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Volume I

Volume II

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

JOHN RUSKIN

VOLUME IX

STONES OF VENICE

VOLUME III

THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.

THE

STONES OF VENICE

VOLUME III.

THE FALL

CONTENTS.

THIRD, OR RENAISSANCE, PERIOD.

APPENDIX.

INDICES.

LIST OF PLATES.

1

THE

STONES OF VENICE.

THIRD, OR RENAISSANCE, PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY RENAISSANCE.

§ I. I trust that the reader has been enabled, by the preceding
chapters, to form some conception of the magnificence
of the streets of Venice during the course of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. Yet by all this magnificence she
was not supremely distinguished above the other cities of the
middle ages. Her early edifices have been preserved to our
times by the circuit of her waves; while continual recurrences
of ruin have defaced the glory of her sister cities. But such
fragments as are still left in their lonely squares, and in the
corners of their streets, so far from being inferior to the buildings
of Venice, are even more rich, more finished, more admirable
in invention, more exuberant in beauty. And although,
in the North of Europe, civilization was less advanced,
and the knowledge of the arts was more confined to the ecclesiastical
orders, so that, for domestic architecture, the period of
perfection must be there placed much later than in Italy, and
considered as extending to the middle of the fifteenth century;
yet, as each city reached a certain point in civilization,
its streets became decorated with the same magnificence, varied
2
only in style according to the materials at hand, and temper
of the people. And I am not aware of any town of wealth
and importance in the middle ages, in which some proof does
not exist, that, at its period of greatest energy and prosperity,
its streets were inwrought with rich sculpture, and even
(though in this, as before noticed, Venice always stood
supreme) glowing with color and with gold. Now, therefore,
let the reader,— forming for himself as vivid and real a
conception as he is able, either of a group of Venetian palaces
in the fourteenth century, or, if he likes better, of one of the
more fantastic but even richer street scenes of Rouen, Antwerp,
Cologne, or Nuremberg, and keeping this gorgeous
image before him,—go out into any thoroughfare, representative,
in a general and characteristic way, of the feeling for
domestic architecture in modern times; let him, for instance,
if in London, walk once up and down Harley Street, or Baker
Street, or Gower Street; and then, looking upon this picture
and on this, set himself to consider (for this is to be the subject
of our following and final inquiry) what have been the
causes which have induced so vast a change in the European
mind.

§ II. Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted
men’s inventive and constructive faculties from the
Grand Canal to Gower Street; from the marble shaft, and the
lancet arch, and the wreathed leafage, and the glowing and
melting harmony of gold and azure, to the square cavity in
the brick wall. We have now to consider the causes and the
steps of this change; and, as we endeavored above to investigate
the nature of Gothic, here to investigate also the nature
of Renaissance.

§ III. Although Renaissance architecture assumes very different
forms among different nations, it may be conveniently
referred to three heads:—Early Renaissance, consisting of the
first corruptions introduced into the Gothic schools: Central
or Roman Renaissance, which is the perfectly formed style:
and Grotesque Renaissance, which is the corruption of the
Renaissance itself.

3

§ IV. Now, in order to do full justice to the adverse cause,
we will consider the abstract nature of the school with reference
only to its best or central examples. The forms of building
which must be classed generally under the term early
Renaissance are, in many cases, only the extravagances and
corruptions of the languid Gothic, for whose errors the classical
principle is in no wise answerable. It was stated in the
second chapter of the “Seven Lamps,” that, unless luxury had
enervated and subtlety falsified the Gothic forms, Roman
traditions could not have prevailed against them; and, although
these enervated and false conditions are almost instantly
colored by the classical influence, it would be utterly
unfair to lay to the charge of that influence the first debasement
of the earlier schools, which had lost the strength of
their system before they could be struck by the plague.

§ V. The manner, however, of the debasement of all
schools of art, so far as it is natural, is in all ages the same;
luxuriance of ornament, refinement of execution, and idle subtleties
of fancy, taking the place of true thought and firm
handling: and I do not intend to delay the reader long by the
Gothic sick-bed, for our task is not so much to watch the wasting
of fever in the features of the expiring king, as to trace
the character of that Hazael who dipped the cloth in water,
and laid it upon his face, Nevertheless, it is necessary to the
completeness of our view of the architecture of Venice, as
well as to our understanding of the manner in which the Central
Renaissance obtained its universal dominion, that we
glance briefly at the principal forms into which Venetian
Gothic first declined. They are two in number: one the corruption
of the Gothic itself; the other a partial return to Byzantine
forms; for the Venetian mind having carried the
Gothic to a point at which it was dissatisfied, tried to retrace
its steps, fell back first upon Byzantine types, and through them
passed to the first Roman. But in thus retracing its steps,
it does not recover its own lost energy. It revisits the places
through which it had passed in the morning light, but it is now
with wearied limbs, and under the gloomy shadows of evening.

4

§ VI. It has just been said that the two principal causes of
natural decline in any school, are over-luxuriance and over-refinement.
The corrupt Gothic of Venice furnishes us with
a curious instance of the one, and the corrupt Byzantine of
the other. We shall examine them in succession.

Now, observe, first, I do not mean by luxuriance of ornament,
quantity of ornament. In the best Gothic in the world
there is hardly an inch of stone left unsculptured. But I mean
that character of extravagance in the ornament itself which
shows that it was addressed to jaded faculties; a violence and
coarseness in curvature, a depth of shadow, a lusciousness in
arrangement of line, evidently arising out of an incapability of
feeling the true beauty of chaste form and restrained power.
I do not know any character of design which may be more
easily recognized at a glance than this over-lusciousness; and
yet it seems to me that at the present day there is nothing so
little understood as the essential difference between chasteness
and extravagance, whether in color, shade, or lines. We speak
loosely and inaccurately of “overcharged” ornament, with an
obscure feeling that there is indeed something in visible Form
which is correspondent to Intemperance in moral habits; but
without any distinct detection of the character which offends
us, far less with any understanding of the most important
lesson which there can be no doubt was intended to be conveyed
by the universality of this ornamental law.

§ VII. In a word, then, the safeguard of highest beauty, in
all visible work, is exactly that which is also the safeguard of
conduct in the soul,—Temperance, in the broadest sense; the
Temperance which we have seen sitting on an equal throne
with Justice amidst the Four Cardinal Virtues, and, wanting
which, there is not any other virtue which may not lead us
into desperate error. Now, observe: Temperance, in the
nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy;
it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in
Love or in Faith; but it means the power which governs the
most intense energy, and prevents its acting in any way but
5
as it ought. And with respect to things in which there may
be excess, it does not mean imperfect enjoyment of them; but
the regulation of their quantity, so that the enjoyment of them
shall be greatest. For instance, in the matter we have at
present in hand, temperance in color does not mean imperfect
or dull enjoyment of color; but it means that government of
color which shall bring the utmost possible enjoyment out of
all hues. A bad colorist does not love beautiful color better
than the best colorist does, nor half so much. But he indulges
in it to excess; he uses it in large masses, and unsubdued;
and then it is a law of Nature, a law as universal as that of
gravitation, that he shall not be able to enjoy it so much as if
he had used it in less quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated,
and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to
paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become
grey, and gets greyer the more he adds to it; all his crimson
has become brown, and gets more sere and autumnal the more
he deepens it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in
his work; he loves the vivid color with all his heart; but for
a long time he does not allow himself anything like it, nothing
but sober browns and dull greys, and colors that have no conceivable
beauty in them; but these by his government become
lovely: and after bringing out of them all the life and power
they possess, and enjoying them to the uttermost,—cautiously,
and as the crown of the work, and the consummation of its
music, he permits the momentary crimson and azure, and the
whole canvas is in a flame.

§ VIII. Again, in curvature, which is the cause of loveliness
in all form; the bad designer does not enjoy it more than the
great designer, but he indulges in it till his eye is satiated, and
he cannot obtain enough of it to touch his jaded feeling for
grace. But the great and temperate designer does not allow
himself any violent curves; he works much with lines in
which the curvature, though always existing, is long before it
is perceived. He dwells on all these subdued curvatures to the
uttermost, and opposes them with still severer lines to bring
6
them out in fuller sweetness; and, at last, he allows himself a
momentary curve of energy, and all the work is, in an instant,
full of life and grace.

The curves drawn in Plate VII. of the first volume, were
chosen entirely to show this character of dignity and restraint,
as it appears in the lines of nature, together with the perpetual
changefulness of the degrees of curvature in one and
the same line; but although the purpose of that plate was
carefully explained in the chapter which it illustrates, as well
as in the passages of “Modern Painters” therein referred to
(vol. ii. pp. 43, 79), so little are we now in the habit of considering
the character of abstract lines, that it was thought by
many persons that this plate only illustrated Hogarth’s reversed
line of beauty, even although the curve of the salvia
leaf, which was the one taken from that plate for future use,
in architecture, was not a reversed or serpentine curve at all.
I shall now, however, I hope, be able to show my meaning
better.

§ IX. Fig. 1 in Plate I., opposite, is a piece of ornamentation
from a Norman-French manuscript of the thirteenth
century, and fig. 2 from an Italian one of the fifteenth. Observe
in the first its stern moderation in curvature; the gradually
united lines nearly straight, though none quite straight,
used for its main limb, and contrasted with the bold but
simple offshoots of its leaves, and the noble spiral from which
it shoots, these in their turn opposed by the sharp trefoils
and thorny cusps. And see what a reserve of resource there
is in the whole; how easy it would have been to make the
curves more palpable and the foliage more rich, and how the
noble hand has stayed itself, and refused to grant one wave of
motion more.

I.

TEMPERANCE AND INTEMPERANCE. IN CURVATURE.

§ X. Then observe the other example, in which, while the
same idea is continually repeated, excitement and interest are
sought for by means of violent and continual curvatures wholly
unrestrained, and rolling hither and thither in confused wantonness.
Compare the character of the separate lines in these
two examples carefully, and be assured that wherever this
7
redundant and luxurious curvature shows itself in ornamentation,
it is a sign of jaded energy and failing invention. Do
not confuse it with fulness or richness. Wealth is not necessarily
wantonness: a Gothic moulding may be buried half a
foot deep in thorns and leaves, and yet will be chaste in every
line; and a late Renaissance moulding may be utterly barren
and poverty-stricken, and yet will show the disposition to luxury
in every line.

§ XI. Plate XX., in the second volume, though prepared
for the special illustration of the notices of capitals, becomes
peculiarly interesting when considered in relation to the points
at present under consideration. The four leaves in the upper
row are Byzantine; the two middle rows are transitional, all
but fig. 11, which is of the formed Gothic; fig. 12 is perfect
Gothic of the finest time (Ducal Palace, oldest part), fig. 13 is
Gothic beginning to decline, fig. 14 is Renaissance Gothic in
complete corruption.

Now observe, first, the Gothic naturalism advancing gradually
from the Byzantine severity; how from the sharp, hard,
formalized conventionality of the upper series the leaves gradually
expand into more free and flexible animation, until in
fig. 12 we have the perfect living leaf as if fresh gathered out
of the dew. And then, in the last two examples and partly in
fig. 11, observe how the forms which can advance no longer
in animation, advance, or rather decline, into luxury and effeminacy
as the strength of the school expires.

§ XII. In the second place, note that the Byzantine and
Gothic schools, however differing in degree of life, are both
alike in temperance, though the temperance of the Gothic is
the nobler, because it consists with entire animation. Observe
how severe and subtle the curvatures are in all the leaves
from fig. 1 to fig. 12, except only in fig. 11; and observe
especially the firmness and strength obtained by the close
approximation to the straight line in the lateral ribs of the
leaf, fig. 12. The longer the eye rests on these temperate curvatures
the more it will enjoy them, but it will assuredly in the
end be wearied by the morbid exaggeration of the last example.

8

II.

GOTHIC CAPITALS.

§ XIII. Finally, observe—and this is very important—how
one and the same character in the work may be a sign of
totally different states of mind, and therefore in one case bad,
and in the other good. The examples, fig. 3. and fig. 12., are
both equally pure in line; but one is subdivided in the extreme,
the other broad in the extreme, and both are beautiful.
The Byzantine mind delighted in the delicacy of subdivision
which nature shows in the fern-leaf or parsley-leaf; and so,
also, often the Gothic mind, much enjoying the oak, thorn,
and thistle. But the builder of the Ducal Palace used great
breadth in his foliage, in order to harmonize with the broad
surface of his mighty wall, and delighted in this breadth as
nature delights in the sweeping freshness of the dock-leaf or
water-lily. Both breadth and subdivision are thus noble, when
they are contemplated or conceived by a mind in health; and
both become ignoble, when conceived by a mind jaded and
satiated. The subdivision in fig. 13 as compared with the
type, fig. 12, which it was intended to improve, is the sign,
not of a mind which loved intricacy, but of one which could
not relish simplicity, which had not strength enough to enjoy
the broad masses of the earlier leaves, and cut them to pieces
idly, like a child tearing the book which, in its weariness, it
cannot read. And on the other hand, we shall continually
find, in other examples of work of the same period, an unwholesome
breadth or heaviness, which results from the mind
having no longer any care for refinement or precision, nor
taking any delight in delicate forms, but making all things
blunted, cumbrous, and dead, losing at the same time the sense
of the elasticity and spring of natural curves. It is as if the
soul of man, itself severed from the root of its health, and
about to fall into corruption, lost the perception of life in all
things around it; and could no more distinguish the wave of
the strong branches, full of muscular strength and sanguine
circulation, from the lax bending of a broken cord, nor the
sinuousness of the edge of the leaf, crushed into deep folds by
the expansion of its living growth, from the wrinkled contraction
9
of its decay.1 Thus, in morals, there is a care for trifles
which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy;
and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and
is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from
thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from
dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most
base. Now, in the various forms assumed by the later Gothic
of Venice, there are one or two features which, under other
circumstances, would not have been signs of decline; but, in
the particular manner of their occurrence here, indicate the
fatal weariness of decay. Of all these features the most distinctive
are its crockets and finials.

§ XIV. There is not to be found a single crocket or finial
upon any part of the Ducal Palace built during the fourteenth
century; and although they occur on contemporary, and on
some much earlier, buildings, they either indicate detached
examples of schools not properly Venetian, or are signs of
incipient decline.

The reason of this is, that the finial is properly the ornament
of gabled architecture; it is the compliance, in the
minor features of the building, with the spirit of its towers,
ridged roof, and spires. Venetian building is not gabled, but
horizontal in its roots and general masses; therefore the finial
is a feature contradictory to its spirit, and adopted only in that
search for morbid excitement which is the infallible indication
of decline. When it occurs earlier, it is on fragments of
true gabled architecture, as, for instance, on the porch of the
Carmini.

In proportion to the unjustifiableness of its introduction
was the extravagance of the form it assumed; becoming,
sometimes, a tuft at the top of the ogee windows, half as high
as the arch itself, and consisting, in the richest examples, of a
human figure, half emergent out of a cup of leafage, as, for
10
instance, in the small archway of the Campo San Zaccaria:
while the crockets, as being at the side of the arch, and not
so strictly connected with its balance and symmetry, appear to
consider themselves at greater liberty even than the finials, and
fling themselves, hither and thither, in the wildest contortions.
Fig. 4. in Plate I, is the outline of one, carved in stone, from
the later Gothic of St. Mark’s; fig. 3. a crocket from the fine
Veronese Gothic; in order to enable the reader to discern the
Renaissance character better by comparison with the examples
of curvature above them, taken from the manuscripts. And
not content with this exuberance in the external ornaments of
the arch, the finial interferes with its traceries. The increased
intricacy of these, as such, being a natural process in the developement
of Gothic, would have been no evil; but they are
corrupted by the enrichment of the finial at the point of the
cusp,—corrupted, that is to say, in Venice: for at Verona the
finial, in the form of a fleur-de-lis, appears long previously at
the cusp point, with exquisite effect; and in our own best
Northern Gothic it is often used beautifully in this place, as
in the window from Salisbury, Plate XII. (Vol. II.), fig. 2.
But in Venice, such a treatment of it was utterly contrary to
the severe spirit of the ancient traceries; and the adoption of
a leafy finial at the extremity of the cusps in the door of San
Stefano, as opposed to the simple ball which terminates those
of the Ducal Palace, is an unmistakable indication of a tendency
to decline.

In like manner, the enrichment and complication of the
jamb mouldings, which, in other schools, might and did take
place in the healthiest periods, are, at Venice, signs of decline,
owing to the entire inconsistency of such mouldings with the
ancient love of the single square jamb and archivolt. The
process of enrichment in them is shown by the successive examples
given in Plate VII., below. They are numbered, and
explained in the Appendix.

§ XV. The date at which this corrupt form of Gothic first
prevailed over the early simplicity of the Venetian types can
be determined in an instant, on the steps of the choir of the
11
Church of St. John and Paul. On our left hand, as we enter,
is the tomb of the Doge Marco Cornaro, who died in 1367.
It is rich and fully developed Gothic, with crockets and finials,
but not yet attaining any extravagant developement. Opposite
to it is that of the Doge Andrea Morosini, who died in
1382. Its Gothic is voluptuous, and over-wrought; the crockets
are bold and florid, and the enormous finial represents a
statue of St. Michael. There is no excuse for the antiquaries
who, having this tomb before them, could have attributed the
severe architecture of the Ducal Palace to a later date; for
every one of the Renaissance errors is here in complete developement,
though not so grossly as entirely to destroy the
loveliness of the Gothic forms. In the Porta della Carta,
1423, the vice reaches its climax.

§ XVI. Against this degraded Gothic, then, came up the
Renaissance armies; and their first assault was in the requirement
of universal perfection. For the first time since the
destruction of Rome, the world had seen, in the work of the
greatest artists of the fifteenth century,—in the painting of
Ghirlandajo, Masaccio, Francia, Perugino, Pinturicchio, and
Bellini; in the sculpture of Mino da Fiesole, of Ghiberti, and
Verrocchio,—a perfection of execution and fulness of knowledge
which cast all previous art into the shade, and which,
being in the work of those men united with all that was great
in that of former days, did indeed justify the utmost enthusiasm
with which their efforts were, or could be, regarded.
But when this perfection had once been exhibited in anything,
it was required in everything; the world could no longer be
satisfied with less exquisite execution, or less disciplined knowledge.
The first thing that it demanded in all work was, that
it should be done in a consummate and learned way; and men
altogether forgot that it was possible to consummate what was
contemptible, and to know what was useless. Imperatively
requiring dexterity of touch, they gradually forgot to look for
tenderness of feeling; imperatively requiring accuracy of
knowledge, they gradually forgot to ask for originality of
thought. The thought and the feeling which they despised
12
departed from them, and they were left to felicitate themselves
on their small science and their neat fingering. This
is the history of the first attack of the Renaissance upon the
Gothic schools, and of its rapid results, more fatal and immediate
in architecture than in any other art, because there the
demand for perfection was less reasonable, and less consistent
with the capabilities of the workman; being utterly opposed
to that rudeness or savageness on which, as we saw above, the
nobility of the elder schools in great part depends. But inasmuch
as the innovations were founded on some of the most
beautiful examples of art, and headed by some of the greatest
men that the world ever saw, and as the Gothic with which
they interfered was corrupt and valueless, the first appearance
of the Renaissance feeling had the appearance of a healthy
movement. A new energy replaced whatever weariness or
dulness had affected the Gothic mind; an exquisite taste and
refinement, aided by extended knowledge, furnished the first
models of the new school; and over the whole of Italy a style
arose, generally now known as cinque-cento, which in sculpture
and painting, as I just stated, produced the noblest masters
which the world ever saw, headed by Michael Angelo, Raphael,
and Leonardo; but which failed of doing the same in architecture,
because, as we have seen above, perfection is therein not
possible, and failed more totally than it would otherwise have
done, because the classical enthusiasm had destroyed the best
types of architectural form.

§ XVII. For, observe here very carefully, the Renaissance
principle, as it consisted in a demand for universal perfection,
is quite distinct from the Renaissance principle as it consists
in a demand for classical and Roman forms of perfection.
And if I had space to follow out the subject as I should desire,
I would first endeavor to ascertain what might have been
the course of the art of Europe if no manuscripts of classical
authors had been recovered, and no remains of classical architecture
left, in the fifteenth century; so that the executive
perfection to which the efforts of all great men had tended for
five hundred years, and which now at last was reached, might
13
have been allowed to develope itself in its own natural and
proper form, in connexion with the architectural structure of
earlier schools. This refinement and perfection had indeed
its own perils, and the history of later Italy, as she sank into
pleasure and thence into corruption, would probably have
been the same whether she had ever learned again to write
pure Latin or not. Still the inquiry into the probable cause
of the enervation which might naturally have followed the
highest exertion of her energies, is a totally distinct one from
that into the particular form given to this enervation by her
classical learning; and it is matter of considerable regret to
me that I cannot treat these two subjects separately: I must
be content with marking them for separation in the mind of
the reader.

§ XVIII. The effect, then, of the sudden enthusiasm for classical
literature, which gained strength during every hour of
the fifteenth century, was, as far as respected architecture, to
do away with the entire system of Gothic science. The
pointed arch, the shadowy vault, the clustered shaft, the
heaven-pointing spire, were all swept away; and no structure
was any longer permitted but that of the plain cross-beam
from pillar to pillar, over the round arch, with square or circular
shafts, and a low-gabled roof and pediment: two elements
of noble form, which had fortunately existed in Rome,
were, however, for that reason, still permitted; the cupola,
and, internally, the waggon vault.

§ XIX. These changes in form were all of them unfortunate;
and it is almost impossible to do justice to the occasionally
exquisite ornamentation of the fifteenth century, on account
of its being placed upon edifices of the cold and meagre
Roman outline. There is, as far as I know, only one Gothic
building in Europe, the Duomo of Florence, in which, though
the ornament be of a much earlier school, it is yet so exquisitely
finished as to enable us to imagine what might have
been the effect of the perfect workmanship of the Renaissance,
coming out of the hands of men like Verrocchio and Ghiberti,
had it been employed on the magnificent framework of Gothic
14
structure. This is the question which, as I shall note in the
concluding chapter, we ought to set ourselves practically to
solve in modern times.

§ XX. The changes effected in form, however, were the
least part of the evil principles of the Renaissance. As I have
just said, its main mistake, in its early stages, was the unwholesome
demand for perfection, at any cost. I hope enough has
been advanced, in the chapter on the Nature of Gothic, to
show the reader that perfection is not to be had from the general
workman, but at the cost of everything,—of his whole
life, thought, and energy. And Renaissance Europe thought
this a small price to pay for manipulative perfection. Men
like Verrocchio and Ghiberti were not to be had every day,
nor in every place; and to require from the common workman
execution or knowledge like theirs, was to require him to become
their copyist. Their strength was great enough to
enable them to join science with invention, method with emotion,
finish with fire; but, in them, the invention and the fire
were first, while Europe saw in them only the method and the
finish. This was new to the minds of men, and they pursued
it to the neglect of everything else. “This,” they cried, “we
must have in all our work henceforward:” and they were
obeyed. The lower workman secured method and finish, and
lost, in exchange for them, his soul.

§ XXI. Now, therefore, do not let me be misunderstood
when I speak generally of the evil spirit of the Renaissance.
The reader may look through all I have written, from first to
last, and he will not find one word but of the most profound
reverence for those mighty men who could wear the Renaissance
armor of proof, and yet not feel it encumber their
living limbs,2—Leonardo and Michael Angelo, Ghirlandajo
and Masaccio, Titian and Tintoret. But I speak of the Renaissance
as an evil time, because, when it saw those men go burning
forth into the battle, it mistook their armor for their
15
strength: and forthwith encumbered with the painful panoply
every stripling who ought to have gone forth only with his
own choice of three smooth stones out of the brook.

§ XXII. This, then, the reader must always keep in mind
when he is examining for himself any examples of cinque-cento
work. When it has been done by a truly great man,
whose life and strength could not be oppressed, and who turned
to good account the whole science of his day, nothing is more
exquisite. I do not believe, for instance, that there is a more
glorious work of sculpture existing in the world than that
equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleone, by Verrocchio, of
which, I hope, before these pages are printed, there will be a
cast in England. But when the cinque-cento work has been
done by those meaner men, who, in the Gothic times, though
in a rough way, would yet have found some means of speaking
out what was in their hearts, it is utterly inanimate,—a base
and helpless copy of more accomplished models; or, if not
this, a mere accumulation of technical skill, in gaining which
the workman had surrendered all other powers that were in
him.

There is, therefore, of course, an infinite gradation in the
art of the period, from the Sistine Chapel down to modern upholstery;
but, for the most part, since in architecture the workman
must be of an inferior order, it will be found that this
cinque-cento painting and higher religious sculpture is noble,
while the cinque-cento architecture, with its subordinate sculpture,
is universally bad; sometimes, however, assuming forms,
in which the consummate refinement almost atones for the loss
of force.

§ XXIII. This is especially the case with that second branch
of the Renaissance which, as above noticed, was engrafted at
Venice on the Byzantine types. So soon as the classical enthusiasm
required the banishment of Gothic forms, it was natural
that the Venetian mind should turn back with affection to the
Byzantine models in which the round arches and simple shafts,
necessitated by recent law, were presented under a form consecrated
by the usage of their ancestors. And, accordingly,
16
the first distinct school of architecture3 which arose under the
new dynasty, was one in which the method of inlaying marble,
and the general forms of shaft and arch, were adopted from
the buildings of the twelfth century, and applied with the utmost
possible refinements of modern skill. Both at Verona
and Venice the resulting architecture is exceedingly beautiful.
At Verona it is, indeed, less Byzantine, but possesses a character
of richness and tenderness almost peculiar to that city. At
Venice it is more severe, but yet adorned with sculpture which,
for sharpness of touch and delicacy of minute form, cannot be
rivalled, and rendered especially brilliant and beautiful by the
introduction of those inlaid circles of colored marble, serpentine,
and porphyry, by which Phillippe de Commynes was so
much struck on his first entrance into the city. The two most
refined buildings in this style in Venice are, the small Church
of the Miracoli, and the Scuola di San Marco beside the Church
of St. John and St. Paul. The noblest is the Rio Façade of
the Ducal Palace. The Casa Dario, and Casa Manzoni, on the
Grand Canal, are exquisite examples of the school, as applied
to domestic architecture; and, in the reach of the canal between
the Casa Foscari and the Rialto, there are several palaces,
of which the Casa Contarini (called “delle Figure”) is the
principal, belonging to the same group, though somewhat later,
and remarkable for the association of the Byzantine principles
of color with the severest lines of the Roman pediment, gradually
superseding the round arch. The precision of chiselling
and delicacy of proportion in the ornament and general lines
of these palaces cannot be too highly praised; and I believe
that the traveller in Venice, in general, gives them rather too
little attention than too much. But while I would ask him to
stay his gondola beside each of them long enough to examine
their every line, I must also warn him to observe, most carefully,
the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the conception
of their ornament, which mark them as belonging to a
period of decline; as well as the absurd mode of introduction
17
of their pieces of colored marble: these, instead of being simply
and naturally inserted in the masonry, are placed in small circular
or oblong frames of sculpture, like mirrors or pictures, and
are represented as suspended by ribands against the wall; a
pair of wings being generally fastened on to the circular tablets,
as if to relieve the ribands and knots from their weight, and
the whole series tied under the chin of a little cherub at the
top, who is nailed against the façade like a hawk on a barn
door.

But chiefly let him notice, in the Casa Contarini delle
Figure, one most strange incident, seeming to have been permitted,
like the choice of the subjects at the three angles of
the Ducal Palace, in order to teach us, by a single lesson, the
true nature of the style in which it occurs. In the intervals
of the windows of the first story, certain shields and torches
are attached, in the form of trophies, to the stems of two trees
whose boughs have been cut off, and only one or two of their
faded leaves left, scarcely observable, but delicately sculptured
here and there, beneath the insertions of the severed boughs.

It is as if the workman had intended to leave us an image
of the expiring naturalism of the Gothic school. I had not
seen this sculpture when I wrote the passage referring to its
period, in the first volume of this work (Chap. XX. § XXXI.):—“Autumn
came,—the leaves were shed,—and the eye was
directed to the extremities of the delicate branches. The
Renaissance frosts came, and all perished!”

§ XXIV. And the hues of this autumn of the early Renaissance
are the last which appear in architecture. The winter
which succeeded was colorless as it was cold; and although
the Venetian painters struggled long against its influence, the
numbness of the architecture prevailed over them at last, and
the exteriors of all the latter palaces were built only in barren
stone. As at this point of our inquiry, therefore, we must bid
farewell to color, I have reserved for this place the continuation
of the history of chromatic decoration, from the Byzantine
period, when we left it in the fifth chapter of the second
volume, down to its final close.

18

§ XXV. It was above stated, that the principal difference in
general form and treatment between the Byzantine and Gothic
palaces was the contraction of the marble facing into the narrow
spaces between the windows, leaving large fields of brick
wall perfectly bare. The reason for this appears to have been,
that the Gothic builders were no longer satisfied with the faint
and delicate hues of the veined marble; they wished for some
more forcible and piquant mode of decoration, corresponding
more completely with the gradually advancing splendor of
chivalric costume and heraldic device. What I have said
above of the simple habits of life of the thirteenth century,
in no wise refers either to costumes of state, or of military
service; and any illumination of the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries (the great period being, it seems to me, from
1250 to 1350), while it shows a peculiar majesty and simplicity
in the fall of the robes (often worn over the chain armor),
indicates, at the same time, an exquisite brilliancy of color and
power of design in the hems and borders, as well as in the
armorial bearings with which they are charged; and while, as
we have seen, a peculiar simplicity is found also in the forms
of the architecture, corresponding to that of the folds of the
robes, its colors were constantly increasing in brilliancy and
decision, corresponding to those of the quartering of the shield,
and of the embroidery of the mantle.

§ XXVI. Whether, indeed, derived from the quarterings of
the knights’ shields, or from what other source, I know not;
but there is one magnificent attribute of the coloring of the
late twelfth, the whole thirteenth, and the early fourteenth
century, which I do not find definitely in any previous work,
nor afterwards in general art, though constantly, and necessarily,
in that of great colorists, namely, the union of one color
with another by reciprocal interference: that is to say, if a
mass of red is to be set beside a mass of blue, a piece of the
red will be carried into the blue, and a piece of the blue carried
into the red; sometimes in nearly equal portions, as in a
shield divided into four quarters, of which the uppermost on
one side will be of the same color as the lowermost on the
19
other; sometimes in smaller fragments, but, in the periods
above named, always definitely and grandly, though in a thousand
various ways. And I call it a magnificent principle, for
it is an eternal and universal one, not in art only,4 but in
human life. It is the great principle of Brotherhood, not by
equality, nor by likeness, but by giving and receiving; the
souls that are unlike, and the nations that are unlike, and the
natures that are unlike, being bound into one noble whole by
each receiving something from, and of, the others’ gifts and
the others’ glory. I have not space to follow out this thought,—it
is of infinite extent and application,—but I note it for the
reader’s pursuit, because I have long believed, and the whole
second volume of “Modern Painters” was written to prove,
that in whatever has been made by the Deity externally delightful
to the human sense of beauty, there is some type of
God’s nature or of God’s laws; nor are any of His laws, in
one sense, greater than the appointment that the most lovely
and perfect unity shall be obtained by the taking of one nature
into another. I trespass upon too high ground; and yet I
cannot fully show the reader the extent of this law, but by
leading him thus far. And it is just because it is so vast and
so awful a law, that it has rule over the smallest things; and
there is not a vein of color on the lightest leaf which the
spring winds are at this moment unfolding in the fields around
20
us, but it is an illustration of an ordainment to which the
earth and its creatures owe their continuance, and their Redemption.

§ XXVII. It is perfectly inconceivable, until it has been
made a subject of special inquiry, how perpetually Nature
employs this principle in the distribution of her light and
shade; how by the most extraordinary adaptations, apparently
accidental, but always in exactly the right place, she contrives
to bring darkness into light, and light into darkness; and that
so sharply and decisively, that at the very instant when one
object changes from light to dark, the thing relieved upon it
will change from dark to light, and yet so subtly that the eye
will not detect the transition till it looks for it. The secret
of a great part of the grandeur in all the noblest compositions
is the doing of this delicately in degree, and broadly in mass;
in color it may be done much more decisively than in light
and shade, and, according to the simplicity of the work, with
greater frankness of confession, until, in purely decorative
art, as in the illumination, glass-painting, and heraldry of the
great periods, we find it reduced to segmental accuracy. Its
greatest masters, in high art, are Tintoret, Veronese, and
Turner.

§ XXVIII. Together with this great principle of quartering
is introduced another, also of very high value as far as regards
the delight of the eye, though not of so profound meaning.
As soon as color began to be used in broad and opposed fields,
it was perceived that the mass of it destroyed its brilliancy,
and it was tempered by chequering it with some other color or
colors in smaller quantities, mingled with minute portions of
pure white. The two moral principles of which this is the
type, are those of Temperance and Purity; the one requiring
the fulness of the color to be subdued, and the other that it
shall be subdued without losing either its own purity or that
of the colors with which it is associated.

§ XXIX. Hence arose the universal and admirable system of
the diapered or chequered background of early ornamental art.
They are completely developed in the thirteenth century, and
21
extend through the whole of the fourteenth gradually yielding
to landscape, and other pictorial backgrounds, as the designers
lost perception of the purpose of their art, and of the value
of color. The chromatic decoration of the Gothic palaces of
Venice was of course founded on these two great principles,
which prevailed constantly wherever the true chivalric and
Gothic spirit possessed any influence. The windows, with
their intermediate spaces of marble, were considered as the
objects to be relieved, and variously quartered with vigorous
color. The whole space of the brick wall was considered as a
background; it was covered with stucco, and painted in fresco,
with diaper patterns.

§ XXX. What? the reader asks in some surprise,—Stucco!
and in the great Gothic period? Even so, but not stucco to
imitate stone. Herein lies all the difference; it is stucco confessed
and understood, and laid on the bricks precisely as gesso
is laid on canvas, in order to form them into a ground for
receiving color from the human hand,—color which, if well
laid on, might render the brick wall more precious than if it
had been built of emeralds. Whenever we wish to paint, we
may prepare our paper as we choose; the value of the ground
in no wise adds to the value of the picture. A Tintoret on
beaten gold would be of no more value than a Tintoret on
coarse canvas; the gold would merely be wasted. All that
we have to do is to make the ground as good and fit for the
color as possible, by whatever means.

§ XXXI. I am not sure if I am right in applying the term
“stucco” to the ground of fresco; but this is of no consequence;
the reader will understand that it was white, and that
the whole wall of the palace was considered as the page of a
book to be illuminated: but he will understand also that the
sea winds are bad librarians; that, when once the painted
stucco began to fade or to fall, the unsightliness of the defaced
color would necessitate its immediate restoration; and that
therefore, of all the chromatic decoration of the Gothic palaces,
there is hardly a fragment left.

Happily, in the pictures of Gentile Bellini, the fresco coloring
22
of the Gothic palaces is recorded, as it still remained in
his time; not with rigid accuracy, but quite distinctly enough
to enable us, by comparing it with the existing colored designs
in the manuscripts and glass of the period, to ascertain precisely
what it must have been.

