150 THE STONES OF VENICE

the top of the church is Venice crowned, between Justice and Temperance, Justice holding a pair of grocer’s scales, of iron, swinging in the wind. There is a two-necked stone eagle (the Barbaro crest), with a copper crown, in the centre of the pediment. A huge statue of a Barbaro in armour, with a fantastic head-dress, over the central door; and four Barbaros in niches, two on each side of it, strutting statues, in the common stage postures of the period,-Jo. Maria Barbaro, sapiens ordinum; Marinus Barbaro, Senator (reading a speech in a Ciceronian attitude); Franc. Barbaro, legatus in classe (in armour, with high-heeled boots, and looking resolutely fierce); and Carolus Barbaro, sapiens ordinum: the decorations of the façade being completed by two trophies, consisting of drums, trumpets, flags, and cannon; and six plans, sculptured in relief, of the towns of Zara, Candia, Padua, Rome, Corfu, and Spalatro.

§ 22. When the traveller has sufficiently considered the meaning of this facade, he ought to visit the Church of St. Eustachio, remarkable for the dramatic effect of the group of sculpture on its façade, and then the Church of the Ospedaletto (see Index, under head Ospedaletto), noticing, on his way, the heads on the foundations of the Palazzo Corner della Regina, and the Palazzo Pesaro, and any other heads carved on the modern bridges, closing with those on the Bridge of Sighs.

He will then have obtained a perfect idea of the style and feeling of the Grotesque Renaissance.¹ I cannot pollute this volume by any illustration of its worst forms, but the head turned to the front, on the right-hand in the opposite Plate [3], will give the general reader an idea of its most

palace; while its possessors-two old men, brothers, the last of the Barbaros, live in one of the garrets on the fourth story. There is reason enough for all this, as I shall show in my book.

“In the little square at the side of our house there is a church, Sta. Maria Zobenigo, and in front of it, instead of saints or sacred sculptures, there are four large niches, in the most conspicuous divisions of the architecture, filled by four statues of the Barbaros, and a fifth over the door.

“So they have been brought to their garrets justly.”]

¹ [Here the “Travellers’ Edition” stops, resuming at § 39, below.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]