116 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

alike. For the architect not being able to secure always the same depth or decision of shadow, nor to add to its sadness by colour, (because even when colour is employed, it cannot follow the moving shade,) is compelled to make many allowances, and avail himself of many contrivances, which the painter needs neither consider nor employ.

§ 13. Of these limitations the first consequence is, that positive shade is a more necessary and more sublime thing in an architect’s hands than in a painter’s. For the latter being able to temper his light with an undertone throughout, and to make it delightful with sweet colour, or awful with lurid colour, and to represent distance, and air, and sun, by the depth of it, and fill its whole space with expression, can deal with an enormous, nay, almost with an universal, extent of it, and the best painters most delight in such extent; but as light, with the architect, is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface, his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades. So that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow;¹ and it seems to me, that the reality of its works, and the use and influence they have in the daily life of men, (as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing to do but in times of rest or of pleasure,) require of it that it should express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as great as there is in human life: and that as the great poem and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric sprightliness, but must be often serious, and sometimes melancholy, else they do not express the truth of this wild world of ours;² so there must be, in this magnificently human art of architecture, some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its

¹ [Here again Ruskin is developing a principle which he had grasped in his earliest essay on the subject: see The Poetry of Architecture, §§ 28, 121, 180 n., 250 (Vol. I. pp. 22, 95, 138, 183).]

² [The MS. inserts, but deletes “(how often do we lay down Dante or Homer in terror or in tears).”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]