220 ST. MARK’S REST

tell us the pillar is to be isolated, and that it is a monument of importance. Look from these shafts to the arcade of the Ducal Palace. Its pillars have been found fault with for wanting bases. But they were meant to be walked beside without stumbling.¹

Next, you see the tops of the capitals of the great pillars spread wide, into flat tables. You can feel, surely, that these are entirely “proper,” to afford room for the statues they are to receive, and that the edges, which bear no weight, may “properly” extend widely. But suppose a weight of superincumbent wall were to be laid on these pillars? The extent of capital which is now graceful, would then be weak and ridiculous.

16. Thus far of propriety, whose simple laws are soon satisfied: next, of proportion.

You see that one of the shafts,-the St. Theodore’s,-is much more slender than the other.

One general law of proportion is that a slender shaft should have a slender capital, and a ponderous shaft, a ponderous one.²

But had this law been here followed, the companion pillars would have instantly become ill-matched. The eye would have discerned in a moment the fat pillar and the lean. They would never have become the fraternal³ pillars-“the two” of the Piazzetta.

With subtle, scarcely at first traceable, care, the designer varied the curves and weight of his capitals; and gave the massive head to the slender shaft, and the slender capital to the massive shaft. And thus they stand in symmetry, and uncontending equity.

Next, for the form of these capitals themselves, and the date of them.

You will find in the guide-books that though the shafts

¹ [See on this subject Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. p. 105).]

² [For Ruskin’s first notice of this point, see the extract from his diary of 1848 given in Vol. VIII. p. xxxi.]

³ [Ruskin was here thinking probably of Wordsworth’s lines entitled “Yew-Trees”-“those fraternal four of Borrowdale.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]