236 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

of an attempt to illustrate this idea of the picturesque, in a painting of dead flowers and decayed fruit; and equally curious to trace the steps of any reasoning which, on such a theory, should account for the picturesqueness of an ass colt as opposed to a horse foal. But there is much excuse for even the most utter failure in reasonings of this kind, since the subject is, indeed, one of the most obscure of all that may legitimately be submitted to human reason; and the idea is itself so varied in the minds of different men, according to their subjects of study, that no definition can be expected to embrace more than a certain number of its infinitely multiplied forms.

§ 12. That peculiar character, however, which separates the picturesque from the characters of subject belonging to the higher walks of art (and this is all that it is necessary for our present purpose to define), may be shortly and decisively expressed. Picturesqueness, in this sense, is Parasitical Sublimity.¹ Of course all sublimity, as well as all beauty, is, in the simple etymological sense, picturesque, that is to say, fit to become the subject of a picture; and all sublimity is, even in the peculiar sense which I am endeavouring to develope, picturesque, as opposed to beauty; that is to say, there is more picturesqueness in the subject of Michael Angelo than of Perugino, in proportion to the prevalence of the sublime element over the beautiful.² But that character, of which the extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be degrading to art, is parasitical sublimity; i.e. a sublimity dependent on the accidents, or on the least essential characters, of the objects to which it belongs; and the picturesque is developed distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of thought of those points of character in which the sublimity is found. Two ideas, therefore, are essential to picturesqueness,-the first, that of sublimity (for pure beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so only as the sublime

¹ [Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 35, and Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. i.]

² [The MS. adds the following footnote:-

“I admit this distinction, however, only as between things included and including. High beauty cannot exist without, and includes, sublimity. Sublimity does not necessarily include beauty.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]