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nor penetrative, but embracing and mysterious; a power faithful more than thoughtful, which conceived and felt more than it created; a power that neither comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams and winds; and which could not rest in the expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth itself.*

§ 16. I have endeavoured to give some idea of one of the hollow balls of stone which, surrounded by flowing leafage, occur in varied succession on the architrave of the central gate of St. Mark’s at Venice, in Plate I. fig. 3. It seems to me singularly beautiful in its unity of lightness, and delicacy of detail, with breadth of light. It looks as if its leaves had been sensitive, and had risen and shut themselves into a bud at some sudden touch, and would presently fall back again into their wild flow. The cornices of San Michele of Lucca,¹ seen above and below the arch, in Plate VI., show the effect of heavy leafage and thick stems arranged on a surface whose curve is a simple quadrant, the light dying from off them as it turns. It would be difficult, as I think, to invent any thing more noble: and I insist on the broad character of their arrangement the more earnestly, because, afterwards modified by greater skill in its management, it became characteristic of the richest pieces of Gothic design. The capital,² given in

* This estimate of Byzantine architecture had been previously formed by Lord Lindsay3-and, I think, by him only;-and it remains, though entirely true, his and mine only, in written statement, though shared with us by all persons who have an eye for colour, and sympathy enough with Christianity to care for its fullest interpretation by Art only: in this sentence of mine, the bit about self-contented Greeks must be omitted. A noble Greek was as little content without God, as George Herbert, or St. Francis; and a Byzantine was nothing else than a Greek,-recognizing Christ for Zeus. [1880.]

¹ [For other drawings by Ruskin of this church, see Plate 1 in Vol. III.; and Plate 1 in Vol. IV.; and Plate XXI. in Stones of Venice, vol. i.; and for his description of it, Vol. III. p. 206 n.]

² [It is the eleventh capital of the Ducal Palace, as described in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 94.]

³ [See his Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 1847, vol. i. pp. 62 seq.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]