110 THE STONES OF VENICE

than any that the human hand can give; but that is nothing to our present business. The simple fact is, that the builders of those cathedrals laid upon them the brightest colours they could obtain, and that there is not, as far as I am aware, in Europe, any monument of a truly noble school which has not been either painted all over, or vigorously touched with paint, mosaic, and gilding in its prominent parts. Thus far, Egyptians, Greeks, Goths, Arabs, and mediæval Christians all agree: none of them, when in their right senses, ever think of doing without paint; and, therefore, when I said above¹ that the Venetians were the only people who had thoroughly sympathized with the Arabs in this respect, I referred, first to their intense love of colour, which led them to lavish the most expensive decorations on ordinary dwelling-houses; and, secondly, to that perfection of the colour-instinct in them, which enabled them to render whatever they did, in this kind, as just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance. It is this principle of theirs, as distinguished from that of the Northern builders, which we have finally to examine.

§ 44. In the second chapter of the first volume, it was noticed that the architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorn,² and that the porch of his cathedral was therefore decorated with a rich wreath of it; but another of the predilections of that architect was there unnoticed, namely, that he did not at all like grey hawthorn, but preferred it green, and he painted it green accordingly, as bright as he could. The colour is still left in every sheltered interstice of the foliage. He had, in fact, hardly the choice of any other colour; he might have gilded the thorns, by way of allegorizing human life, but if they were to be painted at all, they could hardly be painted anything but green, and green all over. People would have been apt to object to any pursuit of abstract harmonies of colour, which might have induced him to paint his hawthorn blue.

§ 45. In the same way, whenever the subject of the

¹ [See above, § 28, p. 98.]

² [See Vol. IX. p. 70, and the passage from Ruskin’s diary there cited in a note.]

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