CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 75

In the cupola of the duomo of Parma the same painter has represented the Assumption with so much deceptive power, that he has made a dome of some thirty feet diameter look like a cloud-wrapt opening in the seventh heaven, crowded with a rushing sea of angels.¹ Is this wrong? Not so: for the subject at once precludes the possibility of deception. We might have taken the vines for a veritable pergola, and the children for its haunting ragazzi; but we know the stayed cloud and moveless angels must be man’s work; let him put his utmost strength to it, and welcome; he can enchant us, but cannot betray.

We may thus apply the rule to the highest, as well as the art of daily occurrence, always remembering that more is to be forgiven to the great painter than to the mere decorative workman; and this especially, because the former, even in deceptive portions, will not trick us so grossly; as we have just seen in Correggio, where a worse painter would have made the thing look like life at once. There is, however, in room, villa, or garden decoration, some fitting admission of trickeries of this kind, as of pictured landscapes at the extremities of alleys and arcades, and ceilings like skies, or painted with prolongations upwards of the architecture of the walls, which things have sometimes a certain luxury and pleasureableness in places meant for idleness, and are² innocent enough as long as they are regarded as mere toys.

§ 16. Touching the false representation of material, the question is infinitely more simple, and the law more sweeping; all such imitations are utterly base and inadmissible.³ It is melancholy to think of the time and expense lost in marbling the shop fronts of London alone, and of the waste of our resources in absolute vanities, in things about which no mortal cares, by which no eye is ever arrested, unless painfully, and

¹ [See ch. xi. of Ricci’s book. For some other remarks by Ruskin, see Catalogue of the Standard Series, No. 13.]

² [The MS. has, “are a kind of men’s rabbits on the wall, innocent ... toys, and not as subjects of art or matters of finish.”]

³ [The MS. inserts, “Whatever the pleasure of those can be is more than I can conceive.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]