CONSTRUCTION XIX. SUPERIMPOSITION 247

indeed, have a kind of buttress, a projection, or subordinate tower at each of its angles; but these are to its main body like the satellites to a shaft, joined with its strength, and associated in its uprightness, part of the tower itself: exactly in the proportion in which they lose their massive unity with its body, and assume the form of true buttress walls set on its angles, the tower loses its dignity.

§ 13. These two characters, then, are common to all noble towers, however otherwise different in purpose or feature,-the first, that they rise from massive foundation to lighter summits, frowning with battlements perhaps, but yet evidently more pierced and thinner in wall than beneath, and, in most ecclesiastical examples, divided into rich open work: the second, that whatever the form of the tower, it shall not appear to stand by help of buttresses. It follows from the first condition, as indeed it would have followed from ordinary æsthetic requirements, that we shall have continual variation in the arrangements of the stories, and the larger number of apertures towards the top,-a condition exquisitely carried out in the old Lombardic towers, in which, however small they may be, the number of apertures is always regularly increased towards the summit; generally one window in the lowest stories, two in the second, then three, five, and six; often, also, one, two, four, and six, with beautiful symmetries of placing not at present to our purpose. We may sufficiently exemplify the general laws of tower building by placing side by side, drawn to the same scale, a mediæval tower, in which most of them are simply and unaffectedly observed, and one of our own modern towers, in which every one of them is violated in small space, convenient for comparison. (Plate 6.)¹

§ 14. The old tower is that of St. Mark’s at Venice, not a very perfect example, for its top is Renaissance, but as

¹ [See below, p. 249 n., and for the plate, Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. pp. 346-347 n.), where Ruskin remarks that the Edinburgh tower is “not kindly represented,” and the Venetian campanile “also, unintentionally, maligned,” the entasis (or swelling) of the tower being omitted.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]