§ XXXII. The walls were generally covered with chequers
of very warm color, a russet inclining to scarlet, more or less
relieved with white, black, and grey; as still seen in the only
example which, having been executed in marble, has been perfectly
preserved, the front of the Ducal Palace. This, however,
owing to the nature of its materials, was a peculiarly
simple example; the ground is white, crossed with double
bars of pale red, and in the centre of each chequer there is a
cross, alternately black with a red centre and red with a black
centre where the arms cross. In painted work the grounds
would be, of course, as varied and complicated as those of
manuscripts; but I only know of one example left, on the
Casa Sagredo, where, on some fragments of stucco, a very
early chequer background is traceable, composed of crimson
quatrefoils interlaced, with cherubim stretching their wings
filling the intervals. A small portion of this ground is seen
beside the window taken from the palace, Vol. II. Plate
XIII. fig. 1.

§ XXXIII. It ought to be especially noticed, that, in all
chequered patterns employed in the colored designs of these
noble periods, the greatest care is taken to mark that they are
grounds of design rather than designs themselves. Modern
architects, in such minor imitations as they are beginning to
attempt, endeavor to dispose the parts in the patterns so as
to occupy certain symmetrical positions with respect to the
parts of the architecture. A Gothic builder never does this:
he cuts his ground into pieces of the shape he requires with
utter remorselessness, and places his windows or doors upon
it with no regard whatever to the lines in which they cut the
pattern: and, in illuminations of manuscripts, the chequer
itself is constantly changed in the most subtle and arbitrary
way, wherever there is the least chance of its regularity attracting
23
the eye, and making it of importance. So intentional
is this, that a diaper pattern is often set obliquely to the vertical
lines of the designs, for fear it should appear in any way
connected with them.

§ XXXIV. On these russet or crimson backgrounds the entire
space of the series of windows was relieved, for the most part,
as a subdued white field of alabaster; and on this delicate and
veined white were set the circular disks of purple and green.
The arms of the family were of course blazoned in their own
proper colors, but I think generally on a pure azure ground;
the blue color is still left behind the shields in the Casa Priuli
and one or two more of the palaces which are unrestored, and
the blue ground was used also to relieve the sculptures of religious
subject. Finally, all the mouldings, capitals, cornices,
cusps, and traceries, were either entirely gilded or profusely
touched with gold.

The whole front of a Gothic palace in Venice may, therefore,
be simply described as a field of subdued russet, quartered
with broad sculptured masses of white and gold; these latter
being relieved by smaller inlaid fragments of blue, purple, and
deep green.

§ XXXV. Now, from the beginning of the fourteenth century,
when painting and architecture were thus united, two
processes of change went on simultaneously to the beginning
of the seventeenth. The merely decorative chequerings on
the walls yielded gradually to more elaborate paintings of
figure-subject; first small and quaint, and then enlarging into
enormous pictures filled by figures generally colossal. As
these paintings became of greater merit and importance, the
architecture with which they were associated was less studied;
and at last a style was introduced in which the framework of
the building was little more interesting than that of a Manchester
factory, but the whole space of its walls was covered
with the most precious fresco paintings. Such edifices are of
course no longer to be considered as forming an architectural
school; they were merely large preparations of artists’ panels;
and Titian, Giorgione, and Veronese no more conferred merit
24
on the later architecture of Venice, as such, by painting on its
façades, than Landseer or Watts could confer merit on that
of London by first whitewashing and then painting its brick
streets from one end to the other.

§ XXXVI. Contemporarily with this change in the relative
values of the color decoration and the stone-work, one equally
important was taking place in the opposite direction, but of
course in another group of buildings. For in proportion as
the architect felt himself thrust aside or forgotten in one edifice,
he endeavored to make himself principal in another; and,
in retaliation for the painter’s entire usurpation of certain
fields of design, succeeded in excluding him totally from those
in which his own influence was predominant. Or, more accurately
speaking, the architects began to be too proud to receive
assistance from the colorists; and these latter sought for
ground which the architect had abandoned, for the unrestrained
display of their own skill. And thus, while one
series of edifices is continually becoming feebler in design and
richer in superimposed paintings, another, that of which we
have so often spoken as the earliest or Byzantine Renaissance,
fragment by fragment rejects the pictorial decoration; supplies
its place first with marbles, and then, as the latter are felt by
the architect, daily increasing in arrogance and deepening in
coldness, to be too bright for his dignity, he casts even these
aside one by one: and when the last porphyry circle has vanished
from the façade, we find two palaces standing side by
side, one built, so far as mere masonry goes, with consummate
care and skill, but without the slightest vestige of color in any
part of it; the other utterly without any claim to interest in
its architectural form, but covered from top to bottom with
paintings by Veronese. At this period, then, we bid farewell
to color, leaving the painters to their own peculiar field; and
only regretting that they waste their noblest work on walls,
from which in a couple of centuries, if not before, the greater
part of their labor must be effaced. On the other hand, the
architecture whose decline we are tracing, has now assumed
an entirely new condition, that of the Central or True Renaissance,
25
whose nature we are to examine in the next
chapter.

§ XXXVII. But before leaving these last palaces over which
the Byzantine influence extended itself, there is one more
lesson to be learned from them of much importance to us.
Though in many respects debased in style, they are consummate
in workmanship, and unstained in honor; there is no imperfection
in them, and no dishonesty. That there is absolutely
no imperfection, is indeed, as we have seen above, a proof of
their being wanting in the highest qualities of architecture;
but, as lessons in masonry, they have their value, and may well
be studied for the excellence they display in methods of levelling
stones, for the precision of their inlaying, and other such
qualities, which in them are indeed too principal, yet very instructive
in their particular way.

§ XXXVIII. For instance, in the inlaid design of the dove
with the olive branch, from the Casa Trevisan (Vol. I. Plate
XX. p. 369), it is impossible for anything to go beyond the
precision with which the olive leaves are cut out of the white
marble; and, in some wreaths of laurel below, the rippled edge
of each leaf is as finely and easily drawn, as if by a delicate
pencil. No Florentine table is more exquisitely finished than
the façade of this entire palace; and as ideals of an executive
perfection, which, though we must not turn aside from our
main path to reach it, may yet with much advantage be kept in
our sight and memory, these palaces are most notable amidst
the architecture of Europe. The Rio Façade of the Ducal
Palace, though very sparing in color, is yet, as an example of
finished masonry in a vast building, one of the finest things,
not only in Venice, but in the world. It differs from other
work of the Byzantine Renaissance, in being on a very large
scale; and it still retains one pure Gothic character, which adds
not a little to its nobleness, that of perpetual variety. There
is hardly one window of it, or one panel, that is like another;
and this continual change so increases its apparent size by confusing
the eye, that, though presenting no bold features, or
striking masses of any kind, there are few things in Italy more
26
impressive than the vision of it overhead, as the gondola glides
from beneath the Bridge of Sighs. And lastly (unless we are
to blame these buildings for some pieces of very childish perspective),
they are magnificently honest, as well as perfect. I
do not remember even any gilding upon them; all is pure
marble, and of the finest kind.5

And therefore, in finally leaving the Ducal Palace,6 let us
take with us one more lesson, the last which we shall receive
from the Stones of Venice, except in the form of a warning.

§ XXXIX. The school of architecture which we have just
been examining is, as we have seen above, redeemed from
severe condemnation by its careful and noble use of inlaid
marbles as a means of color. From that time forward, this art
has been unknown, or despised; the frescoes of the swift and
daring Venetian painters long contended with the inlaid
marbles, outvying them with color, indeed more glorious than
theirs, but fugitive as the hues of woods in autumn; and, at
last, as the art itself of painting in this mighty manner failed
from among men,7 the modern decorative system established
itself, which united the meaninglessness of the veined marble
with the evanescence of the fresco, and completed the harmony
by falsehood.

§ XL. Since first, in the second chapter of the “Seven
Lamps,” I endeavored to show the culpableness, as well as the
baseness, of our common modes of decoration by painted imitation
27
of various woods or marbles, the subject has been discussed
in various architectural works, and is evidently becoming
one of daily increasing interest. When it is considered how
many persons there are whose means of livelihood consist altogether
in these spurious arts, and how difficult it is, even for
the most candid, to admit a conviction contrary both to their
interests and to their inveterate habits of practice and thought,
it is rather a matter of wonder, that the cause of Truth should
have found even a few maintainers, than that it should have
encountered a host of adversaries. It has, however, been defended
repeatedly by architects themselves, and so successfully,
that I believe, so far as the desirableness of this or that method
of ornamentation is to be measured by the fact of its simple
honesty or dishonesty, there is little need to add anything to
what has been already urged upon the subject. But there are
some points connected with the practice of imitating marble,
which I have been unable to touch upon until now, and by the
consideration of which we may be enabled to see something of
the policy of honesty in this matter, without in the least abandoning
the higher ground of principle.

§ XLI. Consider, then, first, what marble seems to have been
made for. Over the greater part of the surface of the world,
we find that a rock has been providentially distributed, in a
manner particularly pointing it out as intended for the service of
man. Not altogether a common rock, it is yet rare enough to
command a certain degree of interest and attention wherever
it is found; but not so rare as to preclude its use for any purpose
to which it is fitted. It is exactly of the consistence
which is best adapted for sculpture: that is to say, neither hard
nor brittle, nor flaky nor splintery, but uniform, and delicately,
yet not ignobly, soft,—exactly soft enough to allow the sculptor
to work it without force, and trace on it the finest lines of
finished form; and yet so hard as never to betray the touch or
moulder away beneath the steel; and so admirably crystallized,
and of such permanent elements, that no rains dissolve it, no
time changes it, no atmosphere decomposes it: once shaped, it
is shaped for ever, unless subjected to actual violence or attrition.
28
This rock, then, is prepared by Nature for the sculptor
and architect, just as paper is prepared by the manufacturer
for the artist, with as great—nay, with greater—care, and more
perfect adaptation of the material to the requirements. And
of this marble paper, some is white and some colored; but
more is colored than white, because the white is evidently
meant for sculpture, and the colored for the covering of large
surfaces.

§ XLII. Now, if we would take Nature at her word, and use
this precious paper which she has taken so much care to provide
for us (it is a long process, the making of that paper; the
pulp of it needing the subtlest possible solution, and the pressing
of it—for it is all hot-pressed—having to be done under
the saw, or under something at least as heavy); if, I say, we use
it as Nature would have us, consider what advantages would
follow. The colors of marble are mingled for us just as if on
a prepared palette. They are of all shades and hues (except
bad ones), some being united and even, some broken, mixed,
and interrupted, in order to supply, as far as possible, the want
of the painter’s power of breaking and mingling the color with
the brush. But there is more in the colors than this delicacy
of adaptation. There is history in them. By the manner in
which they are arranged in every piece of marble, they record
the means by which that marble has been produced, and the
successive changes through which it has passed. And in all
their veins and zones, and flame-like stainings, or broken and
disconnected lines, they write various legends, never untrue,
of the former political state of the mountain kingdom to which
they belonged, of its infirmities and fortitudes, convulsions and
consolidations, from the beginning of time.

Now, if we were never in the habit of seeing anything but
real marbles, this language of theirs would soon begin to be
understood; that is to say, even the least observant of us
would recognize such and such stones as forming a peculiar
class, and would begin to inquire where they came from, and,
at last, take some feeble interest in the main question, Why
they were only to be found in that or the other place, and
29
how they came to make a part of this mountain, and not of
that? And in a little while, it would not be possible to stand
for a moment at a shop door, leaning against the pillars of it,
without remembering or questioning of something well worth
the memory or the inquiry, touching the hills of Italy, or
Greece, or Africa, or Spain; and we should be led on from
knowledge to knowledge, until even the unsculptured walls of
our streets became to us volumes as precious as those of our
libraries.

§ XLIII. But the moment we admit imitation of marble, this
source of knowledge is destroyed. None of us can be at the
pains to go through the work of verification. If we knew
that every colored stone we saw was natural, certain questions,
conclusions, interests, would force themselves upon us
without any effort of our own; but we have none of us time
to stop in the midst of our daily business, to touch and pore
over, and decide with painful minuteness of investigation,
whether such and such a pillar be stucco or stone. And the
whole field of this knowledge, which Nature intended us to
possess when we were children, is hopelessly shut out from us.
Worse than shut out, for the mass of coarse imitations confuses
our knowledge acquired from other sources; and our
memory of the marbles we have perhaps once or twice carefully
examined, is disturbed and distorted by the inaccuracy
of the imitations which are brought before us continually.

§ XLIV. But it will be said, that it is too expensive to employ
real marbles in ordinary cases. It may be so: yet not
always more expensive than the fitting windows with enormous
plate glass, and decorating them with elaborate stucco
mouldings and other useless sources of expenditure in modern
building; nay, not always in the end more expensive than the
frequent repainting of the dingy pillars, which a little water
dashed against them would refresh from day to day, if they
were of true stone. But, granting that it be so, in that very
costliness, checking their common use in certain localities, is
part of the interest of marbles, considered as history. Where
they are not found, Nature has supplied other materials,—clay
30
for brick, or forest for timber,—in the working of which she
intends other characters of the human mind to be developed,
and by the proper use of which certain local advantages will
assuredly be attained, while the delightfulness and meaning
of the precious marbles will be felt more forcibly in the districts
where they occur, or on the occasions when they may be
procured.

§ XLV. It can hardly be necessary to add, that, as the imitation
of marbles interferes with and checks the knowledge of
geography and geology, so the imitation of wood interferes
with that of botany; and that our acquaintance with the
nature, uses, and manner of growth of the timber trees of our
own and of foreign countries, would probably, in the majority
of cases, become accurate and extensive, without any labor or
sacrifice of time, were not all inquiry checked, and all observation
betrayed, by the wretched labors of the “Grainer.”

§ XLVI. But this is not all. As the practice of imitation
retards knowledge, so also it retards art.

There is not a meaner occupation for the human mind than
the imitation of the stains and striæ of marble and wood.
When engaged in any easy and simple mechanical occupation,
there is still some liberty for the mind to leave the literal
work; and the clash of the loom or the activity of the fingers
will not always prevent the thoughts from some happy expatiation
in their own domains. But the grainer must think of
what he is doing; and veritable attention and care, and occasionally
considerable skill, are consumed in the doing of a
more absolute nothing than I can name in any other department
of painful idleness. I know not anything so humiliating
as to see a human being, with arms and limbs complete,
and apparently a head, and assuredly a soul, yet into the hands
of which when you have put a brush and pallet, it cannot do
anything with them but imitate a piece of wood. It cannot
color, it has no ideas of color; it cannot draw, it has no ideas
of form; it cannot caricature, it has no ideas of humor. It is
incapable of anything beyond knots. All its achievement, the
entire result of the daily application of its imagination and
31
immortality, is to be such a piece of texture as the sun and
dew are sucking up out of the muddy ground, and weaving
together, far more finely, in millions of millions of growing
branches, over every rood of waste woodland and shady hill.

§ XLVII. But what is to be done, the reader asks, with men
who are capable of nothing else than this? Nay, they may
be capable of everything else, for all we know, and what we
are to do with them I will try to say in the next chapter; but
meanwhile one word more touching the higher principles of
action in this matter, from which we have descended to those
of expediency. I trust that some day the language of Types
will be more read and understood by us than it has been for
centuries; and when this language, a better one than either
Greek or Latin, is again recognized amongst us, we shall find,
or remember, that as the other visible elements of the universe—its
air, its water, and its flame—set forth, in their pure
energies, the life-giving, purifying, and sanctifying influences
of the Deity upon His creatures, so the earth, in its purity,
sets forth His eternity and His Truth. I have dwelt above
on the historical language of stones; let us not forget this,
which is their theological language; and, as we would not
wantonly pollute the fresh waters when they issue forth in
their clear glory from the rock, nor stay the mountain winds
into pestilential stagnancy, nor mock the sunbeams with artificial
and ineffective light; so let us not by our own base and
barren falsehoods, replace the crystalline strength and burning
color of the earth from which we were born, and to which we
must return; the earth which, like our own bodies, though
dust in its degradation, is full of splendor when God’s hand
gathers its atoms; and which was for ever sanctified by Him,
as the symbol no less of His love than of His truth, when He
bade the high priest bear the names of the Children of Israel
on the clear stones of the Breastplate of Judgment.

32

CHAPTER II.

ROMAN RENAISSANCE.

§ I. Of all the buildings in Venice, later in date than the
final additions to the Ducal Palace, the noblest is, beyond all
question, that which, having been condemned by its proprietor,
not many years ago, to be pulled down and sold for the
value of its materials, was rescued by the Austrian government,
and appropriated—the government officers having no
other use for it—to the business of the Post-Office; though
still known to the gondolier by its ancient name, the Casa
Grimani. It is composed of three stories of the Corinthian
order, at once simple, delicate, and sublime; but on so colossal
a scale, that the three-storied palaces on its right and left only
reach to the cornice which marks the level of its first floor. Yet
it is not at first perceived to be so vast; and it is only when
some expedient is employed to hide it from the eye, that by
the sudden dwarfing of the whole reach of the Grand Canal,
which it commands, we become aware that it is to the majesty
of the Casa Grimani that the Rialto itself, and the whole
group of neighboring buildings, owe the greater part of their
impressiveness. Nor is the finish of its details less notable
than the grandeur of their scale. There is not an erring line,
nor a mistaken proportion, throughout its noble front; and
the exceeding fineness of the chiselling gives an appearance of
lightness to the vast blocks of stone out of whose perfect union
that front is composed. The decoration is sparing, but delicate:
the first story only simpler than the rest, in that it has
pilasters instead of shafts, but all with Corinthian capitals, rich
in leafage, and fruited delicately; the rest of the walls flat and
smooth, and the mouldings sharp and shallow, so that the bold
33
shafts look like crystals of beryl running through a rock of
quartz.

§ II. This palace is the principal type at Venice, and one of
the best in Europe, of the central architecture of the Renaissance
schools; that carefully studied and perfectly executed
architecture to which those schools owe their principal claims
to our respect, and which became the model of most of the
important works subsequently produced by civilized nations.
I have called it the Roman Renaissance, because it is founded,
both in its principles of superimposition, and in the style of
its ornament, upon the architecture of classic Rome at its best
period. The revival of Latin literature both led to its adoption,
and directed its form; and the most important example
of it which exists is the modern Roman basilica of St. Peter’s.
It had, at its Renaissance or new birth, no resemblance either
to Greek, Gothic, or Byzantine forms, except in retaining the
use of the round arch, vault, and dome; in the treatment of
all details, it was exclusively Latin; the last links of connexion
with mediæval tradition having been broken by its builders in
their enthusiasm for classical art, and the forms of true Greek
or Athenian architecture being still unknown to them. The
study of these noble Greek forms has induced various modifications
of the Renaissance in our own times; but the conditions
which are found most applicable to the uses of modern
life are still Roman, and the entire style may most fitly be
expressed by the term “Roman Renaissance.”

§ III. It is this style, in its purity and fullest form,—represented
by such buildings as the Casa Grimani at Venice (built
by San Micheli), the Town Hall at Vicenza (by Palladio), St.
Peter’s at Rome (by Michael Angelo), St. Paul’s and Whitehall
in London (by Wren and Inigo Jones),—which is the true
antagonist of the Gothic school. The intermediate, or corrupt
conditions of it, though multiplied over Europe, are no longer
admired by architects, or made the subjects of their study;
but the finished work of this central school is still, in most
cases, the model set before the student of the nineteenth century,
as opposed to those Gothic, Romanesque, or Byzantine
34
forms which have long been considered barbarous, and are so
still by most of the leading men of the day. That they are,
on the contrary, most noble and beautiful, and that the antagonistic
Renaissance is, in the main, unworthy and unadmirable,
whatever perfection of a certain kind it may possess, it
was my principal purpose to show, when I first undertook the
labor of this work. It has been attempted already to put
before the reader the various elements which unite in the
Nature of Gothic, and to enable him thus to judge, not
merely of the beauty of the forms which that system has
produced already, but of its future applicability to the wants
of mankind, and endless power over their hearts. I would
now endeavor, in like manner, to set before the reader the
Nature of Renaissance, and thus to enable him to compare the
two styles under the same light, and with the same enlarged
view of their relations to the intellect, and capacities for the
service, of man.

§ IV. It will not be necessary for me to enter at length into
any examination of its external form. It uses, whether for its
roofs of aperture or roofs proper, the low gable or circular
arch: but it differs from Romanesque work in attaching great
importance to the horizontal lintel or architrave above the
arch; transferring the energy of the principal shafts to the
supporting of this horizontal beam, and thus rendering the
arch a subordinate, if not altogether a superfluous, feature.
The type of this arrangement has been given already at c, Fig.
XXXVI., p. 145, Vol. I.: and I might insist at length upon
the absurdity of a construction in which the shorter shaft,
which has the real weight of wall to carry, is split into two
by the taller one, which has nothing to carry at all,—that
taller one being strengthened, nevertheless, as if the whole
weight of the building bore upon it; and on the ungracefulness,
never conquered in any Palladian work, of the two half-capitals
glued, as it were, against the slippery round sides of
the central shaft. But it is not the form of this architecture
against which I would plead. Its defects are shared by many
of the noblest forms of earlier building, and might have been
35
entirely atoned for by excellence of spirit. But it is the moral
nature of it which is corrupt, and which it must, therefore, be
our principal business to examine and expose.

§ V. The moral, or immoral, elements which unite to form
the spirit of Central Renaissance architecture are, I believe, in
the main, two,—Pride and Infidelity; but the pride resolves
itself into three main branches,—Pride of Science, Pride of
State, and Pride of System: and thus we have four separate
mental conditions which must be examined successively.

§ VI. 1. Pride of Science. It would have been more
charitable, but more confusing, to have added another element
to our list, namely the Love of Science; but the love is included
in the pride, and is usually so very subordinate an element
that it does not deserve equality of nomenclature. But,
whether pursued in pride or in affection (how far by either we
shall see presently), the first notable characteristic of the Renaissance
central school is its introduction of accurate knowledge
into all its work, so far as it possesses such knowledge;
and its evident conviction, that such science is necessary to the
excellence of the work, and is the first thing to be expressed
therein. So that all the forms introduced, even in its minor
ornament, are studied with the utmost care; the anatomy of
all animal structure is thoroughly understood and elaborately
expressed, and the whole of the execution skilful and practised
in the highest degree. Perspective, linear and aerial, perfect
drawing and accurate light and shade in painting, and true
anatomy in all representations of the human form, drawn or
sculptured, are the first requirements in all the work of this
school.

§ VII. Now, first considering all this in the most charitable
light, as pursued from a real love of truth, and not from vanity,
it would, of course, have been all excellent and admirable, had
it been regarded as the aid of art, and not as its essence. But
the grand mistake of the Renaissance schools lay in supposing
that science and art are the same things, and that to advance
in the one was necessarily to perfect the other. Whereas they
are, in reality, things not only different, but so opposed, that
36
to advance in the one is, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred,
to retrograde in the other. This is the point to which I
would at present especially bespeak the reader’s attention.

§ VIII. Science and art are commonly distinguished by the
nature of their actions; the one as knowing, the other as changing,
producing, or creating. But there is a still more important
distinction in the nature of the things they deal with. Science
deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and
art exclusively with things as they affect the human senses and
human soul.8 Her work is to portray the appearance of things,
and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce
upon living creatures. The work of science is to substitute
facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with
truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence. Art does not
represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind.
Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art
studies only their relations to man; and it requires of everything
which is submitted to it imperatively this, and only this,—what
that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what
it has to say to men, and what it can become to them: a field
of question just as much vaster than that of science, as the soul
is larger than the material creation.

§ IX. Take a single instance. Science informs us that the
sun is ninety-five millions of miles distant from, and 111 times
broader than, the earth; that we and all the planets revolve
round it; and that it revolves on its own axis in 25 days, 14
hours and 4 minutes. With all this, art has nothing whatsoever
to do. It has no care to know anything of this kind.
But the things which it does care to know, are these: that in
the heavens God hath set a tabernacle for the sun, “which is
as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a
37
strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of
the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and there is
nothing hid from the heat thereof.”

§ X. This, then, being the kind of truth with which art is
exclusively concerned, how is such truth as this to be ascertained
and accumulated? Evidently, and only, by perception
and feeling. Never either by reasoning, or report. Nothing
must come between Nature and the artist’s sight; nothing between
God and the artist’s soul. Neither calculation nor hearsay,—be
it the most subtle of calculations, or the wisest of sayings,—may
be allowed to come between the universe, and the
witness which art bears to its visible nature. The whole value
of that witness depends on its being eye-witness; the whole
genuineness, acceptableness, and dominion of it depend on the
personal assurance of the man who utters it. All its victory
depends on the veracity of the one preceding word, “Vidi.”

The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a
seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness
and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no
instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things
around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable
of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall
either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record. It
is not his business either to think, to judge, to argue, or to
know. His place is neither in the closet, nor on the bench,
nor at the bar, nor in the library. They are for other men
and other work. He may think, in a by-way; reason, now and
then, when he has nothing better to do; know, such fragments
of knowledge as he can gather without stooping, or reach without
pains; but none of these things are to be his care. The
work of his life is to be twofold only: to see, to feel.

§ XI. Nay, but, the reader perhaps pleads with me, one of
the great uses of knowledge is to open the eyes; to make
things perceivable which, never would have been seen, unless
first they had been known.

Not so. This could only be said or believed by those who
do not know what the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in
38
comparison with that of other men. There is no great painter,
no great workman in any art, but he sees more with the glance
of a moment than he could learn by the labor of a thousand
hours. God has made every man fit for his work; He has
given to the man whom he means for a student, the reflective,
logical, sequential faculties; and to the man whom He means
for an artist, the perceptive, sensitive, retentive faculties. And
neither of these men, so far from being able to do the other’s
work, can even comprehend the way in which it is done. The
student has no understanding of the vision, nor the painter of
the process; but chiefly the student has no idea of the colossal
grasp of the true painter’s vision and sensibility.

The labor of the whole Geological Society, for the last fifty
years, has but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths
respecting mountain form which Turner saw and expressed
with a few strokes of a camel’s hair pencil fifty years ago, when
he was a boy. The knowledge of all the laws of the planetary
system, and of all the curves of the motion of projectiles, would
never enable the man of science to draw a waterfall or a wave;
and all the members of Surgeons’ Hall helping each other
could not at this moment see, or represent, the natural movement
of a human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer’s son
did two hundred years ago.9

§ XII. But surely, it is still insisted, granting this peculiar
faculty to the painter, he will still see more as he knows more,
and the more knowledge he obtains, therefore, the better. No;
not even so. It is indeed true, that, here and there, a piece of
knowledge will enable the eye to detect a truth which might
otherwise have escaped it; as, for instance, in watching a sunrise,
the knowledge of the true nature of the orb may lead the
painter to feel more profoundly, and express more fully, the
distance between the bars of cloud that cross it, and the sphere
of flame that lifts itself slowly beyond them into the infinite
heaven. But, for one visible truth to which knowledge thus
opens the eyes, it seals them to a thousand: that is to say, if
39
the knowledge occur to the mind so as to occupy its powers of
contemplation at the moment when the sight work is to be
done, the mind retires inward, fixes itself upon the known fact,
and forgets the passing visible ones; and a moment of such
forgetfulness loses more to the painter than a day’s thought
can gain. This is no new or strange assertion. Every person
accustomed to careful reflection of any kind, knows that its
natural operation is to close his eyes to the external world.
While he is thinking deeply, he neither sees nor feels, even
though naturally he may possess strong powers of sight and
emotion. He who, having journeyed all day beside the Leman
Lake, asked of his companions, at evening, where it was,10 probably
was not wanting in sensibility; but he was generally a
thinker, not a perceiver. And this instance is only an extreme
one of the effect which, in all cases, knowledge, becoming a
subject of reflection, produces upon the sensitive faculties. It
must be but poor and lifeless knowledge, if it has no tendency
to force itself forward, and become ground for reflection, in
despite of the succession of external objects. It will not obey
their succession. The first that comes gives it food enough
for its day’s work; it is its habit, its duty, to cast the rest aside,
and fasten upon that. The first thing that a thinking and
knowing man sees in the course of the day, he will not easily
quit. It is not his way to quit anything without getting to the
bottom of it, if possible. But the artist is bound to receive all
things on the broad, white, lucid field of his soul, not to grasp
at one. For instance, as the knowing and thinking man
watches the sunrise, he sees something in the color of a ray, or
the change of a cloud, that is new to him; and this he follows
out forthwith into a labyrinth of optical and pneumatical laws,
perceiving no more clouds nor rays all the morning. But the
painter must catch all the rays, all the colors that come, and see
them all truly, all in their real relations and succession; therefore,
everything that occupies room in his mind he must cast
40
aside for the time, as completely as may be. The thoughtful
man is gone far away to seek; but the perceiving man must
sit still, and open his heart to receive. The thoughtful man is
knitting and sharpening himself into a two-edged sword, wherewith
to pierce. The perceiving man is stretching himself into
a four-cornered sheet wherewith to catch. And all the breadth
to which he can expand himself, and all the white emptiness
into which he can blanch himself, will not be enough to receive
what God has to give him.

§ XIII. What, then, it will be indignantly asked, is an
utterly ignorant and unthinking man likely to make the best
artist? No, not so neither. Knowledge is good for him so
long as he can keep it utterly, servilely, subordinate to his own
divine work, and trample it under his feet, and out of his way,
the moment it is likely to entangle him.

And in this respect, observe, there is an enormous difference
between knowledge and education. An artist need not
be a learned man, in all probability it will be a disadvantage
to him to become so; but he ought, if possible, always to be
an educated man: that is, one who has understanding of his
own uses and duties in the world, and therefore of the general
nature of the things done and existing in the world; and who
has so trained himself, or been trained, as to turn to the best
and most courteous account whatever faculties or knowledge
he has. The mind of an educated man is greater than the
knowledge it possesses; it is like the vault of heaven, encompassing
the earth which lives and flourishes beneath it: but the
mind of an educated and learned man is like a caoutchouc band,
with an everlasting spirit of contraction in it, fastening together
papers which it cannot open, and keeps others from
opening.

Half our artists are ruined for want of education, and by
the possession of knowledge; the best that I have known have
been educated, and illiterate. The ideal of an artist, however,
is not that he should be illiterate, but well read in the best
books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and in bearing.
41
In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should
keep out of it.11

§ XIV. There are, indeed, some kinds of knowledge with
which an artist ought to be thoroughly furnished; those, for
instance, which enable him to express himself; for this knowledge
relieves instead of encumbering his mind, and permits
it to attend to its purposes instead of wearying itself about
means. The whole mystery of manipulation and manufacture
should be familiar to the painter from a child. He should
know the chemistry of all colors and materials whatsoever, and
should prepare all his colors himself, in a little laboratory of
his own. Limiting his chemistry to this one object, the
amount of practical science necessary for it, and such accidental
discoveries as might fall in his way in the course of his
work, of better colors or better methods of preparing them,
would be an infinite refreshment to his mind; a minor subject
of interest to which it might turn when jaded with comfortless
labor, or exhausted with feverish invention, and yet which
would never interfere with its higher functions, when it chose
to address itself to them. Even a considerable amount of
manual labor, sturdy color-grinding and canvas-stretching,
would be advantageous; though this kind of work ought to
be in great part done by pupils. For it is one of the conditions
of perfect knowledge in these matters, that every great
master should have a certain number of pupils, to whom he is
to impart all the knowledge of materials and means which he
himself possesses, as soon as possible; so that, at any rate, by
the time they are fifteen years old, they may know all that he
knows himself in this kind; that is to say, all that the world
of artists know, and his own discoveries besides, and so never
be troubled about methods any more. Not that the knowledge
even of his own particular methods is to be of purpose confined
42
to himself and his pupils, but that necessarily it must be so in
some degree; for only those who see him at work daily can
understand his small and multitudinous ways of practice.
These cannot verbally be explained to everybody, nor is it
needful that they should, only let them be concealed from
nobody who cares to see them; in which case, of course, his
attendant scholars will know them best. But all that can be
made public in matters of this kind should be so with all speed,
every artist throwing his discovery into the common stock, and
the whole body of artists taking such pains in this department
of science as that there shall be no unsettled questions
about any known material or method: that it shall be an
entirely ascertained and indisputable matter which is the best
white, and which the best brown; which the strongest canvas,
and safest varnish; and which the shortest and most perfect
way of doing everything known up to that time: and if
any one discovers a better, he is to make it public forthwith.
All of them taking care to embarrass themselves with no theories
or reasons for anything, but to work empirically only: it
not being in any wise their business to know whether light
moves in rays or in waves; or whether the blue rays of the
spectrum move slower or faster than the rest; but simply to
know how many minutes and seconds such and such a powder
must be calcined, to give the brightest blue.

§ XV. Now it is perhaps the most exquisite absurdity of the
whole Renaissance system, that while it has encumbered the
artist with every species of knowledge that is of no use to him,
this one precious and necessary knowledge it has utterly lost.
There is not, I believe, at this moment, a single question which
could be put respecting pigments and methods, on which the
body of living artists would agree in their answers. The lives
of artists are passed in fruitless experiments; fruitless, because
undirected by experience and uncommunicated in their results.
Every man has methods of his own, which he knows to be
insufficient, and yet jealously conceals from his fellow-workmen:
every colorman has materials of his own, to which it is
rare that the artist can trust: and in the very front of the majestic
43
advance of chemical science, the empirical science of the
artist has been annihilated, and the days which should have led
us to higher perfection are passed in guessing at, or in mourning
over, lost processes; while the so-called Dark ages, possessing
no more knowledge of chemistry than a village herbalist
does now, discovered, established, and put into daily practice
such methods of operation as have made their work, at this
day, the despair of all who look upon it.

§ XVI. And yet even this, to the painter, the safest of
sciences, and in some degree necessary, has its temptations,
and capabilities of abuse. For the simplest means are always
enough for a great man; and when once he has obtained a few
ordinary colors, which he is sure will stand, and a white surface
that will not darken nor moulder, nor rend, he is master
of the world, and of his fellow-men. And, indeed, as if in
these times we were bent on furnishing examples of every
species of opposite error, while we have suffered the traditions
to escape us of the simple methods of doing simple things,
which are enough for all the arts, and to all the ages, we have
set ourselves to discover fantastic modes of doing fantastic
things,—new mixtures and manipulations of metal, and porcelain,
and leather, and paper, and every conceivable condition
of false substance and cheap work, to our own infinitely multiplied
confusion,—blinding ourselves daily more and more to
the great, changeless, and inevitable truth, that there is but
one goodness in art; and that is one which the chemist cannot
prepare, nor the merchant cheapen, for it comes only of a rare
human hand, and rare human soul.

§ XVII. Within its due limits, however, here is one branch
of science which the artist may pursue; and, within limits still
more strict, another also, namely, the science of the appearances
of things as they have been ascertained and registered
by his fellow-men. For no day passes but some visible fact is
pointed out to us by others, which, without their help, we
should not have noticed; and the accumulation and generalization
of visible facts have formed, in the succession of ages,
the sciences of light and shade, and perspective, linear and
44
aerial: so that the artist is now at once put in possession of
certain truths respecting the appearances of things, which, so
pointed out to him, any man may in a few days understand
and acknowledge; but which, without aid, he could not probably
discover in his lifetime. I say, probably could not, because
the time which the history of art shows us to have been
actually occupied in the discovery and systematization of such
truth, is no measure of the time necessary for such discovery.
The lengthened period which elapsed between the earliest and
the perfect developement of the science of light (if I may so
call it) was not occupied in the actual effort to ascertain its
laws, but in acquiring the disposition to make that effort. It
did not take five centuries to find out the appearance of natural
objects; but it took five centuries to make people care about
representing them. An artist of the twelfth century did not
desire to represent nature. His work was symbolical and
ornamental. So long as it was intelligible and lovely, he had
no care to make it like nature. As, for instance, when an old
painter represented the glory round a saint’s head by a burnished
plate of pure gold, he had no intention of imitating an
effect of light. He meant to tell the spectator that the figure
so decorated was a saint, and to produce splendor of effect by
the golden circle. It was no matter to him what light was
like. So soon as it entered into his intention to represent the
appearance of light, he was not long in discovering the natural
facts necessary for his purpose.

