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Stones of Venice [introductions]

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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."

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