172 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

of importance in peculiar places and public edifices, as they engage national affection or vanity; no single city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride of the whole body of the people shall be involved in adorning her; the buildings of London or Munich are not charged with the fulness of the national heart as were the domes of Pisa and Florence:-their credit or shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan; central at the best, not dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished, meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are now distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.

5. In proportion to the increasing spirituality of religion, the conception of worthiness in material offering ceases, and with it the sense of beauty in the evidence of votive labour;¹ machine-work² is substituted for hand-work, as if the value of ornament consisted in the mere multiplication of agreeable forms, instead of in the evidence of human care and

own proper function. Besides, even in the former end it must fail, more or less, according to the scale of the nation; in a city divided into twenty companies it works well, but it is absurd altogether in a kingdom divided into twenty provinces. Independent cities have some reason in being republican, but it must be at the expense of continual jealousies, wars, and seditions. Peace can only be secured by fixed positions of all ranks, and settled government of the whole. I want to study the English people under Elizabeth, for the development of intellect was then great under an absolute monarchy, and the King-love of Shakespeare is very glorious; but with that exception there is nothing that the world has ever shown that can stand-intellectually-beside the power of mind thrown out by the fighting, falling, insane republicanism of Florence-in Giotto, Orcagna and Dante, its first-fruits, with all the clusters of the mighty ones, their satellites, without reckoning the impulse given to the national mind going on in Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and Masaccio and Ghirlandajo, and gathering all into one great flash to expire under the Medicis in Michael Angelo-nothing can be set beside this, I say, except the parallel republicanism of fighting and falling Athens, giving us Æschylus and Phidias and Aristophanes and Thucydides.”]

The reference is to Sismondi’s Histoire des Republiques Italiennes du Moyen Age; the Anziani were the twelve elders, who replaced the former consuls.]

¹ [These were conceptions which Ruskin sought to rekindle in the Seven Lamps, ch. i. (“The Lamp of Sacrifice”).]

² [For Ruskin’s numerous references to this subject, see General Index, s. “Machinery.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]