CONSTRUCTION XIII. THE ROOF 185

this difference between its slope in the Northern and Southern structure is a matter of far greater importance than is commonly supposed, and it is this to which I would especially direct the reader’s attention.

§ 6. One main cause of it, the necessity of throwing off snow in the North, has been a thousand times alluded to: another I do not remember having seen noticed, namely, that rooms in a roof are comfortably habitable in the North, which are painful sotto piombi in Italy; and that there is in wet climates a natural tendency in all men to live as high as possible, out of the damp and mist. These two causes, together with accessible quantities of good timber, have induced in the North a general steep pitch of gable, which, when rounded or squared above a tower, becomes a spire or turret; and this feature, worked out with elaborate decoration, is the key-note of the whole system of aspiration, so called, which the German critics¹ have so ingeniously and falsely ascribed to a devotional sentiment pervading the Northern Gothic: I entirely and boldly deny the whole theory;² our cathedrals were for the most part built by worldly people, who loved the world, and would have gladly stayed in it for ever;³ whose best hope was the escaping hell, which they thought to do by building cathedrals, but who had very vague conceptions of Heaven in general, and very feeble desires respecting their entrance therein; and the form of the spired cathedral has no more intentional reference

¹ [See, for instance, Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842), who takes an expression of aspiration as the distinguishing characteristic of the Gothic style. Ruskin, who seldom read German, probably took his reference to this theory at secondhand from the article in the British Quarterly (elsewhere referred to, p. 304n.), in which (pp. 52-53) an abstract of Kugler’s views is given.]

² [Ruskin returned to the subject and dealt with it more at length in Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 19-21, where he deduces the form of the spire from domestic architecture.]

³ [It was objected by one of Ruskin’s critics that this passage seemed inconsistent with others in which, in the case of Venice, he connected Venetian architecture with Venetian piety. For his reply to the criticism, see Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 22 n., where he distinguishes (1) between decorative features which may reasonably be ascribed to sentiment and structural features which are presumably due to convenience, and (2) between the general spirit of a national architecture and “occasional efforts of superstition.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]