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GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE 163
account (begun already for one of them only, the Dream of St. Ursula, 578*), and of the Gentile Bellini you can only know the value after good study of St. Mark’s itself. Observe, however, at least in this, and in 564 and 566, the perfectly true representation of what the Architecture of Venice was in her glorious time;1 trim, dainty,-red and white like the blossom of a carnation,-touched with gold like a peacock’s plumes, and frescoed, even to its chimneypots, with fairest arabesque,-its inhabitants, and it together, one harmony of work and life,-all of a piece, you see them, in the wonderful palace-perspective on the left in 564, with everybody looking out of their windows. And in this picture of St. Mark’s [567], painted by John Bellini’s good brother, true as he could, hue for hue, and ray for ray, you see that all the tossing of its now white marble foliage against the sky, which in my old book on Venice I compared to the tossed spray of sea waves2 (believing then, as I do still, that the Venetians in their living and breathing days of art were always influenced in their choice of guiding lines of sculpture by their sense of the action of wind or sea), were not, at all events, meant to be like sea foam white in anger, but like light spray in morning sunshine. They were all overlaid with gold.
Not yet in vicious luxury. Those porches of St. Mark’s, so please you, English friends, were not thus gilt for the wedding of Miss Kilmansegg,3 nor are those pictures on the vaults, advertisements, like yours in your railway stations;-all the arts of England bent on recommending you cheap
* Of which, with her legend, if you care to hear more, you will find more in the three numbers of Fors Clavigera now purchasable of my agent in Venice (Mr. Bunney, Fondamenta San Biagio 2143), from whom all my recent publications on Venice may be also procured.4
1 [Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Vol. XI. p. 27).]
2 [Ibid., vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 83).]
3 [See Hood’s poem, “Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg”; for other references to the poem, see Vol. XIII. pp. 33, 520.]
4 [No longer applicable. The numbers of Fors Clavigera are Letters 71, 72, and 73.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