§ XVIII. But, this being fully allowed, it is still true that
the accumulation of facts now known respecting visible phenomena,
is greater than any man could hope to gather for himself,
and that it is well for him to be made acquainted with
them; provided always, that he receive them only at their
true value, and do not suffer himself to be misled by them. I
say, at their true value; that is, an exceedingly small one. All
the information which men can receive from the accumulated
experience of others, is of no use but to enable them more
quickly and accurately to see for themselves. It will in no
wise take the place of this personal sight. Nothing can be
45
done well in art, except by vision. Scientific principles and
experiences are helps to the eye, as a microscope is; and they
are of exactly as much use without the eye. No science of
perspective, or of anything else, will enable us to draw the
simplest natural line accurately, unless we see it and feel it.
Science is soon at her wits’ end. All the professors of perspective
in Europe, could not, by perspective, draw the line of
curve of a sea beach; nay, could not outline one pool of the
quiet water left among the sand. The eye and hand can do it,
nothing else. All the rules of aerial perspective that ever
were written, will not tell me how sharply the pines on the hill-top
are drawn at this moment on the sky. I shall know if I
see them, and love them; not till then. I may study the laws
of atmospheric gradation for fourscore years and ten, and I
shall not be able to draw so much as a brick-kiln through its
own smoke, unless I look at it; and that in an entirely humble
and unscientific manner, ready to see all that the smoke, my
master, is ready to show me, and expecting to see nothing
more.

§ XIX. So that all the knowledge a man has must be held
cheap, and neither trusted nor respected, the moment he comes
face to face with Nature. If it help him, well; if not, but, on
the contrary, thrust itself upon him in an impertinent and contradictory
temper, and venture to set itself in the slightest degree
in opposition to, or comparison with, his sight, let it be
disgraced forthwith. And the slave is less likely to take too
much upon herself, if she has not been bought for a high
price. All the knowledge an artist needs, will, in these days,
come to him almost without his seeking; if he has far to look
for it, he may be sure he does not want it. Prout became
Prout, without knowing a single rule of perspective to the end
of his days; and all the perspective in the Encyclopædia will
never produce us another Prout.

§ XX. And observe, also, knowledge is not only very often
unnecessary, but it is often untrustworthy. It is inaccurate,
and betrays us where the eye would have been true to us. Let
us take the single instance of the knowledge of aerial perspective,
46
of which the moderns are so proud, and see how it betrays
us in various ways. First by the conceit of it, which often
prevents our enjoying work in which higher and better things
were thought of than effects of mist. The other day I showed
a line impression of Albert Durer’s “St. Hubert” to a modern
engraver, who had never seen it nor any other of Albert
Durer’s works. He looked at it for a minute contemptuously,
then turned away: “Ah, I see that man did not know much
about aerial perspective!” All the glorious work and thought
of the mighty master, all the redundant landscape, the living
vegetation, the magnificent truth of line, were dead letters to
him, because he happened to have been taught one particular
piece of knowledge which Durer despised.

§ XXI. But not only in the conceit of it, but in the inaccuracy
of it, this science betrays us. Aerial perspective, as given
by the modern artist, is, in nine cases out of ten, a gross and
ridiculous exaggeration, as is demonstrable in a moment. The
effect of air in altering the hue and depth of color is of course
great in the exact proportion of the volume of air between the
observer and the object. It is not violent within the first few
yards, and then diminished gradually, but it is equal for each
foot of interposing air. Now in a clear day, and clear climate,
such as that generally presupposed in a work of fine color, objects
are completely visible at a distance of ten miles; visible
in light and shade, with gradations between the two. Take,
then, the faintest possible hue of shadow, or of any color, and
the most violent and positive possible, and set them side by
side. The interval between them is greater than the real difference
(for objects may often be seen clearly much farther
than ten miles, I have seen Mont Blanc at 120) caused by the
ten miles of intervening air between any given hue of the
nearest, and most distant, objects; but let us assume it, in
courtesy to the masters of aerial perspective, to be the real difference.
Then roughly estimating a mile at less than it really
is, also in courtesy to them, or at 5000 feet, we have this difference
between tints produced by 50,000 feet of air. Then, ten
47
feet of air will produce the 5000th part of this difference. Let
the reader take the two extreme tints, and carefully gradate
the one into the other. Let him divide this gradated shadow
or color into 5000 successive parts; and the difference in depth
between one of these parts and the next is the exact amount of
aerial perspective between one object, and another, ten feet
behind it, on a clear day.

§ XXII. Now, in Millais’ “Huguenot,” the figures were
standing about three feet from the wall behind them; and the
wise world of critics, which could find no other fault with the
picture, professed to have its eyes hurt by the want of an aerial
perspective, which, had it been accurately given (as, indeed, I
believe it was), would have amounted to the 10⁄35000th, or less
than the 15,000th part of the depth of any given color. It
would be interesting to see a picture painted by the critics,
upon this scientific principle. The aerial perspective usually
represented is entirely conventional and ridiculous; a mere
struggle on the part of the pretendedly well-informed, but
really ignorant, artist, to express distances by mist which he
cannot by drawing.

It is curious that the critical world is just as much offended
by the true presence of aerial perspective, over distances of
fifty miles, and with definite purpose of representing mist, in
the works of Turner, as by the true absence of aerial perspective,
over distances of three feet, and in clear weather, in those
of Millais.

§ XXIII. “Well but,” still answers the reader, “this kind of
error may here and there be occasioned by too much respect
for undigested knowledge; but, on the whole, the gain is
greater than the loss, and the fact is, that a picture of the Renaissance
period, or by a modern master, does indeed represent
nature more faithfully than one wrought in the ignorance of
old times.” No, not one whit; for the most part less faithfully.
Indeed, the outside of nature is more truly drawn; the material
commonplace, which can be systematized, catalogued, and
48
taught to all pains-taking mankind,—forms of ribs and scapulæ,12
of eyebrows and lips, and curls of hair. Whatever can be
measured and handled, dissected and demonstrated,—in a word,
whatever is of the body only,—that the schools of knowledge
do resolutely and courageously possess themselves of, and portray.
But whatever is immeasurable, intangible, indivisible,
and of the spirit, that the schools of knowledge do as certainly
lose, and blot out of their sight, that is to say, all that is worth
art’s possessing or recording at all; for whatever can be arrested,
measured, and systematized, we can contemplate as much
as we will in nature herself. But what we want art to do for
us is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible,
to incorporate the things that have no measure,
and immortalize the things that have no duration. The dimly
seen, momentary glance, the flitting shadow of faint emotion,
the imperfect lines of fading thought, and all that by and
through such things as these is recorded on the features of
49
man, and all that in man’s person and actions, and in the great
natural world, is infinite and wonderful; having in it that
spirit and power which man may witness, but not weigh; conceive,
but not comprehend; love, but not limit; and imagine,
but not define;—this, the beginning and the end of the aim of
all noble art, we have, in the ancient art, by perception; and
we have not, in the newer art, by knowledge. Giotto gives it
us, Orcagna gives it us. Angelico, Memmi, Pisano, it matters
not who,—all simple and unlearned men, in their measure and
manner,—give it us; and the learned men that followed them
give it us not, and we, in our supreme learning, own ourselves
at this day farther from it than ever.

§ XXIV. “Nay,” but it is still answered, “this is because
we have not yet brought our knowledge into right use, but
have been seeking to accumulate it, rather than to apply it
wisely to the ends of art. Let us now do this, and we may
achieve all that was done by that elder ignorant art, and infinitely
50
more.” No, not so; for as soon as we try to put our
knowledge to good use, we shall find that we have much more
than we can use, and that what more we have is an encumbrance.
All our errors in this respect arise from a gross misconception
as to the true nature of knowledge itself. We
talk of learned and ignorant men, as if there were a certain
quantity of knowledge, which to possess was to be learned, and
which not to possess was to be ignorant; instead of considering
that knowledge is infinite, and that the man most learned
in human estimation is just as far from knowing anything as
he ought to know it, as the unlettered peasant. Men are
merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit
is God’s throne, infinitely above all; and there is just as
much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being
discontented with his position, as respects the real quantity
of knowledge he possesses. And, for both of them, the only
true reasons for contentment with the sum of knowledge they
possess are these: that it is the kind of knowledge they need
for their duty and happiness in life; that all they have is
tested and certain, so far as it is in their power; that all they
have is well in order, and within reach when they need it;
that it has not cost too much time in the getting; that none
of it, once got, has been lost; and that there is not too much
to be easily taken care of.

§ XXV. Consider these requirements a little, and the evils
that result in our education and polity from neglecting them.
Knowledge is mental food, and is exactly to the spirit what
food is to the body (except that the spirit needs several sorts
of food, of which knowledge is only one), and it is liable to the
same kind of misuses. It may be mixed and disguised by art,
till it becomes unwholesome; it may be refined, sweetened,
and made palatable, until it has lost all its power of nourishment;
and, even of its best kind, it may be eaten to surfeiting,
and minister to disease and death.

§ XXVI. Therefore, with respect to knowledge, we are to
reason and act exactly as with respect to food. We no more
live to know, than we live to eat. We live to contemplate,
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enjoy, act, adore; and we may know all that is to be known
in this world, and what Satan knows in the other, without
being able to do any of these. We are to ask, therefore, first,
is the knowledge we would have fit food for us, good and
simple, not artificial and decorated? and secondly, how much
of it will enable us best for our work; and will leave our
hearts light, and our eyes clear? For no more than that is
to be eaten without the old Eve-sin.

§ XXVII. Observe, also, the difference between tasting knowledge,
and hoarding it. In this respect it is also like food;
since, in some measure, the knowledge of all men is laid up in
granaries, for future use; much of it is at any given moment
dormant, not fed upon or enjoyed, but in store. And by all
it is to be remembered, that knowledge in this form may be
kept without air till it rots, or in such unthreshed disorder that
it is of no use; and that, however good or orderly, it is still
only in being tasted that it becomes of use; and that men
may easily starve in their own granaries, men of science, perhaps,
most of all, for they are likely to seek accumulation of
their store, rather than nourishment from it. Yet let it not
be thought that I would undervalue them. The good and
great among them are like Joseph, to whom all nations sought
to buy corn; or like the sower going forth to sow beside all
waters, sending forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass:
only let us remember that this is not all men’s work. We are
not intended to be all keepers of granaries, nor all to be measured
by the filling of a storehouse; but many, nay, most of
us, are to receive day by day our daily bread, and shall be
as well nourished and as fit for our labor, and often, also, fit
for nobler and more divine labor, in feeding from the barrel
of meal that does not waste, and from the cruse of oil that
does not fail, than if our barns were filled with plenty, and our
presses bursting out with new wine.

§ XXVIII. It is for each man to find his own measure in this
matter; in great part, also, for others to find it for him, while
he is yet a youth. And the desperate evil of the whole Renaissance
system is, that all idea of measure is therein forgotten,
52
that knowledge is thought the one and the only good,
and it is never inquired whether men are vivified by it or
paralyzed. Let us leave figures. The reader may not believe
the analogy I have been pressing so far; but let him consider
the subject in itself, let him examine the effect of knowledge
in his own heart, and see whether the trees of knowledge and
of life are one now, any more than in Paradise. He must feel
that the real animating power of knowledge is only in the
moment of its being first received, when it fills us with wonder
and joy; a joy for which, observe, the previous ignorance
is just as necessary as the present knowledge. That man is
always happy who is in the presence of something which he
cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
This is the necessary condition of a finite creature with
divinely rooted and divinely directed intelligence; this, therefore,
its happy state,—but observe, a state, not of triumph or
joy in what it knows, but of joy rather in the continual discovery
of new ignorance, continual self-abasement, continual
astonishment. Once thoroughly our own, the knowledge
ceases to give us pleasure. It may be practically useful to us,
it may be good for others, or good for usury to obtain more;
but, in itself, once let it be thoroughly familiar, and it is dead.
The wonder is gone from it, and all the fine color which it had
when first we drew it up out of the infinite sea. And what
does it matter how much or how little of it we have laid aside,
when our only enjoyment is still in the casting of that deep
sea line? What does it matter? Nay, in one respect, it
matters much, and not to our advantage. For one effect of
knowledge is to deaden the force of the imagination and the
original energy of the whole man: under the weight of his
knowledge he cannot move so lightly as in the days of his
simplicity. The pack-horse is furnished for the journey, the
war-horse is armed for war; but the freedom of the field and
the lightness of the limb are lost for both. Knowledge is, at
best, the pilgrim’s burden or the soldier’s panoply, often a
weariness to them both: and the Renaissance knowledge is
like the Renaissance armor of plate, binding and cramping the
53
human form; while all good knowledge is like the crusader’s
chain mail, which throws itself into folds with the body,
yet it is rarely so forged as that the clasps and rivets do not
gall us. All men feel this, though they do not think of it,
nor reason out its consequences. They look back to the days
of childhood as of greatest happiness, because those were the
days of greatest wonder, greatest simplicity, and most vigorous
imagination. And the whole difference between a man of
genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and
most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing
with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not
conscious of much knowledge,—conscious, rather, of infinite
ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration,
delight, and creative force within him meeting the
ocean of visible and governable things around him.

That is what we have to make men, so far as we may. All
are to be men of genius in their degree,—rivulets or rivers, it
does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead
walls encompassing dead heaps of things known and numbered,
but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things
unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks,
on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers,
and so pass on.

§ XXIX. Let each man answer for himself how far his knowledge
has made him this, or how far it is loaded upon him as
the pyramid is upon the tomb. Let him consider, also, how
much of it has cost him labor and time that might have been
spent in healthy, happy action, beneficial to all mankind;
how many living souls may have been left uncomforted and
unhelped by him, while his own eyes were failing by the midnight
lamp; how many warm sympathies have died within
him as he measured lines or counted letters; how many
draughts of ocean air, and steps on mountain-turf, and openings
of the highest heaven he has lost for his knowledge; how
much of that knowledge, so dearly bought, is now forgotten
or despised, leaving only the capacity of wonder less within
him, and, as it happens in a thousand instances, perhaps even
54
also the capacity of devotion. And let him,—if, after thus
dealing with his own heart, he can say that his knowledge
has indeed been fruitful to him,—yet consider how many there
are who have been forced by the inevitable laws of modern
education into toil utterly repugnant to their natures, and that
in the extreme, until the whole strength of the young soul
was sapped away; and then pronounce with fearfulness how
far, and in how many senses, it may indeed be true that the
wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

§ XXX. Now all this possibility of evil, observe, attaches to
knowledge pursued for the noblest ends, if it be pursued imprudently.
I have assumed, in speaking of its effect both on
men generally and on the artist especially, that it was sought
in the true love of it, and with all honesty and directness of
purpose. But this is granting far too much in its favor.
Of knowledge in general, and without qualification, it is said
by the Apostle that “it puffeth up;” and the father of all
modern science, writing directly in its praise, yet asserts this
danger even in more absolute terms, calling it a “venomousness”
in the very nature of knowledge itself.

§ XXXI. There is, indeed, much difference in this respect
between the tendencies of different branches of knowledge; it
being a sure rule that exactly in proportion as they are inferior,
nugatory, or limited in scope, their power of feeding pride is
greater. Thus philology, logic, rhetoric, and the other sciences
of the schools, being for the most part ridiculous and trifling,
have so pestilent an effect upon those who are devoted to them,
that their students cannot conceive of any higher sciences than
these, but fancy that all education ends in the knowledge of
words: but the true and great sciences, more especially natural
history, make men gentle and modest in proportion to the
largeness of their apprehension, and just perception of the infiniteness
of the things they can never know. And this, it
seems to me, is the principal lesson we are intended to be
caught by the book of Job; for there God has thrown open to
us the heart of a man most just and holy, and apparently perfect
in all things possible to human nature except humility.
55
For this he is tried: and we are shown that no suffering, no
self-examination, however honest, however stern, no searching
out of the heart by its own bitterness, is enough to convince
man of his nothingness before God; but that the sight of God’s
creation will do it. For, when the Deity himself has willed
to end the temptation, and to accomplish in Job that for
which it was sent, He does not vouchsafe to reason with him,
still less does He overwhelm him with terror, or confound him
by laying open before his eyes the book of his iniquities. He
opens before him only the arch of the dayspring, and the fountains
of the deep; and amidst the covert of the reeds, and on
the heaving waves, He bids him watch the kings of the children
of pride,—“Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee:”
And the work is done.

§ XXXII. Thus, if, I repeat, there is any one lesson in the
whole book which stands forth more definitely than another, it
is this of the holy and humbling influence of natural science
on the human heart. And yet, even here, it is not the science,
but the perception, to which the good is owing; and the
natural sciences may become as harmful as any others, when
they lose themselves in classification and catalogue-making.
Still, the principal danger is with the sciences of words and
methods; and it was exactly into those sciences that the whole
energy of men during the Renaissance period was thrown.
They discovered suddenly that the world for ten centuries had
been living in an ungrammatical manner, and they made it
forthwith the end of human existence to be grammatical. And
it mattered thenceforth nothing what was said, or what was
done, so only that it was said with scholarship, and done with
system. Falsehood in a Ciceronian dialect had no opposers;
truth in patois no listeners. A Roman phrase was thought
worth any number of Gothic facts. The sciences ceased at once
to be anything more than different kinds of grammars,—grammar
of language, grammar of logic, grammar of ethics, grammar
of art; and the tongue, wit, and invention of the human race
were supposed to have found their utmost and most divine
mission in syntax and syllogism, perspective and five orders.

56

Of such knowledge as this, nothing but pride could come;
and, therefore, I have called the first mental characteristic of
the Renaissance schools, the “pride” of science. If they had
reached any science worth the name, they might have loved it;
but of the paltry knowledge they possessed, they could only be
proud. There was not anything in it capable of being loved.
Anatomy, indeed, then first made a subject of accurate study,
is a true science, but not so attractive as to enlist the affections
strongly on its side: and therefore, like its meaner sisters, it
became merely a ground for pride; and the one main purpose
of the Renaissance artists, in all their work, was to show how
much they knew.

§ XXXIII. There were, of course, noble exceptions; but
chiefly belonging to the earliest periods of the Renaissance,
when its teaching had not yet produced its full effect. Raphael,
Leonardo, and Michael Angelo were all trained in the old
school; they all had masters who knew the true ends of art,
and had reached them; masters nearly as great as they were
themselves, but imbued with the old religious and earnest
spirit, which their disciples receiving from them, and drinking
at the same time deeply from all the fountains of knowledge
opened in their day, became the world’s wonders. Then the
dull wondering world believed that their greatness rose out of
their new knowledge, instead of out of that ancient religious
root, in which to abide was life, from which to be severed was
annihilation. And from that day to this, they have tried to
produce Michael Angelos and Leonardos by teaching the barren
sciences, and still have mourned and marvelled that no more
Michael Angelos came; not perceiving that those great Fathers
were only able to receive such nourishment because they were
rooted on the rock of all ages, and that our scientific teaching,
nowadays, is nothing more nor less than the assiduous watering
of trees whose stems are cut through. Nay, I have even
granted too much in saying that those great men were able to
receive pure nourishment from the sciences; for my own conviction
is, and I know it to be shared by most of those who
love Raphael truly,—that he painted best when he knew least.
57
Michael Angelo was betrayed, again and again, into such vain
and offensive exhibition of his anatomical knowledge as, to this
day, renders his higher powers indiscernible by the greater
part of men; and Leonardo fretted his life away in engineering,
so that there is hardly a picture left to bear his name.
But, with respect to all who followed, there can be no question
that the science they possessed was utterly harmful; serving
merely to draw away their hearts at once from the purposes of
art and the power of nature, and to make, out of the canvas
and marble, nothing more than materials for the exhibition of
petty dexterity and useless knowledge.

§ XXXIV. It is sometimes amusing to watch the naïve and
childish way in which this vanity is shown. For instance,
when perspective was first invented, the world thought it a
mighty discovery, and the greatest men it had in it were as
proud of knowing that retiring lines converge, as if all the
wisdom of Solomon had been compressed into a vanishing
point. And, accordingly, it became nearly impossible for any
one to paint a Nativity, but he must turn the stable and manger
into a Corinthian arcade, in order to show his knowledge
of perspective; and half the best architecture of the time, instead
of being adorned with historical sculpture, as of old, was
set forth with bas-relief of minor corridors and galleries, thrown
into perspective.

Now that perspective can be taught to any schoolboy in a
week, we can smile at this vanity. But the fact is, that all
pride in knowledge is precisely as ridiculous, whatever its kind,
or whatever its degree. There is, indeed, nothing of which
man has any right to be proud; but the very last thing of
which, with any show of reason, he can make his boast is his
knowledge, except only that infinitely small portion of it which
he has discovered for himself. For what is there to be more
proud of in receiving a piece of knowledge from another person,
than in receiving a piece of money? Beggars should not
be proud, whatever kind of alms they receive. Knowledge is
like current coin. A man may have some right to be proud
of possessing it, if he has worked for the gold of it, and assayed
58
it, and stamped it, so that it may be received of all men as
true; or earned it fairly, being already assayed: but if he has
done none of these things, but only had it thrown in his face
by a passer-by, what cause has he to be proud? And though,
in this mendicant fashion, he had heaped together the wealth
of Crœsus, would pride any more, for this, become him, as, in
some sort, it becomes the man who has labored for his fortune,
however small? So, if a man tells me the sun is larger than
the earth, have I any cause for pride in knowing it? or, if any
multitude of men tell me any number of things, heaping all
their wealth of knowledge upon me, have I any reason to be
proud under the heap? And is not nearly all the knowledge
of which we boast in these days cast upon us in this dishonorable
way; worked for by other men, proved by them, and then
forced upon us, even against our wills, and beaten into us in
our youth, before we have the wit even to know if it be good
or not? (Mark the distinction between knowledge and
thought.) Truly a noble possession to be proud of! Be
assured, there is no part of the furniture of a man’s mind
which he has a right to exult in, but that which he has hewn
and fashioned for himself. He who has built himself a hut on
a desert heath, and carved his bed, and table, and chair out of
the nearest forest, may have some right to take pride in the appliances
of his narrow chamber, as assuredly he will have joy in
them. But the man who has had a palace built, and adorned,
and furnished for him, may, indeed, have many advantages
above the other, but he has no reason to be proud of his upholsterer’s
skill; and it is ten to one if he has half the joy in
his couches of ivory that the other will have in his pallet of
pine.

§ XXXV. And observe how we feel this, in the kind of respect
we pay to such knowledge as we are indeed capable of
estimating the value of. When it is our own, and new to us,
we cannot judge of it; but let it be another’s also, and long
familiar to us, and see what value we set on it. Consider how
we regard a schoolboy, fresh from his term’s labor. If he begin
to display his newly acquired small knowledge to us, and
59
plume himself thereupon, how soon do we silence him with
contempt! But it is not so if the schoolboy begins to feel or
see anything. In the strivings of his soul within him he is
our equal; in his power of sight and thought he stands separate
from us, and may be a greater than we. We are ready to
hear him forthwith. “You saw that? you felt that? No
matter for your being a child; let us hear.”

§ XXXVI. Consider that every generation of men stands in
this relation to its successors. It is as the schoolboy: the
knowledge of which it is proudest will be as the alphabet to
those who follow. It had better make no noise about its knowledge;
a time will come when its utmost, in that kind, will be
food for scorn. Poor fools! was that all they knew? and behold
how proud they were! But what we see and feel will
never be mocked at. All men will be thankful to us for telling
them that. “Indeed!” they will say, “they felt that in
their day? saw that? Would God we may be like them,
before we go to the home where sight and thought are
not!”

This unhappy and childish pride in knowledge, then, was
the first constituent element of the Renaissance mind, and it
was enough, of itself, to have cast it into swift decline: but it
was aided by another form of pride, which was above called
the Pride of State; and which we have next to examine.

§ XXXVII. II. Pride of State. It was noticed in the
second volume of “Modern Painters,” p. 122, that the principle
which had most power in retarding the modern school of
portraiture was its constant expression of individual vanity and
pride. And the reader cannot fail to have observed that one
of the readiest and commonest ways in which the painter ministers
to this vanity, is by introducing the pedestal or shaft of
a column, or some fragment, however simple, of Renaissance
architecture, in the background of the portrait. And this is
not merely because such architecture is bolder or grander than,
in general, that of the apartments of a private house. No
other architecture would produce the same effect in the same
degree. The richest Gothic, the most massive Norman, would
60
not produce the same sense of exaltation as the simple and
meagre lines of the Renaissance.

§ XXXVIII. And if we think over this matter a little, we
shall soon feel that in those meagre lines there is indeed an expression
of aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness
of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy
with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency.
All these characters are written in the Renaissance
architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words.
For, observe, all other architectures have something in them
that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities
of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the
multitude. Quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright color, something
that shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and
hearts; and this wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a
rudeness showing that the workman did not mind exposing his
own ignorance if he could please others. But the Renaissance
is exactly the contrary of all this. It is rigid, cold, inhuman;
incapable of glowing, of stooping, of conceding for an instant.
Whatever excellence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply
erudite; a kind which the architect well knows no common
mind can taste. He proclaims it to us aloud. “You cannot
feel my work unless you study Vitruvius. I will give you no
gay color, no pleasant sculpture, nothing to make you happy;
for I am a learned man. All the pleasure you can have in
anything I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formalism, its
perfect finish, its cold tranquillity. I do not work for the
vulgar, only for the men of the academy and the court.”

§ XXXIX. And the instinct of the world felt this in a
moment. In the new precision and accurate law of the classical
forms, they perceived something peculiarly adapted to
the setting forth of state in an appalling manner: Princes delighted
in it, and courtiers. The Gothic was good for God’s
worship, but this was good for man’s worship. The Gothic
had fellowship with all hearts, and was universal, like nature:
it could frame a temple for the prayer of nations, or shrink
into the poor man’s winding stair. But here was an architecture
61
that would not shrink, that had in it no submission, no
mercy. The proud princes and lords rejoiced in it. It was
full of insult to the poor in its every line. It would not be
built of the materials at the poor man’s hand; it would not roof
itself with thatch or shingle, and black oak beams; it would
not wall itself with rough stone or brick; it would not pierce
itself with small windows where they were needed; it would
not niche itself, wherever there was room for it, in the street
corners. It would be of hewn stone; it would have its windows
and its doors, and its stairs and its pillars, in lordly order,
and of stately size; it would have its wings and its corridors,
and its halls and its gardens, as if all the earth were its own.
And the rugged cottages of the mountaineers, and the fantastic
streets of the laboring burgher were to be thrust out of its
way, as of a lower species.

§ XL. It is to be noted also, that it ministered as much to
luxury as to pride. Not to luxury of the eye, that is a holy
luxury; Nature ministers to that in her painted meadows, and
sculptured forests, and gilded heavens; the Gothic builder
ministered to that in his twisted traceries, and deep-wrought
foliage, and burning casements. The dead Renaissance drew
back into its earthliness, out of all that was warm and heavenly;
back into its pride, out of all that was simple and kind; back
into its stateliness, out of all that was impulsive, reverent, and
gay. But it understood the luxury of the body; the terraced
and scented and grottoed garden, with its trickling fountains
and slumbrous shades; the spacious hall and lengthened corridor
for the summer heat; the well-closed windows, and perfect
fittings and furniture, for defence against the cold; and
the soft picture, and frescoed wall and roof, covered with the
last lasciviousness of Paganism;—this is understood and possessed
to the full, and still possesses. This is the kind of
domestic architecture on which we pride ourselves, even to
this day, as an infinite and honorable advance from the rough
habits of our ancestors; from the time when the king’s floor
was strewn with rushes, and the tapestries swayed before the
searching wind in the baron’s hall.

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§ XLI. Let us hear two stories of those rougher times.

At the debate of King Edwin with his courtiers and priests,
whether he ought to receive the Gospel preached to him by
Paulinus, one of his nobles spoke as follows:

“The present life, O king! weighed with the time that is
unknown, seems to me like this. When you are sitting at a
feast with your earls and thanes in winter time, and the fire is
lighted, and the hall is warmed, and it rains and snows, and
the storm is loud without, there comes a sparrow, and flies
through the house. It comes in at one door and goes out at
the other. While it is within, it is not touched by the winter’s
storm; but it is but for the twinkling of an eye, for from
winter it comes and to winter it returns. So also this life of
man endureth for a little space; what goes before or what
follows after, we know not. Wherefore, if this new lore bring
anything more certain, it is fit that we should follow it.”13

That could not have happened in a Renaissance building.
The bird could not have dashed in from the cold into the heat,
and from the heat back again into the storm. It would have
had to come up a flight of marble stairs, and through seven
or eight antechambers; and so, if it had ever made its way
into the presence chamber, out again through loggias and corridors
innumerable. And the truth which the bird brought
with it, fresh from heaven, has, in like manner, to make its
way to the Renaissance mind through many antechambers,
hardly, and as a despised thing, if at all.

§ XLII. Hear another story of those early times.

The king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, at the siege
of Asshur, or Arsur, gave audience to some emirs from Samaria
and Naplous. They found him seated on the ground on a
sack of straw. They expressing surprise, Godfrey answered
them: “May not the earth, out of which we came, and which
is to be our dwelling after death, serve us for a seat during
life?”

It is long since such a throne has been set in the reception
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chambers of Christendom, or such an answer heard from the
lips of a king.

Thus the Renaissance spirit became base both in its abstinence
and its indulgence. Base in its abstinence; curtailing
the bright and playful wealth of form and thought, which
filled the architecture of the earlier ages with sources of
delight for their hardy spirit, pure, simple, and yet rich as the
fretwork of flowers and moss, watered by some strong and
stainless mountain stream: and base in its indulgence; as it
granted to the body what it withdrew from the heart, and
exhausted, in smoothing the pavement for the painless feet,
and softening the pillow for the sluggish brain, the powers of
art which once had hewn rough ladders into the clouds of
heaven, and set up the stones by which they rested for houses
of God.

§ XLIII. And just in proportion as this courtly sensuality
lowered the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune
raised above their fellows, rose their estimate of their own
dignity, together with the insolence and unkindness of its
expression, and the grossness of the flattery with which it
was fed. Pride is indeed the first and the last among the sins
of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has not
been unveiled in the power and prosperity of the wicked.
But there was never in any form of slavery, or of feudal supremacy,
a forgetfulness so total of the common majesty of the
human soul, and of the brotherly kindness due from man to
man, as in the aristocratic follies in the Renaissance. I have
not space to follow out this most interesting and extensive
subject; but here is a single and very curious example of the
kind of flattery with which architectural teaching was mingled
when addressed to the men of rank of the day.

§ XLIV. In St. Mark’s library there is a very curious Latin
manuscript of the twenty-five books of Averulinus, a Florentine
architect, upon the principles of his art. The book was written
in or about 1460, and translated into Latin, and richly illuminated
for Corvinus, king of Hungary, about 1483. I extract
from the third book the following passage on the nature of
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stones. “As there are three genera of men,—that is to say,
nobles, men of the middle classes, and rustics,—so it appears
that there are of stones. For the marbles and common stones
of which we have spoken above, set forth the rustics. The
porphyries and alabasters, and the other harder stones of
mingled quality, represent the middle classes, if we are to deal
in comparisons: and by means of these the ancients adorned
their temples with incrustations and ornaments in a magnificent
manner. And after these come the chalcedonies and
sardonyxes, &c., which are so transparent that there can be
seen no spot in them.14 Thus men endowed with nobility lead
a life in which no spot can be found.”

Canute or Cœur de Lion (I name not Godfrey or St. Louis)
would have dashed their sceptres against the lips of a man
who should have dared to utter to them flattery such as this.
But in the fifteenth century it was rendered and accepted as
a matter of course, and the tempers which delighted in it
necessarily took pleasure also in every vulgar or false means,
of taking worldly superiority. And among such false means
largeness of scale in the dwelling-house was of course one of
the easiest and most direct. All persons, however senseless
or dull, could appreciate size: it required some exertion of
intelligence to enter into the spirit of the quaint carving of the
Gothic times, but none to perceive that one heap of stones
was higher than another.15 And therefore, while in the execution
and manner of work the Renaissance builders zealously
vindicated for themselves the attribute of cold and superior
learning, they appealed for such approbation as they needed
from the multitude, to the lowest possible standard of taste;
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and while the older workman lavished his labor on the minute
niche and narrow casement, on the doorways no higher than
the head, and the contracted angles of the turreted chamber,
the Renaissance builder spared such cost and toil in his detail,
that he might spend it in bringing larger stones from a
distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders,
that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an
ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was
gigantic, above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the
rich. The Titanic insanity extended itself also into ecclesiastical
design: the principal church in Italy was built with little
idea of any other admirableness than that which was to result
from its being huge; and the religious impressions of those
who enter it are to this day supposed to be dependent, in a
great degree, on their discovering that they cannot span the
thumbs of the statues which sustain the vessels for holy
water.

§ XLV. It is easy to understand how an architecture which
thus appealed not less to the lowest instincts of dulness than
to the subtlest pride of learning, rapidly found acceptance
with a large body of mankind; and how the spacious pomp
of the new manner of design came to be eagerly adopted by
the luxurious aristocracies, not only of Venice, but of the
other countries of Christendom, now gradually gathering
themselves into that insolent and festering isolation, against
which the cry of the poor sounded hourly in more ominous
unison, bursting at last into thunder (mark where,—first
among the planted walks and plashing fountains of the palace
wherein the Renaissance luxury attained its utmost height in
Europe, Versailles); that cry, mingling so much piteousness
with its wrath and indignation, “Our soul is filled with the
scornful reproof of the wealthy, and with the despitefulness
of the proud.”

§ XLVI. But of all the evidence bearing upon this subject
presented by the various arts of the fifteenth century, none is
so interesting or so conclusive as that deduced from its tombs.
For, exactly in proportion as the pride of life became more
66
insolent, the fear of death became more servile; and the difference
in the manner in which the men of early and later
days adorned the sepulchre, confesses a still greater difference
in their manner of regarding death. To those he came as the
comforter and the friend, rest in his right hand, hope in his left;
to these as the humiliator, the spoiler, and the avenger. And,
therefore, we find the early tombs at once simple and lovely
in adornment, severe and solemn in their expression; confessing
the power, and accepting the peace, of death, openly and
joyfully; and in all their symbols marking that the hope of
resurrection lay only in Christ’s righteousness; signed always
with this simple utterance of the dead, “I will lay me down
in peace, and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only that
makest me dwell in safety.” But the tombs of the later ages
are a ghastly struggle of mean pride and miserable terror:
the one mustering the statues of the Virtues about the tomb,
disguising the sarcophagus with delicate sculpture, polishing
the false periods of the elaborate epitaph, and filling with
strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and
the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from
behind the curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or
some other more terrible image of the enemy in whose defiance
the whiteness of the sepulchre had been set to shine
above the whiteness of the ashes.

