Or, lastly, do you think the man who designed the procession on the
portal of Amiens was the subordinate workman? that there was an
architect over _him_, restraining him within certain limits, and
ordering of him his bishops at so much a mitre, and his cripples at so
much a crutch? Not so. _Here_, on this sculptured shield, rests
the Master's hand; _this_ is the centre of the Master's thought;
from this, and in subordination to this, waved the arch and sprang the
pinnacle. Having done this, and being able to give human expression and
action to the stone, all the rest--the rib, the niche, the foil, the
shaft--were mere toys to his hand and accessories to his conception:
and if once you also gain the gift of doing this, if once you can carve
one fronton such as you have here, I tell you, you would be able--so
far as it depended on your invention--to scatter cathedrals over
England as fast as clouds rise from its streams after summer rain.
Nay, but perhaps you answer again, our sculptors at present do not
design cathedrals, and could not. No, they could not; but that is
merely because we have made architecture so dull that they cannot take
any interest in it, and, therefore, do not care to add to their higher
knowledge the poor and common knowledge of principles of building. You
have thus separated building from sculpture, and you have taken away
the power of both; for the sculptor loses nearly as much by never
having room for the development of a continuous work, as you do from
having reduced your work to a continuity of mechanism. You are
essentially, and should always be, the same body of men, admitting only
such difference in operation as there is between the work of a painter
at different times, who sometimes labours on a small picture, and
sometimes on the frescoes of a palace gallery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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