CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 167

the chief conditions of right. Another of these is the connection of Symmetry with horizontal, and of Proportion with vertical, division. Evidently there is in symmetry a sense not merely of equality, but of balance: now a thing cannot be balanced by another on the top of it, though it may by one at the side of it. Hence, while it is not only allowable, but often necessary, to divide buildings, or parts of them, horizontally into halves, thirds, or other equal parts, all vertical divisions of this kind are utterly wrong; worst into half, next worst in the regular numbers which more betray the equality. I should have thought this almost the first principle of proportion which a young architect was taught: and yet I remember an important building, recently erected in England, in which the columns are cut in half by the projecting architraves of the central windows; and it is quite usual to see the spires of modern Gothic churches divided by a band of ornament half way up. In all fine spires there are two bands and three parts, as at Salisbury. The ornamented portion of the tower is there cut in half, and allowably, because the spire forms the third mass to which the other two are subordinate: two storeys are also equal in Giotto’s campanile, but dominant over smaller divisions below, and subordinated to the noble third above. Even this arrangement is difficult to treat; and it is usually safer to increase or diminish the height of the divisions regularly as they rise, as in the Doge’s Palace, whose three divisions are in a bold geometrical progression; or, in towers, to get an alternate proportion between the body, the belfry, and the crown, as in the campanile of St. Mark’s.¹ But, at all events, get rid of equality; leave that to children and their card houses: the laws of nature and the reason of man are alike against it, in arts, as in politics.² There is but one thoroughly ugly tower in Italy that I know of, and that

¹ [See the plate of it in Stones of Venice, vol. i. (No. 6).]

² [”If there is any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point,” says Ruskin, “is the impossibility of equality” (Unto this Last, § 54). “Talk of equality” is “stupefaction and fog in the brains” (Munera Pulveris, § 121). See also Time and Tide, §§ 169 seq., “Of Necessary Submission to Authority,” and cf. ibid., § 141; Fors Clavigera, Letter 95; and Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iv. § 3.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]