APPENDIX, 12 439

Was it in parsimony that you buried its paltry pinnacles in that eruption of diseased crockets? or in pecuniary embarrassment that you set up the belfry fools’ caps with the mimicry of dormer windows which nobody can reach nor look out of? Not so, but in mere incapability of better things.

I am sorry to have to speak thus of any living architect; and there is much in this man, if he were rightly estimated, which one might both regard and profit by. He has a most sincere love for his profession, a heartily honest enthusiasm for pixes and piscinas; and though he will never design so much as a pix or a piscina thoroughly well, yet better than most of the experimental architects of the day. Employ him by all means, but on small work. Expect no cathedrals of him; but no one at present can design a better finial.¹ That is an exceedingly beautiful one over the western door of St. George’s: and there is some spirited impishness and switching of tails in the supporting figures at the imposts. Only do not allow his good designing of finials to be employed as an evidence in matters of divinity, nor thence deduce the incompatibility of Protestantism and art.² I should have said all that I have said, above, of artistical apostacy, if Giotto had been now living in Florence, and if art were still doing all that it did once for Rome. But the grossness of the error becomes incomprehensible as well as unpardonable, when we look to what level of degradation the human intellect has sunk at this instant in Italy. So far from Romanism now producing anything great in art, it cannot even preserve what has been given to its keeping. I know no abuses of precious inheritance half so grievous, as the abuse of all that is best in art wherever the Romanist priesthood gets possession of it. It amounts to absolute infatuation. The noblest pieces of mediæval sculpture in North Italy, the two griffins at the central (west) door of the cathedral of Verona,³ were daily permitted to be brought into service, when I was there in the autumn of 1849, by a washer-woman living in the Piazza, who tied her clothes-line to their beaks: and the shafts of St. Mark’s at Venice were used by a salesman of common caricatures to fasten his prints upon (Compare Appendix 25); and this in the face of the continually passing priests: while the quantity of noble art annually destroyed in altarpieces by candle-droppings, or perishing by pure brutality of neglect, passes all estimate. I do not know, as I have repeatedly stated,⁴ how far the splendour of architecture, or other art, is compatible with the honesty and usefulness of religious service. The longer I live, the more I incline to severe

¹ [Ruskin in quoting this passage in Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 64, adds the words, “though he will never design even a final perfectly.”]

² [For the place of A. W. N. Pugin (1812-1852) in the architectural history of his time, see C. L. Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival, 1872, ch. ix. He was a peculiarly zealous convert to Roman Catholicism; in 1851 he lost his reason, and, after confinement in Bedlam, died in the following year. It was doubtless for this reason that Ruskin withdrew the above passage at the time. “St. George’s” is the pro-cathedral in St. George’s Fields, Westminster; “Kirkham” is the Roman Catholic church of St. John the Evangelist, Early English style, at Kirkham, near Preston, Lancashire; “Nottingham,” the Roman Catholic cathedral in that town; Pugin’s own church adjoins the house which he built for himself on the West Cliff at Ramsgate. For Ruskin’s reply to a suggestion that he had “plagiarised” from Pugin, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. appendix 3.]

³ [One of these griffins is engraved in Plate 1 in Modern Painters, vol. iii. (ch. iii. § 11).]

⁴ [See, e.g., Seven Lamps, ch. i., and especially p. 40. n. (Vol. VIII.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]