76 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING
all its flat surfaces are inlaid with coloured stones, much being done with a green serpentine, which forms the greater part of the coast of Genoa. You have, I believe, large beds of this rock in Scotland, and other stones besides, peculiarly Scottish, calculated to form as noble a school of colour as ever existed.*
54. And, now, I have but two things more to say to you in conclusion.
Most of the lecturers whom you allow to address you,
* A series of four examples of designs for windows was exhibited at this point of the lecture, but I have not engraved them, as they were hastily made for the purposes of momentary illustration, and are not such as I choose to publish or perpetuate.1
1 [The omission from the printed lecture of these four examples caused Ruskin to re-write and re-arrange the text. Among his drawings at Brantwood is the one reproduced in Plate XI. opposite, which aptly illustrates the second type of window here described. The four examples were (1) a pointed window with a plain shield; (2) a Giottesque window with coloured stones; (3) a French Gothic window; and (4) the Bourgtheroulde window, or rather (it would seem) a simpler form adapted from that model. The MS. resumes from the passage cited above, § 52 n., p. 74:-
“I have arranged here four successive examples of the form of the pointed window, filled up by the flat shield of stone, which renders it easily fitted with the modern sash. I don’t consider it the best or most beautiful form, but it is the glory of Gothic architecture that it can do anything. It does not imperatively demand even the pointed arch above-if you have not room for it. Whatever you really and seriously want, Gothic will do for you; ... [as in § 55 below] ... new way of treating it.
“Taking, then, this form of the filling shield, and only adding to it a plain cusp, you would have such a window as this, which would be just as cheap as any that you now build, and though not much in itself, would yet join in the picturesque effect of any richer work in its neighbourhood. The shield is here perfectly plain at the lower edge, because when you have a direct example before you belonging to the fine Gothic times, of the very thing you want, it is unwise to leave it, and the filling shield is not, in any windows I can recollect of this kind, decorated along the lower edge until the upper part of the window has been completely charged with ornament.
“This next arch will strike many of you as strange, but I have given it on purpose, as an example of a Gothic with which we are generally little acquainted-the Giottesque Gothic of Tuscany; and I think it especially deserving of your consideration, because I have observed that your Scottish lapidaries have admirable taste and skill in the disposition of the pebbles of your brooches and other ornaments of dress, and I have not the least doubt that the genius of your country would, if directed to this particular style of architecture, produce works as beautiful as they would be original and national in design. The Giottesque Gothic owes at least the half of its beauty to the art of inlaying; its sculpture is indeed the most perfect which was ever produced by the Gothic schools; but besides this rich sculpture, all its flat surfaces are inlaid with coloured stones, in the manner of this example, but infinitely more richly, as I have limited myself here to such decoration as would be ordinarily achievable. In Tuscany a great deal is
[Version 0.04: March 2008]