APPENDIX, 8 431

of character in the figure of the horseman on the left of it. And in making this reference, I would say a few words about those much-abused plates of the Seven Lamps.¹ They are black, they are overbitten, they are hastily drawn, they are coarse and disagreeable; how disagreeable to many readers I venture not to conceive. But their truth is carried to an extent never before attempted in architectural drawing. It does not in the least follow that because a drawing is delicate, or looks careful, it has been carefully drawn from the thing represented; in nine instances out of ten, careful and delicate drawings are made at home. It is not so easy as the reader, perhaps, imagines, to finish a drawing altogether on the spot, especially of details seventy feet from the ground; and any one who will try the position in which I have had to do some of my work-standing, namely, on a cornice or window sill, holding by one arm round a shaft and hanging over the street (or canal, at Venice), with my sketch-book supported against the wall from which I was drawing, by my breast, so as to leave my right hand free-will not thenceforward wonder that shadows should be occasionally carelessly laid in, or lines drawn with some unsteadiness. But, steady or infirm, the sketches of which those plates in the Seven Lamps are facsimiles, were made from the architecture itself, and represent that architecture with its actual shadows at the time of day at which it was drawn, and with every fissure and line of it as they now exist; so that when I am speaking of some new point, which perhaps the drawing was not intended to illustrate, I can yet turn back to it with perfect certainty that if anything be found in it bearing on matters now in hand, I may depend upon it just as securely as if I had gone back to look again at the building.

It is necessary that my readers should understand this thoroughly, and I did not before sufficiently explain it; but I believe I can show them the use of this kind of truth, now that we are again concerned with this front of Lucca. They will find a drawing of the entire front in Gally Knight’s Architecture of Italy.² It may serve to give them an idea of its general disposition, and it looks very careful and accurate; but every bit of the ornament on it is drawn out of the artist’s head. There is not one line of it that exists on the building. The reader will therefore, perhaps, think my ugly black plate of somewhat more value upon the whole, in its rough veracity, than the other in its delicate fiction.*

* One of the upper stories is also in Gally Knight’s plate represented as merely banded, and otherwise plain: it is, in reality, covered with as delicate inlaying as the rest. The whole front is besides out of proportion, and out of perspective, at once; and yet this work is referred to as of authority, by our architects. Well may our architecture fall from its place among the fine arts, as it is doing rapidly; nearly all our works of value being devoted to the Greek architecture, which is utterly useless to us-or worse. One most noble book, however, has been dedicated to our English abbeys,-Mr. E. Sharpe’s Architectural Parallels-almost a model of what I should like to see done for the Gothic of all Europe.³

¹ [On this subject, see Vol. VIII. pp. xlv., 276.]

² [For a note on this book, and further criticisms of it, see Vol. VIII. p. 277.]

³ [See above, p. 398, for a reference to another work by the same author. The full title of the book here referred to is Architectural Parallels; or the Progress of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England, through the 12th and 13th centuries, exhibited in a series of Parallel Examples: 1848.]

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