The stones of Venice ... by John Ruskin

Author:John Ruskin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smith, Elder

the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected -with the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. We have seen above, that the whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious. Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralyzed in its old age, yet making prey in its dotage of all the good and living things that were springing around it in their youth, as the dying and desperate king, who had long fenced himself so strongly with the towers of it, is said to have filled his failing veins with the blood of children*; an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and Sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified, and all insolence fortified ;—the first thing we have to do is to cast it out, and shake the dust of it from our feet for ever. Whatever has any connexion with the five orders, or with any one of the orders,—whatever is Doric, or Tonic, or Tuscan, or Corinthian, or Composite, or in any wise Grecized or Romanized; whatever betrays the smallest respect for Vitruvian laws, or conformity with Palladian work,—that we are to endure no more. To cleanse ourselves of these "cast clouts and rotten rags" is the first thing to be done in the court of our prison.

§ XXXvI. Then, to turn our prison into a palace is an easy

* Louis the Eleventh. "In the month of March, 1481, Louis was seized with a fit of apoplexy at St. Benoit-du-lac-mort, near Chinon. He remained speechless and bereft of reason three days; and then, but very imperfectly restored, he languished in a miserable state. . . To cure him," says a contemporary historian, "wonderful and terrible medicines were compounded. It was reported among the people that his physicians opened the veins of little children, and made him drink their blood, to correct the poorness of his own."—Bussey's Hittory of France. London, 1850.

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