Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/sevenlampsofarch00rusk_1 PLATE IX.— { Frontispiece — Vol. V.) Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto at Florence THE Seven Lamps of Architecture ALSO LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE SESAME AND LILIES— UNTO THIS LAST THE QUEEN OF THE AIR THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. AUTHOR OF “THE STONES OF VENICE,” “ THE CROWN OF WILD OLlVB,’ !> “ SESAME AND LILIES,” ETC. * BOSTON ALDINE BOOK PUBLISHING CO. PUBLISHERS . , .. . . , CONTENTS SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE, Preface Introduction . chapter I. The Lamp of Sacrifice The Lamp of Truth The Lamp of Power CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. The Lamp of Beauty . The Lamp of Life . The Lamp of Memory CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. The Lamp of Obedience ; Notes 5 9 *5 34 69 100 142 167 188 203 LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING Preface ........ 213 Lecture I. . . . . . . .217 Lecture II. ...... 248 Addenda to Lectures I. and II. . ... 270 Lecture III. Turner and his Works . . . 287 Lecture IV. Pre-Raphaelitism . . . . .311 Addenda to Lecture IV. ..... 334 THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE. An Inquiry into the Study of Architecture . . 33c LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE PLATE PAGE I. Ornaments from Rouen, St. Lo, and Venice , 33 II. Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy . 55 III. Traceries from Caen, Bayeux, Rouen and Beavais 60 IV. Intersectional Mouldings 66 V. Capital from the Lower Arcade of the Doge’s Palace, Venice 88 VI. Arch from the Facade of the Church of San Michele at Lucca 90 VII. Pierced Ornaments from Lisieux, Bayeux, Verona, and Padua 93 VIII. Window from the Ca’ Foscari, Venice . . 95 IX. Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto, at Flor- ence. Frontispiece , X. Traceries and Mouldings from Rouen and Salisbury 122 XI. Balcony in the Campo, St. Benedetto, Venice . 131 XII. Fragments from Abbeville, Lucca, Venice and Pisa 149 XIII. Portions of an Arcade on the South Side of the Cathedral of Ferrara 161 XIV. Sculptures from the Cathedral of Rouen . . 165 LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING Plate I. Figs, i, 3 and 5. Illustrative Diagrams . 219 “ II. “ 2. Window in Oakham Castle . . .221 “ III. “ 4 AND 6. Spray OF ASH-TREE, AND IMPROVEMENT of the same on Greek Principles . 226 LATE IV. Fig. 7. Window in Dumblane Cathedral 231 “ V. u 8. Medieval Turret 235 “ VI. “ 9 and 10. Lombardic Towers . 238 “ VII. “ 11 and 12. Spires at Contances and Rouen 240 “ VIII. “ 13 and 14. Illustrative Diagrams . 2 S 3 “ IX. <« 15, Sculpture at Lyons .... 254 “ X. u 16. Niche at Amiens 255 “ XI. «< 1 7 and 18. Tiger’s Head, and improvement of the same on Greek Principles 258 “ XII. “ 19. Garret Window in Hotel de Bourgthe- • roude 265 “ XIII. “ 20 and 21. Trees, as drawn in the thir- teenth century .... 294 “ XIV. (4 22. Rocks, as drawn by the school of Leon- ardo da Vinci 296 “ XV. “ 23. Boughs of Trees, after Titian 298 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE PREFACE. The memoranda which form the basis of the following Essay have been thrown together during the preparation of one of the sections of the third volume of “ Modern Paint- ers/’ * I once thought of giving them a more expanded form ; but their utility, such as it may be, would probably be dimin- ished by farther delay in their publication, more than it would be increased by greater care in their arrangement. Obtained in every case by personal observation, there may be among them some details valuable even to the experienced architect ; but with respect to the opinions founded upon them I must be prepared to bear the charge of impertinence which can hardly but attach to the writer who assumes a dogmatical tone in speaking of an art he has never practised. There are, how- ever, cases in which men feel too keenly to be silent, and per- haps too strongly to be wrong ; I have been forced into this impertinence ; and have suffered too much from the destruc- tion or neglect of the architecture I best loved, and from the erection of that which I cannot love, to reason cautiously re- * The inordinate delay in the appearance of that supplementary vol- ume has, indeed, been chiefly owing to the necessity under which the writer felt himself, of obtaining as many memoranda as possible of mediaeval buildings in Italy and Normandy, now in process of destruction, before that destruction should be consummated by the Restorer or Rev- olutionist His whole time has been lately occupied in taking drawings from one side of buildings, of which masons wei’e knocking down the other ; nor can he yet pledge himself to any time for the publication of the conclusion of “Modern Paintei-s;” he can only promise that its delay shall not be owing to any indolence on his part. 6 P HE FACE. specting the modesty of my opposition to the principles which have induced the scorn of the one, or directed the design of the other. And I have been the less careful to modify the confidence of my statements of principles, because in the midst of the opposition and uncertainty of our architectural systems, it seems to me that there is something grateful in any positive opinion, though in many points wrong, as even weeds are use- ful that grow f on a bank of sand. Every apology is, however, due to the reader, for the hasty and imperfect execution of the plates. Having much more serious work in hand, and desiring merely to render them illustrative of my meaning, I have sometimes very completely failed even of that humble aim ; and the text, being generally written before the illustration was completed, sometimes naively describes as sublime or beautiful, features which the plate represents by a blot. I shall be grateful if the reader will in such cases refer the expressions of praise to the Archi- tecture, and not to the illustration. So far, however, as their coarseness and rudeness admit, the plates are valuable ; being either copies of memoranda made upon the spot, or (Plates IX. and XI.) enlarged and adapted from Daguerreotypes, taken under my own superin- tendence. Unfortunately, the great distance from the ground of the window which is the subject of Plate IX. renders even the Daguerreotype indistinct ; and I cannot answer for the accuracy of any of the mosaic details, more especially of those which surround the window", and which I rather imagine, in the original, to be sculptured in relief. The general propor- tions are, however, studiously preserved ; the spirals of the shafts are counted, and the effect of the wdiole is as near that of the thing itself, as is necessary for the purposes of illustra- tion for which the plate is given. For the accuracy of the rest I can answer, even to the cracks in the stones, and the number of them ; and though the looseness of the drawing, and the picturesque character which is necessarily given by an endeavor to draw old buildings as they actually appear, may perhaps diminish their credit for architectural veracity, they will do so unjustly. PREFACE. 7 The system of lettering adopted in the few instances in which sections have been given, appears somewhat obscure in the references, but it is convenient upon the whole. The line which marks the direction of any section is noted, if the sec- tion be symmetrical, by a single letter ; and the section itself by the same letter with a line over it, a. — a. But if the sec- lion be unsymmetrical, its direction is noted by two letters, a. a. a 2 at its extremities ; and the actual section by the same letters with lines over them, a. a. a a , at the corresponding ex- tremities. The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small number of buildings to which reference has been made. But it is to be remembered that the following chapters pretend only to be a statement of principles, illustrated each by one or two examples, not an essay on European architecture ; and those examples I have generally taken either from the buildings which I love best, or from the schools of architecture which, it appeared to me, have been less carefully described than they deserved. I could as fully, though not with the accuracy and certainty derived from personal observation, have illustrated the principles subsequently advanced, from the architecture of Egypt, India, or Spain, as from that to which the reader will find his attention chiefly directed, the Italian Romanesque and Gothic. But my affections, as well as my experience, led me to that line of richly varied and magnificently intellec- tual schools, which reaches, like a high watershed of Christian architecture, from the Adriatic to the Northumbrian seas, bordered by the impure schools of Spain on the one hand, and of Germany on the other : and as culminating points and centres of this chain, I have considered, first, the cities of the Yal d’Arno, as representing the Italian Romanesque and pure Italian Gothic ; Venice and Verona as representing the Italian Gothic colored by Byzantine elements ; and Rouen, with the associated Norman cities, Caen, Bayeux, and Coutances, as rep- resenting the entire range of Northern architecture from the Romanesque to Flamboyant. I could have -wished to have given more examples from our early English Gothic ; but I have always found it impossible 8 PEE FACE. to work in the cold interiors of our cathedrals, while the dailj services, lamps, and fumigation of those upon the Continent, render them perfectly safe. In the course of last summer I undertook a pilgrimage to the English Shrines, and began with Salisbury, where the consequence of a few days’ work was a state of weakened health, which I may be permitted to name among the causes of the slightness and imperfection of the present Essay. INTRODUCTORY. Some years ago, in conversation with an artist whose works* perhaps, alone, in the present day, unite perfection of drawing with resplendence of color, the writer made some inquiry re- specting the general means by which this latter quality was most easily to be attained. The reply was as concise as it was comprehensive — *■ Know what you have to do, and do it ” — comprehensive, not only as regarded the branch of art to which it temporarily applied, but as expressing the great principle of success in every direction of human effort ; for I believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either in- sufficiency of means or impatience of labor, than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done ; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves. And this is the more cautiously to be remem- bered ; because, while a man’s sense and conscience, aided by Kevelation, are always enough, if earnestly directed, to enable him to discover what is right, neither his sense, nor conscience, nor feeling, are ever enough, because they are not intended, to determine for him what is possible. He knows neither his own strength nor that of his fellows, neither the exact depend- ence to be placed on his allies nor resistance to be expected from his opponents. These are questions respecting which passion may warp his conclusions, and ignorance must limit 10 INTRODUCTORY. them ; but it is his own fault if either interfere with the ap* prehension of duty, or the acknowledgment of right. And, as far as I have taken cognizance of the causes of the many fail- ures to which the efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to me more largely to spring from this single error than from all others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, re- lations of capability, chance, resistance, and inconvenience, in- variably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our powers should reconcile us too easily to our shortcomings, and even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural utmost is in itself well, or, in other words, that the necessity of offences renders them inoffensive. What is true of human polity seems to me not less so of the distinctively political art of Architecture. I have long felt con- vinced of the necessity, in order to its progress, of some de- termined effort to extricate from the confused mass of partial traditions and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during imperfect or restricted practice, those large principles of right which are applicable to every stage and style of it. Uniting the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity does soul and body, it shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity of the reflective, element. This tendency, like every other form of materialism, is increasing with the advance of the age ; and the only laws which resist it, based upon partial precedents, and already regarded with disrespect as decrepit, if not with defiance as tyrannical, are evidently in- applicable to the new forms and functions of the art, which the necessities of the day demand. How many these necessities may become, cannot be conjectured ; they rise, strange and impatient, out of every modern shadow of change. How far it may be possible to meet them without a sacrifice of the es- sential characters of architectural art, cannot be determined by specific calculation or observance. There is no law, no INTRODUCTORY. 11 principle, based on past practice, which may not be overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new condition, or the inven- tion of a new material ; and the most rational, if not the only, mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all that is systematic and consistent in our practice, or of ancient au- thority in our judgment, is to cease for a little while, our en- deavors to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses, restraints, or requirements ; and endeavor to determine, as the guides of every effort, some constant, general, and irre- fragable laws of right — laws, which based upon man’s nature, not upon his knowledge, may possess so far the unchangeable- ness of the one, as that neither the increase nor imperfection of the other may be able to assault or invalidate them. There are, perhaps, no such laws peculiar to any one art. Their range necessarily includes the entire horizon of man’s action. But they have modified forms and operations belong- ing to each of his pursuits, and the extent of their authority cannot surely be considered as a diminution of its weight. Those peculiar aspects of them which belong to the first of the arts, I have endeavored to trace in the following pages ; and since, if truly stated, they must necessarily be, not only safe- guards against every form of error, but sources of every meas- ure of success, I do not think that I claim too much for them in calling them the Lamps of Architecture, nor that it is indo- lence, in endeavoring to ascertain the true nature and nobility of their fire, to refuse to enter into any curious or special ques- tioning of the innumerable hindrances by which their light has been too often distorted or overpowered. Had this farther examination been attempted, the work would have become certainly more invidious, and perhaps less useful, as liable to errors which are avoided by the present simplicity of its plan. Simple though it be, its extent is too great to admit of any adequate accomplishment, unless by a devotion of time which the writer did not feel justified in with- drawing from branches of inquiry in which the prosecution of works already undertaken has engaged him. Both arrange- ments and nomenclature are those of convenience rather than of system ; the one is arbitrary and the other illogical : nor is 12 INTRODUCTORY. it pretended tliat all, or even the greater number of, the prim ciples necessary to the well-being of the art, are included in the inquiry. Many, however, of considerable importance will be found to develope themselves incidentally from those more specially brought forward. Graver apology is necessary for an apparently graver fault. It has been just said, that there is no branch of human work whose constant laws have not close analogy with those which govern every other mode of man’s exertion. But, more than this, exactly as we reduce to greater simplicity and surety any one group of these practical laws, we shall find them passing the mere condition of connection or analogy, and becoming the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws which govern the moral world. However mean or inconsiderable the act, there is something in the well doing of it, which has fellowship with the noblest forms of manly virtue ; and the truth, decision, and temperance, which we reverently regard as honorable conditions of the spiritual being, have a representative or derivative influence over the works of the hand, the movements of the frame, and the action of the intellect. And as thus every action, down even to the drawing of a line or utterance of a syllable, is capable of a peculiar dignity in the manner of it, which we sometimes express by saying it is truly done (as a line or tone is true), so also it is capable of dignity still higher in the motive of it. For there is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled therefore ; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God. Hence George Herbert — “A servant witli this clause Makes drudgery divine ; Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and the action fine. ” Therefore, in the pressing or recommending of any act of manner of acting, we have choice of two separate lines of ar- INTRODUCTORY. 13 gurnent *. one based on representation of the expediency or inherent value of the work, which is often small, and always disputable ; the other based on proofs of its relations to the higher orders of human virtue, and of its acceptableness, so far as it goes, to Him who is the origin of virtue. The former is commonly the more persuasive method, the latter assuredly the more conclusive ; only it is liable to give offence, as if there were irreverence in adducing considerations so weighty in treating subjects of small temporal importance. I believe, however, that no error is more thoughtless than this. We treat God with irreverence by banishing Him from our thoughts, not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot bo troubled with small things. There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or in- sult Him by taking it into our own hands ; and what is true of the Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use ifc most reverently when most habitually : our insolence is in ever acting without reference to it, our true honoring of it is in its universal application. I have been blamed for the familiar introduction of its sacred words. I am grieved to have given pain by so doing ; but my excuse must be my wish that those words were made the ground of every argument and the test of every action. We have them not often enough on our lips, nor deeply enough in our memories, nor loyally enough in our lives. The snow, the vapor, and the stormy wind fulfil His word. Are our acts and thoughts lighter and wilder than these — that we should forget it ? I have therefore ventured, at the risk of giving to some passages the appearance of irreverence, to take the higher line of argument wherever it appeared clearly traceable : and this, I would ask the reader especially to observe, not merely because I think it the best mode of reaching ultimate truth, still less because I think the subject of more importance than many others ; but because every subject should surely, at a period like the present, be taken up in this spirit, or not at all. The aspect of the years that approach us is as solemn as it is full of mystery ; and the weight of evil against which we 14 INTRODUCTORY. have to contend, is increasing like the letting out of water. It is no time for the idleness of metaphysics, or the entertain- ment of the arts. The blasphemies of the earth are sounding louder, and its miseries heaped heavier every day ; and if, in the midst of the exertion which every good man is called upon to put forth for their repression or relief, it is lawful to ask for a thought, for a moment, for a lifting of the finger, in any direction but that of the immediate and overwhelming need, it is at least incumbent upon us to approach the questions in which we would engage him, in the spirit which has become the habit of his mind, and in the hope that neither his zeal nor his usefulness may be checked by the withdrawal of an hour which has shown him how even those things which seemed mechanical, indifferent, or contemptible, depend for their perfection upon the acknowledgment of the sacred prin- ciples of faith, truth, and obedience, for which it has become the occupation of his life to contend. THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE, CHAPTER I. THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. I. Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight or them contributes to liis mental health, power and pleasure. It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distin- guish carefully between Architecture and Building. • To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church build- ing, house building, ship building, and coach building. That one edifice stands, another floats, and another is suspended on iron springs, makes no difference in the nature of the art, if so it may be called, of building or edification. The persons who profess that art, are severally builders, ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their work may justify ; but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of what it erects ; and it is no more architecture which raises a church, or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a required number of persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is architecture which makes a carriage com- modious or a ship swift. I do not, of course, mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately, applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture) ; but in that sense architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the confusion which would arise, and has often arisen, from 16 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. extending principles which belong altogether to building, into the sphere of architecture proper. Let us, therefore, at once confine the name to that a?’t which, taking up and admitting, as conditions of its working the necessities and common uses of the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but other* wise unnecessary. Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws architectural which determine the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, that is Architecture. It would be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or machicolations architectural features, so long as they consist only of an advanced gallery supported on projecting masses, with open intervals beneath for offence. But if these projecting masses be carved beneath into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, that is Architecture. It may not be always easy to draw the line so sharply and simply, because there are few buildings which have not some pretence or color of being architectural ; neither can there be any architecture which is not based on building, nor any good architecture which is not based on good building ; but it is perfectly easy and very necessary to keep the ideas dis- tinct, and to understand fully that Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use. I say common ; because a building raised to the honor of God, or in memory of men, has surely a use to which its architectural adornment fits it ; but not a use which limits, by any inevitable necessities, its plan or details. II. Architecture proper, then, naturally arranges itself un- der five heads : — Devotional ; including all buildings raised for God’s ser- vice or honor. Memorial ; including both monuments and tombs. Civil ; including every edifice raised by nations or societies, for purposes of common business or pleasure. Military ; including all private and public architecture of defence. THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 1 ? Domestic ; including every rank and kind of dwelling-place. Now, of the principles which I would endeavor to develope, while all must be, as I have said, applicable to every stage and style of the art, some, and especially those which are exciting rather than directing, have necessarily fuller reference to one kind of building than another ; and among these I would place first that spirit which, having influence in all, has nevertheless such especial reference to devotional and memorial architec- ture— the spirit which offers for such work precious things sim- ply because they are precious ; not as being necessary to the building, but as an offering, surrendering, and sacrifice of what is to ourselves desirable. It seems to me, not only that this feeling is in most cases wholly wanting in those who for- ward the devotional buildings of the present day ; but that it would even be regarded as an ignorant, dangerous, or perhaps criminal principle by many among us. I have not space to enter into dispute of fill the various objections which may be urged against it — they are many and spacious ; but I may, perhaps, ask the reader’s patience while I set down those sim- ple reasons which cause me to believe it a good and j ust feel- ing, and as well-pleasing to God and honorable in men, as it is beyond all dispute necessary to the production of any great work in the kind with which we are at present concerned, III. Now, first, to define this Lamp, or Spirit of Sacrifice, clearly. I have said that it prompts us to the offering of precious things merely because they are precious, not because they are useful or necessary. It is a spirit, for instance, which of two marbles, equally beautiful, applicable and durable, would choose the more costly because it was so, and of two kinds of decoration, equally effective, would choose the more elaborate because it was so, in order that it might in the same compass present more cost and more thought. It is therefore most unreasoning and enthusiastic, and perhaps best nega- tively defined, as the opposite of the prevalent feeling of modem times, which desires to produce the largest results at the least cost. Of this feeling, then, there are two distinct forms : the first, the wish to exercise self-denial for the sake of self-discipline 2 18 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. merely, a wish acted upon in the abandonment of t hin gs loved or desired, there being no direct call or purpose to be answered by so doing ; and the second, the desire to honor or please some one else by the costliness of the sacrifice. The practice is, in the first case, either private or public ; but most frequently, and perhaps most properly, private ; while, in the latter case, the act is commonly, and with greatest advantage, public. Now, it cannot but at first appear futile to assert the expediency of self-denial for its own sake, when, for so many sakes, it is every day necessary to a far greater degree than any of us practise it. But I believe it is just because we do not enough acknowledge or contemplate it as a good in itself, that we are apt to fail in its duties when they become impera- tive, and to calculate, with some partiality, whether the good proposed to others measures or warrants the amount of griev- ance to ourselves, instead of accepting with gladness the op- portunity of sacrifice as a personal advantage. Be this as it may, it is not necessary to insist upon the matter here ; since there are always higher and more useful channels of self- sacrifice, for those who choose to practise it, than any con- nected with the arts. While in its second branch, that which is especially con- cerned with the arts, the justice of the feeling is still more doubtful ; it depends on our answer to the broad question, Can the Deity be indeed honored by the presentation to Him of any material objects of value, or by any direction of zeal or wisdom which is not immediately beneficial to men ? For, observe, it is not now the question whether the fair- ness and majesty of a building may or may not answer any moral purpose ; it is not the result of labor in any sort of which we are speaking, but the bare and mere costliness — the substance and labor and time themselves : are these, we ask, independently of their result, acceptable offerings to God, and considered by Him as doing Him honor ? So long as we re- fer this question to the decision of feeling, or of conscience, or of reason merely, it will be contradictorily or imperfectly answered ; it admits of entire answer only when we have met another and a far different question, whether the Bible be THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 19 indeed one book or two, and whether the character of God revealed in the Old Testament be other than His character revealed in the New. IV. Now, it is a most secure truth, that, although the par- ticular ordinances divinely appointed for special purposes at any given period of man’s history, may be by the same divine authority abrogated at another, it is impossible that any char- acter of God, appealed to or described in any ordinance past or present, can ever be changed, or understood as changed, by the abrogation of that ordinance. God is one and the same, and is pleased or displeased by the same things for ever, although one part of His pleasure may be expressed at one time rather than another, and although the mode in which His pleasure is to be consulted may be by Him graciously modified to the circumstances of men. Thus, for instance, it was necessary that, in order to the understanding by man of the scheme of Redemption, that scheme should be foreshown from the beginning by the type of bloody sacrifice. But God had no more pleasure in such sacrifice in the time of Moses than He has now ; He never accepted as a propitiation for sin any sacrifice but the single one in prospective ; and that we may not entertain any shadow of doubt on this subject, the worthlessness of all other sacrifice than this is proclaimed at the very time when typical sacrifice was most imperatively de- manded. God was a spirit, and could be worshipped only in spirit and in truth, as singly and exclusively when every day brought its claim of typical and material service or offering, as now when He asks for none but that of the heart. So, therefore, it is a most safe and sure principle that, if in the manner of performing any rite at any time, circumstances can be traced which we are either told, or may legitimately conclude, pleased God at that time, those same circumstances will please Him at all times, in the performance of all rites or offices to which they may be attached in like manner ; unless it has been afterwards revealed that, for some special purpose, it is now His will that such circumstances should be with- drawn. And this argument will have all the more force if it can be shown that such conditions were not essential to the 20 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. completeness of the rite in its human uses and bearings, and only were added to it as being in themselves pleasing to God. Y. Now, was it necessary to the completeness, as a type, of the Levitical sacrifice, or to its utility as an explanation of divine purposes, that it should cost anything to the person in whose behalf it was offered ? On the contrary, the sacrifice which it foreshowed was to be God’s free gift ; and the cost of, or difficulty of obtaining, the sacrificial type, could only render that type in a measure obscure, and less expressive of the offering which God would in the end provide for all men. Yet this costliness was generally a condition of the accept- ableness of the sacrifice. “ Neither will I offer unto the Lord rny God of that which doth cost me nothing.” * That costli- ness, therefore, must be an acceptable condition in all human offerings at all times ; for if it was pleasing to God once, it must please Him always, unless directly forbidden by Him afterwards, which it has never been. Again, was it necessary to the typical perfection of the Levitical offering, that it should be the best of the flock? Doubtless the spotlessness of the sacrifice renders it more ex- pressive to the Christian mind ; but was it because so expres- sive that it was actually, and in so many words, demanded by God ? Not at all. It was demanded by Him expressly on the same grounds on which an earthly governor would demand it, as a testimony of respect. “ Offer it now unto thy governor.” And the less valuable offering was rejected, not because it did not image Christ, nor fulfil the purposes of sacrifice, but be- cause it indicated a feeling that would grudge the best of its possessions to Him who gave them ; and because it was a bold dishonoring of God in the sight of man. Whence it may be infallibly concluded, that in whatever offerings we may now see reason to present unto God (I say not wdiat these may be), a condition of their acceptableness will be now, as it was then, that they should be the best of their kind. YI. But farther, was it necessary to the carrying out of the Mosaical system, that there should be either art or splendor in the form or services of the tabernacle or temple ? Was it * 2 Sam. xxiv. 24. Deut. xvi. 16, 17. f Mai. i. 8. THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. m necessary to the perfection of any one of their typical offices, that there should be that hanging of blue, and purple, and scarlet? those taches of brass and sockets of silver? that working in cedar and overlaying with gold ? One thing at least is evident : there was a deep and awful danger in it ; a danger that the God whom they so worshipped, might be as> soeiated in the minds of the serfs of Egypt with the gods tc whom they had seen similar gifts offered and similar honors paid. The probability, in our times, of fellowship with the feelings of the idolatrous Romanist is absolutely as nothing compared with the danger to the Israelite of a sympathy with the idolatrous Egyptian ; 1 no speculative, no unproved dan- ger ; but proved fatally by their fall during a month’s aban- donment to their own will ; a fall into the most servile idol- atry ; yet marked by such offerings to their idol as their leader was, in the close sequel, instructed to bid them offer to God. This danger was imminent, perpetual, and of the most awful kind : it was the one against which God made provision, not only by commandments, by threatenings, by promises, the most urgent, repeated, and impressive ; but by temporary ordinances of a severity so terrible as almost to dim for a time, in the eyes of His people, His attribute of mercy. The principal object of every instituted law of that Theocracy, of every judgment sent forth in its vindication, was to mark to the people His hatred of idolatry ; a hatred written under their advancing steps, in the blood of the Ganaanite, and more sternly still in the darkness of their own desolation, when the children and the sucklings swooned in the streets of Jerusalem, and the lion tracked his prey in the dust of Samaria.* Yet against this mortal danger provision was not made in one way (to man’s thoughts the simplest, the most natural, the most effective), by withdrawing from the worship of the Divine Being whatever could delight the sense, or shape the imagination, or limit the idea of Deity to place. This one way God refused, demanding for Himself such honors, and accepting for Himself such local dwelling, as had been paid and dedicated to idol gods by heathen worshippers * Lam. ii. 11 . 2 Kings xvii, 25. 22 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. and for what reason ? Was the glory of the tabernacle neo« essary to set forth or image His divine glory to the minds of His people? What! purple or scarlet necessary to the peo- ple who had seen the great river of Egypt run scarlet to the sea, under His condemnation? What! golden lamp and cherub necessary for those who had seen the fires of heaven falling like a mantle on Mount Sinai, and its golden courts opened to receive their mortal lawgiver ? What ! silver clasp and fillet necessary when they had seen the silver waves of the Red Sea clasp in their arched hollows the corpses of the horse and his rider? Nay— not so. There was but one rea- son, and that an eternal one ; that as the covenant that He made with men was accompanied with some external sign of its continuance, and of His remembrance of it, so the accept- ance of that covenant might be marked and signified by use, in some external sign of their love and obedience, and surren- der of themselves and theirs to His will ; and that their grat- itude to Him, and continual remembrance of Him, might have at once their expression and their enduring testimony in the presentation to Him, not only of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not only of the fruits of the earth and the tithe of time, but of all treasures of wisdom and beauty ; of the thought that invents, and the hand that labors ; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone ; of the strength of iron, and of the light of gold. And let us not now lose sight of this broad and unabrogated principle — I might say, incapable of being abrogated, so long as men shall receive earthly gifts from God. Of ail that they have His tithe must be rendered to Him, or in so far and in so much He is forgotten : of the skill and of the treasure, of the strength and of the mind, of the time and of the toil, of- fering must be made reverently ; and if there be any differ- ence between the Levitical and the Christian offering, it is that the latter may be just so much the wider in its range as it is less typical in its meaning, as it is thankful instead of sacrificial. There can be no excuse accepted because the Deity does not now visibly dwell in His temple ; if He is in- visible it is only through our failing faith : nor any excuse TEE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 23 because other calls are more immediate or more sacred ; this ought to be done, and not the other left undone. Yet this objection, as frequent as feeble, must be more specifically an- swered. VH. It has been said — it ought always to be said, for it is true — that a better and more honorable offering is made to our Master in ministry to the poor, in extending the knowledge of His name, in the practice of the virtues by which that name is hallowed, than in material presents to His temple. Assur- edly it is so : woe to all who think that any other kind or man- ner of offering may in any wise take the place of these ! Do the people need place to pray, and calls to hear His word ? Then it is no time for smoothing pillars or carving pulpits ; let us have enough first of walls and roofs. Do the people need teaching from house to house, and bread from day to day? Then they are deacons and ministers we want, not architects. I insist on this, I plead for this ; but let us ex- amine ourselves, and see if this be indeed the reason for our backwardness in the lesser work. The question is not between God’s house and His poor : it is not between God’s house and His Gospel. It is between God’s house and ours. Have we no tesselated colors on our floors ? no frescoed fancies on our roofs ? no niched statuary in our corridors ? no gilded furni- ture in our chambers ? no costly stones in our cabinets ? Has even the tithe of these been offered ? They are, or they ought to be, the signs that enough has been devoted to the great purposes of human stewardship, and that there remains to us what we can spend in luxury ; but there is a greater and prouder luxury than this selfish one — that of bringing a por- tion of such things as these into sacred service, and present- ing them for a memorial * that our pleasure as well as our toil has been hallowed by the remembrance of Him who gave both the strength and the reward. And until this has been done, I do not see how such possessions can be retained in happiness. I do not understand the feeling which would arch our own gates and pave our own thresholds, and leave the church with its narrow door and foot -worn sill ; the feeling which enriches * Num. xxxi. 54. Psa. lxxvi. 11. 24 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. our own chambers with all manner of costliness, and endures the bare wall and mean compass of the temple. There is sel* dom even so severe a choice to be made, seldom so much self- denial to be exercised. There are isolated cases, in which men s happiness and mental activity depend upon a certain degree of luxury in their houses ; but then this is true luxury, felt and tasted, and profited by. In the plurality of instances nothing of the kind is attempted, nor can be enjoyed ; men’s average resources cannot reach it ; and that which they can reach, gives them no pleasure, and might be spared. It will be seen, in the course of the following chapters, that I am no advocate for meanness of private habitation. I would fain in- troduce into it all magnificence, care, and beauty, where they are possible ; but I would not have that useless expense in un- noticed fineries or formalities ; cornicings of ceilings and grain- ing of doors, and fringing of curtains, and thousands such ; things which have become foolishly and apathetically habitual — things on whose common appliance hang whole trades, to which there never yet belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real pleasure, or becoming of the remotest or most con- temptible use — things which cause half the expense of life, and destroy more than half its comfort, manliness, respectability, freshness, and facility. I speak from experience : I know what it is to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate ; and I know it to be in many respects healthier and happier than living between a Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender. I do not say that such things have not their place and pro- priety ; but I say this, emphatically, that the tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in domestic vanities, if not absolutely and meaninglessly lost in domestic discomforts, and incumbrances, would, if collectively offered and wisely em- ployed, build a marble church for every town in England ; such a church as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways and -walks, and as it would bring the light into the eyes to see from afar, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs. VIII. I have said for every town : I do not want a marbl9 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE . 25 church for every village ; nay, I do not want marble churches at all for their own sake, but for the sake of the spirit that would build them. The church has no need of any visible splendors ; her power is independent of them, her purity is in some degree opposed to them. The simplicity of a pastoral sanctuary is lovelier than the majesty of an urban temple ; and it may be more than questioned whether, to the people, such majesty has ever been the source of any increase of effec- tive piety ; but to the builders it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice ; not the emo- tion of admiration, but the act of adoration : not the gift, but the giving . 2 And see how much more charity the full un- derstanding of this might admit, among classes of men of naturally opposite feelings ; and how much more nobleness in the work. There is no need to offend by importunate, self- proclaiming splendor. Your gift may be given in an unpre- suming way. Cut one or two shafts out of a porphyry wliosa preciousness those only would know who would desire it to be so used ; add another month’s labor to the undercutting of a few capitals, whose delicacy will not be seen nor loved by one beholder of ten thousand ; see that the simplest masonry of the edifice be perfect and substantial ; and to those who re- gard such things, their witness will be clear and impressive ; to those who regard them not, all will at least be inoffensive. But do not think the feeling itself a folly, or the act itself use- less. Of what use was that dearly bought water of the well of Bethlehem with which the King of Israel slaked the dust of Adullam ? — yet was not thus better than if he had drunk it ? Of what use was that passionate act of Christian sacrifice, against which, first uttered by the false tongue, the very ob- jection we would now conquer took a sullen tone for ever ? * So also let us not ask of what use our offering is to the church : it is at least better for us than if it had been retained for our* selves. It may be better for others also : there is, at any rate, a chance of this ; though we must always fearfully and widely shun the thought that the magnificence of the temple can materially add to the efficiency of the worship or to the powei * John xii. 5. 26 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE \ of the ministry. Whatever we do, or whatever we offer, let it not interfere with the simplicity of the one, or abate, as if re- placing, the zeal of the other. That is the abuse and fallacy of Romanism, by which the true spirit of Christian offering is directly contradicted. The treatment of the Papists’ temple is eminently exhibitory ; it is surface work throughout ; and the danger and evil of their church decoration lie, not in its reality — not in the true wealth and art of it, of which the lower peo- ple are never cognizant — but in its tinsel and glitter, in the gilding of the shrine and painting of the image, in embroidery of dingy robes and crowding of imitated gems ; all this being frequently thrust forward to the concealment of what is really good or great in their buildings. 5 Of an offering of gratitude which is neither to be exhibited nor rewarded, which is neither to win praise nor purchase salvation, the Romanist (as such) has no conception. IX. "While, however, I would especially deprecate the im- putation of any other acceptableness or usefulness to the gift itself than that which it receives from the spirit of its presen- tation, it may be well to observe, that there is a lower advan- tage which never fails to accompany a dutiful observance oi any right abstract principle. While the first fruits of his pos- sessions were required from the Israelite as a testimony of fidelity, the payment of those first fruits was nevertheless re- warded, and that connectedly and specifically, by the increase of those possessions. Wealth, and length of days, and peace, w r ere the promised and experienced rewards of his offering, though they were not to be the objects of it. The tithe paid into the storehouse was the expressed condition of the bless- ing which there should not be room enough to receive. And it will be thus always : God never forgets any work or labor of love ; and whatever it may be of which the first and best proportions or powers have been presented to Him, he will multiply and increase sevenfold. Therefore, though it may not be necessarily the interest of religion to admit the service of the arts, the arts will never flourish until they have been primarily devoted to that service — devoted, both by architect and employer ; by the one in scrupulous, earnest, affectionate TEE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 27 design ; by the other in expenditure at least more frank, at least less calculating, than that which he would admit in the indulgence of his own private feelings. Let this principle be but once fairly acknowledged among us ; and however it may be chilled and repressed in practice, however feeble may be its real influence, however the sacredness of it may be dimin- ished by counter-workings of vanity and self-interest, yet its mere acknowledgment would bring a reward ; and with our present accumulation of means and of intellect, there would be such an impulse and vitality given to art as it has not felt since the thirteenth century. And I do not assert this as other than a national consequence : I should, indeed, expect a larger measure of every great and spiritual faculty to be always given where those faculties had been wisely and relig- iously employed ; but the impulse to which I refer, would be, humanly speaking, certain ; and would naturally result from obedience to the two great conditions enforced by the Spirit of Sacrifice, first, that we should in everything do our best ; and, secondly, that we should consider increase of ap- parent labor as an increase of beauty in the building. A few practical deductions from these two conditions, and I have done. X. For the first : it is alone enough to secure success, and it is for want of observing it that we continually fail. We are none of us so good architects as to be able to work habitu- ally beneath our strength ; and yet there is not a building that I know of, lately raised, wherein it is not sufficiently evident that neither architect nor builder has done his best. It is the especial characteristic of modern work. All old work nearly lias been hard work. It may be the hard work of children, of barbarians, of rustics ; but it is always their utmost. Ours has as constantly the look of money's worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions ; never of a fair putting forth of our strength. Let us have done with this kind of work at once : cast off every temptation to it : do not let us degrade ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over our short comings ; let us confess our poverty or our parsimony, 28 TEE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. but not belie our human intellect. It is not even a question of how much we are to do, but of how it is to be done ; it is not a question of doing more, but of doing better. Do not let us boss our roofs with wretched, half- worked, blunt-edged rosettes ; do not let us flank our gates with rigid imitations of mediaeval statuary. Such things are mere insults to common sense, and only unfit us for feeling the nobility of their prototypes. We have so much, suppose, to be spent in decoration ; let us go to the Flaxman of his time, whoever he may be, and bid him carve for us a single statue, frieze or capital, or as many as we can afford, compelling upon him the one condition, that they shall be the best he can do ; place them where they will be of the most value, and be content Our other capitals may be