306 THE STONES OF VENICE

remarkable phenomena in the history of Venetian art. If it had occurred suddenly, and at an earlier period, it might have been traced partly to the hatred of the Greeks consequent upon the treachery of Manuel Comnenus,* and the fatal war to which it led;¹ but the change takes place gradually, and not till a much later period. I hoped to have been able to make some careful inquiries into the habits of domestic life of the Venetians before and after the dissolution of their friendly relations with Constantinople; but the labour necessary for the execution of my more immediate task has entirely prevented this: and I must be content to lay the succession of the architectural styles plainly before the reader, and leave the collateral questions to the investigation of others; merely noting this one assured fact, that the root of all that is greatest in Christian art is struck in the thirteenth century;² that the temper of that century is the life-blood of all manly work

* The bitterness of feeling with which the Venetians must have remembered this, was probably the cause of their magnificent heroism in the final siege of the city under Dandolo, and, partly, of the excesses which disgraced their victory.3 The conduct of the allied army of the Crusaders on this occasion cannot, however, be brought in evidence of general barbarism in the thirteenth century: first, because the masses of the crusading armies were in great part composed of the refuse of the nations of Europe; and, secondly, because such a mode of argument might lead us to inconvenient conclusions respecting ourselves, so long as the horses of the Austrian cavalry are stabled in the cloister of the convent which contains the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci.4 See Appendix 3, Vol. III., “Austrian Government in Italy.”

¹ [In 1171 the Emperor Manuel, in consequence of attacks by the Venetians upon the Lombards, had ordered all the Venetians in his dominions to be arrested and their property to be sequestrated. The Republic regarded this as an act of treachery; but for the other side, see Finlay’s History of Greece, 1877, iii. 181. In the spring of 1172 an expedition set sail under the Doge Vital Michieli II. to exact reparation. After some initial success, pestilence broke out in the Venetian fleet, and the Doge ultimately returned home with only seventeen of the one hundred galleys with which he had set out: he was put to death by the infuriated populace.]

² [Compare Eagle’s Nest, § 239, where Ruskin says that “whatever else we may have advanced in, there is no dispute that, in the great arts, we have steadily, since that thirteenth century, declined,” and refers to his “idea of writing the story of that century, at least in England.”]

³ [For Enrico Dandolo and his capture of Constantinople in 1204, see Vol. IX. p. 20 n. An account of the excesses committed by the Crusaders may be read in Finlay, l. c., iii. 270.]

⁴ [S. M. delle Grazie at Milan; the fresco, sadly damaged, is on the wall of the Refectory.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]