432 APPENDIX, 8

As, however, I made a drawing of another part of the church somewhat more delicately, and as I do not choose that my favourite church should suffer in honour by my coarse work, I have had this, as far as might be, facsimiled by line engraving (Plate 21). It represents the southern side of the lower arcade of the west front, and may convey some idea of the exquisite finish and grace of the whole; but the old plate, in the Seven Lamps, gives a nearer view of one of the upper arches, and a more faithful impression of the present aspect of the work, and especially of the seats of the horsemen; the limb straight and well down on the stirrup (the warrior’s seat, observe, not the jockey’s), with a single pointed spur on the heel. The bit of the lower cornice under this arch I could not see, and therefore had not drawn; it was supplied from beneath another arch. I am afraid, however, the reader has lost the thread of my story while I have been recommending my veracity to him. I was insisting upon the healthy tone of this Lucca work as compared with the old spectral Lombard friezes. The apes of the Pavian church ride without stirrups, but all is in good order and harness here: civilisation had done its work; there was reaping of corn in the Val d’Arno, though rough hunting still upon its hills. But in the North, though a century or two later, we find the forests of the Rhone, and its rude limestone cotes, haunted by phantasms still; (more meat-eating, then, I think).¹ I do not know a more interesting group of cathedrals than that of Lyons, Vienne, and Valence:²

¹ [So in the diary, quoted also in the next note, Ruskin writes of the grotesques of Lyons:-

“Now, in what does all this differ from the cinque cento flat and cold grotesque? Chiefly in its energy and involuntariness. It is like natural wit compared with euphuism. It is the overflowing fancy of children compared with the drivelling of old men. (Consider if the exercise and carnivorous habits of the North did not compel this feverish fancy as opposed to the polenta eating Italian). The learned sculptor ought to be able to do more than grotesque; his laboured nonsense is wrong and mean. But from the northern peasant the vision or ghostly superstition comes well.”]

² [As we have already seen (pp. 180, 133, 226), Ruskin studied these cathedrals on his way home from Venice in the spring of 1850. In the diary, from which he copied out the list of subjects given in the text, he thus describes the niches and panelled decoration of Lyons:-

“The west front is of the time and style of the North gate transept of Rouen. In its general arrangement, placing of niches and filling of gables, it is so totally inferior that I do not wonder it is so often passed with a glance; in fact, at first one would set it down as a very ugly façade in good style. Much more might one say this of the apse; which is marvellously harsh and meagre. As compared either with the apse of the Frari or of St. John and Paul, or 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 undercorated. I felt this still more at Bourges, where the perfectly undecorated flying buttresses have exactly the look of shores set to support a ship. But on examining the work of the niches and pedestals I found it by far the most wonderful I have yet seen in northern Gothic. The pedestals of the porches are the same in plan exactly as at Rouen: filled with grotesques in the same way; less able in sculpture but more wild and curious in fancy than Rouen, and many of them much richer in ornamentation, the whole panel filled with a ground of running foliage, like Italian (Can Mastino sarcophagus). Those of the central door are chiefly sacred subject-those of the lateral doors mostly grotesques. I put down from the lateral ones a few of the more striking

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