Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/250

 

become the subject of a picture; and all sublimity is, even in the peculiar sense which I am endeavouring to develop, picturesque, as opposed to beauty; that is to say, there is more picturesqueness in the subject of Michael Angelo than of Perugino, in proportion to the prevalence of the sublime element over the beautiful. But that character, of which the extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be degrading to art, is parasitical sublimity; i.e. a sublimity dependent on the accidents, or on the least essential characters of the objects to which it belongs; and the picturesque is developed distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of thought of those points of character in which the sublimity is found. Two ideas, therefore, are essential to picturesqueness—the first, that of sublimity (for pure beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so only as the sublime element mixes with it), and the second, the subordinate or parasitical position of that sublimity. Of course, therefore, whatever characters of line or shade or expression are productive of sublimity, will become productive of picturesqueness: what these characters are I shall endeavour hereafter to show at length; but, among those which are generally acknowledged, I may name angular and broken lines, vigorous oppositions of light and shadow, and grave, deep, or boldly contrasted colour; and all these are in a still higher degree effective, when, by resemblance or association, they remind us of objects on which a true and essential sublimity exists, as of rocks or mountains, or stormy clouds or waves. Now if these characters, or any others of a higher and more abstract sublimity, be found in the very heart and substance of what we contemplate, as the sublimity of Michael Angelo depends on the expression of mental character in his figures far more than even on the noble lines of their arrangement, the art which represents such characters cannot be properly called picturesque: but if they