62 THE STONES OF VENICE

falls on a range of shafts whose bases are concealed by wooden panelling, and which sustain arches decorated in the most approved style of Renaissance upholstery, with stucco roses in squares under the soffits, and egg and arrow mouldings on the architraves, gilded, on a ground of spotty black and green, with a small pink-faced and black-eyed cherub on every keystone; the rest of the church being for the most part concealed either by dirty hangings, or dirtier whitewash, or dim pictures on warped and wasting canvas; all vulgar, vain, and foul.¹ Yet let us not turn back, for in the shadow of the apse our more careful glance shows us a Greek Madonna, pictured on a field of gold; and we feel giddy at the first step we make on the pavement, for it, also, is of Greek mosaic, waved like the sea,² and dyed like a dove’s neck.

§ 35. Nor are the original features of the rest of the edifice altogether indecipherable; the entire series of shafts marked in the ground plan on each side of the nave, from

¹ [The cathedral underwent elaborate and careful restoration at the expense of the Government in 1870.]

² [Ruskin had the same theory about the undulations in the old pavement of St. Mark’s, now put straight, he complains (see below, p. 116 n.), by Messrs. Salviati. When he was in Venice in 1851, his father sent him an extract from the Journal of Mrs. Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale), where the same suggestion is made. “The Ducal palace is so beautiful, it were worth while almost to cross the Alps to see that, and return home again: and St. Mark’s Church, whose mosaic paintings on the outside are surpassed by no work of art, delights one no less on entering with its numberless rarities, the flooring first, which is all paved with precious stones of the second rank, in small squares, not bigger than a playing-card and sometimes less. By the second rank in gems I mean, carnelian, agate, jasper, serpentine, and verd-antique; on which you place your feet without remorse, but not without a very odd sensation, when you find the ground undulated beneath them, to represent the waves of the sea, and perpetuate marine ideas, which prevail in everything at Venice” (Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, by Hester Lynch Piozzi, 2 vols. 1789, i. 152).

“I think,” wrote Ruskin in reply (Nov. 24, 1851), “she is quite right about the floor being to imitate waves in St. Mark’s. There is no reason for its settling when there is no weight. If it had settled so much under plain pavement what would it have done under the piers? I think it is a very beautiful intention, and that it was partly intended to be marked for such by the very curious mosaic of the Fat Lion on the Sea and the Lean Lion on the Sand, which in another manner warned Venice always to keep upon the waves.”

The excavations made in the crypt during recent years seem, however, to have disposed of the theory in the case of St. Mark’s. “The uneven, wavy form is due, not to any intent of imitating the waves of the sea, but to the fact that the pavement is supported by the crypt, and has settled into hollows corresponding to the cells of the vaulting which, being filled with loose material, are less rigid than the crown where no settlement has taken place” (T. Okey’s Venice, 1903, p. 241).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]