IV. CONCLUSION 225

form in lapping waves of gloomy strength, was worn under full robes of one colour in the ground, his crest quartered on them, and their borders enriched with subtle illumination. The women wore first a dress close to the form in like manner, and then long and flowing robes, veiling them up to the neck, and delicately embroidered around the hem, the sleeves, and the girdle. The use of plate armour gradually introduced more fantastic types; the nobleness of the form was lost beneath the steel; the gradually increasing luxury and vanity of the age strove for continual excitement in more quaint and extravagant devices; and in the fifteenth century, dress reached its point of utmost splendour and fancy, being in many cases still exquisitely graceful, but now, in its morbid magnificence, devoid of all wholesome influence on manners. From this point, like architecture, it was rapidly degraded, and sank through the buff coat, and lace collar, and jack boot, to the bag-wig, tailed coat, and high-heeled shoe; and so to what it is now.¹

§ 33. Precisely analogous to this destruction of beauty in dress has been that of beauty in architecture; its colour, and grace, and fancy, being gradually sacrificed to the base forms of the Renaissance, exactly as the splendour of chivalry has faded into the paltriness of fashion. And observe the form in which the necessary reaction has taken place; necessary, for it was not possible that one of the strongest instincts of the human race could be deprived altogether of its natural food. Exactly in the degree that the architect withdrew from his buildings the sources of delight which in early days they had so richly possessed, demanding, in accordance with the new principles of taste, the banishment of all happy colour and healthy invention, in that degree the minds of men began to turn to landscape as their only resource. The picturesque school of art rose up to address those capacities of enjoyment for which, in sculpture, architecture, or

¹ [In one of his copies for revise, Ruskin here notes in the margin: “Coats. Biglow Papers”-referring presumably to Parson Wilbur’s description, in No. iii., of “th’ Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats.”]

XI. P

[Version 0.04: March 2008]