CONSTRUCTION XIX. SUPERIMPOSITION 245

the look of a scaffolding, with cross-poles tied to its uprights, to the whole clerestory wall. The best method is that which avoids all chance of the upright shafts being supposed continuous, by increasing their number and changing their places in the upper stories, so that the whole work branches from the ground like a tree. This is the superimposition of the Byzantine and the Pisan Romanesque; the most beautiful examples of it being, I think, the southern portico of St. Mark’s,¹ the church of S. Giovanni at Pistoja, and the apse of the cathedral of Pisa. In Renaissance work the two principles are equally distinct, though the shafts are (I think) always one above the other. The reader may see one of the best examples of the separately superimposed story in Whitehall (and another far inferior in St. Paul’s), and by turning himself round at Whitehall may compare with it the system of connecting shafts in the Treasury;² though this is a singularly bad example, the window cornices of the first floor being like shelves in a cupboard, and cutting the mass of the building in two, in spite of the pillars.

§ 11. But this superimposition of lightness on weight is still more distinctly the system of many buildings of the kind which I have above called Architecture of Position,³ that is to say, architecture of which the greater part is intended merely to keep something in a peculiar position; as in lighthouses, and many towers and belfries. The subject of spire and tower architecture, however, is so interesting and extensive, that I have thoughts of writing a detached essay upon it,⁴ and, at all events, cannot enter upon it here: but this much is enough for the reader to note for our present purpose, that, although many towers do in reality stand on

¹ [The southern portico of St. Mark’s is shown in Plate 6 of the Examples (Vol. XI.). For another reference to the “graceful and grand” Romanesque of S. Giovanni, see Seven Lamps, ch. v. § 13 (Vol. VIII. p. 204).]

² [By “Whitehall” is meant the Banqueting Hall (see above, p. 90); the Treasury Buildings, originally built by Sir John Soane, were given a new façade in the Corinthian style by Sir Charles Barry in 1850.]

³ [Above, ch. iii. § 1, p. 74.]

⁴ [The detached essay was not written, but the subject was given some prominence in the first of Ruskin’s Edinburgh lectures in 1853: see Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 19-21.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]