108 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

Christian temple just as they would have decorated a pagan one, merely because the new religion had become Imperial. Then, just as the new art was beginning to assume a distinctive form, down came the northern barbarians upon it; and all their superstitions had to be leavened with it, and all their hard hands and hearts softened by it, before their art could appear in anything like a characteristic form. The warfare in which Europe was perpetually plunged retarded this development for ages; but it steadily and gradually prevailed, working from the eighth to the eleventh century like a seed in the ground, showing little signs of life, but still, if carefully examined, changing essentially every day and every hour: at last, in the twelfth century the blade appears above the black earth; in the thirteenth, the plant is in full leaf.

82. I begin, then, with the thirteenth century, and must now make to you a general assertion, which, if you will note down and examine at your leisure, you will find true and useful, though I have not time at present to give you full demonstration of it.

I say, then, that the art of the thirteenth century is the foundation of all art¹-nor merely the foundation, but the root of it; that is to say, succeeding art is not merely built upon it, but was all comprehended in it, and is developed out of it. Passing this great century, we find three successive branches developed from it, in each of the three following centuries. The fourteenth century is pre-eminently the age of Thought, the fifteenth the age of Drawing, and the sixteenth the age of Painting.

83. Observe, first, the fourteenth century is pre-eminently the age of thought. It begins with the first words of the poem of Dante;² and all the great pictorial poems-the mighty series of works in which everything is done to

¹ [Compare Stones of Venice, vol. ii. and the note thereon, Vol. X. p. 306.]

² [Ruskin refers again to this year-1300, the beginning of the century, the date at which the Divina Commedia was commenced, and the middle of the poet’s threescore years and ten (had such been his), “nel mezzo del cammin,”-in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 400).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]