linked conclave of the Alps know no
decline from their old pre-eminence, nor stoop from their golden thrones in the
circle of the horizon. So lovely is the scene still, in spite of all its injuries, that we
shall find ourselves drawn there again and again at evening out of the narrow
canals and streets of the city, to watch the wreaths of the sea-mists weaving
themselves like mourning veils around the mountains far away, and listen to the
green waves as they fret and sigh along the cemetery shore.

§ IV. But it is morning now: we have a hard day’s work to do at Murano, and our
boat shoots swiftly from beneath the last bridge of Venice, and brings us out into
the open sea and sky.

The pure cumuli of cloud lie crowded and leaning against one another, rank
beyond rank, far over the shining water, each cut away at its foundation by a level
line, trenchant and clear, till they sink to the horizon like a flight of marble steps,
except where the mountains meet them, and are lost in them, barred across by the
grey terraces of those cloud foundations, and reduced into one crestless bank of
blue, spotted here and there with strange flakes of wan, aerial, greenish light,
strewed upon them like snow. And underneath is the long dark line of the
mainland, fringed with low trees; and then the wide-waving surface of the
burnished lagoon trembling slowly, and shaking out into forked bands of
lengthening light the images of the towers of cloud above. To the north, there is
first the great cemetery wall, then the long stray buildings of Murano, and the
island villages beyond, glittering in intense crystalline vermilion, like so much
jewellery scattered on a mirror, their towers poised apparently in the air a little
above the horizon, and their reflections, as sharp and vivid and substantial as
themselves, thrown on the vacancy between them and the sea. And thus the
villages seem standing on the air; and, to the east, there is a cluster of ships that
seem sailing on the land; for the sandy line of the Lido stretches itself between us
and them, and we can see the tall white sails moving beyond it, but not the sea,
only there is a sense of the great sea being indeed there, and a solemn strength of
gleaming light in sky above.

§ V. The most discordant feature in the whole scene is the cloud which hovers
above the glass furnaces of Murano; but this we may not regret, as it is one of the
last signs left of human exertion among the ruinous villages which surround us.
The silent gliding of the gondola brings it nearer to us every moment; we pass the
cemetery, and a deep sea-channel which separates it from Murano, and finally
enter a narrow water-street, with a paved footpath on each side, raised three or
four feet above the canal, and forming a kind of quay between the water and the
doors of the houses. These latter are, for the most part, low, but built with massy
doors and windows of marble or Istrian stone, square-set and barred with iron;
buildings evidently once of no mean order, though now inhabited only by the
poor. Here and there an ogee window of the fourteenth century, or a doorway
deeply enriched with cable mouldings, shows itself in the midst of more ordinary

features; and several houses, consisting of one story only carried on square pillars,
forming a short arcade along the quay, have windows sustained on shafts of red
Verona marble, of singular grace and delicacy. All now in vain: little care is there
for their delicacy or grace among the rough fishermen sauntering on the quay with
their jackets hanging loose from their shoulders, jacket and cap and hair all of the
same dark-greenish sea-grey. But there is some life in the scene, more than is
usual in Venice: the women are sitting at their doors knitting busily, and various
workmen of the glass-houses sifting glass dust upon the pavement, and strange
cries coming from one side of the canal to the other, and ringing far along the
crowded water, from venders of figs and grapes, and gourds and shell-fish; cries
partly descriptive of the eatables in question, but interspersed with others of a
character unintelligible in proportion to their violence, and fortunately so if we
may judge by a sentence which is stencilled in black, within a garland, on the
whitewashed walls of nearly every other house in the street, but which, how often
soever written, no one seems to regard: “Bestemme non più. Lodate Gesù.”

§ VI. We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from
Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated boats full of all
manner of nets that look as if they could never be disentangled, hanging from their
masts and over their sides; and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St.
Mark on its archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small red
lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up into the air (in
passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are covered with hair, and
in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently
the canal turns a little to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main
bustle of the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it,
some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass a considerable
church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square opposite to it with a few acacia
trees, and then find our boat suddenly seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled
into the tide-way of one of the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the
town of Murano into two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed
only by one wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current,
looking at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly knowing if there

be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the sunshine glows on their
ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles on the rushing of the green water by
the grass-grown quay. It needs a strong stroke of the oar to bring us into the mouth
of another quiet canal on the farther side of the tide-way, and we are still
somewhat giddy when we run the head of the gondola into the sand on the left-
hand side of this more sluggish stream, and land under the east end of the Church
of San Donato, the “Matrice” or “Mother” Church of Murano.

§ VII. It stands, it and the heavy campanile detached from it a few yards, in a
small triangular field of somewhat fresher grass than is usual near Venice,
traversed by a paved walk with green mosaic of short grass between the rude
squares of its stones, bounded on one side by ruinous garden walls, on another by
a line of low cottages, on the third, the base of the triangle, by the shallow canal
from which we have just landed. Near the point of the triangular space is a simple
well, bearing date 1502; in its widest part, between the canal and campanile, is a
four-square hollow pillar, each side formed by a separate slab of stone, to which
the iron hasps are still attached that once secured the Venetian standard.

The cathedral itself occupies the northern angle of the field, encumbered with
modern buildings, small outhouse-like chapels, and wastes of white wall with
blank square windows, and itself utterly defaced in the whole body of it, nothing
but the apse having been spared; the original plan is only discoverable by careful
examination, and even then but partially. The whole impression and effect of the
building are irretrievably lost, but the fragments of it are still most precious.

We must first briefly state what is known of its history.

§ VIII. The legends of the Romish Church, though generally more insipid and
less varied than those of Paganism, deserve audience from us on this ground, if on
no other, that they have once been sincerely believed by good men, and have had
no ineffective agency in the foundation of the existent European mind. The reader
must not therefore accuse me of trifling, when I record for him the first piece of
information I have been able to collect respecting the cathedral of Murano:
namely, that the emperor Otho the Great, being overtaken by a storm on the
Adriatic, vowed, if he were preserved, to build and dedicate a church to the

Virgin, in whatever place might be most pleasing to her; that the storm thereupon
abated; and the Virgin appearing to Otho in a dream showed him, covered with
red lilies, that very triangular field on which we were but now standing, amidst the
ragged weeds and shattered pavement. The emperor obeyed the vision; and the
church was consecrated on the 15th of August, 957.

§ IX. Whatever degree of credence we may feel disposed to attach to this piece
of history, there is no question that a church was built on this spot before the close
of the tenth century: since in the year 999 we find the incumbent of the Basilica
(note this word, it is of some importance) di Santa Maria Plebania di Murano
taking an oath of obedience to the Bishop of the Altinat church, and engaging at
the same time to give the said bishop his dinner on the Domenica in Albis, when
the prelate held a confirmation in the mother church, as it was then commonly
called, of Murano. From this period, for more than a century, I can find no records
of any alterations made in the fabric of the church, but there exist very full details
of the quarrels which arose between its incumbents and those of San Stefano, San
Cipriano, San Salvatore, and the other churches of Murano, touching the due
obedience which their less numerous or less ancient brotherhoods owed to St.
Mary’s.

These differences seem to have been renewed at the election of every new
abbot by each of the fraternities, and must have been growing serious when the
patriarch of Grado, Henry Dandolo, interfered in 1102, and, in order to seal a
peace between the two principal opponents, ordered that the abbot of St. Stephen’s
should be present at the service in St. Mary’s on the night of the Epiphany, and
that the abbot of St. Mary’s should visit him of St. Stephen’s on St. Stephen’s day;
and that then the two abbots “should eat apples and drink good wine together, in
peace and charity.”10

§ X. But even this kindly effort seems to have been without result: the irritated
pride of the antagonists remained unsoothed by the love-feast of St. Stephen’s
day; and the breach continued to widen until the abbot of St. Mary’s obtained a
timely accession to his authority in the year 1125. The Doge Domenico Michele,
having in the second crusade secured such substantial advantages for the

Venetians as might well counterbalance the loss of part of their trade with the
East, crowned his successes by obtaining possession in Cephalonia of the body of
St. Donato, bishop of Eurœa; which treasure he having presented on his return to
the Murano basilica, that church was thenceforward called the church of Sts. Mary
and Donato. Nor was the body of the saint its only acquisition: St. Donato’s
principal achievement had been the destruction of a terrible dragon in Epirus;
Michele brought home the bones of the dragon as well as of the saint; the latter
were put in a marble sarcophagus, and the former hung up over the high altar.

§ XI. But the clergy of St. Stefano were indomitable. At the very moment when
their adversaries had received this formidable accession of strength, they had the
audacity “ad onta de’ replicati giuramenti, e dell’inveterata consuetudine,”11 to
refuse to continue in the obedience which they had vowed to their mother church.
The matter was tried in a provincial council; the votaries of St. Stephen were
condemned, and remained quiet for about twenty years, in wholesome dread of
the authority conferred on the abbot of St. Donate, by the Pope’s legate, to
suspend any o the clergy of the island from their office if they refused submission.
In 1172, however, they appealed to Pope Alexander III, and were condemned
again: and we find the struggle renewed at every promising opportunity, during
the course of the 12th and 13th centuries; until at last, finding St. Donate and the
dragon together too strong for him, the abbot of St. Stefano “discovered” in his
church the bodies of two hundred martyrs at once!—a discovery, it is to be
remembered, in some sort equivalent in those days to that of California in ours.
The inscription, however, on the façade of the church, recorded it with quiet
dignity:— “MCCCLXXIV. a di XIV. di Aprile. Furono trovati nella presente chiesa del
protomartire San Stefano, duecento e più corpi de’ Santi Martiri, dal Ven. Prete
Matteo Fradello, piovano della chiesa.”12 Corner, who gives this inscription,
which no longer exists, goes on to explain with infinite gravity, that the bodies in
question, “being of infantile form and stature, are reported by tradition to have
belonged to those fortunate innocents who suffered martyrdom under King Herod;
but that when, or by whom, the church was enriched with so vast a treasure, is not
manifested by any document.”13

§ XII. The issue of the struggle is not to our present purpose. We have already
arrived at the fourteenth century without finding record of any effort made by the
clergy of St. Mary’s to maintain their influence by restoring or beautifying their
basilica; which is the only point at present of importance to us. That great
alterations were made in it at the time of the acquisition of the body of St. Donato
is however highly probable, the mosaic pavement of the interior, which bears its
date inscribed, 1140, being probably the last of the additions. I believe that no part
of the ancient church can be shown to be of more recent date than this; and I shall
not occupy the reader’s time by any inquiry respecting the epochs or authors of
the destructive modern restorations; the wreck of the old fabric, breaking out
beneath them here and there, is generally distinguishable from them at a glance;
and it is enough for the reader to know that none of these truly ancient fragments
can be assigned to a more recent date than 1140, and that some of them may with
probability be looked upon as remains of the shell of the first church, erected in
the course of the latter half of the tenth century. We shall perhaps obtain some
further reason for this belief as we examine these remains themselves.

§ XIII. Of the body of the church, unhappily, they are few and obscure; but the
general form and extent of the building, as shown in the plan, Plate I. fig. 2, are
determined, first, by the breadth of the uninjured east end D E; secondly, by some
remains of the original brickwork of the clerestory, and in all probability of the
side walls also, though these have been refaced; and finally by the series of nave
shafts, which are still perfect. The doors A and B may or may not be in their
original positions; there must of course have been always, as now, a principal
entrance at the west end. The ground plan is composed, like that of Torcello, of
nave and aisles only, but the clerestory has transepts extending as far as the outer
wall of the aisles. The semicircular apse, thrown out in the centre of the east end,
is now the chief feature of interest in the church, though the nave shafts and the
eastern extremities of the aisles, outside, are also portions of the original building;
the latter having been modernized in the interior, it cannot now be ascertained
whether, as is probable, the aisles had once round ends as well as the choir. The
spaces F G form small chapels, of which G has a straight terminal wall behind its
altar, and F a curved one, marked by the dotted line; the partitions which divide

these chapels from the presbytery are also indicated by dotted lines, being modern
work.

§ XIV. The plan is drawn carefully to scale, but the relation in which its
proportions are disposed can hardly be appreciated by the eye. The width of the
nave from shaft to opposite shaft is 32 feet 8 inches: of the aisles, from the shaft to
the wall, 16 feet 2 inches, or allowing 2 inches for the thickness of the modern
wainscot, 16 feet 4 inches, half the breadth of the nave exactly. The intervals
between the shafts are exactly one fourth of the width of the nave, or 8 feet 2
inches, and the distance between the great piers which form the pseudo-transept is
24 feet 6 inches, exactly three times the interval of the shafts. So the four
distances are accurately in arithmetical proportion; i.e.

Ft. In.

Interval of shafts 8 2
Width of aisle 16 4
Width of transept 24 6
Width of nave 32 8

The shafts average 5 feet 4 inches in circumference, as near the base as they can
be got at, being covered with wood; and the broadest sides of the main piers are 4
feet 7 inches wide, their narrowest sides 3 feet 6 inches. The distance a c from the
outmost angle of these piers to the beginning of the curve of the apse is 25 feet,
and from that point the apse is nearly semicircular, but it is so encumbered with
renaissance fittings that its form cannot be ascertained with perfect accuracy. It is
roofed by a concha, or semi-dome; and the external arrangement of its walls
provides for the security of this dome by what is, in fact, a system of buttresses as
effective and definite as that of any of the northern churches, although the
buttresses are obtained entirely by adaptations of the Roman shaft and arch, the
lower story being formed by a thick mass of wall lightened by ordinary
semicircular round-headed niches, like those used so extensively afterwards in
renaissance architecture, each niche flanked by a pair of shafts standing clear of
the wall, and bearing deeply moulded arches thrown over the niche. The wall with

its pillars thus forms a series of massy buttresses (as seen in the ground plan), on
the top of which is an open gallery, backed by a thinner wall, and roofed by arches
whose shafts are set above the pairs of shafts below. On the heads of these arches
rests the roof. We have, therefore, externally a heptagonal apse, chiefly of rough
and common brick, only with marble shafts and a few marble ornaments; but for
that very reason all the more interesting, because it shows us what may be done,
and what was done, with materials such as are now at our own command; and
because in its proportions, and in the use of the few ornaments it possesses, it
displays a delicacy of feeling rendered doubly notable by the roughness of the
work in which laws so subtle are observed, and with which so thoughtful
ornamentation is associated.

§ XV. First, for its proportions: I shall have occasion in Chapter V. to dwell at
some length on the peculiar subtlety of the early Venetian perception for ratios of
magnitude; the relations of the sides of this heptagonal apse supply one of the first
and most curious instances of it. The proportions above given of the nave and
aisles might have been dictated by a mere love of mathematical precision; but
those of the apse could only have resulted from a true love of harmony.

In fig. 6, Plate I. the plan of this part of the church is given on a large scale,
showing that its seven external sides are arranged on a line less than a semicircle,
so that if the figure were completed, it would have sixteen sides; and it will be
observed also, that the seven sides are arranged in four magnitudes, the widest
being the central one. The brickwork is so much worn away, that the measures of
the arches are not easily ascertainable, but those of the plinth on which they stand,
which is nearly uninjured, may be obtained accurately. This plinth is indicated by
the open line in the ground plan, and its sides measure respectively:

Ft. In.

1st. a b in plan 6 7
2nd. b c 7 7
3rd. c d 7 5
4th. d e (central) 7 10

5th. e f 7 5
6th f g 7 8
7th. g h 6 10

§ XVI. Now observe what subtle feeling is indicated by this delicacy of
proportion. How fine must the perceptions of grace have been in those builders
who could not be content without some change between the second and third, the
fifth and sixth terms of proportion, such as should oppose the general direction of
its cadence, and yet were content with a diminution of two inches on a breadth of
seven feet and a half! For I do not suppose that the reader will think the curious
lessening of the third and fifth arch a matter of accident, and even if he did so, I
shall be able to prove to him hereafter that it was not, but that the early builders
were always desirous of obtaining some alternate proportion of this kind. The
relations of the numbers are not easily comprehended in the form of feet and
inches, but if we reduce the first four of them into inches, and then subtract some
constant number, suppose 75, from them all, the remainders 4, 16, 14, 19, will
exhibit the ratio of proportion in a clearer, though exaggerated form.

§ XVII. The pairs of circular spots at b, c, d, etc., on the ground plan fig. 6,
represent the bearing shafts, which are all of solid marble as well as their capitals.
Their measures and various other particulars respecting them are given in
Appendix 6. “Apse of Murano;” here I only wish the reader to note the coloring of
their capitals. Those of the two single shafts in the angles (a, h) are both of deep
purple marble; the two next pairs, b and g, are of white marble; the pairs c and f
are of purple, and d and e are of white: thus alternating with each other on each
side; two white meeting in the centre. Now observe, the purple capitals are all left
plain; the white are all sculptured. For the old builders knew that by carving the
purple capitals they would have injured them in two ways: first, they would have
mixed a certain quantity of grey shadow with the surface hue, and so adulterated
the purity of the color; secondly, they would have drawn away the thoughts from
the color, and prevented the mind from fixing upon it or enjoying it, by the degree
of attention which the sculpture would have required. So they left their purple

capitals full broad masses of color; and sculptured the white ones, which would
otherwise have been devoid of interest.

§ XVIII. But the feature which is most to be noted in this apse is a band of
ornament, which runs round it like a silver girdle, composed of sharp wedges of
marble, preciously inlaid, and set like jewels into the brickwork; above it there is
another band of triangular recesses in the bricks, of nearly similar shape, and it
seems equally strange that all the marbles should have fallen from it, or that it
should have been originally destitute of them. The reader may choose his
hypothesis; but there is quite enough left to interest us in the lower band, which is
fortunately left in its original state, as is sufficiently proved by the curious niceties
in the arrangement of its colors, which are assuredly to be attributed to the care of
the first builder. A word or two, in the first place, respecting the means of color at
his disposal.

§ XIX. I stated that the building was, for the most part, composed of yellow
brick. This yellow is very nearly pure, much more positive and somewhat darker
than that of our English light brick, and the material of the brick is very good and
hard, looking, in places, almost vitrified, and so compact as to resemble stone.
Together with this brick occurs another of a deep full red, and more porous
substance, which is used for decoration chiefly, while all the parts requiring
strength are composed of the yellow brick. Both these materials are cast into any
shape and size the builder required, either into curved pieces for the arches, or flat
tiles for filling the triangles; and, what is still more curious, the thickness of the
yellow bricks used for the walls varies considerably, from two inches to four; and
their length also, some of the larger pieces used in important positions being a foot
and a half long.

With these two kinds of brick, the builder employed five or six kinds of marble:
pure white, and white veined with purple; a brecciated marble of white and black;
a brecciated marble of white and deep green; another, deep red, or nearly of the
color of Egyptian porphyry; and a grey and black marble, in fine layers.

§ XX. The method of employing these materials will be understood at once by a
reference to the opposite plate (Plate III.), which represents two portions of the

lower band. I could not succeed in expressing the variation and chequering of
color in marble, by real tints in the print; and have been content, therefore, to give
them in line engraving. The different triangles are, altogether, of ten kinds:

a. Pure white marble with sculptured surface (as the third and fifth in the upper series of Plate III.).

b. Cast triangle of red brick with a sculptured round-headed piece of white marble inlaid (as the first and
seventh of the upper series, Plate III.).

c. A plain triangle of greenish black marble, now perhaps considerably paler in color than when first
employed (as the second and sixth of the upper series of Plate III.).

d. Cast red brick triangle, with a diamond inlaid of the above-mentioned black marble (as the fourth in
the upper series of Plate III.).

e. Cast white brick, with an inlaid round-headed piece of marble, variegated with black and yellow, or
white and violet (not seen in the plate).

f. Occurs only once, a green-veined marble, forming the upper part of the triangle, with a white piece
below.

g. Occurs only once. A brecciated marble of intense black and pure white, the centre of the lower range
in Plate III.

h. Sculptured white marble with a triangle of veined purple marble inserted (as the first, third, fifth, and
seventh of the lower range in Plate III.).

i. Yellow or white marble veined with purple (as the second and sixth of the lower range in Plate III.).

k. Pure purple marble, not seen in this plate.

III.

Inlaid Bands of Murano.

§ XXI. The band, then, composed of these triangles, set close to each other in
varied but not irregular relations, is thrown, like a necklace of precious stones,
round the apse and along the ends of the aisles; each side of the apse taking, of
course, as many triangles as its width permits. If the reader will look back to the
measures of the sides of the apse, given before, p. 42, he will see that the first and
seventh of the series, being much narrower than the rest, cannot take so many
triangles in their band. Accordingly, they have only six each, while the other five
sides have seven. Of these groups of seven triangles each, that used for the third
and fifth sides of the apse is the uppermost in Plate III.; and that used for the
centre of the apse, and of the whole series, is the lowermost in the same plate; the
piece of black and white marble being used to emphasize the centre of the chain,
exactly as a painter would use a dark touch for a similar purpose.

§ XXII. And now, with a little trouble, we can set before the reader, at a glance,
the arrangement of the groups along the entire extremity of the church.

There are thirteen recesses, indicative of thirteen arches, seen in the ground
plan, fig. 2, Plate I. Of these, the second and twelfth arches rise higher than the
rest; so high as to break the decorated band; and the groups of triangles we have to
enumerate are, therefore, only eleven in number; one above each of the eleven low
arches. And of these eleven, the first and second, tenth and eleventh, are at the
ends of the aisles; while the third to the ninth, inclusive, go round the apse. Thus,
in the following table, the numerals indicate the place of each entire group
(counting from the south to the north side of the church, or from left to right), and
the letters indicate the species of triangle of which it is composed, as described in
the list given above.

6. h. i. h. g. h. i. h.
5. b. c. a. d. a. c. b. 7. b. c. a. d. a. c. b.
4. b. a. b. c. a. e. a. 8. a. e. a. c. b. a. b.
3. b. a. b. e. b. a. 9. a. b. e. b. a. b.
2. a. b. c. 10. a. b. c. b.
1. a. b. c. b. a. 11. b. a. c. f. a. a.

The central group is put first, that it may be seen how the series on the two
sides of the apse answer each other. It was a very curious freak to insert the
triangle e, in the outermost place but one of both the fourth and eighth sides of the
apse, and in the outermost but two in the third and ninth; in neither case having
any balance to it in its own group, and the real balance being only effected on the
other side of the apse, which it is impossible that any one should see at the same
time. This is one of the curious pieces of system which so often occur in mediæval
work, of which the key is now lost. The groups at the ends of the transepts
correspond neither in number nor arrangement; we shall presently see why, but
must first examine more closely the treatment of the triangles themselves, and the
nature of the floral sculpture employed upon them.

IV.

SCULPTURES OF MURANO.

§ XXIII. As the scale of Plate III. is necessarily small, I have given three of the
sculptured triangles on a larger scale in Plate IV. opposite. Fig. 3 is one of the four
in the lower series of Plate IV., and figs. 4 and 5 from another group. The forms of
the trefoils are here seen more clearly; they, and all the other portions of the
design, are thrown out in low and flat relief, the intermediate spaces being cut out
to the depth of about a quarter of an inch. I believe these vacant spaces were
originally filled with a black composition, which is used in similar sculptures at

St. Mark’s, and of which I found some remains in an archivolt moulding here,
though not in the triangles. The surface of the whole would then be perfectly
smooth, and the ornamental form relieved by a ground of dark grey; but, even
though this ground is lost, the simplicity of the method insures the visibility of all
its parts at the necessary distance (17 or 18 feet), and the quaint trefoils have a
crispness and freshness of effect which I found it almost impossible to render in a
drawing. Nor let us fail to note in passing how strangely delightful to the human
mind the trefoil always is. We have it here repeated five or six hundred times in
the space of a few yards, and yet are never weary of it. In fact, there are two
mystical feelings at the root of our enjoyment of this decoration: the one is the
love of trinity in unity, the other that of the sense of fulness with order; of every
place being instantly filled, and yet filled with propriety and ease; the leaves do
not push each other, nor put themselves out of their own way, and yet whenever
there is a vacant space, a leaf is always ready to step in and occupy it.

§ XXIV. I said the trefoil was five or six hundred times repeated. It is so, but
observe, it is hardly ever twice of the same size; and this law is studiously and
resolutely observed. In the carvings a and b of the upper series, Plate III., the
diminution of the leaves might indeed seem merely representative of the growth
of the plant. But look at the lower: the triangles of inlaid purple marble are made
much more nearly equilateral than those of white marble, into whose centres they
are set, so that the leaves may continually diminish in size as the ornament
descends at the sides. The reader may perhaps doubt the accuracy of the drawing
on the smaller scale, but in that given larger, fig. 3, Plate IV., the angles are all
measured, and the purposeful variation of width in the border therefore admits of
no dispute.14 Remember how absolutely this principle is that of nature; the same
leaf continually repeated, but never twice of the same size. Look at the clover
under your feet, and then you will see what this Murano builder meant, and that he
was not altogether a barbarian.

§ XXV. Another point I wish the reader to observe is, the importance attached to
color in the mind of the designer. Note especially—for it is of the highest
importance to see how the great principles of art are carried out through the whole
building—that, as only the white capitals are sculptured below, only the white

triangles are sculptured above. No colored triangle is touched with sculpture; note
also, that in the two principal groups of the apse, given in Plate III., the centre of
the group is color, not sculpture, and the eye is evidently intended to be drawn as
much to the chequers of the stone, as to the intricacies of the chiselling. It will be
noticed also how much more precious the lower series, which is central in the
apse, is rendered, than the one above it in the plate, which flanks it: there is no
brick in the lower one, and three kinds of variegated marble are used in it, whereas
the upper is composed of brick, with black and white marble only; and lastly—for
this is especially delightful—see how the workman made his chiselling finer
where it was to go with the variegated marbles, and used a bolder pattern with the
coarser brick and dark stone. The subtlety and perfection of artistical feeling in all
this are so redundant, that in the building itself the eye can rest upon this colored
chain with the same kind of delight that it has in a piece of the embroidery of Paul
Veronese.

§ XXVI. Such being the construction of the
Fig. II. lower band, that of the upper is remarkable
only for the curious change in its proportions.
The two are separated, as seen in the little
woodcut here at the side, by a string-course
composed of two layers of red bricks, of which
the uppermost projects as a cornice, and is
sustained by an intermediate course of
irregular brackets, obtained by setting the thick
yellow bricks edgeways, in the manner
common to this day. But the wall above is
carried up perpendicularly from this projection, so that the whole upper band is
advanced to the thickness of a brick over the lower one. The result of this is, of
course, that each side of the apse is four or five inches broader above than below;
so that the same number of triangles which filled a whole side of the lower band,
leave an inch or two blank at each angle in the upper. This would have looked
awkward, if there had been the least appearance of its being an accidental error; so
that, in order to draw the eye to it, and show that it is done on purpose, the upper

triangles are made about two inches higher than the lower ones, so as to be much
more acute in proportion and effect, and actually to look considerably narrower,
though of the same width at the base. By this means they are made lighter in
effect, and subordinated to the richly decorated series of the lower band, and the
two courses, instead of repeating, unite with each other, and become a harmonious
whole.

V.

Archivolt in the Duomo of Murano.

In order, however, to make still more sure that this difference in the height of
the triangles should not escape the eye, another course of plain bricks is added
above their points, increasing the width of the band by another two inches. There
are five courses of bricks in the lower band, and it measures 1 ft. 6 in. in height:
there are seven courses in the upper (of which six fall between the triangles), and
it measures 1 ft. 10 in. in height, except at the extremity of the northern aisle,
where for some mysterious reason the intermediate cornice is sloped upwards so

as to reduce the upper triangles to the same height as those below. And here,
finally, observe how determined the builder was that the one series should not be a
mere imitation of the other; he could not now make them acute by additional
height—so he here, and here only, narrowed their bases, and we have seven of
them above, to six below.

§ XXVII. We come now to the most interesting portion of the whole east end, the
archivolt at the end of the northern aisle.

It was above stated, that the band of triangles was broken by two higher arches
at the ends of the aisles. That, however, on the northern side of the apse does not
entirely interrupt, but lifts it, and thus forms a beautiful and curious archivolt,
drawn opposite, in Plate V. The upper band of triangles cannot rise together with
the lower, as it would otherwise break the cornice prepared to receive the second
story; and the curious zigzag with which its triangles die away against the sides of
the arch, exactly as waves break upon the sand, is one of the most curious features
in the structure.

It will be also seen that there is a new feature in the treatment of the band itself
when it turns the arch. Instead of leaving the bricks projecting between the
sculptured or colored stones, reversed triangles of marble are used, inlaid to an
equal depth with the others in the brickwork, but projecting beyond them so as to
produce a sharp dark line of zigzag at their junctions. Three of these
supplementary stones have unhappily fallen out, so that it is now impossible to
determine the full harmony of color in which they were originally arranged. The
central one, corresponding to the keystone in a common arch, is, however, most
fortunately left, with two lateral ones on the right hand, and one on the left.

§ XXVIII. The keystone, if it may be so called, is of white marble, the lateral
voussoirs of purple; and these are the only colored stones in the whole building
which are sculptured; but they are sculptured in a way which, more satisfactorily
proves that the principle above stated was understood by the builders, than if they
had been left blank. The object, observe, was to make the archivolt as rich as
possible; eight of the white sculptured marbles were used upon it in juxtaposition.
Had the purple marbles been left altogether plain, they would have been out of

harmony with the elaboration of the rest. It became necessary to touch them with
sculpture as a mere sign of carefulness and finish, but at the same time destroying
their colored surface as little as possible. The ornament is merely outlined upon
them with a fine incision, as if it had been etched out on their surface preparatory
to being carved. In two of them it is composed merely of three concentric lines,
parallel with the sides of the triangle; in the third, it is a wreath of beautiful
design, which I have drawn of larger size in fig. 2, Plate V., that the reader may
see how completely the surface is left undestroyed by the delicate incisions of the
chisel, and may compare the method of working with that employed on the white
stones, two of which are given in that plate, figs. 4 and 5. The keystone, of which
we have not yet spoken, is the only white stone worked with the light incision; its
design not being capable of the kind of workmanship given to the floral
ornaments, and requiring either to be carved in complete relief, or left as we see it.
It is given at fig. 1 of Plate IV. The sun and moon on each side of the cross are, as
we shall see in the fifth Chapter, constantly employed on the keystones of
Byzantine arches.

§ XXIX. We must not pass without notice the grey and green pieces of marble
inserted at the flanks of the arch. For, observe, there was a difficulty in getting the
forms of the triangle into anything like reconciliation at this point, and a mediæval
artist always delights in a difficulty: instead of concealing it, he boasts of it; and
just as we saw above that he directed the eye to the difficulty of filling the
expanded sides of the upper band by elongating his triangles, so here, having to
put in a piece of stone of awkward shape, he makes that very stone the most
conspicuous in the whole arch, on both sides, by using in one case a dark, cold
grey; in the other a vigorous green, opposed to the warm red and purple and white
of the stones above and beside it. The green and white piece on the right is of a
marble, as far as I know, exceedingly rare. I at first thought the white fragments
were inlaid, so sharply are they defined upon their ground. They are indeed inlaid,
but I believe it is by nature; and that the stone is a calcareous breccia of great
mineralogical interest. The white spots are of singular value in giving piquancy to
the whole range of more delicate transitional hues above. The effect of the whole
is, however, generally injured by the loss of the three large triangles above. I have

no doubt they were purple, like those which remain, and that the whole arch was
thus one zone of white, relieved on a purple ground, encircled by the scarlet
cornices of brick, and the whole chord of color contrasted by the two precious
fragments of grey and green at either side.

§ XXX. The two pieces of carved stone inserted at each side of the arch, as seen
at the bottom of Plate V., are of different workmanship from the rest; they do not
match each other, and form part of the evidence which proves that portions of the
church had been brought from the mainland. One bears an inscription, which, as
its antiquity is confirmed by the shapelessness of its letters, I was much gratified
by not being able to read; but M. Lazari, the intelligent author of the latest and
best Venetian guide, with better skill, has given as much of it as remains, thus:

I have printed the letters as they are placed in the inscription, in order that the
reader may form some idea of the difficulty of reading such legends when the
letters, thus thrown into one heap, are themselves of strange forms, and half worn
away; any gaps which at all occur between them coming in the wrong places.
There is no doubt, however, as to the reading of this fragment:—“T ... Sancte
Marie Domini Genetricis et beati Estefani martiri ego indignus et peccator
Domenicus T.” On these two initial and final T’s, expanding one into Templum,
the other into Torcellanus, M. Lazari founds an ingenious conjecture that the
inscription records the elevation of the church under a certain bishop Dominic of
Torcello (named in the Altinat Chronicle), who flourished in the middle of the
ninth century. If this were so, as the inscription occurs broken off on a fragment
inserted scornfully in the present edifice, this edifice must be of the twelfth
century, worked with fragments taken from the ruins of that built in the ninth. The
two T’s are, however, hardly a foundation large enough to build the church upon,
a hundred years before the date assigned to it both by history and tradition (see

above, § VIII.): and the reader has yet to be made aware of the principal fact
bearing on the question.

§ XXXI. Above the first story of the apse runs, as he knows already, a gallery
under open arches, protected by a light balustrade. This balustrade is worked on
the outside with mouldings, of which I shall only say at present that they are of
exactly the same school as the greater part of the work of the existing church. But
the great horizontal pieces of stone which form the top of this balustrade are
fragments of an older building turned inside out. They are covered with sculptures
on the back, only to be seen by mounting into the gallery. They have once had an
arcade of low wide arches traced on their surface, the spandrils filled with leafage,
and archivolts enriched with studded chainwork and with crosses in their centres.
These pieces have been used as waste marble by the architect of the existing apse.
The small arches of the present balustrade are cut mercilessly through the old
work, and the profile of the balustrade is cut out of what was once the back of the
stone; only some respect is shown for the crosses in the old design, the blocks are
cut so that these shall be not only left uninjured, but come in the centre of the
balustrades.

§ XXXII. Now let the reader observe carefully that this balustrade of Murano is a
fence of other things than the low gallery round the deserted apse. It is a barrier
between two great schools of early architecture. On one side it was cut by
Romanesque workmen of the early Christian ages, and furnishes us with a distinct
type of a kind of ornament which, as we meet with other examples of it, we shall
be able to describe in generic terms, and to throw back behind this balustrade, out
of our way. The front of the balustrade presents us with a totally different
condition of design, less rich, more graceful, and here shown in its simplest
possible form. From the outside of this bar of marble we shall commence our
progress in the study of existing Venetian architecture. The only question is, do we
begin from the tenth or from the twelfth century?

§ XXXIII. I was in great hopes once of being able to determine this positively;
but the alterations in all the early buildings of Venice are so numerous, and the

foreign fragments introduced so innumerable, that I was obliged to leave the
question doubtful. But one circumstance must be noted, bearing upon it closely.

In the woodcut on page 50, Fig. III., b is an archivolt of Murano, a one of St.
Mark’s; the latter acknowledged by all historians and all investigators to be of the
twelfth century.

All the twelfth century archivolts in Venice, without exception, are on the model
of a, differing only in their decorations and sculpture. There is not one which
resembles that of Murano.

But the deep mouldings of Murano are almost exactly similar to those of St.
Michele of Pavia, and other Lombard churches built, some as early as the seventh,
others in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.

On this ground it seems to me probable that the existing apse of Murano is part
of the original earliest church, and that the inscribed fragments used in it have
been brought from the mainland. The balustrade, however, may still be later than
the rest; it will be examined, hereafter, more carefully.15

I have not space to give any farther account of the exterior of the building,
though one half of what is remarkable in it remains untold. We must now see what
is left of interest within the walls.

Fig. III.

§ XXXIV. All hope is taken away by our first glance; for it falls on a range of
shafts whose bases are concealed by wooden panelling, and which sustain arches
decorated in the most approved style of Renaissance upholstery, with stucco roses
in squares under the soffits, and egg and arrow mouldings on the architraves,
gilded, on a ground of spotty black and green, with a small pink-faced and black-
eyed cherub on every keystone; the rest of the church being for the most part
concealed either by dirty hangings, or dirtier whitewash, or dim pictures on
warped and wasting canvas; all vulgar, vain, and foul. Yet let us not turn back, for
in the shadow of the apse our more careful glance shows us a Greek Madonna,
pictured on a field of gold; and we feel giddy at the first step we make on the
pavement, for it, also, is of Greek mosaic waved like the sea, and dyed like a
dove’s neck.

§ XXXV. Nor are the original features of the rest of the edifice altogether
indecipherable; the entire series of shafts marked in the ground plan on each side
of the nave, from the western entrance to the apse, are nearly uninjured; and I
believe the stilted arches they sustain are those of the original fabric, though the
masonry is covered by the Renaissance stucco mouldings. Their capitals, for a
wonder, are left bare, and appear to have sustained no farther injury than has
resulted from the insertion of a large brass chandelier into each of their abaci, each
chandelier carrying a sublime wax candle two inches thick, fastened with wire to
the wall above. The due arrangement of these appendages, previous to festal days,
can only be effected from a ladder set against the angle of the abacus; and ten
minutes before I wrote this sentence, I had the privilege of watching the
candlelighter at his work, knocking his ladder about the heads of the capitals as if
they had given him personal offence. He at last succeeded in breaking away one
of the lamps altogether, with a bit of the marble of the abacus; the whole falling in
ruin to the pavement, and causing much consultation and clamor among a tribe of
beggars who were assisting the sacristan with their wisdom respecting the festal
arrangements.

§ XXXVI. It is fortunate that the capitals themselves, being somewhat rudely cut,
can bear this kind of treatment better than most of those in Venice. They are all
founded on the Corinthian type, but the leaves are in every one different: those of

the easternmost capital of the southern range are the best, and very beautiful, but
presenting no feature of much interest, their workmanship being inferior to most
of the imitations of Corinthian common at the period; much more to the rich
fantasies which we have seen at Torcello. The apse itself, to-day (12th September,
1851), is not to be described; for just in front of it, behind the altar, is a
magnificent curtain of new red velvet with a gilt edge and two golden tassels, held
up in a dainty manner by two angels in the upholsterer’s service; and above all, for
concentration of effect, a star or sun, some five feet broad, the spikes of which
conceal the whole of the figure of the Madonna except the head and hands.

§ XXXVII. The pavement is however still left open, and it is of infinite interest,
although grievously distorted and defaced. For whenever a new chapel has been
built, or a new altar erected, the pavement has been broken up and readjusted so as
to surround the newly inserted steps or stones with some appearance of symmetry;
portions of it either covered or carried away, others mercilessly shattered or
replaced by modern imitations, and those of very different periods, with pieces of
the old floor left here and there in the midst of them, and worked round so as to
deceive the eye into acceptance of the whole as ancient. The portion, however,
which occupies the western extremity of the nave, and the parts immediately
adjoining it in the aisles, are, I believe, in their original positions, and very little
injured: they are composed chiefly of groups of peacocks, lions, stags, and
griffins,—two of each in a group, drinking out of the same vase, or shaking claws
together,—enclosed by interlacing bands, and alternating with chequer or star
patterns, and here and there an attempt at representation of architecture, all
worked in marble mosaic. The floors of Torcello and of St. Mark’s are executed in
the same manner; but what remains at Murano is finer than either, in the
extraordinary play of color obtained by the use of variegated marbles. At St.
Mark’s the patterns are more intricate, and the pieces far more skilfully set
together; but each piece is there commonly of one color: at Murano every
fragment is itself variegated, and all are arranged with a skill and feeling not to be
caught, and to be observed with deep reverence, for that pavement is not dateless,
like the rest of the church; it bears its date on one of its central circles, 1140, and
is, in my mind, one of the most precious monuments in Italy, showing thus early,

and in those rude chequers which the bared knee of the Murano fisher wears in its
daily bending, the beginning of that mighty spirit of Venetian color, which was to
be consummated in Titian.

§ XXXVIII. But we must quit the church for the present, for its garnishings are
completed; the candles are all upright in their sockets, and the curtains drawn into
festoons, and a paste-board crescent, gay with artificial flowers, has been attached
to the capital of every pillar, in order, together with the gilt angels, to make the
place look as much like Paradise as possible. If we return to-morrow, we shall find
it filled with woful groups of aged men and women, wasted and fever-struck,
fixed in paralytic supplication, half-kneeling, half-couched upon the pavement;
bowed down, partly in feebleness, partly in a fearful devotion, with their grey
clothes cast far over their faces, ghastly and settled into a gloomy animal misery,
all but the glittering eyes and muttering lips.

