18 THE STONES OF VENICE

lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labour of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,-barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sandbank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.

§ 3. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in anywise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.¹

The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years,² from the first establishment of a consular*

* I affectedly called it “consular” because the Ducal power was limited by the great council of the people, and often by two subordinate ministers. But see the clearer statement in my re-written history. [1879.]³

¹ [Ruskin, in one of the MS. drafts of this chapter, anticipates his answer to the question propounded again in § 6 below:-

“In every nation, I believe that changes of government are the expression rather than the cause of changes in character. They are the evidences, not the instruments, of its prosperity or distress; and the history of every people ought to be written with less regard to the events of which their government was the agent, than to the disposition of which it was the sign.”]

² [That is, from A.D. 421-the date commonly accepted for the foundation of Venice (but see note below to Appendix 1, p. 417)-to 1797, when General Bonaparte delivered his well-known ultimatum: “Io non voglio più Inquisitori, non voglio più Senato, saro un Attila per lo Stato Veneto.”]

³ [Later editions added the reference “St. Mark’s Rest, ch. v.,” where the outlines of Venetian history are again mapped out.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]