130 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

correspondent conditions of the early Northern and Southern Gothic. But, as we have said, the Italian architects, not being embarrassed for decoration of wall surface, and not being obliged, like the Northmen, to multiply their penetrations, held to the system for some time longer; and while they increased the refinement of the ornament, kept the purity of the plan. That refinement of ornament was their weak point however, and opened the way for the renaissance attack. They fell, like the old Romans, by their luxury,¹ except in the separate instance of the magnificent school of Venice. That architecture began with the luxuriance in which all others expired: it founded itself on the Byzantine mosaic and fretwork; and laying aside its ornaments, one by one, while it fixed its forms by laws more and more severe, stood forth, at last, a model of domestic Gothic, so grand, so complete, so nobly systematised, that, to my mind, there never existed an architecture with so stern a claim to our reverence.* I do not except even the Greek Doric: the Doric had cast nothing away; the fourteenth century Venetian had cast away, one by one, for a succession of centuries, every splendour that art and wealth could give it. It had laid down its crown and its jewels, its gold and its colour, like a king disrobing: it had resigned its exertion, like an athlete

* I have written many passages that are one-sided or incomplete; and which therefore are misleading if read without their contexts or development. But I know of no other paragraph in any of my books so definitely false as this. I did not know the history of Venice when I wrote it; and mistook the expression of the conspiring pride of her later aristocracy, for the temper of the whole nation. The real strength of Venice was in the twelfth, not the fourteenth century: and the abandonment of her Byzantine architecture meant her ruin. See the notes on the destruction of the Ziani Palace in the Stones of Venice [vol. ii. ch. viii.; the “Ziani Palace” = the original Ducal Palace]. Farther, although rendering all this respect to what I suppose to be the self-restraint of Venetian-Gothic, I had carefully guarded the reader from too high an estimate of it, in relation to originally purer styles. The following passage, from the preface to the second edition, has been much too carelessly overlooked by the general reader:-“I must here also deprecate ... noblest of all.” [1880. For the passage given at length in that edition, because the preface to ed. 2 was not then entirely reprinted, see above, p. 12.]

¹ [See the passage from Pliny cited in Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 21).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]