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



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

The gradation of these dimensions is visible at a glance; the boldest step being here taken nearest the centre, while in the Fondaco it is farthest from the centre. The first loss here is of eleven inches, the second of five, the third of five, and then there is a most subtle increase of two inches in the extreme arches, as if to contradict the principle of diminution, and stop the falling away of the building by firm resistance at its flanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ft. In. Three midmost arches of the central group 4 0 Outermost arch of the central group 4 6 Innermost arch of the wing 4 10 Outermost arch of the wing[43] 5 0

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

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

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

Ft. In. Central arch 9 9 Second " 3 8 Third " 3 10 Fourth " 3 10 Fifth " 3 8

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

Sec. XI. I need not point out to the reader that these singular and minute harmonies of proportion indicate, beyond all dispute, not only that the buildings in which they are found are of one school, but (so far as these subtle coincidences of measurement can still be traced in them) in their original form. No modern builder has any idea of connecting his arches in this manner, and restorations in Venice are carried on with too violent hands to admit of the supposition that such refinements would be even noticed in the progress of demolition, much less imitated in heedless reproduction. And as if to direct our attention especially to this character, as indicative of Byzantine workmanship, the most interesting example of all will be found in the arches of the front of St. Mark's itself, whose proportions I have not noticed before, in order that they might here be compared with those of the contemporary palaces.



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

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

Ft. In. The space of its central archivolt is 31 8 " the two on each side, about[44] 19 8 " the two succeeding, about 20 4 " small arches at flanks, about 6 0



I need not make any comment upon the subtle difference of eight inches on twenty feet between the second and third dimensions. If the reader will be at the pains to compare the whole evidence now laid before him, with that deduced above from the apse of Murano, he cannot but confess that it amounts to an irrefragable proof of an intense perception of harmony in the relation of quantities, on the part of the Byzantine architects; a perception which we have at present lost so utterly as hardly to be able even to conceive it. And let it not be said, as it was of the late discoveries of subtle curvature in the Parthenon,[45] that what is not to be demonstrated without laborious measurement, cannot have influence on the beauty of the design. The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far to say, that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the changes of expression in the human countenance. The greater he is, the more he will feel their subtlety, and the intense difficulty of perceiving all their relations, or answering for the consequences of a variation of a hair's breadth in a single curve. Indeed, there is nothing truly noble either in color or in form, but its power depends on circumstances infinitely too intricate to be explained, and almost too subtle to be traced. And as for these Byzantine buildings, we only do not feel them because we do not watch them; otherwise we should as much enjoy the variety of proportion in their arches, as we do at present that of the natural architecture of flowers and leaves. Any of us can feel in an instant the grace of the leaf group, b, in the annexed figure; and yet that grace is simply owing to its being proportioned like the facade of St. Mark's; each leaflet answering to an arch,—the smallest at the root, to those of the porticos. I have tried to give the proportion quite accurately in b; but as the difference between the second and third leaflets is hardly discernible on so small a scale, it is somewhat exaggerated in a.[46] Nature is often far more subtle in her proportions. In looking at some of the nobler species of lilies, full in the front of the flower, we may fancy for a moment that they form a symmetrical six-petaled star; but on examining them more closely, we shall find that they are thrown into a group of three magnitudes by the expansion of two of the inner petals above the stamens to a breadth greater than any of the four others; while the third inner petal, on which the stamens rest, contracts itself into the narrowest of the six, and the three under petals remain of one intermediate magnitude, as seen in the annexed figure.



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

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

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

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

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

The other family resembles the convolvulus, trumpet-flower, and such others, in which the lower part of the bell is slender, and the lip curves outwards at the top. There are fewer flowers constructed on this than on the convex model; but in the organization of trees and of clusters of herbage it is seen continually. Of course, both of these conditions are modified, when applied to capitals, by the enormously greater thickness of the stalk or shaft, but in other respects the parallelism is close and accurate; and the reader had better at once fix the flower outlines in his mind,[47] and remember them as representing the only two orders of capitals that the world has ever seen, or can see.

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

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



Sec. XVII. The concave group, however, was not naturally pleasing to the Byzantine mind. Its own favorite capital was of the bold convex or cushion shape, so conspicuous in all the buildings of the period that I have devoted Plate VII., opposite, entirely to its illustration. The form in which it is first used is practically obtained from a square block laid on the head of the shaft (fig. 1, Plate VII.), by first cutting off the lower corners, as in fig. 2, and then rounding the edges, as in fig. 3; this gives us the bell stone: on this is laid a simple abacus, as seen in fig. 4, which is the actual form used in the upper arcade of Murano, and the framework of the capital is complete. Fig. 5 shows the general manner and effect of its decoration on the same scale; the other figures, 6 and 7, both from the apse of Murano, 8, from the Terraced House, and 9, from the Baptistery of St. Mark's, show the method of chiselling the surfaces in capitals of average richness, such as occur everywhere, for there is no limit to the fantasy and beauty of the more elaborate examples.

