SECTION XVIII. But the palace was not long permitted to remain in this

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[Illustration: John Ruskin.]

STONES OF VENICE

BY JOHN RUSKIN

THE STONES OF VENICE:

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS AND LOCAL INDICES

(PRINTED SEPARATELY)

FOR THE USE OF TRAVELLERS WHILE STAYING IN VENICE AND VERONA.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.

PREFACE.

This volume is the first of a series designed by the Author with the

purpose of placing in the hands of the public, in more serviceable form,

those portions of his earlier works which he thinks deserving of a

permanent place in the system of his general teaching. They were at

first intended to be accompanied by photographic reductions of the

principal plates in the larger volumes; but this design has been

modified by the Author's increasing desire to gather his past and

present writings into a consistent body, illustrated by one series of

plates, purchasable in separate parts, and numbered consecutively. Of

other prefatory matter, once intended,--apologetic mostly,--the reader

shall be spared the cumber: and a clear prospectus issued by the

publisher of the new series of plates, as soon as they are in a state of

forwardness.

The second volume of this edition will contain the most useful matter

out of the third volume of the old one, closed by its topical index,

abridged and corrected.

BRANTWOOD,

_3rd May_, 1879.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I. The Quarry

II. The Throne

III. Torcello

IV. St. Mark's

V. The Ducal Palace

THE STONES OF VENICE

CHAPTER I.

[FIRST OF THE OLD EDITION.]

THE QUARRY.

SECTION I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean,

three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands:

the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great

powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third,

which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led

through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded

for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets

of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a

lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for

the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we

forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and

the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."

Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in

endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final

period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so

quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt,

as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which

was the City, and which the Shadow.

I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever

lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to

be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like

passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

SECTION II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons

which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this

strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of

countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred

with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean,

where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries

in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but

their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as

they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind

than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may,

perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to

form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of

Venetian character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest

which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have

gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.

SECTION III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so

during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including

the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing

severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the

change in the form of her government, or altogether as assuredly in

great part, to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was

composed.

The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from

the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the

Rialto, [Footnote: Appendix I., "Foundations of Venice."] to the moment

when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the

Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and

Seventy-six years [Footnote: Appendix II., "Power of the Doges."] were

passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially

to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive

appears to have been entrusted to tribunes, [Footnote: Sismondi, Hist.

des Rép. Ital., vol. i. ch. v.] chosen, one by the inhabitants of each

of the principal islands. For six hundred years, [Footnote: Appendix

III., "Serrar del Consiglio."] during which the power of Venice was

continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy,

her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much

independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority

gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its

prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable

magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a

king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the

fruits of her former energies, consumed them,--and expired.

SECTION IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the

Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine

hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked

by what was called the "Serrar del Consiglio;" that is to say, the final

and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the

establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of

the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the

doge on the other.

Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most

interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order

and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and

noblest man whom they could find among them, [Footnote: "Ha saputo

trovar modo che non uno, non pochi, non molti, signoreggiano, ma molti

buoni, pochi migliori, e insiememente, _un ottimo solo_." (_Sansovino_,)

Ah, well done, Venice! Wisdom this, indeed.] called their Doge or Leader,

with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him,

out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing

its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth of some among

the families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually

organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body.

This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements,

and the circumstances which determined her character and position among

European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated,

we find the names of all her hero princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo

Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.

SECTION V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the

most eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her

life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed

by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of

Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and

distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this

period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),

Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo

Zeno, 8th May, 1418; [Footnote: Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.] the _visible_

commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the

Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari

followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large

acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in

Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the

battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454,

Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the

Turk in the same year was established the Inquisition of State,

[Footnote: Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the

discovery of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.]

and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious

form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish

invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the

league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement

of the decline of the Venetian power; [Footnote: Ominously signified by

their humiliation to the Papal power (as before to the Turkish) in 1509,

and their abandonment of their right of appointing the clergy of their

territories.] the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the

fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the

diminution of her internal strength.

SECTION VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between

the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the

diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question

at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or

determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple

question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of

individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the

Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy

itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national

enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of

Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction

of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a

people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long

disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live

nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for

three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their

call was heard.

SECTION VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at

many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism;

and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king,

sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her:

the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what

powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made

masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress,

impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from

the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into

prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to

sign covenant with Death. [Footnote: The senate voted the abdication of

their authority by a majority of 512 to 14. (Alison, ch. xxiii.)]

SECTION VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to be

fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double

interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the

evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be

both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political

prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual

religion.

I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I

wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all

Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its

deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or

fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to

last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only

aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial

interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or

enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,

but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her

conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.

The fame of success remains; when the motives of attempt are forgotten;

and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be

reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her

princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in

which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its

devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from

its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement

of her own private interests, at once broke her faith [Footnote: By

directing the arms of the Crusaders against a Christian prince. (Daru,

liv. iv. ch. iv. viii.)] and betrayed her religion.

SECTION IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall

be struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual

feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they

could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit

of assigning to religion a direct influence over all _his own_ actions,

and all the affairs of _his own_ daily life, is remarkable in every great

Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are

instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches

the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course

where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely trust

that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to trace any

more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of Alexander III.

against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by the character of

their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked by the insolence

of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only in her hastiest

councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency whenever she has

time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or when they are

sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the entire subjection

of private piety to national policy is not only remarkable throughout the

almost endless series of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire

was enlarged and maintained, but symbolized by a very singular

circumstance in the building of the city itself. I am aware of no other

city of Europe in which its cathedral was not the principal feature. But

the principal church in Venice was the chapel attached to the palace of

her prince, and called the "Chiesa Ducale." The patriarchal church,

[Footnote: Appendix 4, "San Pietro di Castello."] inconsiderable in size

and mean in decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian

group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the

greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it

less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice,

next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to

national effort, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks,

supported by the vast organization of those great societies on the

mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also,

in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice,

[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, Section V.] who now rests

beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not

satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed

around his tomb.

SECTION X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which

we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo

Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep, and constant tone of individual

religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her

greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and

immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct

even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a

simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which

a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that

religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his

conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy

serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and

a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate

motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this

spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with

its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which

it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to

demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry

presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping

short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence

national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with

several characteristics of the temper of our present English

legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious

interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of my

present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment of

which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be able

to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.

SECTION XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the

policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a

Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely,

the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the

temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid

survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama

to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in

the portico of St. Mark's, [Footnote:

"In that temple porch,

(The brass is gone, the porphyry remains,)

Did BARBAROSSA fling his mantle off,

And kneeling, on his neck receive the foot

Of the proud Pontiff--thus at last consoled

For flight, disguise, and many an aguish shake

On his stony pillow."

I need hardly say whence the lines are taken: Rogers' "Italy" has, I

believe, now a place in the best beloved compartment of all libraries,

and will never be removed from it. There is more true expression of the

spirit of Venice in the passages devoted to her in that poem, than in all

else that has been written of her.] the central expression in most men's

thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is true

that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of her

prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service thus

rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years more

than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement V.,

which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to

Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the great

tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the doge or

the ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted

out the shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of ecclesiastics

from all share in the councils of Venice became an enduring mark of her

knowledge of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and of her defiance of it.

To this exclusion of Papal influence from her councils, the Romanist

will attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success.

[Footnote: At least, such success as they had. Vide Appendix 5, "The

Papal Power in Venice."]

The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy

of the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects

that the English legislature sacrificed their principles to expose

themselves to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed

theirs to avoid.

SECTION XII. One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the

Venetian government, the singular unity of the families composing

it,--unity far from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when

contrasted with the fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the

restless successions of families and parties in power, which fill the

annals of the other states of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be

ended by the dagger, or enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of

law, could not but be anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was

subjected to so severe a restraint: it is much that jealousy appears

usually unmingled with illegitimate ambition, and that, for every

instance in which private passion sought its gratification through

public danger, there are a thousand in which it was sacrificed to the

public advantage. Venice may well call upon us to note with reverence,

that of all the towers which are still seen rising like a branchless

forest from her islands, there is but one whose office was other than

that of summoning to prayer, and that one was a watch-tower only

[Footnote: Thus literally was fulfilled the promise to St. Mark,--Pax

e.] from first to last, while the palaces of the other cities of Italy

were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked

battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank

under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed

with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of

lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable fortifications of the arsenal are

no exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city itself.

They are little more than a semblance of precaution against the attack

of a foreign enemy.]

SECTION XIII. These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief

general interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I

would next endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which

the testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which

the arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true

connection with the history of the state.

1st. Receive the witness of Painting.

It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice

as far back as 1418.

Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini,

and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the

sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith

animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of

Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or

sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His

larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial

rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made

subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the

Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection

between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who

surround her.

Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and

Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the

school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their

artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own

natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up

in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the

vital religion of Venice had expired.

SECTION XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward

observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were

painted, in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna

or St. Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of

the Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the

ducal palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there

is a curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of

one of Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal.

The eye is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of

Venice was in her wars, not in her worship.

The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of

Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects

which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the

principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute

subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or

portraiture.

The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of

Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century

had taken away the religious heart of Venice.

SECTION XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of

Architecture will be our task through many a page to come; but I must

here give a general idea of its heads.

Philippe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, says,--

"Chascun me feit seoir au meillieu de ces deux ambassadeurs qui est

l'honneur d'Italie que d'estre au meillieu; et me menerent au long de la

grant rue, qu'ilz appellent le Canal Grant, et est bien large. Les

gallees y passent à travers et y ay veu navire de quatre cens tonneaux

ou plus pres des maisons: et est la plus belle rue que je croy qui soit

en tout le monde, et la mieulx maisonnee, et va le long de la ville. Les

maisons sont fort grandes et haultes, et de bonne pierre, et les

anciennes toutes painctes; les aul tres faictes depuis cent ans: toutes

ont le devant de marbre blanc, qui leur vient d'Istrie, à cent mils de

la, et encores maincte grant piece de porphire et de sarpentine sur le

devant.... C'est la plus triumphante cité que j'aye jamais veue et qui

plus faict d'honneur à ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus

saigement se gouverne, et où le service de Dieu est le plus

sollennellement faict: et encores qu'il y peust bien avoir d'aultres

faultes, si croy je que Dieu les a en ayde pour la reverence qu'ilz

portent au service de l'Eglise." [Footnote: Mémoires de Commynes, liv.

vii. ch. xviii.]

SECTION XVI. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons.

Observe, first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of

Venice: of which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with

some glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real

life had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression

instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder

palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have

their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away,

and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their

fronts."

On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces

which so struck the French ambassador. [Footnote: Appendix 6,

"Renaissance Ornaments."] He was right in his notice of the distinction.

There had indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the

fifteenth century; and a change of some importance to us moderns: we

English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe in general owes

to it the utter degradation or destruction of her schools of

architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may understand

this, it is necessary that he should have some general idea of the

connection of the architecture of Venice with that of the rest of

Europe, from its origin forwards.

SECTION XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is

derived from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the

East. The history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the

various modes and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once

for all: if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all

the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many

beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all

Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and

what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic,

Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks

gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the

arch. The shaft and arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture,

are from the race of Japheth: the spirituality and sanctity of it from

Ismael, Abraham, and Shem.

SECTION XVIII. There is high probability that the Greek received his

shaft system from Egypt; but I do not care to keep this earlier

derivation in the mind of the reader. It is only necessary that he

should be able to refer to a fixed point of origin, when the form of the

shaft was first perfected. But it may be incidently observed, that if

the Greeks did indeed receive their Doric from Egypt, then the three

families of the earth have each contributed their part to its noblest

architecture: and Ham, the servant of the others, furnishes the

sustaining or bearing member, the shaft; Japheth the arch; Shem the

spiritualization of both.

SECTION XIX. I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are

the roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five

orders; but there are only two real orders, and there never can be any

more until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex:

those are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the

other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,

Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional

form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the centre or root of

both. All other orders are varieties of those, or phantasms and

grotesques altogether indefinite in number and species. [Footnote:

Appendix 7, "Varieties of the Orders."]

SECTION XX. This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was

clumsily copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result,

until they begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service;

except only that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it,

and the Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often

very beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity:

seized upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it;

invented a new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all

over the Roman empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest

at hand, to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman

Christian architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of

the time, very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many

respects ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of

imagination, which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores

of the Bosphorus and the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea, and then

gradually, as the people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes

Corpse-light. The architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange,

gilded, and embalmed repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so

would have remained for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has

been undisturbed. [Footnote: The reader will find the _weak_ points of

Byzantine architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the

opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever opened,--

Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."] But rough wakening was ordained.

Section XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into

two great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other

at Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque,

properly so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative

perfection by Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But

I wish the reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art

together in his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the

same; that is to say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of

the art of old Rome itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the

fountain-head, and entrusted always to the best workmen who could be

found--Latins in Italy and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may

be ranged under the general term of Christian Romanesque, an

architecture which had lost the refinement of Pagan art in the

degradation of the empire, but which was elevated by Christianity to

higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed with brighter

forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in its various

branches over all the central provinces of the empire, taking aspects

more or less refined, according to its proximity to the seats of

government; dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of

the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed,

losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived

of its beauty, but benumbed and incapable of advance or change.

SECTION XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While

in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate

influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its

refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by

inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of

this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the

empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;

and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art

was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and

borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and consistency. The

reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as

broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately

languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the

imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early

organization, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely

nominal extent.

SECTION XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not

susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps,

appear, like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with

the enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with

which they mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual

character. But others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its

influence, back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to

the ice creeks of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the

influence was of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two

nations, pre-eminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of

derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs

of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and

idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was laid

asleep in a glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both

horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over

its golden paralysis.

SECTION XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system

to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the

Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of

worship. The Lombard covered every church which he built with the

sculptured representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.

[Footnote: Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."] The Arab banished all

imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their

minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in their character and

mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the

North, and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they

met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very

centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of

the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck,

is VENICE.

The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal

proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of

the world.

SECTION XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the

importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within

the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between

the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture

expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet

necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.

SECTION XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to

mark the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures

were developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the

distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian

Roman and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and

well-proportioned shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman;

mouldings more or less so; and large surfaces of walls entirely covered

with imagery, mosaic, and paintings, whether of scripture history or of

sacred symbols.

The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the

Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly

introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts

and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and

writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,

and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace

it: this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates

it on features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines

of color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the

dome, and adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.

SECTION XXVII. The changes effected by the Lombard are more curious

still, for they are in the anatomy of the building, more than its

decoration. The Lombard architecture represents, as I said, the whole of

that of the northern barbaric nations. And this I believe was, at first,

an imitation in wood of the Christian Roman churches or basilicas.

Without staying to examine the whole structure of a basilica, the reader

will easily understand thus much of it: that it had a nave and two

aisles, the nave much higher than the aisles; that the nave was

separated from the aisles by rows of shafts, which supported, above,

large spaces of flat or dead wall, rising above the aisles, and forming

the upper part of the nave, now called the clerestory, which had a

gabled wooden roof.

These high dead walls were, in Roman work, built of stone; but in the

wooden work of the North, they must necessarily have been made of

horizontal boards or timbers attached to uprights on the top of the nave

pillars, which were themselves also of wood. [Footnote: Appendix 9,

"Wooden Churches of the North."] Now, these uprights were necessarily

thicker than the rest of the timbers, and formed vertical square

pilasters above the nave piers. As Christianity extended and

civilization increased, these wooden structures were changed into stone;

but they were literally petrified, retaining the form which had been

made necessary by their being of wood. The upright pilaster above the

nave pier remains in the stone edifice, and is the first form of the

great distinctive feature of Northern architecture--the vaulting shaft.

In that form the Lombards brought it into Italy, in the seventh century,

and it remains to this day in St. Ambrogio of Milan, and St. Michele of

Pavia.

SECTION XXVIII. When the vaulting shaft was introduced in the clerestory

walls, additional members were added for its support to the nave piers.

Perhaps two or three pine trunks, used for a single pillar, gave the

first idea of the grouped shaft. Be that as it may, the arrangement of

the nave pier in the form of a cross accompanies the superimposition of

the vaulting shaft; together with corresponding grouping of minor shafts

in doorways and apertures of windows. Thus, the whole body of the

Northern architecture, represented by that of the Lombards, may be

described as rough but majestic work, round-arched, with grouped shafts,

added vaulting shafts, and endless imagery of active life and fantastic

superstitions.

SECTION XXIX. The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one

of the Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but

without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of

their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it

ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of

Gothic architecture is the history of the refinement and

spiritualization of Northern work under its influence. The noblest

buildings of the world, the Pisan-Romanesque, Tuscan (Giottesque)

Gothic, and Veronese Gothic, are those of the Lombard schools

themselves, under its close and direct influence; the various Gothics of

the North are the original forms of the architecture which the Lombards

brought into Italy, changing under the less direct influence of the

Arab.

SECTION XXX. Understanding thus much of the formation of the great

European styles, we shall have no difficulty in tracing the succession

of architectures in Venice herself. From what I said of the central

character of Venetian art, the reader is not, of course, to conclude

that the Roman, Northern, and Arabian elements met together and

contended for the mastery at the same period. The earliest element was

the pure Christian Roman; but few, if any, remains of this art exist at

Venice; for the present city was in the earliest times only one of many

settlements formed on the chain of marshy islands which extend from the

mouths of the Isonzo to those of the Adige, and it was not until the

beginning of the ninth century that it became the seat of government;

while the cathedral of Torcello, though Christian Roman in general form,

was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and shows evidence of Byzantine

workmanship in many of its details. This cathedral, however, with the

church of Santa Fosca at Torcello, San Giacomo di Rialto at Venice, and

the crypt of St. Mark's, forms a distinct group of buildings, in which

the Byzantine influence is exceedingly slight; and which is probably

very sufficiently representative of the earliest architecture on the

islands.

SECTION XXXI. The Ducal residence was removed to Venice in 809, and the

body of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria twenty years later. The

first church of St. Mark's was, doubtless, built in imitation of that

destroyed at Alexandria, and from which the relics of the saint had been

obtained. During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the

architecture of Venice seems to have been formed on the same model, and

is almost identical with that of Cairo under the caliphs, [Footnote:

Appendix 10, "Church of Alexandria."] it being quite immaterial whether

the reader chooses to call both Byzantine or both Arabic; the workmen

being certainly Byzantine, but forced to the invention of new forms by

their Arabian masters, and bringing these forms into use in whatever

other parts of the world they were employed.

To this first manner of Venetian architecture, together with such

vestiges as remain of the Christian Roman, I shall devote the first

division of the following inquiry. The examples remaining of it consist

of three noble churches (those of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part

of St. Mark's), and about ten or twelve fragments of palaces.

SECTION XXXII. To this style succeeds a transitional one, of a character

much more distinctly Arabian: the shafts become more slender, and the

arches consistently pointed, instead of round; certain other changes,

not to be enumerated in a sentence, taking place in the capitals and

mouldings. This style is almost exclusively secular. It was natural for

the Venetians to imitate the beautiful details of the Arabian

dwelling-house, while they would with reluctance adopt those of the

mosque for Christian churches.

I have not succeeded in fixing limiting dates for this style. It appears

in part contemporary with the Byzantine manner, but outlives it. Its

position is, however, fixed by the central date, 1180, that of the

elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, whose capitals are the

two most important pieces of detail in this transitional style in

Venice. Examples of its application to domestic buildings exist in

almost every street of the city, and will form the subject of the second

division of the following essay.

SECTION XXXIII. The Venetians were always ready to receive lessons in

art from their enemies (else had there been no Arab work in Venice). But

their especial dread and hatred of the Lombards appears to have long

prevented them from receiving the influence of the art which that people

had introduced on the mainland of Italy. Nevertheless, during the

practice of the two styles above distinguished, a peculiar and very

primitive condition of pointed Gothic had arisen in ecclesiastical

architecture. It appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab

forms, which were attaining perfection upon the continent, and would

probably, if left to itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab

school, with which it had from the first so close a fellowship, that it

will be found difficult to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those

which seem to have been built under this early Gothic influence. The

churches of San Giacopo dell' Orio, San Giovanni in Bragora, the

Carmine, and one or two more, furnish the only important examples of it.

But, in the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and Dominicans

introduced from the continent their morality and their architecture,

already a distinct Gothic, curiously developed from Lombardic and

Northern (German?) forms; and the influence of the principles exhibited

in the vast churches of St. Paul and the Frari began rapidly to affect

the Venetian-Arab school. Still the two systems never became united; the

Venetian policy repressed the power of the church, and the Venetian

artists resisted its example; and thenceforward the architecture of the

city becomes divided into ecclesiastical and civil: the one an

ungraceful yet powerful form of the Western Gothic, common to the whole

peninsula, and only showing Venetian sympathies in the adoption of

certain characteristic mouldings; the other a rich, luxuriant, and

entirely original Gothic, formed from the Venetian-Arab by the influence

of the Dominican and Franciscan architecture, and especially by the

engrafting upon the Arab forms of the most novel feature of the

Franciscan work, its traceries. These various forms of Gothic, the

_distinctive_ architecture of Venice, chiefly represented by the

churches of St. John and Paul, the Frari, and San Stefano, on the

ecclesiastical side, and by the Ducal palace, and the other principal

Gothic palaces, on the secular side, will be the subject of the third

division of the essay.

SECTION XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic)

style of the Venetian work is centralized by the date 1180, and is

transformed gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from

the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century;

that is to say, over the precise period which I have described as the

central epoch of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year

1418; Foscari became doge five years later, and in his reign the first

marked signs appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe

de Commynes notices as above, the change to which London owes St.

Paul's, Rome St. Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly

supposed to be their noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of

every art she has since practised.

SECTION XXXV. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality

in existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps,"

chap. ii.)

All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at

once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of

extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a

strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the

main land into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and

the Cathedral of Como, (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian

Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della

Carta and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all

architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked

the state of religion over all Europe,--the peculiar degradation of the

Romanist superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which

brought about the Reformation.

SECTION XXXVI. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of

adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France

and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its

destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the

heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he

injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one

of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. It

may be a serious question how far the Pausing of the Reformation has

been a consequence of this error.

The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This

rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a

return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for

Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In

Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in

Architecture by Sansovino and Palladio.

SECTION XXXVII. Instant degradation followed in every direction,--a

flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then

perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the

representations of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous

under the treatment of men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs

without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity,

gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic

affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and

lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of

landscape [Footnote: Appendix II, "Renaissance Landscape."] gradually

usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into

prurient pedantry,--the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the

confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and

Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of

besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and

ditchwater. And thus Christianity and morality, courage, and intellect,

and art all crumbling together into one wreck, we are hurried on to the

fall of Italy, the revolution in France, and the condition of art in

England (saved by her Protestantism from severer penalty) in the time of

George II.

SECTION XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done

anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape

painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is

as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi,

and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no

serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their

works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very

slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor

mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.

Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the

magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by

men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino,

Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its

influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons

are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number regard

it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with architecture,

and have at some time of their lives serious business with it. It does

not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in

buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should

lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building. Nor

is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which we have to

regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in it partly

the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of modern

times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one destroying

the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our schools

and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass through

them.

Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most

corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre

of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline

the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of

the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in

the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation,

and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude

than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the

grave.

SECTION XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that

effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance.

Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere

else. This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay.

I shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader

with successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of

the earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features

with those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and

pause, in the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as

I have made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon

two distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by

particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the

builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be

bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite

in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of

the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may

be immediately useful in fixing in the reader's mind the epoch above

indicated for the commencement of decline.

SECTION XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above

attached to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The

tomb of that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of

the same general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the

period, and it is one of the last which retains it. The classical

element enters largely into its details, but the feeling of the whole is

as yet unaffected. Like all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is

a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure above, and this figure is a

faithful but tender portrait, wrought as far as it can be without

painfulness, of the doge as he lay in death. He wears his ducal robe and

bonnet--his head is laid slightly aside upon his pillow--his hands are

simply crossed as they fall. The face is emaciated, the features large,

but so pure and lordly in their natural chiselling, that they must have

looked like marble even in their animation. They are deeply worn away by

thought and death; the veins on the temples branched and starting; the

skin gathered in sharp folds; the brow high-arched and shaggy; the

eye-ball magnificently large; the curve of the lips just veiled by the

light mustache at the side; the beard short, double, and sharp-pointed:

all noble and quiet; the white sepulchral dust marking like light the

stern angles of the cheek and brow.

