"
On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces
which so struck the French ambassador. [Footnote: Appendix 6,
"Renaissance Ornaments."] He was right in his notice of the distinction.
There had indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the
fifteenth century; and a change of some importance to us moderns: we
English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe in general owes
to it the utter degradation or destruction of her schools of
architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may understand
this, it is necessary that he should have some general idea of the
connection of the architecture of Venice with that of the rest of
Europe, from its origin forwards.
SECTION XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is
derived from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the
East. The history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the
various modes and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once
for all: if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all
the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many
beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all
Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and
what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic,
Early English, French, German, and Tuscan.
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