mere blocks, and our other niches empty. No matter : better our work unfinished than all bad. It may be that we do not desire ornament of so high an order ; choose, then, a less developed style, also, if you will, rougher material ; the law which we are enforcing requires only that what we pretend to do and to give, shall both be the best of their kind ; choose, therefore, the Norman hatchet work, instead of the Flaxman frieze and statue, but let it be the best hatchet work ; and if you cannot afford marble, use Caen stone, but from the best bed ; and if not stone, brick, but the best brick ; preferring always what is good of a lower order of work or material, to what is bad of a higher ; for this is not only the way to improve every kind of work, and to put s every kind of material to better use ; but it is more honest and unpretending, and is in harmony with other just, upright, and manly principles, whose range we shall have presently to take into consideration. XI. The other condition which we had to notice, was the value of the appearance of labor upon architecture. I have spoken of this before ; * and it is, indeed, one of the most frequent sources of pleasure which belong to the art, always, however, within certain somewhat remarkable limits. For it does not at first appear easily to be explained why labor, as represented by materials of value, should, without sense of * Mod. Painters, I. Sec. 1, Chap. 3. THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 29 wrong or error, bear being wasted ; while the waste of actual workmanship is always painful, so soon as it is apparent. But so it is, that, while precious materials may, with a certain profusion and negligence, be employed for the magnificence of what is seldom seen, the work of man cannot be carelessly and idly bestowed, without an immediate sense of wrong ; as if the strength of the living creature were never intended by its Maker to be sacrificed in vain, though it is well for us sometimes to part with what we esteem precious of sub- stance, ar> showing that, in such a service it becomes but dross and dust. And in the nice balance between the straitening of effort or enthusiasm on the one hand, and vainly casting it away upon the other, there are more questions than can be met by any but very just and watchful feeling. In general it is less the mere loss of labor that offends us, than the lack of judgment implied by such loss ; so that if men confessedly work for work’s sake, and it does not appear that they are ig- norant where or how to make their labor tell, we shall not be grossly offended. On the contrary, we shall be pleased if the work be lost in carrying out a principle, or in avoiding a de- ception. It, indeed, is a law properly belonging to another part of our subject, but it may be allowably stated here, that, whenever, by the construction of a building, some parts of it are hidden from the eye which are the continuation of others bearing some consistent ornament, it is not well that the or- nament should cease in the parts concealed ; credit is given for it, and it should not be deceptively withdrawn : as, for in- stance, in the sculpture of the backs of the statues of a temple pediment ; never, perhaps, to be seen, but yet not lawfully to be left unfinished. And so in the working out of ornaments in dark concealed places, in which it is best to err on the side of completion ; and in the carrying round of string courses, and other such continuous work ; not but that they may stop sometimes, on the point of going into some palpably impene- trable recess, but then let them stop boldly and markedly, on some distinct terminal ornament, and never be supposed to exist where they do not. The arches of the towers which flank the transepts of Bouen Cathedral have rosette orna- 30 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. merits on their spandrils, on the three visible sides ; none on the side towards the roof. The right of this is rather a nice point for question. XU. Visibility, however, we must remember, depends, not only on situation, but on distance ; and there is no way in which work is more painfully and unwisely lost than in its over delicacy on parts distant from the eye. Here, again, the principle of honesty must govern our treatment : we must not work any kind of ornament which is, perhaps, to cover the whole building (or at least to occur on all parts of it) deli- cately where it is near the eye, and rudely where it is removed from it. That is trickery and dishonesty. Consider, first, what kinds of ornaments will tell in the distance and what near, and so distribute them, keeping such as by their nature are delicate, down near the eye, and throwing the bold and rough kinds of work to the top ; and if there be any kind which is to be both near and far off, take care that it be as boldly and rudely wrought where it is well seen as where it is distant, so that the spectator may know exactly what it is, and what it is worth. Thus chequered patterns, and in gen- eral such ornaments as common workmen can execute, may extend over the whole building ; but bas-reliefs, and fine niches and capitals, should be kept down, and the common sense of this will always give a building dignity, even though there be some abruptness or awkwardness, in the resulting arrangements. Thus at San Zeno at Verona, the bas-reliefs, full of incident and interest are confined to a parallelogram of the front, reaching to the height of the capitals of the col- umns of the porch. Above these, we find a simple though most lovely, little arcade ; and above that, only blank wall, with square face shafts. The whole effect is tenfold grander and better than if the entire facade had been covered with bad work, and may serve for an example of J:he way to place little where we cannot afford much. So, again, the transept gates of Rouen * are covered with delicate bas-reliefs (of which I * Henceforward, for the sake of convenience, when I name any ca= thedral town in this manner, let me he understood to speak of its cathe iral church. THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 31 shall speak at greater length presently) up to about once and a half a man’s height ; and above that come the usual aud more visible statues and niches. So in the campanile at Florence, the circuit of bas-reliefs is on its lowest story ; above that come its statues ; and above them all its pattern mosaic, and twisted columns, exquisitely finished, like all Italian work of the time, but still, in the eye of the Floren- tine, rough and commonplace by comparison with the bas- reliefs. So generally the most delicate niche work and best mouldings of the French Gothic are in gates and low win- dows well within sight ; although, it being the very spirit of that style to trust to its exuberance for effect, there is occa- sionally a burst upwards and blossoming unrestrainably to the sky, as in the pediment of the west front of Ilouen, and in the recess of the rose window behind it, where there are some most elaborate flower-mouldings, all but invisible from below, and only adding a general enrichment to the deep shadows that relieve the shafts of the advanced pediment. It is observable, however, that this very work is bad flamboyant, aud has corrupt renaissance characters in its detail as well as use ; while in the earlier and grander north and south gates, there is a very noble proportioning of the work to the dis- tance, the niches and statues which crown the northern one, at a height of about one hundred feet from the ground, being alike colossal and simple ; visibly so from below, so as to in- duce no deception, and yet honestly and well-finished above, and all that they are expected to be ; the features very beau- tiful, full of expression, and as delicately wrought as any work of the period. XIII. It is to be remembered, however, that while the orna- ments in every fine ancient building, without exception so far as I am aware, are most delicate at the base, they are often in greater effective quantity on the upper parts. In high towers this is perfectly natural and right, the solidity of the foundation being as necessary as the division and penetration of the superstructure ; hence the lighter work and richly pierced crowns of late Gothic towers. The campanile of Giotto at Florence^ already alluded to, is an exquisite instance 82 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. of tlie union of the two principles, delicate bas-reliefs adorm ing its massy foundation, while the open tracery of the upper windows attracts the eye by its slender intricacy, and a rich cornice crowns the whole. In such truly fine cases of this disposition the upper work is effective by its quantity and in- tricacy only, as the lower portions by delicacy ; so also in the Tour de Beurre at Bouen, where, however, the detail is massy throughout, subdividing into rich meshes as it ascends. In the bodies of buildings the principle is less safe, but its dis- cussion is not connected with our present subject. XIY. Finally, work may be wasted by being too good for its material, or too fine to bear exposure ; and this, generally a characteristic of late, especially of renaissance, work, is per- haps the worst fault of all. I do not know anything more painful or pitiful than the kind of ivory carving with which the Certosa of Pavia, and part of the Colleone sepulchral chapel at Bergamo, and other such buildings, are incrusted, of which it is not possible so much as to think without ex- haustion ; and a heavy sense of the misery it would be, to be forced to look at it at all. And this is not from the quantity of it, nor because it is bad work — much of it is inventive and able ; but because it looks as if it were only fit to be put in inlaid cabinets and velveted caskets, and as if it could not bear one drifting shower or gnawing frost. We are afraid for it, anxious about it, and tormented by it ; and we feel that a massy shaft and a bold shadow would be worth it all. Never- theless, even in cases like these, much depends on the accom- plishment of the great ends of decoration. If the ornament does its duty — if it is ornament, and its points of shade and light tell in the general effect, we shall not be offended by finding that the sculptor in his fulness of fancy has chosen to give much more than these mere points of light, and has composed them of groups of figures. But if the ornament does not answer its purpose, if it have no distant, no truly decorative power ; if generally seen it be a mere incrustation and me£iningless roughness, w*e shall only be chagrined by finding when we look close, that the incrustation has cost years of labor, and has millions of figures and histories in it PLATE I.— (Page 33-Vol. V.) Ornaments from Rouen. St. Lo, and Venice TEE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 3 $ and would be tlie better of being seen through a Stanhope lens. Hence the greatness of the northern Gothic as con- trasted with the latest Italian. It reaches nearly the same extreme of detail ; but it never loses sight of its architectural purpose, never fails in its decorative power ; not a leaflet in it but speaks, and speaks far off, too ; and so long as this be the case, there is no limit to the luxuriance in which such work may legitimately and nobly be bestowed. XV. No limit : it is one of the affectations of architects to speak of overcharged ornament. Ornament cannot be over- charged if it be good, and is always overcharged when it is bad. I have given, on the opposite page (fig. 1), one of the smallest niches of the central gate of Rouen. That gate I suppose to be the most exquisite piece of pure flamboyant work existing ; for though I have spoken of the upper por- tions, especially the receding window, as degenerate, the gate itself is of a purer period, and has hardly any renaissance taint. There are four strings of these niches (each with two figures beneath it) round the porch, from the ground to the top of the arch, with three intermediate rows of larger niches, far more elaborate ; besides the six principal canopies of each outer pier. The total number of the subordinate niches alone, each worked like that in the plate, and each with a different pattern of traceries in each compartment, is one hundred and seventy-six. 4 Yet in all this ornament iliere is not one cusp, one finial that is useless — not a stroke of the chisel is in vain ; the grace and luxuriance of it all are visible — sensible rather — even to the uninquiring eye ; and all its minuteness does not diminish the majesty; while it increases the mystery, of the noble and unbroken vault. It is not less the boast of some styles that they can bear ornament, than of others that they can do without it ; but we do not often enough reflect that those very styles, of so haughty simplicity, owe part of their pleasurableness to contrast, and would be wearisome if universal. They are but the rests and monotones of the art ; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fan- cies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than 8 34 TEE LAMP OF TRUTH. ever filled the depth of midsummer dream ; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves ; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light ; those misty masses of mul- titudinous pinnacle and diademed tower ; the only witnesses, perhaps that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations, Adi else for which the builders sacrificed, has passed away — all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not for what they labored, and w r e see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness — all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life, and their toil upon the earth, one re- ward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep- wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honors, and their errors ; but they have left us their adoration. CHAPTER XL THE LAMP OE TRUTH. X. There is a marked likeness between the virtues of man and the enlightenment of the globe he inhabits — the same diminishing gradation in vigor up to the limits of their do- mains, the same essential separation from their contraries — the same twilight at the meeting of the two : a something wider belt than the line where the world rolls into night, that strange twilight of the virtues ; that dusky debateable land, wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temperance becomes severity, and justice becomes cruelty, and faith superstition, and each and all vanish into gloom. Nevertheless, with the greater number of them, though their dimness increases gradually, we may mark the moment of their sunset ; and, happily, may turn the shadow back by the way by viiich it had gone down : but for one, the line of the horizon is irregular and undefined ; and this, too, the very equator and girdle of them all — Truth ; that only one of which there are no degrees, but breaks and rents continually that pillar of the earth, yet a cloudy pillar ; that golden and narrow line, which the very powers and virtues that lean upon THE LAMP OF TRUTH: 35 it bend, which policy and prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy modify, which courage overshadows with his shield, imagination covers with her wings, and charity dims with her tears. How difficult must the maintenance of that authority be, which, while it has to restrain the hostility of all the worst principles of man, has also to restrain the dis- orders of his best — which is continually assaulted by the one and betrayed by the other, and which regards with the same severity the lightest and the boldest violations of its law! There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimate of wdsdom ; but truth forgives no insult, and endures no stain. We do not enough consider this ; nor enough dread the slight and continual occasions of offence against her. We are too much in the habit of looking at falsehood in its dark- est associations, and through the color of its w T orst purposes. That indignation which we profess to feel at deceit absolute, is indeed only at deceit malicious. We resent calumny, hy- pocrisy and treachery, because they harm us, not because they are untrue. Take the detraction and the mischief from the untruth, and we are little offended by it ; turn it into praise, and we may be pleased with it. And yet it is not calumny nor treachery that does the largest sum of mischief in the world ; they are continually crushed, and are felt only in being conquered. But it is the glistening and softly spoken lie ; the amiable fallacy ; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partizan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which any man who pierces, we thank as we w T ould thank one who dug a well in a desert ; happy in that the thirst for truth still remains with us, even when we have wil- fully left the fountains of it. It would be well if moralists less frequently confused the greatness of a sin with its unpardonableness. The two charac- ters are altogether distinct. The greatness of a fault depends partly on the nature of the person against whom it is com- mitted, partly upon the extent of its consequences. Its par- 36 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. donableness depends, humanly speaking, on the degree oi temptation to it. One class of circumstances determines tlia weight of the attaching punishment ; the other, the claim to remission of punishment : and since it is not easy for men to estimate the relative weight, nor possible for them to know the relative consequences, of crime, it is usually wise in them to quit the care of such nice measurements, and to look to the other and clearer condition of culpability ; esteeming those faults worst which are committed under least tempta- tion. I do not mean to diminish the blame of the injurious and malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity ; yet it seems to me, that the shortest way to check the darker forms of deceit is to set watch more scrupulous against those which have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, with the current of our life. Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as un- intended. Cast them all aside : they may be light and acci- dental ; but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, for all that ; and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them, without over care as to which is largest or blackest. Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only by practice ; it is less a matter of will than of habit, and I doubt if any occasion can be trivial which permits the practice and formation of such a habit. To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and icerhaps as meritorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty ; and it is a strange thought how many men there are, as I trust, who w^ould hold to it at the cost of fortune or life, for one who would hold to it at the cost of a little daily trouble. And seeing that of all sin there is, perhaps, no one moi- flatly opposite to the Almighty, no one more “ wanting the good of virtue and of being,” than this of lying, it is surely a strange insolence to fall into the foulness of it on light or on no temp- tation, and surely becoming an honorable man to resolve that, whatever semblances or fallacies the necessary course of his life may compel him to bear or to believe, none shall distu* \j the serenity of his voluntary actions, nor diminish the reality of his chosen delights. THE LAMP OF TRUTH 37 II. If this be just and wise for truth’s sake, much more is it necessary for the sake of the delights over which she has in- fluence. For, as I advocated the expression of the Spirit of Sacrifice in the acts and pleasures of men, not as if thereby those acts could further the cause of religion, but because most assuredly they might therein be infinitely ennobled them- selves, so I would have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth clear in the hearts of our artists and handicraftsmen, not as if the truthful practice of handicrafts could far advance the cause of truth, but because I would fain see the handicrafts themselves urged by the spurs of chivalry : and it is, indeed, marvellous to see what power and universality there is in this single prin- ciple, and how in the consulting or forgetting of it lies half the dignity or decline of every art and act of man. I have be- fore endeavored to show its range and power in painting ; and I believe a volume, instead of a chapter, might be written on its authority over all that is great in architecture. But I must be content with the force of instances few and familiar, beliew ing that the occasions of its manifestation may be more easily discovered by a desire to be true, than embraced by an analy- sis of truth. Only it is very necessary in the outset to mark clearly wherein consists the essence of fallacy as distinguished from supposition. III. For it might be at first thought that the whole king- dom of imagination was one of deception also. Not so : the action of the imagination is a voluntary summoning of the conceptions of things absent or impossible ; and the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them as such, i.e. in the knowledge of their actual absence or impossibility at the moment of their apparent presence or reality. When the imagination deceives it becomes madness. It is a noble faculty so long as it con- fesses its own ideality ; when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All the difference lies in the fact of the confession, in there being no deception. It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we should be able to invent and to behold what is not ; and to our rank as moral creatures* 3S THE LAMP OF TRUTH. that we should know and confess at tlie same time that it ig not. IV. Again, it might be thought, and has been thought, that the whole art of painting is nothing else than an endeavor to deceive. Not so : it is, on the contrary, a statement of certain facts, in the clearest possible way. For instance : I desire to give an account of a mountain or of a rock ; I begin by telling its shape. But words will not do this distinctly, and I draw its shape, and say, “ This was its shape.” Next : I would fain represent its color ; but words will not do this either, and I dye the paper, and say, “ This was its color.” Such a process may be carried on until the scene appears to exist, and a high pleasure may be taken in its apparent existence. This is a communicated act of imagination, but no lie. The he can consist only in an assertion of its existence (which is never for one instant made, implied, or believed), or else in false state- ments of forms and colors (which are, indeed, made and be- lieved to our great loss, continually). And observe, also, that so degrading a thing is deception in even the approach and appearance of it, that all painting which even reaches the mark of apparent realization, is degraded in so doing. I have enough insisted on this point in another place. V. The violations of truth, which dishonor poetry and painting, are thus for the most part confined to the treatment of theh subjects. But in architecture another and a less sub- tle, more contemptible, violation of truth is possible ; a direct falsity of assertion respecting the nature of material, or the quantity of labor. And this is, in the full sense of the word, wrong ; it is as truly deserving of reprobation as any other moral delinquency ; it is unworthy alike of architects and of nations ; and it has been a sign, wherever it has widely and with toleration existed, of a singular debasement of the arts ; that it is not a sign of worse than this, of a general want of severe probity, can be accounted for only by our knowledge of the strange separation which has for some centuries existed between the arts and all other subjects of human intellect, as matters of conscience. This withdrawal of conscientiousness from among the faculties concerned with art, while it has THE LAMP OF TRUTH 39 destroyed the arts themselves, has also rendered in a measure nugatory the evidence which otherwise they might have pre- sented respecting the character of the respective nations among whom they have been cultivated ; otherwise, it might appear more than strange that a nation so distinguished for its gen- eral uprightness and faith as the English, should admit in their architecture more of pretence, concealment, and deceit, than any other of this or of past time. They are admitted in thoughtlessness, but with fatal effect upon the art in which they are practised. If there were no other causes for the failures which of late have marked every great occasion for architectural exertion, these petty dishon- esties would be enough to account for all. It is the first step and not the least, towards greatness to do away with these ; the first, because so evidently and easily in our power. We may not be able to command good, or beautiful, or inventive architecture ; but we can command an honest architecture : the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility respected ; but what is there but scorn for the mean- ness of deception ? YI. Architectural Deceits are broadly to be considered un- der three heads : — 1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other than the true one ; as in pendants of late Gothic roofs. 