32 THE STONES OF VENICE

lesson to be learned from them of much importance to us. Though in many respects debased in style, they are consummate in workmanship, and unstained in honour; there is no imperfection in them, and no dishonesty. That there is absolutely no imperfection, is indeed, as we have seen above,¹ a proof of their being wanting in the highest qualities of architecture; but, as lessons in masonry, they have their value, and may well be studied for the excellence they display in methods of levelling stones, for the precision of their inlaying, and other such qualities, which in them are indeed too principal, yet very instructive in their particular way.

§ 38. For instance, in the inlaid design of the dove with the olive branch, from the Casa Trevisan² (Vol. I. Plate 20, opposite p. 425) it is impossible for anything to go beyond the precision with which the olive leaves are cut out of the white marble; and, in some wreaths of laurel below, the rippled edge of each leaf is as finely and easily drawn, as if by a delicate pencil. No Florentine table is more exquisitely finished than the façade of this entire palace; and as ideals of an executive perfection,³ which, though we must not turn aside from our main path to reach it, may yet with much advantage be kept in our sight and memory, these palaces are most notable amidst the architecture of Europe. The Rio Façade of the Ducal Palace, though very sparing in colour, is yet, as an example of finished masonry in a vast building, one of the finest things, not only in Venice, but in the world.⁴ It differs from other work of the Byzantine

¹ [See Vol. X. p.202.]

² [See above, § 23.]

³ [See Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 21 n., where Ruskin, citing this passage and § 19 above as instances of his “respect for completion,” establishes a harmony of his various passages on “finish” in art.]

⁴ [On some sheets among the MSS. Ruskin gives an elaborate but fragmentary account of the Rio Façade, from which the following passages are extracted:-

“Of all the Renaissance works I have ever seen, I should give the palm to this, for general beauty; nor is it chief among Renaissance works only,-there is hardly a more impressive scene in Venice or in the world than the reach of narrow canal, between the Bridge of Sighs and the Canonica, which laps like an inlet of a lake against the dark and delicate stones of the gigantic wall, that lifts its sculptured precipice so far into the broad light and blue sky. Its majesty, indeed, depends chiefly on this, that it is a wall: not a

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