CH. I THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE 51

Bergamo,¹ and other such buildings are incrusted, of which it is not possible so much as to think without exhaustion; and a heavy sense of the misery it would be, to be forced to look at it all. And this is not from the quantity of it, nor because it is bad work-much of it is inventive and able; but because it looks as if it were only fit to be put in inlaid cabinets and velveted caskets, and as if it could not bear one drifting shower or gnawing frost. We are afraid for it, anxious about it, and tormented by it; and we feel that a massy shaft and a bold shadow would be worth it all. Nevertheless, even in cases like these, much depends on the accomplishment of the great ends of decoration. If the ornament does its duty-if it is ornament, and its points of shade and light tell in the general effect, we shall not be offended by finding that the sculptor in his fulness of fancy has chosen to give much more than these mere points of light, and has composed them of groups of figures. But if the ornament does not answer its purpose, if it have no distant, no truly decorative power; if, generally seen, it be a mere incrustation and meaningless roughness, we shall only be chagrined by finding when we look close, that the incrustation has cost years of labour, and has millions of figures

quite overwhelming, only nauseate one from their profusion without even giving a single bit of good, pure, great art. After what I have been among in Florence, it looks all derivative and diluted and made me sick-like the metrical version of the Psalms. It is not barbarous. It is an attempt by people without mind or feeling to imitate what is good. But it is all done to be fine, nothing for a simple or great purpose. One little bit of Florentine cypressed cloister is worth a thousand such buildings, and one little bit of Orcagna is worth centuries of work in such sculpture. I never was so over-whelmed with mediocrity.”]

¹ [Of this building (adjoining the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore and now restored) Ruskin gives the following account in his diary of 1846 (May 10):-

“The chapel of Colleone is one of the most vicious specimens of 15th century work; the windows of it are filled up with columns, of which,-each being different from the rest, not in decoration, but in all its proportions and thicknesses, some round, some square, some thickest at the top and others beneath,-the effect is as if they had been brought together by accident, while each is individually of vulgar proportion and more like a candlestick than a column; the awkward shafts of the wheel window are singularly offensive; the work itself even in the details is poor; no invention, though abundance of quantity, the want of feeling throughout being singularly enhanced by finding bas-reliefs of Hercules and Hylas, Hercules and the Nemean Lion, and Hercules and the Hydra, mixed up with those of Cain and Abel and the usual scripture subjects. As might be expected from their position, the profane subjects are not classical, nor the scriptural ones religious.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]