2d. The painting of surfaces to represent some other ma- terial than that of which they actually consist (as in the mar- bling of wood), or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them. 3d. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind. Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture will be noble exactly in the degree in which all these false expedients are avoided. Nevertheless, there are certain degrees of them, which, owing to their frequent usage, or to other causes, have so far lost the nature of deceit as to be admissible ; as, for instance, gilding, vvhich is in architecture no deceit, because it is therein not understood for gold ; wdiile in jewellery it is a deceit, because it is so understood, and therefore altogether to be reprehended. So that there arise, in the application of 40 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. the strict rules of right, many exceptions and niceties of coik science ; which let us as briefly as possible examine. VII. 1st. Structural Deceits. I have limited these to the determined and purposed suggestion of a mode of support other than the true one. The architect is not bound to ex- hibit structure ; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, any more than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the human frame conceal much of its anatomy ; nevertheless, that building will generally be the noblest, which to an in- telligent eye discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does, although from a careless observer they may be concealed. In the vaulting of a Gothic -roof it is no deceit to throw the strength into the ribs of it, and make the intermediate vault a mere shell. Such a structure would be presumed by an intelligent observer, the first time he saw such a roof ; and the beauty of its traceries would be enhanced to him if they confessed and followed the lines of its main strength. If, however, the intermediate shell were made of wood instead of stone, and whitewashed to look like the rest, • — this would, of course, be direct deceit, and altogether un- pardonable. There is, however, a certain deception necessarily occur- ring in Gothic architecture, which relates, not to the points, but to the maimer, of support. The resemblance in its shafts and ribs to the external relations of stems and branches, which has been the ground of so much foolish speculation, necessarily induces in the mind of the spectator a sense or belief of a correspondent internal structure ; that is to say, of a fibrous and continuous strength from the root into the limbs, and an elasticity communicated upwards , sufficient for the support of the ramified portions. The idea of the real conditions, of a great weight of ceiling thrown upon certain narrow, jointed lines, which have a tendency partly to be crushed, and partly to separate and be pushed outwards, is with difficulty received ; and the more so when the pfllars would be, if unassisted, too slight for the weight, and are sup- ported by external flying buttresses, as in the apse of Beau- vais, and other such achievements of the bolder Gothic. Now, THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 41 there is a nice question of conscience in this, which we shall hardly settle but by considering that, when the mind is in- formed beyond the possibility of mistake as to the true nature of things, the affecting it with a contrary impression, however distinct, is no dishonesty, but on the century, a legitimate appeal to the imagination. For instance, the greater part of the happiness which we have in contemplating clouds, results from the impression of their having massive, luminous, warm, and mountain-like surfaces ; and our delight in the sky fre- quently depends upon our considering it as a blue vault. But we know the contrary, in both instances ; we know the cloud to be a damp fog, or a drift of snow flakes ; and the sky to be a lightless abyss. There is, therefore, no dishonesty, while there is much delight, in the irresistibly contrary impression. In the same way, so long as we see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dextrous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its branches. Nor is even the concealment of the support of the external but- tress reprehensible, so long as the pillars are not sensibly in- adequate to their duty. For the weight of a roof is a circum- stance of which the spectator generally has no idea, and the provisions for it, consequently, circumstances whose neces- sity or adaptation he could not understand. It is no deceit, therefore, when the weight to be borne is necessarily un- known, to conceal also the means of bearing it, leaving only to be perceived so much of the support as is indeed adequate to the weight supposed. For the shafts do, indeed, bear as much as they are ever imagined to bear, and the system of added support is no more, as a matter of conscience, to be exhibited, than, in the human or any other form, mechanical provisions for those functions which are themselves unper- ceived. But the moment that the conditions of weight are compre- hended, both truth and feeling require that the conditions of support should be also comprehended. Nothing can be worse, either as judged by the taste or the conscience, than 42 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. affectedly inadequate supports — suspensions in air, and othei such tricks and vanities. Mr. Hope wisely reprehends, for this reason, the arrangement of the main piers of St. Sophia at Constantinople. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, is a piece of architectural juggling, if possible still more to be condemned, because less sublime. YHI. With deceptive concealments of structure are to be classed, though still more blameable, deceptive assumptions of it — the introduction of members which should have, or profess to have, a duty, and have none. One of the most general in- stances of this will be found in the form of the flying buttress in late Gothic. The use of that member is, of course, to con- vey support from one pier to another when the plan of the building renders it necessary or desirable that the supporting masses should be divided into groups, the most frequent neces- sity of this kind arising from the intermediate range of chapels or aisles between the nave or choir walls and their supporting piers. The natural, healthy, and beautiful arrangement is that of a steeply sloping bar of stone, sustained by an arch with its spandril carried farthest down on the lowest side, and dying into the vertical of the outer pier ; that pier being, of course, not square, but rather a piece of wall set at right angles to the supported walls, and, if need be, crowned by a pinnacle to give it greater weight. The whole arrangement is exquisitely car- ried out in the choir of Beauvais. In later Gothic the pinnacle became gradually a decorative member, and was used in all places merely for the sake of its beauty. There is no objection to this ; it is j ust as lawful to build a pinnacle for its beauty as a tower ; but also the buttress became a decorative member ; and was used, first, where it w r as not wanted, and, secondly, in forms in which it could be of no use, becoming a mere tie, not between the pier and wall, but between the wall and the top of the decorative pinnacle, thus attaching itself to the very point where its thrust, if it made any, could not be resisted. The most flagrant instance of this barbarism that 1 remember (though it prevails partially in all the spires of the Nether- lands), is the lantern of St. Ouen at Kouen, where the pierced buttress, having an ogee curve, looks about as much calculated THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 43 to bear a thrust as a switch of willow ; and the pinnacles, huge and richly decorated, have evidently no work to do whatsoever, but stand round the central tower, like four idle servants, as they are — heraldic supporters, that central tower being merely a hollow crown, which needs no more buttressing than a basket does. In fact, I do not know anything more strange or unwise than the praise lavished upon this lantern ; it is one of the basest pieces of Gothic in Europe ; its flamboyant traceries of the last and most degraded forms ; 5 and its entire plan and decoration resembling, and deserving little more credit than, the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery. There are hardly any of the magnificent and serene constructions of the early Gothic which have not, in the course of time, been gradually thinned and pared away into these skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their lines truly follow the structure of the original masses, have an interest like that of the fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance has been dis- solved, but which are usually distorted as well as emaciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things that were ; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the armed and living frame ; and the very winds that whis- tle through the threads of them, are to the diapasoned echoes of the ancient walls, as to the voice of the man was the pining of the spectre. 6 IX. Perhaps the most fruitful source of these kinds of cor- ruption which we have to guard against in recent times, is one which, nevertheless, comes in a “ questionable shape,” and of which it is not easy to determine the proper laws and limils ; I mean the use of iron. The definition of the art of architect- ure, given in the first chapter, is independent of its materials : nevertheless, that art having been, up to the beginning of the present century, practised for the most part in clay, stone, or wood, it has resulted that the sense of proportion and the laws of structure have been based, the one altogether, the other in great part, on the necessities consequent on the employment of those materials ; and that the entire or principal employ- ment of metallic framework would, therefore, be generally felt as a departure from the first principles of the art. Abstract- THE LAMP OF TRUTH. $4 edly there appears no reason why iron should not be used ah well as wood ; and the time is probably near when a new sys- tem of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction. But I believe that the tendency of all present sympathy and association is to limit the idea of architecture to non-metallic work ; and that not without reason. For architecture being in its perfection the earliest, as in its elements it is necessarily the first, of arts, will always precede, in any barbarous nation, the possession of the science necessary either for the obtaining or the management of iron. Its first existence and its earliest laws must, therefore, depend upon the use of materials accessible in quantity, and on the surface of the earth ; that is to say, clay, wood, or stone : and as I think it cannot but be generally felt that one of the chief dignities of architecture is its historical use ; and since the latter is partly dependent on consistency of style, it will be felt right to retain as far as may be, even in periods of more advanced science, the materials and principles of earlier ages. X. But wdiether this be granted me or not, the fact is, that every idea respecting size, proportion, decoration, or construc- tion, on which we are at present in the habit of acting or judg- ing, depends on presupposition of such materials : and as I both feel myself unable to escape the influence of these preju- dices, and believe that my readers will be equally so, it may be perhaps permitted to me to assume that true architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material , 7 and that such works as the cast-iron central spire of Bouen Cathedral, or the iron roofs and pillars of our railway stations, and of some of our churches, are not architecture at all. Yet it is evident that metals may, and sometimes must, enter into the construc- tion to a certain extent, as nails in wooden architecture, and therefore as legitimately rivets and solderings in stone ; neither can we well deny to the Gothic architect the power of support- ing statues, pinnacles, or traceries by iron bars ; and if we grant this I do not see how we can help allowing Brunelleschi his iron chain around the dome of Florence, or the builders of Salisbury their elaborate iron binding of the central tower . 8 If, however, we would not fall into the old sophistry of the THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 45 grains of corn and the heap, we must find a rule which may enable us to stop somewhere. This rule is, I think, thaS metals may be used as a cement but not as a support. For as cements of other kinds are often so strong that the stones may easier be broken than separated, and the wall becomes a solid mass without for that reason losing the character of architect- ure, there is no reason why, when a nation has obtained the knowledge and practice of iron work, metal rods or rivets should not be used in the place of cement, and establish the same or a greater strength and adherence, without in any wise inducing departure from the types and system of architecture before established ; nor does it make any difference except as to sightliness, whether the metal bands or rods so employed, be in the body of the wall or on its exterior, or set as stays and cross-bands ; so only that the use of them be always and distinctly one which might be superseded by mere strength of cement ; as for instance if a pinnacle or muilion be propped or tied by an iron band, it is evident that the iron only pre- vents the separation of the stones by lateral force, which the cement would have done, had it been strong enough. But the moment that the iron in the least degree takes the place of the stone, and acts by its resistance to crushing, and bears superincumbent weight, or if it acts by its own weight as a counterpoise, and so supersedes the use of pinnacles or but- tresses in resisting a lateral thrust, or if, in the form of a rod or girder, it is used to do what wooden beams would have done as well, that instant the building ceases, so far as such applications of metal extend, to be true architecture. XI. The limit, however, thus determined, is an ultimate one, and it is well in all things to be cautious how we approach the utmost limit of lawfulness ; so that, although the employ- ment of metal within this limit cannot be considered as de- stroying the very being and nature of architecture, it will, if, extravagant and frequent, derogate from the dignity of the work, as well as (which is especially to our present point) from its honesty. For although the spectator is not informed as to the quantity or strength of the cement employed, he will gen- erally conceive the stones of the building to be separable £ THE LAMP OF TRUTH. and his estimate of the skill of the architect will be based in a great measure on his supposition of this condition, and of the dif- ficulties attendant upon it : so that it is always more honorable, and it has a tendency to render the style of architecture both more masculine and more scientific, to employ stone and mortar simply as such, and to do as much as possible with the weight of the one and the strength of the other, and rather sometimes to forego a grace, or to confess a weakness, than attain the one, or conceal the other, by means verging upon dishonesty. Nevertheless, where the design is of such delicacy and slightness as, in some parts of very fair and finished edifices, it is desirable that it should be ; and where both its com- pletion and security are in a measure dependent on the use of metal, let not such use be reprehended ; so only that as much is done as may be, by good mortar and good masonry and no slovenly workmanship admitted through confidence in the iron helps ; for it is in this license as in that of wine, a man may use it for his infirmities, but not for his nourish- ment. XII. And, in order to avoid an over use of this liberty, it would be well to consider what application may be conven- iently made of the dovetailing and various adjusting of stones ; for when any artifice is necessary to help the mortar, certainly this ought to come before the use of metal, for it is both safer and more honest. I cannot see that any objection can be made to the fitting of the stones in any shapes the archi- tect pleases : for although it would not be desirable to see buildings put together like Chinese puzzles, there must al- ways be a check upon such an abuse of the practice in its difficulty ; nor is it necessary that it should be always ex- hibited, so that it be understood by the spectator as an ad- mitted help, and that no principal stones are introduced in positions apparently impossible /or them to retain, although a riddle here and there, in unimportant features, may some- times serve to draw the eye to the masonry, and make it in- teresting, as well as to give a delightful sense of a kind of necromantic power in the architect. There is a pretty one in the lintel of the lateral door of the cathedral of Prato THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 4 7 (Plate IV. fig. 4.) ; where the maintenance of the visibly separate stones, alternate marble and serpentine, cannot be understood until their cross-cutting is seen below. Each block is, of course, of the form given in fig. 5. XTTT . Lastly, before leaving the subject of structural de- ceits, I would remind the architect who thinks that I am un- necessarily and narrowly limiting his resources or his art. that the highest greatness and the highest wisdom are shown, the first by a noble submission to, the second by a thoughtful providence for, certain voluntarily admitted restraints. Noth- ing is more evident than this, in that supreme government which is the example, as it is the centre, of all others. The Divine Wisdom is, and can be, shown to us only in its meeting and contending with the difficulties which are voluntarily, and for the sake of that contest , admitted by the Divine Omnipo- tence : and these difficulties, observe, occur in the form of natural laws or ordinances, which might, at many times and in countless ways, be infringed with apparent advantage, but which are never infringed, whatever costly arrangements or adaptations their observance may necessitate for the accom- plishment of given purposes. The example most apposite to our present subject is the structure of the bones of animals. No reason can be given, I believe, why the system of the higher animals should not have been made capable, as that of the Infusoria is, of secreting flint, instead of phosphate of lime, or more naturally still, carbon ; so framing the bones of adamant at once. The elephant or rhinoceros, had the earthy part of their bones been made of diamond, might have been as agile and light as grasshoppers, find other animals might have been framed far more magnificently colossal than any that walk the earth. In other worlds we may, perhaps, see such creations ; a creation for every element, and elements in- finite. But the architecture of animals here, is appointed by God to be a marble architecture, not a flint nor adamant architecture ; and all manner of expedients are adopted to at- tain the utmost degree of strength and size possible under that great limitation. The jaw of the ichthyosaurus is pieced and riveted, the leg of the megatherium is a foot thick, and THE LAMP OF TROTH. 48 the head of the myodon has a double skull ; we, in our wis- dom, should, doubtless, have given the lizard a steel jaw, and the myodon a cast-iron headpiece, and forgotten the great principle to which all creation bears witness, that order and system are nobler things than power. But God shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authoritative per- fection, but even the perfection of Obedience — an obedience to His own laws : and in the cumbrous movement of those unwieldiest of His creatures we are reminded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the hu- man creature “that sweareth to his own hurt and change th not.” XIV. 2d. Surface Deceits. These may be generally denned as the inducing the supposition of some form or material which does not actually exist ; as commonly in the painting of wood to represent marble, or in the painting of ornaments in deceptive relief, &c. But we must be careful to observe, that the evil of them consists always in definitely attempted deception , and that it is a matter of some nicety to mark the point where deception begins or ends. Thus, for instance, the roof of Milan Cathedral is seemingly covered with elaborate fan tracery, forcibly enough painted to enable it, in its dark and removed position, to deceive a care- less observer. This is, of course, gross degradation ; it de- stroys much of the dignity even of the rest of the building, and is in the very strongest terms to be reprehended. The roof of the Sistine Chapel has much architectural de- sign in grissaille mingled with the figures of its frescoes ; and the effect is increase of dignity. In what lies the distinctive character? In two points, principally : — First. That the architecture is so closely associated with the figures, and has so grand fel- lowship with them in its forms and cast shadows, that both are at once felt to be of a piece ; and as the figures must neces- sarilv be painted, the architecture is known to be so too There is thus no deception. Second. That so great a painter as Michael Angelo would always stop short in such minor parts of his design, of the de« THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 49 gree of vulgar force which would be necessary to induce the supposition of their reality ; and, strangely as it may sound, would never paint badly enough to deceive. But though right and wrong are thus found broadly opposed in works severally so mean and so mighty as the roof of Milan and that of the Sistine, there are works neither so great nor so mean, in which the limits of right are vaguely defined, and will need some care to determine ; care only, however, to ap- ply accurately the broad principle with which we set out, that no form nor material is to be deceptively represented. XY. Evidently, then, painting, confessedly such, is no de- ception : it does not assert any material whatever. Whether it be on wood or on stone, or, as will naturally be supposed, on plaster, does not matter. Whatever the material, good painting makes it more precious ; nor can it ever be said to deceive respecting the ground of which it gives us no informa- tion. To cover brick with plaster, and this plaster with fresco, is, therefore, perfectly legitimate ; and as desirable a mode of decoration as it is constant in the great periods. Verona and Venice are now seen deprived of more than half their former splendor ; it depended far more on their frescoes than their marbles. The plaster, in this case, is to be considered as the gesso ground on panel or canvas. But to cover brick with cement, and to divide this cement with joints that it may look like stone, is to tell a falsehood ; and is just as contemptible a procedure as the other is noble. - It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint every- thing ? So long as the painting is confessed — yes ; but if, even in the slightest degree, the sense of it be lost, and the thing painted be supposed real — no. Let us take a few in- stances. In the Campo Santo at Pisa, each fresco is sur- rounded with a border composed of flat colored patterns of great elegance — no part of it in attempted relief. The cer- tainty of flat surface being thus secured, the figures, though the size of life, do not deceive, and the artist thenceforward is at liberty to put forth his whole power, and to lead us througn fields and groves, and depths of pleasant landscape, and to soothe us with the sweet clearness of far off sky, and yet i 50 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. never lose the severity of his primal purpose of architectural decoration. In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at Parma, the trellises of vine shadow the walls, as if with an actual arbor ; and the troops of children, peeping through the oval open- ings, luscious in color and faint in light, may well be ex- pected every instant to break through, or hide behind the covert. The grace of their attitudes, and the evident great- ness of the whole work, mark that it is painting, and barely redeem it from the charge of falsehood ; but even so saved, it is utterly unworthy to take a place among noble or legiti- mate architectural decoration. In the cupola of the duomo of Parma the same painter has represented the Assumption with so much deceptive power, that he has made a dome of some thirty feet diameter look like a cloud- wrapt opening in the seventh heaven, crowded with a rushing sea of angels. Is this wrong? Not so : for the subject at once precludes the possibility of deception. We might have taken the vines for a veritable pergoda, and the children for its haunting ragazzi ; but we know the stayed clouds and