190 THE STONES OF VENICE

the rank of a grotesque work will depend on the degree in which we are in general sensible of the presence of invention. The reader may partly test this power in himself by referring to the Plate (3) given in the opening of this chapter, in which, on the left, is a piece of noble and inventive grotesque, a head of the lion-symbol of St. Mark from the Veronese Gothic;¹ the other is a head introduced as a boss on the foundation of the Palazzo Corner della Regina at Venice, utterly devoid of invention, made merely monstrous by exaggerations of the eyeballs and cheeks, and generally characteristic of that late Renaissance grotesque of Venice with which we are at present more immediately concerned.*

§ 72. The development of that grotesque took place under different laws from those which regulate it in any other European city. For, great as we have seen the Byzantine mind show itself to be in other directions, it was marked as that of a declining nation by the absence of the grotesque element,² and, owing to its influence, the early Venetian Gothic remained inferior to all other schools in this particular character. Nothing can well be more wonderful than its instant failure in any attempt at the representation of ludicrous or fearful images, more especially when it is compared with the magnificent grotesque of the neighbouring city of Verona, in which the Lombard influence had full sway. Nor was it until the last links of connexion with

* Note especially, in connexion with what was advanced in Vol. II. ch. vi. § 13, respecting our English neatness of execution, how the base workman has cut the lines of the architecture neatly and precisely round the abominable head; but the noble workman has used his chisel like a painter’s pencil, and sketched the glory with a few irregular lines, anything rather than circular; and struck out the whole head in the same frank and fearless way, leaving the sharp edges of the stone as they first broke, and flinging back the crest of hair from the forehead with half a dozen hammer strokes, while the poor wretch who did the other was half a day in smoothing its vapid and vermicular curls.

¹ [The lion is sculptured on one of the four small panels at the angles of the sarcophagus in the Castelbarco Tomb at Verona; see the Catalogue of Drawings and Photographs exhibited to illustrate Ruskin’s lecture on Verona and its Rivers, No. 19.]

² [See Vol. X. ch. v. § 28 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]