I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 29

the shields in the Casa Priuli¹ and one or two more of the palaces which are unrestored, and the blue ground was used also to relieve the sculptures of religious subjects. Finally, all the mouldings, capitals, cornices, cusps, and traceries, were either entirely gilded or profusely touched with gold.

The whole front of a Gothic palace in Venice may, therefore, be simply described as a field of subdued russet, quartered with broad sculptured masses of white and gold; these latter being relieved by smaller inlaid fragments of blue, purple, and deep green.*

§ 35. Now, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, when painting and architecture were thus united, two processes of change went on simultaneously to the beginning of the seventeenth. The merely decorative chequerings on the walls yielded gradually to more elaborate paintings of figure-subject; first small and quaint, and then enlarging into enormous pictures filled by figures generally colossal. As these paintings became of greater merit and importance, the architecture with which they were associated was less studied; and at last a style was introduced in which the framework of the building was little more interesting than that of a Manchester factory, but the whole space of its walls was covered with the most precious fresco paintings. Such edifices are of course no longer to be considered as forming an architectural school; they were merely large preparations of artist’s panels; and Titian, Giorgione, and Veronese, no more conferred merit on the later architecture of Venice, as such, by painting on its façades, than Landseer

* See, again and again, Carpaccio’s and Bellini’s backgrounds. Delicate, instead of broad, in the italicised sentence² would have been a better word; the white and gold lines being often mere threads. [1881.]

¹ [One of Ruskin’s numerous sheets of Venetian drawings contains several details from the Casa Priuli, including a tinted sketch of one of the shields. “The blue of the ground of the shield,” he notes, “should be of smalt; it is very delicately gradated, like a blue glass.” For further particulars about the house, see below, Venetian Index, p. 399.]

² [The italics are here introduced from the “Travellers’ Edition.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]