2. THE TWO NORTHERN PORCHES. } _Arranged in one_
3. THE TWO SOUTHERN PORCHES. } _frame._
4. THE NORTHERN PORTICO.
5. THE SOUTHERN PORTICO. _Before restoration._
6. THE WEST FRONT, IN PERSPECTIVE. _Seen from the North._
7. THE WEST FRONT, IN PERSPECTIVE. _Seen from the South._
8. THE SOUTH SIDE. _Before restoration._
9. DETAIL OF CENTRAL ARCHIVOLT.
10. THE CROSS OF THE MERCHANTS OF VENICE.
This last photograph is not of St. Mark’s but is of the inscription
which I discovered, in 1877, on the Church of St. James of the Rialto.
It is of the 9th or 10th century (according to the best antiquarians of
Venice), and is given in this series, first, to confirm the closing
paragraph in my notes on the Prout drawings in Bond Street;[157] and
secondly to show the perfect preservation even of the hair-strokes in
letters carved in the Istrian marble used at Venice a thousand years
ago. The inscription on the cross is--
“Sit crux vera salus huic tua Christe loco.”
(Be Thy Cross, O Christ, the true safety of this place.)
And on the band beneath--
“Hoc circa templum sit jus mercantibus æquum,
Pondera nec vergant nec sit conventio prava.”
(Around this temple let the merchants’ law be just,
Their weights true, and their contracts fair.)
The bearing of this inscription on the relations of Antonio to Shylock
may perhaps not be perceived by a public which now--consistently and
naturally enough, but ominously--considers Shylock a victim to the
support of the principles of legitimate trade, and Antonio a “speculator
and sentimentalist.” From the series of photographs of St. Mark’s
itself, I cannot but think even the least attentive observer must
receive one strong impression--that of the singular preservation of the
minutest details in its sculpture. Observe, this is a quite separate
question from the _stability_ of the fabric. In our northern cathedrals
the stone, for the most part, moulders away; and the restorer usually
replaces it by fresh sculpture, on the faces of walls of which the mass
is perfectly secure. Here, at St. Mark’s, on the contrary, the only
possible pretence for restoration has been, and is, the alleged
insecurity of the masses of inner wall--the external sculptures
remaining in faultless perfection, so far as unaffected by direct human
violence. Both the Greek and Istrian marbles used at Venice are
absolutely defiant of hypæthral influences, and the edges of their
delicatest sculpture remain to this day more sharp than if they had been
cut in steel--for then they would have rusted away. It is especially,
for example, of this quality that I have painted the ornament of the St.
Jean d’Acre pillars, No. 107, which the reader may at once compare with
the daguerreotype (No. 108) beside it, which are exhibited, with the
Prout and Hunt drawings, at the Fine Art Society’s rooms.[158] These
pillars are known to be not later than the sixth century, yet wherever
external violence has spared their decoration it is sharp as a
fresh-growing thistle. Throughout the whole façade of St. Mark’s, the
capitals have only here and there by casualty lost so much as a volute
or an acanthus leaf, and whatever remains is perfect as on the day it
was set in its place, mellowed and subdued only in color by time, but
white still, clearly white; and gray, still softly gray; its porphyry
purple as an Orleans plum, and the serpentine as green as a greengage.
Note also, that in this throughout perfect decorated surface there is
not a loose joint. The appearances of dislocation, which here and there
look like yielding of masonry, are merely carelessness in the replacing
or resetting of the marble armor at the different times when the front
has been retouched--in several cases quite wilful freaks of arrangement.
