198 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

APHORISM 24. Perfect finish characterizes alike the best architecture and the best painting.¹

the stability and finish of their masonry, mosaic, or other work whatsoever, were always perfect in proportion to the apparent improbability of the great designers condescending to the care of details among us so despised. Not only do I fully admit and reassert this most important fact, but I would insist upon perfect and most delicate finish in its right place, as a characteristic of all the highest schools of architecture, as much as it is of those of painting.² But on the other hand, as perfect finish belongs to the perfected art, a progressive finish belongs to progressive art; and I do not think that any more fatal sign of a stupor or numbness settling upon that undeveloped art could possibly be detected, than that it had been taken aback by its own execution, and that the workmanship had gone ahead of the design; while, even in my admission of absolute finish in the right place, as an attribute of the perfected school, I must reserve to myself the right of answering in my own way the two very important questions-what is finish? and what is its right place?

§ 7. But in illustrating either of these points, we must remember that the correspondence of workmanship with thought is, in existent examples, interfered with by the adoption of the designs of an advanced period by the workmen of a rude one. All the beginnings of Christian architecture are of this kind, and the necessary consequence is of course an increase of the visible interval between the power of realization and the beauty of the idea. We have at first an intimation, almost savage in its rudeness, of a classical design; as the art advances, the design is modified by a mixture of Gothic grotesqueness, and the execution more complete, until a harmony is established between the two, in which balance

¹ [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “It has been truly observed ...” down to the end of § 6.]

² [For a general summary of Ruskin’s views on finish in art, see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 21 n. He there refers to this passage, and to his selection of the Campanile of Giotto, in the preceding chapter (§ 43, p. 187), “as the model and mirror of perfect architecture just on account of its exquisite completion.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]