This tomb was sculptured in 1424, and is thus described by one of the

most intelligent of the recent writers who represent the popular feeling

respecting Venetian art.

"Of the Italian school is also the rich but ugly (ricco ma non

bel) sarcophagus in which repose the ashes of Tomaso Mocenigo.

It may be called one of the last links which connect the

declining art of the Middle Ages with that of the Renaissance,

which was in its rise. We will not stay to particularize the

defects of each of the seven figures of the front and sides,

which represent the cardinal and theological virtues; nor will

we make any remarks upon those which stand in the niches above

the pavilion, because we consider them unworthy both of the age

and reputation of the Florentine school, which was then with

reason considered the most notable in Italy." [Footnote:

Selvatico, "Architettura di Venezia," p. 147.]

It is well, indeed, not to pause over these defects; but it might have

been better to have paused a moment beside that noble image of a king's

mortality.

SECTION XLI. In the choir of the same church, St. Giov. and Paolo, is

another tomb, that of the Doge Andrea Vendramin. This doge died in 1478,

after a short reign of two years, the most disastrous in the annals of

Venice. He died of a pestilence which followed the ravage of the Turks,

carried to the shores of the lagoons. He died, leaving Venice disgraced

by sea and land, with the smoke of hostile devastation rising in the

blue distances of Friuli; and there was raised to him the most costly

tomb ever bestowed on her monarchs.

SECTION XLII. If the writer above quoted was cold beside the statue of

one of the fathers of his country, he atones for it by his eloquence

beside the tomb of the Vendramin. I must not spoil the force of Italian

superlative by translation.

"Quando si guarda a quella corretta eleganza di profili e di

proporzioni, a quella squisitezza d'ornamenti, a quel certo

sapore antico che senza ombra d' imitazione traspareda tutta l'

opera"--&c. "Sopra ornatissimo zoccolo fornito di squisiti

intagli s' alza uno stylobate"--&c. "Sotto le colonne, il

predetto stilobate si muta leggiadramente in piedistallo, poi

con bella novita di pensiero e di effetto va coronato da un

fregio il piu gentile che veder si possa"--&c. "Non puossi

lasciar senza un cenno l' _arca dove_ sta chiuso il doge;

capo lavoro di pensiero e di esecuzione," etc.

There are two pages and a half of closely printed praise, of which the

above specimens may suffice; but there is not a word of the statue of

the dead from beginning to end. I am myself in the habit of considering

this rather an important part of a tomb, and I was especially interested

in it here, because Selvatico only echoes the praise of thousands. It is

unanimously declared the chef d'oeuvre of Renaissance sepulchral work,

and pronounced by Cicognara (also quoted by Selvatico).

"Il vertice a cui l'arti Veneziane si spinsero col ministero del

scalpello,"--"The very culminating point to which the Venetian

arts attained by ministry of the chisel."

To this culminating point, therefore, covered with dust and cobwebs, I

attained, as I did to every tomb of importance in Venice, by the

ministry of such ancient ladders as were to be found in the sacristan's

keeping. I was struck at first by the excessive awkwardness and want of

feeling in the fall of the hand towards the spectator, for it is thrown

off the middle of the body in order to show its fine cutting. Now the

Mocenigo hand, severe and even stiff in its articulations, has its veins

finely drawn, its sculptor having justly felt that the delicacy of the

veining expresses alike dignity and age and birth. The Vendramin hand is

far more laboriously cut, but its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes

us feel that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for

it has been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the

joints. Such as the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought

it had been broken off, but, on clearing away the dust, I saw the

wretched effigy had only _one_ hand, and was a mere block on the

inner side. The face, heavy and disagreeable in its features, is made

monstrous by its semi-sculpture. One side of the forehead is wrinkled

elaborately, the other left smooth; one side only of the doge's cap is

chased; one cheek only is finished, and the other blocked out and

distorted besides; finally, the ermine robe, which is elaborately

imitated to its utmost lock of hair and of ground hair on the one side,

is blocked out only on the other: it having been supposed throughout the

work that the effigy was only to be seen from below, and from one side.

SECTION XLIII. It was indeed to be seen by nearly every one; and I do

not blame--I should, on the contrary, have praised--the sculptor for

regulating his treatment of it by its position; if that treatment had

not involved, first, dishonesty, in giving only half a face, a monstrous

mask, when we demanded true portraiture of the dead; and, secondly, such

utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an extreme of

intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his breast,

could have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old man's

countenance--unmajestic once, indeed, but at least sanctified by the

solemnities of death--could have stayed his hand, as he reached the bend

of the grey forehead, and measured out the last veins of it at so much

the zecchin.

I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much

talent should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this

base and senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation

of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a

pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called

chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling

on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea

by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.

But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This

lying monument to a dishonored doge, this culminating pride of the

Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in

its testimony to the character of its sculptor. _He was banished from

Venice for forgery_ in 1487. [Footnote: Selvatico, p. 221.]

SECTION XLIV. I have more to say about this convict's work hereafter;

but I pass at present, to the second, slighter, but yet more interesting

piece of evidence, which I promised.

The ducal palace has two principal façades; one towards the sea, the

other towards the Piazzetta. The seaward side, and, as far as the

seventh main arch inclusive, the Piazzetta side, is work of the early

part of the fourteenth century, some of it perhaps even earlier; while

the rest of the Piazzetta side is of the fifteenth. The difference in

age has been gravely disputed by the Venetian antiquaries, who have

examined many documents on the subject, and quoted some which they never

examined. I have myself collated most of the written documents, and one

document more, to which the Venetian antiquaries never thought of

referring,--the masonry of the palace itself.

SECTION XLV. That masonry changes at the centre of the eighth arch from

the sea angle on the Piazzetta side. It has been of comparatively small

stones up to that point; the fifteenth century work instantly begins

with larger stones, "brought from Istria, a hundred miles away."

[Footnote: The older work is of Istrian stone also, but of different

quality.] The ninth shaft from the sea in the lower arcade, and the

seventeenth, which is above it, in the upper arcade, commence the series

of fifteenth century shafts. These two are somewhat thicker than the

others, and carry the party-wall of the Sala del Scrutinio. Now observe,

reader. The face of the palace, from this point to the Porta della

Carta, was built at the instance of that noble Doge Mocenigo beside

whose tomb you have been standing; at his instance, and in the beginning

of the reign of his successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This

is not disputed; it is only disputed that the sea façade is earlier; of

which, however, the proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible:

for not only the masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower

shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and

lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea façade

being purely Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena

Chapel at Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is

Renaissance-Classic: and the lions' heads between the arches change at

the same point. And there are a multitude of other evidences in the

statues of the angels, with which I shall not at present trouble the

reader.

SECTION XLVI. Now, the architect who built under Foscari, in 1424

(remember my date for the decline of Venice, 1418), was obliged to

follow the principal forms of the older palace. But he had not the wit

to invent new capitals in the same style; he therefore clumsily copied

the old ones. The palace has seventeen main arches on the sea façade,

eighteen on the Piazzetta side, which in all are of course carried by

thirty-six pillars; and these pillars I shall always number from right

to left, from the angle of the palace at the Ponte della Paglia to that

next the Porta della Carta. I number them in this succession, because I

thus have the earliest shafts first numbered. So counted, the 1st, the

18th, and the 36th, are the great supports of the angles of the palace;

and the first of the fifteenth century series, being, as above stated,

the 9th from the sea on the Piazzetta side, is the 26th of the entire

series, and will always in future be so numbered, so that all numbers

above twenty-six indicate fifteenth century work, and all below it,

fourteenth century, with some exceptional cases of restoration.

Then the copied capitals are: the 28th, copied from the 7th; the 29th,

from the 9th; the 30th, from the 10th; the 31st, from the 8th; the 33d,

from the 12th; and the 34th, from the 11th; the others being dull

inventions of the 15th century, except the 36th; which is very nobly

designed.

SECTION XLVII. The capitals thus selected from the earlier portion of

the palace for imitation, together with the rest, will be accurately

described hereafter; the point I have here to notice is in the copy of

the ninth capital, which was decorated (being, like the rest, octagonal)

with figures of the eight Virtues:--Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice,

Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it

Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are

somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain

every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples

(perhaps loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his

arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears

open a lion's jaws; Faith lays her hand on her breast, as she beholds

the Cross; and Hope is praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging

from sunbeams--the hand of God (according to that of Revelations, "The

Lord God giveth them light"); and the inscription above is, "Spes optima

in Deo."

SECTION XLVIII. This design, then, is, rudely and with imperfect

chiselling, imitated by the fifteenth century workmen: the Virtues have

lost their hard features and living expression; they have now all got

Roman noses, and have had their hair curled. Their actions and emblems

are, however, preserved until we come to Hope: she is still praying, but

she is praying to the sun only: _The hand of God is gone_.

Is not this a curious and striking type of the spirit which had then

become dominant in the world, forgetting to see God's hand in the light

He gave; so that in the issue, when the light opened into the

Reformation on the one side, and into full knowledge of ancient

literature on the other, the one was arrested and the other perverted?

SECTION XLIX. Such is the nature of the accidental evidence on which I

shall depend for the proof of the inferiority of character in the

Renaissance workmen. But the proof of the inferiority of the work itself

is not so easy, for in this I have to appeal to judgments which the

Renaissance work has itself distorted. I felt this difficulty very

forcibly as I read a slight review of my former work, "The Seven Lamps,"

in "The Architect:" the writer noticed my constant praise of St. Mark's:

"Mr. Ruskin thinks it a very beautiful building! We," said the

Architect, "think it a very ugly building." I was not surprised at the

difference of opinion, but at the thing being considered so completely a

subject of opinion. My opponents in matters of painting always assume

that there _is_ such a thing as a law of right, and that I do not

understand it: but my architectural adversaries appeal to no law, they

simply set their opinion against mine; and indeed there is no law at

present to which either they or I can appeal. No man can speak with

rational decision of the merits or demerits of buildings: he may with

obstinacy; he may with resolved adherence to previous prejudices; but

never as if the matter could be otherwise decided than by a majority of

votes, or pertinacity of partisanship. I had always, however, a clear

conviction that there _was_ a law in this matter: that good

architecture might be indisputably discerned and divided from the bad;

that the opposition in their very nature and essence was clearly

visible; and that we were all of us just as unwise in disputing about

the matter without reference to principle, as we should be for debating

about the genuineness of a coin, without ringing it. I felt also assured

that this law must be universal if it were conclusive; that it must

enable us to reject all foolish and base work, and to accept all noble

and wise work, without reference to style or national feeling; that it

must sanction the design of all truly great nations and times, Gothic or

Greek or Arab; that it must cast off and reprobate the design of all

foolish nations and times, Chinese or Mexican, or modern European: and

that it must be easily applicable to all possible architectural

inventions of human mind. I set myself, therefore, to establish such a

law, in full belief that men are intended, without excessive difficulty,

and by use of their general common sense, to know good things from bad;

and that it is only because they will not be at the pains required for

the discernment, that the world is so widely encumbered with forgeries

and basenesses. I found the work simpler than I had hoped; the

reasonable things ranged themselves in the order I required, and the

foolish things fell aside, and took themselves away so soon as they were

looked in the face. I had then, with respect to Venetian architecture,

the choice, either to establish each division of law in a separate form,

as I came to the features with which it was concerned, or else to ask

the reader's patience, while I followed out the general inquiry first,

and determined with him a code of right and wrong, to which we might

together make retrospective appeal. I thought this the best, though

perhaps the dullest way; and in these first following pages I have

therefore endeavored to arrange those foundations of criticism, on which

I shall rest in my account of Venetian architecture, in a form clear and

simple enough to be intelligible even to those who never thought of

architecture before. To those who have, much of what is stated in them

will be well known or self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a

simplicity on which the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From

that which appears a mere truism when first stated, they will find very

singular consequences sometimes following,--consequences altogether

unexpected, and of considerable importance; I will not pause here to

dwell on their importance, nor on that of the thing itself to be done;

for I believe most readers will at once admit the value of a criterion

of right and wrong in so practical and costly an art as architecture,

and will be apt rather to doubt the possibility of its attainment than

dispute its usefulness if attained. I invite them, therefore, to a fair

trial, being certain that even if I should fail in my main purpose, and

be unable to induce in my reader the confidence of judgment I desire, I

shall at least receive his thanks for the suggestion of consistent

reasons, which may determine hesitating choice, or justify involuntary

preference. And if I should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of

Venice touchstones, and detecting, by the mouldering of her marble,

poison more subtle than ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal;

and if thus I am enabled to show the baseness of the schools of

architecture and nearly every other art, which have for three centuries

been predominant in Europe, I believe the result of the inquiry may be

serviceable for proof of a more vital truth than any at which I have

hitherto hinted. For observe: I said the Protestant had despised the

arts, and the Rationalist corrupted them. But what has the Romanist done

meanwhile? He boasts that it was the papacy which raised the arts; why

could it not support them when it was left to its own strength? How came

it to yield to Classicalism which was based on infidelity, and to oppose

no barrier to innovations, which have reduced the once faithfully

conceived imagery of its worship to stage decoration? [Footnote:

Appendix XII., "Romanist Modern Art."] Shall we not rather find that

Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown itself

capable of a single great conception since the separation of

Protestantism from its side? [Footnote: Perfectly true: but the whole

vital value of the truth was lost by my sectarian ignorance.

Protestantism (so far as it was still Christianity, and did not consist

merely in maintaining one's own opinion for gospel) could not separate

itself from the Catholic Church. The so-called Catholics became

themselves sectarians and heretics in casting them out; and Europe was

turned into a mere cockpit, of the theft and fury of unchristian men of

both parties; while innocent and silent on the hills and fields, God's

people in neglected peace, everywhere and for ever Catholics, lived and

died.] So long as, corrupt though it might be, no clear witness had been

borne against it, so that it still included in its ranks a vast number of

faithful Christians, so long its arts were noble. But the witness was

borne--the error made apparent; and Rome, refusing to hear the testimony

or forsake the falsehood, has been struck from that instant with an

intellectual palsy, which has not only incapacitated her from any further

use of the arts which once were her ministers, but has made her worship

the shame of its own shrines, and her worshippers their destroyers. Come,

then, if truths such as these are worth our thoughts; come, and let us

know, before we enter the streets of the Sea city, whether we are indeed

to submit ourselves to their undistinguished enchantment, and to look

upon the last changes which were wrought on the lifted forms of her

palaces, as we should on the capricious towering of summer clouds in the

sunset, ere they sank into the deep of night; or, whether, rather, we

shall not behold in the brightness of their accumulated marble, pages on

which the sentence of her luxury was to be written until the waves should

efface it, as they fulfilled--"God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished

it."

CHAPTER II.

[FIRST OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]

THE THRONE.

SECTION I. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in

which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that

toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the

countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of

the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had

surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest,

scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the

long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for

the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of

sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of

the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men,

an equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to

be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive

halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,

there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly

cherished by the traveller than that which, as I endeavored to describe

in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as

his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but

that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some

slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are

far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy;

but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than

atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the

midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the

mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast

sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the

north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the

east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black

weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal,

under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the

ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue,

soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps

beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our

own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and

changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun

declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly

named "St. George of the Seaweed." As the boat drew nearer to the city,

the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one

long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and

willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua

rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage

of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended

themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the

craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole

horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing

through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back

into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away

eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty

fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of

evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea,

until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer

burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it

magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the

gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were

reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not

through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two

rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight

opened the long ranges of columned palaces,--each with its black boat

moored at the portal,--each with its image cast down, beneath its feet,

upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of

rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the

shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the

palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so

adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent;

when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the

gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," [Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's

Cry."] struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the

mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of

the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the

boat's side, and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of

silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its

sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,

[Footnote: Appendix II, "Our Lady of Salvation."] it was no marvel that

the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene

so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its

history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her

existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the

fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the

mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that

all which in nature was wild or merciless,--Time and Decay, as well as

the waves and tempests,--had been won to adorn her instead of to

destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which

seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well

as of the sea.

SECTION II. And although the last few eventful years, fraught with

change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their

influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the

noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only

by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and

though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated

ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried

traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has

been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin,

and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are

little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the

imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the

importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and

disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so

surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there

must be no permission during the task which is before us. The impotent

feeling of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may

indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which

they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from

the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their

own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are

in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the

objects of which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern

fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of

decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into

dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow

deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the

centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever

saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless

interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his

great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty

years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city

have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries,

that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their

tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the

Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the

novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of

the Church of La Salute,--the mighty Doges would not know in what spot

of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the

great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs

had been brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of

_their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the

delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court,

and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have

sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail

over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth,

and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous

a thousand-fold than that which now exists, yet not created in the

day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built

by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of

nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped

by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the

true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and

trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long

denied her dominion.

SECTION III. When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no

feature by which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange

sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and the Apennines, and

enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain

upon itself causes a vast difference in the character of the

distribution of its débris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and

sediment which the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the

plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here

and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm

substrata to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which

descend from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern

slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain

bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks

out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain

washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of

the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky

barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which

continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of

the ruins of ages.

SECTION IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by

insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which

appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually;

the main fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the

Po and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment

to the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly

expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part

of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of

brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these

same pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to

check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona. The

finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the

rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however

pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of

the great chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay before

they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown

down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the

eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of course builds

forward the fastest; on each side of it, north and south, there is a

tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less liable to rapid

change than the delta of the central river. In one of these tracts is

built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE.

SECTION V. What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this

great belt of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place

to inquire. It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the

Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of

from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided

into long islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank

and the true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and

other rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the

neighborhood of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most

places of a foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at

low tide, but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding

channels, from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to

the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets,

consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to

be built upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the

contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low

water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of

seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance

by the confluence of several large river channels towards one of the

openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a

clouded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which

appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at different

periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according to their

size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents and

churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and

encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the

metropolis.

SECTION VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet

(varying considerably with the seasons; [Footnote: Appendix III, "Tides

of Venice."]) but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause

continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a

reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land

is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the

form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages:

there is a channel, some three miles wide, between the city and the

mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy

breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic,

but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city's

having been built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its

true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of

piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in

spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the

quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance

before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But

the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty

inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and

at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark

plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches

of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of

the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the

fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five

feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow

the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea

water like the ruts upon a. wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes

upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed

that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to

and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is

often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of higher

ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what

it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the

windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the

melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of

the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls

and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright

investiture and, sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the

waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness

beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor

and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the

tideless pools, or the seabirds flit from their margins with a

questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the

horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for

his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the

sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children

were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and

yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let

it be remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things

which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole

existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or

compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the

sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would

again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had

stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of

the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and

bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in other

parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have

become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the

tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the

water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible:

even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in

landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps: and the

highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance

halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood

and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water,

a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of

water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily

intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city

would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the

peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.

SECTION VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast

between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the

romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he

have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the

instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the

wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been

permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers

into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of

the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have

understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the

void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand!

How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us

most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then

in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how

little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy

margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among

their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and _the only preparation

possible_, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden

clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white

scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather

and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the

East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendor.

CHAPTER III.

[SECOND OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]

TORCELLO.

SECTION I. Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which

near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a

higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass,

raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow

creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for

some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburnt weeds

whitened with webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool

beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On

this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic

type, which if we ascend towards evening (and there are none to hinder

us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we

may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of

ours. Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid

ashen gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and

purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted

sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming

hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic

mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of

space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its

level gloom. To the very horizon, on the north-east; but, to the north

and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it,

and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched

with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at

momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bars of sand; to the

south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and

pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and

almost beneath our feet, on the same field which sustains the tower we

gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them little larger than

cottages (though built of stone, and one adorned by a quaint belfry),

the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more than

the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable

church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see

little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the

sunlight separates in one glowing mass from the green field beneath and

gray moor beyond. There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor

any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie like a little

company of ships becalmed on a far-away sea.

SECTION II. Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches

of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather,

there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set

shapes of clustered palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the

southern sky.

Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood,--TORCELLO

and VENICE.

Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this

day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances

of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires

mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices

mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames

rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of its

people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the

paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they

left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of

the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending

up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the

temple of their ancient worship. Let us go down into that little space

of meadow land.

SECTION III. The inlet which runs nearest to the base of the campanile

is not that by which Torcello is commonly approached. Another, somewhat

broader, and overhung by alder copse, winds out of the main channel of

the lagoon up to the very edge of the little meadow which was once the

Piazza of the city, and there, stayed by a few grey stones which present

some semblance of a quay, forms its boundary at one extremity. Hardly

larger than an ordinary English farmyard, and roughly enclosed on each

side by broken palings and hedges of honeysuckle and briar, the narrow

field retires from the water's edge, traversed by a scarcely traceable

footpath, for some forty or fifty paces, and then expanding into the

form of a small square, with buildings on three sides of it, the fourth

being that which opens to the water. Two of these, that on our left and

that in front of us as we approach from the canal, are so small that

they might well be taken for the out-houses of the farm, though the

first is a conventual building, and the other aspires to the title of

the "Palazzo publico," both dating as far back as the beginning of the

fourteenth century; the third, the octagonal church of Santa Fosca, is

far more ancient than either, yet hardly on a larger scale. Though the

pillars of the portico which surrounds it are of pure Greek marble, and

their capitals are enriched with delicate sculpture, they, and the

arches they sustain, together only raise the roof to the height of a

cattle-shed; and the first strong impression which the spectator

receives from the whole scene is, that whatever sin it may have been

which has on this spot been visited with so utter a desolation, it could

not at least have been ambition. Nor will this impression be diminished

as we approach, or enter, the larger church to which the whole group of

building is subordinate. It has evidently been built by men in flight

and distress, [Footnote: Appendix IV, "Date of the Duomo of Torcello."]

who sought in the hurried erection of their Island church such a shelter

for their earnest and sorrowful worship as, on the one hand, could not

attract the eyes of their enemies by its splendor, and yet, on the

other, might not awaken too bitter feelings by its contrast with the

churches which they had seen destroyed.

There is visible everywhere a simple and tender effort to recover some

of the form of the temples which they had loved, and to do honor to God

by that which they were erecting, while distress and humiliation

prevented the desire, and prudence precluded the admission, either of

luxury of ornament or magnificence of plan. The exterior is absolutely

devoid of decoration, with the exception only of the western entrance

and the lateral door, of which the former has carved sideposts and

architrave, and the latter, crosses of rich sculpture; while the massy

stone shutters of the windows, turning on huge rings of stone, which

answer the double purpose of stanchions and brackets, cause the whole

building rather to resemble a refuge from Alpine storm than the

cathedral of a populous city; and, internally, the two solemn mosaics of

the eastern and western extremities,--one representing the Last

Judgment, the other the Madonna, her tears falling as her hands are

raised to bless,--and the noble range of pillars which enclose the space

between, terminated by the high throne for the pastor and the

semicircular raised seats for the superior clergy, are expressive at

once of the deep sorrow and the sacred courage of men who had no home

left them upon earth, but who looked for one to come, of men "persecuted

but not forsaken, cast down but not destroyed."

