150 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

She has not yet the least notion of making anybody stand rightly on their feet; you see how St. Leonard and St. Christopher point their toes. Clearly, until we know how to do better than this, in perspective and such matters, our painting cannot come to much. Accordingly, all the Venetian painting of any importance you are now to see in the Academy is subsequent to these sculptures. But these are, fortunately, dated-1378 and 1384. Twenty years more will bring us out of the fourteenth century. And therefore, broadly, all the painter’s art of Venice begins in the fifteenth; and we may as well at once take note that it ends with the sixteenth. There are only these two hundred years of painting in Venice. Now, without much pause in the corridor, though the old well in the cortile has its notabilities if one had time,-up the spiral stairs, and when you have entered the gallery and got your admission tickets-(quite a proper arrangement that you should pay for them,-if I were a Venetian prefect, you should pay a good deal more for leave to come to Venice at all, that I might be sure you cared to come)-walk straight forward till you descend the steps into the first room in the arrangement of the Academy Catalogue.¹ On your right, at the bottom of the steps, you see a large picture (21²) in a series of compartments, of which the central one, the Crowning of the Virgin, was painted by a Venetian vicar (vicar of St. Agnes) in 1381. A happy, faithful, cheerful vicar he must have been; and any vicar, rector, or bishop who could do such a thing now would be a blessing to his parish, and delight to his diocese. Symmetrical, orderly, gay, and in the heart of it nobly grave, this work of the old Plebanus has much in it of the future methods of Venetian composition. The

¹ [The directions here no longer apply, as Room I. in the old arrangement, which Ruskin describes, is now Room XX. The picture next mentioned happens, however, to be in Room I. of the new arrangement (Room XVI. of the old arrangement).]

² [The number (here as throughout the Catalogue) is altered in accordance with the present (1905) numbering of the Gallery. The central picture is signed “MCCCLXXXI STEFANUS PLEBANUS SANCTE AGNET PINXIT.” The signature, however, is stated in the official Catalogue to be apocryphal. For another mention of the picture see, below, p. 185.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]