I. ARCHITECTURE 41

enter the valleys of the Alps, where there is snow to be sustained, we find its form of roof altered by the substitution of a steep gable for a flat one.* There are probably few in the room who have not been in some parts of South Switzerland, and who do not remember the beautiful effect of the grey mountain churches, many of them hardly changed since the tenth and eleventh centuries, whose pointed towers stand up through the green level of the vines, or crown the jutting rocks that border the valley.¹

21. From this form to the true spire the change is slight, and consists in little more than various decoration; generally in putting small pinnacles at the angles, and piercing the central pyramid with traceried windows; sometimes, as at Fribourg and Burgos² throwing it into tracery altogether: but to do this is invariably the sign of a vicious style, as it takes away from the spire its character of a true roof, and turns it merely³ into an ornamental excrescence. At Antwerp and Brussels, the celebrated towers (one, observe, ecclesiastical, being the tower of the cathedral, and the other secular),⁴ are formed by successions of diminishing towers, set one above the other, and each supported by buttresses thrown to the angles of the one beneath. At the English cathedrals of Lichfield and Salisbury, the spire is seen in great purity, only decorated by sculpture; but I am aware of no example so striking in its entire simplicity as that of the towers of the cathedral of Coutances in Normandy.⁵

* The form establishes itself afterwards in the plains, in sympathy with other Gothic conditions, as in the campanile of St. Mark’s at Venice.

¹ [See the drawing of the church of Courmayeur reproduced opposite, Plate VI.]

² [Burgos was known to Ruskin only by pictures and engravings; with Fribourg (Switzerland) he was well familiar: see “The Tower of Fribourg,” Plate 24 in Modern Painters (vol. iv.); the allusion here, however, is to the tower of the Church of St. Nicolas.]

³ [The MS. reads “merely,” which is no doubt the word intended; hitherto it has been printed “nearly.”]

⁴ [The Brussels tower is that of the Town Hall, 1401-1448.]

⁵ [The Cathedral of Coutances was consecrated in 1056, but no part of the original edifice remains “except perhaps the core of the great piers which carry the central tower,” the present structure dating from early in the thirteenth century. The date of the consecration of Salisbury Cathedral is 1258, but the tower is later; that of

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