Barbarous - “The Quarry”
Ruskin elucidates, “While in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its refinement, an impure form of it—a patois of Romanesque—was carried by inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth; and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and borrowed art was organising itself into strength and consistency.” In the context of architecture, the allegorical barbarous designates fortitude and steadiness.
“Eden, the garden of God” - “The Quarry”
Ruskin parallels Tyre to Eden: “The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger…for the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once “as in Eden, the garden of God.” The figurative Eden infers that Tyre’s obliteration is accredited to depravities.
Ghost - “The Quarry”
Venice is comparable to a ghost: “Her successor (Tyre) , like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.” The metaphoric ghost renders Venice a confounded vicinity whose attractiveness is washed-out.
“Corrupted Papacy” - “The Quarry”
Ruskin expounds, “Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence.” The corrupted papacy fast-tracked the advent of Protestantism and rationalism. Corruption is representational of new-fangled archetypes that sponsored religious and socio-political rectification.
“Human Beaver” - “The Virtues Of Architecture”
A human beaver is figurative of a resourceful builder: “He may be merely what Mr. Carlyle rightly calls a human beaver after all; and there may be nothing in all that ingenuity of his greater than a complication of animal faculties, an intricate bestiality,—nest or hive building in its highest development.” At times builders are considered to be natural relative to the architects who scheme convoluted frames for buildings. Nevertheless, builders are helpful in architecture because their originality is what objectifies the architects’ outlines. Accordingly, builders should be commended for their connotation instead of being derided.
