Not merely has Nature given you the
noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above
all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.
You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied
than Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble
and think that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly.
If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous
decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the
marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture,
frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or inlay it with other
coloured marbles as they did in Venice. Otherwise you had better
build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence
and with some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was
ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. For it is
indeed a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only workmen of
nobility of invention and delicacy of hand should be allowed to
touch it at all, carving it into noble statues or into beautiful
decoration, or inlaying it with other coloured marbles: for 'the
true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I
would fain see them taken advantage of to the full.
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