112 THE STONES OF VENICE

like a leaf, and there something like a flower, the whole tracery of the sculpture might be left white, and grounded with gold or blue, or treated in any other manner best harmonizing with the colours around it. And as the necessarily feeble character of the sculpture called for, and was ready to display, the best arrangements of colour, so the precious marbles in the architect’s hands give him at once the best examples and the best means of colour. The best examples, for the tints of all natural stones are as exquisite in quality as endless in change; and the best means, for they are all permanent.

§ 46. Every motive thus concurred in urging him to the study of chromatic decoration, and every advantage was given him in the pursuit of it; and this at the very moment when, as presently to be noticed,¹ the naiveté of barbaric Christianity could only be forcibly appealed to by the help of coloured pictures: so that, both externally and internally, the architectural construction became partly merged in pictorial effect; and the whole edifice is to be regarded less as a temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold.²

§ 47. LAW VII. That the impression of the architecture is not to be dependent on size. And now there is but one final

¹ [See below, § 62, p. 129.]

² [A passage from one of Ruskin’s letters to his father is interesting here:-

“January 10, [1852].-... I have been reading Paradise Regained lately. It seems to me an exact parallel to Turner’s latest pictures-the mind failing altogether, but with irregular intervals and returns of power, exquisite momentary passages and lines. ... I must quote his description of the temple in my chapter on St. Mark’s:

‘And higher yet the glorious temple reared

Her pile, far off appearing, like a mount

Of alabaster, top with golden spires.’

Exactly what St. Mark’s is. It was all gilded at top-in old time.”

(The quotation is from book iv. line 546). So, in Deucalion (i. ch. vii. “The Iris of the Earth”) Ruskin says of St. Mark’s that it was once “a sea-borne vase of alabaster full of incense of prayers; and a purple manuscript,-floor, walls, and roofs blazoned with the scrolls of the gospel.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]