240 THE STONES OF VENICE

Recognizing this error, I hope, not yet wholly too late, and desiring,¹ in what may be left to me of time, only to render past work more available, I am deeply thankful to find a rapidly increasing and concentrating energy of help in my scholars; and at the same time, increase of excellent materials for use or reference in works of illustration produced of late years in London and Paris. Among these, the publications of the Arundel Society hold the first rank in purpose and principle, having been from the beginning conducted by a council of gentlemen in the purest endeavour for public utility, and absolutely without taint of self-interest, or encumbrance of operation by personal or national jealousy.² Failing often, as could not but be the case when their task was one of supreme difficulty, and before unattempted, they have yet on the whole been successful in producing the most instructive and historically valuable set of engravings that have ever been put within reach of the public; and I am content to close this abstract of my history in Venice, by directing the attention alike of traveller and home student to the plate which this Society has given from the altar-piece by Giorgione in his native hamlet of Castel-Franco.

Content in this instance, and henceforward perhaps always, to be myself also a home student,³ for I have never seen the picture, I can recognize it by this print as one which unites every artistic quality for which the painting of Venice has become renowned, with a depth of symbolism and nobleness of manner exemplary of all that in any age of art has characterized its highest masters.⁴

¹ [So in the MS. Previous editions have misread “devising.”]

² [For note on the Arundel Society, see Vol. IV. p. xlv., and see also above, p. 81.]

³ [Ruskin went abroad, however, again in 1882 (to Venice), and in 1888.]

⁴ [This picture-one of the few certainly authentic works of Giorgione-is in the Duomo of Castelfranco, and was painted before 1504, when the artist was only twenty-seven years. Ruskin elsewhere calls it “one of the two most perfect pictures in the world ... an imaginative representation of Christianity, with a monk and a soldier on either side” (The Pleasures of England, Lecture iv.). In the centre is the Madonna enthroned with the Child. It was a votive piece, ordered by a certain Tuzio Costanzi, whose arms appear on the canvas, in memory of his son Matteo, a young condottiere, who died in the service of the Venetian Republic at Ravenna in 1504, and was brought back to his home for burial. The saint is St. Francis; the warrior is sometimes called

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