§ XLVII. This change in the feeling with which sepulchral
monuments were designed, from the eleventh to the eighteenth
centuries, has been common to the whole of Europe.
But, as Venice is in other respects the centre of the Renaissance
system, so also she exhibits this change in the manner
of the sepulchral monument under circumstances peculiarly
calculated to teach us its true character. For the severe
guard which, in earlier times, she put upon every tendency to
personal pomp and ambition, renders the tombs of her ancient
monarchs as remarkable for modesty and simplicity as for
their religious feeling; so that, in this respect, they are separated
by a considerable interval from the more costly monuments
erected at the same periods to the kings or nobles of
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other European states. In later times, on the other hand, as
the piety of the Venetians diminished, their pride overleaped
all limits, and the tombs which in recent epochs, were erected
for men who had lived only to impoverish or disgrace the
state, were as much more magnificent than those contemporaneously
erected for the nobles of Europe, as the monuments
for the great Doges had been humbler. When, in addition to
this, we reflect that the art of sculpture, considered as
expressive of emotion, was at a low ebb in Venice in the
twelfth century, and that in the seventeenth she took the lead
in Italy in luxurious work, we shall at once see the chain of
examples through which the change of feeling is expressed,
must present more remarkable extremes here than it can in
any other city; extremes so startling that their impressiveness
cannot be diminished, while their intelligibility is greatly
increased, by the large number of intermediate types which
have fortunately been preserved.

It would, however, too much weary the general reader if,
without illustrations, I were to endeavor to lead him step by
step through the aisles of St. John and Paul; and I shall
therefore confine myself to a slight notice of those features in
sepulchral architecture generally which are especially illustrative
of the matter at present in hand, and point out the order
in which, if possible, the traveller should visit the tombs in
Venice, so as to be most deeply impressed with the true character
of the lessons they convey.

§ XLVIII. I have not such an acquaintance with the modes
of entombment or memorial in the earliest ages of Christianity
as would justify me in making any general statement respecting
them: but it seems to me that the perfect type of a Christian
tomb was not developed until toward the thirteenth century,
sooner or later according to the civilization of each
country; that perfect type consisting in the raised and perfectly
visible sarcophagus of stone, bearing upon it a recumbent
figure, and the whole covered by a canopy. Before that
type was entirely developed, and in the more ordinary tombs
contemporary with it, we find the simple sarcophagus, often
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with only a rough block of stone for its lid, sometimes with a
low-gabled lid like a cottage roof, derived from Egyptian
forms, and bearing, either on the sides or the lid, at least a
sculpture of the cross, and sometimes the name of the
deceased, and date of erection of the tomb. In more elaborate
examples rich figure-sculpture is gradually introduced;
and in the perfect period the sarcophagus, even when it does
not bear any recumbent figure, has generally a rich sculpture
on its sides representing an angel presenting the dead, in person
and dress as he lived, to Christ or to the Madonna, with
lateral figures, sometimes of saints, sometimes—as in the tombs
of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon—of mourners; but in
Venice almost always representing the Annunciation, the
angel being placed at one angle of the sarcophagus, and the
Madonna at the other. The canopy, in a very simple foursquare
form, or as an arch over a recess, is added above the
sarcophagus, long before the life-size recumbent figure appears
resting upon it. By the time that the sculptors had acquired
skill enough to give much expression to this figure, the canopy
attains an exquisite symmetry and richness; and, in the most
elaborate examples, is surmounted by a statue, generally small,
representing the dead person in the full strength and pride
of life, while the recumbent figure shows him as he lay in
death. And, at this point, the perfect type of the Gothic
tomb is reached.

§ XLIX. Of the simple sarcophagus tomb there are many
exquisite examples both at Venice and Verona; the most
interesting in Venice are those which are set in the recesses
of the rude brick front of the Church of St. John and Paul,
ornamented only, for the most part, with two crosses set in
circles, and the legend with the name of the dead, and an
“Orate pro anima” in another circle in the centre. And in
this we may note one great proof of superiority in Italian
over English tombs; the latter being often enriched with
quatrefoils, small shafts, and arches, and other ordinary architectural
decorations, which destroy their seriousness and solemnity,
render them little more than ornamental, and have
69
no religious meaning whatever; while the Italian sarcophagi
are kept massive, smooth, and gloomy,—heavy-lidded dungeons
of stone, like rock-tombs,—but bearing on their surface,
sculptured with tender and narrow lines, the emblem of the
cross, not presumptuously nor proudly, but dimly graven
upon their granite, like the hope which the human heart holds,
but hardly perceives in its heaviness.

§ L. Among the tombs in front of the Church of St. John
and Paul there is one which is peculiarly illustrative of the
simplicity of these earlier ages. It is on the left of the
entrance, a massy sarcophagus with low horns as of an altar,
placed in a rude recess of the outside wall, shattered and worn,
and here and there entangled among wild grass and weeds.
Yet it is the tomb of two Doges, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo,
by one of whom nearly the whole ground was given for the
erection of the noble church in front of which his unprotected
tomb is wasting away. The sarcophagus bears an inscription
in the centre, describing the acts of the Doges, of which the
letters show that it was added a considerable period after the
erection of the tomb: the original legend is still left in other
letters on its base, to this effect,

“Lord James, died 1251. Lord Laurence, died 1288.”

At the two corners of the sarcophagus are two angels bearing
censers; and on its lid two birds, with crosses like crests upon
their heads. For the sake of the traveller in Venice the
reader will, I think, pardon me the momentary irrelevancy of
telling the meaning of these symbols.

§ LI. The foundation of the church of St. John and Paul
was laid by the Dominicans about 1234, under the immediate
protection of the Senate and the Doge Giacomo Tiepolo,
accorded to them in consequence of a miraculous vision
appearing to the Doge; of which the following account is
given in popular tradition:

“In the year 1226, the Doge Giacomo Tiepolo dreamed a
dream; and in his dream he saw the little oratory of the
Dominicans, and, behold, the ground all around it (now occupied
70
by the church) was covered with roses of the color of
vermilion, and the air was filled with their fragrance. And in
the midst of the roses, there were seen flying to and fro a
crowd of white doves, with golden crosses upon their heads.
And while the Doge looked, and wondered, behold, two angels
descended from heaven with golden censers, and passing through
the oratory, and forth among the flowers, they filled the
place with the smoke of their incense. Then the Doge heard
suddenly a clear and loud voice which proclaimed, ‘This is the
place that I have chosen for my preachers;’ and having heard
it, straightway he awoke and went to the Senate, and
declared to them the vision. Then the Senate decreed that
forty paces of ground should be given to enlarge the monastery;
and the Doge Tiepolo himself made a still larger grant
afterwards.”

There is nothing miraculous in the occurrence of such a
dream as this to the devout Doge; and the fact, of which
there is no doubt, that the greater part of the land on which
the church stands was given by him, is partly a confirmation
of the story. But, whether the sculptures on the tomb were
records of the vision, or the vision a monkish invention from
the sculptures on the tomb, the reader will not, I believe, look
upon its doves and crosses, or rudely carved angels, any more
with disdain; knowing how, in one way or another, they were
connected with a point of deep religious belief.

§ LII. Towards the beginning of the fourteenth century,
in Venice, the recumbent figure begins to appear on the sarcophagus,
the first dated example being also one of the most
beautiful; the statue of the prophet Simeon, sculptured upon
the tomb which was to receive his relics in the church dedicated
to him under the name of San Simeone Grande. So soon
as the figure appears, the sarcophagus becomes much more
richly sculptured, but always with definite religious purpose.
It is usually divided into two panels, which are filled with
small bas-reliefs of the acts or martyrdom of the patron saints
of the deceased: between them, in the centre, Christ, or the
Virgin and Child, are richly enthroned, under a curtained
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canopy; and the two figures representing the Annunciation
are almost always at the angles; the promise of the Birth of
Christ being taken as at once the ground and the type of the
promise of eternal life to all men.

§ LIII. These figures are always in Venice most rudely
chiselled; the progress of figure sculpture being there comparatively
tardy. At Verona, where the great Pisan school
had strong influence, the monumental sculpture is immeasurably
finer; and, so early as about the year 1335,16 the consummate
form of the Gothic tomb occurs in the monument of Can
Grande della Scala at Verona. It is set over the portal of the
chapel anciently belonging to the family. The sarcophagus is
sculptured with shallow bas-reliefs, representing (which is rare
in the tombs with which I am acquainted in Italy, unless they
are those of saints) the principal achievements of the warrior’s
life, especially the siege of Vicenza and battle of Placenza;
these sculptures, however, form little more than a chased and
roughened groundwork for the fully relieved statues representing
the Annunciation, projecting boldly from the front of
the sarcophagus. Above, the Lord of Verona is laid in his
long robe of civil dignity, wearing the simple bonnet, consisting
merely of a fillet bound round the brow, knotted and
falling on the shoulder. He is laid as asleep; his arms crossed
upon his body, and his sword by his side. Above him, a bold
arched canopy is sustained by two projecting shafts, and on
the pinnacle of its roof is the statue of the knight on his war-horse;
his helmet, dragon-winged and crested with the dog’s
head, tossed back behind his shoulders, and the broad and
blazoned drapery floating back from his horse’s breast,—so
truly drawn by the old workman from the life, that it seems
to wave in the wind, and the knight’s spear to shake, and his
marble horse to be evermore quickening its pace, and starting
into heavier and hastier charge, as the silver clouds float past
behind it in the sky.

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§ LIV. Now observe, in this tomb, as much concession is
made to the pride of man as may ever consist with honor,
discretion, or dignity. I do not enter into any question
respecting the character of Can Grande, though there can be
little doubt that he was one of the best among the nobles of
his time; but that is not to our purpose. It is not the question
whether his wars were just, or his greatness honorably
achieved; but whether, supposing them to have been so, these
facts are well and gracefully told upon his tomb. And I
believe there can be no hesitation in the admission of its perfect
feeling and truth. Though beautiful, the tomb is so little
conspicuous or intrusive, that it serves only to decorate the
portal of the little chapel, and is hardly regarded by the
traveller as he enters. When it is examined, the history of
the acts of the dead is found subdued into dim and minute
ornament upon his coffin; and the principal aim of the monument
is to direct the thoughts to his image as he lies in death,
and to the expression of his hope of resurrection; while, seen
as by the memory far away, diminished in the brightness of
the sky, there is set the likeness of his armed youth, stately,
as it stood of old, in the front of battle, and meet to be thus
recorded for us, that we may now be able to remember the
dignity of the frame, of which those who once looked upon it
hardly remembered that it was dust.

§ LV. This, I repeat, is as much as may ever be granted,
but this ought always to be granted, to the honor and the affection
of men. The tomb which stands beside that of Can
Grande, nearest it in the little field of sleep, already shows the
traces of erring ambition. It is the tomb of Mastino the
Second, in whose reign began the decline of his family. It is
altogether exquisite as a work of art; and the evidence of a
less wise or noble feeling in its design is found only in this,
that the image of a virtue, Fortitude, as belonging to the dead,
is placed on the extremity of the sarcophagus, opposite to the
Crucifixion. But for this slight circumstance, of which the
significance will only be appreciated as we examine the series
of later monuments, the composition of this monument of Can
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Mastino would have been as perfect as its decoration is refined.
It consists, like that of Can Grande, of the raised sarcophagus,
bearing the recumbent statue, protected by a noble foursquare
canopy, sculptured with ancient Scripture history. On one
side of the sarcophagus is Christ enthroned, with Can Mastino
kneeling before Him; on the other, Christ is represented in
the mystical form, half-rising from the tomb, meant, I believe,
to be at once typical of His passion and resurrection. The
lateral panels are occupied by statues of saints. At one extremity
of the sarcophagus is the Crucifixion; at the other, a
noble statue of Fortitude, with a lion’s skin thrown over her
shoulders, its head forming a shield upon her breast, her flowing
hair bound with a narrow fillet, and a three-edged sword
in her gauntleted right hand, drawn back sternly behind her
thigh, while, in her left, she bears high the shield of the Scalas.

§ LVI. Close to this monument is another, the stateliest and
most sumptuous of the three; it first arrests the eye of the
stranger, and long detains it,—a many-pinnacled pile surrounded
by niches with statues of the warrior saints.

It is beautiful, for it still belongs to the noble time, the
latter part of the fourteenth century; but its work is coarser
than that of the other, and its pride may well prepare us to
learn that it was built for himself, in his own lifetime, by the
man whose statue crowns it, Can Signorio della Scala. Now
observe, for this is infinitely significant. Can Mastino II. was
feeble and wicked, and began the ruin of his house; his sarcophagus
is the first which bears upon it the image of a virtue,
but he lays claim only to Fortitude. Can Signorio was twice
a fratricide, the last time when he lay upon his death-bed: his
tomb bears upon its gables the images of six virtues,—Faith,
Hope, Charity, Prudence, and (I believe) Justice and Fortitude.

§ LVII. Let us now return to Venice, where, in the second
chapel counting from right to left, at the west end of the
Church of the Frari, there is a very early fourteenth, or perhaps
late thirteenth, century tomb, another exquisite example
of the perfect Gothic form. It is a knight’s; but there is no
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inscription upon it, and his name is unknown. It consists of a
sarcophagus, supported on bold brackets against the chapel
wall, bearing the recumbent figure, protected by a simple canopy
in the form of a pointed arch, pinnacled by the knight’s
crest; beneath which the shadowy space is painted dark blue,
and strewn with stars. The statue itself is rudely carved; but
its lines, as seen from the intended distance, are both tender
and masterly. The knight is laid in his mail, only the hands
and face being bare. The hauberk and helmet are of chain-mail,
the armor for the limbs of jointed steel; a tunic, fitting
close to the breast, and marking the noble swell of it by two
narrow embroidered lines, is worn over the mail; his dagger is
at his right side; his long cross-belted sword, not seen by the
spectator from below, at his left. His feet rest on a hound
(the hound being his crest), which looks up towards its master.
In general, in tombs of this kind, the face of the statue is
slightly turned towards the spectator; in this monument, on
the contrary, it is turned away from him, towards the depth of
the arch: for there, just above the warrior’s breast, is carved a
small image of St. Joseph bearing the infant Christ, who looks
down upon the resting figure; and to this image its countenance
is turned. The appearance of the entire tomb is as if
the warrior had seen the vision of Christ in his dying moments,
and had fallen back peacefully upon his pillow, with his eyes
still turned to it, and his hands clasped in prayer.

§ LVIII. On the opposite side of this chapel is another very
lovely tomb, to Duccio degli Alberti, a Florentine ambassador
at Venice; noticeable chiefly as being the first in Venice on
which any images of the Virtues appear. We shall return to it
presently, but some account must first be given of the more
important among the other tombs in Venice belonging to the
perfect period. Of these, by far the most interesting, though
not the most elaborate, is that of the great Doge Francesco
Dandolo, whose ashes, it might have been thought, were honorable
enough to have been permitted to rest undisturbed in the
chapter-house of the Frari, where they were first laid. But,
as if there were not room enough, nor waste houses enough in
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the desolate city to receive a few convent papers, the monks,
wanting an “archivio,” have separated the tomb into three
pieces: the canopy, a simple arch sustained on brackets, still
remains on the blank walls of the desecrated chamber; the
sarcophagus has been transported to a kind of museum of antiquities,
established in what was once the cloister of Santa
Maria della Salute; and the painting which filled the lunette
behind it is hung far out of sight, at one end of the sacristy of
the same church. The sarcophagus is completely charged with
bas-reliefs: at its two extremities are the types of St. Mark
and St. John; in front, a noble sculpture of the death of
the Virgin; at the angles, angels holding vases. The whole
space is occupied by the sculpture; there are no spiral shafts
or panelled divisions; only a basic plinth below, and crowning
plinth above, the sculpture being raised from a deep concave
field between the two, but, in order to give piquancy and
picturesqueness to the mass of figures, two small trees are introduced
at the head and foot of the Madonna’s couch, an oak
and a stone pine.

§ LIX. It was said above,17 in speaking of the frequent disputes
of the Venetians with the Pontifical power, which in
their early days they had so strenuously supported, that “the
humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted out the shame of
Barbarossa.” It is indeed well that the two events should be
remembered together. By the help of the Venetians, Alexander
III. was enabled, in the twelfth century, to put his foot
upon the neck of the emperor Barbarossa, quoting the words
of the Psalm, “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder.”
A hundred and fifty years later, the Venetian ambassador,
Francesco Dandolo, unable to obtain even an audience from
the Pope, Clement V., to whom he had been sent to pray for
a removal of the sentence of excommunication pronounced
against the republic, concealed himself (according to the common
tradition) beneath the Pontiff’s dining-table; and thence
coming out as he sat down to meat, embraced his feet, and obtained,
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by tearful entreaties, the removal of the terrible sentence.

I say, “according to the common tradition;” for there are
some doubts cast upon the story by its supplement. Most of
the Venetian historians assert that Francesco Dandolo’s surname
of “Dog” was given him first on this occasion, in insult,
by the cardinals; and that the Venetians, in remembrance of
the grace which his humiliation had won for them, made it a
title of honor to him and to his race. It has, however, been
proved18 that the surname was borne by the ancestors of
Francesco Dandolo long before; and the falsity of this seal
of the legend renders also its circumstances doubtful. But the
main fact of grievous humiliation having been undergone,
admits of no dispute; the existence of such a tradition at all
is in itself a proof of its truth; it was not one likely to be
either invented or received without foundation: and it will be
well, therefore, that the reader should remember, in connection
with the treatment of Barbarossa at the door of the Church
of St. Mark’s, that in the Vatican, one hundred and fifty
years later, a Venetian noble, a future Doge, submitted to a
degradation, of which the current report among his people
was, that he had crept on his hands and knees from beneath
the Pontiff’s table to his feet, and had been spurned as a “dog”
by the cardinals present.

§ LX. There are two principal conclusions to be drawn from
this: the obvious one respecting the insolence of the Papal
dominion in the thirteenth century; the second, that there
were probably most deep piety and humility in the character
of the man who could submit to this insolence for the sake of
a benefit to his country. Probably no motive would have
been strong enough to obtain such a sacrifice from most men,
however unselfish; but it was, without doubt, made easier to
Dandolo by his profound reverence for the Pontifical office; a
reverence which, however we may now esteem those who
claimed it, could not but have been felt by nearly all good and
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faithful men at the time of which we are speaking. This is
the main point which I wish the reader to remember as we
look at his tomb, this, and the result of it,—that, some years
afterwards, when he was seated on the throne which his piety
had saved, “there were sixty princes’ ambassadors in Venice
at the same time, requesting the judgment of the Senate on
matters of various concernment, so great was the fame of the
uncorrupted justice of the Fathers.”19

Observe, there are no virtues on this tomb. Nothing but
religious history or symbols; the Death of the Virgin in front,
and the types of St. Mark and St. John at the extremities.

§ LXI. Of the tomb of the Doge Andrea Dandolo, in St.
Mark’s, I have spoken before. It is one of the first in Venice
which presents, in a canopy, the Pisan idea of angels withdrawing
curtains, as of a couch, to look down upon the dead.
The sarcophagus is richly decorated with flower-work; the
usual figures of the Annunciation are at the sides; an enthroned
Madonna in the centre; and two bas-reliefs, one of
the martyrdom of the Doge’s patron saint, St. Andrew, occupy
the intermediate spaces. All these tombs have been richly
colored; the hair of the angels has here been gilded, their
wings bedropped with silver, and their garments covered with
the most exquisite arabesques. This tomb, and that of St.
Isidore in another chapel of St. Mark’s, which was begun by
this very Doge, Andrea Dandolo, and completed after his
death in 1354, are both nearly alike in their treatment, and
are, on the whole, the best existing examples of Venetian
monumental sculpture.

§ LXII. Of much ruder workmanship, though still most precious,
and singularly interesting from its quaintness, is a sarcophagus
in the northernmost chapel, beside the choir of St.
John and Paul, charged with two bas-reliefs and many figures,
but which bears no inscription. It has, however, a shield with
three dolphins on its brackets; and as at the feet of the Madonna
in its centre there is a small kneeling figure of a Doge, we know
78
it to be the tomb of the Doge Giovanni Dolfino, who came to
the throne in 1356.

He was chosen Doge while, as provveditore, he was in Treviso,
defending the city against the King of Hungary. The
Venetians sent to the besiegers, praying that their newly
elected Doge might be permitted to pass the Hungarian lines.
Their request was refused, the Hungarians exulting that they
held the Doge of Venice prisoner in Treviso. But Dolfino,
with a body of two hundred horse, cut his way through their
lines by night, and reached Mestre (Malghera) in safety, where
he was met by the Senate. His bravery could not avert the
misfortunes which were accumulating on the republic. The
Hungarian war was ignominiously terminated by the surrender
of Dalmatia: the Doge’s heart was broken, his eyesight
failed him, and he died of the plague four years after he had
ascended the throne.

§ LXIII. It is perhaps on this account, perhaps in consequence
of later injuries, that the tomb has neither effigy nor
inscription: that it has been subjected to some violence is
evident from the dentil which once crowned its leaf-cornice
being now broken away, showing the whole front. But,
fortunately, the sculpture of the sarcophagus itself is little
injured.

There are two saints, male and female, at its angles, each
in a little niche; a Christ, enthroned in the centre, the Doge
and Dogaressa kneeling at his feet; in the two intermediate
panels, on one side the Epiphany, on the other the Death of
the Virgin; the whole supported, as well as crowned, by an
elaborate leaf-plinth. The figures under the niches are rudely
cut, and of little interest. Not so the central group. Instead
of a niche, the Christ is seated under a square tent, or tabernacle,
formed by curtains running on rods; the idea, of
course, as usual, borrowed from the Pisan one, but here ingeniously
applied. The curtains are opened in front, showing
those at the back of the tent, behind the seated figure; the
perspective of the two retiring sides being very tolerably suggested.
79
Two angels, of half the size of the seated figure,
thrust back the near curtains, and look up reverently to the
Christ; while again, at their feet, about one third of their
size, and half-sheltered, as it seems, by their garments, are the
two kneeling figures of the Doge and Dogaressa, though so
small and carefully cut, full of life. The Christ raising one
hand as to bless, and holding a book upright and open on the
knees, does not look either towards them or to the angels, but
forward; and there is a very noticeable effort to represent
Divine abstraction in the countenance: the idea of the three
magnitudes of spiritual being,—the God, the Angel, and the
Man,—is also to be observed, aided as it is by the complete
subjection of the angelic power to the Divine; for the angels
are in attitudes of the most lowly watchfulness of the face of
Christ, and appear unconscious of the presence of the human
beings who are nestled in the folds of their garments.

§ LXIV. With this interesting but modest tomb of one of
the kings of Venice, it is desirable to compare that of one of
her senators, of exactly the same date, which is raised against
the western wall of the Frari, at the end of the north aisle. It
bears the following remarkable inscription:

The “Amador de Justitia” has perhaps some reference to
Simon Dandolo’s having been one of the Giunta who condemned
the Doge Faliero. The sarcophagus is decorated
merely by the Annunciation group, and an enthroned Madonna
with a curtain behind her throne, sustained by four tiny angels,
who look over it as they hold it up; but the workmanship of
the figures is more than usually beautiful.

§ LXV. Seven years later, a very noble monument was placed
on the north side of the choir of St. John and Paul, to the
Doge Marco Cornaro, chiefly, with respect to our present subject,
noticeable for the absence of religious imagery from the
80
sarcophagus, which is decorated with roses only; three very
beautiful statues of the Madonna and two saints are, however,
set in the canopy above. Opposite this tomb, though about
fifteen years later in date, is the richest monument of the
Gothic period in Venice; that of the Doge Michele Morosini,
who died in 1382. It consists of a highly florid canopy,—an
arch crowned by a gable, with pinnacles at the flanks, boldly
crocketed, and with a huge finial at the top representing St.
Michael,—a medallion of Christ set in the gable; under the
arch, a mosaic, representing the Madonna presenting the Doge
to Christ upon the cross; beneath, as usual, the sarcophagus,
with a most noble recumbent figure of the Doge, his face
meagre and severe, and sharp in its lines, but exquisite in the
form of its small and princely features. The sarcophagus is
adorned with elaborate wrinkled leafage, projecting in front
of it into seven brackets, from which the statues are broken
away; but by which, for there can be no doubt that these last
statues represented the theological and cardinal Virtues, we
must for a moment pause.

§ LXVI. It was noticed above, that the tomb of the Florentine
ambassador, Duccio, was the first in Venice which presented
images of the Virtues. Its small lateral statues of
Justice and Temperance are exquisitely beautiful, and were, I
have no doubt, executed by a Florentine sculptor; the whole
range of artistical power and religious feeling being, in Florence,
full half a century in advance of that of Venice. But
this is the first truly Venetian tomb which has the Virtues;
and it becomes of importance, therefore, to know what was
the character of Morosini.

The reader must recollect, that I dated the commencement
of the fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, considering
that no state could be held as in decline, which numbered
such a man amongst its citizens. Carlo Zeno was a candidate
for the Ducal bonnet together with Michael Morosini; and
Morosini was chosen. It might be anticipated, therefore, that
there was something more than usually admirable or illustrious
in his character. Yet it is difficult to arrive at a just estimate
81
of it, as the reader will at once understand by comparing the
following statements:

§ LXVIII. The writer of the unpretending little history from
which the last quotation is taken has not given his authority
for this statement, and I could not find it, but believed, from
the general accuracy of the book, that some authority might
exist better than Daru’s. Under these circumstances, wishing
if possible to ascertain the truth, and to clear the character of
this great Doge from the accusation, if it proved groundless,
I wrote to the Count Carlo Morosini, his descendant, and one
of the few remaining representatives of the ancient noblesse
82
of Venice; one, also, by whom his great ancestral name is
revered, and in whom it is exalted. His answer appears to
me altogether conclusive as to the utter fallacy of the reports
of Daru and the English history. I have placed his letter in
the close of this volume (Appendix 6), in order that the reader
may himself be the judge upon this point; and I should not
have alluded to Daru’s report, except for the purpose of contradicting
it, but that it still appears to me impossible that
any modern historian should have gratuitously invented the
whole story, and that, therefore, there must have been a trace
in the documents which Daru himself possessed, of some scandal
of this kind raised by Morosini’s enemies, perhaps at the
very time of the disputed election with Carlo Zeno. The
occurrence of the Virtues upon his tomb, for the first time in
Venetian monumental work, and so richly and conspicuously
placed, may partly have been in public contradiction of such
a floating rumor. But the face of the statue is a more explicit
contradiction still; it is resolute, thoughtful, serene, and full
of beauty; and we must, therefore, for once, allow the somewhat
boastful introduction of the Virtues to have been perfectly
just: though the whole tomb is most notable, as furnishing
not only the exact intermediate condition in style
between the pure Gothic and its final Renaissance corruption,
but, at the same time, the exactly intermediate condition of
feeling between the pure calmness of early Christianity, and
the boastful pomp of the Renaissance faithlessness; for here
we have still the religious humility remaining in the mosaic
of the canopy, which shows the Doge kneeling before the
cross, while yet this tendency to self-trust is shown in the surrounding
of the coffin by the Virtues.

§ LXIX. The next tomb by the side of which they appear is
that of Jacopo Cavalli, in the same chapel of St. John and Paul
which contains the tomb of the Doge Delfin. It is peculiarly
rich in religious imagery, adorned by boldly cut types of the
four evangelists, and of two saints, while, on projecting
brackets in front of it, stood three statues of Faith, Hope, and
Charity, now lost, but drawn in Zanotto’s work. It is all rich
83
in detail, and its sculptor has been proud of it, thus recording
his name below the epitaph:

Jacopo Cavalli died in 1384. He was a bold and active
Veronese soldier, did the state much service, was therefore
ennobled by it, and became the founder of the house of the
Cavalli; but I find no especial reason for the images of the
Virtues, especially that of Charity, appearing at his tomb,
unless it be this: that at the siege of Feltre, in the war against
Leopold of Austria, he refused to assault the city, because the
senate would not grant his soldiers the pillage of the town.
The feet of the recumbent figure, which is in full armor, rest
on a dog, and its head on two lions; and these animals (neither
of which form any part of the knight’s bearings) are said by
Zanotto to be intended to symbolize his bravery and fidelity.
If, however, the lions are meant to set forth courage, it is a
pity they should have been represented as howling.

§ LXX. We must next pause for an instant beside the tomb
of Michael Steno, now in the northern aisle of St. John and
Paul, having been removed there from the destroyed church
of the Servi: first, to note its remarkable return to the early
simplicity, the sarcophagus being decorated only with two
crosses in quatrefoils, though it is of the fifteenth century,
Steno dying in 1413; and, in the second place, to observe the
peculiarity of the epitaph, which eulogises Steno as having
been “amator justitie, pacis, et ubertatis,” “a lover of justice,
peace, and plenty.” In the epitaphs of this period, the virtues
which are made most account of in public men are those which
were most useful to their country. We have already seen one
example in the epitaph on Simon Dandolo; and similar expressions
occur constantly in laudatory mentions of their later
84
Doges by the Venetian writers. Thus Sansovino of Marco
Cornaro, “Era savio huomo, eloquente, e amava molto la
pace e l’ abbondanza della citta;” and of Tomaso Mocenigo,
“Huomo oltre modo desideroso della pace.”

Of the tomb of this last-named Doge mention has before
been made. Here, as in Morosini’s, the images of the Virtues
have no ironical power, although their great conspicuousness
marks the increase of the boastful feeling in the treatment
of monuments. For the rest, this tomb is the last in
Venice which can be considered as belonging to the Gothic
period. Its mouldings are already rudely classical, and it has
meaningless figures in Roman armor at the angles; but its
tabernacle above is still Gothic, and the recumbent figure is
very beautiful. It was carved by two Florentine sculptors in
1423.

§ LXXI. Tomaso Mocenigo was succeeded by the renowned
Doge, Francesco Foscari, under whom, it will be remembered,
the last additions were made to the Gothic Ducal Palace;
additions which, in form only, not in spirit, corresponded to
the older portions; since, during his reign, the transition took
place which permits us no longer to consider the Venetian
architecture as Gothic at all. He died in 1457, and his tomb
is the first important example of Renaissance art.

Not, however, a good characteristic example. It is remarkable
chiefly as introducing all the faults of the Renaissance
at an early period, when its merits, such as they are, were yet
undeveloped. Its claim to be rated as a classical composition
is altogether destroyed by the remnants of Gothic feeling
which cling to it here and there in their last forms of degradation;
and of which, now that we find them thus corrupted,
the sooner we are rid the better. Thus the sarcophagus is
supported by a species of trefoil arches; the bases of the
shafts have still their spurs; and the whole tomb is covered
by a pediment, with crockets and a pinnacle. We shall find
that the perfect Renaissance is at least pure in its insipidity,
and subtle in its vice; but this monument is remarkable as
showing the refuse of one style encumbering the embryo of
85
another, and all principles of life entangled either in the swaddling
clothes or the shroud.

§ LXXII. With respect to our present purpose, however, it
is a monument of enormous importance. We have to trace,
be it remembered, the pride of state in its gradual intrusion
upon the sepulchre; and the consequent and correlative vanishing
of the expressions of religious feeling and heavenly
hope, together with the more and more arrogant setting forth
of the virtues of the dead. Now this tomb is the largest and
most costly we have yet seen; but its means of religious
expression are limited to a single statue of Christ, small and
used merely as a pinnacle at the top. The rest of the composition
is as curious as it is vulgar. The conceit, so often
noticed as having been borrowed from the Pisan school, of
angels withdrawing the curtains of the couch to look down
upon the dead, was brought forward with increasing prominence
by every succeeding sculptor; but, as we draw nearer
to the Renaissance period, we find that the angels become of
less importance, and the curtains of more. With the Pisans,
the curtains are introduced as a motive for the angels; with
the Renaissance sculptors, the angels are introduced merely
as a motive for the curtains, which become every day more
huge and elaborate. In the monument of Mocenigo, they
have already expanded into a tent, with a pole in the centre
of it: and in that of Foscari, for the first time, the angels are
absent altogether; while the curtains are arranged in the form
of an enormous French tent-bed, and are sustained at the
flanks by two diminutive figures in Roman armor; substituted
for the angels, merely that the sculptor might show his knowledge
of classical costume. And now observe how often a
fault in feeling induces also a fault in style. In the old tombs,
the angels used to stand on or by the side of the sarcophagus;
but their places are here to be occupied by the Virtues, and
therefore, to sustain the diminutive Roman figures at the
necessary height, each has a whole Corinthian pillar to himself,
a pillar whose shaft is eleven feet high, and some three
or four feet round: and because this was not high enough, it
86
is put on a pedestal four feet and a half high; and has a
spurred base besides of its own, a tall capital, then a huge
bracket above the capital, and then another pedestal above the
bracket, and on the top of all the diminutive figure who has
charge of the curtains.

§ LXXIII. Under the canopy, thus arranged, is placed the
sarcophagus with its recumbent figure. The statues of the
Virgin and the saints have disappeared from it. In their
stead, its panels are filled with half-length figures of Faith,
Hope, and Charity; while Temperance and Fortitude are at
the Doge’s feet, Justice and Prudence at his head, figures now
the size of life, yet nevertheless recognizable only by their
attributes: for, except that Hope raises her eyes, there is no
difference in the character or expression of any of their faces,—they
are nothing more than handsome Venetian women, in
rather full and courtly dresses, and tolerably well thrown into
postures for effect from below. Fortitude could not of course
be placed in a graceful one without some sacrifice of her character,
but that was of no consequence in the eyes of the
sculptors of this period, so she leans back languidly, and
nearly overthrows her own column; while Temperance, and
Justice opposite to her, as neither the left hand of the one
nor the right hand of the other could be seen from below,
have been left with one hand each.

§ LXXIV. Still these figures, coarse and feelingless as they
are, have been worked with care, because the principal effect
of the tomb depends on them. But the effigy of the Doge,
of which nothing but the side is visible, has been utterly neglected;
and the ingenuity of the sculptor is not so great, at
the best, as that he can afford to be slovenly. There is, indeed,
nothing in the history of Foscari which would lead us to
expect anything particularly noble in his face; but I trust,
nevertheless, it has been misrepresented by this despicable
carver; for no words are strong enough to express the baseness
of the portraiture. A huge, gross, bony clown’s face,
with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is
seen so often in the countenances of the worst Romanist
87
priest; a face part of iron and part of clay, with the immobility
of the one, and the foulness of the other, double chinned,
blunt-mouthed, bony-cheeked, with its brows drawn down
into meagre lines and wrinkles over the eyelids; the face of a
man incapable either of joy or sorrow, unless such as may be
caused by the indulgence of passion, or the mortification of
pride. Even had he been such a one, a noble workman would
not have written it so legibly on his tomb; and I believe it to be
the image of the carver’s own mind that is there hewn in the
marble, not that of the Doge Foscari. For the same mind is
visible enough throughout, the traces of it mingled with those
of the evil taste of the whole time and people. There is not
anything so small but it is shown in some portion of its treatment;
for instance, in the placing of the shields at the back of
the great curtain. In earlier times, the shield, as we have
seen, was represented as merely suspended against the tomb by
a thong, or if sustained in any other manner, still its form was
simple and undisguised. Men in those days used their shields
in war, and therefore there was no need to add dignity to their
form by external ornament. That which, through day after
day of mortal danger, had borne back from them the waves
of battle, could neither be degraded by simplicity, nor exalted
by decoration. By its rude leathern thong it seemed to be
fastened to their tombs, and the shield of the mighty was not
cast away, though capable of defending its master no more.

