248 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

good Renaissance as there is in Venice; and it is fit for our present purpose, because it owes none of its effect to ornament.¹ It is built as simply as it well can be to answer its purpose: no buttresses; no external features whatever, except some huts at the base, and the loggia, afterwards built, which, on purpose, I have not drawn; one bold square mass of brickwork; double walls, with an ascending inclined plane between them, with apertures as small as possible, and these only in necessary places, giving just the light required for ascending the stair or slope, not a ray more; and the weight of the whole relieved only by the double pilasters on the sides, sustaining small arches at the top of the mass, each decorated with the scallop or cockle shell, presently to be noticed² as frequent in Renaissance ornament, and here, for once, thoroughly well applied. Then, when the necessary height is reached, the belfry is left open, as in the ordinary Romanesque campanile, only the shafts more slender, but severe and simple, and the whole crowned by as much spire as the tower would carry, to render it more serviceable as a land-mark.³ The arrangement is repeated in numberless campaniles throughout Italy.

¹ [Ruskin’s first note on the architectural merits of the Campanile is in the diary of 1846:-

Padua, May 28.-”I think the Campanile of St. Mark’s is the most perfect instance of the power of proportion that can be given. So by this alone and the right introduction of the little and grand ornament that it has, it entirely effaces all sense of its rude materials and ugly surface; the shell ornament at the top is perfectly right in its use; one of the few instances of its coming well; the loggia is delicious; and yet all this would be quite vulgar without its great blank pyramidal top, and the whole vulgar if it were the least more slender than it is; as may be seen by comparing it with the lanky campanile at Dolo, the middle stage between here and Venice, which has above the loggia an octagonal story with little oblong windows, which spoils it in taste as well as in proportion, for it looks as if the loggia instead of being the top-end, and object of the tower, were only a point on it, and a preparation for the shabby story above, which is worth no preparation, but a blank and important conclusion; and the exaggerated slenderness of the whole completes the viciousness of it, so that though the pyramidal termination is the same as St. Mark’s, there is no virtue in it, and it would be impossible to draw it or use it in any way.”]

² [See below, ch. xx. § 28, p. 275.]

³ [A landmark no longer; the Campanile, after a life (in part) of exactly 1000 years, fell on the morning of July 14, 1902. “Shortly after 9.30,” writes an eye-witness, “I had gone into the Piazza and found a crowd of people in front of the clock-tower, gazing at the crack which had appeared in the Campanile, and which had become

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