300 APPENDIX, 11

of its ornaments has however induced me to believe that it is an extraordinary effort by the best Venetian master of the period, and that it owes its superiority to the affection and zeal with which it has been worked, not to the skill of foreign hands. One of its most remarkable features is the superiority of the flower ornamentation to the recumbent statue, the latter, though highly finished, being hard and ungraceful, in some places unnatural, in its lines. The sculptor had just arrived at the point when he could thoroughly master the disposition of the lines of vegetation, but not the more difficult contours of the human form. This circumstance is alone sufficient to distinguish it from the works of the Pisan and Florentine schools; and as the flower mouldings themselves, refined though they be, are yet entirely modelled on Venetian types, I believe we may safely consider this monument as a kind of high water-mark for Venetian sculpture in the middle of the fourteenth century.

The plan of the sarcophagus is shown [reference to an intended figure]. Being placed in a recess, it was useless to panel the sides; indeed the darkness of the chapel is so great that it is almost impossible to see even the front.

The three projecting portions are each wrought into a square-headed niche, with a shell lightly traced on the back of it behind the horizontal lintel, this lintel being sustained by two spiral shafts, whose length is eked out by pedestals below, and short pilasters above-a most ungraceful arrangement, but redeemed by the loveliness of the carving with which it is charged, and evidently adopted with the intention of keeping the sarcophagus square and quiet in its main lines (note about absence of Gothic feeling in Sarcophagus).

These niches are filled by three saints, of whom the one on the left, with a scroll, is the Baptist; the other two, bearing books, have no marks whereby they may be distinguished. Their drapery is well and freely cast (the emergence of the foot of the figure on the right hand bears a close resemblance to a piece of design hereafter to be examined on the Ducal Palace), but there is an unmeaning smile in the faces, the lips being a little open, marking some inability in the sculptor to express his intention. In the panels between these niches are two most interesting bas-reliefs. In that on the left, St. Isidore, bound, is being dragged behind a horseman who scourges his horse at the gallop, over rocks and briers, in a wild country, these facts being expressed in sculptural language by a row of five bushes below the horse, and three trees in the distance, the ground being broken up into the usual formal upright fragments like pieces of starch, by which the mediæval sculptors represent rocks. The galloping horse is wonderfully spirited for the period. Two warriors appear in the distance with small round shields, not larger than their helmets, the latter being conical and without crests-and the rest of the armour evidently meant to represent Roman costume. This is still more markedly the case in the other bas-relief, where the executioner who beheads St. Isidore is in rich Roman mail. Christ appears to receive the martyr’s soul, in the centre of an effulgence of rays which issues from a conical (cloud?) in the corner of the bas-relief, closely resembling that figured in the [second] plate of the Seven Lamps,¹ when it was conjectured to represent a burst of light of the same kind.

¹ [See Vol. VIII. p. 211.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]