118 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

ever be of the smallest value: this great law respecting breadth, precisely the same in architecture and painting, is so important, that the examination of its two principal applications will include most of the conditions of majestic design on which I would at present insist.

§ 14. Painters are in the habit of speaking loosely of masses of light and shade, meaning thereby any large spaces of either. Nevertheless, it is convenient sometimes to restrict the term “mass” to the portions to which proper form belongs, and to call the field on which such forms are traced, interval. Thus, in foliage with projecting boughs or stems, we have masses of light, with intervals of shade; and, in light skies with dark clouds upon them, masses of shade, with intervals of light.

This distinction is, in architecture, still more necessary; for there are two marked styles dependent upon it: one in which the forms are drawn with light, upon darkness, as in Greek sculpture and pillars; the other in which they are drawn with darkness upon light, as in early Gothic foliation. Now, it is not in the designer’s power determinately to vary degrees and places of darkness, but it is altogether in his power to vary in determined directions his degrees of light. Hence the use of the dark mass characterises, generally, a trenchant style of design, in which the darks and lights are both flat, and terminated by sharp edges; while the use of the light mass is in the same way associated with a softened and full manner of design, in which the darks are much warmed by reflected lights, and the lights are rounded and melt into them. The term applied by Milton to Doric bas-relief-“bossy,” is, as is generally the case with Milton’s epithets, the most comprehensive and expressive of this manner, which the English language contains;¹ while the term which specifically describes

¹ [Paradise Lost, i. 716:-

“Built like a temple, where pilasters round

Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid

With golden architrave; nor did these want

Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven.”

For Ruskin’s study of Milton’s epithets, see Sesame and Lilies, § 20 seq., and Arrows of the Chace, 1880, ii. 260; for his description of sculpture as “essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness,” see Aratra Pentelici, § 21.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]