|
|
|
|
|
|
CHAPTER V
THE WALL VEIL
§ 1. THE summer of the year 1849 was spent by the writer in researches little bearing upon his present subject,1 and connected chiefly with proposed illustrations of the mountain forms in the works of J. M. W. Turner. But there are sometimes more valuable lessons to be learned in the school of nature than in that of Vitruvius,2 and a fragment of building among the Alps is singularly illustrative of the chief feature which I have at present to develop as necessary to the perfection of the wall veil.
It is a fragment of some size; a group of broken walls, one of them overhanging; crowned with a cornice, nodding some hundred and fifty feet over its massive flank, three thousand above its glacier base, and fourteen thousand above the sea,-a wall truly of some majesty, at once the most precipitous and the strongest mass in the whole chain of the Alps, the Mont Cervin.3
1 [See above, Introduction, p. xxiii.]
2 [The De Architectura of Vitruvius, written in the reign of Augustus, is a curious instance of a book becoming famous many centuries after its publication. It was the text-book, and it may almost be said the gospel, of the Renaissance architects, and down to our own time its authority has been considerable. Yet there is nothing to show that among the Romans it possessed any special weight.]
3 [The studies of the Matterhorn here alluded to and utilised were developed more fully in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xvi., where drawings of the mountain made by Ruskin in 1849 are engraved. The image here employed in § 3-“like the hollow of a wave”-occurred to him at the time, as is seen in the following passages from his diary:-
“ZERMATT, Friday, August 3.-Ascended as close as I could to the Matterhorn-a day much to be remembered. I was amazed to find on what a wide extent the rocks of these valleys are continuous, and that the Matterhorn was nothing more than an isolated fragment of a great series of nearly horizontal beds. The glacier of the Cervin pass terminates on the side farthest from Monte Rosa in a great level circular lake of ice, surrounded on three sides by a wall of rock, forming one of the most awful amphitheatres in the
85
|
|
|
[Version 0.04: March 2008]
