ments of that form,' and to so little purpose, that I challenge your critic to find in London, or within twenty miles of it, a single Venetian casement built on the sections which I gave as normal. For Venetian architecture developed out of British moral consciousness I decline to be answerable. His accusation that I induced architects to study sculpture more, and what he is pleased to call "expressional character" less, I admit. I should be glad if he would tell me what, before my baneful influence began to be felt, the expressional character of our building was; and I will reconsider my principles if he can point out to me, on any modern building either in London or, as aforesaid, within twenty miles round, a single piece of good sculpture of which the architect repents, or the public complains. I am, Sir, your faithful servant, March 21. J. RUSKIN. [From "The Liverpool Daily Post," June 9, 1877.] MODERN RESTORATION. VENICE, 15th April, 1877. MY DEAR SIR: It is impossible for any one to know the horror and contempt with which I regard modern restoration -but it is so great that it simply paralyzes me in despair,and in the sense of such difference in all thought and feeling between me and the people I live in the midst of, almost makes it useless for me to talk to them. Of course all restoration is accursed architect's jobbery, and will go on as long as they can get their filthy bread by such business. But things are worse here than in England: you have little there 1 See Arabian Windows in the Campo Santa Maria, Mater Domini, Plate ii. of the Examples of the Architecture of Venice, selected and drawn to measurement from the edifice, 1851. And see, too, Stones of Venice, vol. ii., chap. vii., Gothic Palaces. 2 This letter was originally received by " a Liverpool gentleman," and sent inclosed in a long letter signed “An Antiquarian," to the Liverpool Daily Post. left to lose here, every hour is ruining buildings of inestimable beauty and historical value-simply to keep stonelawyers' at work. I am obliged to hide my face from it all, and work at other things, or I should die of mere indignation and disgust. Ever truly yours, J. RUSKIN. [From "The Kidderminster Times," July 28, 1877.] RIBBESFORD CHURCH. BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE, To the Editor of "The Kidderminster Times." SIR: It chanced that, on the morning of the Sunday, when the appearances of danger in the walls of Ribbesford Church began seriously to manifest themselves (according to the report in your columns of the 21st inst.), I was standing outside of the church, listening to the singing of the last hymn as the sound came through the open door (with the Archer Knight sculptured above it), and showing to the friend who had brought me to the lovely place the extreme interest of the old perpendicular traceries in the freehand working of the apertures. Permit me to say, with reference to the proposed restoration of the church, that no modern architect, no mason either, can, or would if they could, "copy" those traceries. They will assuredly put up with geometrical models in their place, which will be no more like the old traceries than a Kensington paper pattern is like a living flower. Whatever else is added or removed, those traceries should be replaced as they are, and left 'An obvious misprint for " stone-layers." 2 Ribbesford Church was finally closed after the morning service on Sunday, July 15, 1877. It was then restored, and was reopened and reconsecrated on June 15, 1879. The Kidderminster Times of the 21st inst. contained an account of a meeting of the Ribbesford parishioners to consider the restoration of the church. Hence the allusions in this letter to "copying" the traceries, in reverence until they moulder away. If they are already too much decayed to hold the glass safely (which I do not be lieve), any framework which may be necessary can be arranged to hold the casements within them, leaving their bars entirely disengaged, and merely kept from falling by iron supports. But if these are to be "copied," why in the world cannot the congregation pay for a new and original church, to display the genius and wealth of the nineteenth century somewhere else, and leave the dear old ruin to grow gray by Severn side in peace? I am, Sir, your faithful servant, J. RUSKIN. CIRCULAR RESPECTING MEMORIAL STUDIES OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE, NOW IN PROGRESS UNDER MR. RUSKIN'S DIRECTION. This circular will be given to visitors to the Old Water-color Society's Exhibition, Pall Mall East, or on application to the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street. My friends have expressed much surprise at my absence from the public meetings called in defence of St. Mark's. They cannot, however, be too clearly certified that I am now entirely unable to take part in exciting business, or even, without grave danger, to allow my mind to dwell on the subjects which, having once been dearest to it, are now the sources of acutest pain. The illness which all but killed me two years ago was not brought on by overwork, but by grief at the course of public affairs in England, and of affairs, public and private alike, in Venice; the distress of many an old and deeply regarded friend there among the humbler classes of the city being as necessary a consequence of the modern sys 2 This circular, which was distributed as above noted during the winter of 1879-80, is here reprinted by Mr. Ruskin's permission, in connection with the preceding letters upon restoration in architecture. See the Notes on Prout and Hunt, 1879-80, p. 71. 