MARK-MISERICORDIA 393

It is more like a German summer-house, or angle turret, than a chapel, and may be briefly described as a bee-hive set on a low hexagonal tower, with dashes of stonework about its windows like the flourishes of an idle penman.

The cloister of this church is pretty; and the attached cemetery is worth entering, for the sake of feeling the strangeness of the quiet sleeping ground in the midst of the sea.¹

MICHIEL DALLE COLONNE, PALAZZO. Of no importance.

MINELLI PALAZZO.² In the Corte del Maltese, at St. Paternian. It has a spiral external staircase, very picturesque, but of the fifteenth century, and without merit.

MIRACOLI, CHURCH OF STA. MARIA DEI. The most interesting and finished example in Venice of the Byzantine Renaissance, and one of the most important in Italy of the cinque-cento style. All its sculptures should be examined with great care, as the best possible examples of a bad style. Observe, for instance, that in spite of the beautiful work on the square pillars which support the gallery at the west end, they have no more architectural effect than two wooden posts. The same kind of failure in boldness of purpose exists throughout; and the building is, in fact, rather a small museum of unmeaning, though refined sculpture, than a piece of architecture.

Its grotesques are admirable examples of the base Raphaelesque design examined above, XI. 162. Note especially the children’s heads tied up by the hair, in the lateral sculptures at the top of the altar steps. A rude workman who could hardly have carved the head at all, might have been allowed this or any other mode of expressing discontent with his own doings; but the man who could carve a child’s head so perfectly must have been wanting in all human feeling, to cut it off, and tie it by the hair to a vine leaf. Observe, in the Ducal Palace, though far ruder in skill, the heads always emerge from the leaves, they are never tied to them.

MISERICORDIA, CHURCH OF. The church itself is nothing, and contains nothing worth the traveller’s time; but the Albergo de’ Confratelli della Misericordia³ at its side is a very interesting and beautiful relic of the Gothic Renaissance. Lazari says, “del secolo xiv.;” but I believe it to be later. Its traceries are very curious and rich, and the sculpture of its capitals very fine for the late time. Close to it, on the righthand side of the canal, which is crossed by the wooden bridge, is one of the richest Gothic doors in Venice, remarkable for the appearance of antiquity in the general design and stiffness of its figures, though it bears its date, 1505. Its extravagant crockets are almost the only features which, but for this written date, would at first have confessed its lateness; but, on examination, the figures will be found as bad and spiritless as they are apparently archaic, and completely exhibiting the Renaissance palsy of imagination.

¹ [See Vol. X. p. 38.]

² [Now known as the “Palazzo Contarini della Scala,” the Minelli family being extinct.]

³ [Now a large tenement of dwelling-houses.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]