INTRODUCTION xli

wrote,¹ “in which I take so much pride;” and in the same place he gives an interesting account of the photographing of the inscription, and of the help rendered therein by Antonio (“Toni”), Rawdon Brown’s gondolier. A facsimile of the inscription has been given in Vol. XXI. (p. 269), and it is twice printed in this volume (pp. 308, 417).

“VENICE, 7th March, ’77.-I must content myself with an evening word now-sealed before your morning note comes-for my Venetian history requires my unbroken thoughts in the morning. It is going to be very interesting, I think, because I find out so much that other historians can’t in the art.

“I’ve had a strange piece of good fortune to begin with, in discovering, on the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto (the first built in Venice, but supposed to have been entirely destroyed and rebuilt), an inscription of the ninth century which nobody knew of. It stared them in the face, if they looked up, under the church gable; but they never did, and the best antiquary in Venice, the Prefect Samedo of St. Mark’s Library, accepted from me to-day, in amazement, a photograph, clear in every letter, of the Merchants of Venice motto in the ninth century !-which not an historian of the literally hundreds who have written of Venice ever read.”

Ruskin, during this winter at Venice, was the centre of a large circle of friends and pupils. He especially enjoyed making the acquaintance, through an introduction from Professor Norton, of Professor C. H. Moore of Harvard University. Mr. Moore was his companion on many an expedition in the lagoons; and in Venice itself they sketched and studied in the Academy together. He met also two Oxford pupils, Mr. J. Reddie Anderson, whom he set to work on Carpaccio, with results included in this volume (pp. 370 seq.); “and Mr. Whitehead-so much nicer they all are,’ he wrote in a private letter, ‘than I was at their age.’”² Mr. Caird, too, who was helping Ruskin with work at Florence, came to Venice at the same time. Then there was his pupil and assistant, J. W. Bunney, for him to set to work on further pictures and records of Venice. “Two young artists were brought into his circle, during that winter-both Venetians, and both singularly interesting men: Giacomo Boni, the copo d’opera of the Ducal Palace, who was doing his best to preserve, instead of ‘restoring,’ the ancient sculptures; and Angelo Alessandri, a painter of more than usual seriousness of aim and sympathy with the fine qualities of the old masters.”² Ruskin employed Signor Alessandri to make

¹ Postscript to “The Ballad of Santa Zita” in Roadside Songs of Tuscany (see a later volume of this edition). See also Fors Clavigera, Letter 76, § 16.

² W. G. Collingwood’s Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 323.

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