§ LXXV. It was otherwise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The changed system of warfare was rapidly doing
away with the practical service of the shield; and the chiefs
who directed the battle from a distance, or who passed the
greater part of their lives in the council-chamber, soon came
to regard the shield as nothing more than a field for their
armorial bearings. It then became a principal object of their
Pride of State to increase the conspicuousness of these marks
of family distinction by surrounding them with various and
fantastic ornament, generally scroll or flower work, which of
course deprived the shield of all appearance of being intended
for a soldier’s use. Thus the shield of the Foscari is introduced
88
in two ways. On the sarcophagus, the bearings are
three times repeated, enclosed in circular disks, which are
sustained each by a couple of naked infants. Above the
canopy, two shields of the usual form are set in the centre of
circles filled by a radiating ornament of shell flutings, which
give them the effect of ventilators; and their circumference is
farther adorned by gilt rays, undulating to represent a glory.

§ LXXVI. We now approach that period of the early Renaissance
which was noticed in the preceding chapter as being at
first a very visible improvement on the corrupted Gothic. The
tombs executed during the period of the Byzantine Renaissance
exhibit, in the first place, a consummate skill in handling
the chisel, perfect science of drawing and anatomy, high
appreciation of good classical models, and a grace of composition
and delicacy of ornament derived, I believe, principally
from the great Florentine sculptors. But, together with this
science, they exhibit also, for a short time, some return to the
early religious feeling, forming a school of sculpture which
corresponds to that of the school of the Bellini in painting;
and the only wonder is that there should not have been more
workmen in the fifteenth century doing in marble what Perugino,
Francia, and Bellini did on canvas. There are, indeed,
some few, as I have just said, in whom the good and pure
temper shows itself: but the sculptor was necessarily led
sooner than the painter to an exclusive study of classical
models, utterly adverse to the Christian imagination; and he
was also deprived of the great purifying and sacred element
of color, besides having much more of merely mechanical and
therefore degrading labor to go through in the realization of
his thought. Hence I do not know any example in sculpture
at this period, at least in Venice, which has not conspicuous
faults (not faults of imperfection, as in early sculpture, but of
purpose and sentiment), staining such beauties as it may possess;
and the whole school soon falls away, and merges into
vain pomp and meagre metaphor.

§ LXXVII. The most celebrated monument of this period is
that to the Doge Andrea Vendramin, in the Church of St.
89
John and Paul, sculptured about 1480, and before alluded to
in the first chapter of the first volume. It has attracted public
admiration, partly by its costliness, partly by the delicacy and
precision of its chiselling; being otherwise a very base and unworthy
example of the school, and showing neither invention
nor feeling. It has the Virtues, as usual, dressed like heathen
goddesses, and totally devoid of expression, though graceful
and well studied merely as female figures. The rest of its
sculpture is all of the same kind; perfect in workmanship,
and devoid of thought. Its dragons are covered with marvellous
scales, but have no terror nor sting in them; its birds are
perfect in plumage, but have no song in them; its children
lovely of limb, but have no childishness in them.

§ LXXVIII. Of far other workmanship are the tombs of
Pietro and Giovanni Mocenigo, in St. John and Paul, and of
Pietro Bernardo in the Frari; in all which the details are as
full of exquisite fancy, as they are perfect in execution; and
in the two former, and several others of similar feeling, the
old religious symbols return; the Madonna is again seen
enthroned under the canopy, and the sarcophagus is decorated
with legends of the saints. But the fatal errors of sentiment
are, nevertheless, always traceable. In the first place, the
sculptor is always seen to be intent upon the exhibition of his
skill, more than on producing any effect on the spectator’s
mind; elaborate backgrounds of landscape, with tricks of perspective,
imitations of trees, clouds, and water, and various
other unnecessary adjuncts, merely to show how marble could
be subdued; together with useless under-cutting, and over-finish
in subordinate parts, continually exhibiting the same
cold vanity and unexcited precision of mechanism. In the
second place, the figures have all the peculiar tendency to
posture-making, which, exhibiting itself first painfully in Perugino,
rapidly destroyed the veracity of composition in all art.
By posture-making I mean, in general, that action of figures
which results from the painter’s considering, in the first place,
not how, under the circumstances, they would actually have
walked, or stood, or looked, but how they may most gracefully
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and harmoniously walk or stand. In the hands of a great man,
posture, like everything else, becomes noble, even when over-studied,
as with Michael Angelo, who was, perhaps, more than
any other, the cause of the mischief; but, with inferior men,
this habit of composing attitudes ends necessarily in utter lifelessness
and abortion. Giotto was, perhaps, of all painters, the most
free from the infection of the poison, always conceiving an incident
naturally, and drawing it unaffectedly; and the absence
of posture-making in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, as opposed
to the Attitudinarianism of the modern school, has been
both one of their principal virtues, and of the principal causes
of outcry against them.

§ LXXIX. But the most significant change in the treatment
of these tombs, with respect to our immediate object, is in the
form of the sarcophagus. It was above noted, that, exactly in
proportion to the degree of the pride of life expressed in any
monument, would be also the fear of death; and therefore, as
these tombs increase in splendor, in size, and beauty of workmanship,
we perceive a gradual desire to take away from the
definite character of the sarcophagus. In the earliest times,
as we have seen, it was a gloomy mass of stone; gradually it
became charged with religious sculpture; but never with the
slightest desire to disguise its form, until towards the middle
of the fifteenth century. It then becomes enriched with
flower-work and hidden by the Virtues; and, finally, losing its
foursquare form, it is modelled on graceful types of ancient
vases, made as little like a coffin as possible, and refined away
in various elegancies, till it becomes, at last, a mere pedestal
or stage for the portrait statue. This statue, in the meantime,
has been gradually coming back to life, through a curious
series of transitions. The Vendramin monument is one of the
last which shows, or pretends to show, the recumbent figure
laid in death. A few years later, this idea became disagreeable
to polite minds; and, lo! the figures which before had
been laid at rest upon the tomb pillow, raised themselves on
their elbows, and began to look round them. The soul of the
sixteenth century dared not contemplate its body in death.

91

§ LXXX. The reader cannot but remember many instances
of this form of monument, England being peculiarly rich in
examples of them; although, with her, tomb sculpture, after
the fourteenth century, is altogether imitative, and in no degree
indicative of the temper of the people. It was from Italy
that the authority for the change was derived; and in Italy
only, therefore, that it is truly correspondent to the change in
the national mind. There are many monuments in Venice of
this semi-animate type, most of them carefully sculptured, and
some very admirable as portraits, and for the casting of the
drapery, especially those in the Church of San Salvador; but
I shall only direct the reader to one, that of Jacopo Pesaro,
Bishop of Paphos, in the Church of the Frari; notable not
only as a very skilful piece of sculpture, but for the
epitaph, singularly characteristic of the period, and confirmatory
of all that I have alleged against it:

The mingled classicism and carnal pride of this epitaph
surely need no comment. The crown is expected as a right
from the justice of the judge, and the nobility of the Venetian
family is only a little lower than that of the angels. The
quaint childishness of the “Vixit annos Platonicos” is also
very notable.

§ LXXXI. The statue, however, did not long remain in this
partially recumbent attitude. Even the expression of peace
became painful to the frivolous and thoughtless Italians, and
they required the portraiture to be rendered in a manner that
should induce no memory of death. The statue rose up, and
presented itself in front of the tomb, like an actor upon a stage,
92
surrounded now not merely, or not at all, by the Virtues, but by
allegorical figures of Fame and Victory, by genii and muses,
by personifications of humbled kingdoms and adoring nations,
and by every circumstance of pomp, and symbol of adulation,
that flattery could suggest, or insolence could claim.

§ LXXXII. As of the intermediate monumental type, so also
of this, the last and most gross, there are unfortunately many
examples in our own country; but the most wonderful, by
far, are still at Venice. I shall, however, particularize only
two; the first, that of the Doge John Pesaro, in the Frari.
It is to be observed that we have passed over a considerable
interval of time; we are now in the latter half of the seventeenth
century; the progress of corruption has in the meantime
been incessant, and sculpture has here lost its taste and
learning as well as its feeling. The monument is a huge accumulation
of theatrical scenery in marble: four colossal negro
caryatides, grinning and horrible, with faces of black marble
and white eyes, sustain the first story of it; above this, two
monsters, long-necked, half dog and half dragon, sustain an
ornamental sarcophagus, on the top of which the full-length
statue of the Doge in robes of state stands forward with its
arms expanded, like an actor courting applause, under a huge
canopy of metal, like the roof of a bed, painted crimson and
gold; on each side of him are sitting figures of genii, and
unintelligible personifications gesticulating in Roman armor;
below, between the negro caryatides, are two ghastly figures
in bronze, half corpse, half skeleton, carrying tablets on which
is written the eulogium: but in large letters graven in gold,
the following words are the first and last that strike the eye;
the first two phrases, one on each side, on tablets in the lower
story, the last under the portrait statue above:

We have here, at last, the horrible images of death in violent
contrast with the defiant monument, which pretends to bring
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the resurrection down to earth, “Hic revixit;” and it seems
impossible for false taste and base feeling to sink lower. Yet
even this monument is surpassed by one in St. John and Paul.

§ LXXXIII. But before we pass to this, the last with which I
shall burden the reader’s attention, let us for a moment, and
that we may feel the contrast more forcibly, return to a tomb
of the early times.

In a dark niche in the outer wall of the outer corridor of
St. Mark’s—not even in the church, observe, but in the
atrium or porch of it, and on the north side of the church,—is
a solid sarcophagus of white marble, raised only about two
feet from the ground on four stunted square pillars. Its lid
is a mere slab of stone; on its extremities are sculptured two
crosses; in front of it are two rows of rude figures, the uppermost
representing Christ with the Apostles: the lower row is
of six figures only, alternately male and female, holding up
their hands in the usual attitude of benediction; the sixth is
smaller than the rest, and the midmost of the other five has a
glory round its head. I cannot tell the meaning of these
figures, but between them are suspended censers attached to
crosses; a most beautiful symbolic expression of Christ’s
mediatorial function. The whole is surrounded by a rude
wreath of vine leaves, proceeding out of the foot of a cross.

On the bar of marble which separates the two rows of
figures are inscribed these words:

“Here lies the Lord Marin Morosini, Duke.”

It is the tomb of the Doge Marino Morosini, who reigned
from 1249 to 1252.

§ LXXXIV. From before this rude and solemn sepulchre let
us pass to the southern aisle of the church of St. John and
Paul; and there, towering from the pavement to the vaulting
of the church, behold a mass of marble, sixty or seventy feet
in height, of mingled yellow and white, the yellow carved into
the form of an enormous curtain, with ropes, fringes, and
tassels, sustained by cherubs; in front of which, in the now
usual stage attitudes, advance the statues of the Doge Bertuccio
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Valier, his son the Doge Silvester Falier, and his son’s
wife, Elizabeth. The statues of the Doges, though mean and
Polonius-like, are partly redeemed by the Ducal robes; but
that of the Dogaressa is a consummation of grossness, vanity,
and ugliness,—the figure of a large and wrinkled woman, with
elaborate curls in stiff projection round her face, covered from
her shoulders to her feet with ruffs, furs, lace, jewels, and embroidery.
Beneath and around are scattered Virtues, Victories,
Fames, genii,—the entire company of the monumental
stage assembled, as before a drop scene,—executed by various
sculptors, and deserving attentive study as exhibiting every
condition of false taste and feeble conception. The Victory in
the centre is peculiarly interesting; the lion by which she is
accompanied, springing on a dragon, has been intended to
look terrible, but the incapable sculptor could not conceive
any form of dreadfulness, could not even make the lion look
angry. It looks only lachrymose; and its lifted forepaws,
there being no spring nor motion in its body, give it the
appearance of a dog begging. The inscriptions under the
two principal statues are as follows:

“Bertucius Valier, Duke,

Great in wisdom and eloquence,

Greater in his Hellespontic victory,

Greatest in the Prince his son.

Died in the year 1658.”

“Elisabeth Quirina,

The wife of Silvester,

Distinguished by Roman virtue,

By Venetian piety,

And by the Ducal crown,

Died 1708.”

The writers of this age were generally anxious to make the
world aware that they understood the degrees of comparison,
and a large number of epitaphs are principally constructed
with this object (compare, in the Latin, that of the Bishop of
Paphos, given above): but the latter of these epitaphs is also
interesting from its mention, in an age now altogether given
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up to the pursuit of worldly honor, of that “Venetian piety”
which once truly distinguished the city from all others; and
of which some form and shadow, remaining still, served to
point an epitaph, and to feed more cunningly and speciously
the pride which could not be satiated with the sumptuousness
of the sepulchre.

§ LXXXV. Thus far, then, of the second element of the Renaissance
spirit, the Pride of State; nor need we go farther to
learn the reason of the fall of Venice. She was already likened
in her thoughts, and was therefore to be likened in her ruin,
to the Virgin of Babylon. The Pride of State and the Pride
of Knowledge were no new passions: the sentence against
them had gone forth from everlasting. “Thou saidst, I shall
be a lady for ever; so that thou didst not lay these things to
thine heart … Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath
perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and
none else beside me. Therefore shall evil come upon thee
…; thy merchants from thy youth, they shall wander
every one to his quarter; none shall save thee.”21

§ LXXXVI. III. Pride of System. I might have illustrated
these evil principles from a thousand other sources, but I have
not time to pursue the subject farther, and must pass to the
third element above named, the Pride of System. It need
not detain us so long as either of the others, for it is at once
more palpable and less dangerous. The manner in which the
pride of the fifteenth century corrupted the sources of knowledge,
and diminished the majesty, while it multiplied the trappings,
of state, is in general little observed; but the reader is
probably already well and sufficiently aware of the curious
tendency to formulization and system which, under the name
of philosophy, encumbered the minds of the Renaissance
schoolmen. As it was above stated, grammar became the
first of sciences; and whatever subject had to be treated, the
first aim of the philosopher was to subject its principles to a
code of laws, in the observation of which the merit of the
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speaker, thinker, or worker, in or on that subject, was thereafter
to consist; so that the whole mind of the world was
occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints. The sound of
the forging of fetters was heard from sea to sea. The doctors
of all the arts and sciences set themselves daily to the invention
of new varieties of cages and manacles; they themselves
wore, instead of gowns, a chain mail, whose purpose was not
so much to avert the weapon of the adversary as to restrain
the motions of the wearer; and all the acts, thoughts, and
workings of mankind,—poetry, painting, architecture, and
philosophy,—were reduced by them merely to so many different
forms of fetter-dance.

§ LXXXVII. Now, I am very sure that no reader who has
given any attention to the former portions of this work, or the
tendency of what else I have written, more especially the last
chapter of the “Seven Lamps,” will suppose me to underrate
the importance, or dispute the authority, of law. It has been
necessary for me to allege these again and again, nor can they
ever be too often or too energetically alleged, against the vast
masses of men who now disturb or retard the advance of civilization;
heady and high-minded, despisers of discipline, and refusers
of correction. But law, so far as it can be reduced to
form and system, and is not written upon the heart,—as it is,
in a Divine loyalty, upon the hearts of the great hierarchies
who serve and wait about the throne of the Eternal Lawgiver,—this
lower and formally expressible law has, I say, two objects.
It is either for the definition and restraint of sin, or
the guidance of simplicity; it either explains, forbids, and
punishes wickedness, or it guides the movements and actions
both of lifeless things and of the more simple and untaught
among responsible agents. And so long, therefore, as sin and
foolishness are in the world, so long it will be necessary for
men to submit themselves painfully to this lower law, in proportion
to their need of being corrected, and to the degree of
childishness or simplicity by which they approach more nearly
to the condition of the unthinking and inanimate things which
are governed by law altogether; yet yielding, in the manner
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of their submission to it, a singular lesson to the pride of man,—being
obedient more perfectly in proportion to their greatness.22
But, so far as men become good and wise, and rise
above the state of children, so far they become emancipated
from this written law, and invested with the perfect freedom
which consists in the fulness and joyfulness of compliance
with a higher and unwritten law; a law so universal, so subtle,
so glorious, that nothing but the heart can keep it.

§ LXXXVIII. Now pride opposes itself to the observance of
this Divine law in two opposite ways: either by brute resistance,
which is the way of the rabble and its leaders, denying
or defying law altogether; or by formal compliance, which is
the way of the Pharisee, exalting himself while he pretends to
obedience, and making void the infinite and spiritual commandment
by the finite and lettered commandment. And it
is easy to know which law we are obeying: for any law which
we magnify and keep through pride, is always the law of the
letter; but that which we love and keep through humility, is
the law of the Spirit: And the letter killeth, but the Spirit
giveth life.

§ LXXXIX. In the appliance of this universal principle to
what we have at present in hand, it is to be noted, that all
written or writable law respecting the arts is for the childish
and ignorant: that in the beginning of teaching, it is possible
to say that this or that must or must not be done; and laws of
color and shade may be taught, as laws of harmony are to the
young scholar in music. But the moment a man begins to be
anything deserving the name of an artist, all this teachable law
has become a matter of course with him; and if, thenceforth,
he boast himself anywise in the law, or pretend that he lives
and works by it, it is a sure sign that he is merely tithing
cummin, and that there is no true art nor religion in him. For
the true artist has that inspiration in him which is above all
law, or rather, which is continually working out such magnificent
and perfect obedience to supreme law, as can in no wise
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be rendered by line and rule. There are more laws perceived
and fulfilled in the single stroke of a great workman, than
could be written in a volume. His science is inexpressibly
subtle, directly taught him by his Maker, not in any wise communicable
or imitable.23 Neither can any written or definitely
observable laws enable us to do any great thing. It is possible,
by measuring and administering quantities of color, to paint a
room wall so that it shall not hurt the eye; but there are no laws
by observing which we can become Titians. It is possible so to
measure and administer syllables, as to construct harmonious
verse; but there are no laws by which we can write Iliads.
Out of the poem or the picture, once produced, men may elicit
laws by the volume, and study them with advantage, to the
better understanding of the existing poem or picture; but no
more write or paint another, than by discovering laws of vegetation
they can make a tree to grow. And therefore, wheresoever
we find the system and formality of rules much dwelt
upon, and spoken of as anything else than a help for children,
there we may be sure that noble art is not even understood, far
less reached. And thus it was with all the common and public
mind in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The greater
men, indeed, broke through the thorn hedges; and, though
much time was lost by the learned among them in writing
Latin verses and anagrams, and arranging the framework of
quaint sonnets and dexterous syllogisms, still they tore their
way through the sapless thicket by force of intellect or of
piety; for it was not possible that, either in literature or in
painting, rules could be received by any strong mind, so as
materially to interfere with its originality: and the crabbed
discipline and exact scholarship became an advantage to the
men who could pass through and despise them; so that in
spite of the rules of the drama we had Shakspeare, and in spite
of the rules of art we had Tintoret,—both of them, to this day,
doing perpetual violence to the vulgar scholarship and dim-eyed
proprieties of the multitude.

§ XC. But in architecture it was not so; for that was the
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art of the multitude, and was affected by all their errors; and
the great men who entered its field, like Michael Angelo, found
expression for all the best part of their minds in sculpture, and
made the architecture merely its shell. So the simpletons and
sophists had their way with it: and the reader can have no
conception of the inanities and puerilities of the writers, who,
with the help of Vitruvius, re-established its “five orders,”
determined the proportions of each, and gave the various recipes
for sublimity and beauty, which have been thenceforward
followed to this day, but which may, I believe, in this age of
perfect machinery, be followed out still farther. If, indeed,
there are only five perfect forms of columns and architraves,
and there be a fixed proportion to each, it is certainly possible,
with a little ingenuity, so to regulate a stonecutting machine,
as that it shall furnish pillars and friezes to the size ordered,
of any of the five orders, on the most perfect Greek models,
in any quantity; an epitome, also, of Vitruvius, may be made
so simple, as to enable any bricklayer to set them up at their
proper distances, and we may dispense with our architects
altogether.

§ XCI. But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the
faint persuasion which still lurks in men’s minds that architecture
is an art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to
practise it, then let the whole system of the orders and their
proportions be cast out and trampled down as the most vain,
barbarous, and paltry deception that was ever stamped on
human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth, common
to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a
copy, nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely
imagined thing. Five orders! There is not a side chapel in
any Gothic cathedral but it has fifty orders, the worst of them
better than the best of the Greek ones, and all new; and a
single inventive human soul could create a thousand orders in
an hour.24 And this would have been discovered even in the
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worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age
found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the
best of those who devoted themselves to architecture were in
great part occupied in adapting the construction of buildings
to new necessities, such as those developed by the invention
of gunpowder (introducing a totally new and most interesting
science of fortification, which directed the ingenuity of Sanmicheli
and many others from its proper channel), and found
interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the
obsolete architectural laws they had consented to revive, and
the forms of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy,
with the requirements of the daily life of the sixteenth
century.

§ XCII. These, then, were the three principal directions in
which the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses
were rendered still more fatal by the entrance of another element,
inevitably associated with pride. For, as it is written,
“He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool,” so also it is
written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;”
and the self-adulation which influenced not less the learning of
the age than its luxury, led gradually to the forgetfulness of all
things but self, and to an infidelity only the more fatal because
it still retained the form and language of faith.

§ XCIII. IV. Infidelity. In noticing the more prominent
forms in which this faithlessness manifested itself, it is necessary
to distinguish justly between that which was the consequence
of respect for Paganism, and that which followed from the
corruption of Catholicism. For as the Roman architecture is
not to be made answerable for the primal corruption of the
Gothic, so neither is the Roman philosophy to be made
answerable for the primal corruption of Christianity. Year
after year, as the history of the life of Christ sank back into
the depths of time, and became obscured by the misty atmosphere
of the history of the world,—as intermediate actions
and incidents multiplied in number, and countless changes in
men’s modes of life, and tones of thought, rendered it more
difficult for them to imagine the facts of distant time,—it became
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daily, almost hourly, a greater effort for the faithful
heart to apprehend the entire veracity and vitality of the story
of its Redeemer; and more easy for the thoughtless and
remiss to deceive themselves as to the true character of the
belief they had been taught to profess. And this must have
been the case, had the pastors of the Church never failed in
their watchfulness, and the Church itself never erred in its
practice or doctrine. But when every year that removed the
truths of the Gospel into deeper distance, added to them also
some false or foolish tradition; when wilful distortion was
added to natural obscurity, and the dimness of memory was
disguised by the fruitfulness of fiction; when, moreover, the
enormous temporal power granted to the clergy attracted into
their ranks multitudes of men who, but for such temptation,
would not have pretended to the Christian name, so that
grievous wolves entered in among them, not sparing the flock;
and when, by the machinations of such men, and the remissness
of others, the form and administrations of Church doctrine
and discipline had become little more than a means of aggrandizing
the power of the priesthood, it was impossible any
longer for men of thoughtfulness or piety to remain in an
unquestioning serenity of faith. The Church had become so
mingled with the world that its witness could no longer be received;
and the professing members of it, who were placed in
circumstances such as to enable them to become aware of its
corruptions, and whom their interest or their simplicity did not
bribe or beguile into silence, gradually separated themselves
into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one tending to
Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

§ XCIV. Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch
the course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism;
a struggle which, however necessary, was attended with
infinite calamity to the Church. For, in the first place, the
Protestant movement was, in reality, not reformation but reanimation.
It poured new life into the Church, but it did not
form or define her anew. In some sort it rather broke down
her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her
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grapes. The reformers speedily found that the enemy was
never far behind the sower of good seed; that an evil spirit
might enter the ranks of reformation as well as those of resistance;
and that though the deadly blight might be checked
amidst the wheat, there was no hope of ever ridding the wheat
itself from the tares. New temptations were invented by
Satan wherewith to oppose the revived strength of Christianity:
as the Romanist, confiding in his human teachers, had
ceased to try whether they were teachers sent from God, so the
Protestant, confiding in the teaching of the Spirit, believed
every spirit, and did not try the spirits whether they were of
God. And a thousand enthusiasms and heresies speedily
obscured the faith and divided the force of the Reformation.

§ XCV. But the main evils rose out of the antagonism of the
two great parties; primarily, in the mere fact of the existence
of an antagonism. To the eyes of the unbeliever the Church
of Christ, for the first time since its foundation, bore the aspect
of a house divided against itself. Not that many forms
of schism had not before arisen in it; but either they had been
obscure and silent, hidden among the shadows of the Alps
and the marshes of the Rhine; or they had been outbreaks of
visible and unmistakable error, cast off by the Church, rootless,
and speedily withering away, while, with much that was
erring and criminal, she still retained within her the pillar and
ground of the truth. But here was at last a schism in which
truth and authority were at issue. The body that was cast off
withered away no longer. It stretched out its boughs to the
sea and its branches to the river, and it was the ancient trunk
that gave signs of decrepitude. On one side stood the
reanimated faith, in its right hand the book open, and its left
hand lifted up to heaven, appealing for its proof to the Word
of the Testimony and the power of the Holy Ghost. On the
other stood, or seemed to stand, all beloved custom and believed
tradition; all that for fifteen hundred years had been
closest to the hearts of men, or most precious for their help.
Long-trusted legend; long-reverenced power; long-practised
discipline; faiths that had ruled the destiny, and sealed the
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departure, of souls that could not be told or numbered for
multitude; prayers, that from the lips of the fathers to those
of the children had distilled like sweet waterfalls, sounding
through the silence of ages, breaking themselves into heavenly
dew to return upon the pastures of the wilderness; hopes, that
had set the face as a flint in the torture, and the sword as a
flame in the battle, that had pointed the purposes and ministered
the strength of life, brightened the last glances and
shaped the last syllables of death; charities, that had bound
together the brotherhoods of the mountain and the desert, and
had woven chains of pitying or aspiring communion between
this world and the unfathomable beneath and above; and,
more than these, the spirits of all the innumerable, undoubting,
dead, beckoning to the one way by which they had been content
to follow the things that belonged unto their peace;—these
all stood on the other side: and the choice must have
been a bitter one, even at the best; but it was rendered tenfold
more bitter by the natural, but most sinful animosity of
the two divisions of the Church against each other.

§ XCVI. On one side this animosity was, of course, inevitable.
The Romanist party, though still including many Christian
men, necessarily included, also, all the worst of those who
called themselves Christians. In the fact of its refusing correction,
it stood confessed as the Church of the unholy; and,
while it still counted among its adherents many of the simple
and believing,—men unacquainted with the corruption of the
body to which they belonged, or incapable of accepting any
form of doctrine but that which they had been taught from
their youth,—it gathered together with them whatever was
carnal and sensual in priesthood or in people, all the lovers of
power in the one, and of ease in the other. And the rage of
these men was, of course, unlimited against those who either
disputed their authority, reprehended their manner of life, or
cast suspicion upon the popular methods of lulling the conscience
in the lifetime, or purchasing salvation on the death-bed.

§ XCVII. Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various
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tenets which before had been little more than floating errors
in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism,
it became necessary to fasten down with a band
of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid, and less
rational, to the whole body of Romanist Divinity. Multitudes
of minds which in other ages might have brought honor and
strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which
it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned
falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly
be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent
errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable
when they were formally defined and defended;
that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude,
were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that,
above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God’s
word accessible to every man, left all sins against its light incapable
of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment
when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible, the
judgment was pronounced upon her, which made her the scorn
and the prey of her own children, and cast her down from the
throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low,
that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation
was mocked in the temples of Christianity. Judea had
seen her God laid in the manger of the beasts of burden; it
was for Christendom to stable the beasts of burden by the altar
of her God.

§ XCVIII. Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of
Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself. That opposition
was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing,
and incautious. It could indeed hardly be otherwise. Fresh
bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her
anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember
any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching. Forced
by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the
Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting,
rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily. Sect
branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the
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miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten,
though their power and palm were claimed by the
members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love
of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and
mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became
impossible even for the best and truest men to know the
plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly
transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege.
Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull
her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning
recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or
perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that
walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their
guides to be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood
and contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the
rejection of the highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind:
while the learned infidel, standing aloof, drew his own
conclusions, both from the rancor of the antagonists, and from
their errors; believed each in all that he alleged against the
other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he watched the
winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of
England drink the blood of King Charles.

§ XCIX. Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent
of the renewal of the study of Pagan writers. But that
renewal found the faith of Christendom already weakened and
divided; and therefore it was itself productive of an effect
tenfold greater than could have been apprehended from it at
another time. It acted first, as before noticed, in leading the
attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was discovered
that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt,
and the primal object of every scholar became now to purify
his style. To this study of words, that of forms being added,
both as of matters of the first importance, half the intellect of
the age was at once absorbed in the base sciences of grammar,
logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly unworthy of the serious
labor of men, and necessarily rendering those employed upon
them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion. Of the
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debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once
reading a grammarian’s notes on a great poet: logic is unnecessary
for men who can reason; and about as useful to those who
cannot, as a machine for forcing one foot in due succession before
the other would be to a man who could not walk: while
the study of rhetoric is exclusively one for men who desire to
deceive or be deceived; he who has the truth at his heart need
never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue, or, if he fear
it, it is because the base rhetoric of dishonesty keeps the truth
from being heard.

§ C. The study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made
men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly
fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men
took of the Bible. Christ’s teaching was discovered not to be
rhetorical, St. Paul’s preaching not to be logical, and the Greek
of the New Testament not to be grammatical. The stern
truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from
point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill,
the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little
in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism;
and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief
stumbling-blocks to its religion.

§ CI. But it was not the grammarian and logician alone
who was thus retarded or perverted; in them there had been
small loss. The men who could truly appreciate the higher
excellences of the classics were carried away by a current of
enthusiasm which withdrew them from every other study.
Christianity was still professed as a matter of form, but neither
the Bible nor the writings of the Fathers had time left for their
perusal, still less heart left for their acceptance. The human
mind is not capable of more than a certain amount of admiration
or reverence, and that which was given to Horace was
withdrawn from David. Religion is, of all subjects, that
which will least endure a second place in the heart or thoughts,
and a languid and occasional study of it was sure to lead to
error or infidelity. On the other hand, what was heartily admired
and unceasingly contemplated was soon brought nigh to
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being believed; and the systems of Pagan mythology began
gradually to assume the places in the human mind from which
the unwatched Christianity was wasting. Men did not indeed
openly sacrifice to Jupiter, or build silver shrines for Diana,
but the ideas of Paganism nevertheless became thoroughly
vital and present with them at all times; and it did not matter
in the least, as far as respected the power of true religion,
whether the Pagan image was believed in or not, so long as it
entirely occupied the thoughts. The scholar of the sixteenth
century, if he saw the lightning shining from the east unto
the west, thought forthwith of Jupiter, not of the coming of
the Son of Man; if he saw the moon walking in brightness,
he thought of Diana, not of the throne which was to be established
for ever as a faithful witness in heaven; and though his
heart was but secretly enticed, yet thus he denied the God that
is above.25

And, indeed, this double creed, of Christianity confessed
and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch
as it refused effective and practical belief altogether. It
would have been better to have worshipped Diana and Jupiter
at once, than to have gone on through the whole of life naming
one God, imagining another, and dreading none. Better, a
thousandfold, to have been “a Pagan suckled in some creed
outworn,” than to have stood by the great sea of Eternity and
seen no God walking on its waves, no heavenly world on its
horizon.

§ CII. This fatal result of an enthusiasm for classical literature
was hastened and heightened by the misdirection of the
powers of art. The imagination of the age was actively set to
realize these objects of Pagan belief; and all the most exalted
faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed
in the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of
Fiction. The invention which had formerly been both sanctified
and strengthened by laboring under the command of
settled intention, and on the ground of assured belief, had now
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the reins laid upon its neck by passion, and all ground of fact
cut from beneath its feet; and the imagination which formerly
had helped men to apprehend the truth, now tempted them to
believe a falsehood. The faculties themselves wasted away in
their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field;
and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven
that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into
powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.

§ CIII. But this was not all. The habit of using the greatest
gifts of imagination upon fictitious subjects, of course destroyed
the honor and value of the same imagination used in the cause
of truth. Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and
Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion
Virgins and Angels were disembodied and disbelieved. The
images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average
value in the spectator’s mind; and incidents from the Iliad and
from the Exodus to come within the same degrees of credibility.
And, farther, while the powers of the imagination
were becoming daily more and more languid, because unsupported
by faith, the manual skill and science of the artist were
continually on the increase. When these had reached a certain
point, they began to be the principal things considered in the
picture, and its story or scene to be thought of only as a theme
for their manifestation. Observe the difference. In old times,
men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith;
in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might
show their powers of painting. The distinction is enormous,
the difference incalculable as irreconcilable. And thus, the
more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and
the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until
they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects
were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of
color and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed
into that state of utter apathy,—inconceivable, unless it
had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have
been infected by it,—which permits us to place the Madonna
and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass,
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with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling,
from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.

Now all this evil, observe, would have been merely the
necessary and natural operation of an enthusiasm for the
classics, and of a delight in the mere science of the artist, on
the most virtuous mind. But this operation took place upon
minds enervated by luxury, and which were tempted, at the
very same period, to forgetfulness or denial of all religious
principle by their own basest instincts. The faith which had
been undermined by the genius of Pagans, was overthrown
by the crimes of Christians; and the ruin which was begun
by scholarship, was completed by sensuality. The characters
of the heathen divinities were as suitable to the manners of
the time as their forms were agreeable to its taste; and Paganism
again became, in effect, the religion of Europe. That
is to say, the civilized world is at this moment, collectively,
just as Pagan as it was in the second century; a small body
of believers being now, as they were then, representative of
the Church of Christ in the midst of the faithless: but there
is just this difference, and this very fatal one, between the
second and nineteenth centuries, that the Pagans are nominally
and fashionably Christians, and that there is every conceivable
variety and shade of belief between the two; so that
not only is it most difficult theoretically to mark the point
where hesitating trust and failing practice change into definite
infidelity, but it has become a point of politeness not to inquire
too deeply into our neighbor’s religious opinions; and, so
that no one be offended by violent breach of external forms,
to waive any close examination into the tenets of faith. The
fact is, we distrust each other and ourselves so much, that
we dare not press this matter; we know that if, on any occasion
of general intercourse, we turn to our next neighbor,
and put to him some searching or testing question, we shall,
in nine cases out of ten, discover him to be only a Christian in
his own way, and as far as he thinks proper, and that he
doubts of many things which we ourselves do not believe
strongly enough to hear doubted without danger. What is
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in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity; and
consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men’s
evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes
to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable
practice. And under this shelter of charity, humility, and
faintheartedness, the world, unquestioned by others or by
itself, mingles with and overwhelms the small body of Christians,
legislates for them, moralizes for them, reasons for
them; and, though itself of course greatly and beneficently
influenced by the association, and held much in check by its
pretence to Christianity, yet undermines, in nearly the same
degree, the sincerity and practical power of Christianity itself,
until at last, in the very institutions of which the administration
may be considered as the principal test of the genuineness
of national religion, those devoted to education, the Pagan
system is completely triumphant; and the entire body of the
so-called Christian world has established a system of instruction
for its youth, wherein neither the history of Christ’s
Church, nor the language of God’s law, is considered a study
of the smallest importance; wherein, of all subjects of human
inquiry, his own religion is the one in which a youth’s ignorance
is most easily forgiven;26 and in which it is held a light
matter that he should be daily guilty of lying, or debauchery,
or of blasphemy, so only that he write Latin verses accurately,
and with speed.

