80 THE STONES OF VENICE II. PRIDE OF STATE

And therefore, while in the execution and manner of work the Renaissance builders zealously vindicated for themselves the attribute of cold and superior learning, they appealed for such approbation as they needed from the multitude to the lowest possible standard of taste: and while the older workman lavished his labour on the minute niche and narrow casement, on the doorways no higher than the head, and the contracted angles of the turreted chamber, the Renaissance builder spared such cost and toil in his detail, that he might spend it in bringing larger stones from a distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders, that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was gigantic, above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the rich. The Titanic insanity extended itself also into ecclesiastical design: the principal church in Italy was built with little idea of any other admirableness than that which was to result from its being huge; and the religious impressions of those who enter it are to this day supposed to be dependent, in a great degree, on their discovering that they cannot span the thumbs of the statues which sustain the vessels for holy water.

§ 45. It is easy to understand how an architecture which thus appealed not less to the lowest instincts of dulness than to the subtlest pride of learning, rapidly found acceptance with a large body of mankind; and how the spacious pomp of the new manner of design came to be eagerly adopted by the luxurious aristocracies, not only of Venice, but of the other countries of Christendom, now gradually gathering themselves into that insolent and festering isolation, against which the cry of the poor sounded hourly in more ominous unison, bursting at last into thunder (mark where,-first among the planted walks and plashing fountains of the palace wherein the Renaissance luxury attained its utmost height in Europe, Versailles;¹) that cry, mingling so much

¹ [See Carlyle’s French Revolution, Book vii. ch. vi. (“To Versailles”); and compare in Vol. XII. Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 75.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]