348 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

colour; a charm so great, that all the best colourists, without a single exception, depend upon it for the most piquant of their pictorial effects, some vigorous mass of alternate stripes or bars of colour being made central in all their richest arrangements. The whole system of Tintoret’s great picture of the Miracle of St. Mark¹ is poised on the bars of blue, which cross the white turban of the executioner.

§ 2. There are, therefore, no ornaments more deeply suggestive in their simplicity than these alternate bars of horizontal colours; nor do I know any buildings more noble than those of the Pisan Romanesque, in which they are habitually employed; and certainly none so graceful, so attractive, so enduringly delightful in their nobleness. Yet, of this pure and graceful ornamentation, Professor Willis says, “a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur can hardly be conceived:”² and modern architects have substituted for it the ingenious ornament of which the reader has had one specimen above, Fig. 3, p. 90, and with which half the large buildings in London are disfigured, or else traversed by mere straight lines, as, for instance, the back of the Bank. The lines on the Bank may, perhaps, be considered typical of accounts; but in general the walls, if left destitute of them, would have been as much fairer than the walls charged with them, as a sheet of white paper is than the leaf of a ledger. But that the reader may have free liberty of judgment in this matter, I place two examples of the old and the Renaissance ornament side by side on the opposite page. That on the right is Romanesque, from St. Pietro of Pistoja; that on the left, modern English, from the Arthur Club-house,³ St. James’s Street.

¹ [In the Academy at Venice. In his guide to that collection, Ruskin alludes to it as “fine, but much over-rated;” and compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii., Venetian Index, s. “Accademia.”]

² [Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, 1835, p. 12 n.]

³ [“Arthur’s Chocolate House” dates back to 1765, but in 1811 the home of the Club was modernised by the building of a new stone front with Corinthian columns in accordance with designs by Thomas Hopper, the architect of Penrhyn Castle. One of Ruskin’s reviewers observed that Arthur’s did not specially deserve being gibbeted in this plate. A worse instance, said the critic, was “the Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall, where the use of rustication is carried to much greater excess. The architect seems to have been unable to keep his fingers off a piece of plain stone, and hardly a square inch of surface has been left free from his markings and erosions” (Christian Observer, August 1851, p. 548).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]