CONSTRUCTION VII. THE PIER BASE 105

“And Jacob took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar.”¹ I do not fancy that he put a base for it first. If you try to put a base to the rock-piers of Stonehenge, you will hardly find them improved; and two of the most perfect buildings in the world, the Parthenon and Ducal palace of Venice, have no bases to their pillars: the latter has them, indeed, to its upper arcade shafts; and had once, it is said, a continuous raised base for its lower ones: but successive elevations of St. Mark’s Place have covered this base, and parts of the shafts themselves, with an inundation of paving stones; and yet the building is, I doubt not, as grand as ever.² Finally, the two most noble pillars in Venice, those brought from Acre, stand on the smooth marble surface of the Piazzetta, with no independent bases whatever.³ They are rather broken away beneath, so that you may look under parts of them, and stand (not quite erect, but leaning somewhat) safe by their own massy weight. Nor could any bases possibly be devised that would not spoil them.

§ 9. But it is otherwise if the pillar be so slender as to look doubtfully balanced. It would indeed stand quite as safely without an independent base as it would with one (at least, unless the base be in the form of a socket). But it will not appear so safe to the eye. And here, for the first time, I

¹ [Genesis xxviii. 18.]

² [See further on this point St. Mark’s Rest, § 15: “the pillars (of the Ducal Palace) have been found fault with for wanting bases. But they were meant to be walked beside without stumbling.” The foundations of the Ducal Palace were strengthened in the restoration completed in 1889; for particulars on this subject, see next volume.]

³ [The pillars here referred to are the two short square marble pilasters which stand on the south side of St. Mark’s. They were brought in 1256 from the church of St. Saba at Ptolemais (St. Jean d’Acre), which was destroyed by the Venetians, and are elsewhere called by Ruskin the “Jean d’Acre Columns” (St. Mark’s Rest, § 100; and see also Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. iv. § 15, and vol. iii., Venetian index, s. “Piazzetta”). The pillars were subsequently given plinths-“which are as if you gave the Greek Pallas high-heeled boots”: see Ruskin’s preface (reprinted here in the volume containing St. Mark’s Rest) to Count Zorzi’s Osservazioni intorno ai ristorni ... della Basilica di San Marco, 1877. The original standing of the pillars is well shown in a drawing by Prout, given in this edition as an illustration to Ruskin’s Notes on Prout and Hunt. For the granite “Pillars of the Piazzetta,” which on the other hand always had bases, see below, § 17.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]