120 THE STONES OF VENICE IV. INFIDELITY

best of those who devoted themselves to architecture were in great part occupied in adapting the construction of buildings to new necessities, such as those developed by the invention of gunpowder (introducing a totally new and most interesting science of fortification, which directed the ingenuity of Sanmicheli and many others from its proper channel¹), and found interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the absolute architectural laws they had consented to revive, and the forms of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy, with the requirements of the daily life of the sixteenth century.

§ 92. These, then,² were the three principal directions in which the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses were rendered still more fatal by the entrance of another element, inevitably associated with pride. For, as it is written, “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool,” so also it is written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;”³ and the self-adulation which influenced not less the learning of the age than its luxury, led gradually to the forgetfulness of all things but self, and to an infidelity only the more fatal because it still retained the form and language of faith.

§ 93. IV. INFIDELITY. In noticing the more prominent

¹ [See the note on Sanmichele above, p. 43, and compare the reference to Michael Angelo’s conversations given at Vol. IX. p. 448 n.]

² [§ 92 to the end of the chapter forms chapter iv. in the second volume of the “Travellers’ Edition,” beginning “Such were the principal directions in which...” The side-heading “IV. Infidelity” at the beginning of § 93 was omitted. The chapter is headed “Infidelitas,” and the following footnote is appended:-

“The text of my old book begins again here, unaltered. I should rewrite it now, in effect the same, but with much better sense of its close application to ourselves. In the original, the Renaissance Pride was divided into three heads, Pride of State, of Knowledge, and of System; but the last was insufficiently treated, and would lead us into quite other fields of weed, if we followed it now. For Venice in her wig and high-soled shoes thought just as much of herself as an English engineer-o an English banker-or an English Member of Parliament for the borough of Puddlecombe-or the Duke of D-building the profitable port of Barrow, and had set herself to just such profitable business.”

The growth of Barrow-in-Furness was greatly increased by the construction in 1867 of the Devonshire and Buccleuch Docks. Ruskin objected to such enterprise on the ground, among others, that the heavy goods traffic on the Furness railway was undermining the ruins of the Abbey (see Fors Clavigera, Letter 56).]

³ [Proverbs xxviii. 26; Psalms xiv. 1, liii. 1.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]