130 MONUMENTS OF THE CAVALLI FAMILY

the first monument on the right, well lighted by the tall western window, should be looked at next to the physician’s; for as that is the best, this is essentially the worst, piece of sculptured art in the building; a series of academy studies in marble, well executed, but without either taste or invention, and necessarily without meaning, the monument having been erected to a person whose only claim to one was his having stolen money enough to pay for it before he died. It is one of the first pieces extant of entirely mechanical art workmanship, done for money; and the perfection of its details may justify me in directing special attention to it.¹

6. There are no other monuments, still less pictures, in the body of the church deserving notice. The general effect of the interior is impressive, owing partly to the boldness and simplicity of the pillars which sustain the roof; partly to the darkness which involves them: these Dominican churches being, in fact, little more than vast halls for preaching in,² and depending little on decoration, and not at all on light. But the sublimity of shadow soon fails when it has nothing interesting to shade; and the chapel or monuments which, opposite each interval between the pillars, fill the sides of the aisles, possess no interest except in their arabesques of cinque-cento sculpture, of which far better examples may be seen elsewhere; while the differences in their ages, styles, and purposes hinder them from attaining any unity of decorative effect, and break the unity of the church almost as fatally, though not as ignobly, as the incoherent fillings of the aisles at Westminster. The Cavalli chapel itself, though well deserving the illustration which the Arundel Society has bestowed upon it, is filled with a medley of tombs and frescoes of different dates, partly superseding, none illustrating, each

¹ [The monument-the chief work of Danese Cattaneo, pupil of Sansovino-was erected in 1565 in memory of Giano Fregoso, captain-general of the Venetian forces, who died in 1529. He had left 500 ducats in his will for the purpose: see “Ricerche Storiche intorno alla chiesa di S. Anastasia in Verona” in Archivio Veneto, vol. xxi., 1881, pp. 17, 18.]

² [Compare Mornings in Florence, § 11 n. (Vol. XXIII. p. 303).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]