The slope of the porphyry shaft, for instance, on the angle at the left
of my drawing, looks like dilapidation. Were it really so, the building
would be a heap of ruins in twenty-four hours. These porches sustain no
weight above--their pillars carry merely an open gallery; and the
inclination of the red marble pilasters at the angle is not yielding at
all, but an originally capricious adjustment of the marble armor. It
will be seen that the investing marbles between the arch and pilaster
are cut to the intended inclination, which brings the latter nearly into
contact with the upper archivolt; the appearance of actual contact being
caused by the projection of the dripstone. There are, indeed, one or two
leaning towers in Venice whose foundations have partly yielded; but if
_anything_ were in danger on St. Mark’s Place, it would be the
campanile--three hundred feet high--and not the little shafts and
galleries within reach--too easy reach--of the gaslighter’s ladder. And
the only dilapidations I have myself seen on this porch, since I first
drew it forty-six years ago, have been, first, those caused by the
insertion of the lamps themselves, and then the breaking away of the
marble net work of the main capital by the habitual clattering of the
said gaslighter’s ladder against it. A piece of it which I saw so broken
off, and made an oration over to the passers-by in no less broken
Italian, is in my mineral cabinet at Brantwood.
Before leaving this subject of the inclined angle, let me
note--usefully, though not to my present purpose--that the entire beauty
of St. Mark’s campanile depends on this structure, there definitely seen
to be one of real safety. This grace and apparent strength of the whole
mass would be destroyed if the sides of it were made vertical. In Gothic
towers, the same effect is obtained by the retiring of the angle
buttresses, without actual inclination of any but the coping lines.
In the Photograph No. 5 the slope of the angles in the correspondent
portico, as it stood before restoration, is easily visible and
measurable, the difference being, even on so small a scale, full the
twentieth of an inch between the breadth at base and top, at the angles,
while the lines bearing the inner arch are perfectly vertical.
There was, indeed, as will be seen at a glance, some displacement of the
pillars dividing the great window above, immediately to the right of the
portico. But these pillars were exactly the part of the south front
which carried no weight. The arch above them is burdened only by its own
fringes of sculpture; and the pillars carried only the bit of decorated
panelling, which is now bent--not outwards, as it would have been by
pressure, but inwards. The arch has not subsided; it was always of the
same height as the one to the right of it (the Byzantine builders
throwing their arches always in whatever lines they chose); nor is there
a single crack or displacement in the sculpture of the investing fringe.
In No. 3 (to the right hand in the frame) there is dilapidation and
danger enough certainly; but that is wholly caused by the savage and
brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old.
The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of
“making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian
operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged
accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad,
and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones,
little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible
rigidity of the modern mechanic.
This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence
of himself[159] in the _Standard_, has at once the dulness and the
audacity actually to boast of as “_plus exacte_”!
Imagine a Kensington student set to copy a picture by Velasquez, and
substituting a Nottingham lace pattern, traced with absolute exactness,
for the painter’s sparkle and flow and flame, and boasting of his
improvements as “_plus exacte_”! That is precisely what the Italian
restorer does for _his_ original; but, alas! he has the inestimable
privilege also of destroying the original as he works, and putting his
student’s caricature in its place! Nor are any words bitter or
contemptuous enough to describe the bestial stupidities which have thus
already replaced the floor of the church, in my early days the loveliest
in Italy, and the most sacred.
In the Photograph No. 7 there is, and there only, _one_ piece of real
dilapidation--the nodding pinnacle propped on the right. Those pinnacles
stand over the roof gutters, and their bracket supports are, of course,
liable to displacement, if the gutters get choked by frost or otherwise
neglected. The pinnacle is not ten feet high, and can be replaced and
secured as easily as the cowl on a chimney-pot. The timbers underneath
were left there merely to give the wished-for appearance of repairs
going on. They defaced the church front through the whole winter of
1876. I copied the bills stuck on them one Sunday, and they are printed
in the 78th number of _Fors Clavigera_, the first being the announcement
of the Reunited agencies for information on all matters of commercial
enterprise and speculation, and the last the announcement of the loss of
a cinnamon-colored little bitch, with rather long ears (_coll’ orecchie
piùtosto lunghe_). I waited through the winter to see how much the
Venetians really cared for the look of their church; but lodged a formal
remonstrance in March with one of the more reasonable civic authorities,
who presently had them removed. The remonstrance ought, of course, to
have come from the clergy; but they contented themselves with cutting
flower-wreaths on paper to hang over the central door at Christmas-time.