SECTION IV. For observe this choice of subjects. It is indeed possible

that the walls of the nave and aisles, which are now whitewashed, may

have been covered with fresco or mosaic, and thus have supplied a series

of subjects, on the choice of which we cannot speculate. I do not,

however, find record of the destruction of any such works; and I am

rather inclined to believe that at any rate the central division of the

building was originally, decorated, as it is now, simply by mosaics

representing Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles, at one extremity, and

Christ coming to judgment at the other. And if so, I repeat, observe the

significance of this choice. Most other early churches are covered with

imagery sufficiently suggestive of the vivid interest of the builders in

the history and occupations of the world. Symbols or representations of

political events, portraits of living persons, and sculptures of

satirical, grotesque, or trivial subjects are of constant occurrence,

mingled with the more strictly appointed representations of scriptural

or ecclesiastical history; but at Torcello even these usual, and one

should have thought almost necessary, successions of Bible events do not

appear. The mind of the worshipper was fixed entirely upon two great

facts, to him the most precious of all facts,--the present mercy of

Christ to His Church, and His future coming to judge the world. That

Christ's mercy was, at this period, supposed chiefly to be attainable

through the pleading of the Virgin, and that therefore beneath the

figure of the Redeemer is seen that of the weeping Madonna in the act of

intercession, may indeed be matter of sorrow to the Protestant beholder,

but ought not to blind him to the earnestness and singleness of the

faith with which these men sought their sea-solitudes; not in hope of

founding new dynasties, or entering upon new epochs of prosperity, but

only to humble themselves before God, and to pray that in His infinite

mercy He would hasten the time when the sea should give up the dead

which were in it, and Death and Hell give up the dead which were in

them, and when they might enter into the better kingdom, "where the

wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest."

SECTION V. Nor were the strength and elasticity of their minds, even in

the least matters, diminished by thus looking forward to the close of

all things. On the contrary, nothing is more remarkable than the finish

and beauty of all the portions of the building, which seem to have been

actually executed for the place they occupy in the present structure.

The rudest are those which they brought with them from the mainland; the

best and most beautiful, those which appear to have been carved for

their island church: of these, the new capitals already noticed, and the

exquisite panel ornaments of the chancel screen, are the most

conspicuous; the latter form a low wall across the church between the

six small shafts whose places are seen in the plan, and serve to enclose

a space raised two steps above the level of the nave, destined for the

singers, and indicated also in the plan by an open line _a b c d_. The

bas-reliefs on this low screen are groups of peacocks and lions, two

face to face on each panel, rich and fantastic beyond description,

though not expressive of very accurate knowledge either of leonine or

pavonine forms. And it is not until we pass to the back of the stair of

the pulpit, which is connected with the northern extremity of this

screen, that we find evidence of the haste with which the church was

constructed.

SECTION VI. The pulpit, however, is not among the least noticeable of

its features. It is sustained on the four small detached shafts marked

at _p_ in the plan, between the two pillars at the north side of

the screen; both pillars and pulpit studiously plain, while the

staircase which ascends to it is a compact mass of masonry (shaded in

the plan), faced by carved slabs of marble; the parapet of the staircase

being also formed of solid blocks like paving-stones, lightened by rich,

but not deep, exterior carving. Now these blocks, or at least those

which adorn the staircase towards the aisle, have been brought from the

mainland; and, being of size and shape not easily to be adjusted to the

proportions of the stair, the architect has cut out of them pieces of

the size he needed, utterly regardless of the subject or symmetry of the

original design. The pulpit is not the only place where this rough

procedure has been permitted: at the lateral door of the church are two

crosses, cut out of slabs of marble, formerly covered with rich

sculpture over their whole surfaces, of which portions are left on the

surface of the crosses; the lines of the original design being, of

course, just as arbitrarily cut by the incisions between the arms, as

the patterns upon a piece of silk which has been shaped anew. The fact

is, that in all early Romanesque work, large surfaces are covered with

sculpture for the sake of enrichment only; sculpture which indeed had

always meaning, because it was easier for the sculptor to work with some

chain of thought to guide his chisel, than without any; but it was not

always intended, or at least not always hoped, that this chain of

thought might be traced by the spectator. All that was proposed appears

to have been the enrichment of surface, so as to make it delightful to

the eye; and this being once understood, a decorated piece of marble

became to the architect just what a piece of lace or embroidery is to a

dressmaker, who takes of it such portions as she may require, with

little regard to the places where the patterns are divided. And though

it may appear, at first sight, that the procedure is indicative of

bluntness and rudeness of feeling,--we may perceive, upon reflection,

that it may also indicate the redundance of power which sets little

price upon its own exertion. When a barbarous nation builds its

fortress-walls out of fragments of the refined architecture it has

overthrown, we can read nothing but its savageness in the vestiges of

art which may thus chance to have been preserved; but when the new work

is equal, if not superior, in execution, to the pieces of the older art

which are associated with it, we may justly conclude that the rough

treatment to which the latter have been subjected is rather a sign of

the hope of doing better things, than of want of feeling for those

already accomplished. And, in general, this careless fitting of ornament

is, in very truth, an evidence of life in the school of builders, and of

their making a due distinction between work which is to be used for

architectural effect, and work which is to possess an abstract

perfection; and it commonly shows also that the exertion of design is so

easy to them, and their fertility so inexhaustible, that they feel no

remorse in using somewhat injuriously what they can replace with so

slight an effort.

SECTION VII. It appears however questionable in the present instance,

whether, if the marbles had not been carved to his hand, the architect

would have taken the trouble to enrich them. For the execution of the

rest of the pulpit is studiously simple, and it is in this respect that

its design possesses, it seems to me, an interest to the religious

spectator greater than he will take in any other portion of the

building. It is supported, as I said, on a group of four slender shafts;

itself of a slightly oval form, extending nearly from one pillar of the

nave to the next, so as to give the preacher free room for the action of

the entire person, which always gives an unaffected impressiveness to

the eloquence of the southern nations. In the centre of its curved

front, a small bracket and detached shaft sustain the projection of a

narrow marble desk (occupying the place of a cushion in a modern

pulpit), which is hollowed out into a shallow curve on the upper

surface, leaving a ledge at the bottom of the slab, so that a book laid

upon it, or rather into it, settles itself there, opening as if by

instinct, but without the least chance of slipping to the side, or in

any way moving beneath the preacher's hands. Six balls, or rather

almonds, of purple marble veined with white are set round the edge of

the pulpit, and form its only decoration. Perfectly graceful, but severe

and almost cold in its simplicity, built for permanence and service, so

that no single member, no stone of it, could be spared, and yet all are

firm and uninjured as when they were first set together, it stands in

venerable contrast both with the fantastic pulpits of mediaeval

cathedrals and with the rich furniture of those of our modern churches.

It is worth while pausing for a moment to consider how far the manner of

decorating a pulpit may have influence on the efficiency of its service,

and whether our modern treatment of this, to us all-important, feature

of a church be the best possible. [Footnote: Appendix V., "Modern

Pulpits."]

SECTION VIII. When the sermon is good we need not much concern ourselves

about the form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot always be good; and I

believe that the temper in which the congregation set themselves to

listen may be in some degree modified by their perception of fitness or

unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in the disposition of the place

appointed for the speaker,--not to the same degree, but somewhat in the

same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or expression,

irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe, therefore, in the

first place, that pulpits ought never to be highly decorated; the

speaker is apt to look mean or diminutive if the pulpit is either on a

very large scale or covered with splendid ornament, and if the interest

of the sermon should flag the mind is instantly tempted to wander. I

have observed that in almost all cathedrals, when the pulpits are

peculiarly magnificent, sermons are not often preached from them; but

rather, and especially if for any important purpose, from some temporary

erection in other parts of the building:--and though this may often be

done because the architect has consulted the effect upon the eye more

than the convenience of the ear in the placing of his larger pulpit, I

think it also proceeds in some measure from a natural dislike in the

preacher to match himself with the magnificence of the rostrum, lest the

sermon should not be thought worthy of the place. Yet this will rather

hold of the colossal sculptures, and pyramids of fantastic tracery which

encumber the pulpits of Flemish and German churches, than of the

delicate mosaics and ivory-like carving of the Romanesque basilicas, for

when the form is kept simple, much loveliness of color and costliness of

work may be introduced, and yet the speaker not be thrown into the shade

by them.

SECTION IX. But, in the second place, whatever ornaments we admit ought

clearly to be of a chaste, grave, and noble kind; and what furniture we

employ, evidently more for the honoring of God's word than for the ease

of the preacher. For there are two ways of regarding a sermon, either as

a human composition, or a Divine message. If we look upon it entirely as

the first, and require our clergymen to finish it with their utmost care

and learning, for our better delight whether of ear or intellect, we

shall necessarily be led to expect much formality and stateliness in its

delivery, and to think that all is not well if the pulpit have not a

golden fringe round it, and a goodly cushion in front of it, and if the

sermon be not fairly written in a black book, to be smoothed upon the

cushion in a majestic manner before beginning; all this we shall duly

come to expect: but we shall at the same time consider the treatise thus

prepared as something to which it is our duty to listen without

restlessness for half an hour or three quarters, but which, when that

duty has been decorously performed, we may dismiss from our minds in

happy confidence of being provided with another when next it shall be

necessary. But if once we begin to regard the preacher, whatever his

faults, as a man sent with a message to us, which it is a matter of life

or death whether we hear or refuse; if we look upon him as set in charge

over many spirits in danger of ruin, and having allowed to him but an

hour or two in the seven days to speak to them; if we make some endeavor

to conceive how precious these hours ought to be to him, a small vantage

on the side of God after his flock have been exposed for six days

together to the full weight of the world's temptation, and he has been

forced to watch the thorn and the thistle springing in their hearts, and

to see what wheat had been scattered there snatched from the wayside by

this wild bird and the other, and at last, when breathless and weary

with the week's labor they give him this interval of imperfect and

languid hearing, he has but thirty minutes to get at the separate hearts

of a thousand men, to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame

them for all their sins, to warn them of all their dangers, to try by

this way and that to stir the hard fastenings of those doors where the

Master himself has stood and knocked yet none opened, and to call at the

openings of those dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth

her hands and no man regarded,--thirty minutes to raise the dead

in,--let us but once understand and feel this, and we shall look with

changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furniture about the place from

which the message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes

upon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains

recorded in condemnation, perhaps against the utterer and listener

alike, but assuredly against one of them. We shall not so easily bear

with the silk and gold upon the seat of judgment, nor with ornament of

oratory in the mouth of the messenger: we shall wish that his words may

be simple, even when they are sweetest, and the place from which he

speaks like a marble rock in the desert, about which the people have

gathered in their thirst.

SECTION X. But the severity which is so marked in the pulpit at Torcello

is still more striking in the raised seats and episcopal throne which

occupy the curve of the apse. The arrangement at first somewhat recalls

to the mind that of the Roman amphitheatres; the flight of steps which

lead up to the central throne divides the curve of the continuous steps

or seats (it appears in the first three ranges questionable which were

intended, for they seem too high for the one, and too low and close for

the other), exactly as in an amphitheatre the stairs for access

intersect the sweeping ranges of seats. But in the very rudeness of this

arrangement, and especially in the want of all appliances of comfort

(for the whole is of marble, and the arms of the central throne are not

for convenience, but for distinction, and to separate it more

conspicuously from the undivided seats), there is a dignity which no

furniture of stalls nor carving of canopies ever could attain, and well

worth the contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly significative

of an episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was

never disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter

absence of any expression either of pride or self-indulgence.

SECTION XI. But there is one more circumstance which we ought to

remember as giving peculiar significance to the position which the

episcopal throne occupies in this island church, namely, that in the

minds of all early Christians the Church itself was most frequently

symbolized under the image of a ship, of which the bishop was the pilot.

Consider the force which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of

men to whom the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in the

midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the

eight souls were saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man

had become as broad as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who

saw the actual and literal edifice of the Church raked up, itself like

an ark in the midst of the waters. No marvel if with the surf of the

Adriatic rolling between them and the shores of their birth, from which

they were separated for ever, they should have looked upon each other as

the disciples did when the storm came down on the Tiberias Lake, and

have yielded ready and loving obedience to those who ruled them in His

name, who had there rebuked the winds and commanded stillness to the

sea. And if the stranger would yet learn in what spirit it was that the

dominion of Venice was begun, and in what strength she went forth

conquering and to conquer, let him not seek to estimate the wealth of

her arsenals or number of her armies, nor look upon the pageantry of her

palaces, nor enter into the secrets of her councils; but let him ascend

the highest tier of the stern ledges that sweep round the altar of

Torcello, and then, looking as the pilot did of old along the marble

ribs of the goodly temple-ship, let him repeople its veined deck with

the shadows of its dead mariners, and strive to feel in himself the

strength of heart that was kindled within them, when first, after the

pillars of it had settled in the sand, and the roof of it had been

closed against the angry sky that was still reddened by the fires of

their homesteads,--first, within the shelter of its knitted walls,

amidst the murmur of the waste of waves and the beating of the wings of

the sea-birds round the rock that was strange to them,--rose that

ancient hymn, in the power of their gathered voices:

THE SEA IS HIS, AND HE MADE IT,

AND HIS HANDS PREPARED THE DRY LAND.

CHAPTER IV.

ST. MARK'S.

SECTION I. "And so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus." If as

the shores of Asia lessened upon his sight, the spirit of prophecy had

entered into the heart of the weak disciple who had turned back when his

hand was on the plough, and who had been judged, by the chiefest of

Christ's captains, unworthy thenceforward to go forth with him to the

work, [Footnote: Acts, xiii. 13; xv. 38, 39.] how wonderful would he

have thought it, that by the lion symbol in future ages he was to be

represented among men! how woful, that the war-cry of his name should so

often reanimate the rage of the soldier, on those very plains where he

himself had failed in the courage of the Christian, and so often dye

with fruitless blood that very Cypriot Sea, over whose waves, in

repentance and shame, he was following the Son of Consolation!

SECTION II. That the Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the

ninth century, there appears no sufficient reason to doubt, nor that it

was principally in consequence of their having done so, that they chose

him for their patron saint. There exists, however, a tradition that

before he went into Egypt he had founded the Church at Aquileia, and was

thus, in some sort, the first bishop of the Venetian isles and people. I

believe that this tradition stands on nearly as good grounds as that of

St. Peter having been the first bishop of Rome; [Footnote: The reader

who desires to investigate it may consult Galliciolli, "Delle Memorie

Venete" (Venice, 1795), tom. ii. p. 332, and the authorities quoted by

him.] but, as usual, it is enriched by various later additions and

embellishments, much resembling the stories told respecting the church

of Murano. Thus we find it recorded by the Santo Padre who compiled the

"Vite de' Santi spettanti alle Chiese di Venezia," [Footnote: Venice,

1761, tom. i. p. 126.] that "St. Mark having seen the people of Aquileia

well grounded in religion, and being called to Rome by St. Peter, before

setting off took with him the holy bishop Hermagoras, and went in a

small boat to the marshes of Venice. There were at that period some

houses built upon a certain high bank called Rialto, and the boat being

driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy place, when St. Mark,

snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace

be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel goes on to

foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne più veduta Città;" but the

fable is hardly ingenious enough to deserve farther relation.

SECTION III. But whether St. Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not,

St. Theodore was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be

considered as having entirely abdicated his early right, as his statue,

standing on a crocodile, still companions the winged lion on the

opposing pillar of the piazzetta. A church erected to this Saint is said

to have occupied, before the ninth century, the site of St. Mark's; and

the traveller, dazzled by the brilliancy of the great square, ought not

to leave it without endeavoring to imagine its aspect in that early

time, when it was a green field cloister-like and quiet, [Footnote: St.

Mark's Place, "partly covered by turf, and planted with a few trees; and

on account of its pleasant aspect called Brollo or Broglio, that is to

say, Garden." The canal passed through it, over which is built the

bridge of the Malpassi. Galliciolli, lib. I, cap. viii.] divided by a

small canal, with a line of trees on each side; and extending between

the two churches of St. Theodore and St. Geminian, as the little piazza,

of Torcello lies between its "palazzo" and cathedral.

SECTION IV. But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally

removed to the Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the

present one stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it, [Footnote: My

authorities for this statement are given below, in the chapter on the

Ducal Palace.] gave a very different character to the Square of St.

Mark; and fifteen years later, the acquisition of the body of the Saint,

and its deposition in the Ducal Chapel, perhaps not yet completed,

occasioned the investiture of that chapel with all possible splendor.

St. Theodore was deposed from his patronship, and his church destroyed,

to make room for the aggrandizement of the one attached to the Ducal

Palace, and thenceforward known as "St. Mark's." [Footnote: In the

Chronicles, "Sancti Marci Ducalis Cappella."]

SECTION V. This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the

Ducal Palace was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976. It was

partly rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo, on a larger scale; and

with the assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on

under successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building

being completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till

considerably later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085,

[Footnote: "To God the Lord, the glorious Virgin Annunciate, and the

Protector St. Mark."--_Corner_, p. 14. It is needless to trouble the

reader with the various authorities for the above statements: I have

consulted the best. The previous inscription once existing on the church

itself:

"Anno milleno transacto bisque trigeno

Desuper undecimo fuit facta primo,"

is no longer to be seen, and is conjectured by Corner, with much

probability, to have perished "in qualche ristauro."] according to

Sansovino and the author of the "Chiesa Ducale di S. Marco," in 1094

according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and 1096, those years

being the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I incline to the

supposition that it was soon after his accession to the throne in 1085,

though Sansovino writes, by mistake, Ordelafo instead of Vital Falier.

But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh century the great

consecration of the church took place. It was again injured by fire in

1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall of Venice there was

probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree embellish or alter

the fabric, so that few parts of it can be pronounced boldly to be of

any given date. Two periods of interference are, however, notable above

the rest: the first, that in which the Gothic school had superseded the

Byzantine towards the close of the fourteenth century, when the

pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window traceries were added to the

exterior, and the great screen, with various chapels and

tabernacle-work, to the interior; the second, when the Renaissance

school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian and Tintoret

substituted, over one half of the church, their own compositions for the

Greek mosaics with which it was originally decorated; [Footnote: Signed

Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, etc.] happily, though with no good

will, having left enough to enable us to imagine and lament what they

destroyed. Of this irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter;

meantime, I wish only to fix in the reader's mind the succession of

periods of alteration as firmly and simply as possible.

SECTION VI. We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly

stated to be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the

fourteenth, and the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no

difficulty in distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the

Byzantine; but there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how

long, during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,

additions were made to the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily

distinguished from the work of the eleventh century, being purposely

executed in the same manner. Two of the most important pieces of

evidence on this point are, a mosaic in the south transept, and another

over the northern door of the façade; the first representing the

interior, the second the exterior, of the ancient church.

SECTION VII. It has just been stated that the existing building was

consecrated by the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to

that of consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what

appears to have been one of the best arranged and most successful

impostures ever attempted by the clergy of the Romish church. The body

of St. Mark had, without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976;

but the revenues of the church depended too much upon the devotion

excited by these relics to permit the confession of their loss. The

following is the account given by Corner, and believed to this day by

the Venetians, of the pretended miracle by which it was concealed.

"After the repairs undertaken by the Doge Orseolo, the place in which

the body of the holy Evangelist rested had been altogether forgotten, so

that the Doge Vital Falier was entirely ignorant of the place of the

venerable deposit. This was no light affliction, not only to the pious

Doge, but to all the citizens and people; so that at last, moved by

confidence in the Divine mercy, they determined to implore, with prayer

and fasting, the manifestation of so great a treasure, which did not now

depend upon any human effort. A general fast being therefore proclaimed,

and a solemn procession appointed for the 25th day of June, while the

people assembled in the church interceded with God in fervent prayers

for the desired boon, they beheld, with as much amazement as joy, a

slight shaking in the marbles of a pillar (near the place where the

altar of the Cross is now), which, presently falling to the earth,

exposed to the view of the rejoicing people the chest of bronze in which

the body of the Evangelist was laid."

SECTION VIII. Of the main facts of this tale there is no doubt. They

were embellished afterwards, as usual, by many fanciful traditions; as,

for instance, that, when the sarcophagus was discovered, St. Mark

extended his hand out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers,

which he permitted a noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint

and delightful story was further invented of this ring, which I shall

not repeat here, as it is now as well known as any tale of the Arabian

Nights. But the fast and the discovery of the coffin, by whatever means

effected, are facts; and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved

mosaics of the north transept, executed very certainly not long after

the event had taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of

the Bayeux tapestry, and showing, in a conventional manner, the interior

of the church, as it then was, filled by the people, first in prayer,

then in thanksgiving, the pillar standing open before them, and the

Doge, in the midst of them, distinguished by his crimson bonnet

embroidered with gold, but more unmistakably by the inscription "Dux"

over his head, as uniformly is the case in the Bayeux tapestry, and most

other pictorial works of the period. The church is, of course, rudely

represented, and the two upper stories of it reduced to a small scale in

order to form a background to the figures; one of those bold pieces of

picture history which we in our pride of perspective, and a thousand

things besides, never dare attempt. We should have put in a column or

two of the real or perspective size, and subdued it into a vague

background: the old workman crushed the church together that he might

get it all in, up to the cupolas; and has, therefore, left us some

useful notes of its ancient form, though any one who is familiar with

the method of drawing employed at the period will not push the evidence

too far. The two pulpits are there, however, as they are at this day,

and the fringe of mosaic flowerwork which then encompassed the whole

church, but which modern restorers have destroyed, all but one fragment

still left in the south aisle. There is no attempt to represent the

other mosaics on the roof, the scale being too small to admit of their

being represented with any success; but some at least of those mosaics

had been executed at that period, and their absence in the

representation of the entire church is especially to be observed, in

order to show that we must not trust to any negative evidence in such

works. M. Lazari has rashly concluded that the central archivolt of St.

Mark's _must_ be posterior to the year 1205, because it does not

appear in the representation of the exterior of the church over the

northern door; [Footnote: Guida di Venezia, p. 6. (He is right,

however.)] but he justly observes that this mosaic (which is the other

piece of evidence we possess respecting the ancient form of the

building) cannot itself be earlier than 1205, since it represents the

bronze horses which were brought from Constantinople in that year. And

this one fact renders it very difficult to speak with confidence

respecting the date of any part of the exterior of St. Mark's; for we

have above seen that it was consecrated in the eleventh century, and yet

here is one of the most important exterior decorations assuredly

retouched, if not entirely added, in the thirteenth, although its style

would have led us to suppose it had been an original part of the fabric.

However, for all our purposes, it will be enough for the reader to

remember that the earliest parts of the building belong to the eleventh,

twelfth, and first part of the thirteenth century; the Gothic portions

to the fourteenth; some of the altars and embellishments to the

fifteenth and sixteenth; and the modern portion of the mosaics to the

seventeenth.

SECTION IX. This, however, I only wish him to recollect in order that I

may speak generally of the Byzantine architecture of St. Mark's, without

leading him to suppose the whole church to have been built and decorated

by Greek artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the

seventeenth century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to

the original fabric that the general effect is still that of a Byzantine

building; and I shall not, except when it is absolutely necessary,

direct attention to the discordant points, or weary the reader with

anatomical criticism. Whatever in St. Mark's arrests the eye, or affects

the feelings, is either Byzantine, or has been modified by Byzantine

influence; and our inquiry into its architectural merits need not

therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or arrested

by the obscurities of chronology.

SECTION X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St.

Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English

cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let

us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can

see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray

gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the

centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes

in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter,

and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails,

before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim

houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there,

and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and

small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little,

crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side;

and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of

red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show

here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister

arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral square itself, laid

out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not

uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canons' children are

walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the

grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and there

stand for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark

places between their pillars where there were statues once, and where

the fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which

has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth,

perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher up

to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades,

shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking

fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape,

and colored on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen,

melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above

that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though

they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of eddying black

points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into

invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless

birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of theirs, so

harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast

between the cliffs and sea.

SECTION XI. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of

all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its

secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense

and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the

cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who

have passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and

on all who have seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or

catching on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the

city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at the bend of the

river. And then let us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, and land

at the extremity of the Calle Lunga San Moisè, which may be considered

as there answering to the secluded street that led us to our English

cathedral gateway.

SECTION XII. We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide

where it is widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant

salesmen,--a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of

brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high

houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over head an

inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and

chimney flues pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows

with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here

and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some

inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high

over all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be,

occupying, in fact, intervals between the square stone shafts, about

eight feet high, which carry the first floors: intervals of which one is

narrow and serves as a door; the other is, in the more respectable

shops, wainscoted to the height of the counter and glazed above, but in

those of the poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares

laid on benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases

entering at the front only,--and fading away in a few feet from the

threshold into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but

which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the back

of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less pious

shop-keeper sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented with a

penny print; the more religious one has his print colored and set in a

little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a faded

flower or two on each side, and his lamp burning brilliantly. Here at

the fruiterer's, where the dark-green watermelons are heaped upon the

counter like cannon balls, the Madonna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel

leaves; but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out, and there is

nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull gleam of the studded

patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in the darkness. Next

comes a "Vendita Frittole e Liquori," where the Virgin, enthroned in a

very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf, presides over

certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be denned or

enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at the regular wineshop of the

calle, where we are offered "Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28'32," the Madonna

is in great glory, enthroned above ten or a dozen large red casks of

three-year-old vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of

Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and for the evening, when the

gondoliers will come to drink out, under her auspices, the money they

have gained during the day, she will have a whole chandelier.

