ORTO-PATERNIAN 397

the feeling with which Tintoret has relieved the glory round her head against the pure sky, than that which influenced Titian in encumbering his distance with architecture.

(1877. The whole picture has now been daubed over,-chiefly this lovely bit of sky, and is a ghastly ruin and eternal disgrace to modern Venice.)

The “Martyrdom of St. Agnes” was a lovely picture. It has been “restored” since I saw it.¹

OSPEDALETTO, CHURCH OF THE. The most monstrous example of the Grotesque Renaissance which there is in Venice; the sculptures on its façade representing masses of diseased figures and swollen fruit.

It is almost worth devoting an hour to the successive examination of five buildings, as illustrative of the last degradation of the Renaissance. San Moisè is the most clumsy, Santa Maria Zobenigo the most impious, St. Eustachio the most ridiculous, the Ospedaletto the most monstrous, and the head at Santa Maria Formosa the most foul.

OTHELLO, HOUSE OF, at the CARMINI. The researches of Mr. Brown into the origin of the play of Othello have, I think, determined that Shakespeare wrote on definite historical grounds; and that Othello may be in many points identified with Christopher Moro, the lieutenant of the republic at Cyprus in 1508. See Ragguagli su Marin Sanuto, i. 226.²

His palace was standing till very lately, a Gothic building of the fourteenth century, of which Mr. Brown possesses a drawing. It is now destroyed, and a modern square-windowed house built on its site. A statue, said to be a portrait of Moro, but a most paltry work, is set in a niche in the modern wall.

P

PANTALEONE, CHURCH OF ST. Said to contain a Paul Veronese; otherwise of no importance.³

PATERNIAN, CHURCH OF ST. Its little leaning tower⁴ forms an interesting

are too crowded above, and should be arranged as in the figure a below, where also the lie of the drapery is given. It casts no shadow, and is altogether poor and ineffective; yet the picture on the whole is grand and spacious; in the figures the blacks and reds are excessively violent in quantity, the former exceedingly cold. The little Madonna has a sphere or glory of light all about her; in Tintoret’s it is only about her head; but tenfold more expressive and heavenly from its being brought against the light of the sky in the most daring manner.”]

¹ [In the same church (first altar on the right) is the picture of “St. John the Baptist” by Cima da Conegliano, which Ruskin selected for the first example in his Educational Series at Oxford: see Catalogue of that series (where its lovely detail is dwelt upon); and Lectures on Art, § 150 (“the whole picture full of peace and intense faith and hope”).]

² [See Vol. X. p. 353 n.]

³ [The Veronese is in the second chapel on the right, “St. Pantaleone leading a Child;” for the painting of the roof, see St. Mark’s Rest, §§ 189-191.]

⁴ [Since pulled down; now the Savings Bank.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]