26 THE STONES OF VENICE

Ducale.”¹ The patriarchal church,* inconsiderable in size and mean in decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its name, as well as its site, are probably unknown to the greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national efforts, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks,² supported by the vast organisation of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice,† who now rests beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his tomb.

§ 10. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto.³ We find, on the one hand, a deep

* Appendix 4: “San Pietro di Castello”⁴ [p. 419].

† Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, § 5.⁵

¹ [In St. Mark’s Rest, §§ 90, 91, Ruskin reads a different inner meaning into the “Ducal Church” of Venice. The main function of St. Mark’s, he there says, was something “more than of our St. George’s at Windsor.... There was a greater Duke than her Doge, for Venice; and ... she built, for her two Dukes, each their palace, side by side.”]

² [The Church of the Frari, founded by the Franciscans in 1250; and that of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, founded by the Dominicans in 1234; for the latter foundation, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 51.]

³ [The foundation of Venice was laid, it will be remembered, on the island of the Deep Stream (Rivo Alto, Rialto): see Appendix 1, p. 417, below, and St. Mark’s Rest, ch. iii.]

⁴ [In the 1879 (Travellers’) Edition, which did not include the appendices, this note ran as follows:-

“‘San Pietro di Castello.’ See notice in the Handbook Index.”

The first volume of the “Travellers’ Edition” was published before the second, and Ruskin presumably intended to include in the Venetian Index of the latter the account of San Pietro. This, however, was not done, and in the 1884 and later issues of the “Travellers’ Edition” the words were omitted.]

⁵ [The 1884 and later issues of the “Travellers’ Edition” contained the following supplement to this note:-

“His tomb is in the northern aisle of S. Giovanni e Paolo. See § 40, and vol. iii. ch. ii. § 70.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]