302 APPENDIX, 11

(it is curious how often this is the case in Venetian tombs). She holds a book open, on which the infant lays its hand, as it sits stiffly upon her knee. Her throne has a circular back, behind which four tiny angels-heads and shoulders only-hold up a curtain which they peep over. The throne is a very cumbrous piece of upholstery, but very valuable as a piece of evidence; its arms are ornamented by a series of square panels separated by the running mouldings [again reference to an intended plate] crowned by [a finial], exactly the same as that which crowns the Ducal Palace; these panels being filled with roses, also worked like those of the Ducal Palace.

§ 11. A Nameless Tomb (about A.D. 1380: Frari)

It is worth while, before we leave the Frari for the present, to glance at the tomb on the south wall of the third chapel counting from the left, on that next the choir, on the north. It is a plain sarcophagus, with a Madonna and Christ in the centre, and two angels at the angles.

At first the spectator, from the excessive hardness of the draperies and heaviness of features in the figures-the infant looking like a small Henry VIII., ill cut-might suppose this an early tomb, but a glance at the luxuriantly contorted leaves of its bracket will undeceive him. I have only brought [him to it], so that he may see a piece of cheap and hurried mediæval work, a species which, I am grieved to say, occurs oftener in Venice than elsewhere. The precise date of the monument is of little consequence, it being evidently one of the latest of the fourteenth century; neither considering its commonness, need we inquire anxiously to whom it was erected; it has no inscription, and as the shield on its brackets, now colourless, may belong to any one of the three families, Ghigi, Lioni, or Riva, any curiosity we may feel about it is little likely to be gratified. But it is worth noticing as an example of the way in which the idea of the marble curtains,¹ invented by the Pisan sculptors, had taken the fancy of the Italians, just as the veiled vestal did that of Londoners in 1851. There was in this tomb no proper opportunity of introducing it, as it has neither recumbent statue nor canopy; but its vulgar sculptor, thinking the curtains and rod the main things, and their use of very little consequence, has hung them up at the back of the Madonna’s chair, and put two diminutive angels peeping at her from behind them ... [Here follows a notice of various details, not intelligible without the intended illustrations.] Every part of the monument bears witness alike to the sculptor’s plagiarism of thought and idleness in execution.

§ 12. Jacopo Cavalli (A.D. 1384: SS. Giovanni e Paolo)²

It is a tomb of a very different type from any we have yet met with, and had it escaped injury, one of the most important in Venice; but its three principal statues have been broken away, or rather removed, for there are no

¹ [See above, ch. ii. § 72, pp. 103-104, for remarks on the development of this motive in the monumental sculpture of Venice.]

² [See also above, ch. ii. § 69, p. 101.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]