For the rest, the pretence of rottenness in the walls is really too
gross to be answered. There are brick buildings in Italy by tens of
thousands, Roman, Lombardic, Gothic, on all scales and in all exposures.
Which of them has rotted or fallen, but by violence? Shall the tower of
Garisenda stand, and the Campanile of Verona, and the tower of St.
Mark’s, and, forsooth, this little fifty feet of unweighted wall be
rotten and dangerous?
Much more I could say, and show; but the certainty of the ruin of poor
Bedlamite Venice is in her own evil will, and not to be averted by any
human help or pleading. Her _Sabba delle streghe_ has truly come; and in
her own words (see _Fors_, letter 77th): “Finalmente la Piazza di S.
Marco sarà invasa e completamente illuminata dalle Fiamme di Belzebù.
Perchè il _Sabba_ possa riuscire più completo, si raccomanda a tutti gli
spettatori di fischiare durante le fiamme come anime dannate.”
Meantime, in what Saturday pause may be before this Witches’ Sabbath, if
I have, indeed, any English friends, let them now help me, and my
fellow-workers, to get such casts, and colorings, and measurings, as may
be of use in time to come. I am not used to the begging tone, and will
not say more than that what is given me will go in mere daily bread to
the workers, and that next year, if I live, there shall be some
exposition of what we have got done, with the best account I can render
of its parts and pieces. Fragmentary enough they must be,--poor fallen
plumes of the winged lion’s wings,--yet I think I can plume a true shaft
or two with them yet.
Some copies of the second edition of this circular had printed at
the top of its last and otherwise blank page the words, “_Present
State of Subscription Lists:--_,” a printer’s error, mistaken by
some readers for a piece of dry humor.
Subscriptions were collected by Mr. G. Allen, as above intimated,
and also by Mr. F. W. Pullen, secretary to the Ruskin Society of
Manchester, under the authority of the following letter, which was
printed and distributed by him: “_November_ 29, 1879.--DEAR MR.
PULLEN: I am very glad to have your most satisfactory letter, and
as gladly give you authority to receive subscriptions for drawings
and sculptures of St. Mark’s. Mr. Bunney’s large painting of the
whole west façade, ordered by me a year and a half ago, and in
steady progress ever since, is to be completed this spring. It was
a £500 commission for the Guild, but I don’t want to have to pay it
with Guild capital. I have the power of getting casts, also, in
places where nobody else can, and have now energy enough to give
directions, but can no more pay for them out of my own pocket. Ever
gratefully yours, J. R. As a formal authority, this had better have
my full signature--JOHN RUSKIN.” In a further letter to Manchester
on the subject, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: “It is wholly
impossible for me at present to take any part in the defence--at
last, though far too late--undertaken by the true artists and
scholars of England--of the most precious Christian building in
Europe; ... nor is there any occasion that I should, if only those
who care for me will refer to what I have already written, and will
accept from me the full ratification of all that was said by the
various speakers, all without exception men of the most accurate
judgment and true feeling, at the meeting held in Oxford. All that
I think it necessary for you to lay, directly from myself, before
the meeting you are about to hold, is the explicit statement of two
facts of which I am more distinctly cognizant from my long
residences in Italy at different periods, and in Venice during
these last years, than any other person can be--namely, the
Infidel--(malignantly and scornfully Infidel and anti-religionist)
aim of Italian ‘restoration’--and the totality of the destruction
it involves, of whatever it touches.” So again, in a second and
despairing letter, he wrote: “You cannot be too strongly assured of
the total destruction involved, in the restoration of St.
Mark’s.... Then the plague of it all is, What can you do? Nothing
would be effectual, but the appointment of a Procurator of St.
Mark’s, with an enormous salary, dependent on the Church’s being
let alone. What you can do by a meeting at Manchester, I have no
notion. The only really practical thing that I can think of would
be sending me lots of money to spend in getting all the drawings I
can of the old thing before it goes. I don’t believe we can save it
by any protests.” See the _Birmingham Daily Mail_, Nov. 27, 1879.
The reader is also referred to “Fors Clavigera,” New Series, Letter
the Fourth, pp. 125-6.
