I. THE QUARRY 33

ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus saigement se gouverne, et où le service de Dieu est le plus sollempnellement faict: et encores qu’il y peust bien avoir d’aultres faultes, si croy je que Dieu les a en ayde pour la reverence qu’ilz portent au service de l’Eglise.”*

§ 16. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons. Observe, first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of Venice: of which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with some glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real life had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression instantly made on Commynes’ mind by the distinction between the older palaces and those built “within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their fronts.”

On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces which so struck the French ambassador.† He was right in his notice of the distinction. There had indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the fifteenth century; and a change of some importance to us moderns: we English owe to it our St. Paul’s Cathedral,¹ and Europe in general owes to it the utter degradation or destruction of her schools of architecture, never since revived. But that the reader may understand this, it is necessary that he should have

* Mémoires de Commynes, liv. [book] vii. ch. xviii.²

† Appendix 6: “Renaissance Ornaments” [p. 425].

¹ [For Ruskin’s dislike of St. Paul’s, see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. pp. 67, 152, and below, pp. 44, 90, 245.]

² [“Placed between the two ambassadors, the middle being the most honourable place in Italy, I was conducted through the principal street, which they call the Grand Canal, and it is so wide that galleys frequently cross one another; indeed I have seen vessels of four hundred tons or more ride at anchor just by the houses. It is the fairest and best-built street, I think, in the world, and goes quite through the city; the houses are very large and lofty, and built of good stone; the old ones are all painted; those of about a hundred years’ standing are faced with white marble from Istria (which is about a hundred miles from Venice), and inlaid with porphyry and serpentine.... It is the most triumphant city that I have ever seen, the most respectful to all ambassadors and strangers, governed with the greatest wisdom, and serving God with the most solemnity; so that, though in other things they might be faulty, I believe God blesses them for the reverence they show in the service of the Church” (The Memoirs of Philip de Commynes, Bohn’s edition, 1856, ii. 170).]

IX. C

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