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350 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION
the grossest), yet affords the inhabitants of the district a means of obtaining some idea of the variety of effects which are possible with no other material than brick.
§ 5. We have yet to notice another effort of the Renaissance architects to adorn the blank spaces of their walls by what is called Rustication.1 There is sometimes an obscure trace of the remains of the imitation of something organic in this kind of work. In some of the better French eighteenth century buildings it has a distinctly floral character, like a final degradation of Flamboyant leafage; and some of our modern English architects appear to have taken the decayed teeth of elephants for their type; but, for the most part, it resembles nothing so much as worm casts; nor these with any precision. If it did, it would not bring it within the sphere of our properly imitative ornamentation. I thought it unnecessary to warn the reader that he was not to copy forms of refuse or corruption; and that, while he might legitimately take the worm or the reptile for a subject of imitation, he was not to study the worm cast or coprolite.2
§ 6. It is, however, I believe, sometimes supposed that rustication gives an appearance of solidity to foundation stones. Not so; at least to any one who knows the look of a hard stone. You may, by rustication, make your good marble or granite look like wet slime, honeycombed by sand-eels, or like half-baked tufo covered with slow exudation of stalactite, or like rotten claystone coated with concretions of its own mud; but not like the stones of which the hard world is built. Do not think that Nature rusticates her foundations. Smooth sheets of rock, glistening like sea waves, and that ring under the hammer like
consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester in 1841. ... It is a curious-looking edifice, and one which impresses the beholder from its very peculiarity. The lofty bell tower (113 ft.) is said to remind one of the world-famed Campanile of St. Mark’s Church at Venice” (Frederick Arnold, jun.: The History of Streatham, 1886, p. 53).]
1 [For another sense in which this term is used, namely, rustication in construction, and for Ruskin’s partiality for it, see Notes on Prout and Hunt, preface, § 23.]
2 [A stony roundish fossil, supposed to consist of the petrified excrement of an animal.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
