PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 11

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

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

All high art consists in the carving or painting natural objects, chiefly figures:¹ it has always subject and meaning, never consisting solely in arrangement of lines, or even of colours. It always paints or carves something that it sees or believes in; nothing ideal or uncredited.² For the most part, it paints and carves the men and things that are visible around it. And as soon as we possess a body of sculptors able, and willing, and having leave from the English public, to carve on

* The name by which the architect of Cologne Cathedral is designated in the contracts for the work, is “magister lapicida,” the “master stone-cutter;” and I believe this was the usual Latin term throughout the middle ages. The architect of the fourteenth century portions of Notre-Dame, Paris, is styled in French, merely “premier masson.”³

¹ [In his copy for correction, Ruskin here noted in the margin:-

“Introductory Aphorism. ‘All great art is either Truth or Praise.’”

With which aphorism, cf. the heading of The Laws of Fésole, ch. i., “All Great Art is Praise.”]

² [Cf. Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. vii. § 5, where this passage is referred to and further illustrated.]

³ [So in English documents the architect is often called the latomus or cementarius (mason). The architect of Winchester College, for instance, seems to have been William Winford, chief mason. See on this subject Mr. Wyatt Papworth’s Notes on the Superintendents of English Buildings in the Middle Ages, 1860 (republished in the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol. iii. 1887), and Mr. A. F. Leach’s History of Winchester College, 1899, pp. 106-109.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]