84 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

useful wings on the other, but the house built with one wing, if the owner has no need of two; and so on.

60. But observe, in doing all this, there is no High, or as it is commonly called, Fine Art, required at all. There may be much science, together with the lower form of art, or “handicraft,” but there is as yet no Fine Art. Housebuilding, on these terms, is no higher thing than shipbuilding. It indeed will generally be found that the edifice designed with this masculine reference to utility, will have a charm about it, otherwise unattainable, just as a ship, constructed with simple reference to its service against powers of wind and wave, turns out one of the loveliest things that human hands produce.¹ Still, we do not, and properly do not, hold ship-building to be a fine art, nor preserve in our memories the names of immortal ship-builders; neither, so long as the mere utility and constructive merit of the building are regarded, is architecture to be held a fine art, or are the names of architects to be remembered immortally. For any one may at any time be taught to build the ship, or (thus far) the house, and there is nothing deserving of immortality in doing what any one may be taught to do.

But when the house, or church, or other building is thus far designed, and the forms of its dead walls and dead roofs are up to this point determined, comes the divine part of the work-namely, to turn these dead walls into living ones. Only Deity, that is to say, those who are taught by Deity, can do that.

And that is to be done by painting and sculpture, that is to say, by ornamentation. Ornamentation is therefore the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

61. Now observe. It will at once follow from this principle, that a great architect must be a great sculptor or painter.²

¹ [See Ruskin’s preface to The Harbours of England.]

² [See above, Preface, p. 8. Compare Vol. I. p. 5 n., where in his earliest essay on architecture Ruskin ventured on another statement of this kind. Ruskin

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