moveless angels must be man’s work ; let him put his utmost strength to it and welcome, he can enchant us, but cannot betray. We may thus apply the rule to the highest, as well as the art of daily occurrence, always remembering that more is to be forgiven to the great painter than to the mere decorative workman ; and this especially, because the former, even in deceptive portions, wall not trick us so grossly ; as we have just seen in Correggio, where a worse painter would have made the thing look like life at once. There is, however, in room, villa, or garden decoration, some fitting admission of trickeries of this kind, as of pictured landscapes at the ex- tremities of alleys and arcades, and ceilings like skies, or painted with prolongations upwards of the architecture of the walls, which things have sometimes a certain luxury and pleasureableness in places meant for idleness, and are in- nocent enough as long as they are regarded as mere toys. XYI. Touching the false representation of material, the THE LAMP OF TRUTH 51 question is infinitely more simple, and the law more sweep, ing ; all such imitations are utterly base and inadmissible. It is melancholy to think of the time and expense lost in marbling the shop fronts of London alone, and of the waste of our resources in absolute vanities, in things about which no mortal cares, by which no eye is ever arrested, unless painfully, and which do not add one whit to comfort or clean- liness, or even to that great object of commercial art — con- spicuousness. But in architecture of a higher rank, how much more is it to be condemned ? I have made it a rule in the present work not to blame specifically ; but I may, per- haps, be permitted, while I express my sincere admiration of the very noble entrance and general architecture of the British Museum, to express also my regret that the noble granite foundation of the staircase should be mocked at its landing by an imitation, the more blameable because tolerably successful. The only effect of it is to cast a suspicion upon the true stones below, and upon every bit of granite after- wards encountered. One feels a doubt, after it, of the honesty of Memnoa himself. But even this, however derogatory to the noble architecture around it, is less painful than the want of feeling with which, in our cheap modern churches, we suffer the wall decorator to erect about the altar frame- works and pediments daubed with mottled color, and to dye in the same fashions such skeletons or caricatures of columns as may emerge above the pews ; this is not merely bad taste ; it is no unimportant or excusable error which brings even these shadows of vanity and falsehood into the house of prayer. The first condition which just feeling requires in church furniture is, that it should be simple and unaffected, not fictitious nor tawdry. It may be in our power to make it beautiful, but let it at least be pure ; and if we cannot permit much to the architect, do not let us permit anything to the upholsterer ; if we keep to solid stone and solid wood, white- washed, if we like, for cleanliness’ sake (for whitewash has so often been used as the dress of noble things that it has thence received a kind of nobility itself), it must be a bad design in- deed which is grossly offensive. I recollect no instance of a 52 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. \ want of sacred character, or of any marked and painful ugliness^ in the simplest or the most awkwardly built village church, where stone and wood were roughly and nakedly used, and the windows latticed with white glass. But the smoothly stuc- coed walls, the Hat roofs with ventilator ornaments, the barred windows with jaundiced borders and dead ground square panes, the gilded or bronzed wood, the painted iron, the wretched upholstery of curtains and cushions, and pew heads and altar railings, and Birmingham metal candlesticks, and, above all, the green and yellow sickness of the false marble — disguises all, observe ; falsehoods all — who are they who like these things ? who defend them ? who do them ? I have never spoken to any one who did like them, though to many who thought them matters of no consequence. Per- haps not to religion (though I cannot but believe that there are many to whom, as to myself, such things are serious ob- stacles to the repose of mind and temper which should pre- cede devotional exercises) ; but to the general tone of our judgment and feeling — yes ; for assuredly we shall regard, with tolerance, if not with affection, whatever forms of ma- terial things we have been in the habit of associating with our worship, and be little prepared to detect or blame hypocrisy, meanness, and disguise in other kinds of decoration when we suffer objects belonging to the most solemn of all services to be tricked out in a fashion so fictitious and unseemly. XVXI. Painting, however, is not the only mode in which material may be concealed, or rather simulated ; for merely to conceal is, as we have seen, no wrong. Whitewash, for in- stance, though often (by no means always) to be regretted as a concealment, is not to be blamed as a falsity. It shows it- self for what it is, and asserts nothing of what is beneath it. Gilding has become, from its frequent use, equally innocent. It is understood for what it is, a film merely, and is, therefore, allowable to any extent. I do not say expedient : it is one of the most abused means of magnificence we possess, and I much doubt whether any use we ever make of it, balances that loss of pleasure, which, from the frequent sight and per- petual suspicion of it, we suffer in the contemplation of any* THE LAMP OF TRUTH, 53 thing* that is verily of gold. I think gold was meant to be sel- dom seen and to be admired as a precious thing ; and I some- times wish that truth should so far literally prevail as that all should be gold that glittered, or rather that nothing should glitter that was not gold. Nevertheless, nature herself does not dispense with such semblance, but uses light for it ; and I have too great a love for old and saintly art to part with its burnished field, or radiant nimbus ; only it should be used with respect, and to express magnificence, or sacredness, and not in lavish vanity, or in sign painting. Of its expedience, however, any more than of that of color, it is not here the place to speak ; we are endeavoring to determine what is lawful, not what is desirable. Of other and less common modes of dis- guising surface, as of powder of lapis lazuli, or mosaic imita- tions of colored stones, I need hardly speak. The rule will apply to all alike, that whatever is pretended, is wrong ; com- monly enforced also by the exceeding ugliness and insufficient appearance of such methods, as lately in the style of renova- tion by which half the houses in Venice have been defaced, the brick covered first with stucco, and this painted with zigzag veins in imitation of alabaster. But there is one more form of architectural fiction, which is so constant in the great periods that it needs respectful judgment. I mean the facing of brick with precious stone. XVIII. It is well known, that what is meant by a church’s being built of marble is, in nearly all cases, only that a veneer- ing of marble has been fastened on the rough brick -wall, built with certain projections to receive it ; and that what appear to be massy stones, are nothing more than external slabs. Now, it is evident, that, iu this case, the question of right is on the same ground as in that of gilding. If it be clearly understood that a marble facing does not pretend or imply a marble wall, there is no harm in it ; and as it is also evident that, when very precious stones are used, as jaspers and ser- pentines, it must become, not only an extravagant and vain increase of expense, but sometimes an actual impossibility, to obtain mass of them enough to build with, there is no resource but this of veneering ; nor is there anything to be alleged 54 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. against it on the head of durability, such work haying been by experience found to last as long, and in as perfect condi- tion, as any kind of masonry. It is, therefore, to be considered as simply an art of mosaic on a large scale, the ground being of brick, or any other material ; and when lovely stones are to be obtained, it is a manner which should be thoroughly under- stood, and often practised. Nevertheless, as we esteem the shaft of a column more highly for its being of a single block, and as w T e do not regret the loss of substance and value which there is in things of solid gold, silver, agate, or ivory ; so I think the walls themselves may be regarded with a more just complacency if they are known to be all of noble substance ; and that rightly weighing the demands of the two principles of which we have hitherto spoken — Sacrifice and Truth, we should sometimes rather spare external ornament than dimin- ish the unseen value and consistency of what we do ; and I believe that a better manner of design, and a more careful and studious, if less abundant decoration would follow, upon the consciousness of thoroughness in the substance. And, indeed, this is to be remembered, with respect to all the points we have examined ; that while we have traced the limits of license, we have not fixed those of that high rectitude which refuses license. It is thus true that there is no falsity, and much beauty in the use of external color, and that it is lawful to paint either pictures or patterns on whatever surfaces may seem to need enrichment. But it is not less true, that such practices are essentially un architectural ; and while we cannot say that there is actual danger in an over use of them, seeing that they have been always used most lavishly in the times of most noble art, yet they divide the work into two parts and kinds, one of less durability than the other, which dies away from it in pro- cess of ages, and leaves it, unless’ it have noble qualities of its own, naked and bare. That enduring noblesse I should, there- fore, call truly architectural ; and if is not until this has been secured that the accessory power of painting may be called in, for the delight of the immediate time ; nor this, as I think, until every resource of a more stable kind has been exhausted. The true colors of architecture are those of natural stone, and PLATE n.— (Page 55— Vol. Y.) Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy. THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 55 I would fain see these taken advantage of to the full. Every variety of hue, from pale yellow to purple, passing through orange, red, and brown, is entirely at our command ; nearly every kind of green and gray is also attainable : and with these, and pure white, what harmonies might we not achieve ? Of stained and variegated stone, the quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable ; where brighter colors are required, let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used in mosaic — a kind of work as durable as the solid stone, and incapable of losing its lustre by time — and let the painter’s work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber. This is the true and faithful way of building ; where this cannot be, the device of external coloring may, indeed, be employed without dishonor ; but it must be with the warning reflection, that a time will come when such aids must pass away, and when the building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dol- phin. Better the less bright, more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato, and the mosaics of St. Mark’s, are more warmly filled, and more brightly touched, by every return of morning and evening rays ; while the hues of our cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud ; and the temples whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontories, stand in their faded whiteness, like snows which the sunset has left cold. XIX. The last form of fallacy which it will be remembered we had to deprecate, was the substitution of cast or machine work for that of the hand, generally expressible as Operative Deceit. There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice ; one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work ; the other, that it is dishonest. Of its badness, I shall speak in another place, that being evidently no efficient reason against its use when other cannot be had. Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is of the grossest kind, is, I think, a suffi- cient reason to determine absolute and unconditional rejec- tion of it. Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two em tirely distinct sources of agreeableness : one, that of the alv 56 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. stract beauty of its forms, which, for the present, we will suppose to be the same whether they come from the hand or the machine ; the other, the sense of human labor and care spent upon it. How great this latter influence we may per- haps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones : and that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it ; of its delicacy, though it is a thousand fold less delicate ; of its admirableness, though a millionfold less a dmir able ; re- sults from our consciousness of its being the work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends on our discovering in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and heart-breakings — of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success : all this can be traced by a practised eye ; but, grant- ing it even obscure, it is presumed or understood ; and in that is the worth of the thing, just as much as the worth of anything else we call precious. The worth of a diamond is simply the understanding of the time it must take to look for it before it can be cut. It has an intrinsic value besides, which the diamond has not (for a diamond has no more real beauty than a piece of glass) ; but I do not speak of that at present ; I place the two on the same ground ; and I suppose that hand- wrought ornament can no more be generally known from machine work, than a diamond can be known from paste ; nay, that the latter may deceive, for a moment, the mason’s, as the other the jeweller’s eye ; and that it can be detected only by the closest examination. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use that which pretends to a worth which it has not ; which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did not, and is not ; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall, rather ; you have not paid for it, you THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 57 have no business with it, you do not want it. Nobody wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied, are not worth a lie. Leave your walls as bare as a planed board, or build them o t baked mud and chopped straw, if need be ; but do not rough-cast them with falsehood. This, then, being our general law, and I hold it for a more imperative one than any other I have asserted ; and this kind of dishonesty the meanest, as the least necessary ; for orna- ment is an extravagant and inessential thing ; and, therefore, if fallacious, utterly base — this, I say, being our general law, there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions respecting particu- lar substances and their uses. XX. Thus in the use of brick ; since that is known to be originally moulded, there is no reason why it should not be moulded into diverse forms. It will never be supposed to have been cut, and therefore, will cause no deception ; it will have only the credit it deserves. In flat countries, far from any quarry of stone, cast brick may be legitimately, and most successfully, used in decoration, and that elaborate, and even refined. The brick mouldings of the Palazzo Pepoli at Bologna, and those which run round the market-place of Ver- celli, are among the richest in Italy. So also, tile and por- celain work, of which the former is grotesquely, but success- fully, employed in the domestic architecture of France, col- ored tiles being inserted in the diamond spaces between the crossing timbers ; and the latter admirably in Tuscany, in external bas-reliefs, by the Bobbia family, in which works, while we cannot but sometimes regret the useless and ill-ar- ranged colors, we would by no means blame the employment of a material which, whatever its defects, excels every other in permanence, and, perhaps, requires even greater skill in its management than marble. For it is not the material, but the absence of the human labor, which makes the thing worthless ; and a piece of terra cotta, or of plaster of Paris, which has been wrought by human hand, is worth all the stone in Carrara, cut by machinery. It is, indeed, possible, and even usual, for men to sink into machines themselves, so 68 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. that even hand- work has all the characters of mechanism ; oi the difference between living and dead hand-work I shall speak presently ; all that I ask at present is, what it is always in oar power to secure — the confession of what we have done, and what we have given ; so that when we use stone at all, since all stone is naturally supposed to be carved by hand, we must not carve it by machinery ; neither must we use any artificial stone cast into shape, nor any stucco ornaments of the color of stone, or which might in anywise be mistaken for it, as the stucco mouldings in the cor tile of the Palazzo Vec- chio at Florence, which cast a shame and suspicion over every part of the building. But for ductile and fusible materials, as clay, iron, and bronze, since these will usually be supposed to have been cast or stamped, it is at our pleasure to employ them as we will ; remembering that they become precious, or otherwise, just in proportion to the hand- work upon them, or to the clearness of their reception of the hand-work of their mould. But I believe no cause to have been more active in the degradation of our natural feeling for beauty, than the con- stant use of cast iron ornaments. The common iron w r ork of the middle ages was as simple as it was effective, composed of leafage cut flat out of sheet iron, and twisted at the work- man’s will. No ornaments, on the contrary, are so cold, clumsy, and vulgar, so essentially incapable of a fine line, or shadow, as those of cast iron ; and while, on the score of truth, we can hardly allege anything against them, since they are always distinguishable, at a glance, from wrought and ham- mered work, and stand only for what they are, yet I feel very strongly that there is no hope of the progress of the arts of any nation which indulges in these vulgar and cheap substi- tutes for real decoration. Their inefficiency and paltriness I shall endeavor to show 7 more conclusively in another place, enforcing only, at present, the general conclusion that, if even honest or allowable, they are things in which we can never take just pride or pleasure, and must never be employed in any place wherein they might either themselves obtain the credit of being other and better than they are, or be asscn THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 59 dated with the downright work to which it would be a dis- grace to be found in their company. Such are, I believe, the three principal kinds of fallacy by which architecture is liable to be corrupted ; there are, how- ever, other and more subtle forms of it, against which it is less easy to guard by definite law, than by the watchfulness of a manly and unaffected spirit. For, as it has been above no- ticed, there are certain kinds of deception which extend to impressions and ideas only ; of which some are, indeed, of a noble use, as that above referred to, the arborescent look of lofty Gothic aisles ; but of which the most part have so much of legerdemain and trickery about them, that they will lower any style in which they considerably prevail ; and they are likely to prevail when once they are admitted, being apt to catch the fancy alike of uninventive architects and feelingless spectators ; just as mean and shallow minds are, in other matters, delighted with the sense of over-reaching, or tickled with the conceit of detecting the intention to over-reach ; and when subtleties of this kind are accompanied by the display of such dextrous stone-cutting, or architectural sleight of hand, as may become, even by itself, a subject of admiration, it is a great chance if the pursuit of them do not gradually draw us away from all regard and care for the nobler char- acter of the art, and end in its total paralysis or extinction. And against this there is no guarding, but by stem disdain of all display of dexterity and ingenious device, and by put- ting the whole force of our fancy into the arrangement of masses and forms, caring no more how these masses and forms are wrought out, than a great painter cares which way his pencil strikes. It would be easy to give many in- stances of the danger of these tricks and vanities ; but I shall confine myself to the examination of one which has, as I think, been the cause of the fall of Gothic architecture throughout Europe. I mean the system of intersectional mouldings, which, on account of its great importance, and for the sake of the general reader, I may, perhaps, be par- doned for explaining elementarily. XXI. I must, in the first place, however, refer to Professor 60 TEE LAMP OF TRUTH. Willis’s account of the origin of tracery, given in the sixth chapter of his Architecture of the Middle Ages ; since the publication of which I have been not a little amazed to hear of any attempts made to resuscitate the inexcusably absurd theory of its derivation from imitated vegetable form — inex- cusably, I say, because the smallest acquaintance with early Gothic architecture would have informed the supporters of that theory of the simple fact, that, exactly in proportion to the antiquity of the work, the imitation of such organic forms is less, and in the earliest examples does not exist at all. There cannot be the shadow of a question, in the mind of a person familiarised with any single series of consecutive ex- amples, that tracery arose from the gradual enlargement of the penetrations of the shield of stone which, usually sup- ported by a central pillar, occupied the head of early windows. Professor Willis, perhaps, confines his observations somewhat too absolutely to the double sub-arch. I have given, in Plat VII. fig. 2, an interesting case of rude penetration of a high and simply trefoiled shield, from the church of the Eremitani at Padua. But the more frequent and typical form is that of the double sub-arch, decorated with various piercings of the space between it and the superior arch ; with a simple trefoil under a round arch, in the Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen 9 (Plate III. fig. 1) ; with a very beautifully proportioned qua- trefoil, in the triforium of Eu, and that of the choir ef Lisieux ; with quatrefoils, sixfoils, and septfoils, in the transept towers of Rouen (Plate III. fig. 2) ; with a trefoil awkwardly, and very small quatrefoil above, at Coutances, (Plate III. fig. 3) ■; then, with multiplications of the same figures, pointed or round, giv- ing very clumsy shapes of the intermediate stone (fig. 4, from one of the nave chapels of Rouen, fig. 5, from one of the mve chapels of Bayeaux), and finally, by thinning out the stony ribs, reaching conditions like that of the glorious typical form of the clerestory of the apse of Beauvais (fig. 6). XXII. Now, it will be noticed that, during the wdiole r-l this process, the attention is kept fixed on the forms of th A penetrations, that is to say, of the lights as seen from the in- terior, not of the intermediate stone. All the grace of the PLATE III.— (Page 60— Yol. V.) Traceries from Caen, Bayeux, Rouen, and Beayais. THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 61 window is in tlie outline of its light ; and I have drawn all these traceries as seen from within, in order to show the effect of the light thus treated, at first in far off and separate stars, and then gradually enlarging, approaching, until they come and stand over us, as it were, filling the whole space with their effulgence. And it is in this pause of the star, that we have the great, pure, and perfect form of French Gothic ; it was at the instant when the rudeness of the intermediate space had been finally conquered, when the light had expanded to its fullest, and yet had not lost its radiant unity, principality, and visible first causing of the whole, that we have the most exquisite feeling and most faultless judgments in the manage- ment alike of the tracery and decorations. I have given, in Plate X., an exquisite example of it, from a panel decoration of the buttresses of the north door of Rouen ; and in order that the reader may understand what truly fine Gothic w’ork is, and how nobly it unites fantasy and law, as well as for our immediate purpose, it will be well that he should examine its sections and mouldings in detail (they are described in the fourth Chapter, § xxvii.), and that the more carefully, because this design belongs to a period in which the most important change took place in the spirit of Gothic architecture, which, perhaps, ever resulted from the natural progress of any art. That tracery marks a pause between the laying aside of one great ruling principle, and the taking up of another ; a pause as marked, as clear, as conspicuous to the distant view of after times, as to the distant glance of the traveller is tho culminating ridge of the mountain chain over which he has passed. It was the great watershed of Gothic art. Before it, all had been ascent ; after it, all was decline ; both, indeed, by winding paths and varied slopes ; both interrupted, lilu, the gradual rise and fall of the passes of the Alps, by great mountain outliers, isolated or branching from the central chain, and by retrograde or parallel directions of the valleys of access. But the track of the human mind is traceable up to that glorious ridge, in a continuous line, and thence down wards. Like a silver zone — 62 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. “Flung about carelessly, it sliines afar, Catching the eye in many a broken link, In many a turn and traverse, as it glides. And oft above, and oft below, appears — * * * * to him who journeys up As though it were another.” And at that point, and that instant, reaching the place that was nearest heaven, the builders looked back, for the last time, to the way by which they had come, and the scenes through which their early course had passed. They turned away from them and their morning light, and descended to- wards a new horizon, for a time in the warmth of western sun, but plunging with every forward step into more cold and melancholy shade. XXIII. The change of which I speak, is inexpressible in few words, but one more important, more radically influential, could not be. It was the substitution of the line for the mass, as the element of decoration. We have seen the mode in which the openings or penetra- tion of the window’ expanded, until what were, at first, awk- ward forms of intermediate stone, became delicate lines of tracery : and I have been careful in pointing out the peculiar attention bestowed on the proportion and decoration of the mouldings of the window at Rouen, in Plate X., as compared with earlier mouldings, because that beauty and care are sin- gularly significant. They mark that the traceries had caught the eye of the architect. Up to that time, up to the very last instant in which the reduction and thinning of the intervening stone was consummated, his eye had been on the openings only, on the stars of light. He did not care about the stone, a rude border of moulding was all he needed, it w T as the penetrating shape which he was w’atching. But when that shape had re- ceived its last possible expansion, and w’hen the stone-work became an arrangement of graceful and parallel lines, that arrangement, like some form in a picture, unseen and acciden- tally developed, struck suddenly, inevitably, on the sight. It nad literally not been seen before. It flashed out in an in- stant as an independent form. It became a feature of the THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 63 work. The architect took it under his care, thought over it, and distributed its members as we see. Now, the great pause was at the moment when the space and the dividing stone-work were both equally considered. It did not last fifty years. The forms of the tracery were seized with a childish delight in the novel source of beauty ; and the intervening space was cast aside, as an element of decoration, for ever. I have confined myself, in following this change, to the window, as the feature in which it is clearest. But the transition is the same in every member of architect- ure ; and its importance can hardly be understood, unless we take the pains to trace it in the universality, of which illustra- tions, irrelevant to our present purpose, will be found in the third Chapter. I pursue here the question of truth, relating to the treatment of the mouldings. XXIV. The reader will observe that, up to the last expan- sion of the penetrations, the stone- work was necessarily consid- ered, as it actually is, stiff, and unyielding. It was so, also, during the pause of which I have spoken, when the forms of the tracery were still severe and pure ; delicate indeed, but perfectly firm. At the close of the period of pause, the first sign of serious change was like a low breeze, passing through the emaciated tracery, and making it tremble. It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted by the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. lieduced to the slenderness of threads, it began to be considered as possessing also their flexibility. The architect was pleased with this his new fancy, and set him- self to carry it out ; and in a little time, the bars of tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they had been woven together like a net. This was a change which sacrificed a great principle of truth ; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities of the material ; and, however delightful its results in their first developments, it was ultimately ruinous. For, observe the difference between the supposition of duc- tility, and that of elastic structure noticed above in the resem- blance to tree form. That resemblance was not sought, but necessary ; it resulted from the natural conditions of strength 64 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. in the pier or trunk, and slenderness in the ribs or branches, while many of the other suggested conditions of resemblance were perfectly true. A tree branch, though in a certain sense flexible, is not ductile ; it is as firm in its own form as the rib of stone ; both of them will yield up to certain limits, both of them breaking when those limits are exceeded ; while the tree trunk will bend no more than the stone pillar. But when the tracery is assumed to be as yielding as a silken cord ; when the whole fragility, elasticity, and weight of the material are to the eye, if not in terms, denied ; when all the art of the architect is applied to disprove the first conditions of his work- ing, and the first attributes of his materials ; this is a deliber- ate treachery, only redeemed from the charge of direct false- hood by the visibility of the stone surface, and degrading all the traceries it affects exactly in the degree of its presence. XXV. But the declining and morbid taste of the later ar- chitects, was not satisfied with thus much deception. They were delighted with the subtle charm they had created, and thought only of increasing its power. The next step was to consider and represent the tracery, as not only ductile, but penetrable ; and when two mouldings met each other, to manage their intersection, so that one should appear to pass through the other, retaining its independence ; or when two ran parallel to each other, to represent the one as partly con- tained within the other, and partly apparent above it. This form of falsity was that which crushed the art. The flexible traceries were often beautiful, though they were ignoble ; but the penetrated traceries, rendered, as they finally were, merely the means of exhibiting the dexterity of the stone-cutter, an- nihilated both the beauty and dignity of the Gothic types. A system so momentous in its consequences deserves some detailed examination. XXVI. In the drawing of the shafts of the door at Lisieux, under the spandril, in Plate VII., the reader will see the mode of managing the intersection of similar mouldings, which was universal in the great periods. They melted into each other, and became one at the point of crossing, or of contact ; and even the suggestion of so sharp intersection as this of Lisieux THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 65 is usually avoided (this design being, of course, only a pointed form of the earlier Norman arcade, in which the arches are interlaced, and lie each over the preceding, and under the fol- lowing, one, as in Anselm’s tower at Canterbury), since, in the plurality of designs, when mouldings meet each other, they coincide through some considerable portion of their curves, meeting by contact, rather than by intersection ; and at the point of coincidence the section of each separate moulding becomes common to the two thus melted into each other. Thus, in the junction of the circles of the window of the Pa- lazzo Foscari, Plate VIII., given accurately in fig. 8, Plate IV., the section across the line s, is exactly the same as that across any break of the separated moulding above, as $. It some- times, however, happens, that two different mouldings meet each other. This was seldom permitted in the great periods, and, when it took place, was most awkwardly managed. Fig. 1, Plate IV. gives the junction of the mouldings of the gable and vertical, in the window of the spire of Salisbury. That of the gable is composed of a single, and that of the vertical of a double cavetto, decorated with ball-flowers ; and the larger single moulding swallows up one of the double ones, and pushes forward among the smaller balls with the most blundering and clumsy simplicity. In comparing the sections it is to be observed that, in the upper one, the line a b repre- sents an actual vertical in the plane of the window ; while, in the lower one, the line e d represents the horizontal, in the plane of the window, indicated by the perspective line d e. XXVII. The very awkwardness with which such occur- rences of difficulty are met by the earlier builder, marks his dislike of the system, and unwillingness to attract the eye to such arrangements. There is another very clumsy one, in the junction of the upper and sub-arches of the triforium of Salisbury ; but it is kept in the shade, and all the prominent junctions are of mouldings like each other, and managed with perfect simplicity. But so soon as the attention of the builders became, as we have just seen, fixed upon the lines of mouldings instead of the enclosed spaces, those lines began to preserve an independent existence wherever they met ; and different mould* 5 66 THE LAMP OF TRUTH. ings were studiously associated, in order to obtain variety of iutersectional line. We must, however, do the late builders the justice to note that, in one case, the habit grew out of a feeling of proportion, more refined than that of earlier work- men. It shows itself first in the bases of divided pillars, or arch mouldings, whose smaller shafts had originally bases formed by the continued base of the central, or other larger, columns with which they were grouped ; but it being felt, when the eye of the architect became fastidious, that the dimension of moulding which was right for the base of a large shaft, was wrong for that of a small one, each shaft had an independent base ; at first, those of the smaller died simply down on that of the larger ; but when the vertical sections of both became complicated, the bases of the smaller shafts were considered to exist within those of the larger, and the places of their emer- gence, on this supposition, were calculated with the utmost nicety, and cut with singular precision ; so that an elaborate late base of a divided column, as, for instance, of those in the nave of Abbeville, looks exactly as if its smaller shafts had all been finished to the ground first, each with its complete and intricate base, and then the comprehending base of the central pier had been moulded over them in clay, leaving their points and angles sticking out here and there, like the edges of sharp crystals out of a nodule of earth. The exhibition of technical dexterity in work of this kind is often marvellous, the strangest possible shapes of sections being calculated to a hair’s-breadth, and the occurrence of the under and emergent forms being rendered, even in places where they are so slight that they can hardly be detected but by the touch. It is impossible to ren- der a very elaborate example of this kind intelligible, without some fifty measured sections ; but fig. 6, Plate IV. is a very in- teresting and simple one, from the west gate of Bouen. It is part of the base of one of the narrow piers between its princi- pal niches. The square column k, having a base with the pro- file p r, is supposed to contain within itself another similar one, set diagonally, and lifted so far above the inclosing one, as that the recessed part of its profile p r shall fall behind the projecting part of the outer one. The angle of its upper por* PLATE IV.— (Page 66-Vol. V.) Interactional Mouldings. THE LAMP OF TRUTH. \ 67 tion exactly meets the plane of the side of the upper inclosing shaft 4, and would, therefore, not be seen, unless two vertical cuts were made to exhibit it, which form two dark lines the whole way up the shaft. Two small pilasters are run, like fastening stitches, through the junction on the front of the shafts. The sections k n taken respectively at the levels k , n 3 will explain the hypothetical construction of the whole. Fig 0 7 is a base, or joint rather (for passages of this form occur again and again, on the shafts of flamboyant work), of one of the smallest piers of the pedestals which support the lost stat- ues of the porch ; its section below would be the same as 7i, and its construction, after what has been said of the either base, will be at once perceived. XXVIII. There was, however, in this kind of involution, much to be admired as well as reprehended, the proportions of quantities were always as beautiful as they were intricate ; and, though the lines of intersection were harsh, they were exquisitely opposed to the flower-work of the interposing mouldings. But the fancy did not stop here ; it rose from the bases into the arches ; and there, not finding room enough for its exhibition, it withdrew the capitals from the heads even of cylindrical shafts, (we cannot but admire, while we regret, the boldness of the men who could defy the authority and custom of all the nations of the earth for a space of some three thousand years,) in order that the arch mouldings might appear to emerge from the pillar, as at its base they had been lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of the capital ; then they ran the mouldings across and through each other, at the point of the arch ; and finally, not finding their natural directions enough to furnish as many occasions of intersection as they wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off their ends short, when they had passed the point of intersection. Fig. 2, Plate IV. is part of a flying buttress from the apse of St. Gervais at Falaise, in which the moulding whose section is rudely given above at/, (taken vertically through the point /') is carried thrice through itself, in the cross-bar and two arches ; and the flat fillet is cut off sharp at the end of the cross-bar, for the mere pleasure of the truncation Fig. 3 i* 63 TEE LAMP OF TRUTH. half of the head of a door in the Stadthaus of Sursee, in which the shaded part of the section of the joint g g, is that of the arch-moulding, which is three times reduplicated, and six times intersected by itself, the ends being cut off when they become unmanageable. This style is, indeed, earlier exag- gerated in Switzerland and Germany, owing to the imitation in stone of the dovetailing of wood, particularly of the inter- secting of beams at the angles of chalets ; but it only furnishes the more plain instance of the danger of the fallacious system which, from the beginning, repressed the German, and, in the end, ruined the French Gothic. It would be too painful a task to follow further the caricatures of form, and eccen- tricities of treatment, which grow out of this singular abuse — the flattened arch, the shrunken pillar, the lifeless orna- ment, the liny moulding, the distorted and extravagant folia- tion, until the time came when, over these wrecks and rem- nants, deprived of all unity and principle, rose the foul torrent of the renaissance, and swept them all away. So fell the great dynasty of mediaeval architecture. It was because it had lost its own strength, and disobeyed its own laws — because its order, and consistency, and organization, had been broken through — that it could oppose no resistance to the rush of overwhelm- ing innovation. And this, observe, all because it had sacri- ficed a single truth. From that one surrender of its integrity, from that one endeavor to assume the semblance of what it was not, arose the multitudinous forms of disease and decrep- itude, which rotted away the pillars of its supremacy. It was not because its time was come ; it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist, or dreaded by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear it might have survived, and lived ; it would have stood forth in stern comparison with the enervated sensuality of the renaissance ; it would have risen in renewed and purified honor, and with a new soul, from the ashes into which it sank, giving up its glory, as it had received it, for the honor of God — but its own truth was gone, and it sank forever. There was no wisdom nor strength left in it, to raise it from the dust ; and the error of zeal, and the softness of luxury smote it down and dissolved it away THE LAMP OF POWER. 69 It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scattered stones. Those rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea-winds moan and murmur, strewing them joint by joint, and bone by bone, along the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights came once from houses of prayer— those grey arches and quiet isles under which the sheep of our valleys feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars — those shapeless heaps, that are not of the Earth, which lift our fields into strange and sudden banks of flowers, and stay our mountain streams with stones that are not their own, have other thoughts to ask from us than those of mourning for the rage that despoiled, or the fear that forsook them. It was not the robber, not the fanatic, not the Tflasphemer, who sealed the destruction that they had wrought ; the war, the wrath, the terror, might have worked their worst, and the strong walls would have risen, and the slight pillars would have started again, from under the hand of the destroyer. But they could not rise out of the ruins of their own violated truth. CHAPTER HI. THE LAMP OF POWER. I. • In recalling the impressions we have received from the works of man, after a lapse of time long enough to involve in obscurity all but the most vivid, it often happens that we find a strange pre-eminence and durability in many upon whose strength we had little calculated, and that points of character which had escaped the detection of the judgment, become de- veloped under the waste of memory ; as veins of harder rock, whose places could not at first have been discovered by the eye, are left salient under the action of frosts and streams. The traveller who desires to correct the errors of his judg- ment, necessitated by inequalities of temper, infelicities of circumstance, and accidents of association, has no other re- source than to wait for the calm verdict of interposing years ; and to watch for the new arrangements of eminence and shape ro TEE LAMP OF POWER. in tlie images which remain latest in his memory ; as in the ebbing of a mountain lake, he would watch the varying out- lines of its successive shore, and trace, in the form of its de- parting waters, the true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the currents which had excavated, the deepest re- cesses of its primal bed. In thus reverting to the memories of those works of archi- tecture by which we have been most pleasurably impressed, it will generally happen that they fall into two broad classes : the one characterized by an exceeding preciousness and deli- cacy, to which we recur with a sense of affectionate admira- tion ; and the other by a severe, and, in many cases, myste- rious, majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power. From about these two groups, more or less harmonised by intermediate examples, but always distinc- tively marked by features of beauty or of power, there will be swept away, in multitudes, the memories of buildings, per- haps, in their first address to our minds, of no inferior pre- tension, but owing their impressiveness to characters of less enduring nobility — to value of material, accumulation of or- nament, or ingenuity of mechanical construction. Especial interest may, indeed, have been awakened by such circum- stances, and the memory may have been, consequently, ren- dered tenacious of particular parts or effects of the structure ; but it will recall even these only by an active effort, and then without emotion ; while in passive moments, and with thrill- ing influence, the image of purer beauty, and of more spirit- ual power, will return in a fan* and solemn company ; and while the piide of many a stately palace, and the wealth of many a jewelled shrine, perish from our thoughts in a dust of gold, there will rise, through their dimness, the white image of some secluded marble chapel, by river or forest side, with the fretted flower-work shrinking under its arches, as if under vaults of Late-fallen snow ; or the vast weariness of some shad- owy wall whose separate stones are like mountain foundations, and yet numberless. H Now, the difference between these two orders of build- THE LAMP OF POWER. 