III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 145

lords; and let him look at the head that is carved on the base of the tower,* still dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful.

§ 15. A head,-huge, inhuman, and monstrous,¹-leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant: yet let it be endured for that instant; for in that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot, and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty, until it melted away like the white cloud from the ancient field of Santa Maria Formosa.

§ 16. This head is one of many hundreds which disgrace the latest buildings of the city, all more or less agreeing in their expression of sneering mockery, in most cases enhanced by thrusting out the tongue. Most of them occur upon the bridges, which were among the very last works undertaken by the republic, several, for instance, upon the Bridge of Sighs; and they are evidences of a delight in the contemplation of bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall. This spirit of idiotic mockery is, as I have said, the most striking characteristic of the last period of the Renaissance, which, in consequence of the character thus imparted to its sculpture, I have called grotesque; but it must be our immediate task, and it will be a most interesting one,² to distinguish between this base grotesqueness, and that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination, which was above noticed as one of the chief elements of the Northern Gothic mind. Nor is this a question of interesting speculation merely: for the distinction between the true and false

* The keystone of the arch on its western side facing the canal.

¹ [A reminiscence of Virgil’s description of the Cyclops-“Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens” (Æn. iii. 658). For another reference to the head, see below, p. 162.]

² [The “Travellers’ Edition” here has a footnote: “See Appendix I.,” which in that edition consisted of §§ 52-67, below.]

XI. K

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