12 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

the façades of our cathedrals portraits of the living bishops, deans, canons, and choristers, who are to minister in the said cathedrals; and on the façades of our public buildings, portraits of the men chiefly moving or acting in the same; and on our buildings, generally, the birds and flowers which are singing and budding in the fields around them, we shall have a school of English architecture. Not till then.

§ 8. This general principle being understood, there is, I think, nothing in the text which I may not leave in the form in which it was originally written, without further comment, except only the expression of doubt (p. 258) as to the style which ought, at present, to be consistently adopted by our architects. I have now no doubt that the only style proper for modern Northern work, is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century, as exemplified, in England, pre-eminently by the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells,¹ and, in France, by those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Rheims, and Bourges, and by the transepts of that of Rouen.²

§ 9. I must here also deprecate an idea which is often taken up by hasty readers of the Stones of Venice; namely, that I suppose Venetian architecture the most noble of the schools of Gothic. I have great respect for Venetian

¹ [For another reference to Wells-of the west front of which it is said that it is “on a scale of perfect power and effectiveness”-see Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 67. Of Lincoln Ruskin wrote to his father (April 10, 1851):-

“This is to my mind worth all the English cathedrals I have ever seen put together-far beyond my highest expectations. The Galilee-so called-and porch of the small transept on the south side are quite unique, I think, as examples of pure English Gothic in its richest form; and the façade is noble-so thoroughly fine in colour as well as in design-and no small hill neither which it is set upon; and a delightful old town.”

Similarly he wrote at a later date:-

“I have always held, and am prepared against all comers to maintain, that the Cathedral of Lincoln is out-and-out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Islands, and roughly speaking, worth any two other cathedrals we have got.” (See a letter published in the daily papers of June 7, 1898, and reprinted in a later volume of this edition).]

² [Ruskin had seen all these foreign cathedrals on one or other, or several, of his earlier tours. Of Amiens he was to make more detailed study hereafter (see The Bible of Amiens); for Chartres, see Vol. I. p. 377; to Rheims there is a reference in this volume (p. 136); for Bourges, see Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. ii. § 13, ch. vii. § 17; vol. ii. ch. iv. § 44; Lectures on Art, § 165. Rouen was the cathedral specially studied by Ruskin for the purpose of this book; see above, Introduction, p. xxxi.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]