I believe that in few years more we shall wake from all
these errors in astonishment, as from evil dreams; having
been preserved, in the midst of their madness, by those hidden
roots of active and earnest Christianity which God’s grace
has bound in the English nation with iron and brass. But in
the Venetian, those roots themselves had withered; and, from
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the palace of their ancient religion, their pride cast them forth
hopelessly to the pasture of the brute. From pride to infidelity,
from infidelity to the unscrupulous and insatiable pursuit
of pleasure, and from this to irremediable degradation, the
transitions were swift, like the falling of a star. The great
palaces of the haughtiest nobles of Venice were stayed, before
they had risen far above their foundations, by the blast of a
penal poverty; and the wild grass, on the unfinished fragments
of their mighty shafts, waves at the tide-mark where
the power of the godless people first heard the “Hitherto
shalt thou come.” And the regeneration in which they had
so vainly trusted,—the new birth and clear dawning, as they
thought it, of all art, all knowledge, and all hope,—became
to them as that dawn which Ezekiel saw on the hills of
Israel: “Behold the day; behold, it is come. The rod hath
blossomed, pride hath budded, violence is risen up into a rod
of wickedness. None of them shall remain, nor of their multitude;
let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for
wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”

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CHAPTER III.

GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE.

§ I. In the close of the last chapter it was noted that the
phases of transition in the moral temper of the falling Venetians,
during their fall, were from pride to infidelity, and from
infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure. During
the last years of the existence of the state, the minds both of
the nobility and the people seem to have been set simply upon
the attainment of the means of self-indulgence. There was
not strength enough in them to be proud, nor forethought
enough to be ambitious. One by one the possessions of the
state were abandoned to its enemies; one by one the channels
of its trade were forsaken by its own languor, or occupied and
closed against it by its more energetic rivals; and the time,
the resources, and the thoughts of the nation were exclusively
occupied in the invention of such fantastic and costly pleasures
as might best amuse their apathy, lull their remorse, or disguise
their ruin.

§ II. The architecture raised at Venice during this period is
amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men,
being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery
and insolent jest, which, exhausting itself in deformed and
monstrous sculpture, can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined
than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenness.
On such a period, and on such work, it is painful to
dwell, and I had not originally intended to do so; but I found
that the entire spirit of the Renaissance could not be comprehended
unless it was followed to its consummation; and that
there were many most interesting questions arising out of the
study of this particular spirit of jesting, with reference to
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which I have called it the Grotesque Renaissance. For it is
not this period alone which is distinguished by such a spirit.
There is jest—perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently obscene—in
the most noble work of the Gothic periods; and it
becomes, therefore, of the greatest possible importance to
examine into the nature and essence of the Grotesque itself,
and to ascertain in what respect it is that the jesting of art in
its highest flight, differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation.

§ III. The place where we may best commence our inquiry
is one renowned in the history of Venice, the space of ground
before the Church of Santa Maria Formosa; a spot which,
after the Rialto and St. Mark’s Place, ought to possess a peculiar
interest in the mind of the traveller, in consequence of its
connexion with the most touching and true legend of the
Brides of Venice. That legend is related at length in every
Venetian history, and, finally, has been told by the poet
Rogers, in a way which renders it impossible for any one to
tell it after him. I have only, therefore, to remind the reader
that the capture of the brides took place in the cathedral
church, St. Pietro di Castello; and that this of Santa Maria
Formosa is connected with the tale, only because it was yearly
visited with prayers by the Venetian maidens, on the anniversary
of their ancestors’ deliverance. For that deliverance,
their thanks were to be rendered to the Virgin; and there was
no church then dedicated to the Virgin, in Venice, except
this.27

Neither of the cathedral church, nor of this dedicated to
St. Mary the Beautiful, is one stone left upon another. But,
from that which has been raised on the site of the latter, we
may receive a most important lesson, introductory to our immediate
subject, if first we glance back to the traditional history
of the church which has been destroyed.

§ IV. No more honorable epithet than “traditional” can
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be attached to what is recorded concerning it, yet I should
grieve to lose the legend of its first erection. The Bishop of
Uderzo, driven by the Lombards from his Bishopric, as he
was praying, beheld in a vision the Virgin Mother, who
ordered him to found a church in her honor, in the place
where he should see a white cloud rest. And when he went
out, the white cloud went before him; and on the place
where it rested he built a church, and it was called the Church
of St. Mary the Beautiful, from the loveliness of the form in
which she had appeared in the vision.28

The first church stood only for about two centuries. It was
rebuilt in 864, and enriched with various relics some fifty
years later; relics belonging principally to St. Nicodemus,
and much lamented when they and the church were together
destroyed by fire in 1105.

It was then rebuilt in “magnifica forma,” much resembling,
according to Corner, the architecture of the chancel of St.
Mark;29 but the information which I find in various writers,
as to the period at which it was reduced to its present condition,
is both sparing and contradictory.

§ V. Thus, by Corner, we are told that this church, resembling
St. Mark’s, “remained untouched for more than four
centuries,” until, in 1689, it was thrown down by an earthquake,
and restored by the piety of a rich merchant, Turrin
Toroni, “in ornatissima forma;” and that, for the greater
beauty of the renewed church, it had added to it two façades
of marble. With this information that of the Padre dell’
Oratoria agrees, only he gives the date of the earlier rebuilding
of the church in 1175, and ascribes it to an architect of the
name of Barbetta. But Quadri, in his usually accurate little
115
guide, tells us that this Barbetta rebuilt the church in
the fourteenth century; and that of the two façades, so much
admired by Corner, one is of the sixteenth century, and its
architect unknown; and the rest of the church is of the seventeenth,
“in the style of Sansovino.”

§ VI. There is no occasion to examine, or endeavor to reconcile,
these conflicting accounts. All that is necessary for the
reader to know is, that every vestige of the church in which
the ceremony took place was destroyed at least as early as
1689; and that the ceremony itself, having been abolished in
the close of the fourteenth century, is only to be conceived as
taking place in that more ancient church, resembling St.
Mark’s, which, even according to Quadri, existed until that
period. I would, therefore, endeavor to fix the reader’s
mind, for a moment, on the contrast between the former and
latter aspect of this plot of ground; the former, when it had
its Byzantine church, and its yearly procession of the Doge
and the Brides; and the latter, when it has its Renaissance
church “in the style of Sansovino,” and its yearly honoring is
done away.

§ VII. And, first, let us consider for a little the significance
and nobleness of that early custom of the Venetians, which
brought about the attack and the rescue of the year 943: that
there should be but one marriage day for the nobles of the
whole nation,30 so that all might rejoice together; and that
the sympathy might be full, not only of the families who that
year beheld the alliance of their children, and prayed for
them in one crowd, weeping before the altar, but of all the
families of the state, who saw, in the day which brought happiness
to others, the anniversary of their own. Imagine the
strong bond of brotherhood thus sanctified among them, and
consider also the effect on the minds of the youth of the state;
the greater deliberation and openness necessarily given to the
contemplation of marriage, to which all the people were
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solemnly to bear testimony; the more lofty and unselfish tone
which it would give to all their thoughts. It was the exact
contrary of stolen marriage. It was marriage to which God
and man were taken for witnesses, and every eye was invoked
for its glance, and every tongue for its prayers.31

§ VIII. Later historians have delighted themselves in dwelling
on the pageantry of the marriage day itself, but I do not
find that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions.
I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the
jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to
have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed.
The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of
it is one of Sansovino’s, in which he says that the magnificent
dress of the brides in his day was founded “on ancient custom.”32
However this may have been, the circumstances of
the rite were otherwise very simple. Each maiden brought
her dowry with her in a small “cassetta,” or chest; they
went first to the cathedral, and waited for the youths, who
having come, they heard mass together, and the bishop
preached to them and blessed them: and so each bridegroom
took his bride and her dowry and bore her home.

§ IX. It seems that the alarm given by the attack of the
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pirates put an end to the custom of fixing one day for all
marriages: but the main objects of the institution were still
attained by the perfect publicity given to the marriages of all
the noble families; the bridegroom standing in the Court of
the Ducal Palace to receive congratulations on his betrothal,
and the whole body of the nobility attending the nuptials, and
rejoicing, “as at some personal good fortune; since, by the
constitution of the state, they are for ever incorporated together,
as if of one and the same family.”33 But the festival
of the 2nd of February, after the year 943, seems to have been
observed only in memory of the deliverance of the brides, and
no longer set apart for public nuptials.

§ X. There is much difficulty in reconciling the various
accounts, or distinguishing the inaccurate ones, of the manner
of keeping this memorable festival. I shall first give Sansovino’s,
which is the popular one, and then note the points of
importance in the counter-statements. Sansovino says that
the success of the pursuit of the pirates was owing to the ready
help and hard fighting of the men of the district of Sta. Maria
Formosa, for the most part trunkmakers; and that they,
having been presented after the victory to the Doge and the
Senate, were told to ask some favor for their reward. “The
good men then said that they desired the Prince, with his
wife and the Signory, to visit every year the church of their
district, on the day of its feast. And the Prince asking them,
‘Suppose it should rain?’ they answered, ‘We will give you
hats to cover you; and if you are thirsty, we will give you to
drink.’ Whence is it that the Vicar, in the name of the people,
presents to the Doge, on his visit, two flasks of malvoisie34 and
two oranges; and presents to him two gilded hats, bearing the
arms of the Pope, of the Prince, and of the Vicar. And thus
was instituted the Feast of the Maries, which was called noble
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and famous because the people from all round came together
to behold it. And it was celebrated in this manner:….” The
account which follows is somewhat prolix; but its substance
is, briefly, that twelve maidens were elected, two for each division
of the city; and that it was decided by lot which contrade,
or quarters of the town, should provide them with dresses.
This was done at enormous expense, one contrada contending
with another, and even the jewels of the treasury of St. Mark
being lent for the occasion to the “Maries,” as the twelve
damsels were called. They, being thus dressed with gold, and
silver, and jewels, went in their galley to St. Mark’s for the
Doge, who joined them with the Signory, and went first to
San Pietro di Castello to hear mass on St. Mark’s day, the
31st of January, and to Santa Maria Formosa on the 2nd of
February, the intermediate day being spent in passing in
procession through the streets of the city; “and sometimes
there arose quarrels about the places they should pass through,
for every one wanted them to pass by his house.”

§ XI. Nearly the same account is given by Corner, who,
however, does not say anything about the hats or the malvoisie.
These, however, we find again in the Matricola de’ Casseleri,
which, of course, sets the services of the trunkmakers and the
privileges obtained by them in the most brilliant light. The
quaintness of the old Venetian is hardly to be rendered into
English. “And you must know that the said trunkmakers
were the men who were the cause of such victory, and of
taking the galley, and of cutting all the Triestines to pieces,
because, at that time, they were valiant men and well in order.
The which victory was on the 2nd February, on the day of the
Madonna of candles. And at the request and entreaties of the
said trunkmakers, it was decreed that the Doge, every year,
as long as Venice shall endure, should go on the eve of the
said feast to vespers in the said church, with the Signory.
And be it noted, that the vicar is obliged to give to the Doge
two flasks of malvoisie, with two oranges besides. And so
it is observed, and will be observed always.” The reader
must observe the continual confusion between St. Mark’s day
119
the 31st of January, and Candlemas the 2nd of February.
The fact appears to be, that the marriage day in the old
republic was St. Mark’s day, and the recovery of the brides
was the same day at evening; so that, as we are told by
Sansovino, the commemorative festival began on that day, but
it was continued to the day of the Purification, that especial
thanks might be rendered to the Virgin; and, the visit to
Sta. Maria Formosa being the most important ceremony of the
whole festival, the old chroniclers, and even Sansovino, got
confused, and asserted the victory itself to have taken place
on the day appointed for that pilgrimage.

§ XII. I doubt not that the reader who is acquainted with
the beautiful lines of Rogers is as much grieved as I am at the
interference of the “casket-makers” with the achievement
which the poet ascribes to the bridegrooms alone; an interference
quite as inopportune as that of old Le Balafré with
the victory of his nephew, in the unsatisfactory conclusion of
“Quentin Durward.” I am afraid I cannot get the casket-makers
quite out of the way; but it may gratify some of my
readers to know that a chronicle of the year 1378, quoted by
Galliciolli, denies the agency of the people of Sta. Maria
Formosa altogether, in these terms: “Some say that the people
of Sta. M. Formosa were those who recovered the spoil
(“predra;” I may notice, in passing, that most of the old
chroniclers appear to consider the recovery of the caskets
rather more a subject of congratulation than that of the
brides), and that, for their reward, they asked the Doge and
Signory to visit Sta. M. Formosa; but this is false. The
going to Sta. M. Formosa was because the thing had succeeded
on that day, and because this was then the only church in
Venice in honor of the Virgin.” But here is again the mistake
about the day itself; and besides if we get rid altogether
of the trunkmakers, how are we to account for the ceremony
of the oranges and hats, of which the accounts seem authentic?
If, however, the reader likes to substitute “carpenters” or
“house-builders” for casket-makers, he may do so with great
reason (vide Galliciolli, lib. ii. § 1758); but I fear that one or
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the other body of tradesmen must be allowed to have had no
small share in the honor of the victory.

§ XIII. But whatever doubt attaches to the particular circumstances
of its origin, there is none respecting the splendor
of the festival itself, as it was celebrated for four centuries
afterwards. We find that each contrada spent from 800 to
1000 zecchins in the dress of the “Maries” entrusted to it;
but I cannot find among how many contrade the twelve Maries
were divided; it is also to be supposed that most of the
accounts given refer to the later periods of the celebration of
the festival. In the beginning of the eleventh century, the
good Doge Pietro Orseolo II. left in his will the third of his
entire fortune “per la Festa della Marie;” and, in the fourteenth
century, so many people came from the rest of Italy to
see it, that special police regulations were made for it, and the
Council of Ten were twice summoned before it took place.35
The expense lavished upon it seems to have increased till the
year 1379, when all the resources of the republic were required
for the terrible war of Chiozza, and all festivity was for
that time put an end to. The issue of the war left the Venetians
with neither the power nor the disposition to restore the
festival on its ancient scale, and they seem to have been
ashamed to exhibit it in reduced splendor. It was entirely
abolished.

§ XIV. As if to do away even with its memory, every feature
of the surrounding scene which was associated with that
festival has been in succeeding ages destroyed. With one solitary
exception,36 there is not a house left in the whole Piazza
of Santa Maria Formosa from whose windows the festa of the
Maries has ever been seen: of the church in which they worshipped,
not a stone is left, even the form of the ground and
direction of the neighboring canals are changed; and there is
now but one landmark to guide the steps of the traveller to
the place where the white cloud rested, and the shrine was
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built to St. Mary the Beautiful. Yet the spot is still worth
his pilgrimage, for he may receive a lesson upon it, though a
painful one. Let him first fill his mind with the fair images
of the ancient festival, and then seek that landmark the tower
of the modern church, built upon the place where the daughters
of Venice knelt yearly with her noblest lords; and let him
look at the head that is carved on the base of the tower,37 still
dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful.

§ XV. A head,—huge, inhuman, and monstrous,—leering in
bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described,
or to be beheld for more than an instant: yet let it be endured
for that instant; for in that head is embodied the type of the
evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period
of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel the
full horror of it on this spot, and know what pestilence it was
that came and breathed upon her beauty, until it melted away
like the white cloud from the ancient fields of Santa Maria
Formosa.

§ XVI. This head is one of many hundreds which disgrace
the latest buildings of the city, all more or less agreeing in
their expression of sneering mockery, in most cases enhanced
by thrusting out the tongue. Most of them occur upon the
bridges, which were among the very last works undertaken by
the republic, several, for instance, upon the Bridge of Sighs;
and they are evidences of a delight in the contemplation of
bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe,
the most hopeless state into which the human mind can
fall. This spirit of idiotic mockery is, as I have said, the most
striking characteristic of the last period of the Renaissance,
which, in consequence of the character thus imparted to its
sculpture, I have called grotesque; but it must be our immediate
task, and it will be a most interesting one, to distinguish
between this base grotesqueness, and that magnificent condition
of fantastic imagination, which was above noticed as one of the
chief elements of the Northern Gothic mind. Nor is this a
122
question of interesting speculation merely: for the distinction
between the true and false grotesque is one which the present
tendencies of the English mind have rendered it practically
important to ascertain; and that in a degree which, until he
has made some progress in the consideration of the subject, the
reader will hardly anticipate.

§ XVII. But, first, I have to note one peculiarity in the late
architecture of Venice, which will materially assist us in understanding
the true nature of the spirit which is to be the subject
of our inquiry; and this peculiarity, singularly enough, is
first exemplified in the very façade of Santa Maria Formosa
which is flanked by the grotesque head to which our attention
has just been directed. This façade, whose architect is unknown,
consists of a pediment, sustained on four Corinthian
pilasters, and is, I believe, the earliest in Venice which appears
entirely destitute of every religious symbol, sculpture, or inscription;
unless the Cardinal’s hat upon the shield in the
centre of the impediment be considered a religious symbol.
The entire façade is nothing else than a monument to the Admiral
Vincenzo Cappello. Two tablets, one between each pair
of flanking pillars, record his acts and honors; and, on the corresponding
spaces upon the base of the church, are two circular
trophies, composed of halberts, arrows, flags, tridents, helmets,
and lances: sculptures which are just as valueless in a military
as in an ecclesiastical point of view; for, being all copied from
the forms of Roman arms and armor, they cannot even be referred
to for information respecting the costume of the period.
Over the door, as the chief ornament of the façade, exactly in
the spot which in the “barbarous” St. Mark’s is occupied by
the figure of Christ, is the statue of Vincenzo Cappello, in
Roman armor. He died in 1542; and we have, therefore, the
latter part of the sixteenth century fixed as the period when, in
Venice, churches were first built to the glory of man, instead
of the glory of God.

§ XVIII. Throughout the whole of Scripture history, nothing
is more remarkable than the close connection of punishment
with the sin of vain-glory. Every other sin is occasionally permitted
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to remain, for lengthened periods, without definite
chastisement; but the forgetfulness of God, and the claim of
honor by man, as belonging to himself, are visited at once,
whether in Hezekiah, Nebuchadnezzar, or Herod, with the
most tremendous punishment. We have already seen, that the
first reason for the fall of Venice was the manifestation of such
a spirit; and it is most singular to observe the definiteness with
which it is here marked,—as if so appointed, that it might be
impossible for future ages to miss the lesson. For, in the long
inscriptions38 which record the acts of Vincenzo Cappello, it
might, at least, have been anticipated that some expressions
would occur indicative of remaining pretence to religious feeling,
or formal acknowledgement of Divine power. But there
are none whatever. The name of God does not once occur;
that of St. Mark is found only in the statement that Cappello
was a procurator of the church: there is no word touching
either on the faith or hope of the deceased; and the only sentence
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which alludes to supernatural powers at all, alludes to
them under the heathen name of fates, in its explanation of
what the Admiral Cappello would have accomplished, “nisi
fata Christianis adversa vetuissent.”

§ XIX. Having taken sufficient note of all the baseness of
mind which these facts indicate in the people, we shall not be
surprised to find immediate signs of dotage in the conception
of their architecture. The churches raised throughout this
period are so grossly debased, that even the Italian critics of
the present day, who are partially awakened to the true state
of art in Italy, though blind, as yet, to its true cause, exhaust
their terms of reproach upon these last efforts of the Renaissance
builders. The two churches of San Moisè and Santa
Maria Zobenigo, which are among the most remarkable in Venice
for their manifestation of insolent atheism, are characterized by
Lazari, the one as “culmine d’ogni follia architettonica,” the
other as “orrido ammasso di pietra d’Istria,” with added expressions
of contempt, as just as it is unmitigated.

§ XX. Now both these churches, which I should like the
reader to visit in succession, if possible, after that of Sta.
Maria Formosa, agree with that church, and with each other,
in being totally destitute of religious symbols, and entirely
dedicated to the honor of two Venetian families. In San
Moisè, a bust of Vincenzo Fini is set on a tall narrow pyramid,
above the central door, with this marvellous inscription:

It is very difficult to translate this; for fastigium, besides
its general sense, has a particular one in architecture, and refers
to the part of the building occupied by the bust; but the main
meaning of it is that “Vincenzo Fini fills all height with his
virtue.” The inscription goes on into farther praise, but this example
is enough. Over the two lateral doors are two other
laudatory inscriptions of younger members of the Fini family,
the dates of death of the three heroes being 1660, 1685, and
1726, marking thus the period of consummate degradation.

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III.

NOBLE AND IGNOBLE GROTESQUE.

§ XXI. In like manner, the Church of Santa Maria Zobenigo
is entirely dedicated to the Barbaro family; the only religious
symbols with which it is invested being statues of angels blowing
brazen trumpets, intended to express the spreading of the
fame of the Barbaro family in heaven. At the top of the
church is Venice crowned, between Justice and Temperance,
Justice holding a pair of grocer’s scales, of iron, swinging in
the wind. There is a two-necked stone eagle (the Barbaro
crest), with a copper crown, in the centre of the pediment.
A huge statue of a Barbaro in armor, with a fantastic head-dress,
over the central door; and four Barbaros in niches, two
on each side of it, strutting statues, in the common stage
postures of the period,—Jo. Maria Barbaro, sapiens ordinum;
Marinus Barbaro, Senator (reading a speech in a Ciceronian
attitude); Franc. Barbaro, legatus in classe (in armor, with
high-heeled boots, and looking resolutely fierce); and Carolus
Barbaro, sapiens ordinum: the decorations of the façade being
completed by two trophies, consisting of drums, trumpets, flags
and cannon; and six plans, sculptured in relief, of the towns
of Zara, Candia, Padua, Rome, Corfu, and Spalatro.

§ XXII. When the traveller has sufficiently considered the
meaning of this façade, he ought to visit the Church of St.
Eustachio, remarkable for the dramatic effect of the group of
sculpture on its façade, and then the Church of the Ospedaletto
(see Index, under head Ospedaletto); noticing, on his
way, the heads on the foundations of the Palazzo Corner della
Regina, and the Palazzo Pesaro, and any other heads carved
on the modern bridges, closing with those on the Bridge of
Sighs.

He will then have obtained a perfect idea of the style and
feeling of the Grotesque Renaissance. I cannot pollute this
volume by any illustration of its worst forms, but the head
turned to the front, on the right-hand in the opposite Plate,
will give the general reader an idea of its most graceful and
refined developments. The figure set beside it, on the left, is
a piece of noble grotesque, from fourteenth century Gothic;
and it must be our present task to ascertain the nature of the
126
difference which exists between the two, by an accurate inquiry
into the true essence of the grotesque spirit itself.

§ XXIII. First, then, it seems to me that the grotesque is, in
almost all cases, composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the
other fearful; that, as one or other of these elements prevails,
the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive grotesque and
terrible grotesque; but that we cannot legitimately consider it
under these two aspects, because there are hardly any examples
which do not in some degree combine both elements;
there are few grotesques so utterly playful as to be overcast
with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely
to exclude all ideas of jest. But although we cannot
separate the grotesque itself into two branches, we may easily
examine separately the two conditions of mind which it seems
to combine; and consider successively what are the kinds of
jest, and what the kinds of fearfulness, which may be legitimately
expressed in the various walks of art, and how their
expressions actually occur in the Gothic and Renaissance
schools.

First, then, what are the conditions of playfulness which
we may fitly express in noble art, or which (for this is the
same thing) are consistent with nobleness in humanity? In
other words, what is the proper function of play, with respect
not to youth merely, but to all mankind?

§ XXIV. It is a much more serious question than may be at
first supposed; for a healthy manner of play is necessary in
order to a healthy manner of work: and because the choice
of our recreation is, in most cases, left to ourselves, while the
nature of our work is generally fixed by necessity or authority,
it may be well doubted whether more distressful consequences
may not have resulted from mistaken choice in play than from
mistaken direction in labor.

§ XXV. Observe, however, that we are only concerned,
here, with that kind of play which causes laughter or implies
recreation, not with that which consists in the excitement of
the energies whether of body or mind. Muscular exertion is,
indeed, in youth, one of the conditions of recreation; “but
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neither the violent bodily labor which children of all ages
agree to call play,” nor the grave excitement of the mental
faculties in games of skill or chance, are in anywise connected
with the state of feeling we have here to investigate, namely,
that sportiveness which man possesses in common with many
inferior creatures, but to which his higher faculties give nobler
expression in the various manifestations of wit, humor, and
fancy.

With respect to the manner in which this instinct of playfulness
is indulged or repressed, mankind are broadly distinguishable
into four classes: the men who play wisely; who
play necessarily; who play inordinately; and who play not at
all.

§ XXVI. First: Those who play wisely. It is evident that
the idea of any kind of play can only be associated with the
idea of an imperfect, childish, and fatigable nature. As far
as men can raise that nature, so that it shall no longer be interested
by trifles or exhausted by toils, they raise it above
play; he whose heart is at once fixed upon heaven, and open
to the earth, so as to apprehend the importance of heavenly
doctrines, and the compass of human sorrow, will have little
disposition for jest; and exactly in proportion to the breadth
and depth of his character and intellect, will be, in general,
the incapability of surprise, or exuberant and sudden emotion,
which must render play impossible. It is, however, evidently
not intended that many men should even reach, far less pass
their lives in, that solemn state of thoughtfulness, which
brings them into the nearest brotherhood with their Divine
Master; and the highest and healthiest state which is competent
to ordinary humanity appears to be that which, accepting
the necessity of recreation, and yielding to the impulses of
natural delight springing out of health and innocence, does,
indeed, condescend often to playfulness, but never without
such deep love of God, of truth, and of humanity, as shall
make even its slightest words reverent, its idlest fancies profitable,
and its keenest satire indulgent. Wordsworth and
Plato furnish us with, perhaps, the finest and highest examples
128
of this playfulness: in the one case, unmixed with satire,
the perfectly simple effusion of that spirit—in

Plato, and, by the by, in a very wise book of our own
times, not unworthy of being named in such companionship,
“Friends in Council,” mingled with an exquisitely tender and
loving satire.

§ XXVII. Secondly: The men who play necessarily. That
highest species of playfulness, which we have just been considering,
is evidently the condition of a mind, not only highly
cultivated, but so habitually trained to intellectual labor that
it can bring a considerable force of accurate thought into its
moments even of recreation. This is not possible, unless so
much repose of mind and heart are enjoyed, even at the
periods of greatest exertion, that the rest required by the system
is diffused over the whole life. To the majority of mankind,
such a state is evidently unattainable. They must, perforce,
pass a large part of their lives in employments both irksome
and toilsome, demanding an expenditure of energy which exhausts
the system, and yet consuming that energy upon subjects
incapable of interesting the nobler faculties. When such
employments are intermitted, those noble instincts, fancy,
imagination, and curiosity, are all hungry for the food which
the labor of the day has denied to them, while yet the weariness
of the body, in a great degree, forbids their application
to any serious subject. They therefore exert themselves without
any determined purpose, and under no vigorous restraint,
but gather, as best they may, such various nourishment, and
put themselves to such fantastic exercise, as may soonest indemnify
them for their past imprisonment, and prepare them
to endure their recurrence. This sketching of the mental
limbs as their fetters fall away,—this leaping and dancing of
the heart and intellect, when they are restored to the fresh air
of heaven, yet half paralyzed by their captivity, and unable to
turn themselves to any earnest purpose,—I call necessary play.
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It is impossible to exaggerate its importance, whether in polity,
or in art.

§ XXVIII. Thirdly: The men who play inordinately. The
most perfect state of society which, consistently with due understanding
of man’s nature, it may be permitted us to conceive,
would be one in which the whole human race were
divided, more or less distinctly, into workers and thinkers; that
is to say, into the two classes, who only play wisely, or play
necessarily. But the number and the toil of the working class
are enormously increased, probably more than doubled, by the
vices of the men who neither play wisely nor necessarily, but
are enabled by circumstances, and permitted by their want of
principle, to make amusement the object of their existence.
There is not any moment of the lives of such men which is
not injurious to others; both because they leave the work undone
which was appointed for them, and because they necessarily
think wrongly, whenever it becomes compulsory upon
them to think at all. The greater portion of the misery of
this world arises from the false opinions of men whose idleness
has physically incapacitated them from forming true ones.
Every duty which we omit obscures some truth which we
should have known; and the guilt of a life spent in the pursuit
of pleasure is twofold, partly consisting in the perversion
of action, and partly in the dissemination of falsehood.

§ XXIX. There is, however, a less criminal, though hardly
less dangerous condition of mind; which, though not failing
in its more urgent duties, fails in the finer conscientiousness
which regulates the degree, and directs the choice, of amusement,
at those times when amusement is allowable. The most
frequent error in this respect is the want of reverence in approaching
subjects of importance or sacredness, and of caution
in the expression of thoughts which may encourage like irreverence
in others: and these faults are apt to gain upon the
mind until it becomes habitually more sensible to what is ludicrous
and accidental, than to what is grave and essential, in
any subject that is brought before it; or even, at last, desires
to perceive or to know nothing but what may end in jest.
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Very generally minds of this character are active and able;
and many of them are so far conscientious, that they believe
their jesting forwards their work. But it is difficult to calculate
the harm they do, by destroying the reverence which is
our best guide into all truth; for weakness and evil are easily
visible, but greatness and goodness are often latent; and we do
infinite mischief by exposing weakness to eyes which cannot
comprehend greatness. This error, however, is more connected
with abuses of the satirical than of the playful instinct; and I
shall have more to say of it presently.

§ XXX. Lastly: The men who do not play at all: those
who are so dull or so morose as to be incapable of inventing or
enjoying jest, and in whom care, guilt, or pride represses all
healthy exhilaration of the fancy; or else men utterly oppressed
with labor, and driven too hard by the necessities of
the world to be capable of any species of happy relaxation.

§ XXXI. We have now to consider the way in which the presence
or absence of joyfulness, in these several classes, is expressed
in art.

1. Wise play. The first and noblest class hardly ever
speak through art, except seriously; they feel its nobleness
too profoundly, and value the time necessary for its production
too highly, to employ it in the rendering of trivial
thoughts. The playful fancy of a moment may innocently be
expressed by the passing word; but he can hardly have
learned the preciousness of life, who passes days in the elaboration
of a jest. And, as to what regards the delineation of
human character, the nature of all noble art is to epitomize and
embrace so much at once, that its subject can never be altogether
ludicrous; it must possess all the solemnities of the
whole, not the brightness of the partial, truth. For all truth
that makes us smile is partial. The novelist amuses us by his
relation of a particular incident; but the painter cannot set
any one of his characters before us without giving some glimpse
of its whole career. That of which the historian informs us
in successive pages, it is the task of the painter to inform us of
at once, writing upon the countenance not merely the expression
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of the moment, but the history of the life: and the history of
a life can never be a jest.

Whatever part, therefore, of the sportive energy of these
men of the highest class would be expressed in verbal wit or
humor finds small utterance through their art, and will assuredly
be confined, if it occur there at all, to scattered and
trivial incidents. But so far as their minds can recreate
themselves by the imagination of strange, yet not laughable,
forms, which, either in costume, in landscape, or in any other
accessaries, may be combined with those necessary for their
more earnest purposes, we find them delighting in such inventions;
and a species of grotesqueness thence arising in all their
work, which is indeed one of its most valuable characteristics,
but which is so intimately connected with the sublime or terrible
form of the grotesque, that it will be better to notice it
under that head.

§ XXXII. 2. Necessary play. I have dwelt much in a
former portion of this work, on the justice and desirableness
of employing the minds of inferior workmen, and of the lower
orders in general, in the production of objects of art of one
kind or another. So far as men of this class are compelled to
hard manual labor for their daily bread, so far forth their
artistical efforts must be rough and ignorant, and their artistical
perceptions comparatively dull. Now it is not possible,
with blunt perceptions and rude hands, to produce works
which shall be pleasing by their beauty; but it is perfectly
possible to produce such as shall be interesting by their character
or amusing by their satire. For one hard-working man
who possesses the finer instincts which decide on perfection of
lines and harmonies of color, twenty possess dry humor or
quaint fancy; not because these faculties were originally given
to the human race, or to any section of it, in greater degree
than the sense of beauty, but because these are exercised in
our daily intercourse with each other, and developed by the
interest which we take in the affairs of life, while the others
are not. And because, therefore, a certain degree of success will
probably attend the effort to express this humor or fancy, while
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comparative failure will assuredly result from an ignorant
struggle to reach the forms of solemn beauty, the working-man,
who turns his attention partially to art, will probably,
and wisely, choose to do that which he can do best, and indulge
the pride of an effective satire rather than subject himself to
assured mortification in the pursuit of beauty; and this the
more, because we have seen that his application to art is to be
playful and recreative, and it is not in recreation that the conditions
of perfection can be fulfilled.

§ XXXIII. Now all the forms of art which result from the
comparatively recreative exertion of minds more or less blunted
or encumbered by other cares and toils, the art which we may
call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is
the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word,
Grotesque. And it is noble or inferior, first, according to the
tone of the minds which have produced it, and in proportion
to their knowledge, wit, love of truth, and kindness; secondly,
according to the degree of strength they have been able to
give forth; but yet, however much we may find in it needing
to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the work of
good and ordinarily intelligent men. And its delightfulness
ought mainly to consist in those very imperfections which
mark it for work done in times of rest. It is not its own
merit so much as the enjoyment of him who produced it,
which is to be the source of the spectator’s pleasure; it is to
the strength of his sympathy, not to the accuracy of his criticism,
that it makes appeal; and no man can indeed be a lover
of what is best in the higher walks of art, who has not feeling
and charity enough to rejoice with the rude sportiveness of
hearts that have escaped out of prison, and to be thankful for
the flowers which men have laid their burdens down to sow by
the wayside.

§ XXXIV. And consider what a vast amount of human work
this right understanding of its meaning will make fruitful and
admirable to us, which otherwise we could only have passed
by with contempt. There is very little architecture in the
world which is, in the full sense of the words, good and noble.
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A few pieces of Italian Gothic and Romanesque, a few scattered
fragments of Gothic cathedrals, and perhaps two or
three of Greek temples, are all that we possess approaching
to an ideal of perfection. All the rest—Egyptian, Norman,
Arabian, and most Gothic, and, which is very noticeable, for
the most part all the strongest and mightiest—depend for their
power on some developement of the grotesque spirit; but
much more the inferior domestic architecture of the middle
ages, and what similar conditions remain to this day in countries
from which the life of art has not yet been banished by
its laws. The fantastic gables, built up in scroll-work and
steps, of the Flemish street; the pinnacled roofs set with
their small humorist double windows, as if with so many ears
and eyes, of Northern France; the blackened timbers, crossed
and carved into every conceivable waywardness of imagination,
of Normandy and old England; the rude hewing of the
pine timbers of the Swiss cottage; the projecting turrets and
bracketed oriels of the German street; these, and a thousand
other forms, not in themselves reaching any high degree of
excellence, are yet admirable, and most precious, as the fruits
of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds. It is easier to
take away the energy, than to add the cultivation; and the
only effect of the better knowledge which civilized nations
now possess, has been, as we have seen in a former chapter,
to forbid their being happy, without enabling them to be
great.

§ XXXV. It is very necessary, however, with respect to this
provincial or rustic architecture, that we should carefully distinguish
its truly grotesque from its picturesque elements. In
the “Seven Lamps” I defined the picturesque to be “parasitical
sublimity,” or sublimity belonging to the external or accidental
characters of a thing, not to the thing itself. For
instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with fragments
of shale instead of slates, it becomes picturesque, because
the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and
their grey and gloomy color, give to it something of the
savageness, and much of the general aspect, of the slope of a
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mountain side. But as a mere cottage roof, it cannot be sublime,
and whatever sublimity it derives from the wildness or
sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering,
is, so far forth, parasitical. The mountain itself would have
been grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the
cottage cannot be grand as such, and the parasitical grandeur
which it may possess by accidental qualities, is the character
for which men have long agreed to use the inaccurate word
“Picturesque.”

