306 APPENDIX, 11

sculptured men become meagre, real men obese. The landscape is highly wrought, with grass, trees, and architecture, all delicate, but utterly without invention-water of Jordan comes out of a cave and runs under the bank on which Baptist stands, entirely undermining it. Three naked children with wings stand on the opposite shore-a pretty group of admiring Cupids. On the other side, another baptism of some infidel; there is a Turk in background-and a naked woman: the person baptizing is an old man fully draped. The baptized person bows over an altar with Roman rams’ heads at angles-query, is this unction instead of baptism?

Take care to explain the thin, sharp-edged character on which all Renaissance sculpture depends for its piquancy, especially in these small pictures, which are generally capital. The more Renaissance sculpture resembles painting the better it always is. Consider this: Why had they such great painters and in Venice no great sculptors at this period?¹

§ 15. Pietro Bernardo (Frari)²

In the last, or seventh chapel counting from left to right in the Frari, is a tomb composed merely of a sarcophagus sustained on brackets, under which is a tablet with this inscription:-

“Hieronymo. patri. Laurentio. patruo viris illustris et optimis patrie benemeritis. Petrus Bernardus pietatis cultor suorum memor hoc consecravit. Ob. M.D. Mensis Apr.”

The monument is, however, evidently a work far anterior to the sixteenth century, but having been left uninscribed, and only bearing on its brackets the Bernardo shield, seems to have been taken possession of in the name of his father and uncle by this Peter Bernardo in a manner more remarkable for filial piety than common honesty. We cannot therefore use this monument in positive evidence, but a glance at its delicate chiselling will show it to be at all events late fourteenth century work, perhaps even of the beginning of the fifteenth, and it is therefore remarkable as one of the latest occurrences of simple form of sarcophagus, as well as of the sweet religious feeling of the earlier ages. In its centre the Madonna and Christ are seated under a shell canopy, the Christ holding a bird in His hand. Saint Joseph, and a female figure with a book, are at the sides of the throne, and two very noble male figures (one the Baptist) are at the angles. The draperies are well cast, though not fine in feeling (explain difference between a well cast and a feeling drapery). Those over the knees of the Madonna are remarkably elaborate and well worth careful study, and the leaf plinth which crowns the sarcophagus is one of the most exquisitely turned in Venice, but slightly thin and meagre in effort from below. Its profile [reference to intended illustration] is remarkable chiefly for the sharp angle at the base on which the furrows of the leafage falling cut it into a somewhat ungraceful serrated edge, one of the chief reasons of the meagreness of the moulding. The heads of the leaves at the top are exquisitely touched, and when they meet each other cut through, in the manner of the Isidore tomb, but the breadth and beauty of the Isidore

¹ [Ruskin partly worked out this subject in ch. ii. §§ 90-91, pp. 118-119 above.]

² [See, once more, p. 108 above; see also p. 379 below.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]