168 THE STONES OF VENICE

inserted again in the walls of the new buildings, with more or less attempt at symmetry; fragments of friezes and mouldings being often used in the same manner; so that the mode of their original employment can only be seen in St. Mark’s, the Fondaco de’ Turchi, Braided House, and one or two others. The most remarkable point about them is, that the groups of beasts or birds on each side of the small pillars bear the closest possible resemblance to the group of Lions over the gate of Mycenæ; and the whole of the ornamentation of that gate, as far as I can judge of it from drawings,¹ is so like Byzantine sculpture, that I cannot help sometimes suspecting the original conjecture of the French antiquarians, that it was a work of the Middle Ages, to be not altogether indefensible. By far the best among the sculptures at Venice are those consisting of groups thus arranged; the first figure in Plate 11 is one of those used on St. Mark’s,² and, with its chain of wreathen work round it, is very characteristic of the finest kind, except that the intermediate trunk or pillar often branches into luxuriant leafage, usually of the vine, so that the whole ornament seems almost composed from the words of Ezekiel [xvii. 3-6]-”A great eagle with great wings, long-winged, full of feathers, which had divers colours, came unto Lebanon, and took the highest branch of the cedar: He cropped off the top of his young twigs; and carried it into a city of traffic; he set it in a city of merchants. He took also of the seed of the land, ... and it grew, and became a spreading vine of low stature, whose branches turned towards him, and the roots thereof were under him.”

§ 28. The groups of contending and devouring animals are always much ruder in cutting, and take somewhat the place in Byzantine sculpture which the lower grotesques do in the Gothic; true, though clumsy, grotesques being sometimes mingled among them, as four bodies joined to one head

¹ [As, for instance, in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens and Other Places in Greece, 1830.]

² [Its position may be seen in Plate D: see p. 116, above. The design was used on the cover of the early issues of The Stones of Venice: see the facsimile opposite p. liv. in Vol. IX.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]