§ XXXVI. On the other hand, beauty cannot be parasitical.
There is nothing so small or so contemptible, but it may be
beautiful in its own right. The cottage may be beautiful, and
the smallest moss that grows on its roof, and the minutest
fibre of that moss which the microscope can raise into visible
form, and all of them in their own right, not less than the
mountains and the sky; so that we use no peculiar term to
express their beauty, however diminutive, but only when the
sublime element enters, without sufficient worthiness in the
nature of the thing to which it is attached.

§ XXXVII. Now this picturesque element, which is always
given, if by nothing else, merely by ruggedness, adds usually
very largely to the pleasurableness of grotesque work, especially
to that of its inferior kinds; but it is not for this reason
to be confounded with the grotesqueness itself. The knots
and rents of the timbers, the irregular lying of the shingles on
the roofs, the vigorous light and shadow, the fractures and
weather-stains of the old stones, which were so deeply loved
and so admirably rendered by our lost Prout, are the picturesque
elements of the architecture: the grotesque ones are
those which are not produced by the working of nature and
of time, but exclusively by the fancy of man; and, as also for
the most part by his indolent and uncultivated fancy, they are
always, in some degree, wanting in grandeur, unless the picturesque
element be united with them.

§ XXXVIII. 3. Inordinate play. The reader will have some
difficulty, I fear, in keeping clearly in his mind the various
divisions of our subject; but, when he has once read the
135
chapter through, he will see their places and coherence. We
have next to consider the expression throughout of the minds
of men who indulge themselves in unnecessary play. It is
evident that a large number of these men will be more refined
and more highly educated than those who only play necessarily;
the power of pleasure-seeking implies, in general, fortunate
circumstances of life. It is evident also that their play
will not be so hearty, so simple, or so joyful; and this
deficiency of brightness will affect it in proportion to its
unnecessary and unlawful continuance, until at last it becomes
a restless and dissatisfied indulgence in excitement, or a painful
delving after exhausted springs of pleasure.

The art through which this temper is expressed will, in all
probability, be refined and sensual,—therefore, also, assuredly
feeble; and because, in the failure of the joyful energy of the
mind, there will fail, also, its perceptions and its sympathies,
it will be entirely deficient in expression of character, and
acuteness of thought, but will be peculiarly restless, manifesting
its desire for excitement in idle changes of subject and
purpose. Incapable of true imagination, it will seek to supply
its place by exaggerations, incoherencies, and monstrosities;
and the form of the grotesque to which it gives rise
will be an incongruous chain of hackneyed graces, idly thrown
together,—prettinesses or sublimities, not of its own invention,
associated in forms which will be absurd without being
fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible. And because,
in the continual pursuit of pleasure, men lose both cheerfulness
and charity, there will be small hilarity, but much malice,
in this grotesque; yet a weak malice, incapable of expressing
its own bitterness, not having grasp enough of truth to
become forcible, and exhausting itself in impotent or disgusting
caricature.

§ XXXIX. Of course, there are infinite ranks and kinds of
this grotesque, according to the natural power of the minds
which originate it, and to the degree in which they have lost
themselves. Its highest condition is that which first developed
itself among the enervated Romans, and which was brought
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to the highest perfection of which it was capable, by Raphael,
in the arabesques of the Vatican. It may be generally described
as an elaborate and luscious form of nonsense. Its
lower conditions are found in the common upholstery and
decorations which, over the whole of civilized Europe, have
sprung from this poisonous root; an artistical pottage, composed
of nymphs, cupids, and satyrs, with shreddings of heads
and paws of meek wild beasts, and nondescript vegetables.
And the lowest of all are those which have not even graceful
models to recommend them, but arise out of the corruption
of the higher schools, mingled with clownish or bestial satire,
as is the case in the latter Renaissance of Venice, which we
were above examining. It is almost impossible to believe the
depth to which the human mind can be debased in following
this species of grotesque. In a recent Italian garden, the
favorite ornaments frequently consist of stucco images, representing,
in dwarfish caricature, the most disgusting types of
manhood and womanhood which can be found amidst the
dissipation of the modern drawingroom; yet without either
veracity or humor, and dependent, for whatever interest they
possess, upon simple grossness of expression and absurdity of
costume. Grossness, of one kind or another, is, indeed, an
unfailing characteristic of the style; either latent, as in the
refined sensuality of the more graceful arabesques, or, in the
worst examples, manifested in every species of obscene conception
and abominable detail. In the head, described in the
opening of this chapter, at Santa Maria Formosa, the teeth are
represented as decayed.

§ XL. 4. The minds of the fourth class of men who do not
play at all, are little likely to find expression in any trivial
form of art, except in bitterness of mockery; and this character
at once stamps the work in which it appears, as belonging
to the class of terrible, rather than of playful, grotesque. We
have, therefore, now to examine the state of mind which gave
rise to this second and more interesting branch of imaginative
work.

§ XLI. Two great and principal passions are evidently appointed
137
by the Deity to rule the life of man; namely, the love
of God, and the fear of sin, and of its companion—Death.
How many motives we have for Love, how much there is in
the universe to kindle our admiration and to claim our gratitude,
there are, happily, multitudes among us who both feel
and teach. But it has not, I think, been sufficiently considered
how evident, throughout the system of creation, is the purpose
of God that we should often be affected by Fear; not the sudden,
selfish, and contemptible fear of immediate danger, but
the fear which arises out of the contemplation of great powers
in destructive operation, and generally from the perception of
the presence of death. Nothing appears to me more remarkable
than the array of scenic magnificence by which the imagination
is appalled, in myriads of instances, when the actual
danger is comparatively small; so that the utmost possible
impression of awe shall be produced upon the minds of all,
though direct suffering is inflicted upon few. Consider, for
instance, the moral effect of a single thunder-storm. Perhaps
two or three persons may be struck dead within the space of a
hundred square miles; and their deaths, unaccompanied by
the scenery of the storm, would produce little more than a
momentary sadness in the busy hearts of living men. But
the preparation for the Judgment by all that mighty gathering
of clouds; by the questioning of the forest leaves, in their
terrified stillness, which way the winds shall go forth; by the
murmuring to each other, deep in the distance, of the destroying
angels before they draw forth their swords of fire; by the
march of the funeral darkness in the midst of the noon-day,
and the rattling of the dome of heaven beneath the chariot-wheels
of death;—on how many minds do not these produce
an impression almost as great as the actual witnessing of the
fatal issue! and how strangely are the expressions of the
threatening elements fitted to the apprehension of the human
soul! The lurid color, the long, irregular, convulsive sound,
the ghastly shapes of flaming and heaving cloud, are all as
true and faithful in their appeal to our instinct of danger, as
the moaning or wailing of the human voice itself is to our
138
instinct of pity. It is not a reasonable calculating terror which
they awake in us; it is no matter that we count distance by
seconds, and measure probability by averages. That shadow of
the thunder-cloud will still do its work upon our hearts, and
we shall watch its passing away as if we stood upon the
threshing-floor of Araunah.

§ XLII. And this is equally the case with respect to all the
other destructive phenomena of the universe. From the
mightiest of them to the gentlest, from the earthquake to the
summer shower, it will be found that they are attended by
certain aspects of threatening, which strike terror into the
hearts of multitudes more numerous a thousandfold than those
who actually suffer from the ministries of judgment; and
that, besides the fearfulness of these immediately dangerous
phenomena, there is an occult and subtle horror belonging to
many aspects of the creation around us, calculated often to fill
us with serious thought, even in our times of quietness and
peace. I understand not the most dangerous, because most
attractive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending to
exalt the beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless
infinitude of mercy, and blind obliteration of the work of sin;
and which does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances
of God’s kindness on the face of creation. Such
kindness is indeed everywhere and always visible; but not
alone. Wrath and threatening are invariably mingled with
the love; and in the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence
of Hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual
utterances, as that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with
thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of
the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but
the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak
winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of
the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas,
the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all
strength into dust, have these no language for us? We may
seek to escape their teaching by reasonings touching the good
which is wrought out of all evil; but it is vain sophistry.
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The good succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but
so also the evil to the good. Gerizim and Ebal, birth and
death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence
of man, and his Futurity.39

§ XLIII. And because the thoughts of the choice we have
to make between these two, ought to rule us continually, not
so much in our own actions (for these should, for the most
part, be governed by settled habit and principle) as in our
manner of regarding the lives of other men, and our own
responsibilities with respect to them; therefore, it seems to
me that the healthiest state into which the human mind can
be brought is that which is capable of the greatest love, and
the greatest awe: and this we are taught even in our times
of rest; for when our minds are rightly in tone, the merely
pleasurable excitement which they seek with most avidity is
that which rises out of the contemplation of beauty or of terribleness.
We thirst for both, and, according to the height
and tone of our feeling, desire to see them in noble or inferior
forms. Thus there is a Divine beauty, and a terribleness or
sublimity coequal with it in rank, which are the subjects of
the highest art; and there is an inferior or ornamental beauty,
and an inferior terribleness coequal with it in rank, which are
the subjects of grotesque art. And the state of mind in which
the terrible form of the grotesque is developed, is that which
in some irregular manner, dwells upon certain conditions of
terribleness, into the complete depth of which it does not
enter for the time.

§ XLIV. Now the things which are the proper subjects of
human fear are twofold; those which have the power of
Death, and those which have the nature of Sin. Of which
there are many ranks, greater or less in power and vice, from
the evil angels themselves down to the serpent which is their
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type, and which though of a low and contemptible class,
appears to unite the deathful and sinful natures in the most
clearly visible and intelligible form; for there is nothing else
which we know, of so small strength and occupying so unimportant
a place in the economy of creation, which yet is so
mortal and so malignant. It is, then, on these two classes of
objects that the mind fixes for its excitement, in that mood
which gives rise to the terrible grotesque; and its subject will
be found always to unite some expression of vice and danger,
but regarded in a peculiar temper; sometimes (A) of predetermined
or involuntary apathy, sometimes (B) of mockery, sometimes
(C) of diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness.

§ XLV. For observe, the difficulty which, as I above stated,
exists in distinguishing the playful from the terrible grotesque
arises out of this cause; that the mind, under certain phases
of excitement, plays with terror, and summons images which,
if it were in another temper, would be awful, but of which,
either in weariness or in irony, it refrains for the time to
acknowledge the true terribleness. And the mode in which
this refusal takes place distinguishes the noble from the ignoble
grotesque. For the master of the noble grotesque knows
the depth of all at which he seems to mock, and would feel
it at another time, or feels it in a certain undercurrent of
thought even while he jests with it; but the workman of the
ignoble grotesque can feel and understand nothing, and mocks
at all things with the laughter of the idiot and the cretin.

To work out this distinction completely is the chief difficulty
in our present inquiry; and, in order to do so, let us
consider the above-named three conditions of mind in succession,
with relation to objects of terror.

§ XLVI. (A). Involuntary or predetermined apathy. We
saw above that the grotesque was produced, chiefly in subordinate
or ornamental art, by rude, and in some degree uneducated
men, and in their times of rest. At such times, and in
such subordinate work, it is impossible that they should represent
any solemn or terrible subject with a full and serious
entrance into its feeling. It is not in the languor of a leisure
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hour that a man will set his whole soul to conceive the means
of representing some important truth, nor to the projecting
angle of a timber bracket that he would trust its representation,
if conceived. And yet, in this languor, and in this
trivial work, he must find some expression of the serious part
of his soul, of what there is within him capable of awe, as well
as of love. The more noble the man is, the more impossible
it will be for him to confine his thoughts to mere loveliness,
and that of a low order. Were his powers and his time unlimited,
so that, like Frà Angelico, he could paint the Seraphim,
in that order of beauty he could find contentment, bringing
down heaven to earth. But by the conditions of his being, by
his hard-worked life, by his feeble powers of execution, by the
meanness of his employment and the languor of his heart, he
is bound down to earth. It is the world’s work that he is
doing, and world’s work is not to be done without fear. And
whatever there is of deep and eternal consciousness within
him, thrilling his mind with the sense of the presence of sin
and death around him, must be expressed in that slight work,
and feeble way, come of it what will. He cannot forget it,
among all that he sees of beautiful in nature; he may not
bury himself among the leaves of the violet on the rocks, and
of the lily in the glen, and twine out of them garlands of perpetual
gladness. He sees more in the earth than these,—misery
and wrath, and discordance, and danger, and all the work
of the dragon and his angels; this he sees with too deep feeling
ever to forget. And though when he returns to his idle
work,—it may be to gild the letters upon the page, or to carve
the timbers of the chamber, or the stones of the pinnacle,—he
cannot give his strength of thought any more to the woe or to
the danger, there is a shadow of them still present with him:
and as the bright colors mingle beneath his touch, and the fair
leaves and flowers grow at his bidding, strange horrors and
phantasms rise by their side; grisly beasts and venomous serpents,
and spectral fiends and nameless inconsistencies of ghastly
life, rising out of things most beautiful, and fading back into
them again, as the harm and the horror of life do out of its
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happiness. He has seen these things; he wars with them
daily; he cannot but give them their part in his work, though
in a state of comparative apathy to them at the time. He is
but carving and gilding, and must not turn aside to weep; but
he knows that hell is burning on, for all that, and the smoke
of it withers his oak-leaves.

§ XLVII. Now, the feelings which give rise to the false or
ignoble grotesque, are exactly the reverse of these. In the
true grotesque, a man of naturally strong feeling is accidentally
or resolutely apathetic; in the false grotesque, a man naturally
apathetic is forcing himself into temporary excitement. The
horror which is expressed by the one, comes upon him whether
he will or not; that which is expressed by the other, is sought
out by him, and elaborated by his art. And therefore, also,
because the fear of the one is true, and of true things, however
fantastic its expression may be, there will be reality in it, and
force. It is not a manufactured terribleness, whose author,
when he had finished it, knew not if it would terrify any one
else or not: but it is a terribleness taken from the life; a
spectre which the workman indeed saw, and which, as it appalled
him, will appal us also. But the other workman never
felt any Divine fear; he never shuddered when he heard the
cry from the burning towers of the earth,

“Venga Medusa; sì lo farem di smalto.”

He is stone already, and needs no gentle hand laid upon his
eyes to save him.

§ XLVIII. I do not mean what I say in this place to apply to
the creations of the imagination. It is not as the creating but
as the seeing man, that we are here contemplating the master
of the true grotesque. It is because the dreadfulness of the
universe around him weighs upon his heart, that his work is
wild; and therefore through the whole of it we shall find the
evidence of deep insight into nature. His beasts and birds,
however monstrous, will have profound relations with the true.
He may be an ignorant man, and little acquainted with the
laws of nature; he is certainly a busy man, and has not much
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time to watch nature; but he never saw a serpent cross his
path, nor a bird flit across the sky, nor a lizard bask upon a
stone, without learning so much of the sublimity and inner
nature of each as will not suffer him thenceforth to conceive
them coldly. He may not be able to carve plumes or scales
well; but his creatures will bite and fly, for all that. The ignoble
workman is the very reverse of this. He never felt,
never looked at nature; and if he endeavor to imitate the
work of the other, all his touches will be made at random, and
all his extravagances will be ineffective; he may knit brows,
and twist lips, and lengthen beaks, and sharpen teeth, but it
will be all in vain. He may make his creatures disgusting, but
never fearful.

§ XLIX. There is, however, often another cause of difference
than this. The true grotesque being the expression of the repose
or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed
to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous
one. There is much grotesque which is wrought out with
exquisite care and pains, and as much labor given to it as if it
were of the noblest subject; so that the workman is evidently
no longer apathetic, and has no excuse for unconnectedness of
thought, or sudden unreasonable fear. If he awakens horror
now, it ought to be in some truly sublime form. His strength
is in his work; and he must not give way to sudden humor,
and fits of erratic fancy. If he does so, it must be because his
mind is naturally frivolous, or is for the time degraded into the
deliberate pursuit of frivolity. And herein lies the real distinction
between the base grotesque of Raphael and the Renaissance,
above alluded to, and the true Gothic grotesque.
Those grotesques or arabesques of the Vatican, and other such
work, which have become the patterns of ornamentation in
modern times, are the fruit of great minds degraded to base
objects. The care, skill, and science, applied to the distribution
of the leaves, and the drawing of the figures, are intense,
admirable, and accurate; therefore, they ought to have produced
a grand and serious work, not a tissue of nonsense. If
we can draw the human head perfectly, and are masters of its
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expression and its beauty, we have no business to cut it off, and
hang it up by the hair at the end of a garland. If we can draw
the human body in the perfection of its grace and movement,
we have no business to take away its limbs, and terminate it
with a bunch of leaves. Or rather our doing so will imply
that there is something wrong with us; that, if we can consent
to use our best powers for such base and vain trifling, there
must be something wanting in the powers themselves; and
that, however skilful we may be, or however learned, we are
wanting both in the earnestness which can apprehend a noble
truth, and in the thoughtfulness which can feel a noble fear.
No Divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man
who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first
lesson which that terror is sent to teach us, is the value of the
human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.

§ L. And are we never, then, it will be asked, to possess a
refined or perfect ornamentation? Must all decoration be
the work of the ignorant and the rude? Not so; but exactly
in proportion as the ignorance and rudeness diminish, must the
ornamentation become rational, and the grotesqueness disappear.
The noblest lessons may be taught in ornamentation,
the most solemn truths compressed into it. The Book of
Genesis, in all the fulness of its incidents, in all the depth of
its meaning, is bound within the leaf-borders of the gates of
Ghiberti. But Raphael’s arabesque is mere elaborate idleness.
It has neither meaning nor heart in it; it is an unnatural and
monstrous abortion.

§ LI. Now, this passing of the grotesque into higher art, as
the mind of the workman becomes informed with better knowledge,
and capable of more earnest exertion, takes place in two
ways. Either, as his power increases, he devotes himself more
and more to the beauty which he now feels himself able to express,
and so the grotesqueness expands, and softens into the
beautiful, as in the above-named instance of the gates of Ghiberti;
or else, if the mind of the workman be naturally inclined
to gloomy contemplation, the imperfection or apathy of his
work rises into nobler terribleness, until we reach the point of
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the grotesque of Albert Durer, where, every now and then,
the playfulness or apathy of the painter passes into perfect
sublime. Take the Adam and Eve, for instance. When he
gave Adam a bough to hold, with a parrot on it, and a tablet
hung to it, with “Albertus Durer Noricus faciebat, 1504,”
thereupon, his mind was not in Paradise. He was half in play,
half apathetic with respect to his subject, thinking how to do
his work well, as a wise master-graver, and how to receive his
just reward of fame. But he rose into the true sublime in the
head of Adam, and in the profound truthfulness of every creature
that fills the forest. So again in that magnificent coat of
arms, with the lady and the satyr, as he cast the fluttering
drapery hither and thither around the helmet, and wove the
delicate crown upon the woman’s forehead, he was in a kind of
play; but there is none in the dreadful skull upon the shield.
And in the “Knight and Death,” and in the dragons of the
illustrations to the Apocalypse, there is neither play nor
apathy; but their grotesque is of the ghastly kind which best
illustrates the nature of death and sin. And this leads us to
the consideration of the second state of mind out of which the
noble grotesque is developed; that is to say, the temper of
mockery.

§ LII. (B). Mockery, or Satire. In the former part of this
chapter, when I spoke of the kinds of art which were produced
in the recreation of the lower orders, I only spoke of forms of
ornament, not of the expression of satire or humor. But it
seems probable, that nothing is so refreshing to the vulgar
mind as some exercise of this faculty, more especially on the
failings of their superiors; and that, wherever the lower orders
are allowed to express themselves freely, we shall find humor,
more or less caustic, becoming a principal feature in their work.
The classical and Renaissance manufacturers of modern times
having silenced the independent language of the operative, his
humor and satire pass away in the word-wit which has of late
become the especial study of the group of authors headed by
Charles Dickens; all this power was formerly thrown into noble
art, and became permanently expressed in the sculptures of
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the cathedral. It was never thought that there was anything
discordant or improper in such a position: for the builders
evidently felt very deeply a truth of which, in modern times,
we are less cognizant; that folly and sin are, to a certain extent,
synonymous, and that it would be well for mankind in
general, if all could be made to feel that wickedness is as contemptible
as it is hateful. So that the vices were permitted to
be represented under the most ridiculous forms, and all the
coarsest wit of the workman to be exhausted in completing
the degradation of the creatures supposed to be subjected to
them.

§ LIII. Nor were even the supernatural powers of evil exempt
from this species of satire. For with whatever hatred or horror
the evil angels were regarded, it was one of the conditions of
Christianity that they should also be looked upon as vanquished;
and this not merely in their great combat with the King of
Saints, but in daily and hourly combats with the weakest of
His servants. In proportion to the narrowness of the powers
of abstract conception in the workman, the nobleness of the
idea of spiritual nature diminished, and the traditions of the
encounters of men with fiends in daily temptations were imagined
with less terrific circumstances, until the agencies which
in such warfare were almost always represented as vanquished
with disgrace, became, at last, as much the objects of contempt
as of terror.

The superstitions which represented the devil as assuming
various contemptible forms of disguises in order to accomplish
his purposes aided this gradual degradation of conception, and
directed the study of the workman to the most strange and
ugly conditions of animal form, until at last, even in the most
serious subjects, the fiends are oftener ludicrous than terrible.
Nor, indeed, is this altogether avoidable, for it is not possible
to express intense wickedness without some condition of degradation.
Malice, subtlety, and pride, in their extreme, cannot
be written upon noble forms; and I am aware of no effort
to represent the Satanic mind in the angelic form, which has
succeeded in painting. Milton succeeds only because he separately
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describes the movements of the mind, and therefore
leaves himself at liberty to make the form heroic; but that
form is never distinct enough to be painted. Dante, who will
not leave even external forms obscure, degrades them before
he can feel them to be demoniacal; so also John Bunyan: both
of them, I think, having firmer faith than Milton’s in their
own creations, and deeper insight into the nature of sin. Milton
makes his fiends too noble, and misses the foulness, inconstancy,
and fury of wickedness. His Satan possesses some virtues,
not the less virtues for being applied to evil purpose.
Courage, resolution, patience, deliberation in council, this latter
being eminently a wise and holy character, as opposed to
the “Insania” of excessive sin: and all this, if not a shallow
and false, is a smooth and artistical, conception. On the other
hand, I have always felt that there was a peculiar grandeur in
the indescribable, ungovernable fury of Dante’s fiends, ever
shortening its own powers, and disappointing its own purposes;
the deaf, blind, speechless, unspeakable rage, fierce as the lightning,
but erring from its mark or turning senselessly against
itself, and still further debased by foulness of form and action.
Something is indeed to be allowed for the rude feelings of the
time, but I believe all such men as Dante are sent into the
world at the time when they can do their work best; and that,
it being appointed for him to give to mankind the most vigorous
realization possible both of Hell and Heaven, he was born
both in the country and at the time which furnished the most
stern opposition of Horror and Beauty, and permitted it to be
written in the clearest terms. And, therefore, though there
are passages in the “Inferno” which it would be impossible for
any poet now to write, I look upon it as all the more perfect
for them. For there can be no question but that one characteristic
of excessive vice is indecency, a general baseness in
its thoughts and acts concerning the body,40 and that the full
portraiture of it cannot be given without marking, and that in
the strongest lines, this tendency to corporeal degradation;
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which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot
now. And, therefore, I think the twenty-first and twenty-second
books of the “Inferno” the most perfect portraitures
of fiendish nature which we possess; and at the same time, in
their mingling of the extreme of horror (for it seems to me
that the silent swiftness of the first demon, “con l’ali aperte e
sovra i pie leggiero,” cannot be surpassed in dreadfulness) with
ludicrous actions and images, they present the most perfect instances
with which I am acquainted of the terrible grotesque.
But the whole of the “Inferno” is full of this grotesque, as
well as the “Faërie Queen;” and these two poems, together
with the works of Albert Durer, will enable the reader to study
it in its noblest forms, without reference to Gothic cathedrals.

§ LIV. Now, just as there are base and noble conditions of
the apathetic grotesque, so also are there of this satirical grotesque.
The condition which might be mistaken for it is that
above described as resulting from the malice of men given to
pleasure, and in which the grossness and foulness are in the
workman as much as in his subject, so that he chooses to represent
vice and disease rather than virtue and beauty, having his
chief delight in contemplating them; though he still mocks at
them with such dull wit as may be in him, because, as Young
has said most truly,

“’Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool.”

§ LV. Now it is easy to distinguish this grotesque from its
noble counterpart, by merely observing whether any forms of
beauty or dignity are mingled with it or not; for, of course,
the noble grotesque is only employed by its master for good
purposes, and to contrast with beauty: but the base workman
cannot conceive anything but what is base; and there will be
no loveliness in any part of his work, or, at the best, a loveliness
measured by line and rule, and dependent on legal shapes
of feature. But, without resorting to this test, and merely by
examining the ugly grotesque itself, it will be found that, if it
belongs to the base school, there will be, first, no Horror in it;
secondly, no Nature in it; and, thirdly, no Mercy in it.

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§ LVI. I say, first, no Horror. For the base soul has no
fear of sin, and no hatred of it: and, however it may strive to
make its work terrible, there will be no genuineness in the
fear; the utmost it can do will be to make its work disgusting.

Secondly, there will be no Nature in it. It appears to be
one of the ends proposed by Providence in the appointment
of the forms of the brute creation, that the various vices to
which mankind are liable should be severally expressed in
them so distinctly and clearly as that men could not but understand
the lesson; while yet these conditions of vice might, in
the inferior animal, be observed without the disgust and hatred
which the same vices would excite, if seen in men, and might
be associated with features of interest which would otherwise
attract and reward contemplation. Thus, ferocity, cunning,
sloth, discontent, gluttony, uncleanness, and cruelty are seen,
each in its extreme, in various animals; and are so vigorously
expressed, that when men desire to indicate the same vices in
connexion with human forms, they can do it no better than
by borrowing here and there the features of animals. And
when the workman is thus led to the contemplation of the
animal kingdom, finding therein the expressions of vice which
he needs, associated with power, and nobleness, and freedom
from disease, if his mind be of right tone he becomes interested
in this new study; and all noble grotesque is, therefore,
full of the most admirable rendering of animal character. But
the ignoble workman is capable of no interest of this kind;
and, being too dull to appreciate, and too idle to execute, the
subtle and wonderful lines on which the expression of the
lower animal depends, he contents himself with vulgar exaggeration,
and leaves his work as false as it is monstrous, a mass
of blunt malice and obscene ignorance.

§ LVII. Lastly, there will be no Mercy in it. Wherever
the satire of the noble grotesque fixes upon human nature, it
does so with much sorrow mingled amidst its indignation: in
its highest forms there is an infinite tenderness, like that of
the fool in Lear; and even in its more heedless or bitter sarcasm,
it never loses sight altogether of the better nature of
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what it attacks, nor refuses to acknowledge its redeeming or
pardonable features. But the ignoble grotesque has no pity:
it rejoices in iniquity, and exists only to slander.

§ LVIII. I have not space to follow out the various forms of
transition which exist between the two extremes of great
and base in the satirical grotesque. The reader must always
remember, that, although there is an infinite distance between
the best and worst, in this kind the interval is filled by endless
conditions more or less inclining to the evil or the good; impurity
and malice stealing gradually into the nobler forms,
and invention and wit elevating the lower, according to the
countless minglings of the elements of the human soul.

§ LIX. (C). Ungovernableness of the imagination. The
reader is always to keep in mind that if the objects of horror,
in which the terrible grotesque finds its materials, were contemplated
in their true light, and with the entire energy of
the soul, they would cease to be grotesque, and become altogether
sublime; and that therefore it is some shortening of
the power, or the will, of contemplation, and some consequent
distortion of the terrible image in which the grotesqueness
consists. Now this distortion takes place, it was above
asserted, in three ways: either through apathy, satire, or
ungovernableness of imagination. It is this last cause of the
grotesque which we have finally to consider; namely, the
error and wildness of the mental impressions, caused by fear
operating upon strong powers of imagination, or by the failure
of the human faculties in the endeavor to grasp the highest
truths.

§ LX. The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed
dream is the most intelligible example of this kind, but also
the most ignoble; the imagination, in this instance, being
entirely deprived of all aid from reason, and incapable of self-government.
I believe, however, that the noblest forms of
imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable, and
have in them something of the character of dreams; so that
the vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not
submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to
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speak as a prophet, having no power over his words or
thoughts.41 Only, if the whole man be trained perfectly, and
his mind calm, consistent and powerful, the vision which
comes to him is seen as in a perfect mirror, serenely, and in
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consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be
imperfect and ill trained, the vision is seen as in a broken
mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all the passions
of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly
a trace of it remains unbroken. So that, strictly speaking,
the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling
and Divine power: and the rest of the man is to it only as an
instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes;
clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings
true, grotesquely and wildly if they are stained and broken.
And thus the “Iliad,” the “Inferno,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”
the “Faërie Queen,” are all of them true dreams;
only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep,
living sleep which God sends, with a sacredness in it, as of
death, the revealer of secrets.

§ LXI. Now, observe in this matter, carefully, the difference
between a dim mirror and a distorted one; and do not blame
me for pressing the analogy too far, for it will enable me to
explain my meaning every way more clearly. Most men’s
minds are dim mirrors, in which all truth is seen, as St. Paul
tells us, darkly: this is the fault most common and most fatal;
dulness of the heart and mistiness of sight, increasing to utter
hardness and blindness; Satan breathing upon the glass, so
that if we do not sweep the mist laboriously away, it will take
no image. But, even so far as we are able to do this, we have
still the distortion to fear, yet not to the same extent, for we
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can in some sort allow for the distortion of an image, if only
we can see it clearly. And the fallen human soul, at its best,
must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the
mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the
scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it
obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely
to be, as the winds and vapors trouble the field of the telescope
most when it reaches farthest.

§ LXII. Now, so far as the truth is seen by the imagination42
in its wholeness and quietness, the vision is sublime; but so
far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the
human capacity, it becomes grotesque; and it would seem to
be rare that any very exalted truth should be impressed on the
imagination without some grotesqueness in its aspect, proportioned
to the degree of diminution of breadth in the grasp
which is given of it. Nearly all the dreams recorded in the
Bible,—Jacob’s, Joseph’s, Pharaoh’s, Nebuchadnezzar’s,—are
grotesques; and nearly the whole of the accessary scenery in
the books of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse. Thus, Jacob’s
dream revealed to him the ministry of angels; but because
this ministry could not be seen or understood by him in its
fulness, it was narrowed to him into a ladder between heaven
and earth, which was a grotesque. Joseph’s two dreams were
evidently intended to be signs of the steadfastness of the
Divine purpose towards him, by possessing the clearness of
special prophecy; yet were couched in such imagery, as not
to inform him prematurely of his destiny, and only to be
understood after their fulfilment. The sun, and moon, and
stars were at the period, and are indeed throughout the Bible,
the symbols of high authority. It was not revealed to Joseph
that he should be lord over all Egypt; but the representation
of his family by symbols of the most magnificent dominion,
and yet as subject to him, must have been afterwards felt by
him as a distinctly prophetic indication of his own supreme
power. It was not revealed to him that the occasion of his
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brethren’s special humiliation before him should be their coming
to buy corn; but when the event took place, must he not
have felt that there was prophetic purpose in the form of the
sheaves of wheat which first imaged forth their subjection to
him? And these two images of the sun doing obeisance, and
the sheaves bowing down,—narrowed and imperfect intimations
of great truth which yet could not be otherwise conveyed,—are
both grotesque. The kine of Pharaoh eating
each other, the gold and clay of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, the
four beasts full of eyes, and other imagery of Ezekiel and the
Apocalypse, are grotesques of the same kind, on which I need
not further insist.

§ LXIII. Such forms, however, ought perhaps to have been
arranged under a separate head, as Symbolical Grotesque; but
the element of awe enters into them so strongly, as to justify,
for all our present purposes, their being classed with the other
varieties of terrible grotesque. For even if the symbolic
vision itself be not terrible, the sense of what may be veiled
behind it becomes all the more awful in proportion to the
insignificance or strangeness of the sign itself; and, I believe,
this thrill of mingled doubt, fear, and curiosity lies at the very
root of the delight which mankind take in symbolism. It was
not an accidental necessity for the conveyance of truth by
pictures instead of words, which led to its universal adoption
wherever art was on the advance; but the Divine fear which
necessarily follows on the understanding that a thing is other
and greater than it seems; and which, it appears probable,
has been rendered peculiarly attractive to the human heart,
because God would have us understand that this is true not
of invented symbols merely, but of all things amidst which
we live; that there is a deeper meaning within them than eye
hath seen, or ear hath heard; and that the whole visible creation
is a mere perishable symbol of things eternal and true.
It cannot but have been sometimes a subject of wonder with
thoughtful men, how fondly, age after age, the Church has
cherished the belief that the four living creatures which surrounded
the Apocalyptic throne were symbols of the four
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Evangelists, and rejoiced to use those forms in its picture-teaching;
that a calf, a lion, an eagle, and a beast with a
man’s face, should in all ages have been preferred by the
Christian world, as expressive of Evangelistic power and inspiration,
to the majesty of human forms; and that quaint
grotesques, awkward and often ludicrous caricatures even of
the animals represented, should have been regarded by all men,
not only with contentment, but with awe, and have superseded
all endeavors to represent the characters and persons of the
Evangelistic writers themselves (except in a few instances,
confined principally to works undertaken without a definite
religious purpose);—this, I say, might appear more than
strange to us, were it not that we ourselves share the awe,
and are still satisfied with the symbol, and that justly. For,
whether we are conscious of it or not, there is in our hearts,
as we gaze upon the brutal forms that have so holy a signification,
an acknowledgment that it was not Matthew, nor
Mark, nor Luke, nor John, in whom the Gospel of Christ
was unsealed: but that the invisible things of Him from the
beginning of the creation are clearly seen, being understood
by the things that are made; that the whole world, and all
that is therein, be it low or high, great or small, is a continual
Gospel; and that as the heathen, in their alienation from God,
changed His glory into an image made like unto corruptible
man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, the Christian, in his
approach to God, is to undo this work, and to change the corruptible
things into the image of His glory; believing that
there is nothing so base in creation, but that our faith may
give it wings which shall raise us into companionship with
heaven; and that, on the other hand, there is nothing so great
or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the
Gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them
that love Him.

§ LXIV. And it is easy to understand, if we follow out this
thought, how, when once the symbolic language was familiarized
to the mind, and its solemnity felt in all its fulness, there
was no likelihood of offence being taken at any repulsive or
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feeble characters in execution or conception. There was no
form so mean, no incident so commonplace, but, if regarded
in this light, it might become sublime; the more vigorous the
fancy and the more faithful the enthusiasm, the greater would
be the likelihood of their delighting in the contemplation of
symbols whose mystery was enhanced by apparent insignificance,
or in which the sanctity and majesty of meaning were
contrasted with the utmost uncouthness of external form: nor
with uncouthness merely, but even with every appearance of
malignity or baseness; the beholder not being revolted even
by this, but comprehending that, as the seeming evil in the
framework of creation did not invalidate its Divine authorship,
so neither did the evil or imperfection in the symbol
invalidate its Divine message. And thus, sometimes, the
designer at last became wanton in his appeal to the piety of
his interpreter, and recklessly poured out the impurity and
the savageness of his own heart, for the mere pleasure of seeing
them overlaid with the fine gold of the sanctuary, by the religion
of their beholder.