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

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

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



Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7 show some of the modes of application of a peculiarly broad-lobed acanthus leaf, very characteristic of native Venetian work; 4 and 5 are from the same building, two out of a group of four, and show the boldness of the variety admitted in the management even of the capitals most closely derived from the Corinthian. I never saw one of these Venetian capitals in all respects like another. The trefoils into which the leaves fall at the extremities are, however, for the most part similar, though variously disposed, and generally niche themselves one under the other, as very characteristically in fig. 7. The form 8 occurs in St. Mark's only, and there very frequently: 9 at Venice occurs, I think, in St. Mark's only; but it is a favorite early Lombardic form. 10, 11, and 12 are all highly characteristic. 10 occurs with more fantastic interweaving upon its sides in the upper stories of St. Mark's; 11 is derived, in the Casa Loredan, from the great lily capitals of St. Mark's, of which more presently. 13 and 15 are peculiar to St. Mark's. 14 is a lovely condition, occurring both there and in the Fondaco de' Turchi.

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

Sec. XX. I say, first, the Life. Not only is every one of these capitals differently fancied, but there are many of them which have no two sides alike. Fig. 5, for instance, varies on every side in the arrangement of the pendent leaf in its centre; fig. 6 has a different plant on each of its four upper angles. The birds are each cut with a different play of plumage in figs. 9 and 12, and the vine-leaves are every one varied in their position in fig. 13. But this is not all. The differences in the character of ornamentation between them and the Greek capitals, all show a greater love of nature; the leaves are, every one of them, more founded on realities, sketched, however rudely, more directly from the truth; and are continually treated in a manner which shows the mind of the workman to have been among the living herbage, not among Greek precedents. The hard outlines in which, for the sake of perfect intelligibility, I have left this Plate, have deprived the examples of the vitality of their light and shade; but the reader can nevertheless observe the ideas of life occurring perpetually: at the top of fig. 4, for instance, the small leaves turned sideways; in fig. 5, the formal volutes of the old Corinthian transformed into a branching tendril; in fig. 6, the bunch of grapes thrown carelessly in at the right-hand corner, in defiance of all symmetry; in fig. 7, the volutes knitted into wreaths of ivy; in fig. 14, the leaves, drifted, as it were, by a whirlwind round the capital by which they rise; while figs. 13 and 15 are as completely living leaves as any of the Gothic time. These designs may or may not be graceful; what grace or beauty they have is not to be rendered in mere outline,—but they are indisputably more natural than any Greek ones, and therefore healthier, and tending to greatness.

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

I would not attach too much importance to the mere habit of working on the rounded surface of the stone, which is often as much the result of haste or rudeness as of the desire for breadth, though the result obtained is not the less beautiful. But in the capital from the Fondaco de' Turchi, fig. 6, it will be seen that while the sculptor had taken the utmost care to make his leaves free, graceful, and sharp in effect, he was dissatisfied with their separation, and could not rest until he had enclosed them with an unbroken line, like that of a pointed arch; and the same thing is done in many different ways in other capitals of the same building, and in many of St. Mark's: but one such instance would have been enough to prove, if the loveliness of the profiles themselves did not do so, that the sculptor understood and loved the laws of generalization; and that the feeling which bound his prickly leaves, as they waved or drifted round the ridges of his capital, into those broad masses of unbroken flow, was indeed one with that which made Michael Angelo encompass the principal figure in his Creation of Adam with the broad curve of its cloudy drapery. It may seem strange to assert any connexion between so great a conception and these rudely hewn fragments of ruined marble; but all the highest principles of art are as universal as they are majestic, and there is nothing too small to receive their influence. They rule at once the waves of the mountain outline, and the sinuosities of the minutest lichen that stains its shattered stones.

