I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 31

of certain fields of design, succeeded in excluding him totally from those in which his own influence was predominant. Or, more accurately speaking, the architects began to be too proud to receive assistance from the colourists; and these latter sought for ground which the architect had abandoned, for the unrestrained display of their own skill. And thus, while one series of edifices is continually becoming feebler in design and richer in superimposed paintings, another, that of which we have so often spoken as the earliest or Byzantine Renaissance, fragment by fragment rejects the pictorial decoration; supplies its place first with marbles, and then, as the latter are felt by the architect, daily increasing in arrogance and deepening in coldness, to be too bright for his dignity, he casts even these aside one by one: and when the last porphyry circle has vanished from the façade, we find two palaces standing side by side, one built, so far as mere masonry goes, with consummate care and skill, but without the slightest vestige of colour in any part of it; the other utterly without any claim to interest in its architectural form, but covered from top to bottom with paintings by Veronese.* At this period, then, we bid farewell to colour, leaving the painters to their own peculiar field; and only regretting that they waste their noblest work on walls, from which in a couple of centuries, if not before, the greater part of their labour must be effaced. On the other hand, the architecture whose decline we are tracing, has now assumed an entirely new condition, that of the Central or True Renaissance, whose nature we are to examine in the next chapter.

§ 37. But before leaving these last palaces over which the Byzantine influence extended itself, there is one more

* I must really give myself another pat, and say “good dog.” How absolutely accurate and true this account is, the reader may see for himself in a moment by going to the Church of St. Sebastian,¹ where he will see literally the last bits of porphyry vanishing from the façade, and the roof “covered with paintings,” which were indeed once by Paul Veronese, and are now by the pupils of the Venetian Academy. [1881.]

¹ [For further notice of this church-“the tomb, and of old the monument, of Paul Veronese”-see below, Venetian Index, p. 432.]

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