VII. DIVINE RIGHT 275

resolve themselves, on closer inquiry, into an appalled record of the fact that she would actually not eat her meat with her fingers, but applied it to her mouth with “certain two-pronged instruments,”*-(of gold, indeed, but the luxurious sin, in Venetian eyes, was evidently not in the metal, but the prong); and that she indulged herself greatly in the use of perfumes: especially about her bed, for which whether to praise her, as one would an English housewife for sheets laid up in lavender, or to cry haro upon her, as the “stranger who flattereth,” † I know not, until I know better the reason of the creation of perfume itself, and of its use in Eastern religion and delight-“All thy garments smell of myrrh, aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces whereby thou hast made me glad”¹-fading and corrupting at last into the incense of the mass, and the extrait de Millefleurs of Bond Street. What I do know is, that there was no more sacred sight to me, in ancient Florence, than the Spezieria of the Monks of Santa Maria Novella,² with its precious vials of sweet odours, each illuminated with the little picture of the flower from which it had truly been distilled-and yet, that in its loaded air one remembered that the flowers had grown in the fields of the Decameron.³

87. But this also I know, and more surely, that the beautiful work done in St. Mark’s during the Greek girl’s reign in Venice first interpreted to her people’s hearts, and made legible to their eyes, the law of Christianity in its eternal harmony with the laws of the Jew and of the

* “Cibos digitis non tangebat, sed quibusdam fuscinulis aureis et bidentibus suo ori applicabat.” (Petrus Damianus, quoted by Dandolo.4)

† Proverbs vii. 5 and 17.

¹ [Psalms xlv. 8.]

² [See Ruskin’s description of the Spezieria (which still exists) in Vol. IV. p. 352 n.; Vol. XII. p. 251; and Præterita, ii. § 127.]

³ [Ruskin in his copy writes in the margin here “Explain.” The passage describes the mingled impressions of the place; on the one hand, derived from its exquisite neatness and fragrance, as if the herbs and leaves distilled by the monks “had gathered the sunbeams of Florence into their life” (Præterita); on the other hand, reminiscent, in its over-loaded scents, of those fields above Florence in which Boccaccio laid the scene of the Decameron.]

⁴ [Andreæ Danduli, Chronicon Venetum, ch. viii., pt. iii. at vol. xii. p. 247 of Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (Milan, 1728).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]