THIRD, OR RENAISSANCE PERIOD

CHAPTER I

EARLY RENAISSANCE¹

§ 1. I TRUST that the reader has been enabled by the preceding chapters, to form some conception of the magnificence of the streets of Venice during the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet by all this magnificence she was not supremely distinguished above the other cities of the Middle Ages. Her early edifices have been preserved to our times by the circuit of her waves; while continual recurrences of ruin have defaced the glory of her sister cities. But such fragments as are still left in their lonely squares, and in the corners of their streets, so far from being inferior to the buildings of Venice, are even more rich, more finished, more admirable in invention, more exuberant in beauty.² And although, in the North of Europe, civilisation was less advanced, and the knowledge of the arts was more confined to the ecclesiastical orders, so that, for domestic architecture, the period of perfection must be there placed much later than in Italy, and considered as extending to the middle of the fifteenth century; yet, as each city reached a certain point in civilisation, its streets became decorated with the same magnificence, varied only in style according to the

¹ [This chapter, with the omission of §§ 5-14 inclusive, forms ch. i of vol. ii. of the “Travellers’ Edition.”]

² [Ruskin, it will be remembered, deprecated the idea that he supposed “Venetian architecture the most noble of the schools of Gothic”: see Seven Lamps, Preface, 2nd ed. (Vol. VIII. p. 12), where he adds that “the Gothic of Verona is far nobler than that of Venice, and that of Florence nobler than that of Verona.” See also the second letter in Appendix 13, Vol. X.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]