Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/194

148 is of course, however, fit only for domestic work. The front of the Doge's palace at Venice is the purest and most chaste model that I can name (but one) of the fit application of colour to public buildings. The sculpture and mouldings are all white; but the wall surface is chequered with marble blocks of pale rose, the chequers being in no wise harmonized, or fitted to the forms of the windows; but looking as if the surface had been completed first, and the windows cut out of it. In Plate XII, fig. 2, the reader will see two of the patterns used in green and white, on the columns of San Michele of Lucca; every column having a different design. Both are beautiful, but the upper one certainly the best. Yet in sculpture its lines would have been perfectly barbarous, and those even of the lower not enough refined.

XL. Restraining ourselves, therefore, to the use of such simple patterns, so far forth as our colour is subordinate either to architectural structure, or sculptural form, we have yet one more manner of ornamentation to add to our general means of effect, monochrom design, the intermediate condition between colouring and carving. The relations of the entire system of architectural decoration may then be thus expressed:

2. Organic form sub-dominant. Basso-relievo or intaglio. To be more abstract in proportion to the reduction of depth; to be also more rigid and simple in contour; to be touched with colour more boldly and in an increased degree, exactly in proportion to the reduced depth and fulness of form,