74 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

Verona and Venice are now seen deprived of more than half their former splendour; it depended far more on their frescoes¹ than their marbles. The plaster, in this case, is to be considered as the gesso ground on panel or canvas. But to cover brick with cement, and to divide this cement with joints that it may look like stone, is to tell a falsehood; and is just as contemptible a procedure as the other is noble.²

It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint everything? So long as the painting is confessed-yes; but if, even in the slightest degree, the sense of it be lost, and the thing painted be supposed real-no. Let us take a few instances. In the Campo Santo at Pisa, each fresco is surrounded with a border composed of flat coloured patterns of great elegance-no part of it in attempted relief. The certainty of flat surface being thus secured, the figures, though the size of life, do not deceive, and the artist thenceforward is at liberty to put forth his whole power, and to lead us through fields, and groves, and depths of pleasant landscape, and soothe us with the sweet clearness of far-off sky, and yet never lose the severity of his primal purpose of architectural decoration.³

In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at Parma,⁴ the trellises of vine shadow the walls, as if with an actual arbour; and the groups of children, peeping through the oval openings, luscious in colour and faint in light, may well be expected every instant to break through, or hide behind the covert. The grace of their attitudes, and the evident greatness of the whole work, mark that it is painting, and barely redeem it from the charge of falsehood; but even so saved, it is utterly unworthy to take a place among noble or legitimate architectural decoration.

¹ [See Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 212).]

² [Cf. The Poetry of Architecture, § 121, Vol. I. p. 95.]

³ [For Ruskin’s account of the frescoes in the Campo Santo, see Modern Painters, vol. ii.; in this ed., Vol. IV. pp. xxxi., 316.]

⁴ [The Camera di San Paolo, in the convent adjoining San Lodovico, painted by Correggio about the year 1519 for the abbess. An account of the Camera, with reproductions of several of the paintings, is given in ch. viii. of C. Ricci’s Correggio (1896). Ruskin was at Parma in 1845; for his views of Correggio generally, see note in Vol. IV. p. 197.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]