Fit inhabitants, these, for what was once the Garden of Venice, “a terrestrial
paradise,—a place of nymphs and demi-gods!”16

§ XXXIX. We return, yet once again, on the following day. Worshippers and
objects of worship, the sickly crowd and gilded angels, all are gone; and there, far
in the apse, is seen the sad Madonna standing in her folded robe, lifting her hands
in vanity of blessing. There is little else to draw away our thoughts from the
solitary image. An old wooden tablet, carved into a rude effigy of San Donato,
which occupies the central niche in the lower part of the tribune, has an interest of
its own, but is unconnected with the history of the older church. The faded
frescoes of saints, which cover the upper tier of the wall of the apse, are also of
comparatively recent date, much more the piece of Renaissance workmanship,
shaft and entablature, above the altar, which has been thrust into the midst of all,
and has cut away part of the feet of the Madonna. Nothing remains of the original
structure but the semi-dome itself, the cornice whence it springs, which is the
same as that used on the exterior of the church, and the border and face-arch
which surround it. The ground of the dome is of gold, unbroken except by the
upright Madonna, and usual inscription, M R Θ V. The figure wears a robe of
blue, deeply fringed with gold, which seems to be gathered on the head and

thrown back on the shoulders, crossing the breast, and falling in many folds to the
ground. The under robe, shown beneath it where it opens at the breast, is of the
same color; the whole, except the deep gold fringe, being simply the dress of the
women of the time. “Le donne, anco elle del 1100, vestivano di turchino con
manti in spalla, che le coprivano dinanzi e di dietro.”17

Round the dome there is a colored mosaic border; and on the edge of its arch,
legible by the whole congregation, this inscription:

“quos Eva contrivit, pia virgo Maria redemit;
hanc cuncti laudent, qui Cristi munere gaudent.”18

The whole edifice is, therefore, simply a temple to the Virgin: to her is ascribed
the fact of Redemption, and to her its praise.

§ XL. “And is this,” it will be asked of me, “the time, is this the worship, to
which you would have us look back with reverence and regret?” Inasmuch as
redemption is ascribed to the Virgin, No. Inasmuch as redemption is a thing
desired, believed, rejoiced in, Yes,—and Yes a thousand times. As far as the Virgin
is worshipped in place of God, No; but as far as there is the evidence of worship
itself, and of the sense of a Divine presence, Yes. For there is a wider division of
men than that into Christian and Pagan: before we ask what a man worships, we
have to ask whether he worships at all. Observe Christ’s own words on this head:
“God is a spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit, and in
truth.” The worshipping in spirit comes first, and it does not necessarily imply the
worshipping in truth. Therefore, there is first the broad division of men into Spirit
worshippers and Flesh worshippers; and then, of the Spirit worshippers, the
farther division into Christian and Pagan,—worshippers in Falsehood or in Truth.
I therefore, for the moment, omit all inquiry how far the Mariolatry of the early
church did indeed eclipse Christ, or what measure of deeper reverence for the Son
of God was still felt through all the grosser forms of Madonna worship. Let that
worship be taken at its worst; let the goddess of this dome of Murano be looked
upon as just in the same sense an idol as the Athene of the Acropolis, or the Syrian
Queen of Heaven; and then, on this darkest assumption, balance well the

difference between those who worship and those who worship not;—that
difference which there is in the sight of God, in all ages, between the calculating,
smiling, self-sustained, self-governed man, and the believing, weeping,
wondering, struggling, Heaven-governed man;—between the men who say in
their hearts “there is no God,” and those who acknowledge a God at every step, “if
haply they might feel after Him and find Him.” For that is indeed the difference
which we shall find, in the end, between the builders of this day and the builders
on that sand island long ago. They did honor something out of themselves; they
did believe in spiritual presence judging, animating, redeeming them; they built to
its honor and for its habitation; and were content to pass away in nameless
multitudes, so only that the labor of their hands might fix in the sea-wilderness a
throne for their guardian angel. In this was their strength, and there was indeed a
Spirit walking with them on the waters, though they could not discern the form
thereof, though the Masters voice came not to them, “It is I.” What their error cost
them, we shall see hereafter; for it remained when the majesty and the sincerity of
their worship had departed, and remains to this day. Mariolatry is no special
characteristic of the twelfth century; on the outside of that very tribune of San
Donato, in its central recess, is an image of the Virgin which receives the
reverence once paid to the blue vision upon the inner dome. With rouged cheeks
and painted brows, the frightful doll stands in wretchedness of rags, blackened
with the smoke of the votive lamps at its feet; and if we would know what has
been lost or gained by Italy in the six hundred years that have worn the marbles of
Murano, let us consider how far the priests who set up this to worship, the
populace who have this to adore, may be nobler than the men who conceived that
lonely figure standing on the golden field, or than those to whom it seemed to
receive their prayer at evening, far away, where they only saw the blue clouds
rising out of the burning sea.

10 “Mela, e buon vino, con pace e carità,” Memorie Storiche de’ Veneti Primi e
Secondi, di Jacopo Filiasi (Padua, 1811), tom. iii. cap. 23. Perhaps, in the choice of the
abbot’s cheer, there was some occult reference to the verse of Solomon’s Song: “Stay me
with flagons, comfort me with apples.”

11 Notizie Storiche delle Chiese di Venezia, illustrate da Flaminio Corner (Padua,
1758), p. 615.

12 “On the 14th day of April, 1374, there were found, in this church of the first martyr
St. Stefano, two hundred and more bodies of holy martyrs, by the venerable priest,
Matthew Fradello, incumbent of the church.”

13 Notizie Storiche, p. 620.

14 The intention is farther confirmed by the singular variation in the breadth of the
small fillet which encompasses the inner marble. It is much narrower at the bottom than at
the sides, so as to recover the original breadth in the lower border.

15 Its elevation is given to scale in fig. 4, Plate XIII., below.

16 “Luogo de’ ninfe e de’ semidei.”—M. Andrea Calmo, quoted by Mutinelli, Annali
Urbani di Venezia (Venice, 1841), p. 362.

17 “The women, even as far back as 1100, wore dresses of blue, with mantles on the
shoulder, which clothed them before and behind.”—Sansorino.

It would be difficult to imagine a dress more modest and beautiful. See Appendix 7.

18

“Whom Eve destroyed, the pious Virgin Mary redeemed;
All praise her, who rejoice in the Grace of Christ.”

Vide Appendix 8.

CHAPTER IV.

ST. MARK’S.

§ I. “And so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus.” If as the
shores of Asia lessened upon his sight, the spirit of prophecy had entered
into the heart of the weak disciple who had turned back when his hand was
on the plough, and who had been judged, by the chiefest of Christ’s
captains, unworthy thenceforward to go forth with him to the work,19 how
wonderful would he have thought it, that by the lion symbol in future ages
he was to be represented among men! how woful, that the war-cry of his
name should so often reanimate the rage of the soldier, on those very plains
where he himself had failed in the courage of the Christian, and so often
dye with fruitless blood that very Cypriot Sea, over whose waves, in
repentance and shame, he was following the Son of Consolation!

§ II. That the Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the ninth
century, there appears no sufficient reason to doubt, nor that it was
principally in consequence of their having done so, that they chose him for
their patron saint. There exists, however, a tradition that before he went into
Egypt he had founded the Church at Aquileia, and was thus, in some sort,
the first bishop of the Venetian isles and people. I believe that this tradition
stands on nearly as good grounds as that of St. Peter having been the first
bishop of Rome;20 but, as usual, it is enriched by various later additions and
embellishments, much resembling the stories told respecting the church of
Murano. Thus we find it recorded by the Santo Padre who compiled the
“Vite de’ Santi spettanti alle Chiese di Venezia,”21 that “St. Mark having
seen the people of Aquileia well grounded in religion, and being called to
Rome by St. Peter, before setting off took with him the holy bishop

Hermagoras, and went in a small boat to the marshes of Venice. There were
at that period some houses built upon a certain high bank called Rialto, and
the boat being driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy place, when St.
Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him:
‘Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.’” The angel goes on to
foretell the building of “una stupenda, ne più veduta Città;” but the fable is
hardly ingenious enough to deserve farther relation.

§ III. But whether St. Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not, St.
Theodore was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be considered as
having entirely abdicated his early right, as his statue, standing on a
crocodile, still companions the winged lion on the opposing pillar of the
piazzetta. A church erected to this Saint is said to have occupied, before the
ninth century, the site of St. Mark’s; and the traveller, dazzled by the
brilliancy of the great square, ought not to leave it without endeavoring to
imagine its aspect in that early time, when it was a green field cloister-like
and quiet,22 divided by a small canal, with a line of trees on each side; and
extending between the two churches of St. Theodore and St. Geminian, as
the little piazza of Torcello lies between its “palazzo” and cathedral.

§ IV. But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally
removed to the Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the present
one stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it,23 gave a very different character
to the Square of St. Mark; and fifteen years later, the acquisition of the body
of the Saint, and its deposition in the Ducal Chapel, perhaps not yet
completed, occasioned the investiture of that chapel with all possible
splendor. St. Theodore was deposed from his patronship, and his church
destroyed, to make room for the aggrandizement of the one attached to the
Ducal Palace, and thenceforward known as “St. Mark’s.”24

§ V. This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the Ducal
Palace was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976. It was partly
rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo, on a larger scale; and, with the
assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on under
successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building being
completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till considerably
later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085,25 according to
Sansovino and the author of the “Chiesa Ducale di S. Marco,” in 1094
according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and 1096, those years being
the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I incline to the supposition that it was
soon after his accession to the throne in 1085, though Sansovino writes, by
mistake, Ordelafo instead of Vital Falier. But, at all events, before the close
of the eleventh century the great consecration of the church took place. It
was again injured by fire in 1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall
of Venice there was probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree
embellish or alter the fabric, so that few parts of it can be pronounced
boldly to be of any given date. Two periods of interference are, however,
notable above the rest: the first, that in which the Gothic school, had
superseded the Byzantine towards the close of the fourteenth century, when
the pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window traceries were added to the
exterior, and the great screen, with various chapels and tabernacle-work, to
the interior; the second, when the Renaissance school superseded the
Gothic, and the pupils of Titian and Tintoret substituted, over one half of the
church, their own compositions for the Greek mosaics with which it was
originally decorated;26 happily, though with no good will, having left
enough to enable us to imagine and lament what they destroyed. Of this
irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter; meantime, I wish only
to fix in the reader’s mind the succession of periods of alteration as firmly
and simply as possible.

§ VI. We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly
stated to be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the fourteenth,
and the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no difficulty in
distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the Byzantine; but there
is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how long, during the course of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, additions were made to the Byzantine
church, which cannot be easily distinguished from the work of the eleventh
century, being purposely executed in the same manner. Two of the most
important pieces of evidence on this point are, a mosaic in the south
transept, and another over the northern door of the façade; the first
representing the interior, the second the exterior, of the ancient church.

§ VII. It has just been stated that the existing building was consecrated by
the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to that act of
consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what appears to have
been one of the best arranged and most successful impostures ever
attempted by the clergy of the Romish church. The body of St. Mark had,
without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976; but the revenues of the
church depended too much upon the devotion excited by these relics to
permit the confession of their loss. The following is the account given by
Corner, and believed to this day by the Venetians, of the pretended miracle
by which it was concealed.

“After the repairs undertaken by the Doge Orseolo, the place in which the
body of the holy Evangelist rested had been altogether forgotten; so that the
Doge Vital Falier was entirely ignorant of the place of the venerable
deposit. This was no light affliction, not only to the pious Doge, but to all
the citizens and people; so that at last, moved by confidence in the Divine
mercy, they determined to implore, with prayer and fasting, the
manifestation of so great a treasure, which did not now depend upon any
human effort. A general fast being therefore proclaimed, and a solemn

procession appointed for the 25th day of June, while the people assembled
in the church interceded with God in fervent prayers for the desired boon,
they beheld, with as much amazement as joy, a slight shaking in the marbles
of a pillar (near the place where the altar of the Cross is now), which,
presently falling to the earth, exposed to the view of the rejoicing people the
chest of bronze in which the body of the Evangelist was laid.”

§ VIII. Of the main facts of this tale there is no doubt. They were
embellished afterwards, as usual, by many fanciful traditions; as, for
instance, that, when the sarcophagus was discovered, St. Mark extended his
hand out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers, which he permitted a
noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and delightful story was
further invented of this ring, which I shall not repeat here, as it is now as
well known as any tale of the Arabian Nights. But the fast and the discovery
of the coffin, by whatever means effected, are facts; and they are recorded
in one of the best-preserved mosaics of the north transept, executed very
certainly not long after the event had taken place, closely resembling in its
treatment that of the Bayeux tapestry, and showing, in a conventional
manner, the interior of the church, as it then was, filled by the people, first
in prayer, then in thanksgiving, the pillar standing open before them, and
the Doge, in the midst of them, distinguished by his crimson bonnet
embroidered with gold, but more unmistakably by the inscription “Dux”
over his head, as uniformly is the case in the Bayeux tapestry, and most
other pictorial works of the period. The church is, of course, rudely
represented, and the two upper stories of it reduced to a small scale in order
to form a background to the figures; one of those bold pieces of picture
history which we in our pride of perspective, and a thousand things besides,
never dare attempt. We should have put in a column or two of the real or
perspective size, and subdued it into a vague background: the old workman
crushed the church together that he might get it all in, up to the cupolas; and
has, therefore, left us some useful notes of its ancient form, though any one

who is familiar with the method of drawing employed at the period will not
push the evidence too far. The two pulpits are there, however, as they are at
this day, and the fringe of mosaic flower-work which then encompassed the
whole church, but which modern restorers have destroyed, all but one
fragment still left in the south aisle. There is no attempt to represent the
other mosaics on the roof, the scale being too small to admit of their being
represented with any success; but some at least of those mosaics had been
executed at that period, and their absence in the representation of the entire
church is especially to be observed, in order to show that we must not trust
to any negative evidence in such works. M. Lazari has rashly concluded
that the central archivolt of St. Mark’s must be posterior to the year 1205,
because it does not appear in the representation of the exterior of the church
over the northern door;27 but he justly observes that this mosaic (which is
the other piece of evidence we possess respecting the ancient form of the
building) cannot itself be earlier than 1205, since it represents the bronze
horses which were brought from Constantinople in that year. And this one
fact renders it very difficult to speak with confidence respecting the date of
any part of the exterior of St. Mark’s; for we have above seen that it was
consecrated in the eleventh century, and yet here is one of its most
important exterior decorations assuredly retouched, if not entirely added, in
the thirteenth, although its style would have led us to suppose it had been an
original part of the fabric. However, for all our purposes, it will be enough
for the reader to remember that the earliest parts of the building belong to
the eleventh, twelfth, and first part of the thirteenth century; the Gothic
portions to the fourteenth; some of the altars and embellishments to the
fifteenth and sixteenth; and the modern portion of the mosaics to the
seventeenth.

§ IX. This, however, I only wish him to recollect in order that I may speak
generally of the Byzantine architecture of St. Mark’s, without leading him
to suppose the whole church to have been built and decorated by Greek

artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the seventeenth
century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to the original
fabric that the general effect is still that of a Byzantine building; and I shall
not, except when it is absolutely necessary, direct attention to the discordant
points, or weary the reader with anatomical criticism. Whatever in St.
Mark’s arrests the eye, or affects the feelings, is either Byzantine, or has
been modified by Byzantine influence; and our inquiry into its architectural
merits need not therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or
arrested by the obscurities of chronology.

§ X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St. Mark’s
Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral
town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let us go together
up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see the pinnacles of
one of the towers, and then through the low grey gateway, with its
battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into the inner
private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the
tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are little
shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of
somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay
windows jutting out here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves
painted cream color and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape
of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables
warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger houses,
also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit
walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an
old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral square itself,
laid out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not
uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canons’ children are
walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the
grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and there stand

for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places
between their pillars where there were statues once, and where the
fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the
likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king
long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering
wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, and
grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and
swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their stony scales
by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to
the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of
their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of
eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling
suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowed of
restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of theirs, so
harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast between
the cliffs and sea.

§ XI. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its small
formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded,
continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense and steady
performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the cathedral
clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who have passed
through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and on all who have
seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or catching on their
square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their feet was
indicated only by the mist at the bend of the river. And then let us quickly
recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calle Lunga
San Moisè, which may be considered as there answering to the secluded
street that led us to our English cathedral gateway.

§ XII. We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is
widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant salesmen,—a
shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of brazen ringing, all
the worse for its confinement between the high houses of the passage along
which we have to make our way. Over-head an inextricable confusion of
rugged shutters, and iron balconies and chimney flues pushed out on
brackets to save room, and arched windows with projecting sills of Istrian
stone, and gleams of green leaves here and there where a fig-tree branch
escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading the eye up to the
narrow stream of blue sky high over all. On each side, a row of shops, as
densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, intervals between the square
stone shafts, about eight feet high, which carry the first floors: intervals of
which one is narrow and serves as a door; the other is, in the more
respectable shops, wainscoted to the height of the counter and glazed above,
but in those of the poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares
laid on benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases entering at
the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the threshold into a
gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but which is generally
broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the back of the shop,
suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less pious shop-keeper
sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented with a penny print;
the more religious one has his print colored and set in a little shrine with a
gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a faded flower or two on each side,
and his lamp burning brilliantly. Here at the fruiterer’s, where the dark-
green water-melons are heaped upon the counter like cannon balls, the
Madonna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves; but the pewterer next door
has let his lamp out, and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull
gleam of the studded patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in
the darkness. Next comes a “Vendita Frittole e Liquori,” where the Virgin,
enthroned in a very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf,

presides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be
defined or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at the regular wine-shop
of the calle, where we are offered “Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28·32,” the
Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above ten or a dozen large red casks
of three-year-old vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of
Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and for the evening, when the
gondoliers will come to drink out, under her auspices, the money they have
gained during the day, she will have a whole chandelier.

§ XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and,
glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply moulded, in
the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines resting on an
ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side; and so presently
emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moisè, whence to the entrance into
St. Mark’s Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the
Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first by the frightful façade of San
Moisè, which we will pause at another time to examine, and then by the
modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza, and the mingling with the
lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of English and Austrians. We
will push fast through them into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the
“Bocca di Piazza,” and then we forget them all; for between those pillars
there opens a great light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the
vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field
of chequered stones; and, on each side, the countless arches prolong
themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses that
pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back into
sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken
walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly sculpture, and
fluted shafts of delicate stone.

§ XIV. And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered
arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to
have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away;—a
multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of
colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal
and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches,
ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber
and delicate as ivory,—sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and
lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering
among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds
and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred,
and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their
figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the
leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded
back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded
long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of
variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted
with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the
sunshine, Cleopatra-like, “their bluest veins to kiss”—the shadow, as it
steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a
receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven
tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine,
and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them,
in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life—angels,
and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season
upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles,
mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers,—a confusion of
delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in
their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark’s Lion, lifted on a blue
field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches

break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in
flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore
had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them
with coral and amethyst.

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There
is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the restless
crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the
St. Mark’s porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage,
and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every
motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for
seven hundred years.

§ XV. And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it? You
may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St.
Mark’s, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance
brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass
by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest
tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars
are themselves the seats—not “of them that sell doves” for sacrifice, but of
the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the
church there is almost a continuous line of cafés, where the idle Venetians
of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the
Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring
with the organ notes,—the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen
crowd thickening round them,—a crowd, which, if it had its will, would
stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all
day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie
basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children,—every heavy
glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their
throats hoarse with cursing,—gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour

after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the
church porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it
continually.

That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the horror of this,
let us turn aside under the portico which looks towards the sea, and passing
round within the two massive pillars brought from St. Jean d’Acre, we shall
find the gate of the Baptistery; let us enter there. The heavy door closes
behind us instantly, and the light, and the turbulence of the Piazzetta, are
together shut out by it.

§ XVI. We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted, not with arches, but with
small cupolas starred with gold, and chequered with gloomy figures: in the
centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-reliefs, a small figure of the
Baptist standing above it in a single ray of light that glances across the
narrow room, dying as it falls from a window high in the wall, and the first
thing that it strikes, and the only thing that it strikes brightly, is a tomb. We
hardly know if it be a tomb indeed; for it is like a narrow couch set beside
the window, low-roofed and curtained, so that it might seem, but that it has
some height above the pavement, to have been drawn towards the window,
that the sleeper might be wakened early;—only there are two angels who
have drawn the curtain back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look
also, and thank that gentle light that rests upon his forehead for ever, and
dies away upon his breast.

The face is of a man in middle life, but there are two deep furrows right
across the forehead, dividing it like the foundations of a tower: the height of
it above is bound by the fillet of the ducal cap. The rest of the features are
singularly small and delicate, the lips sharp, perhaps the sharpness of death
being added to that of the natural lines; but there is a sweet smile upon
them, and a deep serenity upon the whole countenance. The roof of the
canopy above has been blue, filled with stars; beneath, in the centre of the

tomb on which the figure rests, is a seated figure of the Virgin, and the
border of it all around is of flowers and soft leaves, growing rich and deep,
as if in a field in summer.

It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo, a man early great among the great of
Venice; and early lost. She chose him for her king in his 36th year; he died
ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe half of
what we know of her former fortunes.

§ XVII. Look round at the room in which he lies. The floor of it is of rich
mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble, and its walls are of
alabaster, but worn and shattered, and darkly stained with age, almost a
ruin,—in places the slabs of marble have fallen away altogether, and the
rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all beautiful; the ravaging
fissures fretting their way among the islands and channelled zones of the
alabaster, and the time-stains on its translucent masses darkened into fields
of rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it
through deep sea. The light fades away into the recess of the chamber
towards the altar, and the eye can hardly trace the lines of the bas-relief
behind it of the baptism of Christ: but on the vaulting of the roof the figures
are distinct, and there are seen upon it two great circles, one surrounded by
the “Principalities and powers in heavenly places,” of which Milton has
expressed the ancient division in the single massy line,

“Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,”

and around the other, the Apostles; Christ the centre of both; and upon the
walls, again and again repeated, the gaunt figure of the Baptist, in every
circumstance of his life and death; and the streams of the Jordan running
down between their cloven rocks; the axe laid to the root of a fruitless tree
that springs upon their shore. “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit
shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.” Yes, verily: to be baptized with

fire, or to be cast therein; it is the choice set before all men. The march-
notes still murmur through the grated window, and mingle with the
sounding in our ears of the sentence of judgment, which the old Greek has
written on that Baptistery wall. Venice has made her choice.

§ XVIII. He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her
another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him; but he and his
counsels have long been forgotten by her, and the dust lies upon his lips.

Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the place of his
rest, let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to which
the eye must be accustomed for some moments before the form of the
building can be traced; and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn out
into the form of a Cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pillars.
Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through narrow apertures
like large stars; and here and there a ray or two from some far away
casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a narrow phosphoric stream
upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a thousand colors along the
floor. What else there is of light is from torches, or silver lamps, burning
ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels; the roof sheeted with gold, and
the polished walls covered with alabaster, give back at every curve and
angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and the glories round the heads
of the sculptured saints flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again
into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a continual succession of
crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms
beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening
beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from
running fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the
pleasures of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its
redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead
always at last to the Cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every

stone; sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes
with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet;
but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before
the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of the apse. And
although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the
incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines
upon their marble, a woman standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and
the inscription above her, “Mother of God,” she is not here the presiding
deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and always, burning in the centre of
the temple; and every dome and hollow of its roof has the figure of Christ in
the utmost height of it, raised in power, or returning in judgment.

§ XIX. Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people. At
every hour of the day there are groups collected before the various shrines,
and solitary worshippers scattered through the darker places of the church,
evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and, for the most part,
profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater number of the renowned
shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their appointed prayers with
wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the step of the stranger does
not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark’s; and hardly a
moment passes, from early morning to sunset, in which we may not see
some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long
abasement on the floor of the temple, and then rising slowly with more
confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms given to
the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always in the northern
aisle, leave the church, as if comforted.

§ XX. But we must not hastily conclude from this that the nobler
characters of the building have at present any influence in fostering a
devotional spirit. There is distress enough in Venice to bring many to their
knees, without excitement from external imagery; and whatever there may

be in the temper of the worship offered in St. Mark’s more than can be
accounted for by reference to the unhappy circumstances of the city, is
assuredly not owing either to the beauty of its architecture or to the
impressiveness of the Scripture histories embodied in its mosaics. That it
has a peculiar effect, however slight, on the popular mind, may perhaps be
safely conjectured from the number of worshippers which it attracts, while
the churches of St. Paul and the Frari, larger in size and more central in
position, are left comparatively empty.28 But this effect is altogether to be
ascribed to its richer assemblage of those sources of influence which
address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human mind, and
which, in all ages and countries, have been more or less employed in the
support of superstition. Darkness and mystery; confused recesses of
building; artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained with a
constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness; preciousness of
material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye; close air loaded with a
sweet and peculiar odor associated only with religious services, solemn
music, and tangible idols or images having popular legends attached to
them,—these, the stage properties of superstition, which have been from the
beginning of the world, and must be to the end of it, employed by all
nations, whether openly savage or nominally civilized, to produce a false
awe in minds incapable of apprehending the true nature of the Deity, are
assembled in St. Mark’s to a degree, as far as I know, unexampled in any
other European church. The arts of the Magus and the Brahmin are
exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed Christianity; and the popular
sentiment which these arts excite is to be regarded by us with no more
respect than we should have considered ourselves justified in rendering to
the devotion of the worshippers at Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou.29

§ XXI. Indeed, these inferior means of exciting religious emotion were
employed in the ancient Church as they are at this day, but not employed
alone. Torchlight there was, as there is now; but the torchlight illumined

Scripture histories on the walls, which every eye traced and every heart
comprehended, but which, during my whole residence in Venice, I never
saw one Venetian regard for an instant. I never heard from any one the most
languid expression of interest in any feature of the church, or perceived the
slightest evidence of their understanding the meaning of its architecture;
and while, therefore, the English cathedral, though no longer dedicated to
the kind of services for which it was intended by its builders, and much at
variance in many of its characters with the temper of the people by whom it
is now surrounded, retains yet so much of its religious influence that no
prominent feature of its architecture can be said to exist altogether in vain,
we have in St. Mark’s a building apparently still employed in the
ceremonies for which it was designed, and yet of which the impressive
attributes have altogether ceased to be comprehended by its votaries. The
beauty which it possesses is unfelt, the language it uses is forgotten; and in
the midst of the city to whose service it has so long been consecrated, and
still filled by crowds of the descendants of those to whom it owes its
magnificence, it stands, in reality, more desolate than the ruins through
which the sheep-walk passes unbroken in our English valleys; and the
writing on its marble walls is less regarded and less powerful for the
teaching of men, than the letters which the shepherd follows with his finger,
where the moss is lightest on the tombs in the desecrated cloister.

§ XXII. It must therefore be altogether without reference to its present
usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and meaning of the
architecture of this marvellous building; and it can only be after we have
terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on abstract grounds, that we
can pronounce with any certainty how far the present neglect of St. Mark’s
is significative of the decline of the Venetian character, or how far this
church is to be considered as the relic of a barbarous age, incapable of
attracting the admiration, or influencing the feelings of a civilized
community.

The inquiry before us is twofold. Throughout the first volume, I carefully
kept the study of expression distinct from that of abstract architectural
perfection; telling the reader that in every building we should afterwards
examine, he would have first to form a judgment of its construction and
decorative merit, considering it merely as a work of art; and then to
examine farther, in what degree it fulfilled its expressional purposes.
Accordingly, we have first to judge of St. Mark’s merely as a piece of
architecture, not as a church; secondly, to estimate its fitness for its special
duty as a place of worship, and the relation in which it stands, as such, to
those northern cathedrals that still retain so much of the power over the
human heart, which the Byzantine domes appear to have lost for ever.

§ XXIII. In the two succeeding sections of this work, devoted respectively
to the examination of the Gothic and Renaissance buildings in Venice, I
have endeavored to analyze and state, as briefly as possible, the true nature
of each school,—first in Spirit, then in Form. I wished to have given a
similar analysis, in this section, of the nature of Byzantine architecture; but
could not make my statements general, because I have never seen this kind
of building on its native soil. Nevertheless, in the following sketch of the
principles exemplified in St. Mark’s, I believe that most of the leading
features and motives of the style will be found clearly enough distinguished
to enable the reader to judge of it with tolerable fairness, as compared with
the better known systems of European architecture in the middle ages.

§ XXIV. Now the first broad characteristic of the building, and the root
nearly of every other important peculiarity in it, is its confessed
incrustation. It is the purest example in Italy of the great school of
architecture in which the ruling principle is the incrustation of brick with
more precious materials; and it is necessary before we proceed to criticise
any one of its arrangements, that the reader should carefully consider the
principles which are likely to have influenced, or might legitimately

influence, the architects of such a school, as distinguished from those whose
designs are to be executed in massive materials.

It is true, that among different nations, and at different times, we may
find examples of every sort and degree of incrustation, from the mere
setting of the larger and more compact stones by preference at the outside
of the wall, to the miserable construction of that modern brick cornice, with
its coating of cement, which, but the other day, in London, killed its
unhappy workmen in its fall.30 But just as it is perfectly possible to have a
clear idea of the opposing characteristics of two different species of plants
or animals, though between the two there are varieties which it is difficult to
assign either to the one or the other, so the reader may fix decisively in his
mind the legitimate characteristics of the incrusted and the massive styles,
though between the two there are varieties which confessedly unite the
attributes of both. For instance, in many Roman remains, built of blocks of
tufa and incrusted with marble, we have a style, which, though truly solid,
possesses some of the attributes of incrustation; and in the Cathedral of
Florence, built of brick and coated with marble, the marble facing is so
firmly and exquisitely set, that the building, though in reality incrusted,
assumes the attributes of solidity. But these intermediate examples need not
in the least confuse our generally distinct ideas of the two families of
buildings: the one in which the substance is alike throughout, and the forms
and conditions of the ornament assume or prove that it is so, as in the best
Greek buildings, and for the most part in our early Norman and Gothic; and
the other, in which the substance is of two kinds, one internal, the other
external, and the system of decoration is founded on this duplicity, as pre-
eminently in St. Mark’s.

§ XXV. I have used the word duplicity in no depreciatory sense. In chapter
ii. of the “Seven Lamps,” § 18, I especially guarded this incrusted school
from the imputation of insincerity, and I must do so now at greater length. It

appears insincere at first to a Northern builder, because, accustomed to
build with solid blocks of freestone, he is in the habit of supposing the
external superficies of a piece of masonry to be some criterion of its
thickness. But, as soon as he gets acquainted with the incrusted style, he
will find that the Southern builders had no intention to deceive him. He will
see that every slab of facial marble is fastened to the next by a confessed
rivet, and that the joints of the armor are so visibly and openly
accommodated to the contours of the substance within, that he has no more
right to complain of treachery than a savage would have, who, for the first
time in his life seeing a man in armor, had supposed him to be made of
solid steel. Acquaint him with the customs of chivalry, and with the uses of
the coat of mail, and he ceases to accuse of dishonesty either the panoply or
the knight.

These laws and customs of the St. Mark’s architectural chivalry it must
be our business to develope.

§ XXVI. First, consider the natural circumstances which give rise to such a
style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any quarries of
available stone, and having precarious access to the mainland where they
exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely with brick, or to import
whatever stone they use from great distances, in ships of small tonnage, and
for the most part dependent for speed on the oar rather than the sail. The
labor and cost of carriage are just as great, whether they import common or
precious stone, and therefore the natural tendency would always be to make
each shipload as valuable as possible. But in proportion to the preciousness
of the stone, is the limitation of its possible supply; limitation not
determined merely by cost, but by the physical conditions of the material,
for of many marbles, pieces above a certain size are not to be had for
money. There would also be a tendency in such circumstances to import as
much stone as possible ready sculptured, in order to save weight; and

therefore, if the traffic of their merchants led them to places where there
were ruins of ancient edifices, to ship the available fragments of them
home. Out of this supply of marble, partly composed of pieces of so
precious a quality that only a few tons of them could be on any terms
obtained, and partly of shafts, capitals, and other portions of foreign
buildings, the island architect has to fashion, as best he may, the anatomy of
his edifice. It is at his choice either to lodge his few blocks of precious
marble here and there among his masses of brick, and to cut out of the
sculptured fragments such new forms as may be necessary for the
observance of fixed proportions in the new building; or else to cut the
colored stones into thin pieces, of extent sufficient to face the whole surface
of the walls, and to adopt a method of construction irregular enough to
admit the insertion of fragmentary sculptures; rather with a view of
displaying their intrinsic beauty, than of setting them to any regular service
in the support of the building.

An architect who cared only to display his own skill, and had no respect
for the works of others, would assuredly have chosen the former alternative,
and would have sawn the old marbles into fragments in order to prevent all
interference with his own designs. But an architect who cared for the
preservation of noble work, whether his own or others’, and more regarded
the beauty of his building than his own fame, would have done what those
old builders of St. Mark’s did for us, and saved every relic with which he
was entrusted.

§ XXVII. But these were not the only motives which influenced the
Venetians in the adoption of their method of architecture. It might, under all
the circumstances above stated, have been a question with other builders,
whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or twenty of chalk flints;
and whether to build a small church faced with porphyry and paved with
agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in freestone. But with the Venetians it

could not be a question for an instant; they were exiles from ancient and
beautiful cities, and had been accustomed to build with their ruins, not less
in affection than in admiration: they had thus not only grown familiar with
the practice of inserting older fragments in modern buildings, but they owed
to that practice a great part of the splendor of their city, and whatever charm
of association might aid its change from a Refuge into a Home. The practice
which began in the affections of a fugitive nation, was prolonged in the
pride of a conquering one; and beside the memorials of departed happiness,
were elevated the trophies of returning victory. The ship of war brought
home more marble in triumph than the merchant vessel in speculation; and
the front of St. Mark’s became rather a shrine at which to dedicate the
splendor of miscellaneous spoil, than the organized expression of any fixed
architectural law, or religious emotion.

§ XXVIII. Thus far, however, the justification of the style of this church
depends on circumstances peculiar to the time of its erection, and to the
spot where it arose. The merit of its method, considered in the abstract, rests
on far broader grounds.

In the fifth chapter of the “Seven Lamps,” § 14, the reader will find the
opinion of a modern architect of some reputation, Mr. Wood, that the chief
thing remarkable in this church “is its extreme ugliness;” and he will find
this opinion associated with another, namely, that the works of the Caracci
are far preferable to those of the Venetian painters. This second statement of
feeling reveals to us one of the principal causes of the first; namely, that Mr.
Wood had not any perception of color, or delight in it. The perception of
color is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another,
as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of St.
Mark’s, is the perfection of that color-faculty which few people ever set
themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. For it is on its
value as a piece of perfect and unchangeable coloring, that the claims of

this edifice to our respect are finally rested; and a deaf man might as well
pretend to pronounce judgment on the merits of a full orchestra, as an
architect trained in the composition of form only, to discern the beauty of
St. Mark’s. It possesses the charm of color in common with the greater part
of the architecture, as well as of the manufactures, of the East; but the
Venetians deserve especial note as the only European people who appear to
have sympathized to the full with the great instinct of the Eastern races.
They indeed were compelled to bring artists from Constantinople to design
the mosaics of the vaults of St. Mark’s, and to group the colors of its
porches; but they rapidly took up and developed, under more masculine
conditions, the system of which the Greeks had shown them the example:
while the burghers and barons of the North were building their dark streets
and grisly castles of oak and sandstone, the merchants of Venice were
covering their palaces with porphyry and gold; and at last, when her mighty
painters had created for her a color more priceless than gold or porphyry,
even this, the richest of her treasures, she lavished upon walls whose
foundations were beaten by the sea; and the strong tide, as it runs beneath
the Rialto, is reddened to this day by the reflection of the frescoes of
Giorgione.

§ XXIX. If, therefore, the reader does not care for color, I must protest
against his endeavor to form any judgment whatever of this church of St.
Mark’s. But, if he both cares for and loves it, let him remember that the
school of incrusted architecture is the only one in which perfect and
permanent chromatic decoration is possible; and let him look upon every
piece of jasper and alabaster given to the architect as a cake of very hard
color, of which a certain portion is to be ground down or cut off, to paint the
walls with. Once understand this thoroughly, and accept the condition that
the body and availing strength of the edifice are to be in brick, and that this
under muscular power of brickwork is to be clothed with the defence and
the brightness of the marble, as the body of an animal is protected and

adorned by its scales or its skin, and all the consequent fitnesses and laws of
the structure will be easily discernible: These I shall state in their natural
order.

§ XXX. Law I. That the plinths and cornices used for binding the armor
are to be light and delicate. A certain thickness, at least two or three inches,
must be required in the covering pieces (even when composed of the
strongest stone, and set on the least exposed parts), in order to prevent the
chance of fracture, and to allow for the wear of time. And the weight of this
armor must not be trusted to cement; the pieces must not be merely glued to
the rough brick surface, but connected with the mass which they protect by
binding cornices and string courses; and with each other, so as to secure
mutual support, aided by the rivetings, but by no means dependent upon
them. And, for the full honesty and straight-forwardness of the work, it is
necessary that these string courses and binding plinths should not be of such
proportions as would fit them for taking any important part in the hard work
of the inner structure, or render them liable to be mistaken for the great
cornices and plinths already explained as essential parts of the best solid
building. They must be delicate, slight, and visibly incapable of severer
work than that assigned to them.

§ XXXI. Law II. Science of inner structure is to be abandoned. As the
body of the structure is confessedly of inferior, and comparatively
incoherent materials, it would be absurd to attempt in it any expression of
the higher refinements of construction. It will be enough that by its mass we
are assured of its sufficiency and strength; and there is the less reason for
endeavoring to diminish the extent of its surface by delicacy of adjustment,
because on the breadth of that surface we are to depend for the better
display of the color, which is to be the chief source of our pleasure in the
building. The main body of the work, therefore, will be composed of solid
walls and massive piers; and whatever expression of finer structural science

we may require, will be thrown either into subordinate portions of it, or
entirely directed to the support of the external mail, where in arches or
vaults it might otherwise appear dangerously independent of the material
within.

§ XXXII. Law III. All shafts are to be solid. Wherever, by the smallness of
the parts, we may be driven to abandon the incrusted structure at all, it must
be abandoned altogether. The eye must never be left in the least doubt as to
what is solid and what is coated. Whatever appears probably solid, must be
assuredly so, and therefore it becomes an inviolable law that no shaft shall
ever be incrusted. Not only does the whole virtue of a shaft depend on its
consolidation, but the labor of cutting and adjusting an incrusted coat to it
would be greater than the saving of material is worth. Therefore the shaft,
of whatever size, is always to be solid; and because the incrusted character
of the rest of the building renders it more difficult for the shafts to clear
themselves from suspicion, they must not, in this incrusted style, be in any
place jointed. No shaft must ever be used but of one block; and this the
more, because the permission given to the builder to have his walls and
piers as ponderous as he likes, renders it quite unnecessary for him to use
shafts of any fixed size. In our Norman and Gothic, where definite support
is required at a definite point, it becomes lawful to build up a tower of small
stones in the shape of a shaft. But the Byzantine is allowed to have as much
support as he wants from the walls in every direction, and he has no right to
ask for further license in the structure of his shafts. Let him, by generosity
in the substance of his pillars, repay us for the permission we have given
him to be superficial in his walls. The builder in the chalk valleys of France
and England may be blameless in kneading his clumsy pier out of broken
flint and calcined lime; but the Venetian, who has access to the riches of
Asia and the quarries of Egypt, must frame at least his shafts out of flawless
stone.

§ XXXIII. And this for another reason yet. Although, as we have said, it is
impossible to cover the walls of a large building with color, except on the
condition of dividing the stone into plates, there is always a certain
appearance of meanness and niggardliness in the procedure. It is necessary
that the builder should justify himself from this suspicion; and prove that it
is not in mere economy or poverty, but in the real impossibility of doing
otherwise, that he has sheeted his walls so thinly with the precious film.
Now the shaft is exactly the portion of the edifice in which it is fittest to
recover his honor in this respect. For if blocks of jasper or porphyry be
inserted in the walls, the spectator cannot tell their thickness, and cannot
judge of the costliness of the sacrifice. But the shaft he can measure with
his eye in an instant, and estimate the quantity of treasure both in the mass
of its existing substance, and in that which has been hewn away to bring it
into its perfect and symmetrical form. And thus the shafts of all buildings of
this kind are justly regarded as an expression of their wealth, and a form of
treasure, just as much as the jewels or gold in the sacred vessels; they are, in
fact, nothing else than large jewels,31 the block of precious serpentine or
jasper being valued according to its size and brilliancy of color, like a large
emerald or ruby; only the bulk required to bestow value on the one is to be
measured in feet and tons, and on the other in lines and carats. The shafts
must therefore be, without exception, of one block in all buildings of this
kind; for the attempt in any place to incrust or joint them would be a
deception like that of introducing a false stone among jewellery (for a
number of joints of any precious stone are of course not equal in value to a
single piece of equal weight), and would put an end at once to the
spectator’s confidence in the expression of wealth in any portion of the
structure, or of the spirit of sacrifice in those who raised it.

