Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/54

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34
VAL D'ARNO.

breaking up the work of Quercia, that incidental sentence giving account of the much more disrespectful destruction, by the Perugians, of the tombs of Pope Urban IV., and Martin IV.

Sending was made for John, you see, first, when Pope Urban IV. died in Perugia—whose tomb was to be carved by John; the Greek fountain being a secondary business. But the tomb was so well destroyed, afterwards, that only a few relics remained scattered here and there.

The tomb, I have not the least doubt, was Gothic;—and the breaking of it to pieces was not in order to restore it afterwards, that a living architect might get the job of restoration. Here is a stone out of one of Giovanni Pisano's loveliest Gothic buildings, which I myself saw with my own eyes dashed out, that a modern builder might be paid for putting in another. But Pope Urban's tomb was not destroyed to such end. There was no qualm of the belly, driving the hammer,—qualm of the conscience probably; at all events, a deeper or loftier antagonism than one on points of taste, or economy.

44. You observed that I described his Greek profane manner of design as properly belonging