true to its
primary pictorial condition of noble colour. For we should remember that
all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts. The
greatest triumph of Italian painting was the decoration of a pope's
chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in Venice. Michael Angelo wrought
the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's son, the other. And the little 'Dutch
landscape, which you put over your sideboard today, and between the
windows tomorrow, is' no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents
of field and forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the
once melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.

Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or
English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic attitude
today, their own world, you should absorb but imitate never, copy never.
Unless you can make as beautiful a design in painted china or embroidered
screen or beaten brass out of your American turkey as the Japanese does
out of his grey silver-winged stork, you will never do anything. Let the
Greek carve his lions and the Goth his dragons: buffalo and wild deer are
the animals for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your valleys
in the spring and your hills in the autumn: let them be the flowers for
your art. 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 Pantelicus, 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: fo