§ LXV. It is not, however, in every symbolical subject that
the fearful grotesque becomes embodied to the full. The
element of distortion which affects the intellect when dealing
with subjects above its proper capacity, is as nothing compared
with that which it sustains from the direct impressions of
terror. It is the trembling of the human soul in the presence
of death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual
mirror, and invests them with the fitfulness and ghastliness
of dreams. And from the contemplation of death, and
of the pangs which follow his footsteps, arise in men’s hearts
the troop of strange and irresistible superstitions which, more
or less melancholy or majestic according to the dignity of the
mind they impress, are yet never without a certain grotesqueness,
following on the paralysis of the reason and over-excitement
of the fancy. I do not mean to deny the actual existence
of spiritual manifestations; I have never weighed the
evidence upon the subject; but with these, if such exist, we
are not here concerned. The grotesque which we are examining
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arises out of that condition of mind which appears to follow
naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which
the fancy is brought into morbid action by terror, accompanied
by the belief in spiritual presence, and in the possibility
of spiritual apparition. Hence are developed its most sublime,
because its least voluntary, creations, aided by the fearfulness of
the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the ministers
of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastliness of
expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible grotesque
in its relation to the perfect human frame.

§ LXVI. Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness
of the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the
holiest of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and
wonderful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery
over our Northern hearts for so many ages. The powers of
sudden destruction lurking in the woods and waters, in the
rocks and clouds;—kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz
spirits; the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of
second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented
ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating
its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half
visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself,
doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and
waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high
places of pleasure;—these, partly degrading us by the instinctive
and paralyzing terror with which they are attended, and
partly ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the
eternal world, fill the last and the most important circle in
that great kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all
must be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed
up of life; until the waters of the last fordless river
cease to roll their untransparent volume between us and the
light of heaven, and neither death stand between us and our
brethren, nor symbols between us and our God.

§ LXVII. We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching
to completeness of the various branches of human
feeling which are concerned in the developement of this peculiar
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form of art. It remains for us only to note, as briefly as
possible, what facts in the actual history of the grotesque bear
upon our immediate subject.

From what we have seen to be its nature, we must, I think,
be led to one most important conclusion; that wherever the
human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions,
great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and
not overborne by an undue or hardened preëminence of the
mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full
energy. And, accordingly, I believe that there is no test of
greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the
developement, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque,
and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind
or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention,
or incapability of understanding it. I think that the central
man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the
imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their
highest, is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once
the most distinct and the most noble developement to which it
was ever brought in the human mind. The two other greatest
men whom Italy has produced, Michael Angelo and Tintoret,
show the same element in no less original strength, but oppressed
in the one by his science, and in both by the spirit of
the age in which they lived; never, however, absent even in
Michael Angelo, but stealing forth continually in a strange
and spectral way, lurking in folds of raiment and knots of
wild hair, and mountainous confusions of craggy limb and
cloudy drapery; and, in Tintoret, ruling the entire conceptions
of his greatest works to such a degree that they are an
enigma or an offence, even to this day, to all the petty disciples
of a formal criticism. Of the grotesque in our own
Shakspeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to
his French critics; nor of that of Æschylus and Homer, as
opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will
be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order.

§ LXVIII. As an index of the greatness of nations, it is a less
certain test, or, rather, we are not so well agreed on the meaning
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of the term “greatness” respecting them. A nation may
produce a great effect, and take up a high place in the world’s
history, by the temporary enthusiasm or fury of its multitudes,
without being truly great; or, on the other hand, the discipline
of morality and common sense may extend its physical
power or exalt its well-being, while yet its creative and
imaginative powers are continually diminishing. And again:
a people may take so definite a lead over all the rest of the
world in one direction, as to obtain a respect which is not
justly due to them if judged on universal grounds. Thus the
Greeks perfected the sculpture of the human body; threw
their literature into a disciplined form, which has given it a
peculiar power over certain conditions of modern mind; and
were the most carefully educated race that the world has seen;
but a few years hence, I believe, we shall no longer think
them a greater people than either the Egyptians or Assyrians.

§ LXIX. If, then, ridding ourselves as far as possible of prejudices
owing merely to the school-teaching which remains
from the system of the Renaissance, we set ourselves to discover
in what races the human soul, taken all in all, reached
its highest magnificence, we shall find, I believe, two great
families of men, one of the East and South, the other of the
West and North: the one including the Egyptians, Jews,
Arabians, Assyrians, and Persians; the other, I know not
whence derived, but seeming to flow forth from Scandinavia,
and filling the whole of Europe with its Norman and Gothic
energy. And in both these families, wherever they are seen
in their utmost nobleness, there the grotesque is developed in
its utmost energy; and I hardly know whether most to admire
the winged bulls of Nineveh, or the winged dragons of
Verona.

§ LXX. The reader who has not before turned his attention
to this subject may, however, at first have some difficulty in
distinguishing between the noble grotesque of these great
nations, and the barbarous grotesque of mere savages, as seen
in the work of the Hindoo and other Indian nations; or, more
grossly still, in that of the complete savage of the Pacific
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islands; or if, as is to be hoped, he instinctively feels the difference,
he may yet find difficulty in determining wherein
that difference consists. But he will discover, on consideration,
that the noble grotesque involves the true appreciation
of beauty, though the mind may wilfully turn to other images
or the hand resolutely stop short of the perfection which it
must fail, if it endeavored, to reach; while the grotesque of
the Sandwich islander involves no perception or imagination
of anything above itself. He will find that in the exact proportion
in which the grotesque results from an incapability of
perceiving beauty, it becomes savage or barbarous; and that
there are many stages of progress to be found in it even in its
best times, much truly savage grotesque occurring in the fine
Gothic periods, mingled with the other forms of the ignoble
grotesque resulting from vicious inclinations or base sportiveness.
Nothing is more mysterious in the history of the human
mind, than the manner in which gross and ludicrous images
are mingled with the most solemn subjects in the work of
the middle ages, whether of sculpture or illumination; and
although, in great part, such incongruities are to be accounted
for on the various principles which I have above endeavored
to define, in many instances they are clearly the result of vice
and sensuality. The general greatness of seriousness of an
age does not effect the restoration of human nature; and it
would be strange, if, in the midst of the art even of the best
periods, when that art was entrusted to myriads of workmen,
we found no manifestations of impiety, folly, or impurity.

§ LXXI. It needs only to be added that in the noble grotesque,
as it is partly the result of a morbid state of the imaginative
power, that power itself will be always seen in a high degree;
and that therefore our power of judging of the rank of a
grotesque work will depend on the degree in which we are
in general sensible of the presence of invention. The reader
may partly test this power in himself by referring to the
Plate given in the opening of this chapter, in which, on the
left, is a piece of noble and inventive grotesque, a head of the
lion-symbol of St. Mark, from the Veronese Gothic; the other
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is a head introduced as a boss on the foundation of the Palazzo
Corner della Regina at Venice, utterly devoid of invention,
made merely monstrous by exaggerations of the eyeballs and
cheeks, and generally characteristic of that late Renaissance
grotesque of Venice, with which we are at present more immediately
concerned.43

§ LXXII. The developement of that grotesque took place
under different laws from those which regulate it in any other
European city. For, great as we have seen the Byzantine
mind show itself to be in other directions, it was marked as
that of a declining nation by the absence of the grotesque element;
and, owing to its influence, the early Venetian Gothic
remained inferior to all other schools in this particular character.
Nothing can well be more wonderful than its instant
failure in any attempt at the representation of ludicrous or
fearful images, more especially when it is compared with the
magnificent grotesque of the neighboring city of Verona, in
which the Lombard influence had full sway. Nor was it until
the last links of connexion with Constantinople had been dissolved,
that the strength of the Venetian mind could manifest
itself in this direction. But it had then a new enemy to
encounter. The Renaissance laws altogether checked its imagination
in architecture; and it could only obtain permission
to express itself by starting forth in the work of the Venetian
painters, filling them with monkeys and dwarfs, even amidst
the most serious subjects, and leading Veronese and Tintoret
to the most unexpected and wild fantasies of form and color.

§ LXXIII. We may be deeply thankful for this peculiar reserve
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of the Gothic grotesque character to the last days of
Venice. All over the rest of Europe it had been strongest in
the days of imperfect art; magnificently powerful throughout
the whole of the thirteenth century, tamed gradually in the
fourteenth and fifteenth, and expiring in the sixteenth amidst
anatomy and laws of art. But at Venice, it had not been received
when it was elsewhere in triumph, and it fled to the
lagoons for shelter when elsewhere it was oppressed. And it
was arrayed by the Venetian painters in robes of state, and
advanced by them to such honor as it had never received in its
days of widest dominion; while, in return, it bestowed upon
their pictures that fulness, piquancy, decision of parts, and
mosaic-like intermingling of fancies, alternately brilliant and
sublime, which were exactly what was most needed for the developement
of their unapproachable color-power.

§ LXXIV. Yet, observe, it by no means follows that because
the grotesque does not appear in the art of a nation, the sense
of it does not exist in the national mind. Except in the form
of caricature, it is hardly traceable in the English work of the
present day; but the minds of our workmen are full of it, if
we would only allow them to give it shape. They express it
daily in gesture and gibe, but are not allowed to do so where
it would be useful. In like manner, though the Byzantine
influence repressed it in the early Venetian architecture, it was
always present in the Venetian mind, and showed itself in
various forms of national custom and festival; acted grotesques,
full of wit, feeling, and good-humor. The ceremony of the
hat and the orange, described in the beginning of this chapter,
is one instance out of multitudes. Another, more rude, and
exceedingly characteristic, was that instituted in the twelfth
century in memorial of the submission of Woldaric, the patriarch
of Aquileia, who, having taken up arms against the
patriarch of Grado, and being defeated and taken prisoner by the
Venetians, was sentenced, not to death, but to send every year
on “Fat Thursday” sixty-two large loaves, twelve fat pigs, and
a bull, to the Doge; the bull being understood to represent the
patriarch, and the twelve pigs his clergy: and the ceremonies
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of the day consisting in the decapitation of these representatives,
and a distribution of their joints among the senators;
together with a symbolic record of the attack upon Aquileia,
by the erection of a wooden castle in the rooms of the Ducal
Palace, which the Doge and the Senate attacked and demolished
with clubs. As long as the Doge and the Senate were
truly kingly and noble, they were content to let this ceremony
be continued; but when they became proud and selfish, and
were destroying both themselves and the state by their luxury,
they found it inconsistent with their dignity, and it was abolished,
as far as the Senate was concerned, in 1549.44

§ LXXV. By these and other similar manifestations, the grotesque
spirit is traceable through all the strength of the Venetian
people. But again: it is necessary that we should carefully
distinguish between it and the spirit of mere levity. I said,
in the fifth chapter, that the Venetians were distinctively a
serious people, serious, that is to say, in the sense in which the
English are a more serious people than the French; though
the habitual intercourse of our lower classes in London has a
tone of humor in it which I believe is untraceable in that of
the Parisian populace. It is one thing to indulge in playful
rest, and another to be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure: and
gaiety of heart during the reaction after hard labor, and quickened
by satisfaction in the accomplished duty or perfected
result, is altogether compatible with, nay, even in some sort
arises naturally out of, a deep internal seriousness of disposition;
this latter being exactly the condition of mind which,
as we have seen, leads to the richest developements of the playful
grotesque; while, on the contrary, the continual pursuit of
pleasure deprives the soul of all alacrity and elasticity, and
leaves it incapable of happy jesting, capable only of that which
is bitter, base, and foolish. Thus, throughout the whole of the
early career of the Venetians, though there is much jesting,
there is no levity; on the contrary there is an intense earnestness
both in their pursuit of commercial and political successes,
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and in their devotion to religion,45 which led gradually to the
formation of that highly wrought mingling of immovable resolution
with secret thoughtfulness, which so strangely, sometimes
so darkly, distinguishes the Venetian character at the
time of their highest power, when the seriousness was left, but
the conscientiousness destroyed. And if there be any one sign
by which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to
the very life, by a school of portraiture which has never been
equalled (chiefly because no portraiture ever had subjects so
noble),—I say, if there be one thing more notable than another
in the Venetian features, it is this deep pensiveness and solemnity.
In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads
which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly
owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly raised or
idealized his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults
or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best
of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the color of
his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable,
that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified
portraiture. But at Venice, all is exactly the reverse of this.
The tone of mind in the painter appears often in some degree
frivolous or sensual; delighting in costume, in domestic and
grotesque incident, and in studies of the naked form. But
the moment he gives himself definitely to portraiture, all is
noble and grave; the more literally true his work, the more
majestic; and the same artist who will produce little beyond
what is commonplace in painting a Madonna or an apostle, will
rise into unapproachable sublimity when his subject is a member
of the Forty, or a Master of the Mint.

Such, then, were the general tone and progress of the
Venetian mind, up to the close of the seventeenth century.
First, serious, religious, and sincere; then, though serious still,
comparatively deprived of conscientiousness, and apt to decline
into stern and subtle policy: in the first case, the spirit of the
noble grotesque not showing itself in art at all, but only in
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speech and action; in the second case, developing itself in
painting, through accessories and vivacities of composition,
while perfect dignity was always preserved in portraiture. A
third phase rapidly developed itself.

§ LXXVI. Once more, and for the last time, let me refer the
reader to the important epoch of the death of the Doge
Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423, long ago indicated as the commencement
of the decline of the Venetian power. That commencement
is marked, not merely by the words of the dying Prince,
but by a great and clearly legible sign. It is recorded, that
on the accession of his successor, Foscari, to the throne, “Si
festeggio dalla citta uno anno intero:” “The city kept
festival for a whole year.” Venice had in her childhood sown,
in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing. She now
sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with
deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and
dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the
earth. In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of
vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old
she surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the
powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive
the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled
in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of
delight.

It is as needless, as it is painful, to trace the steps of her
final ruin. That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the
cities of the plain, “Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of
idleness.” By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal
as the fiery reign of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her
place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels
of the dead salt sea.

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CHAPTER IV.

CONCLUSION.

§ I. I fear this chapter will be a rambling one, for it must
be a kind of supplement to the preceding pages, and a general
recapitulation of the things I have too imperfectly and feebly
said.

The grotesques of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the nature of which we examined in the last chapter, close
the career of the architecture of Europe. They were the last
evidences of any feeling consistent with itself, and capable of
directing the efforts of the builder to the formation of anything
worthy the name of a style or school. From that time to this,
no resuscitation of energy has taken place, nor does any for the
present appear possible. How long this impossibility may last,
and in what direction with regard to art in general, as well as
to our lifeless architecture, our immediate efforts may most
profitably be directed, are the questions I would endeavor
briefly to consider in the present chapter.

§ II. That modern science, with all its additions to the comforts
of life, and to the fields of rational contemplation, has
placed the existing races of mankind on a higher platform than
any that preceded them, none can doubt for an instant; and I
believe the position in which we find ourselves is somewhat
analogous to that of thoughtful and laborious youth succeeding
a restless and heedless infancy. Not long ago, it was said to
me by one of the masters of modern science: “When men invented
the locomotive, the child was learning to go; when
they invented the telegraph, it was learning to speak.” He
looked forward to the manhood of mankind, as assuredly the
nobler in proportion to the slowness of its developement. What
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might not be expected from the prime and middle strength of
the order of existence whose infancy had lasted six thousand
years? And, indeed, I think this the truest, as well as the
most cheering, view that we can take of the world’s history.
Little progress has been made as yet. Base war, lying policy,
thoughtless cruelty, senseless improvidence,—all things which,
in nations, are analogous to the petulance, cunning, impatience,
and carelessness of infancy,—have been, up to this hour, as
characteristic of mankind as they were in the earliest periods;
so that we must either be driven to doubt of human progress
at all, or look upon it as in its very earliest stage. Whether
the opportunity is to be permitted us to redeem the hours that
we have lost; whether He, in whose sight a thousand years
are as one day, has appointed us to be tried by the continued
possession of the strange powers with which He has lately endowed
us; or whether the periods of childhood and of probation
are to cease together, and the youth of mankind is to be
one which shall prevail over death, and bloom for ever in the
midst of a new heaven and a new earth, are questions with
which we have no concern. It is indeed right that we should
look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the Day
of God; but not that we should check any human efforts by
anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring
to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here;
and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under
its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just
been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of
future ages.

§ III. It seems to me, then, that the whole human race, so
far as their own reason can be trusted, may at present be regarded
as just emergent from childhood; and beginning for
the first time to feel their strength, to stretch their limbs, and
explore the creation around them. If we consider that, till
within the last fifty years, the nature of the ground we tread
on, of the air we breathe, and of the light by which we see,
were not so much as conjecturally conceived by us; that the
duration of the globe, and the races of animal life by which it
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was inhabited, are just beginning to be apprehended; and that
the scope of the magnificent science which has revealed them,
is as yet so little received by the public mind, that presumption
and ignorance are still permitted to raise their voices against it
unrebuked; that perfect veracity in the representation of general
nature by art has never been attempted until the present
day, and has in the present day been resisted with all the energy
of the popular voice;46 that the simplest problems of social
science are yet so little understood, as that doctrines of
liberty and equality can be openly preached, and so successfully
as to affect the whole body of the civilized world with apparently
incurable disease; that the first principles of commerce
were acknowledged by the English Parliament only a few
months ago, in its free trade measures, and are still so little
understood by the million, that no nation dares to abolish its
custom-houses;47 that the simplest principles of policy are still
not so much as stated, far less received, and that civilized nations
persist in the belief that the subtlety and dishonesty which
they know to be ruinous in dealings between man and man, are
serviceable in dealings between multitude and multitude; finally,
that the scope of the Christian religion, which we have
been taught for two thousand years, is still so little conceived
by us, that we suppose the laws of charity and of self-sacrifice
bear upon individuals in all their social relations, and yet do
not bear upon nations in any of their political relations;—when,
I say, we thus review the depth of simplicity in which the human
169
race are still plunged with respect to all that it most profoundly
concerns them to know, and which might, by them,
with most ease have been ascertained, we can hardly determine
how far back on the narrow path of human progress we ought
to place the generation to which we belong, how far the swaddling
clothes are unwound from us, and childish things beginning
to be put away.

On the other hand, a power of obtaining veracity in the
representation of material and tangible things, which, within
certain limits and conditions, is unimpeachable, has now been
placed in the hands of all men,48 almost without labor. The
foundation of every natural science is now at last firmly laid,
not a day passing without some addition of buttress and pinnacle
to their already magnificent fabric. Social theorems, if
fiercely agitated, are therefore the more likely to be at last determined,
so that they never can be matters of question more.
Human life has been in some sense prolonged by the increased
powers of locomotion, and an almost limitless power of converse.
Finally, there is hardly any serious mind in Europe but
is occupied, more or less, in the investigation of the questions
which have so long paralyzed the strength of religious feeling,
and shortened the dominion of religious faith. And we may
therefore at least look upon ourselves as so far in a definite
state of progress, as to justify our caution in guarding against
the dangers incident to every period of change, and especially
to that from childhood into youth.

§ IV. Those dangers appear, in the main, to be twofold;
consisting partly in the pride of vain knowledge, partly in the
pursuit of vain pleasure. A few points are still to be noticed
with respect to each of these heads.

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Enough, it might be thought, had been said already, touching
the pride of knowledge; but I have not yet applied the
principles, at which we arrived in the third chapter, to the
practical questions of modern art. And I think those principles,
together with what were deduced from the consideration
of the nature of Gothic in the second volume, so necessary and
vital, not only with respect to the progress of art, but even to
the happiness of society, that I will rather run the risk of
tediousness than of deficiency, in their illustration and enforcement.

In examining the nature of Gothic, we concluded that one
of the chief elements of power in that, and in all good architecture,
was the acceptance of uncultivated and rude energy in
the workman. In examining the nature of Renaissance, we
concluded that its chief element of weakness was that pride of
knowledge which not only prevented all rudeness in expression,
but gradually quenched all energy which could only be rudely
expressed; nor only so, but, for the motive and matter of the
work itself, preferred science to emotion, and experience to
perception.

§ V. The modern mind differs from the Renaissance mind
in that its learning is more substantial and extended, and its
temper more humble; but its errors, with respect to the cultivation
of art, are precisely the same,—nay, as far as regards
execution, even more aggravated. We require, at present,
from our general workmen, more perfect finish than was demanded
in the most skilful Renaissance periods, except in their
very finest productions; and our leading principles in teaching,
and in the patronage which necessarily gives tone to teaching,
are, that the goodness of work consists primarily in firmness of
handling and accuracy of science, that is to say, in hand-work
and head-work; whereas heart-work, which is the one work we
want, is not only independent of both, but often, in great degree,
inconsistent with either.

§ VI. Here, therefore, let me finally and firmly enunciate
the great principle to which all that has hitherto been stated is
subservient:—that art is valuable or otherwise, only as it expresses
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the personality, activity, and living perception of a good
and great human soul; that it may express and contain this
with little help from execution, and less from science; and that
if it have not this, if it show not the vigor, perception, and invention
of a mighty human spirit, it is worthless. Worthless,
I mean, as art; it may be precious in some other way, but, as
art, it is nugatory. Once let this be well understood among us,
and magnificent consequences will soon follow. Let me repeat
it in other terms, so that I may not be misunderstood. All art
is great, and good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the
work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say,
not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul, aided, according
to her necessities, by the inferior powers; and therefore
distinguished in essence from all products of those inferior
powers unhelped by the soul. For as a photograph is not a
work of art, though it requires certain delicate manipulations
of paper and acid, and subtle calculations of time, in order to
bring out a good result; so, neither would a drawing like a
photograph, made directly from nature, be a work of art, although
it would imply many delicate manipulations of the pencil
and subtle calculations of effects of color and shade. It is
no more art49 to manipulate a camel’s hair pencil, than to manipulate
a china tray and a glass vial. It is no more art to lay
on color delicately, than to lay on acid delicately. It is no
more art to use the cornea and retina for the reception of an
image, than to use a lens and a piece of silvered paper. But
the moment that inner part of the man, or rather that entire
and only being of the man, of which cornea and retina, fingers
and hands, pencils and colors, are all the mere servants and instruments;50
that manhood which has light in itself, though the
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eyeball be sightless, and can gain in strength when the hand
and the foot are hewn off and cast into the fire; the moment
this part of the man stands forth with its solemn “Behold, it is
I,” then the work becomes art indeed, perfect in honor, priceless
in value, boundless in power.

§ VII. Yet observe, I do not mean to speak of the body and
soul as separable. The man is made up of both: they are to
be raised and glorified together, and all art is an expression of
the one, by and through the other. All that I would insist
upon is, the necessity of the whole man being in his work; the
body must be in it. Hands and habits must be in it, whether
we will or not; but the nobler part of the man may often not
be in it. And that nobler part acts principally in love, reverence,
and admiration, together with those conditions of thought
which arise out of them. For we usually fall into much error
by considering the intellectual powers as having dignity in
themselves, and separable from the heart; whereas the truth
is, that the intellect becomes noble and ignoble according to the
food we give it, and the kind of subjects with which it is conversant.
It is not the reasoning power which, of itself, is noble,
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but the reasoning power occupied with its proper objects.
Half of the mistakes of metaphysicians have arisen from their
not observing this; namely, that the intellect, going through
the same processes, is yet mean or noble according to the matter
it deals with, and wastes itself away in mere rotatory motion,
if it be set to grind straws and dust. If we reason only
respecting words, or lines, or any trifling and finite things, the
reason becomes a contemptible faculty; but reason employed on
holy and infinite things, becomes herself holy and infinite. So
that, by work of the soul, I mean the reader always to understand
the work of the entire immortal creature, proceeding from
a quick, perceptive, and eager heart, perfected by the intellect,
and finally dealt with by the hands, under the direct guidance
of these higher powers.

§ VIII. And now observe, the first important consequence of
our fully understanding this preëminence of the soul, will be
the due understanding of that subordination of knowledge respecting
which so much has already been said. For it must
be felt at once, that the increase of knowledge, merely as such,
does not make the soul larger or smaller; that, in the sight of
God, all the knowledge man can gain is as nothing: but that
the soul, for which the great scheme of redemption was laid, be
it ignorant or be it wise, is all in all; and in the activity,
strength, health, and well-being of this soul, lies the main difference,
in His sight, between one man and another. And
that which is all in all in God’s estimate is also, be assured, all
in all in man’s labor; and to have the heart open, and the eyes
clear, and the emotions and thoughts warm and quick, and not
the knowing of this or the other fact, is the state needed for
all mighty doing in this world. And therefore finally, for this,
the weightiest of all reasons, let us take no pride in our knowledge.
We may, in a certain sense, be proud of being immortal;
we may be proud of being God’s children; we may be proud of
loving, thinking, seeing, and of all that we are by no human
teaching: but not of what we have been taught by rote; not of
the ballast and freight of the ship of the spirit, but only of its
pilotage, without which all the freight will only sink it faster,
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and strew the sea more richly with its ruin. There is not
at this moment a youth of twenty, having received what we
moderns ridiculously call education, but he knows more of
everything, except the soul, than Plato or St. Paul did; but
he is not for that reason a greater man, or fitter for his work,
or more fit to be heard by others, than Plato or St. Paul.
There is not at this moment a junior student in our schools of
painting, who does not know fifty times as much about the
art as Giotto did; but he is not for that reason greater than
Giotto; no, nor his work better, nor fitter for our beholding.
Let him go on to know all that the human intellect can discover
and contain in the term of a long life, and he will not
be one inch, one line, nearer to Giotto’s feet. But let him
leave his academy benches, and, innocently, as one knowing
nothing, go out into the highways and hedges, and there rejoice
with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep;
and in the next world, among the companies of the great and
good, Giotto will give his hand to him, and lead him into their
white circle, and say, “This is our brother.”

§ IX. And the second important consequence of our feeling
the soul’s preëminence will be our understanding the soul’s
language, however broken, or low, or feeble, or obscure in its
words; and chiefly that great symbolic language of past ages,
which has now so long been unspoken. It is strange that the
same cold and formal spirit which the Renaissance teaching
has raised amongst us, should be equally dead to the languages
of imitation and of symbolism; and should at once disdain the
faithful rendering of real nature by the modern school of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and the symbolic rendering of imagined nature
in the work of the thirteenth century. But so it is; and we
find the same body of modern artists rejecting Pre-Raphaelitism
because it is not ideal! and thirteenth century work, because
it is not real!—their own practice being at once false
and un-ideal, and therefore equally opposed to both.

§ X. It is therefore, at this juncture, of much importance
to mark for the reader the exact relation of healthy symbolism
and of healthy imitation; and, in order to do so, let us
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return to one of our Venetian examples of symbolic art, to the
central cupola of St. Mark’s. On that cupola, as has been
already stated, there is a mosaic representing the Apostles on
the Mount of Olives, with an olive-tree separating each from
the other; and we shall easily arrive at our purpose, by comparing
the means which would have been adopted by a modern
artist bred in the Renaissance schools,—that is to say, under
the influence of Claude and Poussin, and of the common teaching
of the present day,—with those adopted by the Byzantine
mosaicist to express the nature of these trees.

§ XI. The reader is doubtless aware that the olive is one of
the most characteristic and beautiful features of all Southern
scenery. On the slopes of the northern Apennines, olives are
the usual forest timber; the whole of the Val d’Arno is wooded
with them, every one of its gardens is filled with them, and
they grow in orchard-like ranks out of its fields of maize, or
corn, or vine; so that it is physically impossible, in most parts
of the neighborhood of Florence, Pistoja, Lucca, or Pisa, to
choose any site of landscape which shall not owe its leading
character to the foliage of these trees. What the elm and oak
are to England, the olive is to Italy; nay, more than this, its
presence is so constant, that, in the case of at least four fifths
of the drawings made by any artist in North Italy, he must
have been somewhat impeded by branches of olive coming between
him and the landscape. Its classical associations double
its importance in Greece; and in the Holy Land the remembrances
connected with it are of course more touching than
can ever belong to any other tree of the field. Now, for many
years back, at least one third out of all the landscapes painted
by English artists have been chosen from Italian scenery;
sketches in Greece and in the Holy Land have become as common
as sketches on Hampstead Heath; our galleries also are
full of sacred subjects, in which, if any background be introduced
at all, the foliage of the olive ought to have been a
prominent feature.

And here I challenge the untravelled English reader to tell
me what an olive-tree is like?

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§ XII. I know he cannot answer my challenge. He has no
more idea of an olive-tree than if olives grew only in the fixed
stars. Let him meditate a little on this one fact, and consider
its strangeness, and what a wilful and constant closing of the
eyes to the most important truths it indicates on the part of
the modern artist. Observe, a want of perception, not of science.
I do not want painters to tell me any scientific facts
about olive-trees. But it had been well for them to have felt
and seen the olive-tree; to have loved it for Christ’s sake,
partly also for the helmed Wisdom’s sake which was to the
heathen in some sort as that nobler Wisdom which stood at
God’s right hand, when He founded the earth and established
the heavens. To have loved it, even to the hoary dimness of
its delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashes of
the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; and to
have traced, line by line, the gnarled writhing of its intricate
branches, and the pointed fretwork of its light and narrow
leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the small rosy-white
stars of its spring blossoming, and the beads of sable
fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs—the right,
in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow,—and,
more than all, the softness of the mantle, silver grey, and tender
like the down on a bird’s breast, with which, far away, it veils
the undulation of the mountains;—these it had been well for
them to have seen and drawn, whatever they had left unstudied
in the gallery.

§ XIII. And if the reader would know the reason why this
has not been done (it is one instance only out of the myriads
which might be given of sightlessness in modern art), and will
ask the artists themselves, he will be informed of another of
the marvellous contradictions and inconsistencies in the base
Renaissance art; for it will be answered him, that it is not
right, nor according to law, to draw trees so that one should be
known from another, but that trees ought to be generalized
into a universal idea of a tree: that is to say, that the very
school which carries its science in the representation of man
down to the dissection of the most minute muscle, refuses so
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much science to the drawing of a tree as shall distinguish one
species from another; and also, while it attends to logic, and
rhetoric, and perspective, and atmosphere, and every other circumstance
which is trivial, verbal, external, or accidental, in
what it either says or sees, it will not attend to what is essential
and substantial,—being intensely solicitous, for instance, if
it draws two trees, one behind the other, that the farthest off
shall be as much smaller as mathematics show that it should
be, but totally unsolicitous to show, what to the spectator is a
far more important matter, whether it is an apple or an orange
tree.

§ XIV. This, however, is not to our immediate purpose. Let
it be granted that an idea of an olive-tree is indeed to be given
us in a special manner; how, and by what language, this idea
is to be conveyed, are questions on which we shall find the
world of artists again divided; and it was this division which
I wished especially to illustrate by reference to the mosaics of
St. Mark’s.

Now the main characteristics of an olive-tree are these. It
has sharp and slender leaves of a greyish green, nearly grey
on the under surface, and resembling, but somewhat smaller
than, those of our common willow. Its fruit, when ripe, is
black and lustrous; but of course so small, that, unless in great
quantity, it is not conspicuous upon the tree. Its trunk and
branches are peculiarly fantastic in their twisting, showing
their fibres at every turn; and the trunk is often hollow, and
even rent into many divisions like separate stems, but the extremities
are exquisitely graceful, especially in the setting on
of the leaves; and the notable and characteristic effect of the
tree in the distance is of a rounded and soft mass or ball of
downy foliage.

§ XV. Supposing a modern artist to address himself to the
rendering of this tree with his best skill: he will probably
draw accurately the twisting of the branches, but yet this will
hardly distinguish the tree from an oak: he will also render
the color and intricacy of the foliage, but this will only confuse
the idea of an oak with that of a willow. The fruit, and the
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peculiar grace of the leaves at the extremities, and the fibrous
structure of the stems, will all be too minute to be rendered
consistently with his artistical feeling of breadth, or with the
amount of labor which he considers it dexterous and legitimate
to bestow upon the work: but, above all, the rounded and monotonous
form of the head of the tree will be at variance with
his ideas of “composition;” he will assuredly disguise or break
it, and the main points of the olive-tree will all at last remain
untold.

§ XVI. Now observe, the old Byzantine mosaicist begins
his work at enormous disadvantage. It is to be some one
hundred and fifty feet above the eye, in a dark cupola; executed
not with free touches of the pencil, but with square pieces
of glass; not by his own hand, but by various workmen under
his superintendence; finally, not with a principal purpose of
drawing olive-trees, but mainly as a decoration of the cupola.
There is to be an olive-tree beside each apostle, and their stems
are to be the chief lines which divide the dome. He therefore
at once gives up the irregular twisting of the boughs hither
and thither, but he will not give up their fibres. Other trees
have irregular and fantastic branches, but the knitted cordage
of fibres is the olive’s own. Again, were he to draw the leaves
of their natural size, they would be so small that their forms
would be invisible in the darkness; and were he to draw them
so large as that their shape might be seen, they would look like
laurel instead of olive. So he arranges them in small clusters
of five each, nearly of the shape which the Byzantines give to
the petals of the lily, but elongated so as to give the idea of leafage
upon a spray; and these clusters,—his object always, be it
remembered, being decoration not less than representation,—he
arranges symmetrically on each side of his branches, laying
the whole on a dark ground most truly suggestive of the heavy
rounded mass of the tree, which, in its turn, is relieved against
the gold of the cupola. Lastly, comes the question respecting
the fruit. The whole power and honor of the olive is in its
fruit; and, unless that be represented, nothing is represented.
But if the berries were colored black or green, they would be
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totally invisible; if of any other color, utterly unnatural, and
violence would be done to the whole conception. There is but
one conceivable means of showing them, namely to represent
them as golden. For the idea of golden fruit of various kinds
was already familiar to the mind, as in the apples of the Hesperides,
without any violence to the distinctive conception of
the fruit itself.51 So the mosaicist introduced small round
golden berries into the dark ground between each leaf, and his
work was done.

IV.

Mosaics of Olive-tree and Flowers.

§ XVII. On the opposite plate, the uppermost figure on the
left is a tolerably faithful representation of the general effect
of one of these decorative olive-trees; the figure on the right
is the head of the tree alone, showing the leaf clusters, berries,
and interlacing of the boughs as they leave the stem. Each
bough is connected with a separate line of fibre in the trunk,
and the junctions of the arms and stem are indicated, down to
the very root of the tree, with a truth in structure which may
well put to shame the tree anatomy of modern times.

§ XVIII. The white branching figures upon the serpentine
band below are two of the clusters of flowers which form the
foreground of a mosaic in the atrium. I have printed the
whole plate in blue, because that color approaches more nearly
than black to the distant effect of the mosaics, of which the
darker portions are generally composed of blue, in greater
quantity than any other color. But the waved background in
this instance, is of various shades of blue and green alternately,
with one narrow black band to give it force; the whole being
intended to represent the distant effect and color of deep grass,
and the wavy line to express its bending motion, just as the
same symbol is used to represent the waves of water. Then
the two white clusters are representative of the distinctly visible
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herbage close to the spectator, having buds and flowers of
two kinds, springing in one case out of the midst of twisted
grass, and in the other out of their own proper leaves; the
clusters being kept each so distinctly symmetrical, as to form,
when set side by side, an ornamental border of perfect architectural
severity; and yet each cluster different from the next,
and every flower, and bud, and knot of grass, varied in form
and thought. The way the mosaic tesseræ are arranged, so as
to give the writhing of the grass blades round the stalks of the
flowers, is exceedingly fine.