408 THE STONES OF VENICE

Venetian dialect now affecting the Latin, which is free from them in the earlier capitals.

§ 97. Third side. Destroyed;¹ but, from the copy, we find it has been Stultitia, Folly; and it is there represented simply as a man riding, a sculpture worth the consideration of the English residents who bring their horses to Venice. Giotto gives Stultitia a feather-cap, and club.² In early manuscripts he is always eating with one hand, and striking with the other; in later ones he has a cap and bells, or cap crested with a cock’s head, whence the word “coxcomb.”

§ 98. Fourth side. Destroyed, all but a book, which identifies it with the “Celestial Chastity” of the Renaissance copy; there represented as a woman pointing to a book, (connecting the convent life with the pursuit of literature?).

Spenser’s Chastity, Britomart, is the most exquisitely wrought of all his characters; but, as before noticed, she is not the chastity of the convent, but of wedded life.³

§ 99. Fifth side. Only a scroll is left;⁴ but, from the copy, we find it has been Honesty or Truth. Inscribed “HONESTATEM DILIGO.” It is very curious, that among all the Christian systems of the virtues which we have examined, we should find this one in Venice only.⁵

The Truth of Spenser, Una, is, after Chastity, the most exquisite character in the Faerie Queen.

§ 100. Sixth side. Falsehood. An old woman leaning on a crutch; and inscribed in the copy “FALSITAS IN ME SEMPER EST.” The Fidessa of Spenser, the great enemy of Una, or Truth, is far more subtly conceived, probably not without

¹ [Now restored; inscribed “Stultitia in me regnat.”]

² [Giotto’s fresco is in the Arena Chapel. As the reader will see by referring to the illustration in Giotto and his Works in Padua, “feather-cap” is an obvious emendation for the misreading of all previous editions “feather, cap.” Lord Lindsay (ii. 197) remarks that this figure of Folly, “looking upwards, with a club as if about to strike,” recalls the line of Horace-“Cœlum ipsum petimus stultitia” (Odes, i. 3, 38). Ruskin refers again to this capital and to Giotto’s fresco in his Review of Lord Lindsay, § 48 (Vol. XII.).]

³ [See above, § 62, p. 383.]

⁴ [Now restored; a man with an open scroll.]

⁵ [Curious, and, as Ruskin afterwards found special reason to perceive, significant.

See the accounts of his discovery of “the first words that Venice ever speaks aloud,” on an inscription upon the church of San Giacomo di Rialto-“Around this Temple, let the Merchant’s law be just, his weights true, and his covenants faithful;” Fors Clavigera, Letter 76 (notes and correspondence), and St. Mark’s Rest, § 131.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]