234 THE STONES OF VENICE

people recognise the vanity, decorous people the indecorum, and loving people, I hope, sometimes the love; but that everybody detests and denies the unexpected truth. And that being so, while every important fact respecting the art of the Renaissance was calmly ascertained and inexorably stated in the Stones of Venice, there has nevertheless been a perpetually increasing gabble ever since, among upholsterers, crockery-mongers, and the demi-monde of Paris and London, proving at last to everybody’s (present) satisfaction that the Sistine Madonna was meant to decorate snuff-boxes, the Georgics to promote the manufacture of Dresden shepherdesses, and the powers of Godhead and Kinghood together to be represented by the contents of the Green Chamber and the reign of August the Strong.¹

The upholsterers and chinamen, however, could never have got the Times newspaper into full cry with them, without the help of modern science and Apothecaries’ Hall; nor could the Æsthetic, Phthisic, and otherwise variously sick hospitals and Hôtels Dieu of the great capitals have produced their Doré painters and their Eliot novelists,² unless the palace or College of Surgeons had been at one end of their Ponte de’ Sospiri, and the prisons of Iron at the other. So that when I was last in Venice, while I could not go up the Grand Canal to call on my dear old friend Rawdon Brown,³ but in passing some dozen of brushed-up palaces full of Shylock’s properties got up for the mobs of Piccadilly and the Palais-Royal, I was finally driven out of my tiny lodgings on the Giudecca⁴ by the rattling and screaming, night and day, of the cranes and whistles of the

¹ [The Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) in the Royal Palace at Dresden. The Palace was founded in 1530, and enlarged by Augustus the Strong after a fire in 1701. The Green Vault contains the finest existing collection of curiosities, trinkets, and small works of art belonging to the late Renaissance and rococo periods.]

² [For Doré’s work-”not fit for a dunghill”-see (among other passages) Fors Clavigera, Letters 29, 34; Time and Tide, §§ 30, 31, 40, 102. For Ruskin’s dislike of George Eliot’s novels, see Hortus Inclusus, 1st ed., i. 122; Fors Clavigera, Letter 29; and Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 108.]

³ [See Vol. IX. p. 420, and X. p. xxvi.]

⁴ [On the occasion referred to, the winter of 1876, Ruskin stayed in lodgings attached to the little Albergo della Calcina on the Zattere, opposite to the Giudecca-a well-known haunt of artists and students.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]