SECTION XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black

Eagle, and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble,

deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of

vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its

side; and so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moisè, whence

to the entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza,

(mouth of the square), the Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first

by the frightful façade of San Moisè, which we will pause at another

time to examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near

the piazza, and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of

lounging groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through them

into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the "Bocca di Piazza," and

then we forget them all; for between those pillars there opens a great

light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of

St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field of

chequered stones; and, on each side, the countless arches prolong

themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses

that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back

into sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and

broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly

sculpture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone.

SECTION XIV. And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of

ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great

square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it

far away;--a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long

low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold,

and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great

vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of

alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,--sculpture fantastic

and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates,

and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined

together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst

of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and

leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among

the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them,

interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the

branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And

round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated

stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with

flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the

sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss"--the shadow, as

it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation,

as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with

interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of

acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the

Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of

language and of life--angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of

men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these,

another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged

with scarlet flowers,--a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts

of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden

strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with

stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break

into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes

and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore

had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid

them with coral and amethyst.

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There

is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the

restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak

upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among

the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living

plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely,

that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.

SECTION XV. And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath

it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway

of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a

countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian,

rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of

the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay,

the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats--not "of them

that sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and

caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is

almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the

middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the

Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music

jarring with the organ notes,--the march drowning the miserere, and the

sullen crowd thickening round them,--a crowd, which, if it had its will,

would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of

the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes,

unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and

unregarded children,--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of

desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with

cursing,--gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour,

clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church

porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it

continually.

That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the horror of this,

let us turn aside under the portico which looks towards the sea, and

passing round within the two massive pillars brought from St. Jean

d'Acre, we shall find the gate of the Baptistery; let us enter there.

The heavy door closes behind us instantly, and the light, and the

turbulence of the Piazzetta, are together shut out by it.

SECTION XVI. We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted, not with arches, but

with small cupolas starred with gold, and chequered with gloomy figures:

in the centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-reliefs, a small

figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single ray of light that

glances across the narrow room, dying as it falls from a window high in

the wall, and the first thing that it strikes, and the only thing that

it strikes brightly, is a tomb. We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed;

for it is like a narrow couch set beside the window, low-roofed and

curtained, so that it might seem, but that it has some height above the

pavement, to have been drawn towards the window, that the sleeper might

be wakened early;--only there are two angels who have drawn the curtain

back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look also and thank that

gentle light that rests upon his forehead for ever, and dies away upon

his breast.

The face is of a man in middle life, but there are two deep furrows

right across the forehead, dividing it like the foundations of a tower:

the height of it above is bound by the fillet of the ducal cap. The rest

of the features are singularly small and delicate, the lips sharp,

perhaps the sharpness of death being added to that of the natural lines;

but there is a sweet smile upon them, and a deep serenity upon the whole

countenance. The roof of the canopy above has been blue, filled with

stars; beneath, in the centre of the tomb on which the figure rests, is

a seated figure of the Virgin, and the border of it all around is of

flowers and soft leaves, growing rich and deep, as if in a field in

summer.

It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo, a man early great among the great of

Venice; and early lost. She chose him for her king in his 36th year; he

died ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe

half of what we know of her former fortunes.

SECTION XVII. Look round at the room in which he lies. The floor of it

is of rich mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble, and its

walls are of alabaster, but worn and shattered, and darkly stained with

age, almost a ruin,--in places the slabs of marble have fallen away

altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all

beautiful; the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands

and channelled zones of the alabaster, and the time-stains on its

translucent masses darkened into fields of rich golden brown, like the

color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it through deep sea. The light

fades away into the recess of the chamber towards the altar, and the eye

can hardly trace the lines of the bas-relief behind it of the baptism of

Christ: but on the vaulting of the roof the figures are distinct, and

there are seen upon it two great circles, one surrounded by the

"Principalities and powers in heavenly places," of which Milton has

expressed the ancient division in the single massy line,

"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,"

and around the other, the Apostles; Christ the centre of both; and upon

the walls, again and again repeated, the gaunt figure of the Baptist, in

every circumstance of his life and death; and the streams of the Jordan

running down between their cloven rocks; the axe laid to the root of a

fruitless tree that springs upon their shore. "Every tree that bringeth

not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire." Yes,

verily: to be baptized with fire, or to be cast therein; it is the

choice set before all men. The march-notes still murmur through the

grated window, and mingle with the sounding in our ears of the sentence

of judgment, which the old Greek has written on that Baptistery wall.

Venice has made her choice.

SECTION XVIII. He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her

another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him; but he

and his counsels have long been forgotten by her, the dust lies upon his

lips.

Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the place of his

rest, let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper

twilight, to which the eye must be accustomed for some moments before

the form of the building can be traced; and then there opens before us a

vast cave, hewn out into the form of a Cross, and divided into shadowy

aisles by many pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters

only through narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray

or two from some far away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts

a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall

in a thousand colors along the floor. What else there is of light is

from torches, or silver lamps, burning ceaselessly in the recesses of

the chapels; the roof sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered

with alabaster, give back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming

to the flames; and the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints

flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under

foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one

picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and

terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of

prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running

fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the pleasures

of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption;

for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always at

last to the Cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every

stonel sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes

with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its

feet; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the

church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of

the apse. And although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when

the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure

traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman standing with her eyes

raised to heaven, and the inscription above her, "Mother of God," she is

not here the presiding deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and

always, burning in the centre of the temple; and every dome and hollow

of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised

in power, or returning in judgment.

SECTION XIX. Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the

people. At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the

various shrines, and solitary worshippers scattered through the dark

places of the church, evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and,

for the most part, profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater

number of the renowned shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their

appointed prayers with wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the

step of the stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of

St. Mark's; and hardly a moment passes, from early morning to sunset, in

which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian

porch, cast itself into long abasement on the floor of the temple, and

then rising slowly with more confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss

and clasp of the arms given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the

lamps burn always in the northern aisle, leave the church, as if

comforted.

SECTION XX. But we must not hastily conclude from this that the nobler

characters of the building have at present any influence in fostering a

devotional spirit. There is distress enough in Venice to bring many to

their knees, without excitement from external imagery; and whatever

there may be in the temper of the worship offered in St. Mark's more

than can be accounted for by reference to the unhappy circumstances of

the city, is assuredly not owing either to the beauty of its

architecture or to the impressiveness of the Scripture histories

embodied in its mosaics. That it has a peculiar effect, however slight,

on the popular mind, may perhaps be safely conjectured from the number

of worshippers which it attracts, while the churches of St. Paul and the

Frari, larger in size and more central in position, are left

comparatively empty. [Footnote: The mere warmth of St. Mark's in winter,

which is much greater than that of the other two churches above named,

must, however, be taken into consideration, as one of the most efficient

causes of its being then more frequented.] But this effect is altogether

to be ascribed to its richer assemblage of those sources of influence

which address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human mind,

and which, in all ages and countries, have been more or less employed in

the support of superstition. Darkness and mystery; confused recesses of

building; artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained

with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness;

preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye; close

air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated only with religious

services, solemn music, and tangible idols or images having popular

legends attached to them,--these, the stage properties of superstition,

which have been from the beginning of the world, and must be to the end

of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or nominally

civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of apprehending the

true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St. Mark's to a degree, as

far as I know, unexampled in any other European church. The arts of the

Magus and the Brahmin are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed

Christianity; and the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be

regarded by us with no more respect than we should have considered

ourselves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshippers at

Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou. [Footnote: I said above that the larger

number of the devotees entered by the "Arabian" porch; the porch, that

is to say, on the north side of the church, remarkable for its rich

Arabian archivolt, and through which access is gained immediately to the

northern transept. The reason is, that in that transept is the chapel of

the Madonna, which has a greater attraction for the Venetians than all

the rest of the church besides. The old builders kept their images of

the Virgin subordinate to those of Christ; but modern Romanism has

retrograded from theirs, and the most glittering portions of the whole

church are the two recesses behind this lateral altar, covered with

silver hearts dedicated to the Virgin.]

SECTION XXI. Indeed, these inferior means of exciting religious emotion

were employed in the ancient Church as they are at this day, but not

employed alone. Torchlight there was, as there is now; but the

torchlight illumined Scripture histories on the walls, which every eye

traced and every heart comprehended, but which, during my whole

residence in Venice, I never saw one Venetian regard for an instant. I

never heard from any one the most languid expression of interest in any

feature of the church, or perceived the slightest evidence of their

understanding the meaning of its architecture; and while, therefore, the

English cathedral, though no longer dedicated to the kind of services

for which it was intended by its builders, and much at variance in many

of its characters with the temper of the people by whom it is now

surrounded, retains yet so much of its religious influence that no

prominent feature of its architecture can be said to exist altogether in

vain, we have in St. Mark's a building apparently still employed in the

ceremonies for which it was designed, and yet of which the impressive

attributes have altogether ceased to be comprehended by its votaries.

The beauty which it possesses is unfelt, the language it uses is

forgotten; and in the midst of the city to whose service it has so long

been consecrated, and still filled by crowds of the descendants of those

to whom it owes its magnificence; it stands, in reality, more desolate

than the ruins through which the sheep-walk passes unbroken in our

English valleys; and the writing on its marble walls is less regarded

and less powerful for the teaching of men, than the letters which the

shepherd follows with his finger, where the moss is lightest on the

tombs in the desecrated cloister.

SECTION XXII. It must therefore be altogether without reference to its

present usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and

meaning of the architecture of this marvellous building; and it can only

be after we have terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on

abstract grounds, that we can pronounce with any certainty how far the

present neglect of St. Mark's is significative of the decline of the

Venetian character, or how far this church is to be considered as the

relic of a barbarous age, incapable of attracting the admiration, or

influencing the feelings of a civilized community.

The inquiry before us is twofold. Throughout the first volume, I

carefully kept the study of _expression_ distinct from that of abstract

architectural perfection; telling the reader that in every building we

should afterwards examine, he would have first to form a judgment of its

construction and decorative merit, considering it merely as a work of

art; and then to examine farther, in what degree it fulfilled its

expressional purposes. Accordingly, we have first to judge of St. Mark's

merely as a piece of architecture, not as a church; secondly, to estimate

its fitness for its special duty as a place of worship, and the relation

in which it stands, as such, to those northern cathedrals that still

retain so much of the power over the human heart, which the Byzantine

domes appear to have lost for ever.

SECTION XXIII. In the two succeeding sections of this work, devoted

respectively to the examination of the Gothic and Renaissance buildings

in Venice, I have endeavored to analyze and state, as briefly as

possible, the true nature of each school,--first in Spirit, then in

Form. I wished to have given a similar analysis, in this section, of the

nature of Byzantine architecture; but could not make my statements

general, because I have never seen this kind of building on its native

soil. Nevertheless, in the following sketch of the principles

exemplified in St. Mark's, I believe that most of the leading features

and motives of the style will be found clearly enough distinguished to

enable the reader to judge of it with tolerable fairness, as compared

with the better known systems of European architecture in the middle

ages.

SECTION XXIV. Now the first broad characteristic of the building, and

the root nearly of every other important peculiarity in it, is its

confessed _incrustation_. It is the purest example in Italy of the

great school of architecture in which the ruling principle is the

incrustation of brick with more precious materials; and it is necessary

before we proceed to criticise any one of its arrangements, that the

reader should carefully consider the principles which are likely to have

influenced, or might legitimately influence, the architects of such a

school, as distinguished from those whose designs are to be executed in

massive materials.

It is true, that among different nations, and at different times, we may

find examples of every sort and degree of incrustation, from the mere

setting of the larger and more compact stones by preference at the

outside of the wall, to the miserable construction of that modern brick

cornice, with its coating of cement, which, but the other day, in

London, killed its unhappy workmen in its fall. [Footnote: Vide

"Builder," for October, 1851.] But just as it is perfectly possible to

have a clear idea of the opposing characteristics of two different

species of plants or animals, though between the two there are varieties

which it is difficult to assign either to the one or the other, so the

reader may fix decisively in his mind the legitimate characteristics of

the incrusted and the massive styles, though between the two there are

varieties which confessedly unite the attributes of both. For instance,

in many Roman remains, built of blocks of tufa and incrusted with

marble, we have a style, which, though truly solid, possesses some of

the attributes of incrustation; and in the Cathedral of Florence, built

of brick and coated with marble, the marble facing is so firmly and

exquisitely set, that the building, though in reality incrusted, assumes

the attributes of solidity. But these intermediate examples need not in

the least confuse our generally distinct ideas of the two families of

buildings: the one in which the substance is alike throughout, and the

forms and conditions of the ornament assume or prove that it is so, as

in the best Greek buildings, and for the most part in our early Norman

and Gothic; and the other, in which the substance is of two kinds, one

internal, the other external, and the system of decoration is founded on

this duplicity, as pre-eminently in St. Mark's.

SECTION XXV. I have used the word duplicity in no depreciatory sense. In

chapter ii. of the "Seven Lamps," Section 18, I especially guarded this

incrusted school from the imputation of insincerity, and I must do so

now at greater length. It appears insincere at first to a Northern

builder, because, accustomed to build with solid blocks of freestone, he

is in the habit of supposing the external superficies of a piece of

masonry to be some criterion of its thickness. But, as soon as he gets

acquainted with the incrusted style, he will find that the Southern

builders had no intention to deceive him. He will see that every slab of

facial marble is fastened to the next by a confessed _rivet_, and that

the joints of the armor are so visibly and openly accommodated to the

contours of the substance within, that he has no more right to complain

of treachery than a savage would have, who, for the first time in his

life seeing a man in armor, had supposed him to be made of solid steel.

Acquaint him with the customs of chivalry, and with the uses of the coat

of mail, and he ceases to accuse of dishonesty either the panoply or the

knight.

These laws and customs of the St. Mark's architectural chivalry it must

be our business to develop.

SECTION XXVI. First, consider the natural circumstances which give rise

to such a style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any

quarries of available stone, and having precarious access to the

mainland where they exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely

with brick, or to import whatever stone they use from great distances,

in ships of small tonnage, and for the most part dependent for speed on

the oar rather than the sail. The labor and cost of carriage are just as

great, whether they import common or precious stone, and therefore the

natural tendency would always be to make each shipload as valuable as

possible. But in proportion to the preciousness of the stone, is the

limitation of its possible supply; limitation not determined merely by

cost, but by the physical conditions of the material, for of many

marbles, pieces above a certain size are not to be had for money. There

would also be a tendency in such circumstances to import as much stone

as possible ready sculptured, in order to save weight; and therefore, if

the traffic of their merchants led them to places where there were ruins

of ancient edifices, to ship the available fragments of them home. Out

of this supply of marble, partly composed of pieces of so precious a

quality that only a few tons of them could be on any terms obtained, and

partly of shafts, capitals, and other portions of foreign buildings, the

island architect has to fashion, as best he may, the anatomy of his

edifice. It is at his choice either to lodge his few blocks of precious

marble here and there among his masses of brick, and to cut out of the

sculptured fragments such new forms as may be necessary for the

observance of fixed proportions in the new building; or else to cut the

colored stones into thin pieces, of extent sufficient to face the whole

surface of the walls, and to adopt a method of construction irregular

enough to admit the insertion of fragmentary sculptures; rather with a

view of displaying their intrinsic beauty, than of setting them to any

regular service in the support of the building.

An architect who cared only to display his own skill, and had no respect

for the works of others, would assuredly have chosen the former

alternative, and would have sawn the old marbles into fragments in order

to prevent all interference with his own designs. But an architect who

cared for the preservation of noble work, whether his own or others',

and more regarded the beauty of his building than his own fame, would

have done what those old builders of St. Mark's did for us, and saved

every relic with which he was entrusted.

SECTION XXVII. But these were not the only motives which influenced the

Venetians in the adoption of their method of architecture. It might,

under all the circumstances above stated, have been a question with

other builders, whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or

twenty of chalk flints; and whether to build a small church faced with

porphyry and paved with agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in

freestone. But with the Venetians it could not be a question for an

instant; they were exiles from ancient and beautiful cities, and had

been accustomed to build with their ruins, not less in affection than in

admiration: they had thus not only grown familiar with the practice of

inserting older fragments in modern buildings, but they owed to that

practice a great part of the splendor of their city, and whatever charm

of association might aid its change from a Refuge into a Home. The

practice which began in the affections of a fugitive nation, was

prolonged in the pride of a conquering one; and beside the memorials of

departed happiness, were elevated the trophies of returning victory. The

ship of war brought home more marble in triumph than 'the merchant

vessel in speculation; and the front of St. Mark's became rather a

shrine at which to dedicate the splendor of miscellaneous spoil, than

the organized expression of any fixed architectural law, or religious

emotion.

SECTION XXVIII. Thus far, however, the justification of the style of

this church depends on circumstances peculiar to the time of its

erection, and to the spot where it arose. The merit of its method,

considered in the abstract, rests on far broader grounds.

In the fifth chapter of the "Seven Lamps," Section 14, the reader will

find the opinion of a modern architect of some reputation, Mr. Wood,

that the chief thing remarkable in this church "is its extreme

ugliness;" and he will find this opinion associated with another,

namely, that the works of the Caracci are far preferable to those of the

Venetian painters. This second statement of feeling reveals to us one of

the principal causes of the first; namely, that Mr. Wood had not any

perception of color, or delight in it. The perception of color is a gift

just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an

ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of St.

Mark's, is the perfection of that color-faculty which few people ever

set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. For it

is on its value as a piece of perfect and unchangeable coloring, that

the claims of this edifice to our respect are finally rested; and a deaf

man might as well pretend to pronounce judgment on the merits of a full

orchestra, as an architect trained in the composition of form only, to

discern the beauty of St. Mark's. It possesses the charm of color in

common with the greater part of the architecture, as well as of the

manufactures, of the East; but the Venetians deserve especial note as

the only European people who appear to have sympathized to the full with

the great instinct of the Eastern races. They indeed were compelled to

bring artists from Constantinople to design the mosaics of the vaults of

St. Mark's, and to group the colors of its porches; but they rapidly

took up and developed, under more masculine conditions, the system of

which the Greeks had shown them the example: while the burghers and

barons of the North were building their dark streets and grisly castles

of oak and sandstone, the merchants of Venice were covering their

palaces with porphyry and gold; and at last, when her mighty painters

had created for her a color more priceless than gold or porphyry, even

this, the richest of her treasures, she lavished upon walls whose

foundations were beaten by the sea; and the strong tide, as it runs

beneath the Rialto, is reddened to this day by the reflection of the

frescoes of Giorgione.

SECTION XXIX. If, therefore, the reader does not care for color, I must

protest against his endeavor to form any judgment whatever of this

church of St. Mark's. But, if he both cares for and loves it, let him

remember that the school of incrusted architecture is _the only one in

which perfect and permanent chromatic decoration is possible_; and

let him look upon every piece of jasper and alabaster given to the

architect as a cake of very hard color, of which a certain portion is to

be ground down or cut off, to paint the walls with. Once understand this

thoroughly, and accept the condition that the body and availing strength

of the edifice are to be in brick, and that this under muscular power of

brickwork is to be clothed with the defence and the brightness of the

marble, as the body of an animal is protected and adorned by its scales

or its skin, and all the consequent fitnesses and laws of the structure

will be easily discernible. These I shall state in their natural order.

SECTION XXX. LAW I. _That the plinths and cornices used for binding

the armor are to be light and delicate._ A certain thickness, at

least two or three inches, must be required in the covering pieces (even

when composed of the strongest stone, and set on the least exposed

parts), in order to prevent the chance of fracture, and to allow for the

wear of time. And the weight of this armor must not be trusted to

cement; the pieces must not be merely glued to the rough brick surface,

but connected with the mass which they protect by binding cornices and

string courses; and with each other, so as to secure mutual support,

aided by the rivetings, but by no means dependent upon them. And, for

the full honesty and straightforwardness of the work, it is necessary

that these string courses and binding plinths should not be of such

proportions as would fit them for taking any important part in the hard

work of the inner structure, or render them liable to be mistaken for

the great cornices and plinths already explained as essential parts of

the best solid building. They must be delicate, slight, and visibly

incapable of severer work than that assigned to them.

SECTION XXXI. LAW II. _Science of inner structure is to be abandoned._ As

the body of the structure is confessedly of inferior, and comparatively

incoherent materials, it would be absurd to attempt in it any expression

of the higher refinements of construction. It will be enough that by its

mass we are assured of its sufficiency and strength; and there is the

less reason for endeavoring to diminish the extent of its surface by

delicacy of adjustment, because on the breadth of that surface we are to

depend for the better display of the color, which is to be the chief

source of our pleasure in the building. The main body of the work,

therefore, will be composed of solid walls and massive piers; and

whatever expression of finer structural science we may require, will be

thrown either into subordinate portions of it, or entirely directed to

the support of the external mail, where in arches or vaults it might

otherwise appear dangerously independent of the material within.

SECTION XXXII. LAW III. _All shafts are to be solid._ Wherever, by the

smallness of the parts, we may be driven to abandon the incrusted

structure at all, it must be abandoned altogether. The eye must never be

left in the least doubt as to what is solid and what is coated. Whatever

appears _probably_ solid, must be _assuredly_ so, and therefore it

becomes an inviolable law that no shaft shall ever be incrusted. Not only

does the whole virtue of a shaft depend on its consolidation, but the

labor of cutting and adjusting an incrusted coat to it would be greater

than the saving of material is worth. Therefore the shaft, of whatever

size, is always to be solid; and because the incrusted character of the

rest of the building renders it more difficult for the shafts to clear

themselves from suspicion, they must not, in this incrusted style, be in

any place jointed. No shaft must ever be used but of one block; and this

the more, because the permission given to the builder to have his walls

and piers as ponderous as he likes, renders it quite unnecessary for him

to use shafts of any fixed size. In our Norman and Gothic, where definite

support is required at a definite point, it becomes lawful to build up a

tower of small stones in the shape of a shaft. But the Byzantine is

allowed to have as much support as he wants from the walls in every

direction, and he has no right to ask for further license in the

structure of his shafts. Let him, by generosity in the substance of his

pillars, repay us for the permission we have given him to be superficial

in his walls. The builder in the chalk valleys of France and England may

be blameless in kneading his clumsy pier out of broken flint and calcined

lime; but the Venetian, who has access to the riches of Asia and the

quarries of Egypt, must frame at least his shafts out of flawless stone.

SECTION XXXIII. And this for another reason yet. Although, as we have

said, it is impossible to cover the walls of a large building with

color, except on the condition of dividing the stone into plates, there

is always a certain appearance of meanness and niggardliness in the

procedure. It is necessary that the builder should justify himself from

this suspicion; and prove that it is not in mere economy or poverty, but

in the real impossibility of doing otherwise, that he has sheeted his

walls so thinly with the precious film. Now the shaft is exactly the

portion of the edifice in which it is fittest to recover his honor in

this respect. For if blocks of jasper or porphyry be inserted in the

walls, the spectator cannot tell their thickness, and cannot judge of

the costliness of the sacrifice. But the shaft he can measure with his

eye in an instant, and estimate the quantity of treasure both in the

mass of its existing substance, and in that which has been hewn away to

bring it into its perfect and symmetrical form. And thus the shafts of

all buildings of this kind are justly regarded as an expression of their

wealth, and a form of treasure, just as much as the jewels or gold in

the sacred vessels; they are, in fact, nothing else than large jewels,

[Footnote: "Quivi presso si vedi una colonna di tanta bellezza e finezza

che e riputato _piutosto gioia che pietra_,"--Sansovino, of the

verd-antique pillar in San Jacomo dell' Orio. A remarkable piece of

natural history and moral philosophy, connected with this subject, will

be found in the second chapter of our third volume, quoted from the work

of a Florentine architect of the fifteenth century.] the block of

precious serpentine or jasper being valued according to its size and

brilliancy of color, like a large emerald or ruby; only the bulk

required to bestow value on the one is to be measured in feet and tons,

and on the other in lines and carats. The shafts must therefore be,

without exception, of one block in all buildings of this kind; for the

attempt in any place to incrust or joint them would be a deception like

that of introducing a false stone among jewellery (for a number of

joints of any precious stone are of course not equal in value to a

single piece of equal weight), and would put an end at once to the

spectator's confidence in the expression of wealth in any portion of the

structure, or of the spirit of sacrifice in those who raised it.

SECTION XXXIV. LAW IV. _The shafts may sometimes be independent of the

construction._ Exactly in proportion to the importance which the

shaft assumes as a large jewel, is the diminution of its importance as a

sustaining member; for the delight which we receive in its abstract

bulk, and beauty of color, is altogether independent of any perception

of its adaptation to mechanical necessities. Like other beautiful things

in this world, its end is to _be_ beautiful; and, in proportion to

its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not

blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of

hammers. Nay, so far from our admiration of the jewel shaft being

dependent on its doing work for us, it is very possible that a chief

part of its preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and

tenderness of material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard

work; and therefore that we shall admire it the more, because we

perceive that if we were to put much weight upon it, it would be

crushed. But, at all events, it is very clear that the primal object in

the placing of such shafts must be the display of their beauty to the

best advantage, and that therefore all imbedding of them in walls, or

crowding of them into groups, in any position in which either their real

size or any portion of their surface would be concealed, is either

inadmissible together, or objectionable in proportion to their value;

that no symmetrical or scientific arrangements of pillars are therefore

ever to be expected in buildings of this kind, and that all such are

even to be looked upon as positive errors and misapplications of

materials: but that, on the contrary, we must be constantly prepared to

see, and to see with admiration, shafts of great size and importance set

in places where their real service is little more than nominal, and

where the chief end of their existence is to catch the sunshine upon

their polished sides, and lead the eye into delighted wandering among

the mazes of their azure veins.

SECTION XXXV. LAW V. _The shafts may be of variable size._ Since

the value of each shaft depends upon its bulk, and diminishes with the

diminution of its mass, in a greater ratio than the size itself

diminishes, as in the case of all other jewellery, it is evident that we

must not in general expect perfect symmetry and equality among the

series of shafts, any more than definiteness of application; but that,

on the contrary, an accurately observed symmetry ought to give us a kind

of pain, as proving that considerable and useless loss has been

sustained by some of the shafts, in being cut down to match with the

rest. It is true that symmetry is generally sought for in works of

smaller jewellery; but, even there, not a perfect symmetry, and obtained

under circumstances quite different from those which affect the placing

of shafts in architecture. First: the symmetry is usually imperfect. The

stones that seem to match each other in a ring or necklace, appear to do

so only because they are so small that their differences are not easily

measured by the eye; but there is almost always such difference between

them as would be strikingly apparent if it existed in the same

proportion between two shafts nine or ten feet in height. Secondly: the

quantity of stones which pass through a jeweller's hands, and the

facility of exchange of such small objects, enable the tradesman to

select any number of stones of approximate size; a selection, however,

often requiring so much time, that perfect symmetry in a group of very

fine stones adds enormously to their value. But the architect has

neither the time nor the facilities of exchange. He cannot lay aside one

column in a corner of his church till, in the course of traffic, he

obtain another that will match it; he has not hundreds of shafts

fastened up in bundles, out of which he can match sizes at his ease; he

cannot send to a brother-tradesman and exchange the useless stones for

available ones, to the convenience of both. His blocks of stone, or his

ready hewn shafts, have been brought to him in limited number, from

immense distances; no others are to be had; and for those which he does

not bring into use, there is no demand elsewhere. His only means of

obtaining symmetry will therefore be, in cutting down the finer masses

to equality with the inferior ones; and this we ought not to desire him

often to do. And therefore, while sometimes in a Baldacchino, or an

important chapel or shrine, this costly symmetry may be necessary, and

admirable in proportion to its probable cost, in the general fabric we

must expect to see shafts introduced of size and proportion continually

varying, and such symmetry as may be obtained among them never

altogether perfect, and dependent for its charm frequently on strange

complexities and unexpected rising and falling of weight and accent in

its marble syllables; bearing the same relation to a rigidly chiselled

and proportioned architecture that the wild lyric rhythm of Aeschylus or

Pindar bears to the finished measures of Pope.

SECTION XXXVI. The application of the principles of jewellery to the

smaller as well as the larger blocks, will suggest to us another reason

for the method of incrustation adopted in the walls. It often happens

that the beauty of the veining in some varieties of alabaster is so

great, that it becomes desirable to exhibit it by dividing the stone,

not merely to economize its substance, but to display the changes in the

disposition of its fantastic lines. By reversing one of two thin plates

successively taken from the stone, and placing their corresponding edges

in contact, a perfectly symmetrical figure may be obtained, which will

enable the eye to comprehend more thoroughly the position of the veins.

And this is actually the method in which, for the most part, the

alabasters of St. Mark are employed; thus accomplishing a double

good,--directing the spectator, in the first place, to close observation

of the nature of the stone employed, and in the second, giving him a

farther proof of the honesty of intention in the builder: for wherever

similar veining is discovered in two pieces, the fact is declared that

they have been cut from the same stone. It would have been easy to

disguise the similarity by using them in different parts of the

building; but on the contrary they are set edge to edge, so that the

whole system of the architecture may be discovered at a glance by any

one acquainted with the nature of the stones employed. Nay, but, it is

perhaps answered me, not by an ordinary observer; a person ignorant of

the nature of alabaster might perhaps fancy all these symmetrical

patterns to have been found in the stone itself, and thus be doubly

deceived, supposing blocks to be solid and symmetrical which were in

reality subdivided and irregular. I grant it; but be it remembered, that

in all things, ignorance is liable to be deceived, and has no right to

accuse anything but itself as the source of the deception. The style and

the words are dishonest, not which are liable to be misunderstood if

subjected to no inquiry, but which are deliberately calculated to lead

inquiry astray. There are perhaps no great or noble truths, from those

of religion downwards, which present no mistakable aspect to casual or

ignorant contemplation. Both the truth and the lie agree in hiding

themselves at first, but the lie continues to hide itself with effort,

as we approach to examine it; and leads us, if undiscovered, into deeper

lies; the truth reveals itself in proportion to our patience and

knowledge, discovers itself kindly to our pleading, and leads us, as it

is discovered, into deeper truths.

SECTION XXXVII. LAW VI. _The decoration must be shallow in

cutting._ The method of construction being thus systematized, it is

evident that a certain style of decoration must arise out of it, based

on the primal condition that over the greater part of the edifice there

can be _no deep cutting_. The thin sheets of covering stones do not

admit of it; we must not cut them through to the bricks; and whatever

ornaments we engrave upon them cannot, therefore, be more than an inch

deep at the utmost. Consider for an instant the enormous differences

which this single condition compels between the sculptural decoration of

the incrusted style, and that of the solid stones of the North, which

may be hacked and hewn into whatever cavernous hollows and black

recesses we choose; struck into grim darknesses and grotesque

projections, and rugged ploughings up of sinuous furrows, in which any

form or thought may be wrought out on any scale,--mighty statues with

robes of rock and crowned foreheads burning in the sun, or venomous

goblins and stealthy dragons shrunk into lurking-places of untraceable

shade: think of this, and of the play and freedom given to the

sculptor's hand and temper, to smite out and in, hither and thither, as

he will; and then consider what must be the different spirit of the

design which is to be wrought on the smooth surface of a film of marble,

where every line and shadow must be drawn with the most tender

pencilling and cautious reserve of resource,--where even the chisel must

not strike hard, lest it break through the delicate stone, nor the mind

be permitted in any impetuosity of conception inconsistent with the fine

discipline of the hand. Consider that whatever animal or human form is

to be suggested, must be projected on a flat surface; that all the

features of the countenance, the folds of the drapery, the involutions

of the limbs, must be so reduced and subdued that the whole work becomes

rather a piece of fine drawing than of sculpture; and then follow out,

until you begin to perceive their endlessness, the resulting differences

of character which will be necessitated in every part of the ornamental

designs of these incrusted churches, as compared with that of the

Northern schools. I shall endeavor to trace a few of them only.

SECTION XXXVIII. The first would of course be a diminution of the

builder's dependence upon human form as a source of ornament: since

exactly in proportion to the dignity of the form itself is the loss

which it must sustain in being reduced to a shallow and linear

bas-relief, as well as the difficulty of expressing it at all under such

conditions. Wherever sculpture can be solid, the nobler characters of

the human form at once lead the artist to aim at its representation,

rather than at that of inferior organisms; but when all is to be reduced

to outline, the forms of flowers and lower animals are always more

intelligible, and are felt to approach much more to a satisfactory

rendering of the objects intended, than the outlines of the human body.

This inducement to seek for resources of ornament in the lower fields of

creation was powerless in the minds of the great Pagan nations,

Ninevite, Greek, or Egyptian: first, because their thoughts were so

concentrated on their own capacities and fates, that they preferred the

rudest suggestion of human form to the best of an inferior organism;

secondly, because their constant practice in solid sculpture, often

colossal, enabled them to bring a vast amount of science into the

treatment of the lines, whether of the low relief, the monochrome vase,

or shallow hieroglyphic.

SECTION XXXIX. But when various ideas adverse to the representation of

animal, and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and

iconoclast Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders' minds

to seek for decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished

practice in solid sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find

artists capable of satisfactorily reducing the high organisms to their

elementary outlines, the choice of subject for surface sculpture would

be more and more uninterruptedly directed to floral organisms, and human

and animal form would become diminished in size, frequency, and general

importance. So that, while in the Northern solid architecture we

constantly find the effect of its noblest features dependent on ranges

of statues, often colossal, and full of abstract interest, independent

of their architectural service, in the Southern incrusted style we must

expect to find the human form for the most part subordinate and

diminutive, and involved among designs of foliage and flowers, in the

manner of which endless examples had been furnished by the fantastic

ornamentation of the Romans, from which the incrusted style had been

directly derived.

SECTION XL. Farther. In proportion to the degree in which his subject

must be reduced to abstract outline will be the tendency in the sculptor

to abandon naturalism of representation, and subordinate every form to

architectural service. Where the flower or animal can be hewn into bold

relief, there will always be a temptation to render the representation

of it more complete than is necessary, or even to introduce details and

intricacies inconsistent with simplicity of distant effect. Very often a

worse fault than this is committed; and in the endeavor to give vitality

to the stone, the original ornamental purpose of the design is

sacrificed or forgotten. But when nothing of this kind can be attempted,

and a slight outline is all that the sculptor can command, we may

anticipate that this outline will be composed with exquisite grace; and

that the richness of its ornamental arrangement will atone for the

feebleness of its power of portraiture. On the porch of a Northern

cathedral we may seek for the images of the flowers that grow in the

neighboring fields, and as we watch with wonder the gray stones that

fret themselves into thorns, and soften into blossoms, we may care

little that these knots of ornament, as we retire from them to

contemplate the whole building, appear unconsidered or confused. On the

incrusted building we must expect no such deception of the eye or

thoughts. It may sometimes be difficult to determine, from the

involutions of its linear sculpture, what were the natural forms which

originally suggested them: but we may confidently expect that the grace

of their arrangement will always be complete; that there will not be a

line in them which could be taken away without injury, nor one wanting

which could be added with advantage.

SECTION XLI. Farther. While the sculptures of the incrusted school will

thus be generally distinguished by care and purity rather than force,

and will be, for the most part, utterly wanting in depth of shadow,

there will be one means of obtaining darkness peculiarly simple and

obvious, and often in the sculptor's power. Wherever he can, without

danger, leave a hollow behind his covering slabs, or use them, like

glass, to fill an aperture in the wall, he can, by piercing them with

holes, obtain points or spaces of intense blackness to contrast with the

light tracing of the rest of his design. And we may expect to find this

artifice used the more extensively, because, while it will be an

effective means of ornamentation on the exterior of the building, it

will be also the safest way of admitting light to the interior, still

totally excluding both rain and wind. And it will naturally follow that

the architect, thus familiarized with the effect of black and sudden

points of shadow, will often seek to carry the same principle into other

portions of his ornamentation, and by deep drill-holes, or perhaps

inlaid portions of black color, to refresh the eye where it may be

wearied by the lightness of the general handling.

SECTION XLII. Farther. Exactly in proportion to the degree in which the

force of sculpture is subdued, will be the importance attached to color

as a means of effect or constituent of beauty. I have above stated that

the incrusted style was the only one in which perfect or permanent color

decoration was _possible_. It is also the only one in which a true

system of color decoration was ever likely to be invented. In order to

understand this, the reader must permit me to review with some care the

nature of the principles of coloring adopted by the Northern and

Southern nations.

SECTION XLIII. I believe that from the beginning of the world there has

never been a true or fine school of art in which color was despised. It

has often been imperfectly attained and injudiciously applied, but I

believe it to be one of the essential signs of life in a school of art,

that it loves color; and I know it to be one of the first signs of death

in the Renaissance schools, that they despised color.

Observe, it is not now the question whether our Northern cathedrals are

better with color or without. Perhaps the great monotone gray of Nature

and of Time is a better color than any that the human hand can give; but

that is nothing to our present business. The simple fact is, that the

builders of those cathedrals laid upon them the brightest colors they

could obtain, and that there is not, as far as I am aware, in Europe,

any monument of a truly noble school which has not been either painted

all over, or vigorously touched with paint, mosaic, and gilding in its

prominent parts. Thus far Egyptians, Greeks, Goths, Arabs, and mediaeval

Christians all agree: none of them, when in their right senses, ever

think of doing without paint; and, therefore, when I said above that the

Venetians were the only people who had thoroughly sympathized with the

Arabs in this respect, I referred, first, to their intense love of

color, which led them to lavish the most expensive decorations on

ordinary dwelling-houses; and, secondly, to that perfection of the

color-instinct in them, which enabled them to render whatever they did,

in this kind, as just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance. It

is this principle of theirs, as distinguished from that of the Northern

builders, which we have finally to examine.

SECTION XLIV. In the second chapter of the first volume, it was noticed

that the architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorn, and that the

porch of his cathedral was therefore decorated with a rich wreath of it;

but another of the predilections of that architect was there unnoticed,

namely, that he did not at all like _gray_ hawthorn, but preferred

it green, and he painted it green accordingly, as bright as he could.

The color is still left in every sheltered interstice of the foliage. He

had, in fact, hardly the choice of any other color; he might have gilded

the thorns, by way of allegorizing human life, but if they were to be

painted at all, they could hardly be painted anything but green, and

green all over. People would have been apt to object to any pursuit of

abstract harmonies of color, which might have induced him to paint his

hawthorn blue.

SECTION XLV. In the same way, whenever the subject of the sculpture was

definite, its color was of necessity definite also; and, in the hands of

the Northern builders, it often became, in consequence, rather the means

of explaining and animating the stories of their stone-work, than a

matter of abstract decorative science. Flowers were painted red, trees

green, and faces flesh-color; the result of the whole being often far

more entertaining than beautiful. And also, though in the lines of the

mouldings and the decorations of shafts or vaults, a richer and more

abstract method of coloring was adopted (aided by the rapid development

of the best principles of color in early glass-painting), the vigorous

depths of shadow in the Northern sculpture confused the architect's eye,

compelling him to use violent colors in the recesses, if these were to

be seen as color at all, and thus injured his perception of more

delicate color harmonies; so that in innumerable instances it becomes

very disputable whether monuments even of the best times were improved

by the color bestowed upon them, or the contrary. But, in the South, the

flatness and comparatively vague forms of the sculpture, while they

appeared to call for color in order to enhance their interest, presented

exactly the conditions which would set it off to the greatest advantage;

breadth or surface displaying even the most delicate tints in the

lights, and faintness of shadow joining with the most delicate and

pearly grays of color harmony; while the subject of the design being in

nearly all cases reduced to mere intricacy of ornamental line, might be

colored in any way the architect chose without any loss of rationality.

Where oak-leaves and roses were carved into fresh relief and perfect

bloom, it was necessary to paint the one green and the other red; but in

portions of ornamentation where there was nothing which could be

definitely construed into either an oak-leaf or a rose, but a mere

labyrinth of beautiful lines, becoming here something like a leaf, and

there something like a flower, the whole tracery of the sculpture might

be left white, and grounded with gold or blue, or treated in any other

manner best harmonizing with the colors around it. And as the

necessarily feeble character of the sculpture called for and was ready

to display the best arrangements of color, so the precious marbles in

the architect's hands give him at once the best examples and the best

means of color. The best examples, for the tints of all natural stones

are as exquisite in quality as endless in change; and the best means,

for they are all permanent.

SECTION XLVI. Every motive thus concurred in urging him to the study of

chromatic decoration, and every advantage was given him in the pursuit

of it; and this at the very moment when, as presently to be noticed, the

_naïveté_ of barbaric Christianity could only be forcibly appealed

to by the help of colored pictures: so that, both externally and

internally, the architectural construction became partly merged in

pictorial effect; and the whole edifice is to be regarded less as a

temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of Common Prayer, a vast

illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded

with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without

in letters of enamel and gold.

SECTION XLVII. LAW VII. _That the impression of the architecture is

not to be dependent on size._ And now there is but one final

consequence to be deduced. The reader understands, I trust, by this

time, that the claims of these several parts of the building upon his

attention will depend upon their delicacy of design, their perfection of

color, their preciousness of material, and their legendary interest. All

these qualities are independent of size, and partly even inconsistent

with it. Neither delicacy of surface sculpture, nor subtle gradations of

color, can be appreciated by the eye at a distance; and since we have

seen that our sculpture is generally to be only an inch or two in depth,

and that our coloring is in great part to be produced with the soft

tints and veins of natural stones, it will follow necessarily that none

of the parts of the building can be removed far from the eye, and

therefore that the whole mass of it cannot be large. It is not even

desirable that it should be so; for the temper in which the mind

addresses itself to contemplate minute and beautiful details is

altogether different from that in which it submits itself to vague

impressions of space and size. And therefore we must not be

disappointed, but grateful, when we find all the best work of the

building concentrated within a space comparatively small; and that, for

the great cliff-like buttresses and mighty piers of the North, shooting

up into indiscernible height, we have here low walls spread before us

like the pages of a book, and shafts whose capitals we may touch with

our hand.

SECTION XLVIII. The due consideration of the principles above stated

will enable the traveller to judge with more candor and justice of the

architecture of St. Mark's than usually it would have been possible for

him to do while under the influence of the prejudices necessitated by

familiarity with the very different schools of Northern art. I wish it

were in my power to lay also before the general reader some

exemplification of the manner in which these strange principles are

developed in the lovely building. But exactly in proportion to the

nobility of any work, is the difficulty of conveying a just impression

of it: and wherever I have occasion to bestow high praise, there it is

exactly most dangerous for me to endeavor to illustrate my meaning,

except by reference to the work itself. And, in fact, the principal

reason why architectural criticism is at this day so far behind all

other, is the impossibility of illustrating the best architecture

faithfully. Of the various schools of painting, examples are accessible

to every one, and reference to the works themselves is found sufficient

for all purposes of criticism; but there is nothing like St. Mark's or

the Ducal Palace to be referred to in the National Gallery, and no

faithful illustration of them is possible on the scale of such a volume

as this. And it is exceedingly difficult on any scale. Nothing is so

rare in art, as far as my own experience goes, as a fair illustration of

architecture; _perfect_ illustration of it does not exist. For all

good architecture depends upon the adaptation of its chiselling to the

effect at a certain distance from the eye; and to render the peculiar

confusion in the midst of order, and uncertainty in the midst of

decision, and mystery in the midst of trenchant lines, which are the

result of distance, together with perfect expression of the

peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the most admirable

artist, devoted to the work with the most severe conscientiousness,

neither the skill nor the determination having as yet been given to the

subject. And in the illustration of details, every building of any

pretensions to high architectural rank would require a volume of plates,

and those finished with extraordinary care. With respect to the two

buildings which are the principal subjects of the present volume, St.

Mark's and the Ducal Palace, I have found it quite impossible to do them

the slightest justice by any kind of portraiture; and I abandoned the

endeavor in the case of the latter with less regret, because in the new

Crystal Palace (as the poetical public insist upon calling it, though it

is neither a palace, nor of crystal) there will be placed, I believe, a

noble cast of one of its angles. As for St. Mark's, the effort was

hopeless from the beginning. For its effect depends not only upon the

most delicate sculpture in every part, out, as we have just stated,

eminently on its color also, and that the most subtle, variable,

inexpressible color in the world,--the color of glass, of transparent

alabaster, of polished marble, and lustrous gold. It would be easier to

illustrate a crest of Scottish mountain, with its purple heather and

pale harebells at their fullest and fairest, or a glade of Jura forest,

with its floor of anemone and moss, than a single portico of St. Mark's.

The fragment of one of its archivolts, given at the bottom of the

opposite Plate, is not to illustrate the thing itself, but to illustrate

the impossibility of illustration.

SECTION XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger

scale; and yet even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp

folds and points of the marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness.

The ground of it is gold, the sculpture in the spandrils is not more

than an inch and a half deep, rarely so much. It is in fact nothing more

than an exquisite sketching of outlines in marble, to about the same

depth as in the Elgin frieze; the draperies, however, being filled with

close folds, in the manner of the Byzantine pictures, folds especially

necessary here, as large masses could not be expressed in the shallow

sculpture without becoming insipid; but the disposition of these folds

is always most beautiful, and often opposed by broad and simple spaces,

like that obtained by the scroll in the hand of the prophet seen in the

Plate.

The balls in the archivolt project considerably, and the interstices

between their interwoven bands of marble are filled with colors like the

illuminations of a manuscript; violet, crimson, blue, gold, and green

alternately: but no green is ever used without an intermixture of blue

pieces in the mosaic, nor any blue without a little centre of pale

green; sometimes only a single piece of glass a quarter of an inch

square, so subtle was the feeling for color which was thus to be

satisfied. [Footnote: The fact is, that no two tesserae of the glass are

exactly of the same tint, the greens being all varied with blues, the

blues of different depths, the reds of different clearness, so that the

effect of each mass of color is full of variety, like the stippled color

of a fruit piece.] The intermediate circles have golden stars set on an

azure ground, varied in the same manner; and the small crosses seen in

the intervals are alternately blue and subdued scarlet, with two small

circles of white set in the golden ground above and beneath them, each

only about half an inch across (this work, remember, being on the

outside of the building, and twenty feet above the eye), while the blue

crosses have each a pale green centre. Of all this exquisitely mingled

hue, no plate, however large or expensive, could give any adequate

conception; but, if the reader will supply in imagination to the

engraving what he supplies to a common woodcut of a group of flowers,

the decision of the respective merits of modern and of Byzantine

architecture may be allowed to rest on this fragment of St. Mark's

alone.

From the vine-leaves of that archivolt, though there is no direct

imitation of nature in them, but on the contrary a studious subjection

to architectural purpose more particularly to be noticed hereafter, we

may yet receive the same kind of pleasure which we have in seeing true

vine-leaves and wreathed branches traced upon golden light; its stars

upon their azure ground ought to make us remember, as its builder

remembered, the stars that ascend and fall in the great arch of the sky:

and I believe that stars, and boughs, and leaves, and bright colors are

everlastingly lovely, and to be by all men beloved; and, moreover, that

church walls grimly seared with squared lines, are not better nor nobler

things than these. I believe the man who designed and the men who

delighted in that archivolt to have been wise, happy, and holy. Let the

reader look back to the archivolt I have already given out of the

streets of London (Plate XIII. Vol. I., Stones of Venice), and see what

there is in it to make us any of the three. Let him remember that the

men who design such work as that call St. Mark's a barbaric monstrosity,

and let him judge between us.

SECTION L. Some farther details of the St. Mark's architecture, and

especially a general account of Byzantine capitals, and of the principal

ones at the angles of the church, will be found in the following

chapter. [Footnote: Some illustration, also, of what was said in SECTION

XXXIII above, respecting the value of the shafts of St. Mark's as large

jewels, will be found in Appendix 9, "Shafts of St. Mark's."] Here I

must pass on to the second part of our immediate subject, namely, the

inquiry how far the exquisite and varied ornament of St. Mark's fits it,

as a Temple, for its sacred purpose, and would be applicable in the

churches of modern times. We have here evidently two questions: the

first, that wide and continually agitated one, whether richness of

ornament be right in churches at all; the second, whether the ornament

of St. Mark's be of a truly ecclesiastical and Christian character.

