208 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

decoration, you have a series of dark and damp cells, which no device that I have yet seen has succeeded in decorating in a perfectly satisfactory manner. If the system be farther carried, and a second or third order of buttresses be added, the real fact is that we have a building standing on two or three rows of concentric piers, with the roof off the whole of it except the central circle, and only ribs left, to carry the weight of the bit of remaining roof in the middle; and after the eye has been accustomed to the bold and simple rounding of the Italian apse, the skeleton character of the disposition is painfully felt. After spending some months in Venice, I thought Bourges Cathedral looked exactly like a half-built ship on its shores.¹ It is useless, however, to dispute respecting the merits of the two systems: both are noble in their place; the northern decidedly the most scientific, or at least involving the greatest display of science, the Italian the calmest and purest; this having in it the sublimity of a calm heaven or a windless noon, the other that of a mountain flank tormented by the north wind, and withering into grisly furrows of alternate chasm and crag.

§ 10. If I have succeeded in making the reader understand the veritable action of the buttress, he will have no

¹ [Ruskin stayed at Bourges in 1850 on his way home from his winter at Venice. His impressions on revisiting Bourges are thus noted in the diary:-

“BOURGES, 10th April.-I feel more and more as I compare this wonderful Gothic with the Italian, how natural and inevitable would be the prejudice of either nation in favour of their own; how, in each country, the powers of invention and fancy have existed in an almost equal development; how, wherever these exist, coupled with general greatness of mind and religious faith, a great architecture exists which it is utterly futile to condemn or criticise because it is not in this rule or in that, because it is not classical in its mouldings, or vertical in its structure; how, wherever fancy fails and affectation and infidelity appear, mean architecture follows-be it in France, Italy, or Germany. This is the leading point I must develope.”

And in a note added to a previous description of Lyons Cathedral, he says:-

(The apse of Lyons) “is marvellously harsh and meagre. As compared either with the apse of the Frari, or of St. John and Paul, so with the lovely Romanesque apses of Verona, it is like the pasteboard Gothic of a bazaar and well shows the superiority of the buttress to the pier, when the former is the least contracted or undecorated. I felt this still more at Bourges, where the perfectly undecorated flying buttresses have exactly the look of shores set to support a ship.”

For other notes from the diary on Bourges, see above, p. 70, and below, p. 263.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]