168 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

only in the creatures that tread on it. A castle tower is left a mere brown bit of canvas, and all his colouring kept for the trumpeters on the top of it. The fields are obscurely green; the sky imperfectly blue; and the mountains could not possibly stand on the very small foundations they are furnished with.

Here is a Religion of Humanity, and nothing else,-to purpose! Nothing in the universe thought worth a look, unless it is in service or foil to some two-legged creature showing itself off to the best advantage. If a flower is in a girl’s hair, it shall be painted properly; but in the fields, shall be only a spot: if a striped pattern is on a boy’s jacket, we paint all the ins and outs of it, and drop not a stitch; but the striped patterns of vineyard or furrow in field, the enamelled mossy mantles of the rocks, the barred heraldry of the shield of the sky,-perhaps insects and birds may take pleasure in them, not we. To his own native lagunes and sea, the painter is yet less sensitive. His absurd rocks, and dotty black hedges round bitumen-coloured fields (575), are yet painted with some grotesque humour, some modest and unworldly beauty; and sustain or engird their castellated quaintnesses in a manner pleasing to the pre-Raphaelite mind. But the sea-waveless as a deal board-and in that tranquillity, for the most part reflecting nothing at its edge,-literally, such a sea justifies that uncourteous saying of earlier Venice of her Doge’s bride,-“Mare sub pede pono.”*

Of all these deficiencies, characteristic not of this master only, but of his age, you will find various analysis in the third volume of Modern Painters, in the chapter on mediæval landscape;¹ with begun examination of the causes which led

* On the scroll in the hand of the throned Venice on the Piazzetta side of the Ducal Palace, the entire inscription is,

“Fortis, justa, trono furias, mare sub pede, pouo.”

“Strong, and just, I put the furies beneath my throne, and the sea

beneath my foot.”

¹ [In this edition Vol. V. pp. 248 seq. See ibid., p. 284, for “’enamelled’ turf or sward.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]