Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/205

Rh there is never any effort to conceal the degree of the sources of its borrowing. Raffaelle carries off a whole figure from Masaccio, or borrows an entire composition from Perugino, with as much tranquillity and simplicity of innocence as a young Spartan pickpocket; and the architect of a Romanesque basilica gathered his columns and capitals where he could find them, as an ant picks up sticks. There is at least a presumption, when we find this frank acceptance, that there is a sense within the mind of power capable of transforming and renewing whatever it adopts; and too conscious, too exalted, to fear the accusation of plagiarism,—too certain that it can prove, and has proved, its independence, to be afraid of expressing its homage to what it admires in the most open and indubitable way; and the necessary consequence of this sense of power is the other sign I have named—the Audacity of treatment when it finds treatment necessary, the unhesitating and sweeping sacrifice of precedent where precedent becomes inconvenient. For instance, in the characteristic forms of Italian Romanesque, in which the hypaethral portion of the heathen temple was replaced by the towering nave, and where, in consequence, the pediment of the west front became divided into three portions, of which the central one, like the apex of a ridge of sloping strata lifted by a sudden fault, was broken away from and raised above the wings; there remained at the extremities of the aisles two triangular fragments of pediment, which could not now be filled by any of the modes of decoration adapted for the unbroken space; and the difficulty became greater when the central portion of the front was occupied by columnar ranges, which could not, without painful abruptness, terminate short of the extremities of the wings. I know not what expedient would have been adopted by architects who had much respect for precedent, under such circumstances, but it certainly would not have been that of