71 ing is not merely that which there is in nature between things beautiful and sublime. It is, also, the difference between what is derivative and original in man’s work ; for whatever is in architecture fair or beautiful, is imitated from natural forms ; and what is not so derived, but depends for its dig- nity upon arrangement and government received from human mind, becomes the expression of the power of that mind, and receives a sublimity high in proportion to the power ex- pressed. All building, therefore, shows man either as gather- ing or governing : and the secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rale. These are the two great intellectual Lamps of Architecture ; the one consisting in a just and humble veneration for the works of God upon the earth, and the other in an understanding of the dominion over those works which has been vested in man. ILL Besides this expression of living authority and power, there is, however, a sympathy in the forms of noble building, with what is most sublime in natural things ; and it is the governing Power directed by this sympathy, whose operation I shall at present endeavor to trace, abandoning all inquiry into the more abstract fields of invention : for this latter faculty, and the questions of proportion and arrangement connected with its discussion, can only be rightly examined in a general view of all arts ; but its sympathy, in architecture, with the vast controlling powers of Nature herself, is special, and may shortly be considered ; and that with the more ad- vantage, that it has, of late, been little felt or regarded by architects. I have seen, in recent efforts, much contest between two schools, one affecting originality, and the other legality — many attempts at beauty of design — many ingenious adapta- tions of construction ; but I have never seen any aim at the expression of abstract power ; never any appearance of a con- sciousness that, in this primal art of man, there is room for the marking of his relations with the mightiest, as well as the fairest, works of God ; and that those works themselves have been permitted, by their Master and his, to receive an added glory from their association with earnest efforts of human thought In the edifices of Man there should be found rever- 72 THE LAMP OF POWER . ent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue — which gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organization, — hut of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky ; for these, and other glories more than these, re- fuse not to connect themselves, in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand ; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some Cyclopean waste of mural stone ; the pin- nacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, unde- graded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers ; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality. IV. Let us, then, see what is this power and majesty, which Nature herself does not disdain to accept from the works of man ; and what that sublimity in the masses built up by his coralline-like energy, which is honorable, even when trans- ferred by association to the dateless hills, w y hich it needed earthquakes to lift, and deluges to mould. And, first of mere size : It might not be thought possible to emulate the sublimity of natural objects in this respect ; nor would it be, if the architect contended with them in pitched battle. It would not be well to build pyramids in the valley of Chamouni ; and St. Peter’s, among its many other errors, counts for not the least injurious its position on the slope of an inconsiderable hill. But imagine it placed on the plain of Marengo, or, like the Superga of Turin, or like La Salute at Venice ! The fact is, that the apprehension of the size of na- tural objects, as well as of architecture, depends more on for- tunate excitement of the imagination than on measurements by the eye ; and the architect has a peculiar advantage in being able to press close upon the sight, such magnitude as he can command. There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall as high as the choir of Beauvais ; and THE LAMP OF PO WER. if we secure a good precipice of wall, or a sheer and unbroken flank of tower, and place them where there are no enormous natural features to oppose them, we shall feel in them no want of sublimity of size. And it may be matter of encouragement in this respect, though one also of regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than nature crushes human power. It does not need much to humiliate a moun- tain. A hut will sometimes do it ; I never look up to the Col de Balme from Chamouni, without a violent feeling of provo- cation against its hospitable little cabin, whose bright white walls form a visibly four-square spot on the green ridge, and entirely destroy all idea of its elevation. A single villa will often mar a whole landscape, and dethrone a dynasty of hills, and the Acropolis of Athens, Parthenon and all, has, I believe, been dwarfed into a model by the palace lately built beneath it. The fact is, that hills are not so high as we fancy them, and, when to the actual impression of no mean comparative size, is added the sense of the toil of manly hand and thought, a sublimity is reached, which nothing but gross error in ar- rangement of its parts can destroy. Y. While, therefore, it is not to be supposed that mere size will ennoble a mean design, yet every increase of magnitude will bestow upon it a certain degree of nobleness : so that it is well to determine at first, whether the building is to be markedly beautiful or markedly sublime ; and if the latter, not to be withheld by respect to smaller parts from reaching largeness of scale ; provided only, that it be evidently in the architect’s power to reach at least that degree of magnitude which is the lowest at which sublimity begins, rudely definable as that which will make a living figure look less than life be- side it. It is the misfortune of most of our modern buildings that we would fain have an universal excellence in them ; and so part of the funds must go in painting, part in gilding, part in fitting up, part in painted windows, part in small steeples, part in ornaments here and there ; and neither the windows, nor the steeple, nor the ornaments, are worth their materials. For there is a crust about the impressible part of men’s minds, which must be pierced through before they can be touched 74 THE LAMP OF POWER to the quick ; and though we may prick at it and scratch it in a thousand separate places, we might as well have let it alone if we do not come through somewhere with a deep thrust : and if we can give such a thrust anywhere, there is no need of another ; it need not be even so “ wide as a church door,” so that it be enough. And mere weight will do this j it is a clumsy way of doing it, but an effectual one, too ; and the apathy which cannot be pierced through by a small steeple, nor shone through by a small window, can be broken through in a moment by the mere weight of a great wall. Let, there- fore, the architect who has not large resources, choose his point of attack first, and, if he choose size, let him abandon decoration ; for, unless they are concentrated, and numerous enough to make their concentration conspicuous, all his orna- ments together would not be worth one huge stone. And the choice must be a decided one, without compromise. It must be no question whether his capitals would not look better with a little carving — let him leave them huge as blocks ; or whether his arches should not have richer architraves — let him throw them a foot higher, if he can ; a yard more across the nave will be worth more to him than a tesselated pavement ; and another fathom of outer wall, than an army of pinnacles. The limitation of size must be only in the uses of the building, or in the ground at his disposal. VI. That limitation, however, being by such circumstances determined, by what means, it is to be next asked, may the actual magnitude be best displayed ; since it is seldom, per- haps never, that a building of any pretension to size looks so large as it is. The appearance of a figure in any distant, more especially in any upper, parts of it will almost always prove that we have under-estimated the magnitude of those parts. It has often been observed that a building, in order to show its magnitude, must be seen all at once. It would, perhaps, be better to say, must be bounded as much as possible by continuous lines, and that its extreme points should be seen all at once ; or we may state, in simpler terms still, that it must have one visible bounding line from top to bottom, and from end to end. This bounding line from top to bottom may THE LAMP OF POWER. 75 either be inclined inwards, and the mass, therefore, pyrami- dical ; or vertical, and the mass form one grand cliff ; or in- clined outwards, as in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, in a sort, in the Greek temple, and in all buildings with heavy cornices or heads. Now, in all these cases, if the bounding line be violently broken ; if the cornice project, or the upper portion of the pyramid recede, too violently, majesty will be lost ; not because the building cannot be seen all at once,— for in the case of a heavy cornice no part of it is necessarily concealed — but because the continuity of its terminal line is broken, and the length of that line , therefore, cannot be esti- mated. But the error is, of course, more fatal when much of the building is also concealed ; as in the well-known case of the recession of the dome of St. Peter’s, and, from the greater number of points of view, in churches whose highest portions, whether dome or tower, are over their cross. Thus there is only one point from which the size of the Cathedral of Florence is felt ; and that is from the corner of the Via de’ Balestrieri, opposite the south-east angle, where it happens that the dome is seen rising instantly above the apse and transepts. In all cases in which the tower is over the cross, the grandeur and height of the tower itself are lost, because there is but one line down which the eye can trace the whole height, and that is in the inner angle of the cross, not easily discerned. Hence, while, in symmetry and feeling, such designs may often have pre-eminence, yet, where the height of the tower itself is to be made apparent, it must be at the west end, or better still, detached as a campanile. Imagine the loss to the Lombard churches if their campaniles were carried only to their present height over their crosses ; or to the Cathedral of Rouen, if the Tour de Beurre were made central, in the place of its present debased spire ! VII. Whether, therefore, we have to do with tower or wall, there must be one bounding line from base to coping ; and I am much inclined, myself, to love the true vertical, or the vertical, with a solemn frown of projection (not a scowl), as in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. This character is always given to rocks by the poets ; with slight foundation indeed 7(5 THE LAMP OF POWER. real rocks being little given to overhanging — but with excel, lent judgment ; for the sense of threatening conveyed by this form is a nobler character than that of mere size. And, in buildings, this threatening should be somewhat carried down into their mass. A mere projecting shelf is not enough, the whole wall must, Jupiter like, nod as well as frown. Hence, I think the propped machicolations of the Palazzo Vecchio and Duomo of Florence far grander headings than any form of Greek cornice. Sometimes the projection may be thrown lower, as in the Doge’s palace of Venice, where the chief ap- pearance of it is above the second arcade ; or it may become a grand swell from the ground, as the head of a ship of the line rises from the sea. This is very nobly attained by the projection of the niches in the third story of the Tour de Beurre at Bouen. VTTT. What is needful in the setting forth of magnitude in height, is right also in the marking it in area — let it be gath- ered well together. It is especially to be noted with respect to the Palazzo Vecchio and other mighty buildings of its order, how mistakenly it has been stated that dimension, in order to become impressive, should be expanded either in height or length, but not equally : whereas, rather it will be found that those buildings seem on the whole the vastest which have been gathered up into a mighty square, and which look as if they had been measured by the angel’s rod, “ the length, and the breadth, and the height of it are equal,” and herein something is to be taken notice of, which I believe not to be sufficiently, if at all, considered among our archi- tects. Of the many broad divisions under which architecture may be considered, none appear to me more significant than that into buildings whose interest is in their walls, and those whose interest is in the lines dividing their walls. In the Greek temple the wall is as nothing ; the entire interest is in the detached columns and the frieze they bear ; in French Flamboyant, and in our detestable Perpendicular, the object is to get rid of the wall surface, and keep the eye altogether on tracery of line ; in Romanesque work and Egyptian, the THE LAMP OF POWER. 77 wall is a confessed and honored member, and the light is often allowed to fall on large areas of it, variously decorated. Now, both these principles are admitted by Nature, the one in her woods and thickets, the other in her plains, and cliffs, and waters ; but the latter is pre-eminently the principle of power, and, in some sense, of beauty also. For, whatever in- finity of fair form there may be in the maze of the forest, there is a fairer, as I think, in the surface of the quiet lake ; and I hardly know that association of shaft or tracery, for which I would exchange the warm sleep of sunshine on some smooth, broad, human-like front of marble. Nevertheless, if breadth is to be beautiful, its substance must in some sort be beautiful ; and we must not hastily condemn the exclusive resting of the northern architects in divided lines, until at least we have remembered the difference between a blank surface of Caen stone, and one mixed from Genoa and Car- rara, of serpentine with snow : but as regards abstract power and awfulness, there is no question ; without breadth of sur- face it is in vain to seek them, and it matters little, so that the surface be wide, bold and unbroken, whether it be of brick or of jasper ; the light of heaven upon it, and the weight of earth in it, are all we need : for it is singular how forgetful the mind may become both of material and workmanship, if only it have space enough over which to range, and to remind it, however feebly, of the joy that it has in contemplating the flatness and sweep of great plains and broad seas. And it is a noble thing for men to do this with their cut stone or moulded clay, and to make the face of a wall look infinite, and its edge against the sky like an horizon : or even if less than this be reached, it is still delightful to mark the play of passing light on its broad surface, and to see by how manj^ artifices and gradations of tinting and shadow, time and storm will set their wild signatures upon it ; and how in the rising or de- clining of the day the unbroken twilight rests long and lu- ridly on its high lineless forehead, and fades away untraceably down its tiers of confused and countless stone. IX. This, then, being, as I think, one of the peculiar ele- ments of sublime architecture, it may be easily seen how neces* 78 THE LAMP OF POWER. sarily consequent upon the love of it will be the choice of a form approaching to the square for the main outline. For, in whatever direction the building is contracted, in that direction the eye w T ill be drawn to its terminal lines ; and the sense of surface will only be at its fullest when those lines are removed, in every direction, as far as possible. Thus the square and circle are pre-eminently the areas of power among those bounded by purely straight or curved lines ; and these, with their relative solids, the cube and sphere, and relative solids of progression (as in the investigation of the laws of proportion I shall call those masses which are generated by the progression of an area of given form along a line in a given direction), the square and cylindrical column, are the elements of utmost power in all architectural arrangements. On the other hand, grace and perfect proportion require an elongation in some one direction : and a sense of power may be communicated to this form of magnitude by a continuous series of any marked features, such as the eye may be unable to number ; while yet we feel, from their boldness, decision, and simplicity, that it is indeed their multitude which has embarrassed us, not any confusion or indistinctness of form. This expedient of continued series forms the sublimity of arcades and aisles, of all ranges of columns, and, on a smaller scale, of those Greek mouldings, of which, repeated as they now are in all the meanest and most familiar forms of our fur- niture, it is impossible altogether to weary. Now, it is evi- dent that the architect has choice of two types of form, each properly associated with its own kind of interest or decora- tion : the square, or greatest area, to be chosen especially w'hen the surface is to be the subject of thought ; and the elongated area, when the divisions of the surface are to be the subjects of thought. Both these orders of form, as I think nearly every other source of power and beauty, are marvel- lously united in that building which I fear to weary the reader by bringing forward too frequently, as a model of all perfec- tion — the Doge’s palace at Venice : its general arrangement, a hollow square ; its principal fagade, an oblong, elongated to the eye by a range of thirty-four small arches, and thirty-five THE LAMP OF PO WER. 79 columns, wliile it is separated by a richly-canopied window in the centre, into two massive divisions, whose height and length are nearly as four to five ; the arcades which give it length being confined to the lower stories, and the upper, between its broad windows, left a mighty surface of smooth marble, chequered with blocks of alternate rose color and white. It would be impossible, I believe, to invent a more magnificent arrangement of all that is in building most dignified and most fair. X. In the Lombard Komanesque, the two principles are more fused into each other, as most characteristically in the Cathedral of Pisa : length of proportion, exhibited by an ar- cade of twenty-one arches above, and fifteen below, at the side of the nave ; bold square proportion in the front ; that front divided into arcades, placed one above the other, the lowest with its pillars engaged, of seven arches, the four uppermost thrown out boldly from the receding wall, and casting deep shadows; the first, above the basement, of nineteen arches; the second of twenty-one ; the third and fourth of eight each ; sixty-three arches in all ; all circular headed, all with cylin- drical shafts, and the low T est with square panellings, set diag- onally under their semicircles, an universal ornament in this style ("Plate XII., fig. 7) ; the apse, a semicircle, with a semi- dome for its roof, and three ranges of circular arches for its exterior ornament ; in the interior of the nave, a range of circular arches below a circular-arched triforium, and a vast fiat surface, observe, of wall decorated with striped marble above ; the whole arrangement (not a peculiar one, but char- acteristic of every church of the period ; and, to my feeling, the most majestic ; not perhaps the fairest, but the mightiest type of form which the mind of man has ever conceived) based exclusively on associations of the circle and the square. I am now, however, trenching upon ground which I desire to reserve for more careful examination, in connection with other aesthetic questions : but I believe the examples I have given wall justify my vindication of the square form from the X’eprobation which has been lightly throwm upon it ; nor might this be done for it only as a ruling outline, but as occurring 80 TEE LAMP OF POWER. constantly in the best mosaics, and in a thousand forms oi minor decoration, which I cannot now examine ; my chief assertion of its majesty being always as it is an exponent of space and surface, and therefore to be chosen, either to rule in their outlines, or to adorn by masses of light and shade those portions of buildings in which surface is to be rendered pre- cious or honorable. XI. Thus far, then, of general forms, and of the modes in which the scale of architecture is best to be exhibited. Let us next consider the manifestations of power which belong to its details and lesser divisions. The first division we have to regard, is the inevitable one of masonry. It is true that this division may, by great art, be concealed ; but I think it unwise (as well as dishonest) to do so ; for this reason, that there is a very noble character always to be obtained by the opposition of large stones to divided masonry, as by shafts and columns of one piece, or massy lintels and architraves, to wall work of bricks or smaller stones ; and there is a certain organization in the management of such parts, like that of the continuous bones of the skeleton, op- posed to the vertebrae, which it is not well to surrender. I hold, therefore, that, for this and other reasons, the masonry of a building is to be shown : and also that, with certain rare exceptions (as in the cases of chapels and shrines of most fin- ished workmanship ) , the smaller the building, the more neces- sary it is that its masonry should be bold, and vice versa. For if a building be under the mark of average magnitude, it is not in our power to increase its apparent size (too easily measurable) by any proportionate diminution in the scale of its masonry. But it may be often in our power to give it a certain nobility by building it of massy stones, or, at all events, introducing such into its make. Thus it is impossible that there should ever be majesty in a cottage built of brick ; but there is a marked element of sublimity in the rude and irre- gular piling of the rocky walls of the mountain cottages of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. Their size is not one whit diminished, though four or five stones reach at their angles from the ground to the eaves, or though a native rock happen THE LAMP OF POWER. 81 to project conveniently, and to be built into the framework ol the wall. On the other hand, after a building has once reached the mark of majestic size, it matters, indeed, comparatively little whether its masonry be large or small, but if it be al- together large, it will sometimes diminish the magnitude for want of a measure ; if altogether small, it will suggest ideas of poverty in material, or deficiency in mechanical resource* besides interfering in many cases with the lines of the design, and delicacy of the workmanship. A very unhappy instance of such interference exists in the fagade of the church of St. Madeleine at Paris, where the columns, being built of very small stones of nearly equal size, with visible joints, look as if they were covered with a close trellis. So, then, that masonry will be generally the most magnificent which, without the use of materials systematically small or large, accommodates itself, naturally and frankly, to the conditions and structure of its work, and displays alike its pow T er of dealing with the vastest masses, and of accomplishing its purpose w r ith the smallest, sometimes heaping rock upon rock with Titanic commandment, and anon binding the dusty remnants and edgy splinters into springing vaults and swelling domes. And if the nobility of this confessed and natural masonry were more commonly felt, w T e should not lose the dignity of it by smoothing surfaces and fitting joints. The sums which we waste in chiselling and polishing stones which would have been better left as they came from the quarry would often raise a building a story higher. Only in this there is to be a certain respect for material also : for if w r e build in marble, or in any limestone, the knowm ease of the workmanship will make its absence seem slovenly ; it will be well to take advantage of the stone’s softness, and to make the design delicate and dependent upon smoothness of chiselled surfaces : but if we build in granite or lava, it is a folly, in most cases, to cast away the labor necessary to smooth it ; it is w T iser to make the design granitic itself, and to leave the blocks rudely squared. I do not deny a certain splendor and sense of power in the smoothing of granite, and in the entire subduing of its iron resistance to the human supremacy. But, m most cases, I believe, the laboj 6 82 THE LAMP OF POWER. and time necessary to do this would be better spent in anothei way ; and that to raise a building to a height of a hundred feet with rough blocks, is better than to raise it to seventy with smooth ones. There is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage of the stone to which the art must indeed be great that pretends to be equivalent ; and a stern expression of brotherhood with the mountain heart from which it has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering obedience to the rule and measure of men. His eye must be delicate indeed, who would desire to see the Pitti palace polished. XII. Next to those of the masonry, we have to consider the divisions of the design itself. Those divisions are, neces- sarily, either into masses of light and shade, or else by traced lines ; which latter must be, indeed, themselves produced by incisions or projections which, in some lights, cast a certain breadth of shade, but which may, nevertheless, if finely enough cut, be always true lines, in distant effect. I call, for instance, such panelling as that of Henry the Seventh’s chapel, pure linear division. Now, it does not seem to me sufficiently recollected, that a wall surface is to an architect simply what a white canvas is to a painter, with this only difference, that the wall has already a sublimity in its height, substance, and other characters already considered, on which it is more dangerous to break than to touch with shade the canvas surface. And, for my own part, I think a smooth, broad, freshly laid surface of gesso a fairer thing than most pictures I see painted on it ; much more, a noble surface of stone than most architectural features which it is caused to assume. But however this may be, the canvas and wall are supposed to be given, and it is our craft to divide them. And the principles on which this division is to be made, are as regards relation of quantities, the same in architecture as in painting, or indeed, in any other art whatsoever, only the painter is by his varied subject partly permitted, partly com- pelled, to dispense with the symmetry of architectural light and shade, and to adopt arrangements apparently free and accidental. So that in modes of grouping there is much dif THE LAMP OF POWER . 