52 THE STONES OF VENICE

portraiture of the dead; and, secondly, such utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an extreme of intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his breast, could have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old man’s countenance-unmajestic once, indeed, but at least sanctified by the solemnities of death-could have stayed his hand, as he reached the bend of the grey forehead, and measured out the last veins of it at so much the zecchin?¹

I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much talent should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this base and senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.

But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This lying monument to a dishonoured doge, this culminating pride of the Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in its testimony to the character of its sculptor. He was banished from Venice for forgery in 1487.*

§ 44. I have more to say about this convict’s work hereafter; but I pass, at present, to the second, slighter, but yet more interesting piece of evidence, which I promised.

The Ducal palace has two principal facades; one towards the sea, the other towards the Piazzetta. The seaward side, and, as far as its seventh main arch inclusive, the Piazzetta side, is work of the early part of the fourteenth century, some of it perhaps even earlier; while the rest of the Piazzetta side is of the fifteenth. The difference in age has been

* Selvatico, p. 221.²

¹ [On this subject, see Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. i., Vol. VIII. pp. 47, 53.]

² [For a reply to a criticism of this connection between the style of the monument and the character of its sculptor, see letterpress to Plate 12 of the Examples of Venetian Architecture (vol. xi. of this ed.). The sculptor’s name was Leopardo.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]