44 THE STONES OF VENICE

of the fifteenth century; that is to say, over the precise period which I have described as the central epoch of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year 1418; Foscari became doge five years later, and in his regin the first marked signs appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe de Commynes notices as above, the change to which London owes St. Paul’s Rome St. Peter’s, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be their noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of every art she has since practised.

§ 35. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality in existing architecture all over the world. (Compare Seven Lamps, chap. ii.) All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the mainland into the meaningless ornamentation of Certosa of Pavia¹ and the Cathedral of Como (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della Carta² and wild crockets of St. Mark’s. This corruption of all architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked the state of religion over all Europe,-the peculiar degardation of the Romanist superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which brought about the Reformation.

§ 36. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England; Rationalists in France and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the heresies of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he injured his own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one of its noblest exercises, and materially diminished his

¹ [For other criticisms of the Certosa, see Vol. VIII. p. 52 n., and below, ch. xx. § 14, p. 263; and for the Cathedral of Como, see also p. 263.]

² [For the Porta della Carta, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. i. § 15; and for the “wild crockets,” ibid., § 14, and Plate 42.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]