428 APPENDIX, 8

pertaining to the matter immediately in hand; but I have left them, as they will be of no use hereafter.

“(Verona.) Comparing the arabesques and sculpture of the Duomo here with St. Mark’s, the first thing that strikes one is the low relief, the second the greater motion and spirit, with infinitely less grace and science. With the Byzantines, however rude the cutting, every line is lovely, and the animals or men are placed in any attitudes which secure ornamental effect, sometimes impossible ones, always severe, restrained, or languid. With the Romanesque workmen all the figures show the effort (often successful) to express energetic action; hunting chiefly, much fighting, and both spirited; some of the dogs running capitally, straining to it, and the knights hitting hard, while yet the faces and drawing are in the last degree barbarous. At Venice all is graceful, fixed, or languid; the Eastern torpor is in every line, the mark of a school formed on severe traditions, and keeping to them, and never likely or desirous to rise beyond them, but with an exquisite sense of beauty, and much solemn religious faith.

“If the great outer archivolt of St. Mark’s is Byzantine, the law is somewhat broken by its busy domesticity; figures engaged in every trade, and in the preparation of viands of all kinds; a crowded kind of London Christmas scene, interleaved (literally) by the superb balls of leafage, unique in sculpture; but even this is strongly opposed to the wild war and chase passion of the Lombard. Farther, the Lombard building is as sharp, precise, and accurate, as that of St. Mark’s is careless. The Byzantines seem to have been too lazy to put their stones together; and, in general, my first impression on coming to Verona, after four months in Venice, is of the exquisitely neat masonry and perfect feeling here; a style of Gothic formed by a combination of Lombard surface ornament with Pisan Gothic, than which nothing can possibly be more chaste, pure, or solemn.”

I have said much of the shafts of the entrance to the crypt of St. Zeno;* the following note of the sculptures on the archivolt above them is to our present purpose:-

“It is covered by very light but most effective bas-reliefs of jesting subjects,-two cocks carrying on their shoulders a long staff, to which a fox (?) is tied by the legs, hanging down between them: the strut of the foremost cock, lifting one leg at right angles to the other, is delicious. Then a stag hunt, with a centaur horseman¹ drawing a bow; the arrow has gone clear through the stag’s throat, and is sticking there. Several capital hunts with dogs, with fruit trees between, and birds in them; the leaves, considering the early time, singularly well set, with the edges outwards, sharp, and deep cut; snails and frogs filling up the intervals, as if suspended in the air, with some saucy puppies on their hind-legs, two or three nondescript beasts; and, finally, on the centre of one of the arches on the south side, an elephant and castle,-a very strange elephant, yet cut as if the carver had seen one.”

Observe this elephant and castle; we shall meet with him farther north.²

* The lower group in Plate 17. [See pp. 130, 131, 357; and cf. p. xxxiii.]

¹ [The MS. diary reads “huntsman.”]

² [See below, p. 433, a reference to the same subject on the cathedral of Lyons. The sign of the “Elephant and Castle” would have had some special interest to Ruskin in connection with the public-house, a well-known landmark to dwellers, like him, in South London suburbs.]

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