38 THE STONES OF VENICE

§ 24. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured representations of bodily exercises-hunting and war.* The Arab banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their minarets, “There is no god but God.” Opposite in their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, is VENICE.

The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal proportions-the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of the world.

§ 25. The reader will now begin to understand something of the importance of the study of the edifices of a city which concludes, within the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:-each architecture expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.

§ 26. It will be part of my endeavour in the following work, to mark the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures were developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;† mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered with

* Appendix 8: “The Northern Energy” [p. 426].

† Classical Greek, it should have been. I did not at this time myself know the difference between Roman and Greek acanthus. The rest of the chapter is now perfectly right, except in the slip pointed out in § 38. [1879.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]