350 PRÆTERITA-II

115. Another influence, no less forcible, and more instantly effective, was brought to bear on me by my first quiet walk through Lucca.

Hitherto, all architecture, except fairy-finished Milan, had depended with me for its delight on being partly in decay. I revered the sentiment of its age, and I was accustomed to look for the signs of age in the mouldering of its traceries, and in the interstices deepening between the stones of its masonry. This looking for cranny and joint was mixed with the love of rough stones themselves, and of country churches built like Westmoreland cottages.

Here in Lucca I found myself suddenly in the presence of twelfth-century buildings, originally set in such balance of masonry that they could all stand without mortar; and in material so incorruptible, that after six hundred years of sunshine and rain, a lancet could not now be put between their joints.

Absolutely for the first time I now saw what mediæval builders were, and what they meant. I took the simplest of all façades for analysis, that of Santa Maria Foris-Portam, and thereon literally began the study of architecture.

In the third-and, for the reader’s relief, last-place in these technical records, Fra Bartolomeo’s picture of the Magdalen, with St. Catherine of Siena,¹ gave me a faultless example of the treatment of pure Catholic tradition by the perfect schools of painting.

116. And I never needed lessoning more in the principles of the three great arts. After those summer days of 1845, I advanced only in knowledge of individual character, provincial feeling, and details of construction or execution. Of what was primarily right and ultimately best, there was never more doubt to me, and my art-teaching, necessarily, in its many local or personal interests partial, has been from

Modern Painters: Vol. IV. p. 347. See also the letter of 1845 to his father: ibid., p. 122 n.; and for other descriptions of the statue, see Vol. XXIII. pp. 219-232, and Vol. XXXIV. pp. 157 n., 170-171.]

¹ [Then in the church of San Romano, now in the Academy of Lucca: see Vol. IV. p. 346.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]