48 THE STONES OF VENICE

in the reader’s mind the epoch above indicated for the commencement of decline.

§ 40. I must again refer to the importance which I have above attached [§ 5] to the death of Carlo Zeno and the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The tomb of that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of the same general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the period, and it is one of the last which retains it. The classical element enters largely into its details, but the feeling of the whole is as yet unaffected. Like all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure above, and this figure is a faithful but tender portrait, wrought as far as it can be without painfulness, of the doge as he lay in death. He wears his Ducal robe and bonnet-his head is laid slightly aside upon his pillow-his hands are simply crossed as they fall. The face is emaciated, the features large, but so pure and lordly in their natural chiselling, that they must have looked like marble even in their animation. They are deeply worn away by thought and death; the veins on the temple branched and starting; the skin gathered in sharp folds; the brow high-arched and shaggy; the eyeball magnificently large; the curve of the lips just veiled by the light moustache at the side; the beard short, double, and sharp-pointed: all noble and quiet; the white sepulchral dust marking like light the stern the angles of the cheek and brow.

This tomb was sculptured in 1424,¹ and is thus described

¹ [This is a mistake; the date is 1423, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 70, where the tomb is again described; see also above, § 9, p. 26. On a sheet of the MS. of the present volume Ruskin gives the sculptors’ inscription in the following note:-

“Insist on large curtain and pole-pushed aside by small angels. Much worse cut altogether than I thought: Madonna at top. Six figures in upper inches of shrine, I know not what virtues below; figures in Roman armour at angles. Insist on violent crocketing all over, in Porta della Carta style and entire Renaissance character [sketches of plinths].

‘PETRUS MAGISTRI NICHOLAI DE FLORENCIA

ET JOHANNES MARTINI DE FESUNS

INFISERUNT HOC OPUS 1423.’

“The intense absurdity of the people-Lazari and others-who with this before their eyes, and the monument having these plinths and luxuriant

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