46 THE STONES OF VENICE I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE

for its roofs of aperture or roofs proper, the low gable or circular arch: but it differs from Romanesque work in attaching great importance to the horizontal lintel or architrave above the arch; transferring the energy of the principal shafts to the supporting of this horizontal beam, and thus rendering the arch a subordinate, if not altogether a superfluous, feature. The type of this arrangement has been given already at c, Fig. 36, p. 179, Vol. I.: and I might insist at length upon the absurdity of a construction in which the shorter shaft, which has the real weight of wall to carry, is split into two by the taller one, which has nothing to carry at all,-that taller one being strengthened, nevertheless, as if the whole weight of the building bore upon it; and on the ungracefulness, never conquered in any Palladian work, of the two half-capitals glued, as it were, against the slippery round sides of the central shaft. But it is not the form of this architecture against which I would plead. Its defects are shared by many of the noblest forms of earlier building, and might have been entirely atoned for by excellence of spirit. But it is the moral nature of it which is corrupt, and which it must, therefore, be our principal business to examine and expose.

§ 5. The moral, or immoral, elements which unite to form the spirit of Central Renaissance architecture are, I believe, in the main, two,-Pride and Infidelity; but the pride resolves itself into three main branches,-Pride of Science, Pride of State, and Pride of System: and thus we have four separate mental conditions which must be examined successively.¹

§ 6. I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE. It would have been more charitable, but more confusing, to have added another element to our list, namely the Love of Science; but the love is included in the pride, and is usually so very subordinate an element, that it does not deserve equality of nomenclature. But, whether pursued in pride or in affection (how far by either we shall see presently), the first notable

¹ [With the following analysis of the Renaissance spirit, compare Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 34, where Ruskin cites in illustration of it Browning’s “The Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed’s Church.”]

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