83 ference (though no opposition) between the two arts ; but in rules of quantity, both are alike, so far forth as their com- mands of means are alike. For the architect, not being able to secure always the same depth or decision of shadow, nor to add to its sadness by color (because even when color is employed, it cannot follow the moving shade), is compelled to make many allowances, and avail himself of many con- trivances, which the painter needs neither consider nor employ. XIII. Of these limitations the first consequence is, that positive shade is a more necessary and more sublime thing in an architect’s hands than in a painter’s. For the latter being able to temper his light with an under-tone throughout, and to make it delightful with sweet color, or awful with lurid color, and to represent distance, and air, and sun, by the depth of it, and fill its whole space with expression, can deal with an enormous, nay, almost with an universal extent of it, and the best painters most delight in such extent ; but as light, with the architect, is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface, his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades. Bo that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow ; and it seems to me, that the reality of its works, and the use and influence they have in the daily life of men (as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing to do but in times of rest or of pleasure) require of it that it should express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as great as there is in human life : and that as the great poem and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric spright- liness, but must be serious often, and sometimes melancholy, else they do not express the truth of this wild world of ours ; so there must be, in this magnificently human art of architec- ture, some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery : and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom, by the frown upon its 84 TEE LAMP OF POWER. front, and the shadow of its recess. So that Rembrandtism is a noble manner in architecture, though a false one in paint- ing ; and I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface. And among the first habits that a young architect should learn, is that of thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its miserable liny skeleton ; but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn lights it, and the dusk leaves it ; when its stones will be hot and its cran- nies cool ; when the lizards will bask on the one, and the birds build in the other. Let him design with the sense of cold and heat upon him ; let him cut out the shadows, as men dig wells in un watered plains ; and lead along the lights, as a founder does his hot metal ; let him keep the full command of both, and see that he knows how they fall, and where they fade. His paper lines and proportions are of no value : all that he has to do must be done by spaces of light and darkness ; and his business is to see that the one is broad and bold enough not to be swallowed up by twilight, and the other deep enough not to be dried like a shallow pool by a noon-day sun. And that this may be, the first necessity is that the quanti- ties of shade or light, whatever they may be, shall be thrown into masses, either of something like equal weight, or else large masses of the one relieved with small of the other ; but masses of one or other kind there must be. No design that is divided at all, and is not divided into masses, can ever be of the smallest value : this great law respecting breadth, pre- cisely the same in architecture and painting, is so important, that the examination of its two principal applications will include most of the conditions of majestic design on which I would at present insist. XIV. Painters are in the habit of speaking loosely of masses of light and shade, meaning thereby any large spaces of either. Nevertheless, it is convenient sometimes to restrict the term mass ” to the portions to which proper form be- longs, and to call the field on which such forms are traced, interval. Thus, in foliage with projecting boughs or stems, we have masses of light, with intervals of shade ; and, in THE LAMP OF POWER. 85 light skies with dark clouds upon them, masses of shade with intervals of light. This distinction is, in architecture, still more necessary ; for there are two marked styles dependent upon it : one in which the forms are drawn with light upon darkness, as in Greek sculpture and pillars ; the other in which they are drawn with darkness upon light, as in early Gothic foliation. Now, it is not in the designer’s power determinately to vary degrees and places of darkness, but it is altogether in his power to vary in determined directions his degrees of light. Hence, the use of the dark mass characterises, generally, a trenchant style of design, in which the darks and lights are both flat, and terminated by sharp edges ; while the use of the light mass is in the same way associated with a softened and full manner of design, in which the darks are much warmed by reflected lights, and the lights are rounded and melt into them. The term applied by Milton to Doric bas- relief — “ bossy, 5 ’ is, as is generally the case with Milton’s epithets, the most comprehensive and expressive of this man- ner, which the English language contains ; while the term which specifically describes the chief member of early Gothic decoration, feuille, foil or leaf, is equally significative of a flat space of shade. XY. \Ve shall shortly consider the actual modes in which these two kinds of mass have been treated. And, first, of the light, or rounded, mass. The modes in which relief was se- cured for the more projecting forms of bas-relief, by the Greeks, have been too well described by Mr. Eastlake * to need recapitulation : the conclusion which forces itself upon us from the facts he has remarked, being one on which I shall have occa- sion farther to insist presently, that the Greek workman cared for shadow only as a dark field wherefrom his light figure or de- sign might be intelligibly detached : his attention was concen- trated on the one aim at readableness, and clearness of accent ; and all composition, all harmony, nay, the very vitality and energy of separate groups were, when necessary, sacrificed to plain speaking. Nor was there any predilection for one kind * Literature of the Fine Arts. — Essay on Bas-relief. m THE LAMP OF PO WEE. of form rather than another. Rounded forms were, in the columns and principal decorative members, adopted, not for their own sake, but as characteristic of the things represented. They were beautifully rounded, because the Greek habitually did well what he had to do, not because he loved roundness more than squareness ; severely rectilinear forms were asso- ciated with the curved ones in the cornice and triglyph, and the mass of the pillar was divided by a fluting, which, in distant effect, destroyed much of its breadth. What power of light these primal arrangements left, was diminished in successive refinements and additions of ornament ; and continued to di- minish through Roman work, until the confirmation of the circular arch as a decorative feature. Its lovely and simple line taught the eye to ask for a similar boundary of solid form ; the dome followed, and necessarily the decorative masses were thenceforward managed with reference to, and in sympathy with, the chief feature of the building. Hence arose, among the Byzantine architects, a system of ornament, entirely re- strained within the superfices of curvilinear masses, on which the light fell with as unbroken gradation as on a dome or col- umn, while the illumined surface was nevertheless cut into details of singular and most ingenious intricacy. Something is, of course, to be allowed for the less dexterity of the work- men ; it being easier to cut down into a solid block, than to arrange the projecting portions of leaf on the Greek capital : such leafy capitals are nevertheless executed by the Byzantines with skill enough to show that their preference of the massive form was by no means compulsory, nor can I think it unwise. On the contrary, while the arrangements of line are far more artful in the Greek capital, the Byzantine light and shade are as incontestably more grand and masculine, based on that quality of pure gradation, which nearly all natural objects possess, and the attainment of which is, in fact, the first and most palpable purpose in natural arrangements of grand form. The rolling heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multiplied by wreaths, yet gathering them all into its broad, torrid, and towering zone, and its midnight darkness oppo- site ; the scarcely less majestic heave of the mountain side, all THE LAMP OF POWER. 87 torn and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock, yet never losing the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy de- cline ; and the head of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf and bough, yet terminated against the sky by a true line, and rounded by a green horizon, which, multiplied in the dis- tant forest, makes it look bossy from above ; all these mark, for a great and honored law, that diffusion of light for which the Byzantine ornaments were designed ; and show us that those builders had truer sympathy with what God made majes- tic, than the self-contemplating and self-contented Greek. I know that they are barbaric in comparison ; but there is a power in their barbarism of sterner tone, a power not sophistic nor penetrative, but embracing and mysterious ; a power faith- ful more than thoughtful, which conceived and felt more than it created ; a power that neither comprehended nor ruled it- self, but worked and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams and winds ; and which could not rest in the expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth itself. XVI. I have endeavored to give some idea of one of the hollow balls of stone which, surrounded by flowing leafage, occur in varied succession on the architrave of the central gate of St. Mark’s at Venice, in Plate I. fig. 2. It seems to me singularly beautiful in its unity of lightness, and delicacy of detail, with breadth of light. It looks as if its leaves had been sensitive, and had risen and shut themselves into a bud at some sudden touch, and would presently fall back again into their wild flow. The cornices of San Michele of Lucca, seen above and below the arch, in Plate VI., show the effect of heavy leafage and thick stems arranged on a surface whose curve is a simple quadrant, the light dying from off them as it turns. It would be difficult, as I think, to invent anything more noble ; and I insist on the broad character of their ar- rangement the more earnestly, because, afterwards modified by greater skill in its management, it became characteristic of the richest pieces of Gothic design. The capital, given in 88 THE LAMP OF POWER Plate V., is of the noblest period of the Venetian Gothic ; and it is interesting to see the play of leafage so luxuriant, abso- lutely subordinated to the breadth of two masses of light and shade. What is done by the Venetian architect, with a power as irresistible as that of the waves of his surrounding sea, is done by the masters of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less expressing their assent to the same great law. The ice spic- ulse of the North, and its broken sunshine, seem to have image in, and influence on the work ; and the leaves which, under the Italian’s hand, roll, and flow, and bow down over their black shadows, as in the weariness of noon-day heat, are, in the North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the edges, and sparkling as if with dew. But the rounding of the ruling form is not less sought and felt. In the lower part of Plate I. is the finial of the pediment given in Plate II. , from the cathe- dral of St. Lo. It is exactly similar in feeling to the Byzan- tine capital, being rounded under the abacus by four branches of thistle leaves, wdiose stems, springing from the angles, bend outwards and fall back to the head, throwing their jaggy spines down upon the full light, forming two sharp quatre- foils. I could not get near enough to this finial to see with what degree of delicacy the spines were cut ; but I have sketched a natural group of thistle-leaves beside it, that the reader may compare the types, and see with what mastery they are subjected to the broad form of the whole. The small capital from Coutances, Plate XIII. fig. 4, w hich is of earlier date, is of simpler elements, and exhibits the principle still more clearly ; but the St. Lo finial is only one of a thousand instances which might be gathered even from the fully de- veloped flamboyant, the feeling of breadth being retained in minor ornaments long after it had been lost in the main de- sign, and sometimes capriciously renewing itself throughout, as in the cylindrical niches and pedestals winch enrich the porches of Caudebee and Bouen. Fig. 1, Plate I. is the sim- plest of those of Bouen ; in the more elaborate there are four projecting sides, divided by buttresses into eight rounded compartments of tracery ; even the whole bulk of the outer THE LAMP OF POWER. 89 pier is treated with the same feeling ; and though composed partly of concave recesses, party of square shafts, partly oi statues and tabernacle work, arranges itself as a whole into one richly rounded tower. XVII. I cannot here enter into the curious questions con- nected with the management of larger curved surfaces ; into the causes of the difference in proportion necessary to be observed between round and square towers ; nor into the reasons why a column or ball may be richly ornamented, while surface decorations would be inexpedient on masses like the Castle of St. Angelo, the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or the dome of St. Peter’s. But what has been above said of the desireableness of serenity in plane surfaces, applies still more forcibly to those which are curved ; and it is to be remem- bered that we are, at present, considering how this serenity and power may be carried into minor divisions, not how the ornamental character of the lower form may, upon occasion, be permitted to fret the calmness of the higher. Nor, though the instances we have examined are of globular or cylindrical masses chiefly, is it to be thought that breadth can only be secured by such alone : many of the noblest forms are of sub- dued curvature, sometimes hardly visible ; but curvature of some degree there must be, in order to secure any measure of grandeur in a small mass of light. One of the most marked distinctions between one artist and another, in the point of skill, will be found in their relative delicacy of per- ception of rounded surface ; the full power of expressing the perspective, foreshortening and various undulation of such surface is, perhaps, the last and most difficult attainment of the hand and eye. For instance : there is, perhaps, no tree which has baffled the landscape painter more than the com- mon black spruce fir. It is rare that we see any representa- tion of it other than caricature. It is conceived as if it grew in one plane, or as a section of a tree, with a set of boughs symmetrically dependent on opposite sides. It is thought formal, unmanageable, and ugly. It would be so, if it grew as it is drawn. But the power of the tree is not in that chan- delier-like section. It is in the dark, flat, solid tables ol 90 THE LAMP OF POWER. leafage, which it holds out on its strong arras, curved slightlj over them like shields, and spreading towards the extremity like a hand. It is vain to endeavor to paint the sharp, grassy, intricate leafage, until this ruling form has been secured ; and in the boughs that approach the spectator, the foreshort- ening of it is like that of a wide hill country, ridge just rising over ridge in successive distances ; and the finger-like ex- tremities, foreshortened to absolute bluntness, require a deli- cacy in the rendering of them like that of the drawing of the hand of the Magdalene upon the vase in Mr. Rogers’s Titian. Get but the back of that foliage, and you have the tree ; but I cannot name the artist who has thoroughly felt it. So, in all drawing and sculpture, it is the power of rounding, softly and perfectly, every inferior mass which preserves the seren- it}', as it follows the truth, of Nature, and which demands the highest knowledge and skill from the workman. A noble de- sign may always be told by the back of a single leaf, and it w 7 as the sacrifice of this breadth and refinement of surface for sharp edges and extravagant undercutting, which destroyed the Gothic mouldings, as the substitution of the line for the light destroyed the Gothic tracery. This change, however, we shall better comprehend after we have glanced, at the chief conditions of arrangement of the second kind of mass ; that which is flat, and of shadow only. XVIII. We have noted above how the wall surface, com- posed of rich materials, and covered with costly work, in modes which we shall examine in the next Chapter, became a subject of peculiar interest to the Christian architects. Its broad flat lights could only be made valuable by points or masses of energetic shadow, which were obtained by the Ro- manesque architect by means of ranges of recessed arcade, in the management of which, however, though all the effect de- pends upon the shadow so obtained, the eye is still, as in classical architecture, caused to dwell upon the projecting col- umns, capitals, and wall, as in Plate VI. But with the enlarge- ment of the windows which, in the Lombard and Romanesque churches, is usually little more than an arched slit, came the conception of the simpler mode of decoration, by penetrations PLATE VL— (Page 90-Yol. Y.) Arch from the Faqade of tite CnuRcn of San Michele, at Lucca. THE LAMP OF POWER. 91 which, seen from within, are forms of light, and, from without, are forms of shade. In Italian traceries the eye is exclusively fixed upon the dark forms of the penetrations, and the whole proportion and power of the design are caused to depend upon them. The intermediate spaces are, indeed, in the most perfect early examples, filled with elaborate ornament ; but this ornament was so subdued as never to disturb the simplic- ity and force of the dark masses ; and in many instances is en- tirely wanting. The composition of the whole depends on the proportioning and shaping of the darks ; and it is impossible that anything can be more exquisite than their placing in the head window of the Giotto campanile, Plate IX., or the church of Or San Michele. So entirely does the effect depend upon them, that it is quite useless to draw Italian tracery in out- line ; if with any intention of rendering its effect, it is better to mark the black spots, and let the rest alone. Of course, when it is desired to obtain an accurate rendering of the de- sign, its lines and mouldings are enough ; but it often hap- pens that works on architecture are of little use, because they afford the reader no means of judging of the effective inten- tion of the arrangements which they state. No person, look- ing at an architectural drawing of the richly foliaged cusps and intervals of Or San Michele, would understand that all this sculpture was extraneous, was a mere added grace, and had nothing to do with the real anatomy of the work, and that by a few bold cuttings through a slab of stone he might reach the main effect of it all at once. I have, therefore, in the plate of the design of Giotto, endeavored especially to mark these points of purpose; there, as in every other in- stance, black shadows of a graceful form lying on the white surface of the stone, like dark leaves laid upon snow. Hence, as before observed, the universal name of foil applied to such ornaments. XIX. In order to the obtaining their full effect, it is evident that much caution is necessary in the management of the glass. In the finest instances, the traceries are open lights, either in towers, as in this design of Giotto’s or in external arcades like that of the Campo Santo at Pisa or the Doge’s 02 TEE LAMP OF POWER. palace at Venice ; and it is thus only that their full beauty is shown. In domestic buildings, or in windows of churches necessarily glazed, the glass was usually withdrawn entirely behind the traceries. Those of the Cathedral of Florence stand quite clear of it, casting their shadows in well detached lines, so as in most lights to give the appearance of a double tracery. In those few instances in which the glass was set in the tracery itself, as in Or San Michele, the effect of the latter is half destroyed : perhaps the especial attention paid by Orgagna to his surface ornament, was connected with the in- tention of so glazing them. It is singular to see, in late archi- tecture, the glass, which tormented the older architects, con- sidered as a valuable means of making the lines of tracery more slender ; as in the smallest intervals of the windows of Merton College, Oxford, where the glass is advanced about two inches from the centre of the tracery bar (that in the larger spaces being in the middle, as usual), in order to prevent the depth of shadow from farther diminishing the apparent interval. Much of the lightness of the effect of the traceries is owing to this seemingly unimportant arrangement. But, generally speaking, glass spoils all traceries ; and it is much to be wished that it should be kept well within them, when it can- not be dispensed with, and that the most careful and beauti- ful designs should be reserved for situations where no glass would be needed. XX. The method of decoration by shadow was, as far as we have hitherto traced it, common to the northern and south- ern Gothic. But in the carrying out of the system they in- stantly diverged. Having marble at his command, and classi- cal decoration in his sight, the southern architect was able to carve the intermediate spaces with exquisite leafage, or to vary his wall surface with inlaid stones. The northern architect neither knew the ancient work, nor possessed the delieate material ; and he had no resource but to cover his walls with holes, cut into foiled shapes like those of the windows. This he did, often with great clumsiness, but always with a vigor- ous sense of composition, and always, observe, depending on the shadows for effect Where the wall was thick and could THE LAMP OF POWER. 93 not be cut through, and the foilings were large, those shadows did not fill the entire space ; but the form was, nevertheless, drawn on the eye by means of them, and when it was possible, they were cut clear through, as in raised screens of pediment, like those on the west front of Bayeux ; cut so deep in every case, as to secure, in all but a direct low front light, great breadth of shadow. The spandril, given at the top of Plate YU., is from the southwestern entrance of the Cathedral of Lisieux ; one of the most quaint and interesting doors in Normandy, probably soon to be lost forever, by the continuance of the masonic operations which have already destroyed the northern tower. Its work is altogether rude, but full of spirit ; the opposite cpandrils have different, though balanced, ornaments very in- accurately adjusted, each rosette or star (as the five-rayed fig- ure, now quite defaced, in the upper portion appears to have been) cut on its own block of stone and fitted in with small nicety, especially illustrating the point I have above insisted upon — the architect’s utter neglect of the forms of interme- diate stone, at this early period. The arcade, of which a single arch and shaft are given on the left, forms the flank of the door ; three outer shafts bear- ing three orders within the spandril which I have drawn, and each of these shafts carried over an inner arcade, decorated above with quatre-foils, cut concave and filled with leaves, the whole disposition exquisitely picturesque and full of strange play of light and shade. For some time the penetrative ornaments, if so they may be for convenience called, maintained their bold and inde* pendent character. Then they multiplied and enlarged, be, coming shallower as they did so ; then they began to run to- gether, one swallowing up, or hanging on to, another, like bubbles in expiring foam — fig. 4, from a spandril at Bayeux, looks as if it had been blown from a pipe ; finally, they lost their individual character altogether, and the eye was made to rest on the separating lines of tracery, as we saw before in the window ; and then came the great change and the fall qA the Gothic power. 94 THE LAMP OF POWER. XXI. Figs. 2 and 3, the one a quadrant of the star window of the little chapel close to St. Anastasia at Verona, and the other a very singular example from the church of the Eremi- tani at Padua, compared with fig. 5, one of the ornaments of the transept towers of Eouen, show the closely correspond- ent conditions of the early Northern and Southern Gothic. 10 But, as we have said, the Italian architects, not being embar- rassed for decoration of wall surface, and not being obliged, like the Northmen, to multiply their penetrations, held to the system for some time longer ; and while they increased the refinement of the ornament, kept the purity of the plan. That refinement of ornament was their weak point, however, and opened the way for the renaissance attack. They fell, like the old Romans, by their luxury, except in the separate instance of the magnificent school of Venice. That architect- ure began with the luxuriance in which all others expired : it founded itself on the Byzantine mosaic and fretwork ; and laying aside its ornaments, one by one, while it fixed its forms by laws more and more severe, stood forth, at last, a model of domestic Gothic, so grand, so complete, so nobly systema- tised, that, to my mind, there never existed an architecture with so stern a claim to our reverence. I do not except even the Greek Doric ; the Doric had cast nothing away ; the four- teenth century Venetian had cast away, one by one, for a suc- cession of centuries, every splendor that art and wealth could give it. It had laid down its crown and its jewels, its gold and its color, like a king disrobing ; it had resigned its exer- tion, like an athlete reposing ; once capricious and fantastic, it had bound itself by laws inviolable and serene as those of nature herself. It retained nothing but its beauty and its power ; both the highest, but both restrained. The Doric Hidings were of irregular number — the Venetian mouldings were unchangeable. The Doric manner of ornament admit- ted no temptation, it was the fasting of an anchorite — the Venetian ornament embraced, while it governed, all vegetable and animal forms ; it was the temperance of a man, the com- mand of Adam over creation. I do not know so magnificent a marking of human authority as the iron grasp of the Vene* . I