And yet, in the cloisters of St. John Lateran at Rome, you have
Greek work, if not contemporary with this at Pisa, yet occupying a
parallel place in the history of architecture, which is abortive, and
monstrous beyond the power of any words to describe. Vasari knew no
difference between these two kinds of Greek work. Nor do your modern
architects. To discern the difference between the sculpture of the font
of Pisa, and the spandrils of the Lateran cloister, requires thorough
training of the hand in the finest methods of draughtsmanship; and,
secondly, trained habit of reading the mythology and ethics of design.
I simply assure you of the fact at present; and if you work, you may
have sight and sense of it.
13. There are Greeks, and Greeks, then, in the twelfth century,
differing as much from each other as vice, in all ages, must differ
from virtue. But in Vasari's sight they are alike; in ours, they must
be so, as far as regards our present purpose. As men of a school, they
are to be summed under the general name of 'Byzantines;' their work all
alike showing specific characters of attenuate, rigid, and in many
respects offensively unbeautiful, design, to which Vasari's epithets of
"goffa, e sproporzionata" are naturally applied by all persons trained
only in modern principles.
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