The meeting in Oxford alluded to above was held in the Sheldonian
Theatre on November 15, 1879. Amongst the principal speakers were
the Dean of Christ Church (in the chair), Dr. Acland, the Professor
of Fine Art (Mr. W. B. Richmond), Mr. Street, Mr. William Morris,
and Mr. Burne Jones.
LETTERS ON SCIENCE.
I.
GEOLOGICAL.
THE CONFORMATION OF THE ALPS. 1864
CONCERNING GLACIERS. 1864.
ENGLISH _versus_ ALPINE GEOLOGY. 1864.
CONCERNING HYDROSTATICS. 1864.
JAMES DAVID FORBES: HIS REAL GREATNESS. 1874.
II.
MISCELLANEOUS.
ON REFLECTIONS IN WATER. 1844.
ON THE REFLECTION OF RAINBOWS. 1861.
A LANDSLIP NEAR GIAGNANO. 1841.
ON THE GENTIAN. 1857.
ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. (Undated.)
I.
GEOLOGICAL.
[From “The Reader,” November 12, 1864.]
_THE CONFORMATION OF THE ALPS._
DENMARK HILL, 10_th November_, 1864.
My attention has but now been directed to the letters in your October
numbers on the subject of the forms of the Alps.[160] I have, perhaps,
some claim to be heard on this question, having spent, out of a somewhat
busy life, eleven summers and two winters (the winter work being
especially useful, owing to the definition of inaccessible ledges of
strata by new-fallen snow) in researches among the Alps, directed solely
to the questions of their external form and its mechanical causes; while
I left to other geologists the more disputable and difficult problems of
relative ages of beds.
I say “more disputable” because, however complex the phases of
mechanical action, its general nature admits, among the Alps, of no
question. The forms of the Alps are quite _visibly_ owing to the action
(how gradual or prolonged cannot yet be determined) of elevatory,
contractile, and expansive forces, followed by that of currents of water
at various temperatures, and of prolonged disintegration--ice having had
small share in modifying even the higher ridges, and none in causing or
forming the valleys.
The reason of the extreme difficulty in tracing the combination of these
several operative causes in any given instance, is that the effective
and destructive drainage by no means follows the leading fissures, but
tells fearfully on the softer rocks, sweeping away inconceivable volumes
of these, while fissures or faults in the harder rocks of quite primal
structural importance may be little deepened or widened, often even
unindicated, by subsequent aqueous action. I have, however, described at
some length the commonest structural and sculptural phenomena in the
fourth volume of “Modern Painters,” and I gave a general sketch of the
subject last year in my lecture[161] at the Royal Institution (fully
reported in the _Journal de Genève_ of 2d September, 1863), but I have
not yet thrown together the mass of material in my possession, because
our leading chemists are only now on the point of obtaining some data
for the analysis of the most important of all forces--that of the
consolidation and crystallization of the metamorphic rocks, causing them
to alter their bulk and exercise irresistible and irregular pressures on
neighboring or incumbent beds.
But, even on existing data, the idea of the excavation of valleys by ice
has become one of quite ludicrous untenableness. At this moment, the
principal glacier in Chamouni pours itself down a slope of twenty
degrees or more over a rock two thousand feet in vertical height; and
just at the bottom of this ice-cataract, where a water-cataract of equal
power would have excavated an almost fathomless pool, the ice simply
accumulates a heap of stones, on the top of which it rests.
The lakes of any hill country lie in what are the isolated lowest (as
its summits are the isolated highest) portions of its broken surface,
and ice no more engraves the one than it builds the other. But how these
hollows were indeed first dug, we know as yet no more than how the
Atlantic was dug; and the hasty expression by geologists of their
fancies in such matters cannot be too much deprecated, because it
deprives their science of the respect really due to it in the minds of a
large portion of the public, who know, and _can_ know, nothing of its
established principles, while they can easily detect its speculative
vanity. There is plenty of work for us all to do, without losing time in
speculation; and when we have got good sections across the entire chain
of the Alps, at intervals of twenty miles apart, from Nice to Innspruch,
and exhaustive maps and sections of the lake-basins of Lucerne, Annecy,
Como, and Garda, we shall have won the leisure, and may assume the
right, to try our wits on the formative question.
