III. MURANO 65

in their sockets, and the curtains drawn into festoons, and a pasteboard crescent, gay with artificial flowers, has been attached to the capital of every pillar, in order, together with the gilt angles, to make the place look as much like Paradise as possible. If we return to-morrow we shall find it filled with woful groups of aged men and women, wasted and fever-struck, fixed in paralytic supplication, half-kneeling, half-crouched upon the pavement; bowed down, partly in feebleness, partly in a fearful devotion, with their grey clothes cast far over their faces, ghastly and settled into a gloomy animal misery, all but the glittering eyes and muttering lips.

Fit inhabitants, these, for what was once the garden of Venice, “a terrestrial Paradise,-a place of nymphs and demigods!”*

§ 39. We return, yet once again, on the following day. Worshippers and objects of worship, the sickly crowd and gilded angels, all are gone; and there, far in the apse, is seen the sad Madonna standing in her folded robe, lifting her hands in vanity of blessing.¹ There is little else to draw away our thoughts from the solitary image. An old wooden tablet, carved into a rude effigy of San Donato, which occupies the central niche in the lower part of the tribune, has an interest of its own, but is unconnected with the history of the older church. The faded frescoes of saints, which cover the upper tier of the wall of the apse, are also of comparatively recent date, much more the piece of Renaissance workmanship, shaft and entablature, above the altar which has

* “Luogo de’ ninfe e de’ semidei.”-M. Andrea Calmo, quoted by Mutinelli, Annali Urbani di Venezia (Venice, 1841), p. 362.

¹ [Elsewhere Ruskin instances the Madonna of Murano as a type of the Mater Dolorosa, distinguished from the Madonna Reine and the Madonna Nourrice: see Bible of Amiens, ch. iv. It had already been described by Lord Lindsay: “At Murano the mosaic in the tribune of the Duomo, executed about the middle of the twelfth century, is one of the most remarkable of the Byzantine revival-a single figure only, the Virgin, the Greek type-standing on a cushion of cloth of gold, alone in the field, and completely enveloped in her long blue robe; her hands are held forth appealingly towards the spectator, two large tear-drops hang on her cheek, settled sorrow dwells on every feature; the very spirit of the ‘Stabat Mater’ breathes through this affecting portraiture-the silent, searching look for sympathy is irresistible” (Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 1847, vol. i. p. 128).]

X. E

[Version 0.04: March 2008]