74 THE STONES OF VENICE

having left enough to enable us to imagine and lament what they destroyed. Of this irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter;¹ meantime, I wish only to fix in the reader’s mind the succession of periods of alterations as firmly and simply as possible.²

§ 6. We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly stated to be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the fourteenth, and the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no difficulty in distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the Byzantine; but there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how long, during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, additions were made to the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily distinguished from the work of the eleventh century, being purposely executed in the same manner. Two of the most important pieces of evidence on this point are, a mosaic in the south transept, and another over the northern door of the façade; the first representing the interior, the second the exterior of the ancient church.³

§ 7. It has just been stated that the existing building was consecrated⁴ by the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to that of consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what appears to have been one of the best arranged and most successful impostures ever attempted by the clergy of the Romish Church. The body of St. Mark had, without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976; but the revenues of the church depended too much upon the devotion excited by these relics to permit the confession of their loss. The following is the account

¹ [See below, p. 139.]

² [See the Circular respecting Memorial Studies of St. Mark’s (in the volume containing St. Mark’s Rest) where Ruskin emphasises the antiquity of much of the existing building. The visitor finds it hard to realise, he says, “that he is actually standing before the very shafts and stones that were set on their foundations here while Harold the Saxon stood by the grave of the Confessor under the fresh-raised vaults of the first Norman Westminster Abbey, of which now a single arch only remains standing.”]

³ [The mosaic in the south transept, Ruskin proceeds to describe (§ 8); the other-over the Door of St. Alipius-is described and illustrated in Dr. Alexander Robertson’s Bible of St. Mark, 1898, p. 68.]

⁴ [In his copy for revision Ruskin here inserts the words “in completion.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]