There can be none in the brute hardness of
the new carving. Look at the animals which I have given in Plate XIV.,
as an instance of living work, and suppose the markings of the scales
and hair once worn away, or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall
ever restore them? The first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and
that again and again--seen it on the Baptistery of Pisa, seen it on
the Casa d'Oro at Venice, seen it on the Cathedral of Lisieux,) is to
dash the old work to pieces; the second is usually to put up the
cheapest and basest imitation which can escape detection, but in all
cases, however careful, and however laboured, an imitation still, a
cold model of such parts as _can_ be modelled, with conjectural
supplements; and my experience has as yet furnished me with only one
instance, that of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, in which even this,
the utmost degree of fidelity which is possible, has been attained, or
even attempted.[166]
Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from
beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a
corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as
your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see
nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and
mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a
mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever
will be out of re-built Milan.
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