ADDENDA TO LECTURES I. AND II 85

This is a universal law. No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

There three greatest architects hitherto known in the world were Phidias, Giotto, and Michael Angelo; with all of whom, architecture was only their play, sculpture and painting their work. All great works of architecture in existence are either the work of single sculptors or painters, or of societies of sculptors and painters, acting collectively for a series of years. A Gothic cathedral is properly to be defined as a piece of the most magnificent associative sculpture, arranged on the noblest principles of building, for the service and delight of multitudes; and the proper definition of architecture, as distinguished from sculpture, is merely “the art of designing sculpture for a particular place, and placing it there on the best principles of building.”

Hence it clearly follows, that in modern days we have no architects. The term “architecture” is not so much as understood by us. I am very sorry to be compelled to the discourtesy of stating this fact, but a fact it is, and a fact which it is necessary to state strongly.

Hence also it will follow, that the first thing necessary to the possession of a school of architecture is the formation of a school of able sculptors, and that till we have that, nothing we do can be called architecture at all.

62. This, then, being my second proposition, the so-called “architects” of the day, as the reader will imagine, are not willing to admit it, or to admit any statement which at all involves it; and every statement, tending in this direction, which I have hitherto made, has of course been met by eager opposition; opposition which perhaps would have been still more energetic, but that architects have not, I think,

here instances Michael Angelo; it is interesting to find (from the recently discovered Dialogues on Painting, in which a Portuguese painter recorded many of the master’s words) that Michael Angelo himself laid down the principle that the ideal painter includes the architect and the sculptor (see the Appendix to Sir Charles Holroyd’s Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 1903).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]