8 THE STONES OF VENICE

they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that “Bridge of Sighs,” which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice;¹ no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero’s death;² and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari³ could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter’s favourite subject, the novelist’s favourite scene, where the water first narrows by

¹ [See Childe Harold, canto iv. st. 1. The Bridge of Sighs was built by Antonio da Ponte in 1589: see below, ch. viii. § 29, p. 355, and in the next volume, ch. iii. §§ 16, 22. The Rialto, by the same architect, was built in 1588.]

² [See Marino Faliero, Act iii. sc. i. The doge was put to death in 1355. The statue (in the square of SS. Giovanni e Paolo) which Byron makes Faliero address as “the sire of my sire’s fathers,” is Verrocchio’s splendid equestrian one of Bartolommeo Colleoni, erected in 1496, for which see in the next volume, ch. i. § 22. Ruskin’s father, on reading this passage, seems to have put in a plea for Byron. Ruskin replied (September 12, 1853):-

“I don’t think Byron’s ignorance of a kind to be compared with Shakespeare’s or any other great man’s: their ignorance is always of things out of their way,-inevitable, natural, and excusable. Byron’s is of the things which he took in hand to write notes about, and was interested in, and in the midst of, but too idle to be accurate, or even to approach accuracy.”

It should, however, be stated that in the Preface to Marino Faliero, Byron explains that he took poetic licence in Faliero’s address; “The equestrian statue,” he says, “is not of a Faliero, but of some other now obsolete warrior, although of a later date.” Ruskin returns to the charge against “the ignorant sentimentality of Byron” in the next volume (Venetian Index, s. “Ponte de’ Sospiri,”) but in his epilogue of 1881 (“Castel-Franco,” §§ 2, 3) makes amends to the poet who had “taught him so much.”]

³ [For Enrico Dandolo and Francesco Foscari, see Vol. IX. pp. 20, 21.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]