Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/119

Rh limestone, the known ease of the workmanship will make its absence seem slovenly; it will be well to take advantage of the stone's softness, and to make the design delicate and dependent upon smoothness of chiselled surfaces: but if we build in granite or lava, it is a folly, in most cases, to cast away the labour necessary to smooth it ; it is wiser to make the design granitic itself, and to leave the blocks rudely squared. I do not deny a certain splendour and sense of power in the smoothing of granite, and in the entire subduing of its iron resistance to the human supremacy. But in most cases I believe, the labour and time necessary to do this, would be better spent in another way; and that to raise a building to a height of a hundred feet with rough blocks, is better than to raise it to seventy with smooth ones. There is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage of the stone to which the art mustindeed be great that pretends to be equivalent; and a stem expression of brotherhood with the mountain heart from which it has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering obedience to the rule and measure of men. His eye must be delicate indeed, who would desire to see the Pitti palace polished.

XII. Next to those of the masonry, we have to consider the divisions of the design itself. Those divisions are necessarily, either into masses of light and shade, or else by traced lines; which latter must be, indeed, themselves produced by incisions or projections which, in some lights, cast a certain breadth of shade, but which may nevertheless, if finely enough cut, be always true lines, in distant effect. I call, for instance, such panelling as that of Henry the Seventh's chapel, pure linear division.

Now, it does not seem to me sufficiently recollected, that a wall surface is to an architect simply what a white canvass is to a painter, with this only difference, that the wall has already a sublimity in its height, substance, and other characters already considered, on