82 THE STONES OF VENICE II. PRIDE OF STATE

early and later days adorned the sepulchre, confesses a still greater difference in their manner of regarding death. To those he came as the comforter and the friend, rest in his right hand, hope in his left; to these as the humiliator, the spoiler, and the avenger. And, therefore, we find the early tombs at once simple and lovely in adornment, severe and solemn in their expression; confessing the power, and accepting the peace, of death, openly and joyfully; and in all their symbols marking that the hope of resurrection lay only in Christ’s righteousness; signed always with this simple utterance of the dead, “I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.”¹ But the tombs of the later ages are a ghastly struggle of mean pride and miserable terror: the one mustering the statues of the Virtues about the tomb, disguising the sarcophagus with delicate sculpture, polishing the false periods of the elaborate epitaph, and filling with strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from behind the curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or some other more terrible image of the enemy in whose defiance the whiteness of the sepulcher had been set to shine above the whiteness of the ashes.

§ 47. This change in the feeling with which sepulchral monuments were designed, from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, has been common to the whole of Europe. But, as Venice is in other respects the centre of the Renaissance system,² so also she exhibits this change in the manner of the sepulchral monument under circumstances peculiarly calculated to teach us its true character. For the severe guard which, in earlier times, she put upon every tendency to personal pomp and ambition, renders the tombs of her ancient monarchs as remarkable for modesty and simplicity as for their religious feeling; so that, in this respect, they are separated by a considerable interval from the more costly monuments erected at the same periods to the kings

¹ [Psalms iv. 8.]

² [See Vol. IX. p. 47.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]