CH. VI THE LAMP OF MEMORY 243

whole finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone; if you attempt to restore that finish, you do it conjecturally; if you copy what is left, granting fidelity to be possible, (and what care, or watchfulness, or cost can secure it,) how is the new work better than the old? There was yet in the old some life, some mysterious suggestion of what it had been, and of what it had lost; some sweetness in the gentle lines which rain and sun had wrought. There can be none in the brute hardness of the new carving. Look at the animals which I have given in Plate XIV., as an instance of living work, and suppose the markings of the scales and hair once worn away, or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall ever restore them? The first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and that again and again-seen it on the Baptistery of Pisa, seen it on the Casa d’ Oro at Venice, seen it on the Cathedral of Lisieux,)¹ is to dash the old work to pieces; the second is usually to put up the cheapest and basest imitation which can escape detection, but in all cases, however careful, and however laboured, an imitation still, a cold model of such parts as can be modelled, with conjectural supplements; and my experience has as yet furnished me with only one instance, that of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, in which even this, the utmost degree of fidelity which is possible, has been attained, or even attempted.²

¹ [For the destructive “restoration” of the Baptistery at Pisa, see Ruskin’s letter of 1845, cited in Vol. IV. p. 38. In another letter he describes the process at the Casa d’ Oro :-

“(VENICE, Sept. 23, 1845).-You cannot imagine what an unhappy day I spent yesterday before the Casa d’Oro-vainly attempting to draw it while the workmen were hammering it down before my face. It would have put me to my hardest possible shifts at any rate,-for it is intolerably difficult, and the intricacy of it as a study of colour unconceivable. If I had had the whole Grand Canal to myself to do it, it would have been no more than I wanted, but fancy trying to work while one sees the cursed plasterers hauling up beams and dashing in the old walls and shattering the mouldings, and pulling barges across your gondola bows and driving you here and there, up and down and across; and all the while with the sense that now one’s art is not enough to be of the slightest service, but that in ten years more one might have done such glorious things.”

Ruskin was at Lisieux in 1848; he mentions above the destructive restoration of the northern tower (p. 128).]

² [The Palais de Justice, begun 1493, was restored, and added to, 1842-52. Some portion of the work done in those years is now (1903) being removed, and the building

[Version 0.04: March 2008]