Sec. XXII. We have not yet spoken of the three braided and chequered capitals, numbered 10, 11, and 12. They are representations of a group, with which many most interesting associations are connected. It was noticed in the last chapter, that the method of covering the exterior of buildings with thin pieces of marble was likely to lead to a system of lighting the interior by minute perforation. In order to obtain both light and air, without admitting any unbroken body of sunshine, in warm countries, it became a constant habit of the Arabian architects to pierce minute and starlike openings in slabs of stone; and to employ the stones so pierced where the Gothic architects employ traceries. Internally, the form of stars assumed by the light as it entered[49] was, in itself, an exquisite decoration; but, externally, it was felt necessary to add some slight ornament upon the surface of the perforated stone; and it was soon found that, as the small perforations had a tendency to look scattered and spotty, the most effective treatment of the intermediate surfaces would be one which bound them together, and gave unity and repose to the pierced and disturbed stone: universally, therefore, those intermediate spaces were carved into the semblance of interwoven fillets, which alternately sank beneath and rose above each other as they met. This system of braided or woven ornament was not confined to the Arabs; it is universally pleasing to the instinct of mankind. I believe that nearly all early ornamentation is full of it,—more especially, perhaps, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon; and illuminated manuscripts depend upon it for their loveliest effects of intricate color, up to the close of the thirteenth century. There are several very interesting metaphysical reasons for this strange and unfailing delight, felt in a thing so simple. It is not often that any idea of utility has power to enhance the true impressions of beauty; but it is possible that the enormous importance of the art of weaving to mankind may give some interest, if not actual attractiveness, to any type or image of the invention to which we owe, at once, our comfort and our pride. But the more profound reason lies in the innate love of mystery and unity; in the joy that the human mind has in contemplating any kind of maze or entanglement, so long as it can discern, through its confusion, any guiding clue or connecting plan: a pleasure increased and solemnized by some dim feeling of the setting forth, by such symbols, of the intricacy, and alternate rise and fall, subjection and supremacy, of human fortune; the

"Weave the warp, and weave the woof,"

of Fate and Time.



Sec. XXIII. But be this as it may, the fact is that we are never tired of contemplating this woven involution; and that, in some degree, the sublime pleasure which we have in watching the branches of trees, the intertwining of the grass, and the tracery of the higher clouds, is owing to it, not less than that which we receive from the fine meshes of the robe, the braiding of the hair, and the various glittering of the linked net or wreathed chain. Byzantine ornamentation, like that of almost all nations in a state of progress, is full of this kind of work: but it occurs most conspicuously, though most simply, in the minute traceries which surround their most solid capitals; sometimes merely in a reticulated veil, as in the tenth figure in the Plate, sometimes resembling a basket, on the edges of which are perched birds and other animals. The diamonded ornament in the eleventh figure is substituted for it in the Casa Loredan, and marks a somewhat later time and a tendency to the ordinary Gothic chequer; but the capitals which show it most definitely are those already so often spoken of as the lily capitals of St. Mark's, of which the northern one is carefully drawn in Plate IX.



Sec. XXIV. These capitals, called barbarous by our architects, are without exception the most subtle pieces of composition in broad contour which I have ever met with in architecture. Their profile is given in the opposite Plate X. fig. 3, b; the inner line in the figure being that of the stone behind the lily, the outer that of the external network, taken through the side of the capital; while fig. 3, c is the outer profile at its angle; and the reader will easily understand that the passing of the one of these lines into the other is productive of the most exquisite and wonderful series of curvatures possible within such compass, no two views of the capital giving the same contour. Upon these profoundly studied outlines, as remarkable for their grace and complexity as the general mass of the capital is for solid strength and proportion to its necessary service, the braided work is wrought with more than usual care; perhaps, as suggested by the Marchese Selvatico, with some idea of imitating those "nets of chequerwork and wreaths of chainwork" on the chapiters of Solomon's temple, which are, I suppose, the first instances on record of an ornamentation of this kind thus applied. The braided work encloses on each of the four sides of the capital a flower whose form, derived from that of the lily, though as usual modified, in every instance of its occurrence, in some minor particulars, is generally seen as represented in fig. 11 of Plate VIII. It is never without the two square or oblong objects at the extremity of the tendrils issuing from its root, set like vessels to catch the dew from the points of its leaves; but I do not understand their meaning. The abacus of the capital has already been given at a, Plate XVI., Vol. I.; but no amount of illustrations or eulogium would be enough to make the reader understand the perfect beauty of the thing itself, as the sun steals from interstice to interstice of its marble veil, and touches with the white lustre of its rays at mid-day the pointed leaves of its thirsty lilies.

