On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2). Ruskin John

it is observable that although each of the three arts peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or sisters—Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture—Painting, in Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in equal stature and perfection."—Vol. i, pp. xii.—xiv.

      28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this forced analogy—the comparison of the architecture of one nation with the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary consequence of its subsequent elevation and civilization. Whatever nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point where Egypt left it—in its turn delivering the gathered globe of heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an exhausted "à vous le dé!" In order to arrive at any useful or true estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the other—sculpture with sculpture—line with line; and to have done this broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this beside the Pietà of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between heart and hand more embarrassed.

      29. Yet let us not be misunderstood:—the great gulf between Christian and Pagan art we cannot bridge—nor do we wish to weaken one single sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by our author. The separation is not gradual, but instant and final—the difference not of degree, but of condition; it is the difference between the dead vapors rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of their idols, into the temple of the One God.

      We shall therefore, as fully as our space admits, examine the application of our author's theory to Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, successively, setting before the reader some of the more interesting passages which respect each art, while we at the same time mark with what degree of caution their conclusions are, in our judgment, to be received.

      30. Accepting Lord Lindsay's first reference to Egypt, let us glance at a few of the physical accidents which influenced its types of architecture. The first of these is evidently the capability of carriage of large blocks of stone over perfectly level land. It was possible to roll to their destination along that uninterrupted plain, blocks which could neither by the Greek have been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor carried over mountain-passes, nor raised except by extraordinary effort to the height of the rock-built fortress or seaward promontory. A small undulation of surface, or embarrassment of road, makes large difference in the portability of masses, and of consequence, in the breadth of the possible intercolumniation, the solidity of the column, and the whole scale of the building. Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be important only by position, in a level country only by bulk. Under the overwhelming mass of mountain-form it is vain to attempt the expression of majesty by size of edifice—the humblest architecture may become important by availing itself of the power of nature, but the mightiest must be crushed in emulating it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; St. Peter's would look like a toy if built beneath the Alpine cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some communication of their own solemnity to the smallest chalet that glitters among their glades of pine. On the other hand, a small building is in a level country lost, and the impressiveness of bulk proportionably increased; hence the instinct of nations has always led them to the loftiest efforts where the masses of their labor might be seen looming at incalculable distance above the open line of the horizon—hence rose her four square mountains above the flat of Memphis, while the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges of columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with a single pediment, bright, but not colossal.

      31. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained—partially in the German after-Gothic—universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland—of causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was conquered by association—the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms of tracery—and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further carried out into all modes of decoration—pinnacles interpenetrating crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besançon. The influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon multiplied columns of confused arcade,6 presents but the exalted image of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the lagoons.

      32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr. Hope's Historical Essay,7 the reader will find further instances of the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great laws of architectural proportion is dependent for its acuteness less on the æsthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary type, whether hut, châlet, or tent.

      As by the constant reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate exaggeration of size—the Egyptian was from the first left without hint of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts.

6

The reader must remember that this arcade was originally quite open, the inner wall having been built after the fire, in 1574.

7

"An Historical Essay on Architecture" by the late Thomas Hope. (Murray, 1835) chap, iv., pp. 23-31.