Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History of Architecture, Vol. 2: Romanesque and Oriental
The author received his first lesson in this great truth - the mis chief of restoration - when in 1860, he saw the great Cloth Hall at Ypres undergoing restoration, and made a drawing rather carefully of the fourteenth century spandril with a shattered monster, already lowered from the scaffolding, and what lay alongside of it - the care fully cut copy of that monster, ready to hoist into the newly decorated wall. His schooling still going on when, in 1882, he watched the workmen slowly carving the great corner capital of the Venetian Ducal Palace, the huge block of Istrian stone which had been already set in the place of the split and obviously unsafe stone which had borne the sea-winds during four centuries. The photo graphs of the details of Reims Cathedral which appear in this history were taken from the scaffolding reared against its walls in the way of restoration in 1883, and before those scaffoldings were taken down the simpler architectural details had been denatural ized. The French restorers have always been careful of the statues in their porches, but they are less in awe of the ?oral sculpture in'the hollow' mouldings above; while the pierced and wrought parapet, the geometrical tracery of window or of panel, and even the simply sculptured crocket or finial were assumed to be fully understood by the modern workman, and the old stones were simply replaced by new ones.
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