xxviii INTRODUCTION

it not that so many noble pictures must be destroyed first. These are what I fear I shall miss most when I come back to London, for I shall not now be within ten minutes’ drive of St. James’s Palace, and I shall have no pictures of the great schools near me. Here it is an infinite privilege to be able to walk out in the morning and to pay a visit to Titian, and, whenever the sun is too hot, to rest under a portico with Paul Veronese. I love Venetian pictures more and more, and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive,¹ so natural, everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called composition, done here by instinct and only called truth.

“I don’t know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just over their heads, occupying the place which in a London countinghouse would be occupied by the commercial almanack, a glorious Bonifazio-Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; and in a less honourable corner three old directors of the Zecca, very mercantile-looking men indeed, counting money also, like the living ones, only a little more living, painted by Tintoret, not to speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana which no one ever looks at.² I wonder when the European mind will again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted to be hung, but to be seen. I only saw these by accident, having been detained in Venice by some obliging person, who abstracted some [jewelry]³ ... and brought me thereby into various relations with the respectable body of people who live at the wrong end of the Bridge of Sighs, the police, whom, in spite of traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the Italy. The present police appear to act on exactly contrary principles: yours found the purse and banished the loser; these don’t find the jewels, and won’t let me go away. I am afraid no punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who steal time.

“However, I hope now to be able to leave Venice on Monday next, and I do not intend to pause, except for rests, on my road home. I trust, therefore, to be in England about the 10th of next month, when I shall come to St. James’s Place the very first day I can get into London. At first I go home to my present house-close to my father’s-beyond Camberwell; I could not live any more in Park Street, with a dead brick wall opposite my windows. But I hope,

¹ This word was misprinted “instructive” in Igdrasil and Ruskiniana.

² For these pictures, see below, Venetian Index, p. 390.

³ See Vol. X. pp. xli.-xlii.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]