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‘Brescia’ seems to be what Ruskin wrote, though it caused problems for the typist making the Ruskin Library Transcript T7A.
Ruskin first read Dante in 1845. He turns here to the Inferno to illustrate the lie which he believes to be at the heart of bad Gothic architecture. One of his aims on this journey is to explain the decline of Gothic, the shift from the ‘perpetuity’ and ‘kingliness’ of truth (M2).
Inferno Canto XXX 49ff reads:
Io vidi un, fatto a guisa di leuto
pur ch’elli avesse avuta l’anguinaia
tronca dall’altro che l’uomo ha forcuto.
La grave idropesì, che sì dispaia
le membra con l’omor che mal converte,
Che ’ l viso non responde alla entrain,
Faceva lui tener le labbra apperte...
In Cary’s translation, which Ruskin used and approved the passage reads:
One I saw
In fashion like a lute, had but the groin
Been sever’d where it meets the forked part,
Swoln dropsy, disproportioning the limbs
With ill-converted moisture, that the paunch
Suits not the visage, open’d wide his lips...
Adam of Brescia was executed by burning for counterfeiting Florentine coins, stamped with the image of John the Baptist, but underweight in their gold content.
The finial is lute shaped like Adam of Brescia. Adam was damned for the greed which led him to produce counterfeit Florentine Florins. His punishment was hydropsy which left him so fat in the lower parts that he would, Dante said, look just like a lute if you were to chop off his legs at the point where the body forks. Here as in the later references in M it is the precision of Dante’s visual image which Ruskin notices.
Adam is in hell fighting with Sinon, the Greek who persuaded the Trojans to accept the wooden horse, as to which of them is the bigger perverter of truth. Ruskin returns to Adam of Brescia in Modern Painters IV (Works, 5.308 [n/a]) as someone who sees mountain streams only as a potential source of more drink for a thirst which can never be satisfied.
The Duomo at Milan is the antithesis of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice: the Ducal Palace is the ‘central building of the world’ while throughout Milan Cathedral ‘there are mixtures of stealing from every style in the world, and every style spoiled’. Similarly Milan cathedral does not have Tintoretto’s vision of Paradise at its heart but instead this reference to a pointless fight in hell between deceivers for whom ‘there is no life but wealth’.
There are other references to Dante at Notebook M p.5; Notebook M p.76; Notebook M p.173; Notebook M p.181; and Notebook M p.199.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]