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

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



Sec. XXV. Of the archivolts which these capitals generally sustain, details are given in the Appendix and in the notice of Venetian doors in Chapter VII. In the private palaces, the ranges of archivolt are for the most part very simple, with dentilled mouldings; and all the ornamental effect is entrusted to pieces of sculpture set in the wall above or between the arches, in the manner shown in Plate XV., below, Chapter VII. These pieces of sculpture are either crosses, upright oblongs, or circles: of all the three forms an example is given in Plate XI. opposite. The cross was apparently an invariable ornament, placed either in the centre of the archivolt of the doorway, or in the centre of the first story above the windows; on each side of it the circular and oblong ornaments were used in various alternation. In too many instances the wall marbles have been torn away from the earliest Byzantine palaces, so that the crosses are left on their archivolts only. The best examples of the cross set above the windows are found in houses of the transitional period: one in the Campo St^a M. Formosa; another, in which a cross is placed between every window, is still well preserved in the Campo St^a Maria Mater Domini; another, on the Grand Canal, in the parish of the Apostoli, has two crosses, one on each side of the first story, and a bas-relief of Christ enthroned in the centre; and finally, that from which the larger cross in the Plate was taken in the house once belonging to Marco Polo, at San Giovanni Grisostomo.

Sec. XXVI. This cross, though graceful and rich, and given because it happens to be one of the best preserved, is uncharacteristic in one respect; for, instead of the central rose at the meeting of the arms, we usually find a hand raised in the attitude of blessing, between the sun and moon, as in the two smaller crosses seen in the Plate. In nearly all representations of the Crucifixion, over the whole of Europe, at the period in question, the sun and the moon are introduced, one on each side of the cross,—the sun generally, in paintings, as a red star; but I do not think with any purpose of indicating the darkness at the time of the agony; especially because, had this been the intention, the moon ought not to have been visible, since it could not have been in the heavens during the day at the time of passover. I believe rather that the two luminaries are set there in order to express the entire dependence of the heavens and the earth upon the work of the Redemption: and this view is confirmed by our frequently finding the sun and moon set in the same manner beside the figure of Christ, as in the centre of the great archivolt of St. Mark's, or beside the hand signifying benediction, without any cross, in some other early archivolts;[50] while, again, not unfrequently they are absent from the symbol of the cross itself, and its saving power over the whole of creation is indicated only by fresh leaves springing from its foot, or doves feeding beside it; and so also, in illuminated Bibles, we find the series of pictures representing the Creation terminate in the Crucifixion, as the work by which all the families of created beings subsist, no less than that in sympathy with which "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

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

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

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

Sec. XXX. Such, then, was that first and fairest Venice which rose out of the barrenness of the lagoon, and the sorrow of her people; a city of graceful arcades and gleaming walls, veined with azure and warm with gold, and fretted with white sculpture like frost upon forest branches turned to marble. And yet, in this beauty of her youth, she was no city of thoughtless pleasure. There was still a sadness of heart upon her, and a depth of devotion, in which lay all her strength. I do not insist upon the probable religious signification of many of the sculptures which are now difficult of interpretation; but the temper which made the cross the principal ornament of every building is not to be misunderstood, nor can we fail to perceive, in many of the minor sculptural subjects, meanings perfectly familiar to the mind of early Christianity. The peacock, used in preference to every other bird, is the well-known symbol of the resurrection; and when drinking from a fountain (Plate XI. fig. 1) or from a font (Plate XI. fig. 5), is, I doubt not, also a type of the new life received in faithful baptism. The vine, used in preference to all other trees, was equally recognized as, in all cases, a type either of Christ himself[53] or of those who were in a state of visible or professed union with him. The dove, at its foot, represents the coming of the Comforter; and even the groups of contending animals had, probably, a distinct and universally apprehended reference to the powers of evil. But I lay no stress on these more occult meanings. The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early Venetian mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would suppose it was traceable;—that love of bright and pure color which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which, in its utmost simplicity, was characteristic of the Byzantine period only; and of which, therefore, in the close of our review of that period, it will be well that we should truly estimate the significance. The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty,—nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who

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

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

Sec. XXXI. I know that this will sound strange in many ears, and will be especially startling to those who have considered the subject chiefly with reference to painting; for the great Venetian schools of color are not usually understood to be either pure or pensive, and the idea of its pre-eminence is associated in nearly every mind with the coarseness of Rubens, and the sensualities of Correggio and Titian. But a more comprehensive view of art will soon correct this impression. It will be discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and earnest the religion of the painter, the more pure and prevalent is the system of his color. It will be found, in the second place, that where color becomes a primal intention with a painter otherwise mean or sensual, it instantly elevates him, and becomes the one sacred and saving element in his work. The very depth of the stoop to which the Venetian painters and Rubens sometimes condescend, is a consequence of their feeling confidence in the power of their color to keep them from falling. They hold on by it, as by a chain let down from heaven, with one hand, though they may sometimes seem to gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last place, it will be found that so surely as a painter is irreligious, thoughtless, or obscene in disposition, so surely is his coloring cold, gloomy, and valueless. The opposite poles of art in this respect are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa; of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harbored an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colors of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their color is for the most part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life:—"In such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness."

