Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/198

152 Considerable size, exhibited by simple terminal lines (Chap. III, § 6). Projection towards the top (§ 7). Breadth of flat surface (§ 8). Square compartments of that surface (§ 9). Varied and visible masonry (§ 11). Vigorous depth of shadow (§ 13), exhibited especially by pierced traceries (§ 18). Varied proportion in ascent (Chap. IV, § 28). Lateral symmetry (§ 28). Sculpture most delicate at the base (Chap I, § 12). Enriched quantity of ornament at the top (§13). Sculpture abstract in inferior ornaments and mouldings (Chap. IV, § 31), complete in animal forms (§ 33). Both to be executed in white marble (§ 40). Vivid colour introduced in flat geometrical patterns (§ 39), and obtained by the use of naturaUy coloured stone (i35).

These characteristics occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto at Florence. The drawing of the tracery of its upper story, which heads this chapter, rude as it is, will nevertheless give the reader some better conception of that tower's magnificence than the thin outlines in which it is usually pourtrayed. In its first appeal to the stranger's eye there is something unpleasing; a mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet