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14 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
pleasure which I hope it may yet give to the readers, few and uninfluential, who still read books through, and wish to understand them; for whom it may be well that I state the main contents of the three volumes.
7. The first contains an analysis of the best structure of stone and brick building, on a simple and natural scale. I meant it to be the groundwork of all my subsequent architectural teaching; and though it is a little forced and artificial in some parts of it, I strongly recommend any youth seriously desiring to understand the principles of noble building, to work steadily through it, reading either together with it or previously, Professor Willis’s Architecture of the Middle Ages.1 But this introduction can be of no use to any modern builder, as it absolutely ignores the use of iron, except as a cement, i. e. bars and rivets instead of mortar, for securing stones.2
The second and third volumes show how the rise and fall of the Venetian builder’s art depended on the moral or immoral temper of the State. It is the main purpose of the book to do this; but in the course of the demonstration it does two other pieces of work besides. It examines the relation of the life of the workman to his work in mediæval times, and its necessary relation to it at all times; and it traces the formation of Venetian Gothic from the earliest Romanesque types until it perished in the revival, so called, of classical principles in the 16th century.
8. The relation of the art of Venice to her moral temper, which is the chief subject of the book, and that of the life of the workman to his work, which is the most important practical principle developed in it, have been both ignored, and could not but be so, by modern architectural readers. The third and comparatively unimportant part of the book, its exhibition of the transitional forms of Arabian and Byzantine architecture adopted by the Christian faith and
1 [See for other recommendations of this work, Vol. VIII. pp. 87, 95.]
2 [On this subject see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 66, and below, p. 222.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
