292 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

the mind. Next we have to consider that which is required when it is referred to the sight, and the various modifications of treatment which are rendered necessary by the variation of its distance from the eye. I say necessary: not merely expedient or economical. It is foolish to carve what is to be seen forty feet off with the delicacy which the eye demands within two yards; not merely because such delicacy is lost in the distance, but because it is a great deal worse than lost:-the delicate work has actually worse effect in the distance than rough work. This is a fact well known to painters, and, for the most part, acknowledged by the critics of painting, namely, that there is a certain distance for which a picture is painted; and that the finish, which is delightful if that distance be small, is actually injurious if the distance be great:¹ and, moreover, that there is a particular method of handling which none but consummate artists reach, which has its effect at the intended distance, and is altogether hieroglyphical and unintelligible at any other. This, I say, is acknowledged in painting, but it is not practically acknowledged in architecture; nor until my attention was specially directed to it, had I myself any idea of the care with which this great question was studied by the mediæval architects. On my first careful examination of the capitals of the upper arcade of the Ducal Palace at Venice,² I was induced, by their singular inferiority of workmanship, to suppose them posterior to those of the lower arcade. It was not till I discovered that some of those

¹ [Ruskin referred to this subject in the volume of Modern Painters (vol. iii. ch. iii. § 20) which followed The Stones of Venice.]

² [For the capitals of the upper arcade, see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 129. We can trace Ruskin’s studies on this point in his diary. “To-day” (17th January 1850), he writes, “I examined the shafts of the upper arcade towards the sea.” He notes and analyses them, and finding many of them bad, enters into speculations as to their later date. But further on in the diary he writes:-

“In the last walk that I took in the upper arcade of Ducal Palace, I thought I had been hardly justified in supposing the ill-executed capitals to be of later time; more especially as I found the upper traceries of the Frari also rough chiselled and their capitals vilely cut, so that it would seem a general practice of the Italian workmen to put careless cutting into the upper stories, (note the remarkable exception in Ca’ d’Oro, where also note the Byzantine forms of capital used in the detached shafts of lower story, while the pilaster heads are elaborately florid, the whole building being thus patch-work), only in the Ducal Palace it is so strange on the one hand to

[Version 0.04: March 2008]