98 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

the worst forms of Unchristian Socialism.¹ So again, there being now no nature or variety in architecture, the multitude are not interested in it; therefore, for the present, they have lost their taste for art altogether, so that you can no longer trust sculpture within their reach. Consider the innumerable forms of evil involved in the temper and taste of the existing populace of London or Paris, as compared with the temper of the populace of Florence, when the quarter of Santa Maria Novella received its title of “Joyful Quarter,” from the rejoicings of the multitude at getting a new picture into their church,² better than the old ones;-all this difference being exclusively chargeable on the Renaissance architecture. And then, farther, if we remember, not only the revolutionary ravage of sacred architecture, but the immeasurably greater destruction effected by the Renaissance builders and their satellites, wherever they came, destruction so wide-spread that there is not a town in France or Italy but it has to deplore the deliberate overthrow of more than half its noblest monuments, in order to put up Greek porticoes or palaces in their stead; adding also all the blame of the ignorance of the meaner kind of men, operating in thousands of miserable abuses upon the frescoes, books, and pictures, as the architects’ hammers did on the carved work, of the Middle Ages;* and, finally, if we examine the influence which the luxury, and, still more, the heathenism, joined with the essential dulness of these schools, have had

* Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps and the weight of the following very simple argument. You allow it is wrong to waste time, that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste other people’s; for you have some right to your own time, but none to theirs. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living, it

¹ [A reference to the then recently adopted phrase “Christian Socialism”; the first number of The Christian Socialist, the organ of the movement, edited by Frederick Denison Maurice, had appeared in November 1850.]

² [See for this incident Vol. III. p. 644 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]