SECTION LI. In the first chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" I

endeavored to lay before the reader some reasons why churches ought to

be richly adorned, as being the only places in which the desire of

offering a portion of all precious things to God could be legitimately

expressed. But I left wholly untouched the question: whether the church,

as such, stood in need of adornment, or would be better fitted for its

purposes by possessing it. This question I would now ask the reader to

deal with briefly and candidly.

The chief difficulty in deciding it has arisen from its being always

presented to us in an unfair form. It is asked of us, or we ask of

ourselves, whether the sensation which we now feel in passing from our

own modern dwelling-house, through a newly built street, into a

cathedral of the thirteenth century, be safe or desirable as a

preparation for public worship. But we never ask whether that sensation

was at all calculated upon by the builders of the cathedral.

SECTION LII. Now I do not say that the contrast of the ancient with the

modern building, and the strangeness with which the earlier

architectural forms fall upon the eye, are at this day disadvantageous.

But I do say, that their effect, whatever it may be, was entirely

uncalculated upon by the old builder. He endeavored to make his work

beautiful, but never expected it to be strange. And we incapacitate

ourselves altogether from fair judgment of its intention, if we forget

that, when it was built, it rose in the midst of other work fanciful and

beautiful as itself; that every dwelling-house in the middle ages was

rich with the same ornaments and quaint with the same grotesques which

fretted the porches or animated the gargoyles of the cathedral; that

what we now regard with doubt and wonder, as well as with delight, was

then the natural continuation, into the principal edifice of the city,

of a style which was familiar to every eye throughout all its lanes and

streets; and that the architect had often no more idea of producing a

peculiarly devotional impression by the richest color and the most

elaborate carving, than the builder of a modern meetinghouse has by his

white-washed walls and square-cut casements. [Footnote: See the farther

notice of this subject in Vol. III., Chap. IV. Stones of Venice.]

SECTION LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and

then follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a

kind of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because,

while we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat

ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our

abbeys. But when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for

every shop door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal

baron and freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not

because the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the

revel or psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof

was easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our

cities; we have substituted one wholly devoid of beauty or meaning; and

then we reason respecting the strange effect upon our minds of the

fragments which, fortunately, we have left in our churches, as if those

churches had always been designed to stand out in strong relief from all

the buildings around them, and Gothic architecture had always been, what

it is now, a religious language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers know,

if they would arouse their knowledge, that this was not so; but they

take no pains to reason the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily

to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and

sometimes, even, that richness in church ornament is a condition or

furtherance of the Romish religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in

modern times: for there being no beauty in our recent architecture, and

much in the remains of the past, and these remains being almost

exclusively ecclesiastical, the High Church and Romanist parties have

not been slow in availing themselves of the natural instincts which were

deprived of all food except from this source; and have willingly

promulgated the theory, that because all the good architecture that is

now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist doctrines, all good

architecture ever has been and must be so,--a piece of absurdity from

which, though here and there a country clergyman may innocently believe

it, I hope the common sense of the nation will soon manfully quit

itself. It needs but little inquiry into the spirit of the past, to

ascertain what, once for all, I would desire here clearly and forcibly

to assert, that wherever Christian church architecture has been good and

lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common

dwelling-house architecture of the period; that when the pointed arch

was used in the street, it was used in the church; when the round arch

was used in the street, it was used in the church; when the pinnacle

was set over the garret window, it was set over the belfry tower; when

the flat roof was used for the drawing-room, it was used for the nave.

There is no sacredness in round arches, nor in pointed; none in

pinnacles, nor in buttresses; none in pillars, nor traceries. Churches

were larger than in most other buildings, because they had to hold more

people; they were more adorned than most other buildings, because they

were safer from violence, and were the fitting subjects of devotional

offering: but they were never built in any separate, mystical, and

religious style; they were built in the manner that was common and

familiar to everybody at the time. The flamboyant traceries that adorn

the façade of Rouen Cathedral had once their fellows in every window of

every house in the market place; the sculptures that adorn the porches

of St. Mark's had once their match on the walls, of every palace on the

Grand Canal; and the only difference between the church and the

dwelling-house was, that there existed a symbolical meaning in the

distribution of the parts of all buildings meant for worship, and that

the painting or sculpture was, in the one case, less frequently of

profane subject than in the other. A more severe distinction cannot be

drawn: for secular history was constantly introduced into church

architecture; and sacred history or allusion generally formed at least

one half of the ornament of the dwelling-house.

SECTION LIV. This fact is so important, and so little considered, that I

must be pardoned for dwelling upon it at some length, and accurately

marking the limits of the assertion I have made. I do not mean that

every dwelling-house of mediaeval cities was as richly adorned and as

exquisite in composition as the fronts of their cathedrals, but that

they presented features of the same kind, often in parts quite as

beautiful; and that the churches were not separated by any change of

style from the buildings round them, as they are now, but were merely

more finished and full examples of a universal style, rising out of the

confused streets of the city as an oak tree does out of an oak copse,

not differing in leafage, but in size and symmetry. Of course the

quainter and smaller forms of turret and window necessary for domestic

service, the inferior materials, often wood instead of stone, and the

fancy of the inhabitants, which had free play in the design, introduced

oddnesses, vulgarities, and variations into house architecture, which

were prevented by the traditions, the wealth, and the skill of the monks

and freemasons; while, on the other hand, conditions of vaulting,

buttressing, and arch and tower building, were necessitated by the mere

size of the cathedral, of which it would be difficult to find examples

elsewhere. But there was nothing more in these features than the

adaptation of mechanical skill to vaster requirements; there was nothing

intended to be, or felt to be, especially ecclesiastical in any of the

forms so developed; and the inhabitants of every village and city, when

they furnished funds for the decoration of their church, desired merely

to adorn the house of God as they adorned their own, only a little more

richly, and with a somewhat graver temper in the subjects of the

carving. Even this last difference is not always clearly discernible:

all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical

buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were

built, every man's house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna,

or of Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door,

and the Old Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the

grotesques of the brackets and the gables.

SECTION LV. And the reader will now perceive that the question

respecting fitness of church decoration rests in reality on totally

different grounds from those commonly made foundations of argument. So

long as our streets are walled with barren brick, and our eyes rest

continually, in our daily life, on objects utterly ugly, or of

inconsistent and meaningless design, it may be a doubtful question

whether the faculties of eye and mind which are capable of perceiving

beauty, having been left without food during the whole of our active

life, should be suddenly feasted upon entering a place of worship; and

color, and music, and sculpture should delight the senses, and stir the

curiosity of men unaccustomed to such appeal, at the moment when they

are required to compose themselves for acts of devotion;--this, I say,

may be a doubtful question: but it cannot be a question at all, that if

once familiarized with beautiful form and color, and accustomed to see

in whatever human hands have executed for us, even for the lowest

services, evidence of noble thought and admirable skill, we shall desire

to see this evidence also in whatever is built or labored for the house

of prayer; that the absence of the accustomed loveliness would disturb

instead of assisting devotion; and that we should feel it as vain to ask

whether, with our own house full of goodly craftsmanship, we should

worship God in a house destitute of it, as to ask whether a pilgrim

whose day's journey had led him through fair woods and by sweet waters,

must at evening turn aside into some barren place to pray.

SECTION LVI. Then the second question submitted to us, whether the

ornament of St. Mark's be truly ecclesiastical and Christian, is

evidently determined together with the first; for, if not only the

permission of ornament at all, but the beautiful execution of it, be

dependent on our being familiar with it in daily life, it will follow

that no style of noble architecture can be exclusively ecclesiastical.

It must be practised in the dwelling before it be perfected in the

church, and it is the test of a noble style that it shall be applicable

to both; for if essentially false and ignoble, it may be made to fit the

dwelling-house, but never can be made to fit the church: and just as

there are many principles which will bear the light of the world's

opinion, yet will not bear the light of God's word, while all principles

which will bear the test of Scripture will also bear that of practice,

so in architecture there are many forms which expediency and convenience

may apparently justify, or at least render endurable, in daily use,

which will yet be found offensive the moment they are used for church

service; but there are none good for church service, which cannot bear

daily use. Thus the Renaissance manner of building is a convenient style

for dwelling-houses, but the natural sense of all religious men causes

them to turn from it with pain when it has been used in churches; and

this has given rise to the popular idea that the Roman style is good for

houses and the Gothic for churches. This is not so; the Roman style is

essentially base, and we can bear with it only so long as it gives us

convenient windows and spacious rooms; the moment the question of

convenience is set aside, and the expression or beauty of the style it

tried by its being used in a church, we find it fails. But because the

Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches they are not therefore

less fit for dwellings. They are in the highest sense fit and good for

both, nor were they ever brought to perfection except where they were

used for both.

SECTION LVII. But there is one character of Byzantine work which,

according to the time at which it was employed, may be considered as

either fitting or unfitting it for distinctly ecclesiastical purposes; I

mean the essentially pictorial character of its decoration. We have

already seen what large surfaces it leaves void of bold architectural

features, to be rendered interesting merely by surface ornament or

sculpture. In this respect Byzantine work differs essentially from pure

Gothic styles, which are capable of filling every vacant space by

features purely architectural, and may be rendered, if we please,

altogether independent of pictorial aid. A Gothic church may be rendered

impressive by mere successions of arches, accumulations of niches, and

entanglements of tracery. But a Byzantine church requires expression and

interesting decoration over vast plane surfaces,--decoration which

becomes noble only by becoming pictorial; that is to say, by

representing natural objects,--men, animals, or flowers. And, therefore,

the question whether the Byzantine style be fit for church service in

modern days, becomes involved in the inquiry, what effect upon religion

has been or may yet be produced by pictorial art, and especially by the

art of the mosaicist?

SECTION LVIII. The more I have examined the subject the more dangerous I

have found it to dogmatize respecting the character of the art which is

likely, at a given period, to be most useful to the cause of religion.

One great fact first meets me. I cannot answer for the experience of

others, but I never yet met with a Christian whose heart was thoroughly

set upon the world to come, and, so far as human judgment could

pronounce, perfect and right before God, who cared about art at all. I

have known several very noble Christian men who loved it intensely, but

in them there was always traceable some entanglement of the thoughts

with the matters of this world, causing them to fall into strange

distresses and doubts, and often leading them into what they themselves

would confess to be errors in understanding, or even failures in duty. I

do not say that these men may not, many of them, be in very deed nobler

than those whose conduct is more consistent; they may be more tender in

the tone of all their feelings, and farther-sighted in soul, and for

that very reason exposed to greater trials and fears, than those whose

hardier frame and naturally narrower vision enable them with less effort

to give their hands to God and walk with Him. But still, the general

fact is indeed so, that I have never known a man who seemed altogether

right and calm in faith, who seriously cared about art; and when

casually moved by it, it is quite impossible to say beforehand by what

class of art this impression will on such men be made. Very often it is

by a theatrical commonplace, more frequently still by false sentiment. I

believe that the four painters who have had, and still have, the most

influence, such as it is, on the ordinary Protestant Christian mind, are

Carlo Dolci, Guercino, Benjamin West, and John Martin. Raphael, much as

he is talked about, is, I believe in very fact, rarely looked at by

religious people; much less his master, or any of the truly great

religious men of old. But a smooth Magdalen of Carlo Dolci with a tear

on each cheek, or a Guercino Christ or St. John, or a Scripture

illustration of West's, or a black cloud with a flash of lightning in it

of Martin's, rarely rails of being verily, often deeply, felt for the

time.

SECTION LIX. There are indeed many very evident reasons for this; the

chief one being that, as all truly great religious painters have been

hearty Romanists, there are none of their works which do not embody, in

some portions of them, definitely Romanist doctrines. The Protestant mind

is instantly struck by these, and offended by them, so as to be incapable

of entering, or at least rendered indisposed to enter, farther into the

heart of the work, or to the discovering those deeper characters of it,

which are not Romanist, but Christian, in the everlasting sense and power

of Christianity. Thus most Protestants, entering for the first time a

Paradise of Angelico, would be irrevocably offended by finding that the

first person the painter wished them to speak to was St. Dominic; and

would retire from such a heaven as speedily as possible,--not giving

themselves time to discover, that whether dressed in black, or white, or

gray, and by whatever name in the calendar they might be called, the

figures that filled that Angelico heaven were indeed more, saintly, and

pure, and full of love in every feature, than any that the human hand

ever traced before or since. And thus Protestantism, having foolishly

sought for the little help it requires at the hand of painting from the

men who embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to receive it

from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who

read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the

painters who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be

taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more

popular Protestant picture than Salvator's "Witch of Endor," of which the

subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul

and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, and a Neapolitan

hag.

SECTION LX. The fact seems to be that strength of religious feeling is

capable of supplying for itself whatever is wanting in the rudest

suggestions of art, and will either, on the one hand, purify what is

coarse into inoffensiveness, or, on the other, raise what is feeble into

impressiveness. Probably all art, as such, is unsatisfactory to it; and

the effort which it makes to supply the void will be induced rather by

association and accident than by the real merit of the work submitted to

it. The likeness to a beloved friend, the correspondence with a habitual

conception, the freedom from any strange or offensive particularity,

and, above all, an interesting choice of incident, will win admiration

for a picture when the noblest efforts of religious imagination would

otherwise fail of power. How much more, when to the quick capacity of

emotion is joined a childish trust that the picture does indeed

represent a fact! It matters little whether the fact be well or ill

told; the moment we believe the picture to be true, we complain little

of its being ill-painted. Let it be considered for a moment, whether the

child, with its colored print, inquiring eagerly and gravely which is

Joseph, and which is Benjamin, is not more capable of receiving a

strong, even a sublime, impression from the rude symbol which it invests

with reality by its own effort, than the connoisseur who admires the

grouping of the three figures in Raphael's "Telling of the Dreams;" and

whether also, when the human mind is in right religious tone, it has not

always this childish power--I speak advisedly, this power--a noble one,

and possessed more in youth than at any period of after life, but

always, I think, restored in a measure by religion--of raising into

sublimity and reality the rudest symbol which is given to it of

accredited truth.

SECTION LXI. Ever since the period of the Renaissance, however, the

truth has not been accredited; the painter of religious subject is no

longer regarded as the narrator of a fact, but as the inventor of an

idea. [Footnote: I do not mean that modern Christians believe less in

the _facts_ than ancient Christians, but they do not believe in the

representation of the facts as true. We look upon the picture as this or

that painter's conception; the elder Christians looked upon it as this

or that, painter's description of what had actually taken place. And in

the Greek Church all painting is, to this day, strictly a branch of

tradition. See M. Dideron's admirably written introduction to his

Iconographie Chrétienne, p. 7:--"Un de mes compagnons s'étonnait de re

trouver à la Panagia de St. Luc, le saint Jean Chrysostome qu'il avait

dessiné dans le baptistère de St. Marc, à Venise. Le costume des

personnages est partout et en tout temps le même, non-seulement pour la

forme, mais pour la couleur, mais pour le dessin, mais jusque pour le

nombre et l'épaisseur des plis."] We do not severely criticise the

manner in which a true history is told, but we become harsh

investigators of the faults of an invention; so that in the modern

religious mind, the capacity of emotion, which renders judgment

uncertain, is joined with an incredulity which renders it severe; and

this ignorant emotion, joined with ignorant observance of faults, is the

worst possible temper in which any art can be regarded, but more

especially sacred art. For as religious faith renders emotion facile, so

also it generally renders expression simple; that is to say a truly

religious painter will very often be ruder, quainter, simpler, and more

faulty in his manner of working, than a great irreligious one. And it

was in this artless utterance, and simple acceptance, on the part of

both the workman and the beholder, that all noble schools of art have

been cradled; it is in them that they _must_ be cradled to the end

of time. It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss of power in

modern days, owing to the imperative requirement that art shall be

methodical and learned: for as long as the constitution of this world

remains unaltered, there will be more intellect in it than there can be

education; there will be many men capable of just sensation and vivid

invention, who never will have time to cultivate or polish their natural

powers. And all unpolished power is in the present state of society

lost; in other things as well as in the arts, but in the arts

especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake the polish for

the power. Until a man has passed through a course of academy

studentship, and can draw in an approved manner with French chalk, and

knows foreshortening, and perspective, and something of anatomy, we do

not think he can possibly be an artist; what is worse, we are very apt

to think that we can _make_ him an artist by teaching him anatomy,

and how to draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is

utterly independent of all such accomplishments: and I believe there are

many peasants on every estate, and laborers in every town of Europe, who

have imaginative powers of a high order, which nevertheless cannot be

used for our good, because we do not choose to look at anything but what

is expressed in a legal and scientific way. I believe there is many a

village mason who, set to carve a series of Scripture or any other

histories, would find many a strange and noble fancy in his head, and

set it down, roughly enough indeed, but in a way well worth our having.

But we are too grand to let him do this, or to set up his clumsy work

when it is done; and accordingly the poor stone-mason is kept hewing

stones smooth at the corners, and we build our church of the smooth

square stones, and consider ourselves wise.

SECTION LXII. I shall pursue this subject farther in another place; but

I allude to it here in order to meet the objections of those persons who

suppose the mosaics of St. Mark's, and others of the period, to be

utterly barbarous as representations of religious history. Let it be

granted that they are so; we are not for that reason to suppose they

were ineffective in religious teaching. I have above spoken of the whole

church as a great Book of Common Prayer; the mosaics were its

illuminations, and the common people of the time were taught their

Scripture history by means of them, more impressively perhaps, though

far less fully, than ours are now by Scripture reading. They had no

other Bible, and--Protestants do not often enough consider this--_could_

have no other. We find it somewhat difficult to furnish our poor with

printed Bibles; consider what the difficulty must have been when they

could be given only in manuscript. The walls of the church necessarily

became the poor man's Bible, and a picture was more easily read upon the

walls than a chapter. Under this view, and considering them merely as the

Bible pictures of a great nation in its youth, I shall finally invite the

reader to examine the connection and subjects of these mosaics; but in

the meantime I have to deprecate the idea of their execution being in any

sense barbarous. I have conceded too much to modern prejudice, in

permitting them to be rated as mere childish efforts at colored

portraiture: they have characters in them of a very noble kind; nor are

they by any means devoid of the remains of the science of the later Roman

empire. The character of the features is almost always fine, the

expression stern and quiet, and very solemn, the attitudes and draperies

always majestic in the single figures, and in those of the groups which

are not in violent action; [Footnote: All the effects of Byzantine art to

represent violent action are inadequate, most of them ludicrously so,

even when the sculptural art is in other respects far advanced. The early

Gothic sculptors, on the other hand, fail in all points of refinement,

but hardly ever in expression of action. This distinction is of course

one of the necessary consequences of the difference in all respects

between the repose of the Eastern, and activity of the Western mind,

which we shall have to trace out completely in the inquiry into the

nature of Gothic.] while the bright coloring and disregard of chiaroscuro

cannot be regarded as imperfections, since they are the only means by

which the figures could be rendered clearly intelligible in the distance

and darkness of the vaulting. So far am I from considering them

barbarous, that I believe of all works of religious art whatsoever,

these, and such as these, have been the most effective. They stand

exactly midway between the debased manufacture of wooden and waxen images

which is the support of Romanist idolatry all over the world, and the

great art which leads the mind away from the religious subject to the art

itself. Respecting neither of these branches of human skill is there, nor

can there be, any question. The manufacture of puppets, however

influential on the Romanist mind of Europe, is certainly not deserving of

consideration as one of the fine arts. It matters literally nothing to a

Romanist what the image he worships is like. Take the vilest doll that is

screwed together in a cheap toy-shop, trust it to the keeping of a large

family of children, let it be beaten about the house by them till it is

reduced to a shapeless block, then dress it in a satin frock and declare

it to have fallen from heaven, and it will satisfactorily answer all

Romanist purposes. Idolatry, [Footnote: Appendix X, "Proper Sense of the

word Idolatry."] it cannot be too often repeated, is no encourager of the

fine arts. But, on the other hand, the highest branches of the fine arts

are no encouragers either of idolatry or of religion. No picture of

Leonardo's or Raphael's, no statue of Michael Angelo's, has ever been

worshipped, except by accident. Carelessly regarded, and by ignorant

persons, there is less to attract in them than in commoner works.

Carefully regarded, and by intelligent persons, they instantly divert the

mind from their subject to their art, so that admiration takes the place

of devotion. I do not say that the Madonna di S. Sisto, the Madonna del

Cardellino, and such others, have not had considerable religious

influence on certain minds, but I say that on the mass of the people of

Europe they have had none whatever, while by far the greater number of

the most celebrated statues and pictures are never regarded with any

other feelings than those of admiration of human beauty, or reverence for

human skill. Effective religious art, therefore, has always lain, and I

believe must always lie, between the two extremes--of barbarous

idol-fashioning on one side, and magnificent craftsmanship on the other.

It consists partly in missal-painting, and such book-illustrations as,

since the invention of printing, have taken its place; partly in

glass-painting; partly in rude sculpture on the outsides of buildings;

partly in mosaics; and partly in the frescoes and tempera pictures which,

in the fourteenth century, formed the link between this powerful, because

imperfect, religious art, and the impotent perfection which succeeded it.

SECTION LXIII. But of all these branches the most important are the

inlaying and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented

in a central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting

could not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions,

and frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern

book-illustration has been so little skillful as hardly to be worth

naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes of great

importance, has always a tendency to lose itself in architectural

effect; and was probably seldom deciphered, in all its parts, by the

common people, still less the traditions annealed in the purple burning

of the painted window. Finally, tempera pictures and frescoes were often

of limited size or of feeble color. But the great mosaics of the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries covered the walls and roofs of the churches

with inevitable lustre; they could not be ignored or escaped from; their

size rendered them majestic, their distance mysterious, their color

attractive. They did not pass into confused or inferior decorations;

neither were they adorned with any evidences of skill or science, such

as might withdraw the attention from their subjects. They were before

the eyes of the devotee at every interval of his worship; vast

shadowings forth of scenes to whose realization he looked forward, or of

spirits whose presence he invoked. And the man must be little capable of

receiving a religious impression of any kind, who, to this day, does not

acknowledge some feeling of awe, as he looks up at the pale countenances

and ghastly forms which haunt the dark roofs of the Baptisteries of

Parma and Florence, or remains altogether untouched by the majesty of

the colossal images of apostles, and of Him who sent apostles, that look

down from the darkening gold of the domes of Venice and Pisa.

SECTION LXIV. I shall, in a future portion of this work, endeavor to

discover what probabilities there are of our being able to use this kind

of art in modern churches; but at present it remains for us to follow

out the connection of the subjects represented in St. Mark's so as to

fulfil our immediate object, and form an adequate conception of the

feelings of its builders, and of its uses to those for whom it was

built.

Now, there is one circumstance to which I must, in the outset, direct

the reader's special attention, as forming a notable distinction between

ancient and modern days. Our eyes are now familiar and weaned with

writing; and if an inscription is put upon a building, unless it be

large and clear, it is ten to one whether we ever trouble ourselves to

decipher it. But the old architect was sure of readers. He knew that

every one would be glad to decipher all that he wrote; that they would

rejoice in possessing the vaulted leaves of his stone manuscript; and

that the more he gave them, the more grateful would the people be. We

must take some pains, therefore, when we enter St. Mark's, to read all

that is inscribed, or we shall not penetrate into the feeling either of

the builder or of his times.

SECTION LXV. A large atrium or portico is attached to two sides of the

church, a space which was especially reserved for unbaptized persons and

new converts. It was thought right that, before their baptism, these

persons should be led to contemplate the great facts of the Old

Testament history; the history of the Fall of Man, and of the lives of

Patriarchs up to the period of the Covenant by Moses: the order of the

subjects in this series being very nearly the same as in many Northern

churches, but significantly closing with the Fall of the Manna, in order

to mark to the catechumen the insufficiency of the Mosaic covenant for

salvation,--"Our fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are

dead,"--and to turn his thoughts to the true Bread of which the manna

was the type.

