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This sheet is mostly written impressions (56 lines). It makes a useful contrast with the agenda of 6th October in Dijon to define the ‘conditions, or laws of beauty in the most refined work’ by a consideration of the necessary parts and necessary functions of a building.
The general impression after Italian gothic of confused structure - no sure support of anything - the whole curiously balanced and equipoised - held by cross thrusts here and side thrusts there - here tied and there wedged - the whole most ingenious but unnatural and uncomfortable. the want of proportion in the pillars painful. They have not the look of shafts doing their work but of material squeezed together and held tightly by a case of iron rods; the walls look bound together in the same way. The small shafts having a capital here and a band there, like gaspipes, and then a long run to the ground without anything at all and these I believe necessary faults of a most blessed and glorious whole. If there be any fault which is unnecessary it is the want of grouping in the small shafts.
Sheet No. 188, together with the suggestion on Notebook M2 p.176, that ‘it is utterly futile to condemn or criticise because it is not in this rule or in that’ suggest an approach by Ruskin much closer to that of Woods than to the certainties of judgment he was seeking at Works, 9.55f. Ruskin had had a ‘clear conviction that there was a law, that ‘good architecture might be indisputably discerned and divided from the bad’.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]