66 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

sublimity of the ideal beast, from the cornice of your schools of design. Behold it (fig. 18).¹

43. Now we call ourselves civilised and refined in matters of art, but I assure you it is seldom that, in the very basest and coarsest grotesques of the inferior Gothic workmen, anything so contemptible as this head can be ever found. They only sink into such a failure accidentally, and in a single instance; and we, in our civilisation, repeat this noble piece of work threescore and six times over, as not being able to invent anything else so good! Do not think Mr. Millais has caricatured it. It is drawn with the strictest fidelity; photograph one of the heads to-morrow, and you will find the photograph tell you the same tale. Neither imagine that this is an unusual example of modern work. Your banks and public offices are covered with ideal lions’ heads in every direction, and you will find them all just as bad as this. And, farther, note that the admission of such barbarous types of sculpture is not merely ridiculous; it is seriously harmful to your powers of perceiving truth or beauty of any kind or at any time. Imagine the effect on the minds of your children of having such representations of a lion’s head as this thrust upon them perpetually; and consider what a different effect might be produced upon them if, instead of this barren and insipid absurdity, every boss on your buildings were, according to the workman’s best ability, a faithful rendering of the form of some existing animal, so that all their walls were so many pages of natural history. And, finally, consider the difference, with respect to the mind of the workman himself, between being kept all his life carving, by sixties, and forties, and thirties, repetitions of one false and futile model,-and being sent, for every piece of work he had to execute, to make a stern and faithful study from some living creature of God.²

¹ [For the flap with which this Plate is provided, see above, p. 6. Ruskin was a great admirer of Millais’ animal-drawing: see Fors Clavigera (1877), Letter 79.]

² [Compare Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. (“The Nature of Gothic”), §§ 11-24 (Vol. X. pp. 191-203).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]