SECTION LXVI. Then, when after his baptism he was permitted to enter the

church, over its main entrance he saw, on looking back, a mosaic of

Christ enthroned, with the Virgin on one side and St. Mark on the other,

in attitudes of adoration. Christ is represented as holding a book open

upon his knee, on which is written: "I AM THE DOOR; BY ME IF ANY MAN

ENTER IN, HE SHALL BE SAVED." On the red marble moulding which surrounds

the mosaic is written: "I AM THE GATE OF LIFE; LET THOSE WHO ARE MINE,

ENTER BY ME." Above, on the red marble fillet which forms the cornice of

the west end of the church, is written, with reference to the figure of

Christ below: "WHO HE WAS, AND FROM WHOM HE CAME, AND AT WHAT PRICE HE

REDEEMED THEE, AND WHY HE MADE THEE, AND GAVE THEE ALL THINGS, DO THOU

CONSIDER."

Now observe, this was not to be seen and read only by the catechumen

when he first entered the church; every one who at any time entered, was

supposed to look back and to read this writing; their daily entrance

into the church was thus made a daily memorial of their first entrance

into the spiritual Church; and we shall find that the rest of the book

which was opened for them upon its walls continually led them in the

same manner to regard the visible temple as in every part a type of the

invisible Church of God.

SECTION LXVII. Therefore the mosaic of the first dome, which is over the

head of the spectator as soon as he has entered by the great door (that

door being the type of baptism), represents the effusion of the Holy

Spirit, as the first consequence and seal of the entrance into the

Church of God. In the centre of the cupola is the Dove, enthroned in the

Greek manner, as the Lamb is enthroned, when the Divinity of the Second

and Third Persons is to be insisted upon together with their peculiar

offices. From the central symbol of the Holy Spirit twelve streams of

fire descend upon the heads of the twelve apostles, who are represented

standing around the dome; and below them, between the windows which are

pierced in its walls, are represented, by groups of two figures for each

separate people, the various nations who heard the apostles speak, at

Pentecost, every man in his own tongue. Finally, on the vaults, at the

four angles which support the cupola, are pictured four angels, each

bearing a tablet upon the end of a rod in his hand: on each of the

tablets of the three first angels is inscribed the word "Holy;" on that

of the fourth is written "Lord;" and the beginning of the hymn being

thus put into the mouths of the four angels, the words of it are

continued around the border of the dome, uniting praise to God for the

gift of the Spirit, with welcome to the redeemed soul received into His

Church:

"HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, LORD GOD OF SABAOTH:

HEAVEN AND EARTH ARE FULL OF THY GLORY.

HOSANNA IN THE HIGHEST:

BLESSED IS HE THAT COMETH IN THE NAME OF THE LORD."

And observe in this writing that the convert is required to regard the

outpouring of the Holy Spirit especially as a work of _sanctification_.

It is the _holiness_ of God manifested in the giving of His Spirit to

sanctify those who had become His children, which the four angels

celebrate in their ceaseless praise; and it is on account of this

holiness that the heaven and earth are said to be full of His glory.

SECTION LXVIII. After thus hearing praise rendered to God by the angels

for the salvation of the newly-entered soul, it was thought fittest that

the worshipper should be led to contemplate, in the most comprehensive

forms possible, the past evidence and the future hopes of Christianity,

as summed up in three facts without assurance of which all faith is

vain; namely that Christ died, that He rose again, and that He ascended

into heaven, there to prepare a place for His elect. On the vault

between the first and second cupolas are represented the crucifixion and

resurrection of Christ, with the usual series of intermediate

scenes,--the treason of Judas, the judgment of Pilate, the crowning with

thorns, the descent into Hades, the visit of the women to the sepulchre,

and the apparition to Mary Magdalene. The second cupola itself, which is

the central and principal one of the church, is entirely occupied by the

subject of the Ascension. At the highest point of it Christ is

represented as rising into the blue heaven, borne up by four angels, and

throned upon a rainbow, the type of reconciliation. Beneath him, the

twelve apostles are seen upon the Mount of Olives, with the Madonna,

and, in the midst of them, the two men in white apparel who appeared at

the moment of the Ascension, above whom, as uttered by them, are

inscribed the words, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into

heaven? This Christ, the Son of God, as He is taken from you, shall so

come, the arbiter of the earth, trusted to do judgment and justice."

SECTION LXIX. Beneath the circle of the apostles, between the windows of

the cupola, are represented the Christian virtues, as sequent upon the

crucifixion of the flesh, and the spiritual ascension together with

Christ. Beneath them, on the vaults which support the angles of the

cupola, are placed the four Evangelists, because on their evidence our

assurance of the fact of the ascension rests; and, finally, beneath

their feet, as symbols of the sweetness and fulness of the Gospel which

they declared, are represented the four rivers of Paradise, Pison,

Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates.

SECTION LXX. The third cupola, that over the altar, represents the

witness of the Old Testament to Christ; showing him enthroned in its

centre, and surrounded by the patriarchs and prophets. But this dome was

little seen by the people; [Footnote: It is also of inferior workmanship,

and perhaps later than the rest. Vide Lord Lindsay, vol. i, p. 124,

note.] their contemplation was intended to be chiefly drawn to that of

the centre of the church, and thus the mind of the worshipper was at once

fixed on the main groundwork and hope of Christianity,--"Christ is

risen," and "Christ shall come." If he had time to explore the minor

lateral chapels and cupolas, he could find in them the whole series of

New Testament history, the events of the Life of Christ, and the

Apostolic miracles in their order, and finally the scenery of the Book of

Revelation; [Footnote: The old mosaics from the Revelation have perished,

and have been replaced by miserable work of the seventeenth century.] but

if he only entered, as often the common people do to this hour, snatching

a few moments before beginning the labor of the day to offer up an

ejaculatory prayer, and advanced but from the main entrance as far as the

altar screen, all the splendor of the glittering nave and variegated

dome, if they smote upon his heart, as they might often, in strange

contrast with his reed cabin among the shallows of the lagoon, smote upon

it only that they might proclaim the two great messages--"Christ is

risen," and "Christ shall come." Daily, as the white cupolas rose like

wreaths of sea-foam in the dawn, while the shadowy campanile and frowning

palace were still withdrawn into the night, they rose with the Easter

Voice of Triumph,--"Christ is risen;" and daily, as they looked down upon

the tumult of the people, deepening and eddying in the wide square that

opened from their feet to the sea, they uttered above them the sentence

of warning,--"Christ shall come."

SECTION LXXI. And this thought may surely dispose the reader to look

with some change of temper upon the gorgeous building and wild blazonry

of that shrine of St. Mark's. He now perceives that it was in the hearts

of the old Venetian people far more than a place of worship. It was at

once a type of the Redeemed Church of God, and a scroll for the written

word of God. It was to be to them, both an image of the Bride, all

glorious within, her clothing of wrought gold; and the actual Table of

the Law and the Testimony, written within and without. And whether

honored as the Church or as the Bible, was it not fitting that neither

the gold nor the crystal should be spared in the adornment of it; that,

as the symbol of the Bride, the building of the wall thereof should be

of jasper, [Footnote: Rev. xxi. 18.] and the foundations of it garnished

with all manner of precious stones; and that, as the channel of the

World, that triumphant utterance of the Psalmist should be true of

it,--"I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in all

riches"? And shall we not look with changed temper down the long

perspective of St. Mark's Place towards the sevenfold gates and glowing

domes of its temple, when we know with what solemn purpose the shafts of

it were lifted above the pavement of the populous square? Men met there

from all countries of the earth, for traffic or for pleasure; but, above

the crowd swaying for ever to and fro in the restlessness of avarice or

thirst of delight, was seen perpetually the glory of the temple,

attesting to them, whether they would hear or whether they would

forbear, that there was one treasure which the merchantmen might buy

without a price, and one delight better than all others, in the word and

the statutes of God. Not in the wantonness of wealth, not in vain

ministry to the desire of the eyes or the pride of life, were those

marbles hewn into transparent strength, and those arches arrayed in the

colors of the iris. There is a message written in the dyes of them, that

once was written in blood; and a sound in the echoes of their vaults,

that one day shall fill the vault of heaven,--"He shall return, to do

judgment and justice." The strength of Venice was given her, so long as

she remembered this: her destruction found her when she had forgotten

this; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot it without

excuse. Never had city a more glorious Bible. Among the nations of the

North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled their temples with confused

and hardly legible imagery; but, for her, the skill and the treasures of

the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page, till the

Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi. In other

cities, the meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn from

religious association, subject to violence and to change; and on the

grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled street,

there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot justify,

we may sometimes forgive. But the sins of Venice, whether in her palace

or in her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand. The walls

on which its testimony was written were separated but by a few inches of

marble from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or confined

the victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off all

shame and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled

with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin

was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God,

burning with the letters of His Law. Mountebank and masker laughed their

laugh, and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not

unforetold; for amidst them all, through century after century of

gathering vanity and festering guilt, that white dome of St. Mark's had

uttered in the dead ear of Venice, "Know thou, that for all these things

God will bring thee into judgment."

CHAPTER V.

THE DUCAL PALACE.

SECTION I. It was stated in the commencement of the preceding chapter

that the Gothic art of Venice was separated by the building of the Ducal

Palace into two distinct periods; and that in all the domestic edifices

which were raised for half a century after its completion, their

characteristic and chiefly effective portions were more or less directly

copied from it. The fact is, that the Ducal Palace was the great work of

Venice at this period, itself the principal effort of her imagination,

employing her best architects in its masonry, and her best painters in

its decoration, for a long series of years; and we must receive it as a

remarkable testimony to the influence which it possessed over the minds

of those who saw it in its progress, that, while in the other cities of

Italy every palace and church was rising in some original and daily more

daring form, the majesty of this single building was able to give pause

to the Gothic imagination in its full career; stayed the restlessness of

innovation in an instant, and forbade the powers which had created it

thenceforth to exert themselves in new directions, or endeavor to summon

an image more attractive.

SECTION II. The reader will hardly believe that while the architectural

invention of the Venetians was thus lost, Narcissus-like, in

self-contemplation, the various accounts of the progress of the building

thus admired and beloved are so confused as frequently to leave it

doubtful to what portion of the palace they refer; and that there is

actually, at the time being, a dispute between the best Venetian

antiquaries, whether the main façade of the palace be of the fourteenth

or fifteenth century. The determination of this question is of course

necessary before we proceed to draw any conclusions from the style of

the work; and it cannot be determined without a careful review of the

entire history of the palace, and of all the documents relating to it. I

trust that this review may not be found tedious,--assuredly it will not

be fruitless,--bringing many facts before us, singularly illustrative of

the Venetian character.

SECTION III. Before, however, the reader can enter upon any inquiry into

the history of this building, it is necessary that he should be

thoroughly familiar with the arrangement and names of its principal

parts, as it at present stands; otherwise he cannot comprehend so much

as a single sentence of any of the documents referring to it. I must do

what I can, by the help of a rough plan and bird's-eye view, to give him

the necessary topographical knowledge:

Opposite is a rude ground plan of the buildings round St. Mark's Place;

and the following references will clearly explain their relative

positions:

A. St. Mark's Place.

B. Piazzetta.

P. V. Procuratie Vecchie.

P. N. (opposite) Procuratie Nuove.

P. L. Libreria Vecchia.

I. Piazzetta de' Leoni.

T. Tower of St. Mark.

F F. Great Façade of St. Mark's Church.

M. St. Mark's. (It is so united with the Ducal Palace, that the

separation cannot be indicated in the plan, unless all the walls had

been marked, which would have confused the whole.)

D D D. Ducal Palace. g s. Giant's stair.

C. Court of Ducal Palace. J. Judgement angle.

c. Porta della Carta. a. Fig-tree angle.

p p. Ponte della Paglia (Bridge of Straw).

S. Ponte de' Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs).

R R. Riva de' Schiavoni.

[Illustration: FIG. I. The Ducal Palace--Ground Plan.]

[Illustration: FIG. II. The Ducal Palace--Bird's eye View.]

The reader will observe that the Ducal Palace is arranged somewhat in

the form of a hollow square, of which one side faces the Piazzetta, B,

and another the quay called the Riva de' Schiavoni, R R; the third is on

the dark canal called the "Rio del Palazzo," and the fourth joins the

Church of St. Mark.

Of this fourth side, therefore, nothing can be seen. Of the other three

sides we shall have to speak constantly; and they will be respectively

called, that towards the Piazzetta, the "Piazzetta Façade;" that towards

the Riva de' Schiavoni, the "Sea Façade;" and that towards the Rio del

Palazzo, the "Rio Façade." This Rio, or canal, is usually looked upon by

the traveller with great respect, or even horror, because it passes

under the Bridge of Sighs. It is, however, one of the principal

thoroughfares of the city; and the bridge and its canal together occupy,

in the mind of a Venetian, very much the position of Fleet Street and

Temple Bar in that of a Londoner,--at least, at the time when Temple Bar

was occasionally decorated with human heads. The two buildings closely

resemble each other in form.

SECTION IV. We must now proceed to obtain some rough idea of the

appearance and distribution of the palace itself; but its arrangement

will be better understood by supposing ourselves raised some hundred and

fifty feet above the point in the lagoon in front of it, so as to get a

general view of the Sea Façade and Rio Façade (the latter in very steep

perspective), and to look down into its interior court. Fig. II. roughly

represents such a view, omitting all details on the roofs, in order to

avoid confusion. In this drawing we have merely to notice that, of the

two bridges seen on the right, the uppermost, above the black canal, is

the Bridge of Sighs; the lower one is the Ponte della Paglia, the

regular thoroughfare from quay to quay, and, I believe, called the

Bridge of Straw, because the boats which brought straw from the mainland

used to sell it at this place. The corner of the palace, rising above

this bridge, and formed by the meeting of the Sea Façade and Rio Façade,

will always be called the Vine angle, because it is decorated by a

sculpture of the drunkenness of Noah. The angle opposite will be called

the Fig-tree angle, because it is decorated by a sculpture of the Fall

of Man. The long and narrow range of building, of which the roof is seen

in perspective behind this angle, is the part of the palace fronting the

Piazzetta; and the angle under the pinnacle most to the left of the two

which terminate it will be called, for a reason presently to be stated,

the Judgment angle. Within the square formed by the building is seen its

interior court (with one of its wells), terminated by small and

fantastic buildings of the Renaissance period, which face the Giant's

Stair, of which the extremity is seen sloping down on the left.

SECTION V. The great façade which fronts the spectator looks southward.

Hence the two traceried windows lower than the rest, and to the right of

the spectator, may be conveniently distinguished as the "Eastern

Windows." There are two others like them, filled with tracery, and at

the same level, which look upon the narrow canal between the Ponte della

Paglia and the Bridge of Sighs: these we may conveniently call the

"Canal Windows." The reader will observe a vertical line in this dark

side of the palace, separating its nearer and plainer wall from a long

four-storied range of rich architecture. This more distant range is

entirely Renaissance: its extremity is not indicated, because I have no

accurate sketch of the small buildings and bridges beyond it, and we

shall have nothing whatever to do with this part of the palace in our

present inquiry. The nearer and undecorated wall is part of the older

palace, though much defaced by modern opening of common windows,

refittings of the brickwork, etc.

SECTION VI. It will be observed that the façade is composed of a smooth

mass of wall, sustained on two tiers of pillars, one above the other.

The manner in which these support the whole fabric will be understood at

once by the rough section, Fig. III., which is supposed to be taken

right through the palace to the interior court, from near the middle of

the Sea Façade. Here _a_ and _d_ are the rows of shafts, both

in the inner court and on the Façade, which carry the main walls;

_b_, _c_ are solid walls variously strengthened with pilasters. A, B, C

are the three stories of the interior of the palace.

[Illustration: FIG. III.]

The reader sees that it is impossible for any plan to be more simple,

and that if the inner floors and walls of the stories A, B were removed,

there would be left merely the form of a basilica,--two high walls,

carried on ranges of shafts, and roofed by a low gable.

The stories A, B are entirely modernized, and divided into confused

ranges of small apartments, among which what vestiges remain of ancient

masonry are entirely undecipherable, except by investigations such as I

have had neither the time nor, as in most cases they would involve the

removal of modern plastering, the opportunity, to make. With the

subdivisions of this story, therefore, I shall not trouble the reader;

but those of the great upper story, C, are highly important.

SECTION VII. In the bird's-eye view above, Fig. II., it will be noticed

that the two windows on the right are lower than the other four of the

façade. In this arrangement there is one of the most remarkable

instances I know of the daring sacrifice of symmetry to convenience,

which was noticed in Chap. VII. as one of the chief noblenesses of the

Gothic schools.

The part of the palace in which the two lower windows occur, we shall

find, was first built, and arranged in four stories in order to obtain

the necessary number of apartments. Owing to circumstances, of which we

shall presently give an account, it became necessary, in the beginning

of the fourteenth century, to provide another large and magnificent

chamber for the meeting of the senate. That chamber was added at the

side of the older building; but, as only one room was wanted, there was

no need to divide the added portion into two stories. The entire height

was given to the single chamber, being indeed not too great for just

harmony with its enormous length and breadth. And then came the question

how to place the windows, whether on a line with the two others, or

above them.

The ceiling of the new room was to be adorned by the paintings of the

best masters in Venice, and it became of great importance to raise the

light near that gorgeous roof, as well as to keep the tone of

illumination in the Council Chamber serene; and therefore to introduce

light rather in simple masses than in many broken streams. A modern

architect, terrified at the idea of violating external symmetry, would

have sacrificed both the pictures and the peace of the council. He would

have placed the larger windows at the same level with the other two, and

have introduced above them smaller windows, like those of the upper

story in the older building, as if that upper story had been continued

along the façade. But the old Venetian thought of the honor of the

paintings, and the comfort of the senate, before his own reputation. He

unhesitatingly raised the large windows to their proper position with

reference to the interior of the chamber, and suffered the external

appearance to take care of itself. And I believe the whole pile rather

gains than loses in effect by the variation thus obtained in the spaces

of wall above and below the windows.

SECTION VIII. On the party wall, between the second and third windows,

which faces the eastern extremity of the Great Council Chamber, is

painted the Paradise of Tintoret; and this wall will therefore be

hereafter called the "Wall of the Paradise."

In nearly the centre of the Sea Façade, and between the first and second

windows of the Great Council Chamber, is a large window to the ground,

opening on a balcony, which is one of the chief ornaments of the palace,

and will be called in future the "Sea Balcony."

The façade which looks on the Piazzetta is very nearly like this to the

Sea, but the greater part of it was built in the fifteenth century, when

people had become studious of their symmetries. Its side windows are all

on the same level. Two light the west end of the Great Council Chamber,

one lights a small room anciently called the Quarantia Civil Nuova; the

other three, and the central one, with a balcony like that to the Sea,

light another large chamber, called Sala del Scrutinio, or "Hall of

Enquiry," which extends to the extremity of the palace above the Porta

della Carta.

SECTION IX. The reader is now well enough acquainted with the topography

of the existing building, to be able to follow the accounts of its

history.

We have seen above, that there were three principal styles of Venetian

architecture; Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance.

The Ducal Palace, which was the great work of Venice, was built

successively in the three styles. There was a Byzantine Ducal Palace, a

Gothic Ducal Palace, and a Renaissance Ducal Palace. The second

superseded the first totally; a few stones of it (if indeed so much) are

all that is left. But the third superseded the second in part only, and

the existing building is formed by the union of the two.

We shall review the history of each in succession. [Footnote: The reader

will find it convenient to note the following editions of the printed

books which have been principally consulted in the following inquiry. The

numbers of the manuscripts referred to in the Marcian Library are given

with the quotations.

Sansovino. Venetia Descritta. 410, Venice, 1663.

Sansovino. Lettera intorno al Palazzo Ducale, 8vo, Venice, 1829.

Temanza. Antica Pianta di Venezia, with text. Venice, 1780.

Cadorin. Pareri di XV. Architetti. Svo, Venice,1838.

Filiasi. Memorie storiche. 8vo, Padua, 1811.

Bettio. Lettera discorsiva del Palazzo Ducale, 8vo, Venice, 1837.

Selvatico. Architettura di Venezia. 8vo, Venice, 1847.]

1st. The BYZANTINE PALACE.

In the year of the death of Charlemagne, 813, the Venetians determined

to make the island of Rialto the seat of the government and capital of

their state. [Footnote: The year commonly given is 810, as in the Savina

Chronicle (Cod. Marcianus), p. 13. "Del 810 fece principiar el pallazzo

Ducal nel luogo ditto Brucio in confin di S. Moise, et fece riedificar

la isola di Eraclia." The Sagornin Chronicle gives 804; and Filiasi,

vol. vi. chap. I, corrects this date to 813.] Their Doge, Angelo or

Agnello Participazio, instantly took vigorous means for the enlargement

of the small group of buildings which were to be the nucleus of the

future Venice. He appointed persons to superintend the raising of the

banks of sand, so as to form more secure foundations, and to build

wooden bridges over the canals. For the offices of religion, he built

the Church of St. Mark; and on, or near, the spot where the Ducal Palace

now stands, he built a palace for the administration of the government.

[Footnote: "Ampliò la città, fornilla di casamenti, _e per il culto d'

Iddio e l' amministrazione della giustizia_ eresse la capella di S.

Marco, e il palazzo di sua residenza."--Pareri, p. 120. Observe, that

piety towards God, and justice towards man, have been at least the

nominal purposes of every act and institution of ancient Venice. Compare

also Temanza, p. 24. "Quello che abbiamo di certo si è che il suddetto

Agnello lo incomminciò da fondamenti, e cosi pure la capella ducale di

S. Marco."]

The history of the Ducal Palace therefore begins with the birth of

Venice, and to what remains of it, at this day, is entrusted the last

representation of her power.

SECTION X. Of the exact position and form of this palace of Participazio

little is ascertained. Sansovino says that it was "built near the Ponte

della Paglia, and answeringly on the Grand Canal," towards San Giorgio;

that is to say, in the place now occupied by the Sea Façade; but this

was merely the popular report of his day. [Footnote: What I call the

Sea, was called "the Grand Canal" by the Venetians, as well as the great

water street of the city; but I prefer calling it "the Sea," in order to

distinguish between that street and the broad water in front of the

Ducal Palace, which, interrupted only by the island of San Giorgio,

stretches for many miles to the south, and for more than two to the

boundary of the Lido. It was the deeper channel, just in front of the

Ducal Palace, continuing the line of the great water street itself which

the Venetians spoke of as "the Grand Canal." The words of Sansovino are:

"Fu cominciato dove si vede, vicino al ponte della paglia, et

rispondente sul canal grande." Filiasi says simply: "The palace was

built where it now is." "Il palazio fu fatto dove ora pure

esiste."--Vol. iii. chap. 27. The Savina Chronicle, already quoted,

says: "in the place called the Bruolo (or Broglio), that is to say on

the Piazzetta."]

We know, however, positively, that it was somewhere upon the site of the

existing palace; and that it had an important front towards the

Piazzetta, with which, as we shall see hereafter, the present palace at

one period was incorporated. We know, also, that it was a pile of some

magnificence, from the account given by Sagornino of the visit paid by

the Emperor Otho the Great, to the Doge Pietro Orseolo II. The

chronicler says that the Emperor "beheld carefully all the beauty of the

palace;" [Footnote: "Omni decoritate illius perlustrata."--Sagornino,

quoted by Cadorin and Temanza.] and the Venetian historians express

pride in the buildings being worthy of an emperor's examination. This

was after the palace had been much injured by fire in the revolt against

Candiano IV., [Footnote: There is an interesting account of this revolt

in Monaci, p. 68. Some historians speak of the palace as having been

destroyed entirely; but, that it did not even need important

restorations, appears from Sagornino's expression, quoted by Cadorin and

Temanza. Speaking of the Doge Participazio, he says: "Qui Palatii

hucusque manentis fuerit fabricator." The reparations of the palace are

usually attributed to the successor of Candiano, Pietro Orseolo I.; but

the legend, under the picture of that Doge in the Council Chamber,

speaks only of his rebuilding St. Mark's, and "performing many

miracles." His whole mind seems to have been occupied with

ecclesiastical affairs; and his piety was finally manifested in a way

somewhat startling to the state, by absconding with a French priest to

St. Michael's in Gascony, and there becoming a monk. What repairs,

therefore, were necessary to the Ducal Palace, were left to be

undertaken by his son, Orseolo II., above named.] and just repaired, and

richly adorned by Orseolo himself, who is spoken of by Sagornino as

having also "adorned the chapel of the Ducal Palace" (St. Mark's) with

ornaments of marble and gold. [Footnote: "Quam non modo marmoreo, verum

aureo compsit ornamento."--_Temanza_] There can be no doubt

whatever that the palace at this period resembled and impressed the

other Byzantine edifices of the city, such as the Fondaco de Turchi,

&c., whose remains have been already described; and that, like them, it

was covered with sculpture, and richly adorned with gold and color.