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

Sec. XXXIII. Nor does it seem difficult to discern a noble reason for this universal law. In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes of color upon the front of the sky, when it became the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided light were sanctified to the human heart for ever; nor this, it would seem, by mere arbitrary appointment, but in consequence of the fore-ordained and marvellous constitution of those hues into a sevenfold, or, more strictly still, a threefold order, typical of the Divine nature itself. Observe also, the name Shem, or Splendor, given to that son of Noah in whom this covenant with mankind was to be fulfilled, and see how that name was justified by every one of the Asiatic races which descended from him. Not without meaning was the love of Israel to his chosen son expressed by the coat "of many colors;" not without deep sense of the sacredness of that symbol of purity, did the lost daughter of David tear it from her breast:—"With such robes were the king's daughters that were virgins apparelled."[55] We know it to have been by Divine command that the Israelite, rescued from servitude, veiled the tabernacle with its rain of purple and scarlet, while the under sunshine flashed through the fall of the color from its tenons of gold: but was it less by Divine guidance that the Mede, as he struggled out of anarchy, encompassed his king with the sevenfold burning of the battlements of Ecbatana?—of which one circle was golden like the sun, and another silver like the moon; and then came the great sacred chord of color, blue, purple, and scarlet; and then a circle white like the day, and another dark, like night; so that the city rose like a great mural rainbow, a sign of peace amidst the contending of lawless races, and guarded, with color and shadow, that seemed to symbolize the great order which rules over Day, and Night, and Time, the first organization of the mighty statutes,—the law of the Medes and Persians, that altereth not.

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

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

Sec. XXXVI. And we have never yet looked with enough reverence upon the separate gift which was thus bestowed upon her; we have never enough considered what an inheritance she has left us, in the works of those mighty painters who were the chief of her children. That inheritance is indeed less than it ought to have been, and other than it ought to have been; for before Titian and Tintoret arose,—the men in whom her work and her glory should have been together consummated,—she had already ceased to lead her sons in the way of truth and life, and they erred much, and fell short of that which was appointed for them. There is no subject of thought more melancholy, more wonderful, than the way in which God permits so often His best gifts to be trodden under foot of men, His richest treasures to be wasted by the moth, and the mightiest influences of His Spirit, given but once in the world's history, to be quenched and shortened by miseries of chance and guilt. I do not wonder at what men Suffer, but I wonder often at what they Lose. We may see how good rises out of pain and evil; but the dead, naked, eyeless loss, what good comes of that? The fruit struck to the earth before its ripeness; the glowing life and goodly purpose dissolved away in sudden death; the words, half spoken, choked upon the lips with clay for ever; or, stranger than all, the whole majesty of humanity raised to its fulness, and every gift and power necessary for a given purpose, at a given moment, centred in one man, and all this perfected blessing permitted to be refused, perverted, crushed, cast aside by those who need it most,—the city which is Not set on a hill, the candle that giveth light to None that are in the house:—these are the heaviest mysteries of this strange world, and, it seems to me, those which mark its curse the most. And it is true that the power with which this Venice had been entrusted, was perverted, when at its highest, in a thousand miserable ways; still, it was possessed by her alone; to her all hearts have turned which could be moved by its manifestation, and none without being made stronger and nobler by what her hand had wrought. That mighty Landscape, of dark mountains that guard the horizon with their purple towers, and solemn forests, that gather their weight of leaves, bronzed with sunshine, not with age, into those gloomy masses fixed in heaven, which storm and frost have power no more to shake, or shed;—that mighty Humanity, so perfect and so proud, that hides no weakness beneath the mantle, and gains no greatness from the diadem; the majesty of thoughtful form, on which the dust of gold and flame of jewels are dashed as the sea-spray upon the rock, and still the great Manhood seems to stand bare against the blue sky;—that mighty Mythology, which fills the daily walks of men with spiritual companionship, and beholds the protecting angels break with their burning presence through the arrow-flights of battle:—measure the compass of that field of creation, weigh the value of the inheritance that Venice thus left to the nations of Europe, and then judge if so vast, so beneficent a power could indeed have been rooted in dissipation or decay. It was when she wore the ephod of the priest, not the motley of the masquer, that the fire fell upon her from heaven; and she saw the first rays of it through the rain of her own tears, when, as the barbaric deluge ebbed from the hills of Italy, the circuit of her palaces, and the orb of her fortunes, rose together, like the Iris, painted upon the Cloud.