§ XXXIV. Law IV. The shafts may sometimes be independent of the
construction. Exactly in proportion to the importance which the shaft
assumes as a large jewel, is the diminution of its importance as a sustaining

member; for the delight which we receive in its abstract bulk, and beauty of
color, is altogether independent of any perception of its adaptation to
mechanical necessities. Like other beautiful things in this world, its end is
to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be
otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot
make them into heads of hammers. Nay, so far from our admiration of the
jewel shaft being dependent on its doing work for us, it is very possible that
a chief part of its preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and
tenderness of material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard work; and
therefore that we shall admire it the more, because we perceive that if we
were to put much weight upon it, it would be crushed. But, at all events, it
is very clear that the primal object in the placing of such shafts must be the
display of their beauty to the best advantage, and that therefore all
imbedding of them in walls, or crowding of them into groups, in any
position in which either their real size or any portion of their surface would
be concealed, is either inadmissible altogether, or objectionable in
proportion to their value; that no symmetrical or scientific arrangements of
pillars are therefore ever to be expected in buildings of this kind, and that
all such are even to be looked upon as positive errors and misapplications of
materials: but that, on the contrary, we must be constantly prepared to see,
and to see with admiration, shafts of great size and importance set in places
where their real service is little more than nominal, and where the chief end
of their existence is to catch the sunshine upon their polished sides, and lead
the eye into delighted wandering among the mazes of their azure veins.

§ XXXV. Law V. The shafts may be of variable size. Since the value of
each shaft depends upon its bulk, and diminishes with the diminution of its
mass, in a greater ratio than the size itself diminishes, as in the case of all
other jewellery, it is evident that we must not in general expect perfect
symmetry and equality among the series of shafts, any more than
definiteness of application; but that, on the contrary, an accurately observed

symmetry ought to give us a kind of pain, as proving that considerable and
useless loss has been sustained by some of the shafts, in being cut down to
match with the rest. It is true that symmetry is generally sought for in works
of smaller jewellery; but, even there, not a perfect symmetry, and obtained
under circumstances quite different from those which affect the placing of
shafts in architecture. First: the symmetry is usually imperfect. The stones
that seem to match each other in a ring or necklace, appear to do so only
because they are so small that their differences are not easily measured by
the eye; but there is almost always such difference between them as would
be strikingly apparent if it existed in the same proportion between two
shafts nine or ten feet in height. Secondly: the quantity of stones which pass
through a jeweller’s hands, and the facility of exchange of such small
objects, enable the tradesman to select any number of stones of approximate
size; a selection, however, often requiring so much time, that perfect
symmetry in a group of very fine stones adds enormously to their value. But
the architect has neither the time nor the facilities of exchange. He cannot
lay aside one column in a corner of his church till, in the course of traffic,
he obtain another that will match it; he has not hundreds of shafts fastened
up in bundles, out of which he can match sizes at his ease; he cannot send to
a brother-tradesman and exchange the useless stones for available ones, to
the convenience of both. His blocks of stone, or his ready hewn shafts, have
been brought to him in limited number, from immense distances; no others
are to be had; and for those which he does not bring into use, there is no
demand elsewhere. His only means of obtaining symmetry will therefore
be, in cutting down the finer masses to equality with the inferior ones; and
this we ought not to desire him often to do. And therefore, while sometimes
in a Baldacchino, or an important chapel or shrine, this costly symmetry
may be necessary, and admirable in proportion to its probable cost, in the
general fabric we must expect to see shafts introduced of size and
proportion continually varying, and such symmetry as may be obtained

among them never altogether perfect, and dependent for its charm
frequently on strange complexities and unexpected rising and falling of
weight and accent in its marble syllables; bearing the same relation to a
rigidly chiselled and proportioned architecture that the wild lyric rhythm of
Æschylus or Pindar bears to the finished measures of Pope.

§ XXXVI. The application of the principles of jewellery to the smaller as
well as the larger blocks, will suggest to us another reason for the method of
incrustation adopted in the walls. It often happens that the beauty of the
veining in some varieties of alabaster is so great, that it becomes desirable
to exhibit it by dividing the stone, not merely to economize its substance,
but to display the changes in the disposition of its fantastic lines. By
reversing one of two thin plates successively taken from the stone, and
placing their corresponding edges in contact, a perfectly symmetrical figure
may be obtained, which will enable the eye to comprehend more thoroughly
the position of the veins. And this is actually the method in which, for the
most part, the alabasters of St. Mark are employed; thus accomplishing a
double good,—directing the spectator, in the first place, to close observation
of the nature of the stone employed, and in the second, giving him a farther
proof of the honesty of intention in the builder: for wherever similar veining
is discovered in two pieces, the fact is declared that they have been cut from
the same stone. It would have been easy to disguise the similarity by using
them in different parts of the building; but on the contrary they are set edge
to edge, so that the whole system of the architecture may be discovered at a
glance by any one acquainted with the nature of the stones employed. Nay,
but, it is perhaps answered me, not by an ordinary observer; a person
ignorant of the nature of alabaster might perhaps fancy all these
symmetrical patterns to have been found in the stone itself, and thus be
doubly deceived, supposing blocks to be solid and symmetrical which were
in reality subdivided and irregular. I grant it; but be it remembered, that in
all things, ignorance is liable to be deceived, and has no right to accuse

anything but itself as the source of the deception. The style and the words
are dishonest, not which are liable to be misunderstood if subjected to no
inquiry, but which are deliberately calculated to lead inquiry astray. There
are perhaps no great or noble truths, from those of religion downwards,
which present no mistakeable aspect to casual or ignorant contemplation.
Both the truth and the lie agree in hiding themselves at first, but the lie
continues to hide itself with effort, as we approach to examine it; and leads
us, if undiscovered, into deeper lies; the truth reveals itself in proportion to
our patience and knowledge, discovers itself kindly to our pleading, and
leads us, as it is discovered, into deeper truths.

§ XXXVII. Law VI. The decoration must be shallow in cutting. The method
of construction being thus systematized, it is evident that a certain style of
decoration must arise out of it, based on the primal condition that over the
greater part of the edifice there can be no deep cutting. The thin sheets of
covering stones do not admit of it; we must not cut them through to the
bricks; and whatever ornaments we engrave upon them cannot, therefore,
be more than an inch deep at the utmost. Consider for an instant the
enormous differences which this single condition compels between the
sculptural decoration of the incrusted style, and that of the solid stones of
the North, which may be hacked and hewn into whatever cavernous
hollows and black recesses we choose; struck into grim darknesses and
grotesque projections, and rugged ploughings up of sinuous furrows, in
which any form or thought may be wrought out on any scale,—mighty
statues with robes of rock and crowned foreheads burning in the sun, or
venomous goblins and stealthy dragons shrunk into lurking-places of
untraceable shade: think of this, and of the play and freedom given to the
sculptor’s hand and temper, to smite out and in, hither and thither, as he
will; and then consider what must be the different spirit of the design which
is to be wrought on the smooth surface of a film of marble, where every line
and shadow must be drawn with the most tender pencilling and cautious

reserve of resource,—where even the chisel must not strike hard, lest it
break through the delicate stone, nor the mind be permitted in any
impetuosity of conception inconsistent with the fine discipline of the hand.
Consider that whatever animal or human form is to be suggested, must be
projected on a flat surface; that all the features of the countenance, the folds
of the drapery, the involutions of the limbs, must be so reduced and subdued
that the whole work becomes rather a piece of fine drawing than of
sculpture; and then follow out, until you begin to perceive their endlessness,
the resulting differences of character which will be necessitated in every
part of the ornamental designs of these incrusted churches, as compared
with that of the Northern schools. I shall endeavor to trace a few of them
only.

§ XXXVIII. The first would of course be a diminution of the builder’s
dependence upon human form as a source of ornament: since exactly in
proportion to the dignity of the form itself is the loss which it must sustain
in being reduced to a shallow and linear bas-relief, as well as the difficulty
of expressing it at all under such conditions. Wherever sculpture can be
solid, the nobler characters of the human form at once lead the artist to aim
at its representation, rather than at that of inferior organisms; but when all is
to be reduced to outline, the forms of flowers and lower animals are always
more intelligible, and are felt to approach much more to a satisfactory
rendering of the objects intended, than the outlines of the human body. This
inducement to seek for resources of ornament in the lower fields of creation
was powerless in the minds of the great Pagan nations, Ninevite, Greek, or
Egyptian: first, because their thoughts were so concentrated on their own
capacities and fates, that they preferred the rudest suggestion of human
form to the best of an inferior organism; secondly, because their constant
practice in solid sculpture, often colossal, enabled them to bring a vast
amount of science into the treatment of the lines, whether of the low relief,
the monochrome vase, or shallow hieroglyphic.

§ XXXIX. But when various ideas adverse to the representation of animal,
and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and iconoclast
Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders’ minds to seek for
decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished practice in solid
sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find artists capable of
satisfactorily reducing the high organisms to their elementary outlines, the
choice of subject for surface sculpture would be more and more
uninterruptedly directed to floral organisms, and human and animal form
would become diminished in size, frequency, and general importance. So
that, while in the Northern solid architecture we constantly find the effect of
its noblest features dependent on ranges of statues, often colossal, and full
of abstract interest, independent of their architectural service, in the
Southern incrusted style we must expect to find the human form for the
most part subordinate and diminutive, and involved among designs of
foliage and flowers, in the manner of which endless examples had been
furnished by the fantastic ornamentation of the Romans, from which the
incrusted style had been directly derived.

§ XL. Farther. In proportion to the degree in which his subject must be
reduced to abstract outline will be the tendency in the sculptor to abandon
naturalism of representation, and subordinate every form to architectural
service. Where the flower or animal can be hewn into bold relief, there will
always be a temptation to render the representation of it more complete than
is necessary, or even to introduce details and intricacies inconsistent with
simplicity of distant effect. Very often a worse fault than this is committed;
and in the endeavor to give vitality to the stone, the original ornamental
purpose of the design is sacrificed or forgotten. But when nothing of this
kind can be attempted, and a slight outline is all that the sculptor can
command, we may anticipate that this outline will be composed with
exquisite grace; and that the richness of its ornamental arrangement will
atone for the feebleness of its power of portraiture. On the porch of a

Northern cathedral we may seek for the images of the flowers that grow in
the neighboring fields, and as we watch with wonder the grey stones that
fret themselves into thorns, and soften into blossoms, we may care little that
these knots of ornament, as we retire from them to contemplate the whole
building, appear unconsidered or confused. On the incrusted building we
must expect no such deception of the eye or thoughts. It may sometimes be
difficult to determine, from the involutions of its linear sculpture, what were
the natural forms which originally suggested them: but we may confidently
expect that the grace of their arrangement will always be complete; that
there will not be a line in them which could be taken away without injury,
nor one wanting which could be added with advantage.

§ XLI. Farther. While the sculptures of the incrusted school will thus be
generally distinguished by care and purity rather than force, and will be, for
the most part, utterly wanting in depth of shadow, there will be one means
of obtaining darkness peculiarly simple and obvious, and often in the
sculptor’s power. Wherever he can, without danger, leave a hollow behind
his covering slabs, or use them, like glass, to fill an aperture in the wall, he
can, by piercing them with holes, obtain points or spaces of intense
blackness to contrast with the light tracing of the rest of his design. And we
may expect to find this artifice used the more extensively, because, while it
will be an effective means of ornamentation on the exterior of the building,
it will be also the safest way of admitting light to the interior, still totally
excluding both rain and wind. And it will naturally follow that the architect,
thus familiarized with the effect of black and sudden points of shadow, will
often seek to carry the same principle into other portions of his
ornamentation, and by deep drill-holes, or perhaps inlaid portions of black
color, to refresh the eye where it may be wearied by the lightness of the
general handling.

§ XLII. Farther. Exactly in proportion to the degree in which the force of
sculpture is subdued, will be the importance attached to color as a means of
effect or constituent of beauty. I have above stated that the incrusted style
was the only one in which perfect or permanent color decoration was
possible. It is also the only one in which a true system of color decoration
was ever likely to be invented. In order to understand this, the reader must
permit me to review with some care the nature of the principles of coloring
adopted by the Northern and Southern nations.

§ XLIII. I believe that from the beginning of the world there has never
been a true or fine school of art in which color was despised. It has often
been imperfectly attained and injudiciously applied, but I believe it to be
one of the essential signs of life in a school of art, that it loves color; and I
know it to be one of the first signs of death in the Renaissance schools, that
they despised color.

Observe, it is not now the question whether our Northern cathedrals are
better with color or without. Perhaps the great monotone grey of Nature and
of Time is a better color than any that the human hand can give; but that is
nothing to our present business. The simple fact is, that the builders of those
cathedrals laid upon them the brightest colors they could obtain, and that
there is not, as far as I am aware, in Europe, any monument of a truly noble
school which has not been either painted all over, or vigorously touched
with paint, mosaic, and gilding in its prominent parts. Thus far Egyptians,
Greeks, Goths, Arabs, and mediæval Christians all agree: none of them,
when in their right senses, ever think of doing without paint; and, therefore,
when I said above that the Venetians were the only people who had
thoroughly sympathized with the Arabs in this respect, I referred, first, to
their intense love of color, which led them to lavish the most expensive
decorations on ordinary dwelling-houses; and, secondly, to that perfection
of the color-instinct in them, which enabled them to render whatever they

did, in this kind, as just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance. It is
this principle of theirs, as distinguished from that of the Northern builders,
which we have finally to examine.

§ XLIV. In the second chapter of the first volume, it was noticed that the
architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorn, and that the porch of his
cathedral was therefore decorated with a rich wreath of it; but another of the
predilections of that architect was there unnoticed, namely, that he did not
at all like grey hawthorn, but preferred it green, and he painted it green
accordingly, as bright as he could. The color is still left in every sheltered
interstice of the foliage. He had, in fact, hardly the choice of any other
color; he might have gilded the thorns, by way of allegorizing human life,
but if they were to be painted at all, they could hardly be painted any tiling
but green, and green all over. People would have been apt to object to any
pursuit of abstract harmonies of color, which might have induced him to
paint his hawthorn blue.

§ XLV. In the same way, whenever the subject of the sculpture was
definite, its color was of necessity definite also; and, in the hands of the
Northern builders, it often became, in consequence, rather the means of
explaining and animating the stories of their stone-work, than a matter of
abstract decorative science. Flowers were painted red, trees green, and faces
flesh-color; the result of the whole being often far more entertaining than
beautiful. And also, though in the lines of the mouldings and the
decorations of shafts or vaults, a richer and more abstract method of
coloring was adopted (aided by the rapid development of the best principles
of color in early glass-painting), the vigorous depths of shadow in the
Northern sculpture confused the architect’s eye, compelling him to use
violent colors in the recesses, if these were to be seen as color at all, and
thus injured his perception of more delicate color harmonies; so that in
innumerable instances it becomes very disputable whether monuments even

of the best times were improved by the color bestowed upon them, or the
contrary. But, in the South, the flatness and comparatively vague forms of
the sculpture, while they appeared to call for color in order to enhance their
interest, presented exactly the conditions which would set it off to the
greatest advantage; breadth of surface displaying even the most delicate
tints in the lights, and faintness of shadow joining with the most delicate
and pearly greys of color harmony; while the subject of the design being in
nearly all cases reduced to mere intricacy of ornamental line, might be
colored in any way the architect chose without any loss of rationality.
Where oak-leaves and roses were carved into fresh relief and perfect bloom,
it was necessary to paint the one green and the other red; but in portions of
ornamentation where there was nothing which could be definitely construed
into either an oak-leaf or a rose, but a mere labyrinth of beautiful lines,
becoming here something like a leaf, and there something like a flower, the
whole tracery of the sculpture might be left white, and grounded with gold
or blue, or treated in any other manner best harmonizing with the colors
around it. And as the necessarily feeble character of the sculpture called for
and was ready to display the best arrangements of color, so the precious
marbles in the architect’s hands give him at once the best examples and the
best means of color. The best examples, for the tints of all natural stones are
as exquisite in quality as endless in change; and the best means, for they are
all permanent.

§ XLVI. Every motive thus concurred in urging him to the study of
chromatic decoration, and every advantage was given him in the pursuit of
it; and this at the very moment when, as presently to be noticed, the naïveté
of barbaric Christianity could only be forcibly appealed to by the help of
colored pictures: so that, both externally and internally, the architectural
construction became partly merged in pictorial effect; and the whole edifice
is to be regarded less as a temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of
Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of

parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written
within and without in letters of enamel and gold.

§ XLVII. Law VII. That the impression of the architecture is not to be
dependent on size. And now there is but one final consequence to be
deduced. The reader understands, I trust, by this time, that the claims of
these several parts of the building upon his attention will depend upon their
delicacy of design, their perfection of color, their preciousness of material,
and their legendary interest. All these qualities are independent of size, and
partly even inconsistent with it. Neither delicacy of surface sculpture, nor
subtle gradations of color, can be appreciated by the eye at a distance; and
since we have seen that our sculpture is generally to be only an inch or two
in depth, and that our coloring is in great part to be produced with the soft
tints and veins of natural stones, it will follow necessarily that none of the
parts of the building can be removed far from the eye, and therefore that the
whole mass of it cannot be large. It is not even desirable that it should be
so; for the temper in which the mind addresses itself to contemplate minute
and beautiful details is altogether different from that in which it submits
itself to vague impressions of space and size. And therefore we must not be
disappointed, but grateful, when we find all the best work of the building
concentrated within a space comparatively small; and that, for the great
cliff-like buttresses and mighty piers of the North, shooting up into
indiscernible height, we have here low walls spread before us like the pages
of a book, and shafts whose capitals we may touch with our hand.

§ XLVIII. The due consideration of the principles above stated will enable
the traveller to judge with more candor and justice of the architecture of St.
Mark’s than usually it would have been possible for him to do while under
the influence of the prejudices necessitated by familiarity with the very
different schools of Northern art. I wish it were in my power to lay also
before the general reader some exemplification of the manner in which

these strange principles are developed in the lovely building. But exactly in
proportion to the nobility of any work, is the difficulty of conveying a just
impression of it; and wherever I have occasion to bestow high praise, there
it is exactly most dangerous for me to endeavor to illustrate my meaning,
except by reference to the work itself. And, in fact, the principal reason why
architectural criticism is at this day so far behind all other, is the
impossibility of illustrating the best architecture faithfully. Of the various
schools of painting, examples are accessible to every one, and reference to
the works themselves is found sufficient for all purposes of criticism; but
there is nothing like St. Mark’s or the Ducal Palace to be referred to in the
National Gallery, and no faithful illustration of them is possible on the scale
of such a volume as this. And it is exceedingly difficult on any scale.
Nothing is so rare in art, as far as my own experience goes, as a fair
illustration of architecture; perfect illustration of it does not exist. For all
good architecture depends upon the adaptation of its chiselling to the effect
at a certain distance from the eye; and to render the peculiar confusion in
the midst of order, and uncertainty in the midst of decision, and mystery in
the midst of trenchant lines, which are the result of distance, together with
perfect expression of the peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the
most admirable artist, devoted to the work with the most severe
conscientiousness, neither the skill nor the determination having as yet been
given to the subject. And in the illustration of details, every building of any
pretensions to high architectural rank would require a volume of plates, and
those finished with extraordinary care. With respect to the two buildings
which are the principal subjects of the present volume, St. Mark’s and the
Ducal Palace, I have found it quite impossible to do them the slightest
justice by any kind of portraiture; and I abandoned the endeavor in the case
of the latter with less regret, because in the new Crystal Palace (as the
poetical public insist upon calling it, though it is neither a palace, nor of
crystal) there will be placed, I believe, a noble cast of one of its angles. As

for St. Mark’s, the effort was hopeless from the beginning. For its effect
depends not only upon the most delicate sculpture in every part, but, as we
have just stated, eminently on its color also, and that the most subtle,
variable, inexpressible color in the world,—the color of glass, of transparent
alabaster, of polished marble, and lustrous gold. It would be easier to
illustrate a crest of Scottish mountain, with its purple heather and pale
harebells at their fullest and fairest, or a glade of Jura forest, with its floor
of anemone and moss, than a single portico of St. Mark’s. The fragment of
one of its archivolts, given at the bottom of the opposite Plate, is not to
illustrate the thing itself, but to illustrate the impossibility of illustration.

§ XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger scale; and yet
even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp folds and points of the
marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness. The ground of it is gold, the
sculpture in the spandrils is not more than an inch and a half deep, rarely so
much. It is in fact nothing more than an exquisite sketching of outlines in
marble, to about the same depth as in the Elgin frieze; the draperies,
however, being filled with close folds, in the manner of the Byzantine
pictures, folds especially necessary here, as large masses could not be
expressed in the shallow sculpture without becoming insipid; but the
disposition of these folds is always most beautiful, and often opposed by
broad and simple spaces, like that obtained by the scroll in the hand of the
prophet, seen in the plate.

VI.

THE VINE TREE, AND IN SERVICE.

The balls in the archivolt project considerably, and the interstices
between their interwoven bands of marble are filled with colors like the
illuminations of a manuscript; violet, crimson, blue, gold, and green
alternately: but no green is ever used without an intermixture of blue pieces

in the mosaic, nor any blue without a little centre of pale green; sometimes
only a single piece of glass a quarter of an inch square, so subtle was the
feeling for color which was thus to be satisfied.32 The intermediate circles
have golden stars set on an azure ground, varied in the same manner; and
the small crosses seen in the intervals are alternately blue and subdued
scarlet, with two small circles of white set in the golden ground above and
beneath them, each only about half an inch across (this work, remember,
being on the outside of the building, and twenty feet above the eye), while
the blue crosses have each a pale green centre. Of all this exquisitely
mingled hue, no plate, however large or expensive, could give any adequate
conception; but, if the reader will supply in imagination to the engraving
what he supplies to a common woodcut of a group of flowers, the decision
of the respective merits of modern and of Byzantine architecture may be
allowed to rest on this fragment of St. Mark’s alone.

From the vine-leaves of that archivolt, though there is no direct imitation
of nature in them, but on the contrary a studious subjection to architectural
purpose more particularly to be noticed hereafter, we may yet receive the
same kind of pleasure which we have in seeing true vine-leaves and
wreathed branches traced upon golden light; its stars upon their azure
ground ought to make us remember, as its builder remembered, the stars
that ascend and fall in the great arch of the sky: and I believe that stars, and
boughs, and leaves, and bright colors are everlastingly lovely, and to be by
all men beloved; and, moreover, that church walls grimly seared with
squared lines, are not better nor nobler things than these. I believe the man
who designed and the men who delighted in that archivolt to have been
wise, happy, and holy. Let the reader look back to the archivolt I have
already given out of the streets of London (Plate XIII. Vol. I.), and see what
there is in it to make us any of the three. Let him remember that the men
who design such work as that call St. Mark’s a barbaric monstrosity, and let
him judge between us.

§ L. Some farther details of the St. Mark’s architecture, and especially a
general account of Byzantine capitals, and of the principal ones at the
angles of the church, will be found in the following chapter.33 Here I must
pass on to the second part of our immediate subject, namely, the inquiry
how far the exquisite and varied ornament of St. Mark’s fits it, as a Temple,
for its sacred purpose, and would be applicable in the churches of modern
times. We have here evidently two questions: the first, that wide and
continually agitated one, whether richness of ornament be right in churches
at all; the second, whether the ornament of St. Mark’s be of a truly
ecclesiastical and Christian character.

§ LI. In the first chapter of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture” I
endeavored to lay before the reader some reasons why churches ought to be
richly adorned, as being the only places in which the desire of offering a
portion of all precious things to God could be legitimately expressed. But I
left wholly untouched the question: whether the church, as such, stood in
need of adornment, or would be better fitted for its purposes by possessing
it. This question I would now ask the reader to deal with briefly and
candidly.

The chief difficulty in deciding it has arisen from its being always
presented to us in an unfair form. It is asked of us, or we ask of ourselves,
whether the sensation which we now feel in passing from our own modern
dwelling-house, through a newly built street, into a cathedral of the
thirteenth century, be safe or desirable as a preparation for public worship.
But we never ask whether that sensation was at all calculated upon by the
builders of the cathedral.

§ LII. Now I do not say that the contrast of the ancient with the modern
building, and the strangeness with which the earlier architectural forms fall
upon the eye, are at this day disadvantageous. But I do say, that their effect,

whatever it may be, was entirely uncalculated upon by the old builder. He
endeavored to make his work beautiful, but never expected it to be strange.
And we incapacitate ourselves altogether from fair judgment of its
intention, if we forget that, when it was built, it rose in the midst of other
work fanciful and beautiful as itself; that every dwelling-house in the
middle ages was rich with the same ornaments and quaint with the same
grotesques which fretted the porches or animated the gargoyles of the
cathedral; that what we now regard with doubt and wonder, as well as with
delight, was then the natural continuation, into the principal edifice of the
city, of a style which was familiar to every eye throughout all its lanes and
streets; and that the architect had often no more idea of producing a
peculiarly devotional impression by the richest color and the most elaborate
carving, than the builder of a modern meeting-house has by his
whitewashed walls and square-cut casements.34

§ LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and then follow
out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a kind of
sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because, while we look
habitually out of square windows and live under flat ceilings, we meet with
the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our abbeys. But when those abbeys
were built, the pointed arch was used for every shop door, as well as for that
of the cloister, and the feudal baron and freebooter feasted, as the monk
sang, under vaulted roofs; not because the vaulting was thought especially
appropriate to either the revel or psalm, but because it was then the form in
which a strong roof was easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly
architecture of our cities; we have substituted one wholly devoid of beauty
or meaning; and then we reason respecting the strange effect upon our
minds of the fragments which, fortunately, we have left in our churches, as
if those churches had always been designed to stand out in strong relief
from all the buildings around them, and Gothic architecture had always
been, what it is now, a religious language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers

know, if they would arouse their knowledge, that this was not so; but they
take no pains to reason the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily to
the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and
sometimes, even, that richness in church ornament is a condition or
furtherance of the Romish religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in
modern times: for there being no beauty in our recent architecture, and
much in the remains of the past, and these remains being almost exclusively
ecclesiastical, the High Church and Romanist parties have not been slow in
availing themselves of the natural instincts which were deprived of all food
except from this source; and have willingly promulgated the theory, that
because all the good architecture that is now left is expressive of High
Church or Romanist doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must
be so,—a piece of absurdity from which, though here and there a country
clergyman may innocently believe it, I hope the common sense of the
nation will soon manfully quit itself. It needs but little inquiry into the spirit
of the past, to ascertain what, once for all, I would desire here clearly and
forcibly to assert, that wherever Christian church architecture has been good
and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common
dwelling-house architecture of the period; that when the pointed arch was
used in the street, it was used in the church; when the round arch was used
in the street, it was used in the church; when the pinnacle was set over the
garret window, it was set over the belfry tower; when the flat roof was used
for the drawing-room, it was used for the nave. There is no sacredness in
round arches, nor in pointed; none in pinnacles, nor in buttresses; none in
pillars, nor in traceries. Churches were larger than most other buildings,
because they had to hold more people; they were more adorned than most
other buildings, because they were safer from violence, and were the fitting
subjects of devotional offering: but they were never built in any separate,
mystical, and religious style; they were built in the manner that was
common and familiar to everybody at the time. The flamboyant traceries

that adorn the façade of Rouen Cathedral had once their fellows in every
window of every house in the market-place; the sculptures that adorn the
porches of St. Mark’s had once their match on the walls of every palace on
the Grand Canal; and the only difference between the church and the
dwelling-house was, that there existed a symbolical meaning in the
distribution of the parts of all buildings meant for worship, and that the
painting or sculpture was, in the one case, less frequently of profane subject
than in the other. A more severe distinction cannot be drawn: for secular
history was constantly introduced into church architecture; and sacred
history or allusion generally formed at least one half of the ornament of the
dwelling-house.

§ LIV. This fact is so important, and so little considered, that I must be
pardoned for dwelling upon it at some length, and accurately marking the
limits of the assertion I have made. I do not mean that every dwelling-house
of mediæval cities was as richly adorned and as exquisite in composition as
the fronts of their cathedrals, but that they presented features of the same
kind, often in parts quite as beautiful; and that the churches were not
separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they are
now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal style,
rising out of the confused streets of the city as an oak tree does out of an
oak copse, not differing in leafage, but in size and symmetry. Of course the
quainter and smaller forms of turret and window necessary for domestic
service, the inferior materials, often wood instead of stone, and the fancy of
the inhabitants, which had free play in the design, introduced oddnesses,
vulgarities, and variations into house architecture, which were prevented by
the traditions, the wealth, and the skill of the monks and freemasons; while,
on the other hand, conditions of vaulting, buttressing, and arch and tower
building, were necessitated by the mere size of the cathedral, of which it
would be difficult to find examples elsewhere. But there was nothing more
in these features than the adaptation of mechanical skill to vaster

requirements; there was nothing intended to be, or felt to be, especially
ecclesiastical in any of the forms so developed; and the inhabitants of every
village and city, when they furnished funds for the decoration of their
church, desired merely to adorn the house of God as they adorned their
own, only a little more richly, and with a somewhat graver temper in the
subjects of the carving. Even this last difference is not always clearly
discernible: all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical
buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were built,
every man’s house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna, or of
Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door, and the Old
Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the grotesques of the
brackets and the gables.

§ LV. And the reader will now perceive that the question respecting fitness
of church decoration rests in reality on totally different grounds from those
commonly made foundations of argument. So long as our streets are walled
with barren brick, and our eyes rest continually, in our daily life, on objects
utterly ugly, or of inconsistent and meaningless design, it may be a doubtful
question whether the faculties of eye and mind which are capable of
perceiving beauty, having been left without food during the whole of our
active life, should be suddenly feasted upon entering a place of worship;
and color, and music, and sculpture should delight the senses, and stir the
curiosity of men unaccustomed to such appeal, at the moment when they
are required to compose themselves for acts of devotion;—this, I say, may
be a doubtful question: but it cannot be a question at all, that if once
familiarized with beautiful form and color, and accustomed to see in
whatever human hands have executed for us, even for the lowest services,
evidence of noble thought and admirable skill, we shall desire to see this
evidence also in whatever is built or labored for the house of prayer; that
the absence of the accustomed loveliness would disturb instead of assisting
devotion; and that we should feel it as vain to ask whether, with our own

house full of goodly craftsmanship, we should worship God in a house
destitute of it, as to ask whether a pilgrim whose day’s journey had led him
through fair woods and by sweet waters, must at evening turn aside into
some barren place to pray.

§ LVI. Then the second question submitted to us, whether the ornament of
St. Mark’s be truly ecclesiastical and Christian, is evidently determined
together with the first; for, if not only the permission of ornament at all, but
the beautiful execution of it, be dependent on our being familiar with it in
daily life, it will follow that no style of noble architecture can be
exclusively ecclesiastical. It must be practised in the dwelling before it be
perfected in the church, and it is the test of a noble style that it shall be
applicable to both; for if essentially false and ignoble, it may be made to fit
the dwelling-house, but never can be made to fit the church: and just as
there are many principles which will bear the light of the world’s opinion,
yet will not bear the light of God’s word, while all principles which will
bear the test of Scripture will also bear that of practice, so in architecture
there are many forms which expediency and convenience may apparently
justify, or at least render endurable, in daily use, which will yet be found
offensive the moment they are used for church service; but there are none
good for church service, which cannot bear daily use. Thus the Renaissance
manner of building is a convenient style for dwelling-houses, but the
natural sense of all religious men causes them to turn from it with pain
when it has been used in churches; and this has given rise to the popular
idea that the Roman style is good for houses and the Gothic for churches.
This is not so; the Roman style is essentially base, and we can bear with it
only so long as it gives us convenient windows and spacious rooms; the
moment the question of convenience is set aside, and the expression or
beauty of the style is tried by its being used in a church, we find it fail. But
because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches they are not
therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the highest sense fit and good

for both, nor were they ever brought to perfection except where they were
used for both.

§ LVII. But there is one character of Byzantine work which, according to
the time at which it was employed, may be considered as either fitting or
unfitting it for distinctly ecclesiastical purposes; I mean the essentially
pictorial character of its decoration. We have already seen what large
surfaces it leaves void of bold architectural features, to be rendered
interesting merely by surface ornament or sculpture. In this respect
Byzantine work differs essentially from pure Gothic styles, which are
capable of filling every vacant space by features purely architectural, and
may be rendered, if we please, altogether independent of pictorial aid. A
Gothic church may be rendered impressive by mere successions of arches,
accumulations of niches, and entanglements of tracery. But a Byzantine
church requires expression and interesting decoration over vast plane
surfaces,—decoration which becomes noble only by becoming pictorial;
that is to say, by representing natural objects,—men, animals, or flowers.
And, therefore, the question whether the Byzantine style be fit for church
service in modern days, becomes involved in the inquiry, what effect upon
religion has been or may yet be produced by pictorial art, and especially by
the art of the mosaicist?

§ LVIII. The more I have examined the subject the more dangerous I have
found it to dogmatize respecting the character of the art which is likely, at a
given period, to be most useful to the cause of religion. One great fact first
meets me. I cannot answer for the experience of others, but I never yet met
with a Christian whose heart was thoroughly set upon the world to come,
and, so far as human judgment could pronounce, perfect and right before
God, who cared about art at all. I have known several very noble Christian
men who loved it intensely, but in them there was always traceable some
entanglement of the thoughts with the matters of this world, causing them to

fall into strange distresses and doubts, and often leading them into what
they themselves would confess to be errors in understanding, or even
failures in duty. I do not say that these men may not, many of them, be in
very deed nobler than those whose conduct is more consistent; they may be
more tender in the tone of all their feelings, and farther-sighted in soul, and
for that very reason exposed to greater trials and fears, than those whose
hardier frame and naturally narrower vision enable them with less effort to
give their hands to God and walk with Him. But still, the general fact is
indeed so, that I have never known a man who seemed altogether right and
calm in faith, who seriously cared about art; and when casually moved by it,
it is quite impossible to say beforehand by what class of art this impression
will on such men be made. Very often it is by a theatrical commonplace,
more frequently still by false sentiment. I believe that the four painters who
have had, and still have, the most influence, such as it is, on the ordinary
Protestant Christian mind, are Carlo Dolci, Guercino, Benjamin West, and
John Martin. Raphael, much as he is talked about, is, I believe in very fact,
rarely looked at by religious people; much less his master, or any of the
truly great religious men of old. But a smooth Magdalen of Carlo Dolci
with a tear on each cheek, or a Guercino Christ or St. John, or a Scripture
illustration of West’s, or a black cloud with a flash of lightning in it of
Martin’s, rarely fails of being verily, often deeply, felt for the time.

§ LIX. There are indeed many very evident reasons for this; the chief one
being that, as all truly great religious painters have been hearty Romanists,
there are none of their works which do not embody, in some portions of
them, definitely Romanist doctrines. The Protestant mind is instantly struck
by these, and offended by them, so as to be incapable of entering, or at least
rendered indisposed to enter, farther into the heart of the work, or to the
discovering those deeper characters of it, which are not Romanist, but
Christian, in the everlasting sense and power of Christianity. Thus most
Protestants, entering for the first time a Paradise of Angelico, would be

irrevocably offended by finding that the first person the painter wished
them to speak to was St. Dominic; and would retire from such a heaven as
speedily as possible,—not giving themselves time to discover, that whether
dressed in black, or white, or grey, and by whatever name in the calendar
they might be called, the figures that filled that Angelico heaven were
indeed more saintly, and pure, and full of love in every feature, than any
that the human hand ever traced before or since. And thus Protestantism,
having foolishly sought for the little help it requires at the hand of painting
from the men who embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to
receive it from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism,
but who read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to
regard the painters who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready
to be taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no
more popular Protestant picture than Salvator’s “Witch of Endor,” of which
the subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of
Saul and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, and a
Neapolitan hag.

§ LX. The fact seems to be that strength of religious feeling is capable of
supplying for itself whatever is wanting in the rudest suggestions of art, and
will either, on the one hand, purify what is coarse into inoffensiveness, or,
on the other, raise what is feeble into impressiveness. Probably all art, as
such, is unsatisfactory to it; and the effort which it makes to supply the void
will be induced rather by association and accident than by the real merit of
the work submitted to it. The likeness to a beloved friend, the
correspondence with a habitual conception, the freedom from any strange or
offensive particularity, and, above all, an interesting choice of incident, will
win admiration for a picture when the noblest efforts of religious
imagination would otherwise fail of power. How much more, when to the
quick capacity of emotion is joined a childish trust that the picture does
indeed represent a fact! it matters little whether the fact be well or ill told;

the moment we believe the picture to be true, we complain little of its being
ill-painted. Let it be considered for a moment, whether the child, with its
colored print, inquiring eagerly and gravely which is Joseph, and which is
Benjamin, is not more capable of receiving a strong, even a sublime,
impression from the rude symbol which it invests with reality by its own
effort, than the connoisseur who admires the grouping of the three figures in
Raphael’s “Telling of the Dreams;” and whether also, when the human mind
is in right religious tone, it has not always this childish power—I speak
advisedly, this power—a noble one, and possessed more in youth than at
any period of after life, but always, I think, restored in a measure by
religion—of raising into sublimity and reality the rudest symbol which is
given to it of accredited truth.

§ LXI. Ever since the period of the Renaissance, however, the truth has not
been accredited; the painter of religious subject is no longer regarded as the
narrator of a fact, but as the inventor of an idea.35 We do not severely
criticise the manner in which a true history is told, but we become harsh
investigators of the faults of an invention; so that in the modern religious
mind, the capacity of emotion, which renders judgment uncertain, is joined
with an incredulity which renders it severe; and this ignorant emotion,
joined with ignorant observance of faults, is the worst possible temper in
which any art can be regarded, but more especially sacred art. For as
religious faith renders emotion facile, so also it generally renders expression
simple; that is to say a truly religious painter will very often be ruder,
quainter, simpler, and more faulty in his manner of working, than a great
irreligious one. And it was in this artless utterance, and simple acceptance,
on the part of both the workman and the beholder, that all noble schools of
art have been cradled; it is in them that they must be cradled to the end of
time. It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss of power in modern
days, owing to the imperative requirement that art shall be methodical and
learned: for as long as the constitution of this world remains unaltered, there

will be more intellect in it than there can be education; there will be many
men capable of just sensation and vivid invention, who never will have time
to cultivate or polish their natural powers. And all unpolished power is in
the present state of society lost; in other things as well as in the arts, but in
the arts especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake the polish
for the power. Until a man has passed through a course of academy
studentship, and can draw in an approved manner with French chalk, and
knows foreshortening, and perspective, and something of anatomy, we do
not think he can possibly be an artist; what is worse, we are very apt to
think that we can make him an artist by teaching him anatomy, and how to
draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is utterly independent
of all such accomplishments: and I believe there are many peasants on
every estate, and laborers in every town, of Europe, who have imaginative
powers of a high order, which nevertheless cannot be used for our good,
because we do not choose to look at anything but what is expressed in a
legal and scientific way. I believe there is many a village mason who, set to
carve a series of Scripture or any other histories, would find many a strange
and noble fancy in his head, and set it down, roughly enough indeed, but in
a way well worth our having. But we are too grand to let him do this, or to
set up his clumsy work when it is done; and accordingly the poor stone-
mason is kept hewing stones smooth at the corners, and we build our church
of the smooth square stones, and consider ourselves wise.

§ LXII. I shall pursue this subject farther in another place; but I allude to it
here in order to meet the objections of those persons who suppose the
mosaics of St. Mark’s, and others of the period, to be utterly barbarous as
representations of religious history. Let it be granted that they are so; we are
not for that reason to suppose they were ineffective in religious teaching. I
have above spoken of the whole church as a great Book of Common Prayer;
the mosaics were its illuminations, and the common people of the time were
taught their Scripture history by means of them, more impressively perhaps,

though far less fully, than ours are now by Scripture reading. They had no
other Bible, and—Protestants do not often enough consider this—could
have no other. We find it somewhat difficult to furnish our poor with printed
Bibles; consider what the difficulty must have been when they could be
given only in manuscript. The walls of the church necessarily became the
poor man’s Bible, and a picture was more easily read upon the walls than a
chapter. Under this view, and considering them merely as the Bible pictures
of a great nation in its youth, I shall finally invite the reader to examine the
connexion and subjects of these mosaics; but in the meantime I have to
deprecate the idea of their execution being in any sense barbarous. I have
conceded too much to modern prejudice, in permitting them to be rated as
mere childish efforts at colored portraiture: they have characters in them of
a very noble kind; nor are they by any means devoid of the remains of the
science of the later Roman empire. The character of the features is almost
always fine, the expression stern and quiet, and very solemn, the attitudes
and draperies always majestic in the single figures, and in those of the
groups which are not in violent action;36 while the bright coloring and
disregard of chiaroscuro cannot be regarded as imperfections, since they are
the only means by which the figures could be rendered clearly intelligible in
the distance and darkness of the vaulting. So far am I from considering
them barbarous, that I believe of all works of religious art whatsoever,
these, and such as these, have been the most effective. They stand exactly
midway between the debased manufacture of wooden and waxen images
which is the support of Romanist idolatry all over the world, and the great
art which leads the mind away from the religious subject to the art itself.
Respecting neither of these branches of human skill is there, nor can there
be, any question. The manufacture of puppets, however influential on the
Romanist mind of Europe, is certainly not deserving of consideration as one
of the fine arts. It matters literally nothing to a Romanist what the image he
worships is like. Take the vilest doll that is screwed together in a cheap toy-

shop, trust it to the keeping of a large family of children, let it be beaten
about the house by them till it is reduced to a shapeless block, then dress it
in a satin frock and declare it to have fallen from heaven, and it will
satisfactorily answer all Romanist purposes. Idolatry,37 it cannot be too
often repeated, is no encourager of the fine arts. But, on the other hand, the
highest branches of the fine arts are no encouragers either of idolatry or of
religion. No picture of Leonardo’s or Raphael’s, no statue of Michael
Angelo’s, has ever been worshipped, except by accident. Carelessly
regarded, and by ignorant persons, there is less to attract in them than in
commoner works. Carefully regarded, and by intelligent persons, they
instantly divert the mind from their subject to their art, so that admiration
takes the place of devotion. I do not say that the Madonna di S. Sisto, the
Madonna del Cardellino, and such others, have not had considerable
religious influence on certain minds, but I say that on the mass of the people
of Europe they have had none whatever; while by far the greater number of
the most celebrated statues and pictures are never regarded with any other
feelings than those of admiration of human beauty, or reverence for human
skill. Effective religious art, therefore, has always lain, and I believe must
always lie, between the two extremes—of barbarous idol-fashioning on one
side, and magnificent craftsmanship on the other. It consists partly in missal
painting, and such book-illustrations as, since the invention of printing,
have taken its place; partly in glass-painting; partly in rude sculpture on the
outsides of buildings; partly in mosaics; and partly in the frescoes and
tempera pictures which, in the fourteenth century, formed the link between
this powerful, because imperfect, religious art, and the impotent perfection
which succeeded it.