2 In February, 1878; see the Turner Notes of that year, and Fors Clavigera, New Series-Letter the Fourth, March, 1880. tem of centralization, as the destruction of her ancient civil and religious buildings. How far forces of this national momentum may be arrested by protest, or mollified by petition, I know not; what in either kind I have felt myself able to do has been done two years since, in conjunction with one of the few remaining representatives of the old Venetian noblesse.' All that now remains for me is to use what time may be yet granted for such record as hand and heart can make of the most precious building in Europe, standing yet in the eyes of men and the sunshine of heaven. 2 The drawing of the first two arches of the west front, now under threat of restoration, which, as an honorary member of the Old Water-color Society, I have the privilege of exhibiting in its rooms this year, shows with sufficient accuracy the actual state of the building, and the peculiar qualities of its architecture. The principles of that architecture are analyzed at length in the second volume of the "Stones of Venice," and the whole façade described there with the best care I could, in hope of directing the attention of English architects to the forms of Greek sculpture which enrich it. The words have been occasionally read for the sound of them; and perhaps, when the building is destroyed, may be some day, with amazement, perceived to have been true. In the mean time, the drawing just referred to, every touch of it made from the building, and left as the color dried in the spring mornings of 1877, will make clear some of the points chiefly insisted on in the "Stones of Venice," and which are of yet more importance now. Of these, the first and main 1 Count Alvise Piero Zorzi, the author of an admirable and authorita tive essay on the restoration of St. Mark's (Venice, 1877). ? This drawing (No. 28 in the Exhibition) was of a small portion of the west front. 3 Stones of Venice, vol. ii., chapter 4, of original edition, and vol. i., chapter 4, of the smaller edition for the use of travellers. 4 In the first edition of this circular this sentence ran as follows: "In the mean time, with the aid of the drawing just referred to, every touch of it from the building, and left, as the color dried in the morning light of the 10th May, 1877, some of the points chiefly insisted on in the 'Stones of Venice,' are of importance now." ones are the exquisite delicacy of the work and perfection of its preservation to this time. It seems to me that the English visitor never realizes thoroughly what it is that he looks at in the St. Mark's porches: its glittering confusion in a style unexampled, its bright colors, its mingled marbles, produce on him no real impression of age, and its diminutive size scarcely any of grandeur. It looks to him almost like a stage scene, got up solidly for some sudden festa. No mere guide-book's passing assertion of date--this century or the other-can in the least make him even conceive, and far less feel, that he is actually standing before the very shafts and stones that were set on their foundations here while Harold the Saxon stood by the grave of the Confessor under the fresh-raised vaults of the first Norman Westminster Abbey, of which now a single arch only remains standing. He cannot, by any effort, imagine that those exquisite and lace-like sculptures of twined acanthusevery leaf-edge as sharp and fine as if they were green weeds fresh springing in the dew, by the Pan-droseion '—were, indeed, cut and finished to their perfect grace while the Norman axes were hewing out rough zigzags and dentils round the aisles of Durham and Lindisfarne. Or nearer, in what is left of our own Canterbury-it is but an hour's journey in pleasant Kent you may compare, almost as if you looked from one to the other, the grim grotesque of the block capitals in the crypt with the foliage of these flexile ones, and with their marble doves scarcely distinguishable from the living birds that nestle between them. Or, going down two centuries (for the fillings of the portico arches were not completed till after 1204), what thirteenth-century work among our gray limestone walls can be thought of as wrought in the same hour with that wreath of intertwined white marble, relieved by gold, of which the tenderest and sharpest lines of the pencil cannot finely enough express the surfaces and undulations? For indeed, without and within, St. Mark's is not, in the real nature of it, a piece of architecture, but a jewelled casket and painted reliquary, chief of the treasures of what were once the world's treasuries of sacred things, the kingdoms of Christendom. 1 Printed "Pan-choreion" in the first edition. |