I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 27

“stucco” to the ground of fresco: but this is of no consequence: the reader will understand that it was white, and that the whole wall of the palace was considered as the page of a book to be illuminated: but he will understand also that the sea winds are bad librarians; that, when once the painted stucco began to fade or to fall, the unsightliness of the defaced colour would necessitate its immediate restoration; and that therefore, of all the chromatic decoration of the Gothic palaces, there is hardly a fragment left.

Happily, in the pictures of Gentile Bellini,¹ the fresco colouring of the Gothic palaces is recorded, as it still remained in his time; not with rigid accuracy, but quite distinctly enough to enable us, by comparing it with the existing coloured designs in the manuscripts and glass of the period, to ascertain precisely what it must have been.²

§ 32. The walls were generally covered with chequers of very warm colour, a russet inclining to scarlet more or less relieved with white, black, and grey; as still seen in the only example which, having been executed in marble, has been perfectly preserved, the front of the Ducal Palace. This, however, owing to the nature of its materials, was a peculiarly simple example; the ground is white, crossed with double bars of pale red, and in the centre of each chequer there is a cross, alternately black with a red centre and red with a black centre where the arms cross. In painted work the grounds would be, of course, as varied and complicated as those of manuscripts; but I only know of one example left, on the Casa Sagredo, where, on some fragments of stucco, a very early chequer background is traceable, composed of crimson quatrefoils interlaced, with cherubims stretching their

¹ [See the account of them in the Guide to the Academy at Venice, where Ruskin describes the architecture of Venice therein represented as “red and white, like the blossom of a carnation, touched with gold like a peacock’s plumes, and frescoed, even to its chimney-pots, with fairest arabesque.” Compare Ruskin’s word-picture of Venice-”a golden city, paved with emerald”-in Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. ix. § 1.]

² [On the frescoes of the Venetian Palaces, see below, p. 378 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]