xxii INTRODUCTION

and knotty, is deeply undercut and good, but it is put in narrow cords on broad bare mouldings, and so is rather hurtful than otherwise. A line of trefoiled foliation runs round the entrance door; but precisely in the place where it is most ineffective, that is to say nearly in the middle of its meagre mouldings, which have no columns nor capitals, but have continuous imposts, the foliation beginning abruptly and unexpectedly at the point; and so looks like a piece of paste-board ornament stuck on. There are no traces of ornament in the blank triangular space, now painted, below, but the two little doors underneath are flat headed or nearly so ... [reference to a sketch]; the barbarous intersection of the curved by the horizontal moulding is especially painful. The rest of the detail, though not altogether so vicious, is entirely mindless, barred, ponderous, ill put together and exactly like, even to some of the minutić of design, that which I used to draw in the blank leaves of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.¹ The design at ... [reference to a sketch] is remarkable for the thoroughly savage introduction of the round ball in the triangle, and for the imposition of the rich bracket abruptly on the meagre moulding. To this barbarism might advantageously be opposed the daring use of the fleur-de-lis at Beauvais, filling up or rather forming a trefoil, in a mode which could not have been thought of but when the spirit of Gothic defied its letter and laws.

So, again, at Sens (April 17) he had written:-

“In one of the side chapels of the Cathedral of Sens there is a most precious tomb of the Cardinal Duprin,² surrounded on four sides with admirable sculpture, full of most Giottesque invention, and most instructive in the various modes by which expression has been attained through vigorous undercut shadows. All the faces have the look of portraits, and most vigorous ones; a design of the Cardinal in council on one of the shorter sides is exquisite in its variation of vivid gesture, and the figures of the secretary sitting, and the standing figure laying the sceptre on the table, are graceful as Perugino. The horses’ heads also are superb.”

Ruskin on this tour of 1846 was, then, as enthusiastically absorbed in sections and mouldings, as formerly in flowers and rocks, and as busy in drawing doors and windows, as once in making sketches of skies and mountains. But one member of the party felt in this diversion of interest a serious disappointment. We have seen with what pleasurable

¹ Now in the British Museum; see Vol. I. p. xxxv.

² The tomb of Chancellor Duprat (not Duprin) is in the first chapel on the left of the choir.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]