§ LXIII. But of all these branches the most important are the inlaying and
mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented in a central
manner by these mosaics of St. Mark’s. Missal-painting could not, from its
minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and frequently merged

itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern book-illustration has been
so little skilful as hardly to be worth naming. Sculpture, though in some
positions it becomes of great importance, has always a tendency to lose
itself in architectural effect; and was probably seldom deciphered, in all its
parts, by the common people, still less the traditions annealed in the purple
burning of the painted window. Finally, tempera pictures and frescoes were
often of limited size or of feeble color. But the great mosaics of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries covered the walls and roofs of the churches with
inevitable lustre; they could not be ignored or escaped from; their size
rendered them majestic, their distance mysterious, their color attractive.
They did not pass into confused or inferior decorations; neither were they
adorned with any evidences of skill or science, such as might withdraw the
attention from their subjects. They were before the eyes of the devotee at
every interval of his worship; vast shadowings forth of scenes to whose
realization he looked forward, or of spirits whose presence he invoked. And
the man must be little capable of receiving a religious impression of any
kind, who, to this day, does not acknowledge some feeling of awe, as he
looks up at the pale countenances and ghastly forms which haunt the dark
roofs of the Baptisteries of Parma and Florence, or remains altogether
untouched by the majesty of the colossal images of apostles, and of Him
who sent apostles, that look down from the darkening gold of the domes of
Venice and Pisa.

§ LXIV. I shall, in a future portion of this work, endeavor to discover what
probabilities there are of our being able to use this kind of art in modern
churches; but at present it remains for us to follow out the connexion of the
subjects represented in St. Mark’s so as to fulfil our immediate object, and
form an adequate conception of the feelings of its builders, and of its uses to
those for whom it was built.

Now there is one circumstance to which I must, in the outset, direct the
reader’s special attention, as forming a notable distinction between ancient
and modern days. Our eyes are now familiar and wearied with writing; and
if an inscription is put upon a building, unless it be large and clear, it is ten
to one whether we ever trouble ourselves to decipher it. But the old
architect was sure of readers. He knew that every one would be glad to
decipher all that he wrote; that they would rejoice in possessing the vaulted
leaves of his stone manuscript; and that the more he gave them, the more
grateful would the people be. We must take some pains, therefore, when we
enter St. Mark’s, to read all that is inscribed, or we shall not penetrate into
the feeling either of the builder or of his times.

§ LXV. A large atrium or portico is attached to two sides of the church, a
space which was especially reserved for unbaptized persons and new
converts. It was thought right that, before their baptism, these persons
should be led to contemplate the great facts of the Old Testament history;
the history of the Fall of Man, and of the lives of Patriarchs up to the period
of the Covenant by Moses: the order of the subjects in this series being very
nearly the same as in many Northern churches, but significantly closing
with the Fall of the Manna, in order to mark to the catechumen the
insufficiency of the Mosaic covenant for salvation,—“Our fathers did eat
manna in the wilderness, and are dead,”—and to turn his thoughts to the
true Bread of which that manna was the type.

§ LXVI. Then, when after his baptism he was permitted to enter the
church, over its main entrance he saw, on looking back, a mosaic of Christ
enthroned, with the Virgin on one side and St. Mark on the other, in
attitudes of adoration. Christ is represented as holding a book open upon his
knee, on which is written: “I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he
shall be saved.” On the red marble moulding which surrounds the mosaic is

written: “I am the gate of life; Let those who are mine enter by me.”

Above, on the red marble fillet which forms the cornice of the west end of
the church, is written, with reference to the figure of Christ below: “Who he
was, and from whom he came, and at what price he redeemed thee, and

why he made thee, and gave thee all things, do thou consider.”

Now observe, this was not to be seen and read only by the catechumen
when he first entered the church; every one who at any time entered, was
supposed to look back and to read this writing; their daily entrance into the
church was thus made a daily memorial of their first entrance into the
spiritual Church; and we shall find that the rest of the book which was
opened for them upon its walls continually led them in the same manner to
regard the visible temple as in every part a type of the invisible Church of
God.

§ LXVII. Therefore the mosaic of the first dome, which is over the head of
the spectator as soon as he has entered by the great door (that door being the
type of baptism), represents the effusion of the Holy Spirit, as the first
consequence and seal of the entrance into the Church of God. In the centre
of the cupola is the Dove, enthroned in the Greek manner, as the Lamb is
enthroned, when the Divinity of the Second and Third Persons is to be
insisted upon together with their peculiar offices. From the central symbol
of the Holy Spirit twelve streams of fire descend upon the heads of the
twelve apostles, who are represented standing around the dome; and below
them, between the windows which are pierced in its walls, are represented,
by groups of two figures for each separate people, the various nations who
heard the apostles speak, at Pentecost, every man in his own tongue.
Finally, on the vaults, at the four angles which support the cupola, are
pictured four angels, each bearing a tablet upon the end of a rod in his hand:
on each of the tablets of the three first angels is inscribed the word “Holy;”
on that of the fourth is written “Lord;” and the beginning of the hymn being
thus put into the mouths of the four angels, the words of it are continued

around the border of the dome, uniting praise to God for the gift of the
Spirit, with welcome to the redeemed soul received into His Church:

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth:
Heaven and Earth are full of thy Glory.
Hosanna in the Highest:
Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

And observe in this writing that the convert is required to regard the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit especially as a work of sanctification. It is the
holiness of God manifested in the giving of His Spirit to sanctify those who
had become His children, which the four angels celebrate in their ceaseless
praise; and it is on account of this holiness that the heaven and earth are
said to be full of His glory.

§ LXVIII. After thus hearing praise rendered to God by the angels for the
salvation of the newly-entered soul, it was thought fittest that the
worshipper should be led to contemplate, in the most comprehensive forms
possible, the past evidence and the future hopes of Christianity, as summed
up in three facts without assurance of which all faith is vain; namely that
Christ died, that He rose again, and that He ascended into heaven, there to
prepare a place for His elect. On the vault between the first and second
cupolas are represented the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, with the
usual series of intermediate scenes,—the treason of Judas, the judgment of
Pilate, the crowning with thorns, the descent into Hades, the visit of the
women to the sepulchre, and the apparition to Mary Magdalene. The second
cupola itself, which is the central and principal one of the church, is entirely
occupied by the subject of the Ascension. At the highest point of it Christ is
represented as rising into the blue heaven, borne up by four angels, and
throned upon a rainbow, the type of reconciliation. Beneath him, the twelve

apostles are seen upon the Mount of Olives, with the Madonna, and, in the
midst of them, the two men in white apparel who appeared at the moment
of the Ascension, above whom, as uttered by them, are inscribed the words,
“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This Christ, the
Son of God, as He is taken from you, shall so come, the arbiter of the earth,
trusted to do judgment and justice.”

§ LXIX. Beneath the circle of the apostles, between the windows of the
cupola, are represented the Christian virtues, as sequent upon the
crucifixion of the flesh, and the spiritual ascension together with Christ.
Beneath them, on the vaults which support the angles of the cupola, are
placed the four Evangelists, because on their evidence our assurance of the
fact of the ascension rests; and, finally, beneath their feet, as symbols of the
sweetness and fulness of the Gospel which they declared, are represented
the four rivers of Paradise, Pison, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates.

§ LXX. The third cupola, that over the altar, represents the witness of the
Old Testament to Christ; showing him enthroned in its centre, and
surrounded by the patriarchs and prophets. But this dome was little seen by
the people;38 their contemplation was intended to be chiefly drawn to that
of the centre of the church, and thus the mind of the worshipper was at once
fixed on the main groundwork and hope of Christianity,—“Christ is risen,”
and “Christ shall come.” If he had time to explore the minor lateral chapels
and cupolas, he could find in them the whole series of New Testament
history, the events of the Life of Christ, and the Apostolic miracles in their
order, and finally the scenery of the Book of Revelation;39 but if he only
entered, as often the common people do to this hour, snatching a few
moments before beginning the labor of the day to offer up an ejaculatory
prayer, and advanced but from the main entrance as far as the altar screen,
all the splendor of the glittering nave and variegated dome, if they smote
upon his heart, as they might often, in strange contrast with his reed cabin

among the shallows of the lagoon, smote upon it only that they might
proclaim the two great messages—“Christ is risen,” and “Christ shall
come.” Daily, as the white cupolas rose like wreaths of sea-foam in the
dawn, while the shadowy campanile and frowning palace were still
withdrawn into the night, they rose with the Easter Voice of Triumph,
—“Christ is risen;” and daily, as they looked down upon the tumult of the
people, deepening and eddying in the wide square that opened from their
feet to the sea, they uttered above them the sentence of warning,—“Christ
shall come.”

§ LXXXI. And this thought may surely dispose the reader to look with
some change of temper upon the gorgeous building and wild blazonry of
that shrine of St. Mark’s. He now perceives that it was in the hearts of the
old Venetian people far more than a place of worship. It was at once a type
of the Redeemed Church of God, and a scroll for the written word of God.
It was to be to them, both an image of the Bride, all glorious within, her
clothing of wrought gold; and the actual Table of the Law and the
Testimony, written within and without. And whether honored as the Church
or as the Bible, was it not fitting that neither the gold nor the crystal should
be spared in the adornment of it; that, as the symbol of the Bride, the
building of the wall thereof should be of jasper,40 and the foundations of it
garnished with all manner of precious stones; and that, as the channel of the
World, that triumphant utterance of the Psalmist should be true of it,—“I
have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in all riches?” And
shall we not look with changed temper down the long perspective of St.
Mark’s Place towards the sevenfold gates and glowing domes of its temple,
when we know with what solemn purpose the shafts of it were lifted above
the pavement of the populous square? Men met there from all countries of
the earth, for traffic or for pleasure; but, above the crowd swaying for ever
to and fro in the restlessness of avarice or thirst of delight, was seen
perpetually the glory of the temple, attesting to them, whether they would

hear or whether they would forbear, that there was one treasure which the
merchantmen might buy without a price, and one delight better than all
others, in the word and the statutes of God. Not in the wantonness of
wealth, not in vain ministry to the desire of the eyes or the pride of life,
were those marbles hewn into transparent strength, and those arches arrayed
in the colors of the iris. There is a message written in the dyes of them, that
once was written in blood; and a sound in the echoes of their vaults, that
one day shall fill the vault of heaven,—“He shall return, to do judgment and
justice.” The strength of Venice was given her, so long as she remembered
this: her destruction found her when she had forgotten this; and it found her
irrevocably, because she forgot it without excuse. Never had city a more
glorious Bible. Among the nations of the North, a rude and shadowy
sculpture filled their temples with confused and hardly legible imagery; but,
for her, the skill and the treasures of the East had gilded every letter, and
illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star
of the Magi. In other cities, the meetings of the people were often in places
withdrawn from religious association, subject to violence and to change;
and on the grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled
street, there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot
justify, we may sometimes forgive. But the sins of Venice, whether in her
palace or in her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand. The
walls on which its testimony was written were separated but by a few
inches of marble from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or
confined the victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off
all shame and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled
with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin
was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning
with the letters of His Law. Mountebank and masquer laughed their laugh,
and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for
amidst them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and

festering guilt, that white dome of St. Mark’s had uttered in the dead ear of
Venice, “Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into
judgment.”

19 Acts, xiii. 13; xv. 38, 39.

20 The reader who desires to investigate it may consult Galliciolli, “Delle Memorie Venete”
(Venice, 1795), tom. ii. p. 332, and the authorities quoted by him.

21 Venice, 1761, tom. i. p. 126.

22 St. Mark’s Place, “partly covered by turf, and planted with a few trees; and on account of its
pleasant aspect called Brollo or Broglio, that is to say, Garden.” The canal passed through it, over
which is built the bridge of the Malpassi, Galliciolli, lib. i. cap. viii.

23 My authorities for this statement are given below, in the chapter on the Ducal Palace.

24 In the Chronicles, “Sancti Marci Ducalis Cappella.”

25 “To God the Lord, the glorious Virgin Annunciate, and the Protector St. Mark.”—Corner, p.
14. It is needless to trouble the reader with the various authorities for the above statements: I have
consulted the best. The previous inscription once existing on the church itself:

“Anno milleno transacto bisque trigeno
Desuper undecimo fuit facta primo,”

is no longer to be seen, and is conjectured by Corner, with much probability, to have perished “in
qualche ristauro.”

26 Signed Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, &c.

27 Guida di Venezia, p. 6.

28 The mere warmth of St. Mark’s in winter, which is much greater than that of the other two
churches above named, must, however, be taken into consideration, as one of the most efficient
causes of its being then more frequented.

29 I said above that the larger number of the devotees entered by the “Arabian” porch; the
porch, that is to say, on the north side of the church, remarkable for its rich Arabian archivolt, and
through which access is gained immediately to the northern transept. The reason is, that in that
transept is the chapel of the Madonna, which has a greater attraction for the Venetians than all the
rest of the church besides. The old builders kept their images of the Virgin subordinate to those of
Christ; but modern Romanism has retrograded from theirs, and the most glittering portions of the

whole church are the two recesses behind this lateral altar, covered with silver hearts dedicated to
the Virgin.

30 Vide “Builder,” for October, 1851.

31 “Quivi presso si vedi una colonna di tanta bellezza e finezza che e riputato piutosto gioia che
pietra.”—Sansovino, of the verd-antique pillar in San Jacomo dell’ Orio. A remarkable piece of
natural history and moral philosophy, connected with this subject, will be found in the second
chapter of our third volume, quoted from the work of a Florentine architect of the fifteenth century.

32 The fact is, that no two tesseræ of the glass are exactly of the same tint, the greens being all
varied with blues, the blues of different depths, the reds of different clearness, so that the effect of
each mass of color is full of variety, like the stippled color of a fruit piece.

33 Some illustration, also, of what was said in § XXXIII. above, respecting the value of the shafts

of St. Mark’s as large jewels, will be found in Appendix 9, “Shafts of St. Mark’s.”

34 See the farther notice of this subject in Vol. III. Chap. IV.

35 I do not mean that modern Christians believe less in the facts than ancient Christians, but
they do not believe in the representation of the facts as true. We look upon the picture as this or that
painter’s conception; the elder Christians looked upon it as this or that painter’s description of what
had actually taken place. And in the Greek Church all painting is, to this day, strictly a branch of
tradition. See M. Dideron’s admirably written introduction to his Iconographie Chrétienne, p. 7:
—“Un de mes compagnons s’étonnait de retrouver à la Panagia de St. Luc, le saint Jean
Chrysostome qu’il avait dessiné dans le baptistère de St. Marc, à Venise. Le costume des
personnages est partout et en tout temps le même, non-seulement pour la forme, mais pour la
couleur, mais pour le dessin, mais jusque pour le nombre et l’épaisseur des plis.”

36 All the effects of Byzantine art to represent violent action are inadequate, most of them
ludicrously so, even when the sculptural art is in other respects far advanced. The early Gothic
sculptors, on the other hand, fail in all points of refinement, but hardly ever in expression of action.
This distinction is of course one of the necessary consequences of the difference in all respects
between the repose of the Eastern, and activity of the Western, mind, which we shall have to trace
out completely in the inquiry into the nature of Gothic.

37 Appendix 10, “Proper Sense of the word Idolatry.”

38 It is also of inferior workmanship, and perhaps later than the rest. Vide Lord Lindsay, vol. i.
p. 124, note.

39 The old mosaics from the Revelation have perished, and have been replaced by miserable
work of the seventeenth century.

40 Rev. xxi. 18.

CHAPTER V.

BYZANTINE PALACES.

§ I. The account of the architecture of St. Mark’s given in the previous chapter
has, I trust, acquainted the reader sufficiently with the spirit of the Byzantine
style: but he has probably, as yet, no clear idea of its generic forms. Nor would it
be safe to define these after an examination of St. Mark’s alone, built as it was
upon various models, and at various periods. But if we pass through the city,
looking for buildings which resemble St. Mark’s—first, in the most important
feature of incrustation; secondly, in the character of the mouldings,—we shall find
a considerable number, not indeed very attractive in their first address to the eye,
but agreeing perfectly, both with each other, and with the earliest portions of St.
Mark’s, in every important detail; and to be regarded, therefore, with profound
interest, as indeed the remains of an ancient city of Venice, altogether different in
aspect from that which now exists. From these remains we may with safety
deduce general conclusions touching the forms of Byzantine architecture, as
practised in Eastern Italy, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.

§ II. They agree in another respect, as well as in style. All are either ruins, or
fragments disguised by restoration. Not one of them is uninjured or unaltered; and
the impossibility of finding so much as an angle or a single story in perfect

condition is a proof, hardly less convincing than the method of their architecture,
that they were indeed raised during the earliest phases of the Venetian power. The
mere fragments, dispersed in narrow streets, and recognizable by a single capital,
or the segment of an arch, I shall not enumerate: but, of important remains, there
are six in the immediate neighborhood of the Rialto, one in the Rio di Ca’ Foscari,
and one conspicuously placed opposite the great Renaissance Palace known as the
Vendramin Calerghi, one of the few palaces still inhabited41 and well maintained;
and noticeable, moreover, as having a garden beside it, rich with evergreens, and
decorated by gilded railings and white statues that cast long streams of snowy
reflection down into the deep water. The vista of canal beyond is terminated by
the Church of St. Geremia, another but less attractive work of the Renaissance; a
mass of barren brickwork, with a dull leaden dome above, like those of our
National Gallery. So that the spectator has the richest and meanest of the late
architecture of Venice before him at once: the richest, let him observe, a piece of
private luxury; the poorest, that which was given to God. Then, looking to the left,
he will see the fragment of the work of earlier ages, testifying against both, not
less by its utter desolation than by the nobleness of the traces that are still left of
it.

§ III. It is a ghastly ruin; whatever is venerable or sad in its wreck being
disguised by attempts to put it to present uses of the basest kind. It has been
composed of arcades borne by marble shafts, and walls of brick faced with
marble: but the covering stones have been torn away from it like the shroud from
a corpse; and its walls, rent into a thousand chasms, are filled and refilled with
fresh brickwork, and the seams and hollows are choked with clay and whitewash,
oozing and trickling over the marble,—itself blanched into dusty decay by the
frosts of centuries. Soft grass and wandering leafage have rooted themselves in the
rents, but they are not suffered to grow in their own wild and gentle way, for the
place is in a sort inhabited; rotten partitions are nailed across its corridors, and
miserable rooms contrived in its western wing; and here and there the weeds are
indolently torn down, leaving their haggard fibres to struggle again into
unwholesome growth when the spring next stirs them: and thus, in contest
between death and life, the unsightly heap is festering to its fall.

Of its history little is recorded, and that little futile. That it once belonged to the
dukes of Ferrara, and was bought from them in the sixteenth century, to be made a
general receptacle for the goods of the Turkish merchants, whence it is now
generally known as the Fondaco, or Fontico, de’ Turchi, are facts just as important
to the antiquary, as that, in the year 1852, the municipality of Venice allowed its
lower story to be used for a “deposito di Tabacchi.” Neither of this, nor of any
other remains of the period, can we know anything but what their own stones will
tell us.

§ IV. The reader will find in Appendix 11, written chiefly for the traveller’s
benefit, an account of the situation and present state of the other seven Byzantine
palaces. Here I shall only give a general account of the most interesting points in
their architecture.

They all agree in being round-arched and incrusted with marble, but there are
only six in which the original disposition of the parts is anywise traceable;
namely, those distinguished in the Appendix as the Fondaco de’ Turchi, Casa
Loredan, Caso Farsetti, Rio-Foscari House, Terraced House, and Madonnetta
House:42 and these six agree farther in having continuous arcades along their
entire fronts from one angle to the other, and in having their arcades divided, in
each case, into a centre and wings; both by greater size in the midmost arches, and
by the alternation of shafts in the centre, with pilasters, or with small shafts, at the
flanks.

§ V. So far as their structure can be traced, they agree also in having tall and few
arches in their lower stories, and shorter and more numerous arches above: but it
happens most unfortunately that in the only two cases in which the second stories
are left the ground floors are modernized, and in the others where the sea stories
are left the second stories are modernized; so that we never have more than two
tiers of the Byzantine arches, one above the other. These, however, are quite
enough to show the first main point on which I wish to insist, namely, the subtlety
of the feeling for proportion in the Greek architects; and I hope that even the
general reader will not allow himself to be frightened by the look of a few

measurements, for, if he will only take the little pains necessary to compare them,
he will, I am almost certain, find the result not devoid of interest.

Fig. IV.

§ VI. I had intended originally to give elevations of all these palaces; but have
not had time to prepare plates requiring so much labor and care. I must, therefore,
explain the position of their parts in the simplest way in my power.

The Fondaco de’ Turchi has sixteen arches in its sea story, and twenty-six above
them in its first story, the whole based on a magnificent foundation, built of blocks
of red marble, some of them seven feet long by a foot and a half thick, and raised
to a height of about five feet above high-water mark. At this level, the elevation of

one half of the building, from its flank to the central pillars of its arcades, is rudely
given in Fig. IV., in the previous page. It is only drawn to show the arrangement
of the parts, as the sculptures which are indicated by the circles and upright
oblongs between the arches are too delicate to be shown in a sketch three times
the size of this. The building once was crowned with an Arabian parapet; but it
was taken down some years since, and I am aware of no authentic representation
of its details. The greater part of the sculptures between the arches, indicated in
the woodcut only by blank circles, have also fallen, or been removed, but enough
remain on the two flanks to justify the representation given in the diagram of their
original arrangement.

And now observe the dimensions. The small arches of the wings in the ground
story, a, a, a, measure, in breadth, from

Ft. In.

shaft to shaft 4 5
interval b 7 6½
interval c 7 11
intervals d, e, f, &c. 8 1

The difference between the width of the arches b and c is necessitated by the
small recess of the cornice on the left hand as compared with that of the great
capitals; but this sudden difference of half a foot between the two extreme arches
of the centre offended the builder’s eye, so he diminished the next one,
unnecessarily, two inches, and thus obtained the gradual cadence to the flanks,
from eight feet down to four and a half, in a series of continually increasing steps.
Of course the effect cannot be shown in the diagram, as the first difference is less
than the thickness of its lines. In the upper story the capitals are all nearly of the
same height, and there was no occasion for the difference between the extreme
arches. Its twenty-six arches are placed, four small ones above each lateral three
of the lower arcade, and eighteen larger above the central ten; thus throwing the
shafts into all manner of relative positions, and completely confusing the eye in
any effort to count them: but there is an exquisite symmetry running through their
apparent confusion; for it will be seen that the four arches in each flank are

arranged in two groups, of which one has a large single shaft in the centre, and the
other a pilaster and two small shafts. The way in which the large shaft is used as
an echo of those in the central arcade, dovetailing them, as it were, into the system
of the pilasters,—just as a great painter, passing from one tone of color to another,
repeats, over a small space, that which he has left,—is highly characteristic of the
Byzantine care in composition. There are other evidences of it in the arrangement
of the capitals, which will be noticed below in the seventh chapter. The lateral
arches of this upper arcade measure 3 ft. 2 in. across, and the central 3 ft. 11 in., so
that the arches in the building are altogether of six magnitudes.

§ VII. Next let us take the Casa Loredan. The mode of arrangement of its pillars
is precisely like that of the Fondaco de’ Turchi, so that I shall merely indicate
them by vertical lines in order to be able to letter the intervals. It has five arches in
the centre of the lower story, and two in each of its wings.

Ft. In.

The midmost interval, a, of the central five, is 6 1
The two on each side, b, b 5 2
The two extremes, c, c 4 9
Inner arches of the wings, d, d 4 4
Outer arches of the wings, e, e 4 6

The gradation of these dimensions is visible at a glance; the boldest step being
here taken nearest the centre, while in the Fondaco it is farthest from the centre.
The first loss here is of eleven inches, the second of five, the third of five, and
then there is a most subtle increase of two inches in the extreme arches, as if to

contradict the principle of diminution, and stop the falling away of the building by
firm resistance at its flanks.

I could not get the measures of the upper story accurately, the palace having
been closed all the time I was in Venice; but it has seven central arches above the
five below, and three at the flanks above the two below, the groups being
separated by double shafts.

§ VIII. Again, in the Casa Farsetti, the lower story has a centre of five arches,
and wings of two. Referring, therefore, to the last figure, which will answer for
this palace also, the measures of the intervals are:

Ft. In.

a 8 0
b 5 10
c 5 4
d and e 5 3

It is, however, possible that the interval c and the wing arches may have been
intended to be similar; for one of the wing arches measures 5 ft. 4 in. We have
thus a simpler proportion than any we have hitherto met with; only two losses
taking place, the first of 2 ft. 2 in., the second of 6 inches.

The upper story has a central group of seven arches, whose widths are 4 ft. 1 in.

Ft. In.

The next arch on each side 3 5
The three arches of each wing 3 6

Here again we have a most curious instance of the subtlety of eye which was
not satisfied without a third dimension, but could be satisfied with a difference of
an inch on three feet and a half.

§ IX. In the Terraced House, the ground floor is modernized, but the first story is
composed of a centre of five arches, with wings of two, measuring as follows:

Ft. In.

Three midmost arches of the central
4 0
group
Outermost arch of the central group 4 6
Innermost arch of the wing 4 10
Outermost arch of the wing43 5 0

Here the greatest step is towards the centre; but the increase, which is unusual,
is towards the outside, the gain being successively six, four, and two inches.

I could not obtain the measures of the second story, in which only the central
group is left; but the two outermost arches are visibly larger than the others, thus
beginning a correspondent proportion to the one below, of which the lateral
quantities have been destroyed by restorations.

§ X. Finally, in the Rio-Foscari House, the central arch is the principal feature,
and the four lateral ones form one magnificent wing; the dimensions being from
the centre to the side:

Ft. In.

Central arch 9 9
Second " 3 8
Third " 3 10
Fourth " 3 10
Fifth " 3 8

The difference of two inches on nearly three feet in the two midmost arches
being all that was necessary to satisfy the builder’s eye.

§ XI. I need not point out to the reader that these singular and minute harmonies
of proportion indicate, beyond all dispute, not only that the buildings in which
they are found are of one school, but (so far as these subtle coincidences of
measurement can still be traced in them) in their original form. No modern builder
has any idea of connecting his arches in this manner, and restorations in Venice

are carried on with too violent hands to admit of the supposition that such
refinements would be even noticed in the progress of demolition, much less
imitated in heedless reproduction. And as if to direct our attention especially to
this character, as indicative of Byzantine workmanship, the most interesting
example of all will be found in the arches of the front of St. Mark’s itself, whose
proportions I have not noticed before, in order that they might here be compared
with those of the contemporary palaces.

Fig. V.

§ XII. The doors actually employed for entrance in the western façade are as
usual five, arranged as at a in the annexed woodcut, Fig. V.; but the Byzantine
builder could not be satisfied with so simple a group, and he introduced, therefore,
two minor arches at the extremities, as at b, by adding two small porticos which
are of no use whatever except to consummate the proportions of the façade, and
themselves to exhibit the most exquisite proportions in arrangements of shaft and
archivolt with which I am acquainted in the entire range of European architecture.

Into these minor particulars I cannot here enter; but observe the dimensions of
the range of arches in the façade, as thus completed by the flanking porticos:

Ft. In.

The space of its central archivolt is 31 8

" the two on each side,
19 8
about44
" the two succeeding,
20 4
about
" small arches at flanks,
6 0
about

I need not make any comment upon the subtle
difference of eight inches on twenty feet between the Fig. VI.

second and third dimensions. If the reader will be at
the pains to compare the whole evidence now laid
before him, with that deduced above from the apse of
Murano, he cannot but confess that it amounts to an
irrefragable proof of an intense perception of
harmony in the relation of quantities, on the part of
the Byzantine architects; a perception which we have at present lost so utterly as
hardly to be able even to conceive it. And let it not be said, as it was of the late
discoveries of subtle curvature in the Parthenon,45 that what is not to be
demonstrated without laborious measurement, cannot have influence on the
beauty of the design. The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect;
nay, it is not going too far to say, that it is most influenced by what it detects least.
Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the
changes of expression in the human countenance. The greater he is, the more he
will feel their subtlety, and the intense difficulty of perceiving all their relations,
or answering for the consequences of a variation of a hair’s breadth in a single
curve. Indeed, there is nothing truly noble either in color or in form, but its power
depends on circumstances infinitely too intricate to be explained, and almost too
subtle to be traced. And as for these Byzantine buildings, we only do not feel them
because we do not watch them; otherwise we should as much enjoy the variety of
proportion in their arches, as we do at present that of the natural architecture of
flowers and leaves. Any of us can feel in an instant the grace of the leaf group, b,
in the annexed figure; and yet that grace is simply owing to its being proportioned
like the façade of St. Mark’s; each leaflet answering to an arch,—the smallest at

the root, to those of the porticos. I have tried to give the proportion quite
accurately in b; but as the difference between the second and third leaflets is
hardly discernible on so small a scale, it is somewhat exaggerated in a.46 Nature is
often far more subtle in her proportions. In looking at some of the nobler species
of lilies, full in the front of the flower, we may fancy for a moment that they form
a symmetrical six-petaled star; but on examining them more closely, we shall find
that they are thrown into a group of three magnitudes by the expansion of two of
the inner petals above the stamens to a breadth greater than any of the four others;
while the third inner petal, on which the stamens rest, contracts itself into the
narrowest of the six, and the three under petals remain of one intermediate
magnitude, as seen in the annexed figure.

§ XIII. I must not, however, weary the reader with this
Fig. VII. subject, which has always been a favorite one with me, and
is apt to lead too far; we will return to the palaces on the
Grand Canal. Admitting, then, that their fragments are
proved, by the minute correspondences of their
arrangement, to be still in their original positions, they
indicate to us a form, whether of palace or dwelling-house,
in which there were, universally, central galleries, or
loggias, opening into apartments on each wing, the amount
of light admitted being immense; and the general proportions of the building,
slender, light, and graceful in the utmost degree, it being in fact little more than an
aggregate of shafts and arches. Of the interior disposition of these palaces there is
in no instance the slightest trace left, nor am I well enough acquainted with the
existing architecture of the East to risk any conjecture on this subject. I pursue the
statement of the facts which still are ascertainable respecting their external forms.

§ XIV. In every one of the buildings above mentioned, except the Rio-Foscari
House (which has only one great entrance between its wings), the central arcades
are sustained, at least in one story, and generally in both, on bold detached
cylindrical shafts, with rich capitals, while the arches of the wings are carried on
smaller shafts assisted by portions of wall, which become pilasters of greater or
less width.

And now I must remind the reader of what was pointed out above (Vol. I. Chap.
XXVII. §§ III. XXXV. XL.), that there are two great orders of capitals in the world;
that one of these is convex in its contour, the other concave; and that richness of
ornament, with all freedom of fancy, is for the most part found in the one, and
severity of ornament, with stern discipline of the fancy, in the other.

Of these two families of capitals both occur in the Byzantine period, but the
concave group is the longest-lived, and extends itself into the Gothic times. In the
account which I gave of them in the first volume, they were illustrated by giving
two portions of a simple curve, that of a salvia leaf. We must now investigate their
characters more in detail; and these may be best generally represented by
considering both families as formed upon the types of flowers,—the one upon that
of the water-lily, the other upon that of the convolvulus. There was no intention in
the Byzantine architects to imitate either one or the other of these flowers; but, as
I have already so often repeated, all beautiful works of art must either
intentionally imitate or accidentally resemble natural forms; and the direct
comparison with the natural forms which these capitals most resemble, is the
likeliest mode of fixing their distinctions in the reader’s mind.

The one then, the convex family, is modelled according to the commonest
shapes of that great group of flowers which form rounded cups, like that of the
water-lily, the leaves springing horizontally from the stalk, and closing together
upwards. The rose is of this family, but her cup is filled with the luxuriance of her
leaves; the crocus, campanula, ranunculus, anemone, and almost all the loveliest
children of the field, are formed upon the same type.

The other family resembles the convolvulus, trumpet-flower, and such others,
in which the lower part of the bell is slender, and the lip curves outwards at the
top. There are fewer flowers constructed on this than on the convex model; but in
the organization of trees and of clusters of herbage it is seen continually. Of
course, both of these conditions are modified, when applied to capitals, by the
enormously greater thickness of the stalk or shaft, but in other respects the
parallelism is close and accurate; and the reader had better at once fix the flower

outlines in his mind,47 and remember them as representing the only two orders of
capitals that the world has ever seen, or can see.

§ XV. The examples of the concave family in the Byzantine times are found
principally either in large capitals founded on the Greek Corinthian, used chiefly
for the nave pillars of churches, or in the small lateral shafts of the palaces. It
appears somewhat singular that the pure Corinthian form should have been
reserved almost exclusively for nave pillars, as at Torcello, Murano, and St.
Mark’s; it occurs, indeed, together with almost every other form, on the exterior of
St. Mark’s also, but never so definitely as in the nave and transept shafts. Of the
conditions assumed by it at Torcello enough has been said; and one of the most
delicate of the varieties occurring in St. Mark’s is given in Plate VIII., fig. 15,
remarkable for the cutting of the sharp thistle-like leaves into open relief, so that
the light sometimes shines through them from behind, and for the beautiful curling
of the extremities of the leaves outwards, joining each other at the top, as in an
undivided flower.

§ XVI. The other characteristic examples of the concave groups in the Byzantine
times are as simple as those resulting from the Corinthian are rich. They occur on
the small shafts at the flanks of the Fondaco de’ Turchi, the Casa Farsetti, Casa
Loredan, Terraced House, and upper story of the Madonnetta House, in forms so
exactly similar that the two figures 1 and 2 in Plate VIII. may sufficiently
represent them all. They consist merely of portions cut out of the plinths or string-
courses which run along all the faces of these palaces, by four truncations in the
form of arrowy leaves (fig. 1, Fondaco de’ Turchi), and the whole rounded a little
at the bottom so as to fit the shaft. When they occur between two arches they
assume the form of the group fig. 2 (Terraced House). Fig. 3 is from the central
arches of the Casa Farsetti, and is only given because either it is a later restoration
or a form absolutely unique in the Byzantine period.

VII.

BYZANTINE CAPITALS. CONVEX GROUP.

§ XVII. The concave group, however, was not naturally pleasing to the
Byzantine mind. Its own favorite capital was of the bold convex or cushion shape,
so conspicuous in all the buildings of the period that I have devoted Plate VII.,
opposite, entirely to its illustration. The form in which it is first used is practically
obtained from a square block laid on the head of the shaft (fig. 1, Plate VII.), by
first cutting off the lower corners, as in fig. 2, and then rounding the edges, as in
fig. 3; this gives us the bell stone: on this is laid a simple abacus, as seen in fig. 4,

which is the actual form used in the upper arcade of Murano, and the framework
of the capital is complete. Fig. 5 shows the general manner and effect of its
decoration on the same scale; the other figures, 6 and 7, both from the apse of
Murano, 8, from the Terraced House, and 9, from the Baptistery of St. Mark’s,
show the method of chiselling the surfaces in capitals of average richness, such as
occur everywhere, for there is no limit to the fantasy and beauty of the more
elaborate examples.

§ XVIII. In consequence of the peculiar affection entertained for these massy
forms by the Byzantines, they were apt, when they used any condition of capital
founded on the Corinthian, to modify the concave profile by making it bulge out
at the bottom. Fig. 1, a, Plate X., is the profile of a capital of the pure concave
family; and observe, it needs a fillet or cord round the neck of the capital to show
where it separates from the shaft. Fig. 4, a, on the other hand, is the profile of the
pure convex group, which not only needs no such projecting fillet, but would be
encumbered by it; while fig. 2, a, is the profile of one of the Byzantine capitals
(Fondaco de’ Turchi, lower arcade) founded on Corinthian, of which the main
sweep is concave, but which bends below into the convex bell-shape, where it
joins the shaft. And, lastly, fig. 3, a, is the profile of the nave shafts of St. Mark’s,
where, though very delicately granted, the concession to the Byzantine temper is
twofold; first at the spring of the curve from the base, and secondly the top, where
it again becomes convex, though the expression of the Corinthian bell is still
given to it by the bold concave leaves.

§ XIX. These, then, being the general modifications of Byzantine profiles, I have
thrown together in Plate VIII., opposite, some of the most characteristic examples
of the decoration of the concave and transitional types; their localities are given in
the note below,48 and the following are the principal points to be observed
respecting them.

The purest concave forms, 1 and 2, were never decorated in the earliest times,
except sometimes by an incision or rib down the centre of their truncations on the
angles.

VIII.

BYZANTINE CAPITALS. CONCAVE GROUP.

Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7 show some of the modes of application of a peculiarly
broad-lobed acanthus leaf, very characteristic of native Venetian work; 4 and 5 are
from the same building, two out of a group of four, and show the boldness of the
variety admitted in the management even of the capitals most closely derived
from the Corinthian. I never saw one of these Venetian capitals in all respects like

another. The trefoils into which the leaves fall at the extremities are, however, for
the most part similar, though variously disposed, and generally niche themselves
one under the other, as very characteristically in fig. 7. The form 8 occurs in St.
Mark’s only, and there very frequently: 9 at Venice occurs, I think, in St. Mark’s
only; but it is a favorite early Lombardic form. 10, 11, and 12 are all highly
characteristic. 10 occurs with more fantastic interweaving upon its sides in the
upper stories of St. Mark’s; 11 is derived, in the Casa Loredan, from the great lily
capitals of St. Mark’s, of which more presently. 13 and 15 are peculiar to St.
Mark’s. 14 is a lovely condition, occurring both there and in the Fondaco de’
Turchi.

The modes in which the separate portions of the leaves are executed in these
and other Byzantine capitals, will be noticed more at length hereafter. Here I only
wish the reader to observe two things, both with respect to these and the capitals
of the convex family on the former Plate: first the Life, secondly, the Breadth, of
these capitals, as compared with Greek forms.

§ XX. I say, first, the Life. Not only is every one of these capitals differently
fancied, but there are many of them which have no two sides alike. Fig. 5, for
instance, varies on every side in the arrangement of the pendent leaf in its centre;
fig. 6 has a different plant on each of its four upper angles. The birds are each cut
with a different play of plumage in figs. 9 and 12, and the vine-leaves are every
one varied in their position in fig. 13. But this is not all. The differences in the
character of ornamentation between them and the Greek capitals, all show a
greater love of nature; the leaves are, every one of them, more founded on
realities, sketched, however rudely, more directly from the truth; and are
continually treated in a manner which shows the mind of the workman to have
been among the living herbage, not among Greek precedents. The hard outlines in
which, for the sake of perfect intelligibility, I have left this Plate, have deprived
the examples of the vitality of their light and shade; but the reader can
nevertheless observe the ideas of life occurring perpetually: at the top of fig. 4, for
instance, the small leaves turned sideways; in fig. 5, the formal volutes of the old
Corinthian transformed into a branching tendril; in fig. 6, the bunch of grapes
thrown carelessly in at the right-hand corner, in defiance of all symmetry; in fig.

7, the volutes knitted into wreaths of ivy; in fig. 14, the leaves, drifted, as it were,
by a whirlwind round the capital by which they rise; while figs. 13 and 15 are as
completely living leaves as any of the Gothic time. These designs may or may not
be graceful; what grace or beauty they have is not to be rendered in mere outline,
—but they are indisputably more natural than any Greek ones, and therefore
healthier, and tending to greatness.