J. RUSKIN.[162]
[From “The Reader,” November 26, 1864.]
_CONCERNING GLACIERS._
DENMARK HILL, _November_ 21.
I am obliged to your Scottish correspondent for the courtesy with which
he expresses himself towards me; and, as his letter refers to several
points still (to my no little surprise) in dispute among geologists, you
will perhaps allow me to occupy, in reply, somewhat more of your
valuable space than I had intended to ask for.
I say “to my no little surprise,” because the great principles of
glacial action have been so clearly stated by their discoverer, Forbes,
and its minor phenomena (though in an envious temper, which, by its
bitterness, as a pillar of salt, has become the sorrowful monument of
the discovery it denies)[163] so carefully described by Agassiz, that I
never thought there would be occasion for much talk on the subject
henceforward. As much as seems now necessary to be said I will say as
briefly as I can.
What a river carries fast at the bottom of it, a glacier carries slowly
at the top of it. This is the main distinction between their agencies. A
piece of rock which, falling into a strong torrent, would be perhaps
swept down half a mile in twenty minutes, delivering blows on the rocks
at the bottom audible like distant heavy cannon,[164] and at last dashed
into fragments, which in a little while will be rounded pebbles (having
done enough damage to everything it has touched in its course)--this
same rock, I say, falling on a glacier, lies on the top of it, and is
thereon carried down, if at fullest speed, at the rate of three yards in
a week, doing usually damage to nothing at all. That is the primal
difference between the work of water and ice; these further differences,
however, follow from this first one.
Though a glacier never rolls its moraine into pebbles, as a torrent does
its shingle, it torments and teases the said morain very sufficiently,
and without intermission. It is always moving it on, and melting from
under it, and one stone is always toppling, or tilting, or sliding over
another, and one company of stones crashing over another, with
staggering shift of heap behind. Now, leaving out of all account the
pulverulent effect of original precipitation to glacier level from two
or three thousand feet above, let the reader imagine a mass of sharp
granite road-metal and paving-stones, mixed up with boulders of any size
he can think of, and with wreck of softer rocks (micaceous schists in
quantities, usually), the whole, say, half a quarter of a mile wide,
and of variable thickness, from mere skin-deep mock-moraine on mounds of
unsuspected ice--treacherous, shadow-begotten--to a railroad embankment,
_passenger_-embankment, one eternal collapse of unconditional ruin,
rotten to its heart with frost and thaw (in regions on the edge of
each), and withering sun and waste of oozing ice; fancy all this heaved
and shovelled, slowly, by a gang of a thousand Irish laborers, twenty
miles downhill. You will conjecture there may be some dust developed on
the way?--some at the hill bottom? Yet thus you will have but a dim idea
of the daily and final results of the movements of glacier
moraines--beautiful result in granite and slate dust, delivered by the
torrent at last in banks of black and white slime, recovering itself,
far away, into fruitful fields, and level floor for human life.
Now all this is utterly independent of any action whatsoever by the ice
on its sustaining rocks. It _has_ an action on these indeed; but of this
limited nature as compared with that of water. A stone at the bottom of
a stream, or deep-sea current, necessarily and always presses on the
bottom with the weight of the column of water above it--plus the excess
of its own weight above that of a bulk of water equal to its own; but a
stone under a glacier may be hitched or suspended in the ice itself for
long spaces, not touching bottom at all. When dropped at last, the
weight of ice may not come upon it for years, for that weight is only
carried on certain spaces of the rock bed; and in those very spaces the
utmost a stone can do is to press on the bottom with the force necessary
to drive the given stone into ice of a given density (usually porous);
and, with this maximum pressure, to move at the maximum rate of about a
third of an inch in a quarter of an hour! Try to saw a piece of marble
through (with edge of iron, not of soppy ice, for saw, and with sharp
flint sand for felspar slime), and move your saw at the rate of an inch
in three-quarters of an hour, and see what lively and progressive work
you will make of it!