244 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

§ 19. Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan. But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place. And look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may prevent it. The principle of modern times, (a principle which, I believe, at least in France, to be systematically acted on by the masons, in order to find themselves work, as the abbey of St. Ouen was pulled down by the magistrates of the town by way of giving work to some vagrants,)¹ is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards. Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon a roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together

“restored” (in the better sense of the word) to its original design. See, for its history, Theodore Andrea Cook’s Story of Rouen, pp. 277 seq.]

¹ [The reference is to the destructive “restoration” of the church in the years 1846-52, when the two flanking towers of the west front-set diagonally and carried up only for 50 feet, with three deep-set portals-were pulled down, and the front was rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc, who made no attempt to follow the original design. A drawing of the original west front is given at p. 236 of T. A. Cook’s Story of Rouen, where also full particulars of the building and its history will be found.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]