§ XXI. In the second place, note in all these examples, the excessive breadth of
the masses, however afterwards they may be filled with detail. Whether we
examine the contour of the simpler convex bells, or those of the leaves which
bend outwards from the richer and more Corinthian types, we find they are all
outlined by grand and simple curves, and that the whole of their minute fretwork
and thistle-work is cast into a gigantic mould which subdues all their
multitudinous points and foldings to its own inevitable dominion. And the fact is,
that in the sweeping lines and broad surfaces of these Byzantine sculptures we
obtain, so far as I know, for the first time in the history of art, the germ of that
unity of perfect ease in every separate part, with perfect subjection to an enclosing
form or directing impulse, which was brought to its most intense expression in the
compositions of the two men in whom the art of Italy consummated itself and
expired—Tintoret and Michael Angelo.

I would not attach too much importance to the mere habit of working on the
rounded surface of the stone, which is often as much the result of haste or
rudeness as of the desire for breadth, though the result obtained is not the less
beautiful. But in the capital from the Fondaco de’ Turchi, fig. 6, it will be seen that
while the sculptor had taken the utmost care to make his leaves free, graceful, and
sharp in effect, he was dissatisfied with their separation, and could not rest until he
had enclosed them with an unbroken line, like that of a pointed arch; and the same
thing is done in many different ways in other capitals of the same building, and in
many of St. Mark’s: but one such instance would have been enough to prove, if
the loveliness of the profiles themselves did not do so, that the sculptor
understood and loved the laws of generalization; and that the feeling which bound
his prickly leaves, as they waved or drifted round the ridges of his capital, into
those broad masses of unbroken flow, was indeed one with that which made

Michael Angelo encompass the principal figure in his Creation of Adam with the
broad curve of its cloudy drapery. It may seem strange to assert any connexion
between so great a conception and these rudely hewn fragments of ruined marble;
but all the highest principles of art are as universal as they are majestic, and there
is nothing too small to receive their influence. They rule at once the waves of the
mountain outline, and the sinuosities of the minutest lichen that stains its shattered
stones.

§ XXII. We have not yet spoken of the three braided and chequered capitals,
numbered 10, 11, and 12. They are representations of a group, with which many
most interesting associations are connected. It was noticed in the last chapter, that
the method of covering the exterior of buildings with thin pieces of marble was
likely to lead to a system of lighting the interior by minute perforation. In order to
obtain both light and air, without admitting any unbroken body of sunshine, in
warm countries, it became a constant habit of the Arabian architects to pierce
minute and starlike openings in slabs of stone; and to employ the stones so pierced
where the Gothic architects employ traceries. Internally, the form of stars assumed
by the light as it entered49 was, in itself, an exquisite decoration; but, externally, it
was felt necessary to add some slight ornament upon the surface of the perforated
stone; and it was soon found that, as the small perforations had a tendency to look
scattered and spotty, the most effective treatment of the intermediate surfaces
would be one which bound them together, and gave unity and repose to the
pierced and disturbed stone: universally, therefore, those intermediate spaces were
carved into the semblance of interwoven fillets, which alternately sank beneath
and rose above each other as they met. This system of braided or woven ornament
was not confined to the Arabs; it is universally pleasing to the instinct of mankind.
I believe that nearly all early ornamentation is full of it,—more especially,
perhaps, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon; and illuminated manuscripts depend
upon it for their loveliest effects of intricate color, up to the close of the thirteenth
century. There are several very interesting metaphysical reasons for this strange
and unfailing delight, felt in a thing so simple. It is not often that any idea of
utility has power to enhance the true impressions of beauty; but it is possible that
the enormous importance of the art of weaving to mankind may give some

interest, if not actual attractiveness, to any type or image of the invention to which
we owe, at once, our comfort and our pride. But the more profound reason lies in
the innate love of mystery and unity; in the joy that the human mind has in
contemplating any kind of maze or entanglement, so long as it can discern,
through its confusion, any guiding clue or connecting plan: a pleasure increased
and solemnized by some dim feeling of the setting forth, by such symbols, of the
intricacy, and alternate rise and fall, subjection and supremacy, of human fortune;
the

"Weave the warp, and weave the woof,"

of Fate and Time.

IX.

LILY CAPITAL OF ST. MARKS.

§ XXIII. But be this as it may, the fact is that we are never tired of contemplating
this woven involution; and that, in some degree, the sublime pleasure which we
have in watching the branches of trees, the intertwining of the grass, and the
tracery of the higher clouds, is owing to it, not less than that which we receive
from the fine meshes of the robe, the braiding of the hair, and the various
glittering of the linked net or wreathed chain. Byzantine ornamentation, like that

of almost all nations in a state of progress, is full of this kind of work: but it
occurs most conspicuously, though most simply, in the minute traceries which
surround their most solid capitals; sometimes merely in a reticulated veil, as in the
tenth figure in the Plate, sometimes resembling a basket, on the edges of which
are perched birds and other animals. The diamonded ornament in the eleventh
figure is substituted for it in the Casa Loredan, and marks a somewhat later time
and a tendency to the ordinary Gothic chequer; but the capitals which show it
most definitely are those already so often spoken of as the lily capitals of St.
Mark’s, of which the northern one is carefully drawn in Plate IX.

X.

THE FOUR VENETIAN FLOWER ORDERS.

§ XXIV. These capitals, called barbarous by our architects, are without exception
the most subtle pieces of composition in broad contour which I have ever met
with in architecture. Their profile is given in the opposite Plate X. fig. 3, b; the
inner line in the figure being that of the stone behind the lily, the outer that of the
external network, taken through the side of the capital; while fig. 3, c is the outer
profile at its angle; and the reader will easily understand that the passing of the
one of these lines into the other is productive of the most exquisite and wonderful

series of curvatures possible within such compass, no two views of the capital
giving the same contour. Upon these profoundly studied outlines, as remarkable
for their grace and complexity as the general mass of the capital is for solid
strength and proportion to its necessary service, the braided work is wrought with
more than usual care; perhaps, as suggested by the Marchese Selvatico, with some
idea of imitating those “nets of chequerwork and wreaths of chainwork” on the
chapiters of Solomon’s temple, which are, I suppose, the first instances on record
of an ornamentation of this kind thus applied. The braided work encloses on each
of the four sides of the capital a flower whose form, derived from that of the lily,
though as usual modified, in every instance of its occurrence, in some minor
particulars, is generally seen as represented in fig. 11 of Plate VIII. It is never
without the two square or oblong objects at the extremity of the tendrils issuing
from its root, set like vessels to catch the dew from the points of its leaves; but I
do not understand their meaning. The abacus of the capital has already been given
at a, Plate XVI., Vol. I.; but no amount of illustrations or eulogium would be
enough to make the reader understand the perfect beauty of the thing itself, as the
sun steals from interstice to interstice of its marble veil, and touches with the
white lustre of its rays at mid-day the pointed leaves of its thirsty lilies.

In all the capitals hitherto spoken of, the form of the head of the bell has been
square, and its varieties of outline have been obtained in the transition from the
square of the abacus to the circular outline of the shafts. A far more complex
series of forms results from the division of the bell by recesses into separate lobes
or leaves, like those of a rose or tulip, which are each in their turn covered with
flower-work or hollowed into reticulation. The example (fig. 10, Plate VII.) from
St. Mark’s will give some idea of the simplest of these conditions: perhaps the
most exquisite in Venice, on the whole, is the central capital of the upper arcade of
the Fondaco de’ Turchi.

Such are the principal generic conditions of the Byzantine capital; but the
reader must always remember that the examples given are single instances, and
those not the most beautiful but the most intelligible, chosen out of thousands: the
designs of the capitals of St. Mark’s alone would form a volume.

XI.

BYZANTINE SCULPTURE.

§ XXV. Of the archivolts which these capitals generally sustain, details are given
in the Appendix and in the notice of Venetian doors in Chapter VII. In the private
palaces, the ranges of archivolt are for the most part very simple, with dentilled
mouldings; and all the ornamental effect is entrusted to pieces of sculpture set in
the wall above or between the arches, in the manner shown in Plate XV., below,

Chapter VII. These pieces of sculpture are either crosses, upright oblongs, or
circles: of all the three forms an example is given in Plate XI. opposite. The cross
was apparently an invariable ornament, placed either in the centre of the archivolt
of the doorway, or in the centre of the first story above the windows; on each side
of it the circular and oblong ornaments were used in various alternation. In too
many instances the wall marbles have been torn away from the earliest Byzantine
palaces, so that the crosses are left on their archivolts only. The best examples of
the cross set above the windows are found in houses of the transitional period: one
in the Campo Sta M. Formosa; another, in which a cross is placed between every
window, is still well preserved in the Campo Sta Maria Mater Domini; another, on
the Grand Canal, in the parish of the Apostoli, has two crosses, one on each side
of the first story, and a bas-relief of Christ enthroned in the centre; and finally, that
from which the larger cross in the Plate was taken in the house once belonging to
Marco Polo, at San Giovanni Grisostomo.

§ XXVI. This cross, though graceful and rich, and given because it happens to
be one of the best preserved, is uncharacteristic in one respect; for, instead of the
central rose at the meeting of the arms, we usually find a hand raised in the
attitude of blessing, between the sun and moon, as in the two smaller crosses seen
in the Plate. In nearly all representations of the Crucifixion, over the whole of
Europe, at the period in question, the sun and the moon are introduced, one on
each side of the cross,—the sun generally, in paintings, as a red star; but I do not
think with any purpose of indicating the darkness at the time of the agony;
especially because, had this been the intention, the moon ought not to have been
visible, since it could not have been in the heavens during the day at the time of
passover. I believe rather that the two luminaries are set there in order to express
the entire dependence of the heavens and the earth upon the work of the
Redemption: and this view is confirmed by our frequently finding the sun and
moon set in the same manner beside the figure of Christ, as in the centre of the
great archivolt of St. Mark’s, or beside the hand signifying benediction, without
any cross, in some other early archivolts;50 while, again, not unfrequently they are
absent from the symbol of the cross itself, and its saving power over the whole of
creation is indicated only by fresh leaves springing from its foot, or doves feeding

beside it; and so also, in illuminated Bibles, we find the series of pictures
representing the Creation terminate in the Crucifixion, as the work by which all
the families of created beings subsist, no less than that in sympathy with which
“the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

§ XXVII. This habit of placing the symbol of the Christian faith in the centres of
their palaces was, as I above said, universal in early Venice; it does not cease till
about the middle of the fourteenth century. The other sculptures, which were set
above or between the arches, consist almost invariably of groups of birds or
beasts; either standing opposite to each other with a small pillar or spray of
leafage between them, or else tearing and devouring each other. The multitude of
these sculptures, especially of the small ones enclosed in circles, as figs 5 and 6,
Plate XI., which are now scattered through the city of Venice, is enormous, but
they are seldom to be seen in their original positions. When the Byzantine palaces
were destroyed, these fragments were generally preserved, and inserted again in
the walls of the new buildings, with more or less attempt at symmetry; fragments
of friezes and mouldings being often used in the same manner; so that the mode of
their original employment can only be seen in St. Mark’s, the Fondaco de’ Turchi,
Braided House, and one or two others. The most remarkable point about them is,
that the groups of beasts or birds on each side of the small pillars bear the closest
possible resemblance to the group of Lions over the gate of Mycenæ; and the
whole of the ornamentation of that gate, as far as I can judge of it from drawings,
is so like Byzantine sculpture, that I cannot help sometimes suspecting the original
conjecture of the French antiquarians, that it was a work of the middle ages, to be
not altogether indefensible. By far the best among the sculptures at Venice are
those consisting of groups thus arranged; the first figure in Plate XI. is one of
those used on St. Mark’s, and, with its chain of wreathen work round it, is very
characteristic of the finest kind, except that the immediate trunk or pillar often
branches into luxuriant leafage, usually of the vine, so that the whole ornament
seems almost composed from the words of Ezekiel. “A great eagle with great
wings, long-winged, full of feathers, which had divers colors, came into Lebanon,
and took the highest branch of the cedar: He cropped off the top of his young
twigs; and carried it into a city of traffic; he set it in a city of merchants. He took

also of the seed of the land, ... and it grew, and became a spreading vine of low
stature, whose branches turned towards him, and the roots thereof were under
him.”

§ XXVIII. The groups of contending and devouring animals are always much
ruder in cutting, and take somewhat the place in Byzantine sculpture which the
lower grotesques do in the Gothic; true, though clumsy, grotesques being
sometimes mingled among them, as four bodies joined to one head in the centre;51
but never showing any attempt at variety of invention, except only in the effective
disposition of the light and shade, and in the vigor and thoughtfulness of the
touches which indicate the plumes of the birds or foldings of the leaves. Care,
however, is always taken to secure variety enough to keep the eye entertained, no
two sides of these Byzantine ornaments being in all respects the same: for
instance, in the chainwork round the first figure in Plate XI. there are two circles
enclosing squares on the left-hand side of the arch at the top, but two smaller
circles and a diamond on the other, enclosing one square, and two small circular
spots or bosses; and in the line of chain at the bottom there is a circle on the right,
and a diamond on the left, and so down to the working of the smallest details. I
have represented this upper sculpture as dark, in order to give some idea of the
general effect of these ornaments when seen in shadow against light; an effect
much calculated upon by the designer, and obtained by the use of a golden ground
formed of glass mosaic inserted in the hollows of the marble. Each square of glass
has the leaf gold upon its surface protected by another thin film of glass above it,
so that no time or weather can affect its lustre, until the pieces of glass are bodily
torn from their setting. The smooth glazed surface of the golden ground is washed
by every shower of rain, but the marble usually darkens into an amber color in
process of time; and when the whole ornament is cast into shadow, the golden
surface, being perfectly reflective, refuses the darkness, and shows itself in bright
and burnished light behind the dark traceries of the ornament. Where the marble
has retained its perfect whiteness, on the other hand, and is seen in sunshine, it is
shown as a snowy tracery on a golden ground; and the alternations and
intermingling of these two effects form one of the chief enchantments of
Byzantine ornamentation.

§ XXIX. How far the system of grounding with gold and color, universal in St.
Mark’s, was carried out in the sculptures of the private palaces, it is now
impossible to say. The wrecks of them which remain, as above noticed, show few
of their ornamental sculptures in their original position; and from those marbles
which were employed in succeeding buildings, during the Gothic period, the
fragments of their mosaic grounds would naturally rather have been removed than
restored. Mosaic, while the most secure of all decorations if carefully watched and
refastened when it loosens, may, if neglected and exposed to weather, in process
of time disappear so as to leave no vestige of its existence. However this may
have been, the assured facts are, that both the shafts of the pillars and the facing of
the old building were of veined or variously colored marble: the capitals and
sculptures were either, as they now appear, of pure white marble, relieved upon
the veined ground; or, which is infinitely the more probable, grounded in the
richer palaces with mosaic of gold, in the inferior ones with blue color; and only
the leaves and edges of the sculpture gilded. These brighter hues were opposed by
bands of deeper color, generally alternate russet and green, in the archivolts,—
bands which still remain in the Casa Loredan and Fondaco de’ Turchi, and in a
house in the Corte del Remer, near the Rialto, as well as in St. Mark’s; and by
circular disks of green serpentine and porphyry, which, together with the circular
sculptures, appear to have been an ornament peculiarly grateful to the Eastern
mind, derived probably in the first instance from the suspension of shields upon
the wall, as in the majesty of ancient Tyre. “The men of Arvad with thine army
were upon thy walls round about, and the Gammadins were in thy towers: they
hanged their shields upon thy walls round about; they have made thy beauty
perfect.”52 The sweet and solemn harmony of purple with various green (the
same, by the by, to which the hills of Scotland owe their best loveliness) remained
a favorite chord of color with the Venetians, and was constantly used even in the
later palaces; but never could have been seen in so great perfection as when
opposed to the pale and delicate sculpture of the Byzantine time.

§ XXX. Such, then, was that first and fairest Venice which rose out of the
barrenness of the lagoon, and the sorrow of her people; a city of graceful arcades
and gleaming walls, veined with azure and warm with gold, and fretted with white

sculpture like frost upon forest branches turned to marble. And yet, in this beauty
of her youth, she was no city of thoughtless pleasure. There was still a sadness of
heart upon her, and a depth of devotion, in which lay all her strength. I do not
insist upon the probable religious signification of many of the sculptures which
are now difficult of interpretation; but the temper which made the cross the
principal ornament of every building is not to be misunderstood, nor can we fail to
perceive, in many of the minor sculptural subjects, meanings perfectly familiar to
the mind of early Christianity. The peacock, used in preference to every other bird,
is the well-known symbol of the resurrection; and when drinking from a fountain
(Plate XI. fig. 1) or from a font (Plate XI. fig. 5), is, I doubt not, also a type of the
new life received in faithful baptism. The vine, used in preference to all other
trees, was equally recognized as, in all cases, a type either of Christ himself53 or
of those who were in a state of visible or professed union with him. The dove, at
its foot, represents the coming of the Comforter; and even the groups of
contending animals had, probably, a distinct and universally apprehended
reference to the powers of evil. But I lay no stress on these more occult meanings.
The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early Venetian
mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would suppose it was traceable;—that
love of bright and pure color which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root
of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which, in its utmost
simplicity, was characteristic of the Byzantine period only; and of which,
therefore, in the close of our review of that period, it will be well that we should
truly estimate the significance. The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the
nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more common than to hear it
spoken of as a subordinate beauty,—nay, even as the mere source of a sensual
pleasure; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who

“Could strip, for aught the prospect yields
To them, their verdure from the fields;
And take the radiance from the clouds
With which the sun his setting shrouds.”

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in thoughtlessness;
and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their
own existence would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold
from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the
blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the
eye, the radiance from the hair,—if they could but see for an instant, white human
creatures living in a white world,—they would soon feel what they owe to color.
The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most
divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color, and sad color, for color
cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the
loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which
love color the most.

§ XXXI. I know that this will sound strange in many ears, and will be especially
startling to those who have considered the subject chiefly with reference to
painting; for the great Venetian schools of color are not usually understood to be
either pure or pensive, and the idea of its pre-eminence is associated in nearly
every mind with the coarseness of Rubens, and the sensualities of Correggio and
Titian. But a more comprehensive view of art will soon correct this impression. It
will be discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and earnest the religion
of the painter, the more pure and prevalent is the system of his color. It will be
found, in the second place, that where color becomes a primal intention with a
painter otherwise mean or sensual, it instantly elevates him, and becomes the one
sacred and saving element in his work. The very depth of the stoop to which the
Venetian painters and Rubens sometimes condescend, is a consequence of their
feeling confidence in the power of their color to keep them from falling. They
hold on by it, as by a chain let down from heaven, with one hand, though they
may sometimes seem to gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last
place, it will be found that so surely as a painter is irreligious, thoughtless, or
obscene in disposition, so surely is his coloring cold, gloomy, and valueless. The
opposite poles of art in this respect are Frà Angelico and Salvator Rosa; of whom
the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never
harbored an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery,

the colors of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted
window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator
was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and
revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their color is for the most part
gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it
must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life:—“In such laughter
the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”

§ XXXII. These are no singular instances. I know no law more severely without
exception than this of the connexion of pure color with profound and noble
thought. The late Flemish pictures, shallow in conception and obscene in subject,
are always sober in color. But the early religious painting of the Flemings is as
brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos painted in
crimson, and blue, and gold. The Caraccis, Guidos, and Rembrandts in brown and
grey. The builders of our great cathedrals veiled their casements and wrapped their
pillars with one robe of purple splendor. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance
left their palaces filled only with cold white light, and in the paleness of their
native stone.54

§ XXXIII. Nor does it seem difficult to discern a noble reason for this universal
law. In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes of color upon the front of the
sky, when it became the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided
light were sanctified to the human heart for ever; nor this, it would seem, by mere
arbitrary appointment, but in consequence of the fore-ordained and marvellous
constitution of those hues into a sevenfold, or, more strictly still, a threefold order,
typical of the Divine nature itself. Observe also, the name Shem, or Splendor,
given to that son of Noah in whom this covenant with mankind was to be fulfilled,
and see how that name was justified by every one of the Asiatic races which
descended from him. Not without meaning was the love of Israel to his chosen son
expressed by the coat “of many colors;” not without deep sense of the sacredness
of that symbol of purity, did the lost daughter of David tear it from her breast:
—“With such robes were the king’s daughters that were virgins apparelled.”55 We
know it to have been by Divine command that the Israelite, rescued from
servitude, veiled the tabernacle with its rain of purple and scarlet, while the under

sunshine flashed through the fall of the color from its tenons of gold: but was it
less by Divine guidance that the Mede, as he struggled out of anarchy,
encompassed his king with the sevenfold burning of the battlements of Ecbatana?
—of which one circle was golden like the sun, and another silver like the moon;
and then came the great sacred chord of color, blue, purple, and scarlet; and then a
circle white like the day, and another dark, like night; so that the city rose like a
great mural rainbow, a sign of peace amidst the contending of lawless races, and
guarded, with color and shadow, that seemed to symbolize the great order which
rules over Day, and Night, and Time, the first organization of the mighty statutes,
—the law of the Medes and Persians, that altereth not.

§ XXXIV. Let us not dream that it is owing to the accidents of tradition or
education that those races possess the supremacy over color which has always
been felt, though but lately acknowledged among men. However their dominion
might be broken, their virtue extinguished, or their religion defiled, they retained
alike the instinct and the power: the instinct which made even their idolatry more
glorious than that of others, bursting forth in fire-worship from pyramid, cave, and
mountain, taking the stars for the rulers of its fortune, and the sun for the God of
its life; the power which so dazzled and subdued the rough crusader into
forgetfulness of sorrow and of shame, that Europe put on the splendor which she
had learnt of the Saracen, as her sackcloth of mourning for what she suffered from
his sword;—the power which she confesses to this day, in the utmost
thoughtlessness of her pride, or her beauty, as it treads the costly carpet, or veils
itself with the variegated Cachemire; and in the emulation of the concourse of her
workmen, who, but a few months back, perceived, or at least admitted, for the first
time, the pre-eminence which has been determined from the birth of mankind, and
on whose charter Nature herself has set a mysterious seal, granting to the Western
races, descended from that son of Noah whose name was Extension, the treasures
of the sullen rock, and stubborn ore, and gnarled forest, which were to accomplish
their destiny across all distance of earth and depth of sea, while she matured the
jewel in the sand, and rounded the pearl in the shell, to adorn the diadem of him
whose name was Splendor.

§ XXXV. And observe, farther, how in the Oriental mind a peculiar seriousness is
associated with this attribute of the love of color; a seriousness rising out of
repose, and out of the depth and breadth of the imagination, as contrasted with the
activity, and consequent capability of surprise, and of laughter, characteristic of
the Western mind: as a man on a journey must look to his steps always, and view
things narrowly and quickly; while one at rest may command a wider view,
though an unchanging one, from which the pleasure he receives must be one of
contemplation, rather than of amusement or surprise. Wherever the pure Oriental
spirit manifests itself definitely, I believe its work is serious; and the meeting of
the influences of the Eastern and Western races is perhaps marked in Europe more
by the dying away of the grotesque laughter of the Goth than by any other sign. I
shall have more to say on this head in other places of this volume; but the point I
wish at present to impress upon the reader is, that the bright hues of the early
architecture of Venice were no sign of gaiety of heart, and that the investiture with
the mantle of many colors by which she is known above all other cities of Italy
and of Europe, was not granted to her in the fever of her festivity, but in the
solemnity of her early and earnest religion. She became in after times the revel of
the earth, the masque of Italy; and therefore is she now desolate: but her glorious
robe of gold and purple was given her when first she rose a vestal from the sea,
not when she became drunk with the wine of her fornication.

§ XXXVI. And we have never yet looked with enough reverence upon the
separate gift which was thus bestowed upon her; we have never enough
considered what an inheritance she has left us, in the works of those mighty
painters who were the chief of her children. That inheritance is indeed less than it
ought to have been, and other than it ought to have been; for before Titian and
Tintoret arose,—the men in whom her work and her glory should have been
together consummated,—she had already ceased to lead her sons in the way of
truth and life, and they erred much, and fell short of that which was appointed for
them. There is no subject of thought more melancholy, more wonderful, than the
way in which God permits so often His best gifts to be trodden under foot of men,
His richest treasures to be wasted by the moth, and the mightiest influences of His
Spirit, given but once in the world’s history, to be quenched and shortened by

miseries of chance and guilt. I do not wonder at what men Suffer, but I wonder
often at what they Lose. We may see how good rises out of pain and evil; but the
dead, naked, eyeless loss, what good comes of that? The fruit struck to the earth
before its ripeness; the glowing life and goodly purpose dissolved away in sudden
death; the words, half spoken, choked upon the lips with clay for ever; or, stranger
than all, the whole majesty of humanity raised to its fulness, and every gift and
power necessary for a given purpose, at a given moment, centred in one man, and
all this perfected blessing permitted to be refused, perverted, crushed, cast aside
by those who need it most,—the city which is Not set on a hill, the candle that
giveth light to None that are in the house:—these are the heaviest mysteries of this
strange world, and, it seems to me, those which mark its curse the most. And it is
true that the power with which this Venice had been entrusted, was perverted,
when at its highest, in a thousand miserable ways; still, it was possessed by her
alone; to her all hearts have turned which could be moved by its manifestation,
and none without being made stronger and nobler by what her hand had wrought.
That mighty Landscape, of dark mountains that guard the horizon with their
purple towers, and solemn forests, that gather their weight of leaves, bronzed with
sunshine, not with age, into those gloomy masses fixed in heaven, which storm
and frost have power no more to shake, or shed;—that mighty Humanity, so
perfect and so proud, that hides no weakness beneath the mantle, and gains no
greatness from the diadem; the majesty of thoughtful form, on which the dust of
gold and flame of jewels are dashed as the sea-spray upon the rock, and still the
great Manhood seems to stand bare against the blue sky;—that mighty Mythology,
which fills the daily walks of men with spiritual companionship, and beholds the
protecting angels break with their burning presence through the arrow-flights of
battle:—measure the compass of that field of creation, weigh the value of the
inheritance that Venice thus left to the nations of Europe, and then judge if so vast,
so beneficent a power could indeed have been rooted in dissipation or decay. It
was when she wore the ephod of the priest, not the motley of the masquer, that the
fire fell upon her from heaven; and she saw the first rays of it through the rain of
her own tears, when, as the barbaric deluge ebbed from the hills of Italy, the
circuit of her palaces, and the orb of her fortunes, rose together, like the Iris,
painted upon the Cloud.

41 In the year 1851, by the Duchesse de Berri.

42 Of the Braided House and Casa Businello, described in the Appendix, only the great central
arcades remain.

43 Only one wing of the first story is left. See Appendix 11.

44 I am obliged to give these measures approximately, because, this front having been studied
by the builder with unusual care, not one of its measures is the same as another; and the symmetries
between the correspondent arches are obtained by changes in the depth of their mouldings and
variations in their heights, far too complicated for me to enter into here; so that of the two arches
stated as 19 ft. 8 in. in span, one is in reality 19 ft. 6½ in., the other 19 ft. 10 in., and of the two
stated as 20 ft. 4 in., one is 20 ft. and the other 20 ft. 8 in.

45 By Mr. Penrose.

46 I am sometimes obliged, unfortunately, to read my woodcuts backwards owing to my having
forgotten to reverse them on the wood.

47 Vide Plate X. figs. 1 and 4.

48

1. Fondaco de’ Turehi, lateral pillars. 9. St. Mark’s.
2. Terraced House, lateral pillars. 10. Braided House, upper arcade.
3. Casa Farsetti, central pillars, upper arcade. 11. Casa Loredan, upper arcade.
4. Casa Loredan, lower arcade. 12. St. Mark’s.
5. Casa Loredan, lower arcade. 13. St. Mark’s.
6. Fondaco de’ Turchi, upper arcade. 14. Fondaco de’ Turchi, upper arcade.
7. Casa Loredan, upper arcade. 15. St. Mark’s.
8. St. Mark’s.

49 Compare “Seven Lamps,” chap. ii. § 22.

50 Two of these are represented in the second number of my folio work upon Venice.

51 The absence of the true grotesque spirit in Byzantine work will be examined in the third
chapter of the third volume.

52 Ezekiel, xxvii. 11.

53 Perhaps this type is in no place of Scripture more touchingly used than in Lamentations, i.
12, where the word “afflicted” is rendered in the Vulgate “vindemiavit,” “vintaged.”

54 Appendix 12, “Modern Painting on Glass.”

55 2 Samuel, xiii. 18.

SECOND, OR GOTHIC, PERIOD.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NATURE OF GOTHIC.

§ I. If the reader will look back to the division of our subject which was made in
the first chapter of the first volume, he will find that we are now about to enter
upon the examination of that school of Venetian architecture which forms an
intermediate step between the Byzantine and Gothic forms; but which I find may
be conveniently considered in its connexion with the latter style. In order that we
may discern the tendency of each step of this change, it will be wise in the outset
to endeavor to form some general idea of its final result. We know already what
the Byzantine architecture is from which the transition was made, but we ought to
know something of the Gothic architecture into which it led. I shall endeavor
therefore to give the reader in this chapter an idea, at once broad and definite, of
the true nature of Gothic architecture, properly so called; not of that of Venice
only, but of universal Gothic: for it will be one of the most interesting parts of our
subsequent inquiry, to find out how far Venetian architecture reached the universal
or perfect type of Gothic, and how far it either fell short of it, or assumed foreign
and independent forms.

§ II. The principal difficulty in doing this arises from the fact that every building
of the Gothic period differs in some important respect from every other; and many
include features which, if they occurred in other buildings, would not be
considered Gothic at all; so that all we have to reason upon is merely, if I may be
allowed so to express it, a greater or less degree of Gothicness in each building we
examine. And it is this Gothicness,—the character which, according as it is found
more or less in a building, makes it more or less Gothic,—of which I want to
define the nature; and I feel the same kind of difficulty in doing so which would
be encountered by any one who undertook to explain, for instance, the nature of
Redness, without any actual red thing to point to, but only orange and purple
things. Suppose he had only a piece of heather and a dead oak-leaf to do it with.
He might say, the color which is mixed with the yellow in this oak-leaf, and with
the blue in this heather, would be red, if you had it separate; but it would be
difficult, nevertheless, to make the abstraction perfectly intelligible: and it is so in
a far greater degree to make the abstraction of the Gothic character intelligible,
because that character itself is made up of many mingled ideas, and can consist
only in their union. That is to say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor
vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some of
these things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as to
have life.

§ III. Observe also, that, in the definition proposed, I shall only endeavor to
analyze the idea which I suppose already to exist in the reader’s mind. We all have
some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term
Gothic; but I know that many persons have this idea in their minds without being
able to define it: that is to say, understanding generally that Westminster Abbey is
Gothic, and St. Paul’s is not, that Strasburg Cathedral is Gothic, and St. Peter’s is
not, they have, nevertheless, no clear notion of what it is that they recognize in the
one or miss in the other, such as would enable them to say how far the work at
Westminster or Strasburg is good and pure of its kind: still less to say of any non-
descript building, like St. James’s Palace or Windsor Castle, how much right
Gothic element there is in it, and how much wanting, And I believe this inquiry to
be a pleasant and profitable one; and that there will be found something more than

usually interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the
Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and our
Northern hearts. And if, at any point of the inquiry, I should interfere with any of
the reader’s previously formed conceptions, and use the term Gothic in any sense
which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask him to accept, but only to
examine and understand, my interpretation, as necessary to the intelligibility of
what follows in the rest of the work.

§ IV. We have, then, the Gothic character submitted to our analysis, just as the
rough mineral is submitted to that of the chemist, entangled with many other
foreign substances, itself perhaps in no place pure, or ever to be obtained or seen
in purity for more than an instant; but nevertheless a thing of definite and separate
nature, however inextricable or confused in appearance. Now observe: the chemist
defines his mineral by two separate kinds of character; one external, its crystalline
form, hardness, lustre, &c.; the other internal, the proportions and nature of its
constituent atoms. Exactly in the same manner, we shall find that Gothic
architecture has external forms, and internal elements. Its elements are certain
mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of
variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed arches,
vaulted roofs, &c. And unless both the elements and the forms are there, we have
no right to call the style Gothic. It is not enough that it has the Form, if it have not
also the power and life. It is not enough that it has the Power, if it have not the
form. We must therefore inquire into each of these characters successively; and
determine first, what is the Mental Expression, and secondly, what the Material
Form, of Gothic architecture, properly so called.

1st. Mental Power or Expression. What characters, we have to discover, did the
Gothic builders love, or instinctively express in their work, as distinguished from
all other builders?

§ V. Let us go back for a moment to our chemistry, and note that, in defining a
mineral by its constituent parts, it is not one nor another of them, that can make up
the mineral, but the union of all: for instance, it is neither in charcoal, nor in
oxygen, nor in lime, that there is the making of chalk, but in the combination of all

three in certain measures; they are all found in very different things from chalk,
and there is nothing like chalk either in charcoal or in oxygen, but they are
nevertheless necessary to its existence.

So in the various mental characters which make up the soul of Gothic. It is not
one nor another that produces it; but their union in certain measures. Each one of
them is found in many other architectures besides Gothic; but Gothic cannot exist
where they are not found, or, at least, where their place is not in some way
supplied. Only there is this great difference between the composition of the
mineral, and of the architectural style, that if we withdraw one of its elements
from the stone, its form is utterly changed, and its existence as such and such a
mineral is destroyed; but if we withdraw one of its mental elements from the
Gothic style, it is only a little less Gothic than it was before, and the union of two
or three of its elements is enough already to bestow a certain Gothicness of
character, which gains in intensity as we add the others, and loses as we again
withdraw them.

§ VI. I believe, then, that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the
following, placed in the order of their importance:

1. Savageness.
2. Changefulness.
3. Naturalism.
4. Grotesqueness.
5. Rigidity.
6. Redundance.

These characters are here expressed as belonging to the building; as belonging
to the builder, they would be expressed thus:—1. Savageness, or Rudeness. 2.
Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5, Obstinacy. 6.
Generosity. And I repeat, that the withdrawal of any one, or any two, will not at
once destroy the Gothic character of a building, but the removal of a majority of
them will. I shall proceed to examine them in their order.

§ VII. 1. Savageness. I am not sure when the word “Gothic” was first generically
applied to the architecture of the North; but I presume that, whatever the date of
its original usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric
character of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied that
they were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture had been
originally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that they and their
buildings together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness, which, in
contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, appeared like a
perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman in their first
encounter. And when that fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence of his luxury,
and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized Europe,
at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of
unmitigated contempt, not unmixed with aversion. From that contempt, by the
exertion of the antiquaries and architects of this century, Gothic architecture has
been sufficiently vindicated; and perhaps some among us, in our admiration of the
magnificent science of its structure, and sacredness of its expression, might desire
that the term of ancient reproach should be withdrawn, and some other, of more
apparent honorableness, adopted in its place. There is no chance, as there is no
need, of such a substitution. As far as the epithet was used scornfully, it was used
falsely; but there is no reproach in the word, rightly understood; on the contrary,
there is a profound truth, which the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously
recognizes. It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is
rude and wild; but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or
despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our
profoundest reverence.

§ VIII. The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science
have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge,
but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to
imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern
and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that
broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We
know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not

enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world’s surface which
a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and
of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the
sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of
their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake,
and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot
of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and
there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but
for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain,
laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer
to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with
terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of
laurel, and orange and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the
burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent
sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colors
change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of
Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and
Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen
through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the
brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see
the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering
with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering
into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm and
chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the
roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the
north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable
like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And,
having once traversed in thought its gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all
its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in
the belt of animal life: the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in
the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted
leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us
contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with the

frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern
tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the
wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey: and
then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it
bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice at the
expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands that gave him birth.
Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and
smoothes with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless
sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by
him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth
animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the
moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged
wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern
sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as
the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity and
honorableness; and we should err grievously in refusing either to recognise as an
essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as a
desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wildness of thought, and
roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and
the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more energetically
because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye
dimmed by the moor-mist, or blinded by the hail; this outspeaking of the strong
spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the earth, nor bask in
dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for bread, and cleave the
forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their delight, some of the hard
habits of the arm and heart that grew on them as they swung the axe or pressed the
plough.

§ IX. If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression
of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble
character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of
climate, but of religious principle.

In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXI. of the first volume of this
work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament, properly so called,
might be divided into three:—1. Servile ornament, in which the execution or
power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher:
—2. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain
point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its
inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;—and 3. Revolutionary
ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all. I must here explain
the nature of these divisions at somewhat greater length.

Of Servile ornament, the principal schools are the Greek, Ninevite, and
Egyptian; but their servility is of different kinds. The Greek master-workman was
far advanced in knowledge and power above the Assyrian or Egyptian. Neither he
nor those for whom he worked could endure the appearance of imperfection in
anything; and, therefore, what ornament he appointed to be done by those beneath
him was composed of mere geometrical forms,—balls, ridges, and perfectly
symmetrical foliage,—which could be executed with absolute precision by line
and rule, and were as perfect in their way when completed, as his own figure
sculpture. The Assyrian and Egyptian, on the contrary, less cognizant of accurate
form in anything, were content to allow their figure sculpture to be executed by
inferior workmen, but lowered the method of its treatment to a standard which
every workman could reach, and then trained him by discipline so rigid, that there
was no chance of his falling beneath the standard appointed. The Greek gave to
the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian
gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal
standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave.56

§ X. But in the mediæval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this
slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small
things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only
recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon
the acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission of lost power and fallen
nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as
might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contemplating

the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God’s greater glory. Therefore,
to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do
what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your
effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of
shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of
architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds; and
out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every
touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

§ XI. But the modern English mind has this much in common with that of the
Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection
compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes
ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to
prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not
considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be
preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are
always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more
perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to
more faults and shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show
through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall
be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one
year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its
nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see,
or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set
the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its
mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to
prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we
may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But, above all, in our
dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe
requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble
issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences,
because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every
man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labor, there are some

powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion,
tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all
our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless
we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honor
them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this
is what we have to do with all our laborers; to look for the thoughtful part of them,
and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are
obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in
company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a
straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy
and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect
precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think
about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head,
he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks
wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a
thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a
machine before, an animated tool.

§ XII. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either
made a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not
intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their
actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers
measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you
must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs
and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the
accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the
finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten
hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be
worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far
as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which
cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours
are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the
working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think,

to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once.
Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon
shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of
him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon
him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration
behind and within them.

§ XIII. And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you
have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the
ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and
perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered
steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England
was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly,
these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more
bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men
may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer
flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their
souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of
their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work
on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,—this it is to be
slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her
feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the
vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the
animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the
strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked
into the exactness of a line.

§ XIV. And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral
front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old
sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and
stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of
the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought,
and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure;

but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her
children.

§ XV. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this
degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of
the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent,
destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to
themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not
forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride.
These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society
were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that
they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore
look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the
scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the
kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes
them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the
lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so
much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor
was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of
standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity
and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come
when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that
to obey another man, to labor for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not
slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,—liberty from care. The man who says
to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in most
cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The
movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other, by
the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but
we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to
another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is
the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a
reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also
noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble

as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of
mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most
of the serf nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for
his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old
mountain servant, who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and
the lives of his seven sons for his chief?57—and as each fell, calling forth his
brother to the death, “Another for Hector!” And therefore, in all ages and all
countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not
only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all
evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings;
for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men
who received them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to
feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk
into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism,
numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes;—this nature
bade not,—this God blesses not,—this humanity for no long time is able to
endure.

§ XVI. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized
invention of the division of labor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly
speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of
men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of
intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but
exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good
and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see
with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to
be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think there
might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our
manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—
that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and
strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen,
to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of
advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met

only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show
them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to
mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes,
of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by
a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got
only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for
the products and results of healthy and ennobling labor.

§ XVII. And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this
demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple
rules:

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in
the production of which Invention has no share.

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or
noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of
preserving record of great works.

The second of these principles is the only one which directly rises out of the
consideration of our immediate subject; but I shall briefly explain the meaning
and extent of the first also, reserving the enforcement of the third for another
place.

1. Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the
production of which invention has no share.

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or
thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the
glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by
the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who
chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual
and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like
hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods, or fuse the fragments, have

the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young
lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much
more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.

But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite invention; and
if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say for the beautiful form, or
color, or engraving, and not for mere finish of execution, we are doing good to
humanity.

§ XVIII. So, again, the cutting of precious stones, in all ordinary cases, requires
little exertion of any mental faculty; some tact and judgment in avoiding flaws,
and so on, but nothing to bring out the whole mind. Every person who wears cut
jewels merely for the sake of their value is, therefore, a slave-driver.

But the working of the goldsmith, and the various designing of grouped
jewellery and enamel-work, may become the subject of the most noble human
intelligence. Therefore, money spent in the purchase of well-designed plate, of
precious engraved vases, cameos, or enamels, does good to humanity; and, in
work of this kind, jewels may be employed to heighten its splendor; and their
cutting is then a price paid for the attainment of a noble end, and thus perfectly
allowable.

