94 THE STONES OF VENICE

killed its unhappy workmen in its fall.* But just as it is perfectly possible to have a clear idea of the opposing characteristics of two different species of plants or animals, though between the two there are varieties which it is difficult to assign either to the one or the other, so the reader may fix decisively in his mind the legitimate characteristics of the incrusted and the massive styles, though between the two there are varieties which confessedly unite the attributes of both. For instance, in many Roman remains, built of blocks of tufa and incrusted with marble, we have a style, which, though truly solid, possesses some of the attributes of incrustation; and in the Cathedral of Florence, built of brick and coated with marble, the marble facing is so firmly and exquisitely set, that the building, though in reality incrusted, assumes the attributes of solidity. But these intermediate examples need not in the least confuse our generally distinct ideas of the two families of buildings: the one in which the substance is alike throughout, and the forms and conditions of the ornament assume or prove that it is so, as in the best Greek buildings, and for the most part in our early Norman and Gothic; and the other, in which the substance is of two kinds, one internal, the other external, and the system of decoration is founded on this duplicity, as pre-eminently in St. Mark’s.

§ 25. I have used the word duplicity in no depreciatory sense. In Chapter II. of the Seven Lamps, § 18, I especially guarded this incrusted school from the imputation of insincerity, and I must do so now at greater length. It appears insincere at first to a Northern builder, because, accustomed to build with solid blocks of freestone, he is in

* Vide Builder, for October, 1851.¹

¹ [“Four men were killed on Friday last by the fall of an exterior cornice newly erected on a building of five stories, and nearly 80 feet in length, forming three houses in course of erection near Vauxhall Bridge. ... The whole of the cornice fell in one piece, carrying the whole of the stage with it, and snapping the scaffold-poles, precipitating the workmen to the ground” (Builder, September 27, 1851). The accident formed the subject of a leading article in the same journal of October 4, 1851. For a reference to another accident of the kind, see below, ch. vii. § 47, p. 313.]

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