VII. GOTHIC PALACES 301

characteristically at Venice; and we shall therefore pause on the threshold of this final change, to glance back upon, and gather together, those fragments of purer pointed architecture which were above noticed as the forlorn hopes of the Gothic assault.

The little Campiello San Rocco is entered by a sottoportico behind the Church of the Frari. Looking back, the upper traceries of the magnificent apse are seen towering above the irregular roofs and chimneys of the little square; and our lost Prout¹ was enabled to bring the whole subject into an exquisitely picturesque composition, by the fortunate occurrence of four quaint trefoiled windows in one of the houses on the right. These trefoils are among the most ancient efforts of Gothic art in Venice. I have given a rude sketch of them in Fig. 33. They are built entirely of brick, except the central shaft and capital, which are of Istrian stone. Their structure is the simplest possible; the trefoils being cut out of the radiating bricks which form the pointed arch, and the edge or upper limit of that pointed arch indicated by a roll moulding formed of cast bricks, in length of about a foot, and ground at the bottom so as to meet in one, as in Fig. 34. The capital of the shaft is one of the earliest transitional forms,* and observe

* See account of series of capitals in final Appendix.2

¹ [Prout had died of a stroke of apoplexy on February 9 or 10, 1852. Ruskin heard the news while he was writing this book at Venice, and thus refers to it in a letter to his father (February 17):-

“Strange-in my dressing room, I have on the opposite sides, ever since I came here, six plates from Turner and three of Prout; all now by dead men. I carried nobody else with me on this journey except some Albert Dürer. ... Apoplexy!-hardly the kind of man one would have expected to go that way. Poor little fellow! it will be long ere England sees the like of him again-little as she thought of him compared with her R.A.’s and Sir this-and-thats.”]

² [Appendix 10 (iii.) in the next volume.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]