304 THE STONES OF VENICE

the most perfect curves, and of almost every size, strength, and hardness; and moulded bricks, wrought into flower-work and tracery as fine as raised patterns upon china. And, just as many of the finest works of the Italian sculptors were executed in porcelain, many of the best thoughts of their architects are expressed in brick, or in the softer material of terra cotta; and if this were so in Italy, where there is not one city from whose towers we may not descry the blue outline of Alp or Apennine, everlasting quarries of granite or marble, how much more ought it to be so among the fields of England! I believe that the best academy for her architects, for some half century to come, would be the brick-field;¹ for of this they may rest assured, that till they know how to use clay, they will never know how to use marble.

§ 39. And now observe, as we pass from fig. 2 to fig. 3, and from fig. 5, to fig. 6, in Plate 17, a most interesting step of transition. As we saw above, § 14, the round arch yielding to the Gothic, by allowing a point to emerge at its summit, so here we have the Gothic conceding something to the form which had been assumed by the round; and itself slightly altering its outline so as to meet the condescension of the round arch half way. At page 176 of the first volume, I have drawn to scale one of these minute concessions of the pointed arch, granted at Verona out of pure courtesy to the Venetian forms, by one of the purest Gothic monuments in the world;² and the small window here, fig. 6, is a similar example at Venice itself, from the Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini, where the reversed curve at the head of the pointed arch is just perceptible and no more. The other examples, figs. 3 and 7, the first from a small but very noble house in the Merceria, the second from an isolated palace at Murano, show more advanced conditions of the reversed curve, which, though still employing the broad decorated

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 64, “go and learn” to make bricks; and compare Letter 47. Ruskin had already in his first architectural essay dealt at some length with the proper use of brick: see in Vol. I., The Poetry of Architecture, §§ 185-195.]

² [The Castelbarco Tomb. See in Vol. IX., Fig. 34 and Plate D.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]