§ XIX. I shall perhaps press this law farther elsewhere, but our immediate
concern is chiefly with the second, namely, never to demand an exact finish, when
it does not lead to a noble end. For observe, I have only dwelt upon the rudeness
of Gothic, or any other kind of imperfectness, as admirable, where it was
impossible to get design or thought without it. If you are to have the thought of a
rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and untaught way; but from
an educated man, who can without effort express his thoughts in an educated way,
take the graceful expression, and be thankful. Only get the thought, and do not
silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have
taught him his grammar. Grammar and refinement are good things, both, only be
sure of the better thing first. And thus in art, delicate finish is desirable from the
greatest masters, and is always given by them. In some places Michael Angelo,
Leonardo, Phidias, Perugino, Turner, all finished with the most exquisite care; and

the finish they give always leads to the fuller accomplishment of their noble
purposes. But lower men than these cannot finish, for it requires consummate
knowledge to finish consummately, and then we must take their thoughts as they
are able to give them. So the rule is simple: Always look for invention first, and
after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is
capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement
of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed.
Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only that the practical purpose be
answered, and never imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be
accomplished by patience and sandpaper.

§ XX. I shall only give one example, which however will show the reader what I
mean, from the manufacture already alluded to, that of glass. Our modern glass is
exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are
proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy,
inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was
justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian
workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and
getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a
mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges, while the old Venetian
cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new
design for every glass that he made, and never moulded a handle or a lip without a
new fancy in it. And therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy
enough, when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is
so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same
form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the
workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his
design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely
form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make
the worker a man or a grindstone.

§ XXI. Nay, but the reader interrupts me,—“If the workman can design
beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken away and
made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass there, and I will have it

blown and cut for him by common workmen, and so I will have my design and
my finish too.”

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first,
that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands;
the second, that manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect.

On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is indeed both
possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should be carried out by the
labor of others; in this sense I have already defined the best architecture to be the
expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood. But on a smaller
scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s
thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit
of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is
often all the difference between a great and a common work of art. How wide the
separation is between original and second-hand execution, I shall endeavor to
show elsewhere; it is not so much to our purpose here as to mark the other and
more fatal error of despising manual labor when governed by intellect; for it is no
less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect, than to value it for
its own sake. We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we
want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we
call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought
often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be
gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the
other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid
thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made
healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be
separated with impunity. It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in
some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether; so that
though there should still be a trenchant distinction of race between nobles and
commoners, there should not, among the latter, be a trenchant distinction of
employment, as between idle and working men, or between men of liberal and
illiberal professions. All professions should be liberal, and there should be less
pride felt in peculiarity of employment, and more in excellence of achievement.

And yet more, in each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its
hardest work. The painter should grind his own colors; the architect work in the
mason’s yard with his men; the master-manufacturer be himself a more skilful
operative than any man in his mills; and the distinction between one man and
another be only in experience and skill, and the authority and wealth which these
must naturally and justly obtain.

§ XXII. I should be led far from the matter in hand, if I were to pursue this
interesting subject. Enough, I trust, has been said to show the reader that the
rudeness or imperfection which at first rendered the term “Gothic” one of
reproach is indeed, when rightly understood, one of the most noble characters of
Christian architecture, and not only a noble but an essential one. It seems a
fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture
can be truly noble which is not imperfect. And this is easily demonstrable. For
since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing all in perfection,
cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his
workmen in the old Greek, and present English fashion, and level his work to a
slave’s capacities, which is to degrade it; or else he must take his workmen as he
finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength,
which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as
the intellect of the age can make it.

§ XXIII. But the principle may be stated more broadly still. I have confined the
illustration of it to architecture, but I must not leave it as if true of architecture
only. Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish
between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and
science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be
admitted, so only that the laborer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately
speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is
always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

§ XXIV. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no
great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say,
his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will

now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he will always give to
the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they require; and
according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of
dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude or anger with
himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also. I believe there
has only been one man who would not acknowledge this necessity, and strove
always to reach perfection, Leonardo; the end of his vain effort being merely that
he would take ten years to a picture, and leave it unfinished. And therefore, if we
are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be
imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect,
in its own bad way.58

§ XXV. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all
that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state
of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is
decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past,
a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that
live there are certain, irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of
life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each
side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity
as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to
check exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and
more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the
law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other
noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for
the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the
period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was
a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by
veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Thus far then of the Rudeness or Savageness, which is the first mental element
of Gothic architecture. It is an element in many other healthy architectures also, as

in Byzantine and Romanesque; but true Gothic cannot exist without it.

§ XXVI. The second mental element above named was Changefulness, or
Variety.

I have already enforced the allowing independent operation to the inferior
workman, simply as a duty to him, and as ennobling the architecture by rendering
it more Christian. We have now to consider what reward we obtain for the
performance of this duty, namely, the perpetual variety of every feature of the
building.

Wherever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the building must of
course be absolutely like each other; for the perfection of his execution can only
be reached by exercising him in doing one thing, and giving him nothing else to
do. The degree in which the workman is degraded may be thus known at a glance,
by observing whether the several parts of the building are similar or not; and if, as
in Greek work, all the capitals are alike, and all the mouldings unvaried, then the
degradation is complete; if, as in Egyptian or Ninevite work, though the manner of
executing certain figures is always the same, the order of design is perpetually
varied, the degradation is less total; if, as in Gothic work, there is perpetual
change both in design and execution, the workman must have been altogether set
free.

§ XXVII. How much the beholder gains from the liberty of the laborer may
perhaps be questioned in England, where one of the strongest instincts in nearly
every mind is that Love of Order which makes us desire that our house windows
should pair like our carriage horses, and allows us to yield our faith unhesitatingly
to architectural theories which fix a form for everything and forbid variation from
it. I would not impeach love of order: it is one of the most useful elements of the
English mind; it helps us in our commerce and in all purely practical matters; and
it is in many cases one of the foundation stones of morality. Only do not let us
suppose that love of order is love of art. It is true that order, in its highest sense, is
one of the necessities of art, just as time is a necessity of music; but love of order
has no more to do with our right enjoyment of architecture or painting, than love
of punctuality with the appreciation of an opera. Experience, I fear, teaches us that

accurate and methodical habits in daily life are seldom characteristic of those who
either quickly perceive, or richly possess, the creative powers of art; there is,
however, nothing inconsistent between the two instincts, and nothing to hinder us
from retaining our business habits, and yet fully allowing and enjoying the noblest
gifts of Invention. We already do so, in every other branch of art except
architecture, and we only do not so there because we have been taught that it
would be wrong. Our architects gravely inform us that, as there are four rules of
arithmetic, there are five orders of architecture; we, in our simplicity, think that
this sounds consistent, and believe them. They inform us also that there is one
proper form for Corinthian capitals, another for Doric, and another for Ionic. We,
considering that there is also a proper form for the letters A, B, and C, think that
this also sounds consistent, and accept the proposition. Understanding, therefore,
that one form of the said capitals is proper, and no other, and having a
conscientious horror of all impropriety, we allow the architect to provide us with
the said capitals, of the proper form, in such and such a quantity, and in all other
points to take care that the legal forms are observed; which having done, we rest
in forced confidence that we are well housed.

§ XXVIII. But our higher instincts are not deceived. We take no pleasure in the
building provided for us, resembling that which we take in a new book or a new
picture. We may be proud of its size, complacent in its correctness, and happy in
its convenience. We may take the same pleasure in its symmetry and
workmanship as in a well-ordered room, or a skilful piece of manufacture. And
this we suppose to be all the pleasure that architecture was ever intended to give
us. The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting
the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our
minds for a moment. And for good reason:—There is indeed rhythm in the verses,
quite as strict as the symmetries or rhythm of the architecture, and a thousand
times more beautiful, but there is something else than rhythm. The verses were
neither made to order, nor to match, as the capitals were; and we have therefore a
kind of pleasure in them other than a sense of propriety. But it requires a strong
effort of common sense to shake ourselves quit of all that we have been taught for
the last two centuries, and wake to the perception of a truth just as simple and

certain as it is new: that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colors, or
stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of
architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things;
that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of
genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require
of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but
entertaining.

Yet all this is true, and self-evident; only hidden from us, as many other self-
evident things are, by false teaching. Nothing is a great work of art, for the
production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as
architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a
manufacture; and it is, of the two procedures, rather less rational (because more
easy) to copy capitals or mouldings from Phidias, and call ourselves architects,
than to copy heads and hands from Titian, and call ourselves painters.

§ XXIX. Let us then understand at once, that change or variety is as much a
necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no
merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no
more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose
ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we
should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees
all of one size.

§ XXX. And this we confess in deeds, though not in words. All the pleasure
which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in pictures, sculpture,
minor objects of virtù, or mediæval architecture, which we enjoy under the term
picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings, and we find all
men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery:
hence, as I shall hereafter show, that peculiar love of landscape which is
characteristic of the age. It would be well, if, in all other matters, we were as
ready to put up with what we dislike, for the sake of compliance with established
law, as we are in architecture.

§ XXXI. How so debased a law ever came to be established, we shall see when
we come to describe the Renaissance schools: here we have only to note, as the
second most essential element of the Gothic spirit, that it broke through that law
wherever it found it in existence; it not only dared, but delighted in, the
infringement of every servile principle; and invented a series of forms of which
the merit was, not merely that they were new, but that they were capable of
perpetual novelty. The pointed arch was not merely a bold variation from the
round, but it admitted of millions of variations in itself; for the proportions of a
pointed arch are changeable to infinity, while a circular arch is always the same.
The grouped shaft was not merely a bold variation from the single one, but it
admitted of millions of variations in its grouping, and in the proportions resultant
from its grouping. The introduction of tracery was not only a startling change in
the treatment of window lights, but admitted endless changes in the interlacement
of the tracery bars themselves. So that, while in all living Christian architecture
the love of variety exists, the Gothic schools exhibited that love in culminating
energy; and their influence, wherever it extended itself, may be sooner and farther
traced by this character than by any other; the tendency to the adoption of Gothic
types being always first shown by greater irregularity and richer variation in the
forms of the architecture it is about to supersede, long before the appearance of
the pointed arch or of any other recognizable outward sign of the Gothic mind.

§ XXXII. We must, however, herein note carefully what distinction there is
between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of
change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased
love of change that it was destroyed. In order to understand this clearly, it will be
necessary to consider the different ways in which change and monotony are
presented to us in nature; both having their use, like darkness and light, and the
one incapable of being enjoyed without the other: change being most delightful
after some prolongation of monotony, as light appears most brilliant after the eyes
have been for some time closed.

§ XXXIII. I believe that the true relations of monotony and change may be most
simply understood by observing them in music. We may therein notice, first, that
there is a sublimity and majesty in monotony which there is not in rapid or

frequent variation. This is true throughout all nature. The greater part of the
sublimity of the sea depends on its monotony; so also that of desolate moor and
mountain scenery; and especially the sublimity of motion, as in the quiet,
unchanged fall and rise of an engine beam. So also there is sublimity in darkness
which there is not in light.

§ XXXIV. Again, monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree,
becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it
in one or two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its
notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of
repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less
delightful according to the length of the previous monotony. Nature, of course,
uses both these kinds of variation perpetually. The sea-waves, resembling each
other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a
monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump
of trees, is a monotony of the second.

§ XXXV. Farther: in order to the enjoyment of the change in either case, a certain
degree of patience is required from the hearer or observer. In the first case, he
must be satisfied to endure with patience the recurrence of the great masses of
sound or form, and to seek for entertainment in a careful watchfulness of the
minor details. In the second case, he must bear patiently the infliction of the
monotony for some moments, in order to feel the full refreshment of the change.
This is true even of the shortest musical passage in which the element of
monotony is employed. In cases of more majestic monotony, the patience required
is so considerable that it becomes a kind of pain,—a price paid for the future
pleasure.

§ XXXVI. Again: the talent of the composer is not in the monotony, but in the
changes: he may show feeling and taste by his use of monotony in certain places
or degrees; that is to say, by his various employment of it; but it is always in the
new arrangement or invention that his intellect is shown, and not in the monotony
which relieves it.

Lastly: if the pleasure of change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful,
for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in
extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which
we have above spoken.

§ XXXVII. From these facts we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought
to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is
altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and, of those who love it, it
may be truly said, “they love darkness rather than light.” But monotony in certain
measure, used in order to give value to change, and, above all, that transparent
monotony which, like the shadows of a great painter, suffers all manner of dimly
suggested form to be seen through the body of it, is an essential in architectural as
in all other composition; and the endurance of monotony has about the same place
in a healthy mind that the endurance of darkness has: that is to say, as a strong
intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the
broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere
brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and the storm;
and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of fortune in order to
reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while an inferior man will not pay the
price; exactly in like manner a great mind will accept, or even delight in,
monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more
patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great
future pleasure of change. But in all cases it is not that the noble nature loves
monotony, any more than it loves darkness or pain. But it can bear with it, and
receives a high pleasure in the endurance or patience, a pleasure necessary to the
well-being of this world; while those who will not submit to the temporary
sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change
itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is
no more escape.

§ XXXVIII. From these general uses of variety in the economy of the world, we
may at once understand its use and abuse in architecture. The variety of the Gothic
schools is the more healthy and beautiful, because in many cases it is entirely
unstudied, and results, not from the mere love of change, but from practical

necessities. For in one point of view Gothic is not only the best, but the only
rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services,
vulgar or noble. Undefined in its slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch, or
disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a
staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace and unexhausted energy;
and whenever it finds occasion for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it
without the slightest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty,—subtle and
flexible like a fiery serpent, but ever attentive to the voice of the charmer. And it is
one of the chief virtues of the Gothic builders, that they never suffered ideas of
outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of
what they did. If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one;
a buttress, they built one; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of
external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring
interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to its
symmetry than injure it. So that, in the best times of Gothic, a useless window
would rather have been opened in an unexpected place for the sake of the surprise,
than a useful one forbidden for the sake of symmetry. Every successive architect,
employed upon a great work, built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly
regardless of the style adopted by his predecessors; and if two towers were raised
in nominal correspondence at the sides of a cathedral front, one was nearly sure to
be different from the other, and in each the style at the top to be different from the
style at the bottom.59

§ XXXIX. These marked variations were, however, only permitted as part of the
great system of perpetual change which ran through every member of Gothic
design, and rendered it as endless a field for the beholder’s inquiry, as for the
builder’s imagination: change, which in the best schools is subtle and delicate, and
rendered more delightful by intermingling of a noble monotony; in the more
barbaric schools is somewhat fantastic and redundant; but, in all, a necessary and
constant condition of the life of the school. Sometimes the variety is in one
feature, sometimes in another; it may be in the capitals or crockets, in the niches
or the traceries, or in all together, but in some one or other of the features it will be
found always. If the mouldings are constant, the surface sculpture will change; if

the capitals are of a fixed design, the traceries will change; if the traceries are
monotonous, the capitals will change; and if even, as in some fine schools, the
early English for example, there is the slightest approximation to an unvarying
type of mouldings, capitals, and floral decoration, the variety is found in the
disposition of the masses, and in the figure sculpture.

§ XL. I must now refer for a moment, before we quit the consideration of this,
the second mental element of Gothic, to the opening of the third chapter of the
“Seven Lamps of Architecture,” in which the distinction was drawn (§ 2) between
man gathering and man governing; between his acceptance of the sources of
delight from nature, and his developement of authoritative or imaginative power
in their arrangement: for the two mental elements, not only of Gothic, but of all
good architecture, which we have just been examining, belong to it, and are
admirable in it, chiefly as it is, more than any other subject of art, the work of
man, and the expression of the average power of man. A picture or poem is often
little more than a feeble utterance of man’s admiration of something out of
himself; but architecture approaches more to a creation of his own, born of his
necessities, and expressive of his nature. It is also, in some sort, the work of the
whole race, while the picture or statue are the work of one only, in most cases
more highly gifted than his fellows. And therefore we may expect that the first
two elements of good architecture should be expressive of some great truths
commonly belonging to the whole race, and necessary to be understood or felt by
them in all their work that they do under the sun. And observe what they are: the
confession of Imperfection and the confession of Desire of Change. The building
of the bird and the bee needs not express anything like this. It is perfect and
unchanging. But just because we are something better than birds or bees, our
building must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine,
and cannot rest in the condition we have attained. If we pretend to have reached
either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s
work only may express that; but ours may never have that sentence written upon
it,—“And behold, it was very good.” And, observe again, it is not merely as it
renders the edifice a book of various knowledge, or a mine of precious thought,
that variety is essential to its nobleness. The vital principle is not the love of

Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic
spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders
hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles,
and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet
is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. The Greek could stay in his triglyph furrow,
and be at peace; but the work of the Gothic heart is fretwork still, and it can
neither rest in, nor from, its labor, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of
change shall be pacified for ever in the change that must come alike on them that
wake and them that sleep.

§ XLI. The third constituent element of the Gothic mind was stated to be
Naturalism; that is to say, the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the
effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws.

This characteristic of the style partly follows in necessary connexion with those
named above. For, so soon as the workman is left free to represent what subjects
he chooses, he must look to the nature that is round him for material, and will
endeavor to represent it as he sees it, with more or less accuracy according to the
skill he possesses, and with much play of fancy, but with small respect for law.
There is, however, a marked distinction between the imaginations of the Western
and Eastern races, even when both are left free; the Western, or Gothic, delighting
most in the representation of facts, and the Eastern (Arabian, Persian, and
Chinese) in the harmony of colors and forms. Each of these intellectual
dispositions has its particular forms of error and abuse, which, though I have often
before stated, I must here again briefly explain; and this the rather, because the
word Naturalism is, in one of its senses, justly used as a term of reproach, and the
questions respecting the real relations of art and nature are so many and so
confused throughout all the schools of Europe at this day, that I cannot clearly
enunciate any single truth without appearing to admit, in fellowship with it, some
kind of error, unless the reader will bear with me in entering into such an analysis
of the subject as will serve us for general guidance.

§ XLII. We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colors and
lines is an art analogous to the composition60 of music, and entirely independent

of the representation of facts. Good coloring does not necessarily convey the
image of anything but itself. It consists in certain proportions and arrangements of
rays of light, but not in likenesses to anything. A few touches of certain greys and
purples laid by a master’s hand on white paper, will be good coloring; as more
touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to
represent a dove’s neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect
imitation of the dove’s neck. But the good coloring does not consist in that
imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple.

In like manner, as soon as a great sculptor begins to shape his work out of the
block, we shall see that its lines are nobly arranged, and of noble character. We
may not have the slightest idea for what the forms are intended, whether they are
of man or beast, of vegetation or drapery. Their likeness to anything does not
affect their nobleness. They are magnificent forms, and that is all we need care to
know of them, in order to say whether the workman is a good or bad sculptor.

§ XLIII. Now the noblest art is an exact unison of the abstract value, with the
imitative power, of forms and colors. It is the noblest composition, used to express
the noblest facts. But the human mind cannot in general unite the two perfections:
it either pursues the fact to the neglect of the composition, or pursues the
composition to the neglect of the fact.

§ XLIV. And it is intended by the Deity that it should do this; the best art is not
always wanted. Facts are often wanted without art, as in a geological diagram; and
art often without facts, as in a Turkey carpet. And most men have been made
capable of giving either one or the other, but not both; only one or two, the very
highest, can give both.

Observe then. Men are universally divided, as respects their artistical
qualifications, into three great classes; a right, a left, and a centre. On the right
side are the men of facts, on the left the men of design,61 in the centre the men of
both.

The three classes of course pass into each other by imperceptible gradations.
The men of facts are hardly ever altogether without powers of design; the men of

design are always in some measure cognizant of facts; and as each class possesses
more or less of the powers of the opposite one, it approaches to the character of
the central class. Few men, even in that central rank, are so exactly throned on the
summit of the crest that they cannot be perceived to incline in the least one way or
the other, embracing both horizons with their glance. Now each of these classes
has, as I above said, a healthy function in the world, and correlative diseases or
unhealthy functions; and, when the work of either of them is seen in its morbid
condition, we are apt to find fault with the class of workmen, instead of finding
fault only with the particular abuse which has perverted their action.

§ XLV. Let us first take an instance of the healthy action of the three classes on a
simple subject, so as fully to understand the distinction between them, and then
we shall more easily examine the corruptions to which they are liable. Fig. 1 in
Plate VI. is a spray of vine with a bough of cherry-tree, which I have outlined
from nature as accurately as I could, without in the least endeavoring to compose
or arrange the form. It is a simple piece of fact-work, healthy and good as such,
and useful to any one who wanted to know plain truths about tendrils of vines, but
there is no attempt at design in it. Plate XIX., below, represents a branch of vine
used to decorate the angle of the Ducal Palace. It is faithful as a representation of
vine, and yet so designed that every leaf serves an architectural purpose, and could
not be spared from its place without harm. This is central work; fact and design
together. Fig. 2 in Plate VI. is a spandril from St. Mark’s, in which the forms of
the vine are dimly suggested, the object of the design being merely to obtain
graceful lines and well proportioned masses upon the gold ground. There is not
the least attempt to inform the spectator of any facts about the growth of the vine;
there are no stalks or tendrils,—merely running bands with leaves emergent from
them, of which nothing but the outline is taken from the vine, and even that
imperfectly. This is design, unregardful of facts.

Now the work is, in all these three cases, perfectly healthy. Fig. 1 is not bad
work because it has not design, nor Fig. 2 bad work because it has not facts. The
object of the one is to give pleasure through truth, and of the other to give pleasure
through composition. And both are right.

What, then, are the diseased operations to which the three classes of workmen
are liable?

§ XLVI. Primarily, two; affecting the two inferior classes:

1st, When either of those two classes Despises the other:

2nd, When either of the two classes Envies the other; producing, therefore, four
forms of dangerous error.

First, when the men of facts despise design. This is the error of the common
Dutch painters, of merely imitative painters of still life, flowers, &c., and other
men who, having either the gift of accurate imitation or strong sympathies with
nature, suppose that all is done when the imitation is perfected or sympathy
expressed. A large body of English landscapists come into this class, including
most clever sketchers from nature, who fancy that to get a sky of true tone, and a
gleam of sunshine or sweep of shower faithfully expressed, is all that can be
required of art. These men are generally themselves answerable for much of their
deadness of feeling to the higher qualities of composition. They probably have not
originally the high gifts of design, but they lose such powers as they originally
possessed by despising, and refusing to study, the results of great power of design
in others. Their knowledge, as far as it goes, being accurate, they are usually
presumptuous and self-conceited, and gradually become incapable of admiring
anything but what is like their own works. They see nothing in the works of great
designers but the faults, and do harm almost incalculable in the European society
of the present day by sneering at the compositions of the greatest men of the
earlier ages,62 because they do not absolutely tally with their own ideas of
“Nature.”

§ XLVII. The second form of error is when the men of design despise facts. All
noble design must deal with facts to a certain extent, for there is no food for it but
in nature. The best colorist invents best by taking hints from natural colors; from
birds, skies, or groups of figures. And if, in the delight of inventing fantastic color
and form the truths of nature are wilfully neglected, the intellect becomes
comparatively decrepit, and that state of art results which we find among the

Chinese. The Greek designers delighted in the facts of the human form, and
became great in consequence; but the facts of lower nature were disregarded by
them, and their inferior ornament became, therefore, dead and valueless.

§ XLVIII. The third form of error is when the men of facts envy design: that is to
say, when, having only imitative powers, they refuse to employ those powers upon
the visible world around them; but, having been taught that composition is the end
of art, strive to obtain the inventive powers which nature has denied them, study
nothing but the works of reputed designers, and perish in a fungous growth of
plagiarism and laws of art.

Here was the great error of the beginning of this century; it is the error of the
meanest kind of men that employ themselves in painting, and it is the most fatal of
all, rendering those who fall into it utterly useless, incapable of helping the world
with either truth or fancy, while, in all probability, they deceive it by base
resemblances of both, until it hardly recognizes truth or fancy when they really
exist.

§ XLIX. The fourth form of error is when the men of design envy facts; that is to
say, when the temptation of closely imitating nature leads them to forget their own
proper ornamental function, and when they lose the power of the composition for
the sake of graphic truth; as, for instance, in the hawthorn moulding so often
spoken of round the porch of Bourges Cathedral, which, though very lovely, might
perhaps, as we saw above, have been better, if the old builder, in his excessive
desire to make it look like hawthorn, had not painted it green.

§ L. It is, however, carefully to be noted, that the two morbid conditions to
which the men of facts are liable are much more dangerous and harmful than
those to which the men of design are liable. The morbid state of men of design
injures themselves only; that of the men of facts injures the whole world. The
Chinese porcelain-painter is, indeed, not so great a man as he might be, but he
does not want to break everything that is not porcelain; but the modern English
fact-hunter, despising design, wants to destroy everything that does not agree with
his own notions of truth, and becomes the most dangerous and despicable of
iconoclasts, excited by egotism instead of religion. Again: the Bourges sculptor,

painting his hawthorns green, did indeed somewhat hurt the effect of his own
beautiful design, but did not prevent any one from loving hawthorn: but Sir
George Beaumont, trying to make Constable paint grass brown instead of green,
was setting himself between Constable and nature, blinding the painter, and
blaspheming the work of God.

§ LI. So much, then, of the diseases of the inferior classes, caused by their
envying or despising each other. It is evident that the men of the central class
cannot be liable to any morbid operation of this kind, they possessing the powers
of both.

But there is another order of diseases which affect all the three classes,
considered with respect to their pursuit of facts. For observe, all the three classes
are in some degree pursuers of facts; even the men of design not being in any case
altogether independent of external truth. Now, considering them all as more or
less searchers after truth, there is another triple division to be made of them.
Everything presented to them in nature has good and evil mingled in it: and artists,
considered as searchers after truth, are again to be divided into three great classes,
a right, a left, and a centre. Those on the right perceive, and pursue, the good, and
leave the evil: those in the centre, the greatest, perceive and pursue the good and
evil together, the whole thing as it verily is: those on the left perceive and pursue
the evil, and leave the good.

§ LII. The first class, I say, take the good and leave the evil. Out of whatever is
presented to them, they gather what it has of grace, and life, and light, and
holiness, and leave all, or at least as much as possible, of the rest undrawn. The
faces of their figures express no evil passions; the skies of their landscapes are
without storm; the prevalent character of their color is brightness, and of their
chiaroscuro fulness of light. The early Italian and Flemish painters, Angelico and
Hemling, Perugino, Francia, Raffaelle in his best time, John Bellini, and our own
Stothard, belong eminently to this class.

§ LIII. The second, or greatest class, render all that they see in nature
unhesitatingly, with a kind of divine grasp and government of the whole,
sympathizing with all the good, and yet confessing, permitting, and bringing good

out of the evil also. Their subject is infinite as nature, their color equally balanced
between splendor and sadness, reaching occasionally the highest degrees of both,
and their chiaroscuro equally balanced between light and shade.

The principal men of this class are Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Giotto, Tintoret,
and Turner. Raffaelle in his second time, Titian, and Rubens are transitional; the
first inclining to the eclectic, and the last two to the impure class, Raffaelle rarely
giving all the evil, Titian and Rubens rarely all the good.

§ LIV. The last class perceive and imitate evil only. They cannot draw the trunk
of a tree without blasting and shattering it, nor a sky except covered with stormy
clouds: they delight in the beggary and brutality of the human race; their color is
for the most part subdued or lurid, and the greatest spaces of their pictures are
occupied by darkness.

Happily the examples of this class are seldom seen in perfection. Salvator Rosa
and Caravaggio are the most characteristic: the other men belonging to it approach
towards the central rank by imperceptible gradations, as they perceive and
represent more and more of good. But Murillo, Zurbaran, Camillo Procaccini,
Rembrandt, and Teniers, all belong naturally to this lower class.

§ LV. Now, observe: the three classes into which artists were previously divided,
of men of fact, men of design, and men of both, are all of Divine institution; but of
these latter three, the last is in no wise of Divine institution. It is entirely human,
and the men who belong to it have sunk into it by their own faults. They are, so
far forth, either useless or harmful men. It is indeed good that evil should be
occasionally represented, even in its worst forms, but never that it should be taken
delight in: and the mighty men of the central class will always give us all that is
needful of it; sometimes, as Hogarth did, dwelling upon it bitterly as satirists,—
but this with the more effect, because they will neither exaggerate it, nor represent
it mercilessly, and without the atoning points that all evil shows to a Divinely
guided glance, even at its deepest. So then, though the third class will always, I
fear, in some measure exist, the two necessary classes are only the first two; and
this is so far acknowledged by the general sense of men, that the basest class has
been confounded with the second; and painters have been divided commonly only

into two ranks, now known, I believe, throughout Europe by the names which
they first received in Italy, “Puristi and Naturalisti.” Since, however, in the
existing state of things, the degraded or evil-loving class, though less defined than
that of the Puristi, is just as vast as it is indistinct, this division has done infinite
dishonor to the great faithful painters of nature: and it has long been one of the
objects I have had most at heart to show that, in reality, the Purists, in their
sanctity, are less separated from these natural painters than the Sensualists in their
foulness; and that the difference, though less discernible, is in reality greater,
between the man who pursues evil for its own sake, and him who bears with it for
the sake of truth, than between this latter and the man who will not endure it at all.

§ LVI. Let us, then, endeavor briefly to mark the real relations of these three vast
ranks of men, whom I shall call, for convenience in speaking of them, Purists,
Naturalists, and Sensualists; not that these terms express their real characters, but I
know no word, and cannot coin a convenient one, which would accurately express
the opposite of Purist; and I keep the terms Purist and Naturalist in order to
comply, as far as possible, with the established usage of language on the
Continent. Now, observe: in saying that nearly everything presented to us in
nature has mingling in it of good and evil, I do not mean that nature is conceivably
improvable, or that anything that God has made could be called evil, if we could
see far enough into its uses, but that, with respect to immediate effects or
appearances, it may be so, just as the hard rind or bitter kernel of a fruit may be an
evil to the eater, though in the one is the protection of the fruit, and in the other its
continuance. The Purist, therefore, does not mend nature, but receives from nature
and from God that which is good for him; while the Sensualist fills himself “with
the husks that the swine did eat.”

The three classes may, therefore, be likened to men reaping wheat, of which the
Purists take the fine flour, and the Sensualists the chaff and straw, but the
Naturalists take all home, and make their cake of the one, and their couch of the
other.

§ LVII. For instance. We know more certainly every day that whatever appears to
us harmful in the universe has some beneficent or necessary operation; that the

storm which destroys a harvest brightens the sunbeams for harvests yet unsown,
and that the volcano which buries a city preserves a thousand from destruction.
But the evil is not for the time less fearful, because we have learned it to be
necessary; and we easily understand the timidity or the tenderness of the spirit
which would withdraw itself from the presence of destruction, and create in its
imagination a world of which the peace should be unbroken, in which the sky
should not darken nor the sea rage, in which the leaf should not change nor the
blossom wither. That man is greater, however, who contemplates with an equal
mind the alternations of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less beneath the
sunny sky, can bear also to watch the bars of twilight narrowing on the horizon;
and, not less sensible to the blessing of the peace of nature, can rejoice in the
magnificence of the ordinances by which that peace is protected and secured. But
separated from both by an immeasurable distance would be the man who
delighted in convulsion and disease for their own sake; who found his daily food
in the disorder of nature mingled with the suffering of humanity; and watched
joyfully at the right hand of the Angel whose appointed work is to destroy as well
as to accuse, while the corners of the House of feasting were struck by the wind
from the wilderness.

§ LVIII. And far more is this true, when the subject of contemplation is humanity
itself. The passions of mankind are partly protective, partly beneficent, like the
chaff and grain of the corn; but none without their use, none without nobleness
when seen in balanced unity with the rest of the spirit which they are charged to
defend. The passions of which the end is the continuance of the race; the
indignation which is to arm it against injustice, or strengthen it to resist wanton
injury; and the fear63 which lies at the root of prudence, reverence, and awe, are
all honorable and beautiful, so long as man is regarded in his relations to the
existing world. The religious Purist, striving to conceive him withdrawn from
those relations, effaces from the countenance the traces of all transitory passion,
illumines it with holy hope and love, and seals it with the serenity of heavenly
peace; he conceals the forms of the body by the deep-folded garment, or else
represents them under severely chastened types, and would rather paint them
emaciated by the fast, or pale from the torture, than strengthened by exertion, or

flushed by emotion. But the great Naturalist takes the human being in its
wholeness, in its mortal as well as its spiritual strength. Capable of sounding and
sympathizing with the whole range of its passions, he brings one majestic
harmony out of them all; he represents it fearlessly in all its acts and thoughts, in
its haste, its anger, its sensuality, and its pride, as well as in its fortitude or faith,
but makes it noble in them all; he casts aside the veil from the body, and beholds
the mysteries of its form like an angel looking down on an inferior creature: there
is nothing which he is reluctant to behold, nothing that he is ashamed to confess;
with all that lives, triumphing, falling, or suffering, he claims kindred, either in
majesty or in mercy, yet standing, in a sort, afar off, unmoved even in the
deepness of his sympathy; for the spirit within him is too thoughtful to be grieved,
too brave to be appalled, and too pure to be polluted.

§ LIX. How far beneath these two ranks of men shall we place, in the scale of
being, those whose pleasure is only in sin or in suffering; who habitually
contemplate humanity in poverty or decrepitude, fury or sensuality; whose works
are either temptations to its weakness, or triumphs over its ruin, and recognize no
other subjects for thought or admiration than the subtlety of the robber, the rage of
the soldier, or the joy of the Sybarite. It seems strange, when thus definitely stated,
that such a school should exist. Yet consider a little what gaps and blanks would
disfigure our gallery and chamber walls, in places that we have long approached
with reverence, if every picture, every statue, were removed from them, of which
the subject was either the vice or the misery of mankind, portrayed without any
moral purpose: consider the innumerable groups having reference merely to
various forms of passion, low or high; drunken revels and brawls among peasants,
gambling or fighting scenes among soldiers, amours and intrigues among every
class, brutal battle pieces, banditti subjects, gluts of torture and death in famine,
wreck, or slaughter, for the sake merely of the excitement,—that quickening and
suppling of the dull spirit that cannot be gained for it but by bathing it in blood,
afterward to wither back into stained and stiffened apathy; and then that whole
vast false heaven of sensual passion, full of nymphs, satyrs, graces, goddesses,
and I know not what, from its high seventh circle in Correggio’s Antiope, down to

the Grecized ballet-dancers and smirking Cupids of the Parisian upholsterer.
Sweep away all this, remorselessly, and see how much art we should have left.

§ LX. And yet these are only the grossest manifestations of the tendency of the
school. There are subtler, yet not less certain, signs of it in the works of men who
stand high in the world’s list of sacred painters. I doubt not that the reader was
surprised when I named Murillo among the men of this third rank. Yet, go into the
Dulwich Gallery, and meditate for a little over that much celebrated picture of the
two beggar boys, one eating lying on the ground, the other standing beside him.
We have among our own painters one who cannot indeed be set beside Murillo as
a painter of Madonnas, for he is a pure Naturalist, and, never having seen a
Madonna, does not paint any; but who, as a painter of beggar or peasant boys,
may be set beside Murillo, or any one else,—W. Hunt. He loves peasant boys,
because he finds them more roughly and picturesquely dressed, and more
healthily colored, than others. And he paints all that he sees in them fearlessly; all
the health and humor, and freshness, and vitality, together with such awkwardness
and stupidity, and what else of negative or positive harm there may be in the
creature; but yet so that on the whole we love it, and find it perhaps even
beautiful, or if not, at least we see that there is capability of good in it, rather than
of evil; and all is lighted up by a sunshine and sweet color that makes the smock-
frock as precious as cloth of gold. But look at those two ragged and vicious
vagrants that Murillo has gathered out of the street. You smile at first, because
they are eating so naturally, and their roguery is so complete. But is there anything
else than roguery there, or was it well for the painter to give his time to the
painting of those repulsive and wicked children? Do you feel moved with any
charity towards children as you look at them? Are we the least more likely to take
any interest in ragged schools, or to help the next pauper child that comes in our
way, because the painter has shown us a cunning beggar feeding greedily? Mark
the choice of the act. He might have shown hunger in other ways, and given
interest to even this act of eating, by making the face wasted, or the eye wistful.
But he did not care to do this. He delighted merely in the disgusting manner of
eating, the food filling the cheek; the boy is not hungry, else he would not turn
round to talk and grin as he eats.

§ LXI. But observe another point in the lower figure. It lies so that the sole of the
foot is turned towards the spectator; not because it would have lain less easily in
another attitude, but that the painter may draw, and exhibit, the grey dust
engrained in the foot. Do not call this the painting of nature: it is mere delight in
foulness. The lesson, if there be any, in the picture, is not one whit the stronger.
We all know that a beggar’s bare foot cannot be clean; there is no need to thrust its
degradation into the light, as if no human imagination were vigorous enough for
its conception.

§ LXII. The position of the Sensualists, in treatment of landscape, is less
distinctly marked than in that of the figure: because even the wildest passions of
nature are noble: but the inclination is manifested by carelessness in marking
generic form in trees and flowers: by their preferring confused and irregular
arrangements of foliage or foreground to symmetrical and simple grouping; by
their general choice of such picturesqueness as results from decay, disorder, and
disease, rather than of that which is consistent with the perfection of the things in
which it is found; and by their imperfect rendering of the elements of strength and
beauty in all things. I propose to work out this subject fully in the last volume of
“Modern Painters;” but I trust that enough has been here said to enable the reader
to understand the relations of the three great classes of artists, and therefore also
the kinds of morbid condition into which the two higher (for the last has no other
than a morbid condition) are liable to fall. For, since the function of the Naturalists
is to represent, as far as may be, the whole of nature, and the Purists to represent
what is absolutely good for some special purpose or time, it is evident that both
are liable to error from shortness of sight, and the last also from weakness of
judgment. I say, in the first place, both may err from shortness of sight, from not
seeing all that there is in nature; seeing only the outsides of things, or those points
of them which bear least on the matter in hand. For instance, a modern continental
Naturalist sees the anatomy of a limb thoroughly, but does not see its color against
the sky, which latter fact is to a painter far the more important of the two. And
because it is always easier to see the surface than the depth of things, the full sight
of them requiring the highest powers of penetration, sympathy, and imagination,
the world is full of vulgar Naturalists: not Sensualists, observe, not men who

delight in evil; but men who never see the deepest good, and who bring discredit
on all painting of Nature by the little that they discover in her. And the Purist,
besides being liable to this same shortsightedness, is liable also to fatal errors of
judgment; for he may think that good which is not so, and that the highest good
which is the least. And thus the world is full of vulgar Purists,64 who bring
discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because
the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of
weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of
things: the greatest men being, in all times of art, Naturalists, without any
exception; and the greatest Purists being those who approach nearest to the
Naturalists, as Benozzo Gozzoli and Perugino. Hence there is a tendency in the
Naturalists to despise the Purists, and in the Purists to be offended with the
Naturalists (not understanding them, and confounding them with the Sensualists);
and this is grievously harmful to both.

§ LXIII. Of the various forms of resultant mischief it is not here the place to
speak: the reader may already be somewhat wearied with a statement which has
led us apparently so far from our immediate subject. But the digression was
necessary, in order that I might clearly define the sense in which I use the word
Naturalism when I state it to be the third most essential characteristic of Gothic
architecture. I mean that the Gothic builders belong to the central or greatest rank
in both the classifications of artists which we have just made; that, considering all
artists as either men of design, men of facts, or men of both, the Gothic builders
were men of both; and that again, considering all artists as either Purists,
Naturalists, or Sensualists, the Gothic builders were Naturalists.

§ LXIV. I say first, that the Gothic builders were of that central class which
unites fact with design; but that the part of the work which was more especially
their own was the truthfulness. Their power of artistical invention or arrangement
was not greater than that of Romanesque and Byzantine workmen: by those
workmen they were taught the principles, and from them received their models, of
design; but to the ornamental feeling and rich fancy of the Byzantine the Gothic
builder added a love of fact which is never found in the South. Both Greek and
Roman used conventional foliage in their ornament, passing into something that

was not foliage at all, knotting itself into strange cup-like buds or clusters, and
growing out of lifeless rods instead of stems; the Gothic sculptor received these
types, at first, as things that ought to be, just as we have a second time received
them; but he could not rest in them. He saw there was no veracity in them, no
knowledge, no vitality. Do what he would, he could not help liking the true leaves
better; and cautiously, a little at a time, he put more of nature into his work, until
at last it was all true, retaining, nevertheless, every valuable character of the
original well-disciplined and designed arrangement.65

§ LXV. Nor is it only in external and visible subject that the Gothic workman
wrought for truth: he is as firm in his rendering of imaginative as of actual truth;
that is to say, when an idea would have been by a Roman, or Byzantine,
symbolically represented, the Gothic mind realizes it to the utmost. For instance,
the purgatorial fire is represented in the mosaic of Torcello (Romanesque) as a red
stream, longitudinally striped like a riband, descending out of the throne of Christ,
and gradually extending itself to envelope the wicked. When we are once
informed what this means, it is enough for its purpose; but the Gothic inventor
does not leave the sign in need of interpretation. He makes the fire as like real fire
as he can; and in the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen the sculptured flames burst out
of the Hades gate, and flicker up, in writhing tongues of stone, through the
interstices of the niches, as if the church itself were on fire. This is an extreme
instance, but it is all the more illustrative of the entire difference in temper and
thought between the two schools of art, and of the intense love of veracity which
influenced the Gothic design.

