CH. III THE LAMP OF POWER 131

reposing; once capricious and fantastic, it had bound itself by laws inviolable and serene as those of Nature herself. It retained nothing but its beauty and its power; both the highest, but both restrained. The Doric flutings were of irregular number-the Venetian mouldings were unchangeable. The Doric manner of ornament admitted no temptation; it was the fasting of an anchorite-the Venetian ornament embraced, while it governed, all vegetable and animal forms; it was the temperance of a man, the command of Adam over creation. I do not know so magnificent a marking of human authority as the iron grasp of the Venetian over his own exuberance of imagination; the calm and solemn restraint with which, his mind filled with thoughts of flowing leafage and fiery life, he gives those thoughts expression for an instant, and then withdraws within those massy bars and levelled cusps of stone.*

And his power to do this depended altogether on his retaining the forms of the shadows in his sight. Far from carrying the eye to the ornaments, upon the stone, he abandoned these latter one by one; and while his mouldings received the most shapely order and symmetry, closely correspondent with that of the Rouen tracery, (compare Plates

* The plate represents one of the lateral windows of the third storey of the Palazzo Foscari.1 It was drawn from the opposite side of the Grand Canal, and the lines of its traceries are therefore given as they appear in somewhat distant effect. It shows only segments of the characteristic quatrefoils of the central windows. I found by measurement their construction exceedingly simple. Four circles are drawn in contact within the large circle. Two tangential lines are then drawn to each opposite pair, enclosing the four circles in a hollow cross. An inner circle struck through the intersections of the circles by the tangents, truncates the cusps.2

¹ [Ruskin spent much time and labour upon drawing this Palace during his sojourn at Venice with J. D. Harding in 1845. He writes to his father (Sept. 17):-

“Harding and I shall do the Foscari pretty well between us. I have got the architecture-mouldings, capitals and all. I began it small. Harding said I should frighten the Daguerreotype into fits, and Couttet said: ‘Ça ne le ressemble pas: c’est la même chose.’ I found it impossible, however, to accomplish it so completely, and am therefore taking large studies of the most interesting part, leaving the rest to sketch in lightly.”

For notices of the Palace, see Stones of Venice, Venetian Index, and vol. ii. ch. v. §§ 2, 4, 10, 14.]

² [Note 11, at the end of the book, in eds. 1 and 2. Appendix iv. in the 1880 and later eds.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]