Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/116

82 length being confined to the lower stories, and the upper, between its broad windows, left a mighty sur- face of smooth marble, chequered with blocks of alternate rose-colour and white. It would be impossible, I believe, to invent a more magnificent arrangement of all that is in building most dignified and most fair.

X. In the Lombard Romanesque, the two principles are more fused into each other, as most characteristically in the cathedral of Pisa: length of proportion, exhibited by an arcade of twenty-one arches above, and fifteen below, at the side of the nave; bold square proportion in the front; that front divided into arcades, placed one above the other, the lowest with its pillars engaged, of seven arches, the four uppermost thrown out boldly from the receding wall, and casting deep shadows; the first, above the basement, of nineteen arches; the second, of twenty-one; the third and fourth of eight each; sixty-three arches in all; all circular headed, all with cylindrical shafts and the lowest with square panellings, set diagonally under their semicircles, an universal ornament in this style (Plate XII, fig. 7); the apse a semicircle, with a semidome for its roof, and three ranges of circular arches for its exterior ornament; in the interior of the nave, a range of circular arches below a circular-arched triforium, and a vast flat surface, observe, of wall decorated with striped marble above; the whole arrangement (not a peculiar one, but characteristic of every church of the period; and, to my feeling, the most majestic; not perhaps the fairest, but the mightiest type of form which the mind of man has ever conceived) based exclusively on associations of the circle and the square.

I am now, however, trenching upon ground which I desire to reserve for more careful examination, in connection with other aesthetic questions: but I believe the examples I have given will justify my vindication of the square form from the reprobation which has been lightly thrown upon it; nor might this be