§ LXVI. I do not say that this love of veracity is always healthy in its operation. I
have above noticed the errors into which it falls from despising design; and there
is another kind of error noticeable in the instance just given, in which the love of
truth is too hasty, and seizes on a surface truth instead of an inner one. For in
representing the Hades fire, it is not the mere form of the flame which needs most
to be told, but its unquenchableness, its Divine ordainment and limitation, and its
inner fierceness, not physical and material, but in being the expression of the
wrath of God. And these things are not to be told by imitating the fire that flashes
out of a bundle of sticks. If we think over his symbol a little, we shall perhaps find

that the Romanesque builder told more truth in that likeness of a blood-red stream,
flowing between definite shores and out of God’s throne, and expanding, as if fed
by a perpetual current, into the lake wherein the wicked are cast, than the Gothic
builder in those torch-flickerings about his niches. But this is not to our immediate
purpose; I am not at present to insist upon the faults into which the love of truth
was led in the later Gothic times, but on the feeling itself, as a glorious and
peculiar characteristic of the Northern builders. For, observe, it is not, even in the
above instance, love of truth, but want of thought, which causes the fault. The
love of truth, as such, is good, but when it is misdirected by thoughtlessness or
over-excited by vanity, and either seizes on facts of small value, or gathers them
chiefly that it may boast of its grasp and apprehension, its work may well become
dull or offensive. Yet let us not, therefore, blame the inherent love of facts, but the
incautiousness of their selection, and impertinence of their statement.

§ LXVII. I said, in the second place, that Gothic work, when referred to the
arrangement of all art, as purist, naturalist, or sensualist, was naturalist. This
character follows necessarily on its extreme love of truth, prevailing over the
sense of beauty, and causing it to take delight in portraiture of every kind, and to
express the various characters of the human countenance and form, as it did the
varieties of leaves and the ruggedness of branches. And this tendency is both
increased and ennobled by the same Christian humility which we saw expressed
in the first character of Gothic work, its rudeness. For as that resulted from a
humility which confessed the imperfection of the workman, so this naturalist
portraiture is rendered more faithful by the humility which confesses the
imperfection of the subject. The Greek sculptor could neither bear to confess his
own feebleness, nor to tell the faults of the forms that he portrayed. But the
Christian workman, believing that all is finally to work together for good, freely
confesses both, and neither seeks to disguise his own roughness of work, nor his
subject’s roughness of make. Yet this frankness being joined, for the most part,
with depth of religious feeling in other directions, and especially with charity,
there is sometimes a tendency to Purism in the best Gothic sculpture; so that it
frequently reaches great dignity of form and tenderness of expression, yet never so
as to lose the veracity of portraiture, wherever portraiture is possible: not exalting

its kings into demi-gods, nor its saints into archangels, but giving what kingliness
and sanctity was in them, to the full, mixed with due record of their faults; and
this in the most part with a great indifference like that of Scripture history, which
sets down, with unmoved and unexcusing resoluteness, the virtues and errors of
all men of whom it speaks, often leaving the reader to form his own estimate of
them, without an indication of the judgment of the historian. And this veracity is
carried out by the Gothic sculptors in the minuteness and generality, as well as the
equity, of their delineation: for they do not limit their art to the portraiture of
saints and kings, but introduce the most familiar scenes and most simple subjects;
filling up the backgrounds of Scripture histories with vivid and curious
representations of the commonest incidents of daily life, and availing themselves
of every occasion in which, either as a symbol, or an explanation of a scene or
time, the things familiar to the eye of the workman could be introduced and made
of account. Hence Gothic sculpture and painting are not only full of valuable
portraiture of the greatest men, but copious records of all the domestic customs
and inferior arts of the ages in which it flourished.66

§ LXVIII. There is, however, one direction in which the Naturalism of the Gothic
workmen is peculiarly manifested; and this direction is even more characteristic of
the school than the Naturalism itself; I mean their peculiar fondness for the forms
of Vegetation. In rendering the various circumstances of daily life, Egyptian and
Ninevite sculpture is as frank and as diffuse as the Gothic. From the highest
pomps of state or triumphs of battle, to the most trivial domestic arts and
amusements, all is taken advantage of to fill the field of granite with the perpetual
interest of a crowded drama; and the early Lombardic and Romanesque sculpture
is equally copious in its description of the familiar circumstances of war and the
chase. But in all the scenes portrayed by the workmen of these nations, vegetation
occurs only as an explanatory accessory; the reed is introduced to mark the course
of the river, or the tree to mark the covert of the wild beast, or the ambush of the
enemy, but there is no especial interest in the forms of the vegetation strong
enough to induce them to make it a subject of separate and accurate study. Again,
among the nations who followed the arts of design exclusively, the forms of
foliage introduced were meagre and general, and their real intricacy and life were

neither admired nor expressed. But to the Gothic workman the living foliage
became a subject of intense affection, and he struggled to render all its characters
with as much accuracy as was compatible with the laws of his design and the
nature of his material, not unfrequently tempted in his enthusiasm to transgress the
one and disguise the other.

§ LXIX. There is a peculiar significancy in this, indicative both of higher
civilization and gentler temperament, than had before been manifested in
architecture. Rudeness, and the love of change, which we have insisted upon as
the first elements of Gothic, are also elements common to all healthy schools. But
here is a softer element mingled with them, peculiar to the Gothic itself. The
rudeness or ignorance which would have been painfully exposed in the treatment
of the human form, are still not so great as to prevent the successful rendering of
the wayside herbage; and the love of change, which becomes morbid and feverish
in following the haste of the hunter, and the rage of the combatant, is at once
soothed and satisfied as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the budding
of the flower. Nor is this all: the new direction of mental interest marks an infinite
change in the means and the habits of life. The nations whose chief support was in
the chase, whose chief interest was in the battle, whose chief pleasure was in the
banquet, would take small care respecting the shapes of leaves and flowers; and
notice little in the forms of the forest trees which sheltered them, except the signs
indicative of the wood which would make the toughest lance, the closest roof, or
the clearest fire. The affectionate observation of the grace and outward character
of vegetation is the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence, sustained by
the gifts, and gladdened by the splendor, of the earth. In that careful distinction of
species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed organization, which characterize
the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life, influenced by
habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry; and every discriminating and
delicate touch of the chisel, as it rounds the petal or guides the branch, is a
prophecy of the developement of the entire body of the natural sciences,
beginning with that of medicine, of the recovery of literature, and the
establishment of the most necessary principles of domestic wisdom and national
peace.

§ LXX. I have before alluded to the strange and vain supposition, that the
original conception of Gothic architecture had been derived from vegetation,—
from the symmetry of avenues, and the interlacing of branches. It is a supposition
which never could have existed for a moment in the mind of any person
acquainted with early Gothic; but, however idle as a theory, it is most valuable as
a testimony to the character of the perfected style. It is precisely because the
reverse of this theory is the fact, because the Gothic did not arise out of, but
develope itself into, a resemblance to vegetation, that this resemblance is so
instructive as an indication of the temper of the builders. It was no chance
suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but a gradual and
continual discovery of a beauty in natural forms which could be more and more
perfectly transferred into those of stone, that influenced at once the heart of the
people, and the form of the edifice. The Gothic architecture arose in massy and
mountainous strength, axe-hewn, and iron-bound, block heaved upon block by the
monk’s enthusiasm and the soldier’s force; and cramped and stanchioned into
such weight of grisly wall, as might bury the anchoret in darkness, and beat back
the utmost storm of battle, suffering but by the same narrow crosslet the passing
of the sunbeam, or of the arrow. Gradually, as that monkish enthusiasm became
more thoughtful, and as the sound of war became more and more intermittent
beyond the gates of the convent or the keep, the stony pillar grew slender and the
vaulted roof grew light, till they had wreathed themselves into the semblance of
the summer woods at their fairest, and of the dead field-flowers, long trodden
down in blood, sweet monumental statues were set to bloom for ever, beneath the
porch of the temple, or the canopy of the tomb.

§ LXXI. Nor is it only as a sign of greater gentleness or refinement of mind, but
as a proof of the best possible direction of this refinement, that the tendency of the
Gothic to the expression of vegetative life is to be admired. That sentence of
Genesis, “I have given thee every green herb for meat,” like all the rest of the
book, has a profound symbolical as well as a literal meaning. It is not merely the
nourishment of the body, but the food of the soul, that is intended. The green herb
is, of all nature, that which is most essential to the healthy spiritual life of man.
Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not

intended to be seen by all men,—perhaps their power is greatest over those who
are unaccustomed to them. But trees, and fields, and flowers were made for all,
and are necessary for all. God has connected the labor which is essential to the
bodily sustenance, with the pleasures which are healthiest for the heart; and while
He made the ground stubborn, He made its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair.
The proudest architecture that man can build has no higher honor than to bear the
image and recall the memory of that grass of the field which is, at once, the type
and the support of his existence; the goodly building is then most glorious when it
is sculptured into the likeness of the leaves of Paradise; and the great Gothic spirit,
as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it
is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the
waters,—but like her in this also, “Lo, in her mouth was an olive branch, plucked
off.”

§ LXXII. The fourth essential element of the Gothic mind was above stated to be
the sense of the Grotesque; but I shall defer the endeavor to define this most
curious and subtle character until we have occasion to examine one of the
divisions of the Renaissance schools, which was morbidly influenced by it (Vol.
III. Chap. III.). It is the less necessary to insist upon it here, because every reader
familiar with Gothic architecture must understand what I mean, and will, I
believe, have no hesitation in admitting that the tendency to delight in fantastic
and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images, is a universal instinct of the Gothic
imagination.

§ LXXIII. The fifth element above named was Rigidity; and this character I must
endeavor carefully to define, for neither the word I have used, nor any other that I
can think of, will express it accurately. For I mean, not merely stable, but active
rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to
resistance, which makes the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved, and the
stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending, and is as much seen in the
quivering of the lance as in the glittering of the icicle.

§ LXXIV. I have before had occasion (Vol. I. Chap. XIII. § VII.) to note some
manifestations of this energy or fixedness; but it must be still more attentively

considered here, as it shows itself throughout the whole structure and decoration
of Gothic work. Egyptian and Greek buildings stand, for the most part, by their
own weight and mass, one stone passively incumbent on another: but in the
Gothic vaults and traceries there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a
limb, or fibres of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of force from part
to part, and also a studious expression of this throughout every visible line of the
building. And, in like manner, the Greek and Egyptian ornament is either mere
surface engraving, as if the face of the wall had been stamped with a seal, or its
lines are flowing, lithe, and luxuriant; in either case, there is no expression of
energy in framework of the ornament itself. But the Gothic ornament stands out in
prickly independence, and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, and freezing into
pinnacles; here starting up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom; anon
knitting itself into a branch, alternately thorny, bossy, and bristly, or writhed into
every form of nervous entanglement; but, even when most graceful, never for an
instant languid, always quickset; erring, if at all, ever on the side of brusquerie.

§ LXXV. The feelings or habits in the workman which give rise to this character
in the work, are more complicated and various than those indicated by any other
sculptural expression hitherto named. There is, first, the habit of hard and rapid
working; the industry of the tribes of the North, quickened by the coldness of the
climate, and giving an expression of sharp energy to all they do (as above noted,
Vol. I. Chap. XIII. § VII.), as opposed to the languor of the Southern tribes,
however much of fire there may be in the heart of that languor, for lava itself may
flow languidly. There is also the habit of finding enjoyment in the signs of cold,
which is never found, I believe, in the inhabitants of countries south of the Alps.
Cold is to them an unredeemed evil, to be suffered, and forgotten as soon as may
be; but the long winter of the North forces the Goth (I mean the Englishman,
Frenchman, Dane, or German), if he would lead a happy life at all, to find sources
of happiness in foul weather as well as fair, and to rejoice in the leafless as well as
in the shady forest. And this we do with all our hearts; finding perhaps nearly as
much contentment by the Christmas fire as in the summer sunshine, and gaining
health and strength on the ice-fields of winter, as well as among the meadows of
spring. So that there is nothing adverse or painful to our feelings in the cramped

and stiffened structure of vegetation checked by cold; and instead of seeking, like
the Southern sculptor, to express only the softness of leafage nourished in all
tenderness, and tempted into all luxuriance by warm winds and glowing rays, we
find pleasure in dwelling upon the crabbed, perverse, and morose animation of
plants that have known little kindness from earth or heaven, but, season after
season, have had their best efforts palsied by frost, their brightest buds buried
under snow, and their goodliest limbs lopped by tempest.

§ LXXVI. There are many subtle sympathies and affections which join to confirm
the Gothic mind in this peculiar choice of subject; and when we add to the
influence of these, the necessities consequent upon the employment of a rougher
material, compelling the workman to seek for vigor of effect, rather than
refinement of texture or accuracy of form, we have direct and manifest causes for
much of the difference between the northern and southern cast of conception: but
there are indirect causes holding a far more important place in the Gothic heart,
though less immediate in their influence on design. Strength of will, independence
of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control, and that
general tendency to set the individual reason against authority, and the individual
deed against destiny, which, in the Northern tribes, has opposed itself throughout
all ages to the languid submission, in the Southern, of thought to tradition, and
purpose to fatality, are all more or less traceable in the rigid lines, vigorous and
various masses, and daringly projecting and independent structure of the Northern
Gothic ornament: while the opposite feelings are in like manner legible in the
graceful and softly guided waves and wreathed bands, in which Southern
decoration is constantly disposed; in its tendency to lose its independence, and
fuse itself into the surface of the masses upon which it is traced; and in the
expression seen so often, in the arrangement of those masses themselves, of an
abandonment of their strength to an inevitable necessity, or a listless repose.

§ LXXVII. There is virtue in the measure, and error in the excess, of both these
characters of mind, and in both of the styles which they have created; the best
architecture, and the best temper, are those which unite them both; and this fifth
impulse of the Gothic heart is therefore that which needs most caution in its
indulgence. It is more definitely Gothic than any other, but the best Gothic

building is not that which is most Gothic: it can hardly be too frank in its
confession of rudeness, hardly too rich in its changefulness, hardly too faithful in
its naturalism; but it may go too far in its rigidity, and, like the great Puritan spirit
in its extreme, lose itself either in frivolity of division, or perversity of purpose.67
It actually did so in its later times; but it is gladdening to remember that in its
utmost nobleness, the very temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the
Protestant spirit of self-dependence and inquiry, was expressed in its every line.
Faith and aspiration there were, in every Christian ecclesiastical building, from the
first century to the fifteenth; but the moral habits to which England in this age
owes the kind of greatness that she has,—the habits of philosophical investigation,
of accurate thought, of domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-
reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth,—were only traceable
in the features which were the distinctive creation of the Gothic schools, in the
veined foliage, and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and
fearless height of subtle pinnacle and crested tower, sent like an “unperplexed
question up to Heaven.”68

§ LXXVIII. Last, because the least essential, of the constituent elements of this
noble school, was placed that of Redundance,—the uncalculating bestowal of the
wealth of its labor. There is, indeed, much Gothic, and that of the best period, in
which this element is hardly traceable, and which depends for its effect almost
exclusively on loveliness of simple design and grace of uninvolved proportion:
still, in the most characteristic buildings, a certain portion of their effect depends
upon accumulation of ornament; and many of those which have most influence on
the minds of men, have attained it by means of this attribute alone. And although,
by careful study of the school, it is possible to arrive at a condition of taste which
shall be better contented by a few perfect lines than by a whole façade covered
with fretwork, the building which only satisfies such a taste is not to be considered
the best. For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being, as we saw
above, that it shall both admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest
as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the
statement may appear, a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that
which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and

forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has
offered is perfect; and disdains, either by the complexity or the attractiveness of its
features, to embarrass our investigation, or betray us into delight. That humility,
which is the very life of the Gothic school, is shown not only in the imperfection,
but in the accumulation, of ornament. The inferior rank of the workman is often
shown as much in the richness, as the roughness, of his work; and if the co-
operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we
must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble,
and wins the regard of the inattentive. There are, however, far nobler interests
mingling, in the Gothic heart, with the rude love of decorative accumulation: a
magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it never could do enough to reach the
fulness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless
labor before the altar than stand idle in the market; and, finally, a profound
sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe, rising out of that
Naturalism whose operation we have already endeavored to define. The sculptor
who sought for his models among the forest leaves, could not but quickly and
deeply feel that complexity need not involve the loss of grace, nor richness that of
repose; and every hour which he spent in the study of the minute and various work
of Nature, made him feel more forcibly the barrenness of what was best in that of
man: nor is it to be wondered at, that, seeing her perfect and exquisite creations
poured forth in a profusion which conception could not grasp nor calculation sum,
he should think that it ill became him to be niggardly of his own rude
craftsmanship; and where he saw throughout the universe a faultless beauty
lavished on measureless spaces of broidered field and blooming mountain, to
grudge his poor and imperfect labor to the few stones that he had raised one upon
another, for habitation or memorial. The years of his life passed away before his
task was accomplished; but generation succeeded generation with unwearied
enthusiasm, and the cathedral front was at last lost in the tapestry of its traceries,
like a rock among the thickets and herbage of spring.

§ LXXIX. We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching to completeness of the various moral
or imaginative elements which composed the inner spirit of Gothic architecture. We have, in the second
place, to define its outward form.

Now, as the Gothic spirit is made up of several elements, some of which may, in particular examples,
be wanting, so the Gothic form is made up of minor conditions of form, some of which may, in
particular examples, be imperfectly developed.

We cannot say, therefore, that a building is either Gothic or not Gothic in form, any more than we
can in spirit. We can only say that it is more or less Gothic, in proportion to the number of Gothic forms
which it unites.

§ LXXX. There have been made lately many subtle and ingenious endeavors to base the definition of
Gothic form entirely upon the roof-vaulting; endeavors which are both forced and futile: for many of
the best Gothic buildings in the world have roofs of timber, which have no more connexion with the
main structure of the walls of the edifice than a hat has with that of the head it protects; and other
Gothic buildings are merely enclosures of spaces, as ramparts and walls, or enclosures of gardens or
cloisters, and have no roofs at all, in the sense in which the word “roof” is commonly accepted. But
every reader who has ever taken the slightest interest in architecture must know that there is a great
popular impression on this matter, which maintains itself stiffly in its old form, in spite of all
ratiocination and definition; namely, that a flat lintel from pillar to pillar is Grecian, a round arch
Norman or Romanesque, and a pointed arch Gothic.

And the old popular notion, as far as it goes, is perfectly right, and can never be bettered. The most
striking outward feature in all Gothic architecture is, that it is composed of pointed arches, as in
Romanesque that it is in like manner composed of round; and this distinction would be quite as clear,
though the roofs were taken off every cathedral in Europe. And yet, if we examine carefully into the
real force and meaning of the term “roof” we shall perhaps be able to retain the old popular idea in a
definition of Gothic architecture which shall also express whatever dependence that architecture has
upon true forms of roofing.

§ LXXXI. In Chap. XIII. of the first volume, the reader will remember that roofs were considered as
generally divided into two parts; the roof proper, that is to say, the shell, vault, or ceiling, internally
visible; and the roof-mask, which protects this lower roof from the weather. In some buildings these
parts are united in one framework; but, in most, they are more or less independent of each other, and in
nearly all Gothic buildings there is considerable interval between them.

Now it will often happen, as above noticed, that owing to the nature of the apartments required, or
the materials at hand, the roof proper may be flat, coved, or domed, in buildings which in their walls
employ pointed arches, and are, in the straitest sense of the word, Gothic in all other respects. Yet so far
forth as the roofing alone is concerned, they are not Gothic unless the pointed arch be the principal
form adopted either in the stone vaulting or the timbers of the roof proper.

I shall say then, in the first place, that “Gothic architecture is that which uses, if possible, the pointed
arch in the roof proper.” This is the first step in our definition.

§ LXXXII. Secondly. Although there may be many advisable or necessary forms for the lower roof or
ceiling, there is, in cold countries exposed to rain and snow, only one advisable form for the roof-mask,
and that is the gable, for this alone will throw off both rain and snow from all parts of its surface as
speedily as possible. Snow can lodge on the top of a dome, not on the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far
as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the
pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable
occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable
built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;69 and all the so-called
aspiration of Gothic architecture is, as above noticed (Vol. I. Chap. XII. § VI.), nothing more than its
developement. So that we must add to our definition another clause, which will be, at present, by far
the most important, and it will stand thus: “Gothic architecture is that which uses the pointed arch for
the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask.”

§ LXXXIII. And here, in passing, let us notice a principle as true in architecture as in morals. It is not
the compelled, but the wilful, transgression of law which corrupts the character. Sin is not in the act, but
in the choice. It is a law for Gothic architecture, that it shall use the pointed arch for its roof proper; but
because, in many cases of domestic building, this becomes impossible for want of room (the whole
height of the apartment being required everywhere), or in various other ways inconvenient, flat ceilings
may be used, and yet the Gothic shall not lose its purity. But in the roof-mask, there can be no necessity
nor reason for a change of form: the gable is the best; and if any other—dome, or bulging crown, or
whatsoever else—be employed at all, it must be in pure caprice, and wilful transgression of law. And
wherever, therefore, this is done, the Gothic has lost its character; it is pure Gothic no more.

§ LXXXIV. And this last clause of the definition is to be
more strongly insisted upon, because it includes multitudes of Fig. VIII.

buildings, especially domestic, which are Gothic in spirit, but
which we are not in the habit of embracing in our general
conception of Gothic architecture; multitudes of street
dwelling-houses and straggling country farm-houses, built
with little care for beauty, or observance of Gothic laws in
vaults or windows, and yet maintaining their character by the
sharp and quaint gables of the roofs. And, for the reason just
given, a house is far more Gothic which has square windows, and a boldly gabled roof, than the one
which has pointed arches for the windows, and a domed or flat roof. For it often happened in the best
Gothic times, as it must in all times, that it was more easy and convenient to make a window square
than pointed; not but that, as above emphatically stated, the richness of church architecture was also
found in domestic; and systematically “when the pointed arch was used in the church it was used in the
street,” only in all times there were cases in which men could not build as they would, and were
obliged to construct their doors or windows in the readiest way; and this readiest way was then, in

small work, as it will be to the end of time, to put a flat stone for a lintel and build the windows as in
Fig. VIII.; and the occurrence of such windows in a building or a street will not un-Gothicize them, so
long as the bold gable roof be retained, and the spirit of the work be visibly Gothic in other respects.
But if the roof be wilfully and conspicuously of any other form than the gable,—if it be domed, or
Turkish, or Chinese,—the building has positive corruption mingled with its Gothic elements, in
proportion to the conspicuousness of the roof; and, if not absolutely un-Gothicized, can maintain its
character only by such vigor of vital Gothic energy in other parts as shall cause the roof to be forgotten,
thrown off like an eschar from the living frame. Nevertheless, we must always admit that it may be
forgotten, and that if the Gothic seal be indeed set firmly on the walls, we are not to cavil at the forms
reserved for the tiles and leads. For, observe, as our definition at present stands, being understood of
large roofs only, it will allow a conical glass-furnace to be a Gothic building, but will not allow so
much, either of the Duomo of Florence, or the Baptistery of Pisa. We must either mend it, therefore, or
understand it in some broader sense.

§ LXXXV. And now, if the reader will look back to the fifth paragraph of Chap. III. Vol. I., he will find
that I carefully extended my definition of a roof so as to include more than is usually understood by the
term. It was there said to be the covering of a space, narrow or wide. It does not in the least signify,
with respect to the real nature of the covering, whether the space protected be two feet wide, or ten;
though in the one case we call the protection an arch, in the other a vault or roof. But the real point to
be considered is, the manner in which this protection stands, and not whether it is narrow or broad. We
call the vaulting of a bridge "an arch,” because it is narrow with respect to the river it crosses; but if it
were built above us on the ground, we should call it a waggon vault, because then we should feel the
breadth of it. The real question is the nature of the curve, not the extent of space over which it is
carried: and this is more the case with respect to Gothic than to any other architecture; for, in the
greater number of instances, the form of the roof is entirely dependent on the ribs; the domical shells
being constructed in all kinds of inclinations, quite undeterminable by the eye, and all that is definite in
their character being fixed by the curves of the ribs.

§ LXXXVI. Let us then consider our definition as including
Fig. IX. the narrowest arch, or tracery bar, as well as the broadest Fig. X.

roof, and it will be nearly a perfect one. For the fact is, that
all good Gothic is nothing more than the developement, in
various ways, and on every conceivable scale, of the group
formed by the pointed arch for the bearing line below, and
the gable for the protecting line above; and from the huge,
gray, shaly slope of the cathedral roof, with its elastic pointed vaults
beneath, to the slight crown-like points that enrich the smallest niche of its
doorway, one law and one expression will be found in all. The modes of
support and of decoration are infinitely various, but the real character of
the building, in all good Gothic, depends upon the single lines of the gable
over the pointed arch, Fig. IX., endlessly rearranged or repeated. The
larger woodcut, Fig. X., represents three characteristic conditions of the

treatment of the group: a, from a tomb at Verona (1328); b, one of the
lateral porches at Abbeville; c, one of the uppermost points of the great
western façade of Rouen Cathedral; both these last being, I believe, early
work of the fifteenth century. The forms of the pure early English and
French Gothic are too well known to need any notice; my reason will
appear presently for choosing, by way of example, these somewhat rare
conditions.

§ LXXXVII. But, first, let us try whether we cannot get the forms of the
other great architectures of the world broadly expressed by relations of the
same lines into which we have compressed the Gothic. We may easily do
this if the reader will first allow me to remind him of the true nature of the
pointed arch, as it was expressed in § X. Chap. X. of the first volume. It
was said there, that it ought to be called a “curved gable,” for, strictly
speaking, an “arch” cannot be “pointed.” The so-called pointed arch ought
always to be considered as a gable, with its sides curved in order to enable
them to bear pressure from without. Thus considering it, there are but
three ways in which an interval between piers can be bridged,—the three
ways represented by A, B, and C, Fig. XI.,70 on page 213,—A, the lintel; B,
the round arch; C, the gable. All the architects in the world will never
discover any other ways of bridging a space than these three; they may
vary the curve of the arch, or curve the sides of the gable, or break them;
but in doing this they are merely modifying or subdividing, not adding to
the generic forms.

§ LXXXVIII. Now there are three good architectures in the world, and
there never can be more, correspondent to each of these three simple ways
of covering in a space, which is the original function of all architectures.
And those three architectures are pure exactly in proportion to the
simplicity and directness with which they express the condition of roofing
on which they are founded. They have many interesting varieties,
according to their scale, manner of decoration, and character of the nations by whom they are practised,
but all their varieties are finally referable to the three great heads:—

A, Greek: Architecture of the Lintel.

B, Romanesque: Architecture of the Round Arch.

C, Gothic: Architecture of the Gable.

Fig. XI.

The three names, Greek, Romanesque, and Gothic, are indeed inaccurate when used in this vast
sense, because they imply national limitations; but the three architectures may nevertheless not unfitly
receive their names from those nations by whom they were carried to the highest perfections. We may
thus briefly state their existing varieties.

§ LXXXIX. A. GREEK: Lintel Architecture. The worst of the three; and, considered with reference to
stone construction, always in some measure barbarous. Its simplest type is Stonehenge; its most
refined, the Parthenon; its noblest, the Temple of Karnak.

In the hands of the Egyptian, it is sublime; in those of the Greek, pure; in those of the Roman, rich;
and in those of the Renaissance builder, effeminate.

B. Romanesque: Round-arch Architecture. Never thoroughly developed until Christian times. It falls
into two great branches, Eastern and Western, or Byzantine and Lombardic; changing respectively in
process of time, with certain helps from each other, into Arabian Gothic and Teutonic Gothic. Its most
perfect Lombardic type is the Duomo of Pisa; its most perfect Byzantine type (I believe), St. Mark’s at
Venice. Its highest glory is, that it has no corruption. It perishes in giving birth to another architecture
as noble as itself.

C. Gothic: Architecture of the Gable. The daughter of the Romanesque; and, like the Romanesque,
divided into two great branches, Western and Eastern, or pure Gothic and Arabian Gothic; of which the
latter is called Gothic, only because it has many Gothic forms, pointed arches, vaults, &c., but its spirit
remains Byzantine, more especially in the form of the roof-mask, of which, with respect to these three
great families, we have next to determine the typical form.

§ XC. For, observe, the distinctions we have hitherto been stating, depend on the form of the stones
first laid from pier to pier; that is to say, of the simplest condition of roofs proper. Adding the relations
of the roof-mask to these lines, we shall have the perfect type of form for each school.

In the Greek, the Western Romanesque, and Western
Gothic, the roof-mask is the gable: in the Eastern Fig. XII.

Romanesque, and Eastern Gothic, it is the dome: but I have
not studied the roofing of either of these last two groups, and
shall not venture to generalize them in a diagram. But the
three groups, in the hands of the Western builders, may be
thus simply represented: a, Fig. XII., Greek;71 b, Western
Romanesque; c, Western, or true, Gothic.

Now, observe, first, that the relation of the roof-mask to the
roof proper, in the Greek type, forms that pediment which
gives its most striking character to the temple, and is the
principal recipient of its sculptural decoration. The relation of
these lines, therefore, is just as important in the Greek as in
the Gothic schools.

§ XCI. Secondly,
Fig. XIII. the reader must observe the difference of steepness in the
Romanesque and Gothic gables. This is not an unimportant
distinction, nor an undecided one. The Romanesque gable
does not pass gradually into the more elevated form; there is
a great gulf between the two; the whole effect of all Southern
architecture being dependent upon the use of the flat gable,
and of all Northern upon that of the acute. I need not here
dwell upon the difference between the lines of an Italian
village, or the flat tops of most Italian towers, and the peaked
gables and spires of the North, attaining their most fantastic
developement, I believe, in Belgium: but it may be well to
state the law of separation, namely, that a Gothic gable must
have all its angles acute, and a Romanesque one must have
the upper one obtuse: or, to give the reader a simple practical rule, take any gable, a or b, Fig. XIII.,
and strike a semicircle on its base; if its top rises above the semicircle, as at b, it is a Gothic gable; if it
falls beneath it, a Romanesque one; but the best forms in each group are those which are distinctly
steep, or distinctly low. In the figure f is, perhaps, the average of Romanesque slope, and g of Gothic.

Fig. XIV.

§ XCII. But although we do not find a transition from one school into the other in the slope of the
gables, there is often a confusion between the two schools in the association of the gable with the arch
below it. It has just been stated that the pure Romanesque condition is the round arch under the low

gable, a, Fig. XIV., and the pure Gothic condition is the pointed arch under the high gable, b. But in the
passage from one style to the other, we sometimes find the two conditions reversed; the pointed arch
under a low gable, as d, or the round arch under a high gable, as c. The form d occurs in the tombs of
Verona, and c in the doors of Venice.

§ XCIII. We have thus determined the relation of Gothic to the other architectures of the world, as far
as regards the main lines of its construction; but there is still one word which needs to be added to our
definition of its form, with respect to a part of its decoration, which rises out of that construction. We
have seen that the first condition of its form is, that it shall have pointed arches. When Gothic is
perfect, therefore, it will follow that the pointed arches must be built in the strongest possible manner.

Now, if the reader will look back to Chapter XI. of Vol. I.,
Fig. XV. he will find the subject of the masonry of the pointed arch
discussed at length, and the conclusion deduced, that of all
possible forms of the pointed arch (a certain weight of
material being given), that generically represented at e, Fig.
XV., is the strongest. In fact, the reader can see in a moment
that the weakness of the pointed arch is in its flanks, and that
by merely thickening them gradually at this point all chance
of fracture is removed. Or, perhaps, more simply still:—
Suppose a gable built of stone, as at a, and pressed upon from
without by a weight in the direction of the arrow, clearly it
would be liable to fall in, as at b. To prevent this, we make a
pointed arch of it, as at c; and now it cannot fall inwards, but
if pressed upon from above may give way outwards, as at d.
But at last we build as at e, and now it can neither fall out nor
in.

§ XCIV. The forms of arch thus obtained, with a pointed
projection called a cusp on each side, must for ever be
delightful to the human mind, as being expressive of the
utmost strength and permanency obtainable with a given
mass of material. But it was not by any such process of reasoning, nor with any reference to laws of
construction, that the cusp was originally invented. It is merely the special application to the arch of the
great ornamental system of Foliation; or the adaptation of the forms of leafage which has been above
insisted upon as the principal characteristic of Gothic Naturalism. This love of foliage was exactly
proportioned, in its intensity, to the increase of strength in the Gothic spirit: in the Southern Gothic it is
soft leafage that is most loved; in the Northern thorny leafage. And if we take up any Northern
illuminated manuscript of the great Gothic time, we shall find every one of its leaf ornaments
surrounded by a thorny structure laid round it in gold or in color; sometimes apparently copied
faithfully from the prickly developement of the root of the leaf in the thistle, running along the stems
and branches exactly as the thistle leaf does along its own stem, and with sharp spines proceeding from

the points, as in Fig. XVI. At other times, and for the most part in work in the thirteenth century, the
golden ground takes the form of pure and severe cusps, sometimes enclosing the leaves, sometimes
filling up the forks of the branches (as in the example fig. 1, Plate I. Vol. III.), passing imperceptibly
from the distinctly vegetable condition (in which it is just as certainly representative of the thorn, as
other parts of the design are of the bud, leaf, and fruit) into the crests on the necks, or the membranous
sails of the wings, of serpents, dragons, and other grotesques, as in Fig. XVII., and into rich and vague
fantasies of curvature; among which, however, the pure cusped system of the pointed arch is
continually discernible, not accidentally, but designedly indicated, and connecting itself with the
literally architectural portions of the design.

§ XCV. The system, then, of what is
Fig. XVII. called Foliation, whether simple, as in Fig. XVI.

the cusped arch, or complicated, as in
tracery, rose out of this love of
leafage; not that the form of the arch is
intended to imitate a leaf, but to be
invested with the same characters of
beauty which the designer had
discovered in the leaf. Observe, there
is a wide difference between these two
intentions. The idea that large Gothic
structure, in arches and roofs, was
intended to imitate vegetation is, as above noticed, untenable for an
instant in the front of facts. But the Gothic builder perceived that, in the
leaves which he copied for his minor decorations, there was a peculiar beauty, arising from certain
characters of curvature in outline, and certain methods of subdivision and of radiation in structure. On a
small scale, in his sculptures and his missal-painting, he copied the leaf or thorn itself; on a large scale
he adopted from it its abstract sources of beauty, and gave the same kinds of curvatures and the same
species of subdivision to the outline of his arches, so far as was consistent with their strength, never, in
any single instance, suggesting the resemblance to leafage by irregularity of outline, but keeping the
structure perfectly simple, and, as we have seen, so consistent with the best principles of masonry, that
in the finest Gothic designs of arches, which are always single cusped (the cinquefoiled arch being
licentious, though in early work often very lovely), it is literally impossible, without consulting the
context of the building, to say whether the cusps have been added for the sake of beauty or of strength;
nor, though in mediæval architecture they were, I believe, assuredly first employed in mere love of
their picturesque form, am I absolutely certain that their earliest invention was not a structural effort.
For the earliest cusps with which I am acquainted are those used in the vaults of the great galleries of
the Serapeum, discovered in 1850 by M. Maniette at Memphis, and described by Colonel Hamilton in a
paper read in February last before the Royal Society of Literature.72 The roofs of its galleries were
admirably shown in Colonel Hamilton’s drawings made to scale upon the spot, and their profile is a
cusped round arch, perfectly pure and simple; but whether thrown into this form for the sake of
strength or of grace, I am unable to say.

§ XCVI. It is evident, however, that the structural advantage of the cusp is available only in the case of
arches on a comparatively small scale. If the arch becomes very large, the projections under the flanks
must become too ponderous to be secure; the suspended weight of stone would be liable to break off,
and such arches are therefore never constructed with heavy cusps, but rendered secure by general mass
of masonry; and what additional appearance of support may be thought necessary (sometimes a
considerable degree of actual support) is given by means of tracery.

§ XCVII. Of what I stated in the second chapter of the
“Seven Lamps” respecting the nature of tracery, I need Fig. XVIII.

repeat here only this much, that it began in the use of
penetrations through the stone-work of windows or
walls, cut into forms which looked like stars when seen
from within, and like leaves when seen from without:
the name foil or feuille being universally applied to the
separate lobes of their extremities, and the pleasure
received from them being the same as that which we
feel in the triple, quadruple, or other radiated leaves of
vegetation, joined with the perception of a severely
geometrical order and symmetry. A few of the most
common forms are represented, unconfused by exterior
mouldings, in Fig. XVIII., and the best traceries are
nothing more than close clusters of such forms, with
mouldings following their outlines.

§ XCVIII. The term “foliated,” therefore, is equally
descriptive of the most perfect conditions both of the
simple arch and of the traceries by which, in later
Gothic, it is filled; and this foliation is an essential
character of the style. No Gothic is either good or
characteristic which is not foliated either in its arches
or apertures. Sometimes the bearing arches are foliated,
and the ornamentation above composed of figure sculpture; sometimes the bearing arches are plain, and
the ornamentation above them is composed of foliated apertures. But the element of foliation must
enter somewhere, or the style is imperfect. And our final definition of Gothic will, therefore, stand thus:
—

“Foliated Architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-
mask.”

§ XCIX. And now there is but one point more to be examined, and we have done.

Foliation, while it is the most distinctive and
Fig. XIX. peculiar, is also the easiest method of decoration which

Gothic architecture possesses; and, although in the
disposition of the proportions and forms of foils, the
most noble imagination may be shown, yet a builder
without imagination at all, or any other faculty of
design, can produce some effect upon the mass of his
work by merely covering it with foolish foliation.
Throw any number of crossing lines together at
random, as in Fig. XIX., and fill their squares and
oblong openings with quatrefoils and cinquefoils, and
you will immediately have what will stand, with most
people, for very satisfactory Gothic. The slightest
possible acquaintance with existing forms will enable
any architect to vary his patterns of foliation with as
much ease as he would those of a kaleidoscope, and to
produce a building which the present European public
will think magnificent, though there may not be, from foundation to coping, one ray of invention, or
any other intellectual merit, in the whole mass of it. But floral decoration, and the disposition of
mouldings, require some skill and thought; and, if they are to be agreeable at all, must be verily
invented, or accurately copied. They cannot be drawn altogether at random, without becoming so
commonplace as to involve detection: and although, as I have just said, the noblest imagination may be
shown in the dispositions of traceries, there is far more room for its play and power when those
traceries are associated with floral or animal ornament; and it is probable, à priori, that, wherever true
invention exists, such ornament will be employed in profusion.

§ C. Now, all Gothic may be divided into two vast schools, one early, the other late;73 of which the
former, noble, inventive, and progressive, uses the element of foliation moderately, that of floral and
figure sculpture decoration profusely; the latter, ignoble, uninventive, and declining, uses foliation
immoderately, floral and figure sculpture subordinately. The two schools touch each other at that
instant of momentous change, dwelt upon in the “Seven Lamps,” chap, ii., a period later or earlier in
different districts, but which may be broadly stated as the middle of the fourteenth century; both styles
being, of course, in their highest excellence at the moment when they meet, the one ascending to the
point of junction, the one declining from it, but, at first, not in any marked degree, and only showing
the characters which justify its being above called, generically, ignoble, as its declension reaches
steeper slope.

§ CI. Of these two great schools, the first uses foliation only in large and simple masses, and covers
the minor members, cusps, &c., of that foliation, with various sculpture. The latter decorates foliation
itself with minor foliation, and breaks its traceries into endless and lace-like subdivision of tracery.

A few instances will explain the difference clearly. Fig. 2, Plate XII., represents half of an eight-
foiled aperture from Salisbury; where the element of foliation is employed in the larger disposition of
the starry form; but in the decoration of the cusp it has entirely disappeared, and the ornament is floral.

XII.

LINEAR AND SURFACE GOTHIC.

But in fig. 1, which is part of a fringe round one of the later windows in Rouen Cathedral, the
foliation is first carried boldly round the arch, and then each cusp of it divided into other forms of
foliation. The two larger canopies of niches below, figs. 5 and 6, are respectively those seen at the
flanks of the two uppermost examples of gabled Gothic in Fig. X., p. 213. Those examples were there
chosen in order also to illustrate the distinction in the character of ornamentation which we are at
present examining; and if the reader will look back to them, and compare their methods of treatment,
he will at once be enabled to fix that distinction clearly in his mind. He will observe that in the
uppermost the element of foliation is scrupulously confined to the bearing arches of the gable, and of
the lateral niches, so that, on any given side of the monument, only three foliated arches are discernible.
All the rest of the ornamentation is “bossy sculpture,” set on the broad marble surface. On the point of
the gable are set the shield and dog-crest of the Scalas, with its bronze wings, as of a dragon, thrown
out from it on either side; below, an admirably sculptured oak-tree fills the centre of the field; beneath
it is the death of Abel, Abel lying dead upon his face on one side, Cain opposite, looking up to heaven

in terror: the border of the arch is formed of various leafage, alternating with the scala shield; and the
cusps are each filled by one flower, and two broad flowing leaves. The whole is exquisitely relieved by
color; the ground being of pale red Verona marble, and the statues and foliage of white Carrara marble,
inlaid.

