the world, in their boundless inventiveness, unfailing elegance, and elaborate finish.1 There is more mind poured out in turning a single angle of that church than would serve to build a modern cathedral.* 2 So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and to symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion § 16. Abstracto speak hereafter at length,3 referring to it only tion necessary from imperat present as one of the operations of imagination fection of contemplative; other abstractions there are which materials. are necessarily consequent on the imperfection of materials, as of the hair in sculpture, which is necessarily treated in masses that are in no sort imitative, but only stand for hair, and have the grace, flow, and feeling of it without the texture or division; and other abstractions there are in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of another; * I have not brought forward any instances of the Imaginative power in architecture, as my object is not at present to exhibit its operation in all matter, but only to define its essence; but it may be well to note, in our New Houses of Parliament, how far a building approved by a committee of Taste may proceed without manifesting either imagination or composition. It remains to be seen how far the towers may redeem it; and I allude to it at present unwillingly, and only in the desire of influencing, so far as I may, those who have the power to prevent the adoption of a design for a bridge to take the place of that of Westminster, which was exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Academy, professing to be in harmony with the new building, but which was fit only to carry a railroad over a canal.** ** The existing bridge, to wit. [1883.] 1 [It was in this spirit of enthusiasm that Ruskin was to return to study and describe these capitals: see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii.] 2 [Ed. 1 adds here: "modern cathedral; and of the careful finish of the work this may serve for example, that one of the capitals of the Doge's palace is formed of eight heads of different animals, of which one is a bear's with a honeycomb in the mouth whose carved cells are hexagonal." This is the twentieth capital in the description of them in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 118.] 3 [In Modern Painters the subject was again touched, though not at length, in vol. iii. ch. viii. § 6. The fuller treatment was given in the Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xxi.] [Ruskin did not modify his first opinion of the new Houses of Parliament. "The absurdest and emptiest piece of filigree," he called it, "and as it were eternal foolscap in freestone" (Eagle's Nest, § 201); see also Fors Clavigera, Letter 6; Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. § 220, ch. viii. § 23; and Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. eh. xii. § 9.] capable of are not ima 2 as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy-charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own Gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe;1 and again in the phantom vignette of Turner already noticed; only such operations of the imagination are to be held of lower kind, and dangerous consequence if frequently trusted in; for those painters only have the right imaginative power who can set the supernatural form before us, fleshed and boned like ourselves.* Other abstractions § 17. Abstractions of things occur, frequently, of things which have much varied accident accidental variety of form; as of waves, on Greek sculptures in successive volutes, and of clouds ginative; often in supporting volumes in the sacred pictures : but these I do not look upon as results of imagination at all, but mere signs and letters; and whenever a very highly imaginative mind touches them, it always realizes as far as may be. Even Titian is content to use, at the top of his S. Pietro Martire, the conventional, round, opaque cloud, which cuts his trees open like an axe; but Tintoret, in his picture of the Golden Calf, though compelled to represent the Sinai under conventional form, in order that the receiving of the tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as it is possible to give more truth, he takes a grand fold of horizontal cloud straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows the forests of the mountains through its misty volume, like 5 * Comp. Ch. V. § 4 [p. 315]. [Poussin's Apollo is in his "Cephalus and Aurora," No. 65; Wilson's, in "The Destruction of Niobe's Children," No. 110.] [Above, § 7, p. 299. See also Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. viii. § 7.] 3 [See on this subject Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xx. § 25, and Appendix 21.] 4 See Vol. III. p. 28.] 66 [For "an axe," ed. 1 reads a gouge."] [In S. Maria dell' Orto, Venice. In his Venetian notes of 1845 (see above, p. xxxvi.) Ruskin thus describes the picture : "The chief point of interest in it to me is the simple treatment of the cloud-covered Sinai, which is reduced to a rock of size so comparatively small, that Moses on the top of it is half the size of life; and yet it is keptby its gloom and by rejecting all mean detail-in the highest degree sublime. The clouds cover it in horizontal, massy, transparent, sombre flakes." For another reference, see Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. iv. § 2 n.] |