FOOTNOTES

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

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

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

[44] I am obliged to give these measures approximately, because, this front having been studied by the builder with unusual care, not one of its measures is the same as another; and the symmetries between the correspondent arches are obtained by changes in the depth of their mouldings and variations in their heights, far too complicated for me to enter into here; so that of the two arches stated as 19 ft. 8 in. in span, one is in reality 19 ft. 6-1/2 in., the other 19 ft. 10 in., and of the two stated as 20 ft. 4 in., one is 20 ft. and the other 20 ft. 8 in.

[45] By Mr. Penrose.

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

[47] Vide Plate X. figs. 1 and 4.

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

[49] Compare "Seven Lamps," chap. ii. Sec. 22.

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

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

[52] Ezekiel, xxvii. 11.

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

[54] Appendix 12, "Modern Painting on Glass."

[55] 2 Samuel, xiii. 18.



SECOND, OR GOTHIC, PERIOD.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NATURE OF GOTHIC.

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

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

Sec. III. Observe also, that, in the definition proposed, I shall only endeavor to analyze the idea which I suppose already to exist in the reader's mind. We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic; but I know that many persons have this idea in their minds without being able to define it: that is to say, understanding generally that Westminster Abbey is Gothic, and St. Paul's is not, that Strasburg Cathedral is Gothic, and St. Peter's is not, they have, nevertheless, no clear notion of what it is that they recognize in the one or miss in the other, such as would enable them to say how far the work at Westminster or Strasburg is good and pure of its kind: still less to say of any non-descript building, like St. James's Palace or Windsor Castle, how much right Gothic element there is in it, and how much wanting, And I believe this inquiry to be a pleasant and profitable one; and that there will be found something more than usually interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and our Northern hearts. And if, at any point of the inquiry, I should interfere with any of the reader's previously formed conceptions, and use the term Gothic in any sense which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation, as necessary to the intelligibility of what follows in the rest of the work.

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

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

Sec. V. Let us go back for a moment to our chemistry, and note that, in defining a mineral by its constituent parts, it is not one nor another of them, that can make up the mineral, but the union of all: for instance, it is neither in charcoal, nor in oxygen, nor in lime, that there is the making of chalk, but in the combination of all three in certain measures; they are all found in very different things from chalk, and there is nothing like chalk either in charcoal or in oxygen, but they are nevertheless necessary to its existence.

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

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

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

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

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

Sec. VIII. The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought its gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey: and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice at the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smoothes with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

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

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

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

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

Sec. X. But in the mediaeval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God's greater glory. Therefore, to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

Sec. XI. But the modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences, because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labor, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honor them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all our laborers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

Sec. XII. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either made a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

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

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

Sec. XV. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labor for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,—liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief?[57]—and as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, "Another for Hector!" And therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes;—this nature bade not,—this God blesses not,—this humanity for no long time is able to endure.

Sec. XVI. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods, or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.

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

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

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

Sec. XIX. I shall perhaps press this law farther elsewhere, but our immediate concern is chiefly with the second, namely, never to demand an exact finish, when it does not lead to a noble end. For observe, I have only dwelt upon the rudeness of Gothic, or any other kind of imperfectness, as admirable, where it was impossible to get design or thought without it. If you are to have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and untaught way; but from an educated man, who can without effort express his thoughts in an educated way, take the graceful expression, and be thankful. Only get the thought, and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar. Grammar and refinement are good things, both, only be sure of the better thing first. And thus in art, delicate finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is always given by them. In some places Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Phidias, Perugino, Turner, all finished with the most exquisite care; and the finish they give always leads to the fuller accomplishment of their noble purposes. But lower men than these cannot finish, for it requires consummate knowledge to finish consummately, and then we must take their thoughts as they are able to give them. So the rule is simple: Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves' work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only that the practical purpose be answered, and never imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by patience and sandpaper.

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

Sec. XXI. Nay, but the reader interrupts me,—"If the workman can design beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken away and made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass there, and I will have it blown and cut for him by common workmen, and so I will have my design and my finish too."