§ CII. The figure below it, b, represents the southern lateral door of the principal church in Abbeville:
the smallness of the scale compelled me to make it somewhat heavier in the lines of its traceries than it
is in reality, but the door itself is one of the most exquisite pieces of flamboyant Gothic in the world;
and it is interesting to see the shield introduced here, at the point of the gable, in exactly the same
manner as in the upper example, and with precisely the same purpose,—to stay the eye in its ascent,
and to keep it from being offended by the sharp point of the gable, the reversed angle of the shield
being so energetic as completely to balance the upward tendency of the great convergent lines. It will
be seen, however, as this example is studied, that its other decorations are altogether different from
those of the Veronese tomb; that, here, the whole effect is dependent on mere multiplications of similar
lines of tracery, sculpture being hardly introduced except in the seated statue under the central niche,
and, formerly, in groups filling the shadowy hollows under the small niches in the archivolt, but broken
away in the Revolution. And if now we turn to Plate XII., just passed, and examine the heads of the two
lateral niches there given from each of these monuments on a larger scale, the contrast will be yet more
apparent. The one from Abbeville (fig. 5), though it contains much floral work of the crisp Northern
kind in its finial and crockets, yet depends for all its effect on the various patterns of foliation with
which its spaces are filled; and it is so cut through and through that it is hardly stronger than a piece of
lace: whereas the pinnacle from Verona depends for its effect on one broad mass of shadow, boldly
shaped into the trefoil in its bearing arch; and there is no other trefoil on that side of the niche. All the
rest of its decoration is floral, or by almonds and bosses; and its surface of stone is unpierced, and kept
in broad light, and the mass of it thick and strong enough to stand for as many more centuries as it has
already stood, scatheless, in the open street of Verona. The figures 3 and 4, above each niche, show
how the same principles are carried out into the smallest details of the two edifices, 3 being the
moulding which borders the gable at Abbeville, and 4, that in the same position at Verona; and as thus
in all cases the distinction in their treatment remains the same, the one attracting the eye to broad
sculptured surfaces, the other to involutions of intricate lines, I shall hereafter characterize the two
schools, whenever I have occasion to refer to them, the one as Surface-Gothic, the other as Linear-
Gothic.

§ CIII. Now observe: it is not, at present, the question, whether the form of the Veronese niche, and
the design of its flower-work, be as good as they might have been; but simply, which of the two
architectural principles is the greater and better. And this we cannot hesitate for an instant in deciding.
The Veronese Gothic is strong in its masonry, simple in its masses, but perpetual in its variety. The late
French Gothic is weak in masonry, broken in mass, and repeats the same idea continually. It is very
beautiful, but the Italian Gothic is the nobler style.

§ CIV. Yet, in saying that the French Gothic repeats one idea, I mean merely that it depends too much
upon the foliation of its traceries. The disposition of the traceries themselves is endlessly varied and

inventive; and indeed, the mind of the French workman was, perhaps, even richer in fancy than that of
the Italian, only he had been taught a less noble style. This is especially to be remembered with respect
to the subordination of figure sculpture above noticed as characteristic of the later Gothic.

It is not that such sculpture is wanting; on the contrary, it is often worked into richer groups, and
carried out with a perfection of execution, far greater than those which adorn the earlier buildings: but,
in the early work, it is vigorous, prominent, and essential to the beauty of the whole; in the late work it
is enfeebled, and shrouded in the veil of tracery, from which it may often be removed with little harm
to the general effect.74

§ CV. Now the reader may rest assured that no principle of art is more absolute
than this,—that a composition from which anything can be removed without Fig. XX.

doing mischief is always so far forth inferior. On this ground, therefore, if on no
other, there can be no question, for a moment, which of the two schools is the
greater; although there are many most noble works in the French traceried
Gothic, having a sublimity of their own dependent on their extreme richness and
grace of line, and for which we may be most grateful to their builders. And,
indeed, the superiority of the Surface-Gothic cannot be completely felt, until we
compare it with the more degraded Linear schools, as, for instance, with our
own English Perpendicular. The ornaments of the Veronese niche, which we
have used for our example, are by no means among the best of their school, yet
they will serve our purpose for such a comparison. That of its pinnacle is
composed of a single upright flowering plant, of which the stem shoots up
through the centres of the leaves, and bears a pendent blossom, somewhat like
that of the imperial lily. The leaves are thrown back from the stem with singular
grace and freedom, and foreshortened, as if by a skilful painter, in the shallow
marble relief. Their arrangement is roughly shown in the little woodcut at the
side (Fig. XX.); and if the reader will simply try the experiment for himself,—
first, of covering a piece of paper with crossed lines, as if for accounts, and
filling all the interstices with any foliation that comes into his head, as in Figure
XIX. above; and then, of trying to fill the point of a gable with a piece of leafage
like that in Figure XX. above, putting the figure itself aside,—he will presently
find that more thought and invention are required to design this single minute
pinnacle, than to cover acres of ground with English perpendicular.

§ CVI. We have now, I believe, obtained a sufficiently accurate knowledge both of the spirit and form
of Gothic architecture; but it may, perhaps, be useful to the general reader, if, in conclusion, I set down
a few plain and practical rules for determining, in every instance, whether a given building be good
Gothic or not, and, if not Gothic, whether its architecture is of a kind which will probably reward the
pains of careful examination.

§ CVII. First. Look if the roof rises in a steep gable, high above the walls. If it does not do this, there
is something wrong; the building is not quite pure Gothic, or has been altered.

§ CVIII. Secondly. Look if the principal windows and doors have pointed arches with gables over
them. If not pointed arches, the building is not Gothic; if they have not any gables over them, it is either
not pure, or not first-rate.

If, however, it has the steep roof, the pointed arch, and gable all united, it is nearly certain to be a
Gothic building of a very fine time.

§ CIX. Thirdly. Look if the arches are cusped, or apertures foliated. If the building has met the first
two conditions, it is sure to be foliated somewhere; but, if not everywhere, the parts which are
unfoliated are imperfect, unless they are large bearing arches, or small and sharp arches in groups,
forming a kind of foliation by their own multiplicity, and relieved by sculpture and rich mouldings. The
upper windows, for instance, in the east end of Westminster Abbey are imperfect for want of foliation.
If there be no foliation anywhere, the building is assuredly imperfect Gothic.

§ CX. Fourthly. If the building meets all the first three conditions, look if its arches in general,
whether of windows and doors, or of minor ornamentation, are carried on true shafts with bases and
capitals. If they are, then the building is assuredly of the finest Gothic style. It may still, perhaps, be an
imitation, a feeble copy, or a bad example of a noble style; but the manner of it, having met all these
four conditions, is assuredly first-rate.

If its apertures have not shafts and capitals, look if they are plain openings in the walls, studiously
simple, and unmoulded at the sides; as, for instance, the arch in Plate XIX. Vol. I. If so, the building
may still be of the finest Gothic, adapted to some domestic or military service. But if the sides of the
window be moulded, and yet there are no capitals at the spring of the arch, it is assuredly of an inferior
school.

This is all that is necessary to determine whether the building be of a fine Gothic style. The next tests
to be applied are in order to discover whether it be good architecture or not: for it may be very impure
Gothic, and yet very noble architecture; or it may be very pure Gothic, and yet, if a copy, or originally
raised by an ungifted builder, very bad architecture.

If it belong to any of the great schools of color, its criticism becomes as complicated, and needs as
much care, as that of a piece of music, and no general rules for it can be given; but if not—

§ CXI. First. See if it looks as if it had been built by strong men; if it has the sort of roughness, and
largeness, and nonchalance, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness which seems always to be
the sign-manual of the broad vision, and massy power of men who can see past the work they are
doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it. If the building has this character, it is
much already in its favor; it will go hard but it proves a noble one. If it has not this, but is altogether
accurate, minute, and scrupulous in its workmanship, it must belong to either the very best or the very
worst of schools: the very best, in which exquisite design is wrought out with untiring and
conscientious care, as in the Giottesque Gothic; or the very worst, in which mechanism has taken the
place of design. It is more likely, in general, that it should belong to the worst than the best: so that, on

the whole, very accurate workmanship is to be esteemed a bad sign; and if there is nothing remarkable
about the building but its precision, it may be passed at once with contempt.

§ CXII. Secondly. Observe if it be irregular, its different parts fitting themselves to different purposes,
no one caring what becomes of them, so that they do their work. If one part always answers accurately
to another part, it is sure to be a bad building; and the greater and more conspicuous the irregularities,
the greater the chances are that it is a good one. For instance, in the Ducal Palace, of which a rough
woodcut is given in Chap. VIII., the general idea is sternly symmetrical; but two windows are lower
than the rest of the six; and if the reader will count the arches of the small arcade as far as to the great
balcony, he will find it is not in the centre, but set to the right-hand side by the whole width of one of
those arches. We may be pretty sure that the building is a good one; none but a master of his craft
would have ventured to do this.

§ CXIII. Thirdly. Observe if all the traceries, capitals, and other ornaments are of perpetually varied
design. If not, the work is assuredly bad.

§ CXIV. Lastly. Read the sculpture. Preparatory to reading it, you will have to discover whether it is
legible (and, if legible, it is nearly certain to be worth reading). On a good building, the sculpture is
always so set, and on such a scale, that at the ordinary distance from which the edifice is seen, the
sculpture shall be thoroughly intelligible and interesting. In order to accomplish this, the uppermost
statues will be ten or twelve feet high, and the upper ornamentation will be colossal, increasing in
fineness as it descends, till on the foundation it will often be wrought as if for a precious cabinet in a
king’s chamber; but the spectator will not notice that the upper sculptures are colossal. He will merely
feel that he can see them plainly, and make them all out at his ease.

And, having ascertained this, let him set himself to read them. Thenceforward the criticism of the
building is to be conducted precisely on the same principles as that of a book; and it must depend on
the knowledge, feeling, and not a little on the industry and perseverance of the reader, whether, even in
the case of the best works, he either perceive them to be great, or feel them to be entertaining.

56 The third kind of ornament, the Renaissance, is that in which the inferior detail becomes principal, the executor of every
minor portion being required to exhibit skill and possess knowledge as great as that which is possessed by the master of the
design; and in the endeavor to endow him with this skill and knowledge, his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole
building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility. We must fully inquire into the nature of this form of
error, when we arrive at the examination of the Renaissance schools.

57 Vide Preface to “Fair Maid of Perth.”

58 The Elgin marbles are supposed by many persons to be “perfect.” In the most important portions they indeed approach
perfection, but only there. The draperies are unfinished, the hair and wool of the animals are unfinished, and the entire bas-
reliefs of the frieze are roughly cut.

59 In the eighth chapter we shall see a remarkable instance of this sacrifice of symmetry to convenience in the arrangement
of the windows of the Ducal Palace.

60 I am always afraid to use this word “Composition;” it is so utterly misused in the general parlance respecting art. Nothing
is more common than to hear divisions of art into “form, composition, and color,” or “light and shade and composition,” or
“sentiment and composition,” or it matters not what else and composition; the speakers in each case attaching a perfectly
different meaning to the word, generally an indistinct one, and always a wrong one. Composition is, in plain English, “putting
together,” and it means the putting together of lines, of forms, of colors, of shades, or of ideas. Painters compose in color,
compose in thought, compose in form, and compose in effect: the word being of use merely in order to express a scientific,
disciplined, and inventive arrangement of any of these, instead of a merely natural or accidental one.

61 Design is used in this place as expressive of the power to arrange lines and colors nobly. By facts, I mean facts perceived
by the eye and mind, not facts accumulated by knowledge. See the chapter on Roman Renaissance (Vol. III. Chap. II.) for this
distinction.

62 “Earlier,” that is to say, pre-Raphaelite ages. Men of this stamp will praise Claude, and such other comparatively debased
artists; but they cannot taste the work of the thirteenth century.

63 Not selfish fear, caused by want of trust in God, or of resolution in the soul.

64 I reserve for another place the full discussion of this interesting subject, which here would have led me too far; but it
must be noted, in passing, that this vulgar Purism, which rejects truth, not because it is vicious, but because it is humble, and
consists not in choosing what is good, but in disguising what is rough, extends itself into every species of art. The most definite
instance of it is the dressing of characters of peasantry in an opera or ballet scene; and the walls of our exhibitions are full of
works of art which “exalt nature” in the same way, not by revealing what is great in the heart, but by smoothing what is coarse
in the complexion. There is nothing, I believe, so vulgar, so hopeless, so indicative of an irretrievably base mind, as this species
of Purism. Of healthy Purism carried to the utmost endurable length in this direction, exalting the heart first, and the features
with it, perhaps the most characteristic instance I can give is Stothard’s vignette to “Jorasse,” in Rogers’s Italy; at least it would
be so if it could be seen beside a real group of Swiss girls. The poems of Rogers, compared with those of Crabbe, are admirable
instances of the healthiest Purism and healthiest Naturalism in poetry. The first great Naturalists of Christian art were Orcagna
and Giotto.

65 The reader will understand this in a moment by glancing at Plate XX., the last in this volume, where the series 1 to 12
represents the change in one kind of leaf, from the Byzantine to the perfect Gothic.

66 The best art either represents the facts of its own day, or, if facts of the past, expresses them with accessories of the time
in which the work was done. All good art, representing past events, is therefore full of the most frank anachronism, and always
ought to be. No painter has any business to be an antiquarian. We do not want his impressions or suppositions respecting things
that are past. We want his clear assertions respecting things present.

67 See the account of the meeting at Talla Linns, in 1682, given in the fourth chapter of the “Heart of Midlothian.” At length
they arrived at the conclusion that “they who owned (or allowed) such names as Monday, Tuesday, January, February, and so
forth, served themselves heirs to the same if not greater punishment than had been denounced against the idolaters of old.”

68 See the beautiful description of Florence in Elizabeth Browning’s “Casa Guidi Windows,” which is not only a noble
poem, but the only book I have seen which, favoring the Liberal cause in Italy, gives a just account of the incapacities of the
modern Italian.

69 Salisbury spire is only a tower with a polygonal gabled roof of stone, and so also the celebrated spires of Caen and
Coutances.

70 Or by the shaded portions of Fig. XXIX. Vol. I.

71 The reader is not to suppose that Greek architecture had always, or often, flat ceilings, because I call its lintel the roof
proper. He must remember I always use these terms of the first simple arrangements of materials that bridge a space; bringing in
the real roof afterwards, if I can. In the case of Greek temples it would be vain to refer their structure to the real roof, for many
were hypæthral, and without a roof at all. I am unfortunately more ignorant of Egyptian roofing than even of Arabian, so that I
cannot bring this school into the diagram; but the gable appears to have been magnificently used for a bearing roof. Vide Mr.
Fergusson’s section of the Pyramid of Geezeh, “Principles of Beauty in Art,” Plate I., and his expressions of admiration of
Egyptian roof masonry, page 201.

72 See ‘Athenæum,’ March 5th, 1853.

73 Late, and chiefly confined to Northern countries, so that the two schools may be opposed either as Early and Late Gothic,
or (in the fourteenth century) as Southern and Northern Gothic.

74 In many of the best French Gothic churches, the groups of figures have been all broken away at the Revolution, without
much harm to the picturesqueness, though with grievous loss to the historical value of the architecture: whereas, if from the
niche at Verona we were to remove its floral ornaments, and the statue beneath it, nothing would remain but a rude square
trefoiled shell, utterly valueless, or even ugly.

CHAPTER VII.

GOTHIC PALACES.

§ I. The buildings out of the remnants of which we have endeavored to recover some conception of
the appearance of Venice during the Byzantine period, contribute hardly anything at this day to the
effect of the streets of the city. They are too few and too much defaced to attract the eye or influence
the feelings. The charm which Venice still possesses, and which for the last fifty years has rendered it
the favorite haunt of all the painters of picturesque subject, is owing to the effect of the palaces
belonging to the period we have now to examine, mingled with those of the Renaissance.

This effect is produced in two different ways. The Renaissance palaces are not more picturesque in
themselves than the club-houses of Pall Mall; but they become delightful by the contrast of their
severity and refinement with the rich and rude confusion of the sea life beneath them, and of their white
and solid masonry with the green waves. Remove from beneath them the orange sails of the fishing
boats, the black gliding of the gondolas, the cumbered decks and rough crews of the barges of traffic,
and the fretfulness of the green water along their foundations, and the Renaissance palaces possess no
more interest than those of London or Paris. But the Gothic palaces are picturesque in themselves, and
wield over us an independent power. Sea and sky, and every other accessory might be taken away from
them, and still they would be beautiful and strange. They are not less striking in the loneliest streets of

Padua and Vicenza (where many were built during the period of the Venetian authority in those cities)
than in the most crowded thoroughfares of Venice itself; and if they could be transported into the midst
of London, they would still not altogether lose their power over the feelings.

§ II. The best proof of this is in the perpetual attractiveness of all pictures, however poor in skill,
which have taken for their subject the principal of these Gothic buildings, the Ducal Palace. In spite of
all architectural theories and teachings, the paintings of this building are always felt to be delightful; we
cannot be wearied by them, though often sorely tried; but we are not put to the same trial in the case of
the palaces of the Renaissance. They are never drawn singly, or as the principal subject, nor can they
be. The building which faces the Ducal Palace on the opposite side of the Piazzetta is celebrated among
architects, but it is not familiar to our eyes; it is painted only incidentally, for the completion, not the
subject, of a Venetian scene; and even the Renaissance arcades of St. Mark’s Place, though frequently
painted, are always treated as a mere avenue to its Byzantine church and colossal tower. And the Ducal
Palace itself owes the peculiar charm which we have hitherto felt, not so much to its greater size as
compared with other Gothic buildings, or nobler design (for it never yet has been rightly drawn), as to
its comparative isolation. The other Gothic structures are as much injured by the continual
juxtaposition of the Renaissance palaces, as the latter are aided by it; they exhaust their own life by
breathing it into the Renaissance coldness: but the Ducal Palace stands comparatively alone, and fully
expresses the Gothic power.

§ III. And it is just that it should be so seen, for it is
the original of nearly all the rest. It is not the elaborate Fig. XXI.

and more studied developement of a national style, but
the great and sudden invention of one man, instantly
forming a national style, and becoming the model for
the imitation of every architect in Venice for upwards
of a century. It was the determination of this one fact
which occupied me the greater part of the time I spent
in Venice. It had always appeared to me most strange
that there should be in no part of the city any incipient
or imperfect types of the form of the Ducal Palace; it
was difficult to believe that so mighty a building had been the conception of one man, not only in
disposition and detail, but in style; and yet impossible, had it been otherwise, but that some early
examples of approximate Gothic form must exist. There is not one. The palaces built between the final
cessation of the Byzantine style, about 1300, and the date of the Ducal Palace (1320-1350), are all
completely distinct in character, so distinct that I at first intended the account of them to form a
separate section of this volume; and there is literally no transitional form between them and the
perfection of the Ducal Palace. Every Gothic building in Venice which resembles the latter is a copy of
it. I do not mean that there was no Gothic in Venice before the Ducal Palace, but that the mode of its
application to domestic architecture had not been determined. The real root of the Ducal Palace is the
apse of the church of the Frari. The traceries of that apse, though earlier and ruder in workmanship, are
nearly the same in mouldings, and precisely the same in treatment (especially in the placing of the

lions’ heads), as those of the great Ducal Arcade; and the originality of thought in the architect of the
Ducal Palace consists in his having adapted those traceries, in a more highly developed and finished
form, to civil uses. In the apse of the church they form narrow and tall window lights, somewhat more
massive than those of Northern Gothic, but similar in application: the thing to be done was to adapt
these traceries to the forms of domestic building necessitated by national usage. The early palaces
consisted, as we have seen, of arcades sustaining walls faced with marble, rather broad and long than
elevated. This form was kept for the Ducal Palace; but instead of round arches from shaft to shaft, the
Frari traceries were substituted, with two essential modifications. Besides being enormously increased
in scale and thickness, that they might better bear the superincumbent weight, the quatrefoil, which in
the Frari windows is above the arch, as at a, Fig. XXI., on previous page, was, in the Ducal Palace, put
between the arches, as at b; the main reason for this alteration being that the bearing power of the
arches, which was now to be trusted with the weight of a wall forty feet high,75 was thus thrown
between the quatrefoils, instead of under them, and thereby applied at far better advantage. And, in the
second place, the joints of the masonry were changed. In the Frari (as often also in St. John and St.
Paul’s) the tracery is formed of two simple cross bars or slabs of stone, pierced into the requisite forms,
and separated by a horizontal joint, just on a level with the lowest cusp of the quatrefoils, as seen in
Fig. XXI., a. But at the Ducal Palace the horizontal joint is in the centre of the quatrefoils, and two
others are introduced beneath it at right angles to the run of the mouldings, as seen in Fig. XXI., b.76
The Ducal Palace builder was sternly resolute in carrying out this rule of masonry. In the traceries of
the large upper windows, where the cusps are cut through as in the quatrefoil Fig. XXII., the lower cusp
is left partly solid, as at a, merely that the joint a b may have its right place and direction.

§ IV. The ascertaining the formation of the Ducal Palace traceries from those
Fig. XXII. of the Frari, and its priority to all other buildings which resemble it in Venice,
rewarded me for a great deal of uninteresting labor in the examination of
mouldings and other minor features of the Gothic palaces, in which alone the
internal evidence of their date was to be discovered, there being no historical
records whatever respecting them. But the accumulation of details on which the
complete proof of the fact depends, could not either be brought within the
compass of this volume, or be made in anywise interesting to the general reader.
I shall therefore, without involving myself in any discussion, give a brief
account of the developement of Gothic design in Venice, as I believe it to have
taken place. I shall possibly be able at some future period so to compress the
evidence on which my conviction rests, as to render it intelligible to the public, while, in the meantime,
some of the more essential points of it are thrown together in the Appendix, and in the history of the
Ducal Palace given in the next chapter.

§ V. According, then, to the statement just made, the Gothic architecture of Venice is divided into two
great periods: one, in which, while various irregular Gothic tendencies are exhibited, no consistent type
of domestic building was developed; the other, in which a formed and consistent school of domestic
architecture resulted from the direct imitation of the great design of the Ducal Palace. We must deal

with these two periods separately; the first of them being that which has been often above alluded to,
under the name of the transitional period.

We shall consider in succession the general form, the windows, doors, balconies, and parapets, of the
Gothic palaces belonging to each of these periods.

§ VI. First. General Form.

We have seen that the wrecks of the Byzantine palaces consisted merely of upper and lower arcades
surrounding cortiles; the disposition of the interiors being now entirely changed, and their original
condition untraceable. The entrances to these early buildings are, for the most part, merely large
circular arches, the central features of their continuous arcades: they do not present us with definitely
separated windows and doors.

But a great change takes place in the Gothic period. These long arcades break, as it were, into pieces,
and coagulate into central and lateral windows, and small arched doors, pierced in great surfaces of
brick wall. The sea story of a Byzantine palace consists of seven, nine, or more arches in a continuous
line; but the sea story of a Gothic palace consists of a door and one or two windows on each side, as in
a modern house. The first story of a Byzantine palace consists of, perhaps, eighteen or twenty arches,
reaching from one side of the house to the other; the first story of a Gothic palace consists of a window
of four or five lights in the centre, and one or two single windows on each side. The germ, however, of
the Gothic arrangement is already found in the Byzantine, where, as we have seen, the arcades, though
continuous, are always composed of a central mass and two wings of smaller arches. The central group
becomes the door or the middle light of the Gothic palace, and the wings break into its lateral windows.

§ VII. But the most essential difference in the entire arrangement, is the loss of the unity of
conception which, regulated Byzantine composition. How subtle the sense of gradation which disposed
the magnitudes of the early palaces we have seen already, but I have not hitherto noticed that the
Byzantine work was centralized in its ornamentation as much as in its proportions. Not only were the
lateral capitals and archivolts kept comparatively plain, while the central ones were sculptured, but the
midmost piece of sculpture, whatever it might be,—capital, inlaid circle, or architrave,—was always
made superior to the rest. In the Fondaco de’ Turchi, for instance, the midmost capital of the upper
arcade is the key to the whole group, larger and more studied than all the rest; and the lateral ones are
so disposed as to answer each other on the opposite sides, thus, A being put for the central one,

F E B C A C B E F ,

a sudden break of the system being admitted in one unique capital at the extremity of the series.

§ VIII. Now, long after the Byzantine arcades had been contracted into windows, this system of
centralization was more or less maintained; and in all the early groups of windows of five lights the
midmost capital is different from the two on each side of it, which always correspond. So strictly is this
the case, that whenever the capitals of any group of windows are not centralized in this manner, but are
either entirely like each other, or all different, so as to show no correspondence, it is a certain proof,
even if no other should exist, of the comparative lateness of the building.

In every group of windows in Venice which I was able to examine, and which were centralized in
this manner, I found evidence in their mouldings of their being anterior to the Ducal Palace. That
palace did away with the subtle proportion and centralization of the Byzantine. Its arches are of equal
width, and its capitals are all different and ungrouped; some, indeed, are larger than the rest, but this is
not for the sake of proportion, only for particular service when more weight is to be borne. But, among
other evidences of the early date of the sea façade of that building, is one subtle and delicate concession
to the system of centralization which is finally closed. The capitals of the upper arcade are, as I said, all
different, and show no arranged correspondence with each other; but the central one is of pure Parian
marble, while all the others are of Istrian stone.

The bold decoration of the central window and balcony above, in the Ducal Palace, is only a peculiar
expression of the principality of the central window, which was characteristic of the Gothic period not
less than of the Byzantine. In the private palaces the central windows become of importance by their
number of lights; in the Ducal Palace such an arrangement was, for various reasons, inconvenient, and
the central window, which, so far from being more important than the others, is every way inferior in
design to the two at the eastern extremity of the façade, was nevertheless made the leading feature by
its noble canopy and balcony.

§ IX. Such being the principal differences in the general conception of the Byzantine and Gothic
palaces, the particulars in the treatment of the latter are easily stated. The marble facings are gradually
removed from the walls; and the bare brick either stands forth confessed boldly, contrasted with the
marble shafts and archivolts of the windows, or it is covered with stucco painted in fresco, of which
more hereafter. The Ducal Palace, as in all other respects, is an exact expression of the middle point in
the change. It still retains marble facing; but instead of being disposed in slabs as in the Byzantine
times, it is applied in solid bricks or blocks of marble, 11½ inches long, by 6 inches high.

The stories of the Gothic palaces are divided by string courses, considerably bolder in projection
than those of the Byzantines, and more highly decorated; and while the angles of the Byzantine palaces
are quite sharp and pure, those of the Gothic palaces are wrought into a chamfer, filled by small twisted
shafts which have capitals under the cornice of each story.

§ X. These capitals are little observed in the general effect, but the shafts are of essential importance
in giving an aspect of firmness to the angle; a point of peculiar necessity in Venice, where, owning to
the various convolutions of the canals, the angles of the palaces are not only frequent, but often
necessarily acute, every inch of ground being valuable. In other cities, the appearance as well as the
assurance of stability can always be secured by the use of massy stones, as in the fortress palaces of
Florence; but it must have been always desirable at Venice to build as lightly as possible, in
consequence of the comparative insecurity of the foundations. The early palaces were, as we have seen,
perfect models of grace and lightness, and the Gothic, which followed, though much more massive in
the style of its details, never admitted more weight into its structure than was absolutely necessary for
its strength, Hence, every Gothic palace has the appearance of enclosing as many rooms, and attaining
as much strength, as is possible, with a minimum quantity of brick and stone. The traceries of the
windows, which in Northern Gothic only support the glass, at Venice support the building; and thus the

greater ponderousness of the traceries is only an indication of the greater lightness of the structure.
Hence, when the Renaissance architects give their opinions as to the stability of the Ducal Palace when
injured by fire, one of them, Christofore Sorte, says, that he thinks it by no means laudable that the
“Serenissimo Dominio” of the Venetian senate “should live in a palace built in the air.”77 And again,
Andrea della Valle says, that78 “the wall of the saloon is thicker by fifteen inches than the shafts below
it, projecting nine inches within, and six without, standing as if in the air, above the piazza;”79 and yet
this wall is so nobly and strongly knit together, that Rusconi, though himself altogether devoted to the
Renaissance school, declares that the fire which had destroyed the whole interior of the palace had
done this wall no more harm than the bite of a fly to an elephant. “Troveremo che el danno che ha
patito queste muraglie sarà conforme alla beccatura d’ una mosca fatta ad un elefante.”80

§ XI. And so in all the other palaces built at the time, consummate strength was joined with a
lightness of form and sparingness of material which rendered it eminently desirable that the eye should
be convinced, by every possible expedient, of the stability of the building; and these twisted pillars at
the angles are not among the least important means adopted for this purpose, for they seem to bind the
walls together as a cable binds a chest. In the Ducal Palace, where they are carried up the angle of an
unbroken wall forty feet high, they are divided into portions, gradually diminishing in length towards
the top, by circular bands or rings, set with the nail-head or dog-tooth ornament, vigorously projecting,
and giving the column nearly the aspect of the stalk of a reed; its diminishing proportions being exactly
arranged as they are by Nature in all jointed plants. At the top of the palace, like the wheat-stalk
branching into the ear of corn, it expands into a small niche with a pointed canopy, which joins with the
fantastic parapet in at once relieving, and yet making more notable by its contrast, the weight of massy
wall below. The arrangement is seen in the woodcut, Chap. VIII.; the angle shafts being slightly
exaggerated in thickness, together with their joints, as otherwise they would hardly have been
intelligible on so small a scale.

The Ducal Palace is peculiar in these niches at the angles, which throughout the rest of the city
appear on churches only; but some may perhaps have been removed by restorations, together with the
parapets with which they were associated.

Fig. XXIII.

§ XII. Of these roof parapets of Venice, it has been already noticed that the examples which remain
differ from those of all other cities of Italy in their purely ornamental character. (Chap. I. § XII.) They
are not battlements, properly so-called; still less machicolated cornices, such as crown the fortress
palaces of the great mainland nobles; but merely adaptations of the light and crown-like ornaments
which crest the walls of the Arabian mosque. Nor are even these generally used on the main walls of
the palaces themselves. They occur on the Ducal Palace, on the Casa d’ Oro, and, some years back,
were still standing on the Fondaco de’ Turchi; but the majority of the Gothic Palaces have the plain
dog-tooth cornice under the tiled projecting roof (Vol. I. Chap. XIV. § IV.); and the highly decorated
parapet is employed only on the tops of walls which surround courts or gardens, and which, without
such decoration, would have been utterly devoid of interest. Fig. XXIII. represents, at b, part of a
parapet of this kind which surrounds the courtyard of a palace in the Calle del Bagatin, between San G.
Grisostomo, and San Canzian: the whole is of brick, and the mouldings peculiarly sharp and varied; the
height of each separate pinnacle being about four feet, crowning a wall twelve or fifteen feet high: a
piece of the moulding which surrounds the quatrefoil is given larger in the figure at a, together with the
top of the small arch below, having the common Venetian dentil round it, and a delicate little moulding
with dog-tooth ornament to carry the flanks of the arch. The moulding of the brick is throughout sharp
and beautiful in the highest degree. One of the most curious points about it is the careless way in which
the curved outlines of the pinnacles are cut into the plain brickwork, with no regard whatever to the
places of its joints. The weather of course wears the bricks at the exposed joints, and jags the outline a
little; but the work has stood, evidently from the fourteenth century, without sustaining much harm.

§ XIII. This parapet may be taken as a general type of the wall-parapet of Venice in the Gothic period;
some being much less decorated, and others much more richly: the most beautiful in Venice is in the
little Calle, opening on the Campo and Traghetto San Samuele; it has delicately carved devices in stone
let into each pinnacle.

The parapets of the palaces themselves were lighter and more fantastic, consisting of narrow lance-
like spires of marble, set between the broader pinnacles, which were in such cases generally carved into
the form of a fleur-de-lis: the French word gives the reader the best idea of the form, though he must

remember that this use of the lily for the parapets has nothing to do with France, but is the carrying out
of the Byzantine system of floral ornamentation, which introduced the outline of the lily everywhere;
so that I have found it convenient to call its most beautiful capitals, the lily capitals of St. Mark’s. But
the occurrence of this flower, more distinctly than usual, on the battlements of the Ducal Palace, was
the cause of some curious political speculation in the year 1511, when a piece of one of these
battlements was shaken down by the great earthquake of that year. Sanuto notes in his diary that “the
piece that fell was just that which bore the lily,” and records sundry sinister anticipations, founded on
this important omen, of impending danger to the adverse French power. As there happens, in the Ducal
Palace, to be a joint in the pinnacles which exactly separates the “part which bears the lily” from that
which is fastened to the cornice, it is no wonder that the omen proved fallacious.

§ XIV. The decorations of the parapet were completed by attaching gilded balls of metal to the
extremities of the leaves of the lilies, and of the intermediate spires, so as literally to form for the wall a
diadem of silver touched upon the points with gold; the image being rendered still more distinct in the
Casa d’ Oro, by variation in the height of the pinnacles, the highest being in the centre of the front.

Very few of these light roof parapets now remain; they are, of course, the part of the building which
dilapidation first renders it necessary to remove. That of the Ducal Palace, however, though often, I
doubt not, restored, retains much of the ancient form, and is exceedingly beautiful, though it has no
appearance from below of being intended for protection, but serves only, by its extreme lightness, to
relieve the eye when wearied by the breadth of wall beneath; it is nevertheless a most serviceable
defence for any person walking along the edge of the roof. It has some appearance of insecurity, owing
to the entire independence of the pieces of stone composing it, which, though of course fastened by
iron, look as if they stood balanced on the cornice like the pillars of Stonehenge; but I have never heard
of its having been disturbed by anything short of an earthquake; and, as we have seen, even the great
earthquake of 1511, though it much injured the Gorne, or battlements at the Casa d’ Oro, and threw
down several statues at St. Mark’s,81 only shook one lily from the brow of the Ducal Palace.

§ XV. Although, however, these light and fantastic forms
appear to have been universal in the battlements meant Fig. XXIV.

primarily for decoration, there was another condition of
parapet altogether constructed for the protection of persons
walking on the roofs or in the galleries of the churches, and
from these more substantial and simple defences, the
Balconies, to which the Gothic palaces owe half of their
picturesque effect, were immediately derived; the balcony
being, in fact, nothing more than a portion of such roof
parapets arranged round a projecting window-sill sustained
on brackets, as in the central example of the annexed figure.
We must, therefore, examine these defensive balustrades and
the derivative balconies consecutively.

§ XVI. Obviously, a parapet with an unbroken edge, upon
which the arm may rest (a condition above noticed, Vol. I. p.
157., as essential to the proper performance of its duty), can
be constructed only in one of three ways. It must either be (1)
of solid stone, decorated, if at all, by mere surface sculpture,
as in the uppermost example in Fig. XXIV., above; or (2)
pierced into some kind of tracery, as in the second; or (3)
composed of small pillars carrying a level bar of stone, as in
the third; this last condition being, in a diseased and swollen
form, familiar to us in the balustrades of our bridges.82

§ XVII. (1.) Of these three kinds, the first, which is
employed for the pulpit at Torcello and in the nave of St.
Mark’s, whence the uppermost example is taken, is beautiful
when sculpture so rich can be employed upon it; but it is
liable to objection, first, because it is heavy and unlike a
parapet when seen from below; and, secondly, because it is
inconvenient in use. The position of leaning over a balcony
becomes cramped and painful if long continued, unless the
foot can be sometimes advanced beneath the ledge on which
the arm leans, i. e. between the balusters or traceries, which
of course cannot be done in the solid parapet: it is also more
agreeable to be able to see partially down through the penetrations, than to be obliged to lean far over
the edge. The solid parapet was rarely used in Venice after the earlier ages.

§ XVIII. (2.) The Traceried Parapet is chiefly used in the Gothic of the North, from which the above
example, in the Casa Contarini Fasan, is directly derived. It is, when well designed, the richest and
most beautiful of all forms, and many of the best buildings of France and Germany are dependent for
half their effect upon it; its only fault being a slight tendency to fantasticism. It was never frankly
received in Venice, where the architects had unfortunately returned to the Renaissance forms before the
flamboyant parapets were fully developed in the North; but, in the early stage of the Renaissance, a
kind of pierced parapet was employed, founded on the old Byzantine interwoven traceries; that is to
say, the slab of stone was pierced here and there with holes, and then an interwoven pattern traced on
the surface round them. The difference in system will be understood in a moment by comparing the
uppermost example in the figure at the side, which is a Northern parapet from the Cathedral of
Abbeville, with the lowest, from a secret chamber in the Casa Foscari. It will be seen that the Venetian
one is far more simple and severe, yet singularly piquant, the black penetrations telling sharply on the
plain broad surface. Far inferior in beauty, it has yet one point of superiority to that of Abbeville, that it
proclaims itself more definitely to be stone. The other has rather the look of lace.

The intermediate figure is a panel of the main balcony of the
Ducal Palace, and is introduced here as being an exactly transitional Fig. XXV.

condition between the Northern and Venetian types. It was built
when the German Gothic workmen were exercising considerable
influence over those in Venice, and there was some chance of the
Northern parapet introducing itself. It actually did so, as above
shown, in the Casa Contarini Fasan, but was for the most part
stoutly resisted and kept at bay by the Byzantine form, the lowest in
the last figure, until that form itself was displaced by the common,
vulgar, Renaissance baluster; a grievous loss, for the severe pierced
type was capable of a variety as endless as the fantasticism of our
own Anglo-Saxon manuscript ornamentation.

§ XIX. (3.) The Baluster Parapet. Long before the idea of tracery
had suggested itself to the minds either of Venetian or any other
architects, it had, of course, been necessary to provide protection
for galleries, edges of roofs, &c.; and the most natural form in
which such protection could be obtained was that of a horizontal bar or hand-rail, sustained upon short
shafts or balusters, as in Fig. XXIV. p. 243. This form was, above all others, likely to be adopted where
variations of Greek or Roman pillared architecture were universal in the larger masses of the building;
the parapet became itself a small series of columns, with capitals and architraves; and whether the
cross-bar laid upon them should be simply horizontal, and in contact with their capitals, or sustained by
mimic arches, round or pointed, depended entirely on the system adopted in the rest of the work. Where
the large arches were round, the small balustrade arches would be so likewise; where those were
pointed, these would become so in sympathy with them.

§ XX. Unfortunately, wherever a balcony or parapet is used in an inhabited house, it is, of course, the
part of the structure which first suffers from dilapidation, as well as that of which the security is most
anxiously cared for. The main pillars of a casement may stand for centuries unshaken under the steady
weight of the superincumbent wall, but the cement and various insetting of the balconies are sure to be
disturbed by the irregular pressures and impulses of the persons leaning on them; while, whatever
extremity of decay may be allowed in other parts of the building, the balcony, as soon as it seems
dangerous, will assuredly be removed or restored. The reader will not, if he considers this, be surprised
to hear that, among all the remnants of the Venetian domestic architecture of the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries, there is not a single instance of the original balconies being preserved. The palace
mentioned below (§ XXXII.), in the piazza of the Rialto, has, indeed, solid slabs of stone between its
shafts, but I cannot be certain that they are of the same period; if they are, this is the only existing
example of the form of protection employed for casements during this transitional period, and it cannot
be reasoned from as being the general one.

§ XXI. It is only, therefore, in the churches of Torcello, Murano, and St. Mark’s, that the ancient forms
of gallery defence may still be seen. At Murano, between the pillars of the apse, a beautiful balustrade
is employed, of which a single arch is given in the Plate opposite, fig. 4, with its section, fig. 5.; and at
St. Mark’s, a noble round-arched parapet, with small pillars of precisely the same form as those of

Murano, but shorter, and bound at the angles into groups of four by the serpentine knot so often
occurring in Lombardic work, runs round the whole exterior of the lower story of the church, and round
great part of its interior galleries, alternating with the more fantastic form, fig. 6. In domestic
architecture, the remains of the original balconies begin to occur first in the beginning of the fourteenth
century, when the round arch had entirely disappeared; and the parapet consists, almost without
exception, of a series of small trefoiled arches, cut boldly through a bar of stone which rests upon the
shafts, at first very simple, and generally adorned with a cross at the point of each arch, as in fig. 7 in
the last Plate, which gives the angle of such a balcony on a large scale; but soon enriched into the
beautiful conditions, figs. 2 and 3, and sustained on brackets formed of lions’ heads, as seen in the
central example of their entire effect, fig. 1.

XIII.

BALCONIES.

§ XXII. In later periods, the round arches return; then the interwoven Byzantine form; and finally, as
above noticed, the common English or classical balustrade; of which, however, exquisite examples, for
grace and variety of outline, are found designed in the backgrounds of Paul Veronese. I could willingly