I. THE QUARRY 47

in her strength the centre* of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendour of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave.

§ 39. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else. This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay.¹ I shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader with successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of the earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features with those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and pause, in the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as I have made its depth discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon two distinct kinds of evidence:-the first, the testimony borne by particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be bad:-the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may be immediately useful in fixing

* I am ashamed of having been so entrapped by my own metaphor. Look back to § 24. She was the centre of Christian art only as the place of slack water between two currents. I confuse that notion here, with the central power of a fountain in a pool. [1879.]

¹ [Ruskin did not adhere quite strictly to the divisions of the treatise here sketched out. He promises three divisions, and a fourth point to be incidently noticed-viz. (1) Byzantine architecture at Venice (§ 31 above), (2) Transitional (§ 32), and (3) Gothic (§ 33), with (4) incidental references to Renaissance. In fact, however, he treated (2) and (3) together (see vol. ii. ch. vi. § 1), and devoted a separate division of the work to (4), thus:-First, or Byzantine, Period (vol. ii. chs. i.-v.); Second, or Gothic, Period (vol. ii. chs. vi.-viii.); Third, or Renaissance, Period (vol. iii. chs. i.-iv.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]