106 THE STONES OF VENICE

hollows and black recesses we choose; struck into grim darknesses and grotesque projections, and rugged ploughings up of sinuous furrows, in which any form or thought may be wrought out on any scale,-mighty statues with robes of rock and crowned foreheads burning in the sun, or venomous goblins and stealthy dragons¹ shrunk into lurking-places of untraceable shade: think of this, and of the play and freedom given to the sculptor’s hand and temper, to smite out and in, hither and thither, as he will; and then consider what must be the different spirit of the design which is to be wrought on the smooth surface of a film of marble, where every line and shadow must be drawn with the most tender pencilling and cautious reserve of resource,-where even the chisel must not strike hard, lest it break through the delicate stone, nor the mind be permitted in any impetuosity of conception inconsistent with the fine discipline of the hand. Consider that whatever animal or human form is to be suggested, must be projected on a flat surface; that all the features of the countenance, the folds of the drapery, the involutions of the limbs, must be so reduced and subdued that the whole work becomes rather a piece of fine drawing than of sculpture: and then follow out, until you begin to perceive their endlessness, the resulting differences of character which will be necessitated in every part of the ornamental designs of these incrusted churches, as compared with that of the Northern schools. I shall endeavour to trace a few of them only.

§ 38. The first would of course be a diminution of the builder’s dependence upon human form as a source of ornament: since exactly in proportion to the dignity of the form itself is the loss which it must sustain in being reduced to a shallow and linear bas-relief, as well as the difficulty of expressing it at all under such conditions. Wherever sculpture can be solid, the nobler characters of the human form

¹ [As an instance of the care which Ruskin took in selecting even what might seem unimportant words, we may trace the variations in the MS. here. First he wrote “lurking fiends and cavernous beasts;” next, “subtle fiends and venomous beasts;” and finally the words as in the text.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]