“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 185

of the column, and the whole scale of the building. Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be important only by position, in a level country only by bulk. Under the over-whelming mass of mountain-form it is vain to attempt the expression of majesty by size of edifice-the humblest architecture may become important by availing itself of the power of nature, but the mightiest must be crushed in emulating it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; ¹ St. Peter’s would look like a toy if built beneath the Alpine cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some communication of their own solemnity to the smallest châlet that glitters among their glades of pine.² On the other hand, a small building is in a level country lost, and the impressiveness of bulk proportionably increased; hence the instinct of nations has always led them to the loftiest efforts where the masses of their labour might be seen looming at incalculable distance above the open line of the horizon-hence rose her four-square mountains above the flat of Memphis, while the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges of columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with a single pediment, bright, but not colossal.³

16. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the

¹ [Ruskin had sketched at Amalfi in 1841; for a rough sketch of the Superga at Turin, see Modern Painters, vol. v. Fig. 91.]

² [Compare on this point The Poetry of Architecture, Vol. I. pp. 37, 164, and Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 103.]

³ [For the situation of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassæ, in the territory of Phigaleia, see Leake’s Travels in the Morea, 1830, ii. 9, and Mahaffy’s Rambles in Greece, p. 318; the sculptures were removed to the British Museum in 1812. The position of the Temple of Athena at Sunium (Cape Colonna) has been sung by Byron-“Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,” etc. (Don Juan, canto iii. st. 86).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]