SECTION XI. In the year 1106, it was for the second time injured by

fire, [Footnote: "L'anno 1106, uscito fuoco d'una casa privata, arse

parte del palazzo."--_Sansovino_. Of the beneficial effect of these

fires, vide Cadorin.] but repaired before 1116, when it received another

emperor, Henry V. (of Germany), and was again honored by imperial

praise. [Footnote: "Urbis situm, aedificiorum decorem, et regiminis

sequitatem multipliciter commendavit."--_Cronaca Dandolo_, quoted

by Cadorin.]

Between 1173 and the close of the century, it seems to have been again

repaired and much enlarged by the Doge Sebastian Ziani. Sansovino says

that this Doge not only repaired it, but "enlarged it in every

direction;" [Footnote: "Non solamente rinovo il palazzo, ma lo aggrandi

per ogni verso."--_Sansovino_. Zanotto quotes the Altinat Chronicle

for account of these repairs.] and, after this enlargement, the palace

seems to have remained untouched for a hundred years, until, in the

commencement of the fourteenth century, the works of the Gothic Palace

were begun. As, therefore, the old Byzantine building was, at the time

when those works first interfered with it, in the form given to it by

Ziani, I shall hereafter always speak of it as the _Ziani_ Palace; and

this the rather, because the only chronicler whose words are perfectly

clear respecting the existence of part of this palace so late as the year

1422, speaks of it as built by Ziani. The old "palace of which half

remains to this day, was built, as we now see it, by Sebastian Ziani."

[Footnote: "El palazzo che anco di mezzo se vede vecchio, per M.

Sebastian Ziani fu fatto compir, come el se vede."--_Chronicle of Pietro

Dolfino_, Cod. Ven. p. 47. This Chronicle is spoken of by Sansovino as

"molto particolare, e distinta."--_Sansovino, Venezia descritta_, p.

593.--It terminates in the year 1422.]

So far, then, of the Byzantine Palace.

SECTION XII. 2nd. The GOTHIC PALACE. The reader, doubtless, recollects

that the important change in the Venetian government which gave

stability to the aristocratic power took place about the year 1297,

[Footnote: See Vol. I. Appendix 3, Stones of Venice.] under the Doge

Pietro Gradenigo, a man thus characterized by Sansovino:--"A prompt and

prudent man, of unconquerable determination and great eloquence, who

laid, so to speak, the foundations of the eternity of this republic, by

the admirable regulations which he introduced into the government."

We may now, with some reason, doubt of their admirableness; but their

importance, and the vigorous will and intellect of the Doge, are not to

be disputed. Venice was in the zenith of her strength, and the heroism

of her citizens was displaying itself in every quarter of the world.

[Footnote: Vide Sansovino's enumeration of those who flourished in the

reign of Gradenigo, p. 564.] The acquiescence in the secure

establishment of the aristocratic power was an expression, by the

people, of respect for the families which had been chiefly instrumental

in raising the commonwealth to such a height of prosperity.

The Serrar del Consiglio fixed the numbers of the Senate within certain

limits, and it conferred upon them a dignity greater than they had ever

before possessed. It was natural that the alteration in the character of

the assembly should be attended by some change in the size, arrangement,

or decoration of the chamber in which they sat.

We accordingly find it recorded by Sansovino, that "in 1301 another

saloon was begun on the Rio del Palazzo, _under the Doge

Gradenigo_, and finished in 1309, _in which year the Grand Council

first sat in it_." [Footnote: Sansovino, 324, I.] In the first year,

therefore, of the fourteenth century, the Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice

was begun; and as the Byzantine Palace was, in its foundation, coeval

with that of the state, so the Gothic Palace was, in its foundation,

coeval with that of the aristocratic power. Considered as the principal

representation of the Venetian school of architecture, the Ducal Palace

is the Parthenon of Venice, and Gradenigo its Pericles.

SECTION XIII. Sansovino, with a caution very frequent among Venetian

historians, when alluding to events connected with the Serrar del

Consiglio, does not specially mention the cause for the requirement of

the new chamber; but the Sivos Chronicle is a little more distinct in

expression. "In 1301, it was determined to build a great saloon _for

the assembling_ of the Great Council, and the room was built which is

_now_ called the Sala del Scrutinio." [Footnote: "1301 fu presa

parte di fare una sala grande per la riduzione del gran consiglio, e fu

fatta quella che ora si chiama dello Scrutinio."--_Cronaca Sivos_,

quoted by Cadorin. There is another most interesting entry in the

Chronicle of Magno, relating to this event; but the passage is so ill

written, that I am not sure if I have deciphered it correctly:--"Del

1301 fu preso de fabrichar la sala fo ruina e fu fata (fatta) quella se

adoperava a far e pregadi e fu adopera per far el Gran Consegio fin

1423, che fu anni 122." This last sentence, which is of great

importance, is luckily unmistakable:--"The room was used for the

meetings of the Great Council until 1423, that is to say, for 122

years."--_Cod. Ven._ tom. i. p. 126. The Chronicle extends from

1253 to 1454.

Abstract 1301 to 1309; Gradenigo's room--1340-42, page 295-1419. New

proposals, p. 298.] _Now_, that is to say, at the time when the

Sivos Chronicle was written; the room has long ago been destroyed, and

its name given to another chamber on the opposite side of the palace:

but I wish the reader to remember the date 1301, as marking the

commencement of a great architectural epoch, in which took place the

first appliance of the energy of the aristocratic power, and of the

Gothic style, to the works of the Ducal Palace. The operations then

begun were continued, with hardly an interruption, during the whole

period of the prosperity of Venice. We shall see the new buildings

consume, and take the place of, the Ziani Palace, piece by piece: and

when the Ziani Palace was destroyed, they fed upon themselves; being

continued round the square, until, in the sixteenth century, they

reached the point where they had been begun in the fourteenth, and

pursued the track they had then followed some distance beyond the

junction; destroying or hiding their own commencement, as the serpent,

which is the type of eternity, conceals its tail in its jaws.

SECTION XIV. We cannot, therefore, _see_ the extremity, wherein lay

the sting and force of the whole creature,--the chamber, namely, built

by the Doge Gradenigo; but the reader must keep that commencement and

the date of it carefully in his mind. The body of the Palace Serpent

will soon become visible to us.

The Gradenigo Chamber was somewhere on the Rio Façade, behind the

present position of the Bridge of Sighs; i.e. about the point marked on

the roof by the dotted lines in the woodcut; it is not known whether low

or high, but probably on a first story. The great façade of the Ziani

Palace being, as above mentioned, on the Piazzetta, this chamber was as

far back and out of the way as possible; secrecy and security being

obviously the points first considered.

SECTION XV. But the newly constituted Senate had need of other additions

to the ancient palace besides the Council Chamber. A short, but most

significant, sentence is added to Sansovino's account of the construction

of that room. "There were, _near it_," he says, "the Cancellaria, and the

_Gheba_ or _Gabbia_, afterwards called the Little Tower." [Footnote: "Vi

era appresso la Cancellarla, e la Gheba o Gabbia, iniamata poi

Torresella,"---P. 324. A small square tower is seen above the Vine angle

in the view of Venice dated 1500, and attributed to Albert Durer. It

appears about 25 feet square, and is very probably the Torresella in

question.]

Gabbia means a "cage;" and there can be no question that certain

apartments were at this time added at the top of the palace and on the

Rio Façade, which were to be used as prisons. Whether any portion of the

old Torresella still remains is a doubtful question; but the apartments

at the top of the palace, in its fourth story, were still used for

prisons as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. [Footnote:

Vide Bettio, Lettera, p. 23.] I wish the reader especially to notice

that a separate tower or range of apartments was built for this purpose,

in order to clear the government of the accusations so constantly made

against them, by ignorant or partial historians, of wanton cruelty to

prisoners. The stories commonly told respecting the "piombi" of the

Ducal Palace are utterly false. Instead of being, as usually reported,

small furnaces under the leads of the palace, they were comfortable

rooms, with good flat roofs of larch, and carefully ventilated.

[Footnote: Bettio, Lettera, p. 20. "Those who wrote without having seen

them described them as covered with lead; and those who have seen them

know that, between their flat timber roofs and the sloping leaden roof

of the palace the interval is five metres where it is least, and nine

where it is greatest."] The new chamber, then, and the prisons, being

built, the Great Council first sat in their retired chamber on the Rio

in the year 1309.

SECTION XVI. Now, observe the significant progress of events. They had

no sooner thus established themselves in power than they were disturbed

by the conspiracy of the Tiepolos, in the year 1310. In consequence of

that conspiracy the Council of Ten was created, still under the Doge

Gradenigo; who, having finished his work and left the aristocracy of

Venice armed with this terrible power, died in the year 1312, some say

by poison. He was succeeded by the Doge Marino Giorgio, who reigned only

one year; and then followed the prosperous government of John Soranzo.

There is no mention of any additions to the Ducal Palace during his

reign, but he was succeeded by that Francesco Dandolo, the sculptures on

whose tomb, still existing in the cloisters of the Salute, may be

compared by any traveller with those of the Ducal Palace. Of him it is

recorded in the Savina Chronicle: "This Doge also had the great gate

built which is at the entry of the palace, above which is his statue

kneeling, with the gonfalon in hand, before the feet of the Lion of St.

Mark's." [Footnote: "Questo Dose anche fese far la porta granda che se

al intrar del Pallazzo, in su la qual vi e la sua statua che sta in

zenocchioni con lo confalon in man, davanti li pie de lo Lion S.

Marco."--_Savin Chronicle_, Cod. Ven. p. 120.]

SECTION XVII. It appears, then, that after the Senate had completed

their Council Chamber and the prisons, they required a nobler door than

that of the old Ziani Palace for their Magnificences to enter by. This

door is twice spoken of in the government accounts of expenses, which

are fortunately preserved, [Footnote: These documents I have not

examined myself, being satisfied of the accuracy of Cadorin, from whom I

take the passages quoted.] in the following terms:--

"1335, June 1. We, Andrew Dandolo and Mark Loredano, procurators of St.

Mark's, have paid to Martin the stone-cutter and his associates....

[Footnote: "Libras tres, soldeos 15 grossorum."--Cadorin, 189, I.]

for a stone of which the lion is made which is put over the gate of the

palace."

"1344, November 4. We have paid thirty-five golden ducats for making

gold leaf, to gild the lion which is over the door of the palace

stairs."

The position of this door is disputed, and is of no consequence to the

reader, the door itself having long ago disappeared, and been replaced

by the Porta della Carta.

SECTION XVIII. But before it was finished, occasion had been discovered

for farther improvements. The Senate found their new Council Chamber

inconveniently small, and, about thirty years after its completion,

began to consider where a larger and more magnificent one might be

built. The government was now thoroughly established, and it was

probably felt that there was some meanness in the retired position, as

well as insufficiency in the size, of the Council Chamber on the Rio.

The first definite account which I find of their proceedings, under

these circumstances, is in the Caroldo Chronicle: [Footnote: Cod. Ven.,

No. CXLI. p. 365.]

"1340. On the 28th of December, in the preceding year, Master Marco

Erizzo, Nicolo Soranzo, and Thomas Gradenigo, were chosen to examine

where a new saloon might be built in order to assemble therein the

Greater Council.... On the 3rd of June, 1341, the Great Council elected

two procurators of the work of this saloon, with a salary of eighty

ducats a year."

It appears from the entry still preserved in the Archivio, and quoted by

Cadorin, that it was on the 28th of December, 1340, that the

commissioners appointed to decide on this important matter gave in their

report to the Grand Council, and that the decree passed thereupon for the

commencement of a new Council Chamber on the Grand Canal. [Footnote:

Sansovino is more explicit than usual in his reference to this decree:

"For it having appeared that the place (the first Council Chamber) is not

capacious enough, the saloon on the Grand Canal was ordered." "Per cio

parendo che il luogo non fosse capace, fu ordinata la Sala sul Canal

Grande."--P. 324.]

_The room then begun is the one now in existence_, and its building

involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the

present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all

prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio.

SECTION XIX. In saying that it is the same now in existence, I do not

mean that it has undergone no alterations; as we shall see hereafter, it

has been refitted again and again, and some portions of its walls

rebuilt; but in the place and form in which it first stood, it still

stands; and by a glance at the position which its windows occupy, as

shown in Figure II. above, the reader will see at once that whatever can

be known respecting the design of the Sea Façade, must be gleaned out of

the entries which refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber.

Cadorin quotes two of great importance, to which we shall return in due

time, made during the progress of the work in 1342 and 1344; then one of

1349, resolving that the works at the Ducal Palace, which had been

discontinued during the plague, should be resumed; and finally one in

1362, which speaks of the Great Council Chamber as having been neglected

and suffered to fall into "great desolation," and resolves that it shall

be forthwith completed. [Footnote: Cadorin, 185, 2. The decree of 1342

is falsely given as of 1345 by the Sivos Chronicle, and by Magno; while

Sanuto gives the decree to its right year, 1342, but speaks of the

Council Chamber as only begun in 1345.]

The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the

conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder.

[Footnote: Calendario. See Appendix I., Vol. III.] The work was resumed

in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at least so far as

that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the walls;

[Footnote: "II primo che vi colorisse fu Guariento il quale l'anno 1365

vi fece il Paradiso in testa della sala."--_Sansovino_.] so that

the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this time. Its

decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion; the

paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400. [Footnote: "L'an poi

1400 vi fece il ciclo compartita a quadretti d'oro, ripieni di stelle,

ch'era la insegna del Doge Steno."--_Sansovino_, lib. viii.] They

represented the heavens covered with stars, [Footnote: "In questi tempi

si messe in oro il ciclo della sala del Gran Consiglio et si fece il

pergole del finestra grande chi guarda sul canale, adornato l'uno e

l'altro di stelle, eh' erano la insegne del Doge."--_Sansovino_,

lib. xiii. Compare also Pareri, p. 129.] this being, says Sansovino, the

bearings of the Doge Steno. Almost all ceilings and vaults were at this

time in Venice covered with stars, without any reference to armorial

bearings; but Steno claims, under his noble title of Stellifer, an

important share in completing the chamber, in an inscription upon two

square tablets, now inlaid in the walls on each side of the great window

towards the sea:

"MILLE QUADRINGENTI CURREBANT QUATUOR ANNI

HOC OPUS ILLUSTRIS MICHAEL DUX STELLIFER AUXIT."

And in fact it is to this Doge that we owe the beautiful balcony of that

window, though the work above it is partly of more recent date; and I

think the tablets bearing this important inscription have been taken out

and reinserted in the newer masonry. The labor of these final

decorations occupied a total period of sixty years. The Grand Council

sat in the finished chamber for the first time in 1423. In that year the

Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice was completed. It had taken, to build it,

the energies of the entire period which I have above described as the

central one of her life.

SECTION XX. 3rd. The RENAISSANCE PALACE. I must go back a step or two,

in order to be certain that the reader understands clearly the state of

the palace in 1423. The works of addition or renovation had now been

proceeding, at intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three

years. Three generations at least had been accustomed to witness the

gradual advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately

symmetry, and to contrast the Works of sculpture and painting with which

it was decorated,--full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the

fourteenth century,--with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of

the Doge Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new

Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as

the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and

more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the

building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the

"Palazzo Vecchio." [Footnote: Baseggio (Pareri, p. 127) is called the

Proto of the _New_ Palace. Farther notes will be found in Appendix I.,

Vol. III.] That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in

Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side of it

towards the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the Riva

dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Façade as important as that to

the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the

water; and the _old_ palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and

interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the

nobles daily met. Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered

the discrepancy between it and the companion building more painful; and

then began to arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity

of destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta

with the same splendor as the Sea Façade. But no such sweeping measure of

renovation had been Contemplated by the Senate when they first formed the

plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room, then a

gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as necessary

additions to the palace, not as involving the entire reconstruction of

the ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury, and the shadows upon

the political horizon, rendered it more than imprudent to incur the vast

additional expense which such a project involved; and the Senate, fearful

of itself, and desirous to guard against the weakness of its own

enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a man fearful of some

strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from the point of danger.

It was a decree, not merely that the old palace should not be rebuilt,

but that no one should _propose_ rebuilding it. The feeling of the

desirableness of doing so was, too strong to permit fair discussion, and

the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was to carry it.

SECTION XXI. The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own

weakness, forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace under

the penalty of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own

enthusiasm too low: there was a man among them whom the loss of a

thousand ducats could not deter from proposing what he believed to be

for the good of the state.

Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire

which occurred in 1419, and which injured both the church of St. Mark's,

and part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I

shall relate in the words of Sanuto. [Footnote: Cronaca Sanudo, No.

cxxv. in the Marcian Library, p. 568.]

SECTION XXII. "Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care

to repair and adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's

house things went on more slowly, _for it did not please the Doge_

[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo.] _to restore it in the form in which it

was before_; and they could not rebuild it altogether in a better

manner, so great was the parsimony of these old fathers; because it was

forbidden by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a thousand ducats any

one who should propose to throw down the _old_ palace, and to

rebuild it more richly and with greater expense. But the Doge, who was

magnanimous, and who desired above all things what was honorable to the

city, had the thousand ducats carried into the Senate Chamber, and then

proposed that the palace should be rebuilt; saying: that, 'since the

late fire had ruined in great part the Ducal habitation (not only his

own private palace, but all the places used for public business) this

occasion was to be taken for an admonishment sent from God, that they

ought to rebuild the palace more nobly, and in a way more befitting the

greatness to which, by God's grace, their dominions had reached; and

that his motive in proposing this was neither ambition, nor selfish

interest: that, as for ambition, they might have seen in the whole

course of his life, through so many years, that he had never done

anything for ambition, either in the city, or in foreign business; but

in all his actions had kept justice first in his thoughts, and then the

advantage of the state, and the honor of the Venetian name: and that, as

far as regarded his private interest, if it had not been for this

accident of the fire, he would never have thought of changing anything

in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more honorable form; and

that during the many years in which he had lived in it, he had never

endeavored to make any change, but had always been content with it, as

his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well that, if they took

in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them, being now very

old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to another life

before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that therefore

they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this building

for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and its

Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by his

successors.' Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to

observe the laws,... he had brought with him the thousand ducats which

had been appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that

he might prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that

he sought, but the dignity of the state.'" There was no one (Sanuto goes

on to tell us) who ventured, or desired, to oppose the wishes of the

Doge; and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses

of the work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work;

and the palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at

present seen; but, as Mocenigo had prophesied, not long after, he ended

his life, and not only did not see the work brought to a close, but

hardly even begun."

SECTION XXIII. There are one or two expressions in the above extracts

which if they stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the

whole palace had been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember,

that, at this time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred

years in building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat

in it; and it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to

destroy and rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should

propose in our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of

Parliament, under the title of the "old palace," and rebuild _them_.

SECTION XXIV. The manner in which Sanuto expresses himself will at once

be seen to be perfectly natural, when it is remembered that although we

now speak of the whole building as the "Ducal Palace," it consisted, in

the minds of the old Venetians, of four distinct buildings. There were

in it the palace, the state prisons, the senate-house, and the offices

of public business; in other words, it was Buckingham Palace, the Tower

of olden days, the Houses of Parliament, and Downing Street, all in one;

and any of these four portions might be spoken of, without involving an

allusion to any other. "Il Palazzo" was the Ducal residence, which, with

most of the public offices, Mocenigo _did_ propose to pull down and

rebuild, and which was actually pulled down and rebuilt. But the new

Council Chamber, of which the whole façade to the Sea consisted, never

entered into either his or Sanuto's mind for an instant, as necessarily

connected with the Ducal residence.

I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought

forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422

[Footnote: Vide notes in Appendix.] that the decree passed to rebuild

the palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari

was elected in his room. [Footnote: On the 4th of April, 1423, according

to the copy of the Zancarol Chronicle in the Marcian Library, but

previously, according to the Caroldo Chronicle, which makes Foscari

enter the Senate as Doge on the 3rd of April.] The Great Council Chamber

was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate

as Doge,--the 3rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle;

[Footnote: "Nella quale (the Sala del Gran Consiglio) non si fece Gran

Consiglio salvo nell' anno 1423, alli 3, April, et fu il primo giorno

che il Duce Foscari venisse in Gran Consiglio dopo la sua

creatione."--Copy in Marcian Library, p. 365.] the 23rd, which is

probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;

[Footnote: "E a di 23 April (1423, by the context) sequente fo fatto

Gran Conscio in la salla nuovo dovi avanti non esta piu fatto Gran

Conscio si che el primo Gran Conscio dopo la sua (Foscari's) creation fo

fatto in la sala nuova, nel qual conscio fu el Marchese di Mantoa," &c.,

p. 426.]--and, the following year, on the 27th of March, the first

hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani. [Footnote: Compare

Appendix I. Vol. III.]

SECTION XXV. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly

called the "Renaissance" It was the knell of the architecture of

Venice,--and of Venice herself.

The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun: I

dated its commencement above (Ch. I., Vol. I.) from the death of

Mocenigo. A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been

called to his account: his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this

instance mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had

forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces

might be built upon her burdened islands, but none of them could take

the place, or recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her

unfrequented shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of her

fortunes, the city never flourished again.

SECTION XXVI. I have no intention of following out, in their intricate

details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued

under succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I

am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the

architecture of the fifteenth century: but the main facts are the

following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the

Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most

particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back

from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta

della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge

Foscari; [Footnote: "Tutte queste fatture si compirono sotto il dogade

del Foscari, nel 1441."--_Pareri_, p. 131.] the interior buildings

connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro, (the Othello

of Shakspeare) [Footnote: This identification has been accomplished, and

I think conclusively, by my friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has devoted all

the leisure which, during the last twenty years his manifold office of

kindness to almost every English visitant of Venice have left him, in

discovering and translating the passages of the Venetian records which

bear upon English history and literature. I shall have occasion to take

advantage hereafter of a portion of his labors, which I trust will

shortly be made public.] in 1462.

SECTION XXVII. By reference to the figure the reader will see that we

have now gone the round of the palace, and that the new work of 1462 was

close upon the first piece of the Gothic palace, the _new_ Council

Chamber of 1301. Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still

left between the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or as is more

probable, the last stones of it may have been swept away after the fire

of 1419, and replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever

buildings, old or new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion

of the Porta della Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479,

together with so much of the palace on the Rio that, though the saloon

of Gradenigo, then known as the Sala de' Pregadi, was not destroyed, it

became necessary to reconstruct the entire façades of the portion of the

palace behind the Bridge of Sighs, both towards the court and canal.

This work was entrusted to the best Renaissance architects of the close

of the fifteenth and opening of the sixteenth centuries; Antonio Ricci

executing the Giant's staircase, and on his absconding with a large sum

of the public money, Pietro Lombardo taking his place. The whole work

must have been completed towards the middle of the sixteenth century.

The architects of the palace, advancing round the square and led by

fire, had more than reached the point from which they had set out; and

the work of 1560 was joined to the work of 1301-1340, at the point

marked by the conspicuous vertical line in Figure II on the Rio Façade.

SECTION XVIII. But the palace was not long permitted to remain in this

finished form. Another terrific fire, commonly called the great fire,

burst out in 1574, and destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious

pictures of the Great Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the

Sea Façade, and most of those on the Rio Façade, leaving the building a

mere shell, shaken and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the

Great Council whether the ruin should not be thrown down, and an

entirely new palace built in its stead. The opinions of all the leading

architects of Venice were taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or

the possibility of repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given

in writing, have been preserved, and published by the Abbé Cadorin, in

the work already so often referred to; and they form one of the most

important series of documents connected with the Ducal Palace.

I cannot help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental

resemblance to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was

first given in favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others,

especially Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute

designs of their own; but the best architects in Venice, and to his

immortal honor, chiefly Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for

the Gothic pile, and prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and

Tintoret painted his noblest picture on the wall from which the Paradise

of Guariento had withered before the flames.