4 THE STONES OF VENICE

materials at hand, and temper of the people. And I am not aware of any town of wealth and importance in the Middle Ages, in which some proof does not exist that, at its period of greatest energy and prosperity, its streets were inwrought with rich sculpture, and even (though in this, as before noticed,¹ Venice always stood supreme) glowing with colour and with gold. Now, therefore, let the reader,-forming for himself as vivid and real a conception as he is able, either of a group of Venetian palaces in the fourteenth century, or, if he likes better, of one of the more fantastic but even richer street scenes of Rouen, Antwerp, Cologne, or Nuremberg, and keeping this gorgeous image before him,-go out into any thoroughfare representative, in a general and characteristic way, of the feeling for domestic architecture in modern times: let him, for instance, if in London, walk once up and down Harley Street, or Baker Street, or Gower Street;² and then, looking upon this picture and on this,³ set himself to consider (for this is to be the subject of our following and final inquiry) what have been the causes which have induced so vast a change in the European mind.

§ 2. Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructive faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street; from the marble shaft, and the lancet arch, and the wreathed leafage, and the glowing and melting harmony of gold and azure, to the square cavity in the brick wall. We have now to consider the causes and the steps of this change; and, as we endeavoured above to investigate the nature of Gothic, here to investigate also the nature of Renaissance.

§ 3. Although Renaissance architecture assumes very different forms among different nations, it may be conveniently referred to three heads:-Early Renaissance, consisting of the first corruptions introduced into the Gothic schools;

¹ [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. v. § 29 (Vol. X. p. 170).]

² [Gower Street is again selected, as a type of modern ugliness, in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi. §§ 12, 13. Tennyson’s “long, unlovely street” (In Memoriam, vii.) was Wimpole Street.]

³ [Hamlet, iii. 4.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]