170 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

divinely designed, and arrived at by steady progress of taste, from the Creation to 1480, and then the ne plus ultra, and real Babel-style without bewilderment-its top truly reaching to heaven,¹-style which was never thenceforth to be bettered by human thought or skill. Of which Giocondine manner, I really think you had better at once see a substantially existent piece. It will not take long,-say an hour, with lunch; and the good door-keeper will let you come in again without paying.*

So (always supposing the day fine) go down to your boat, and order yourself to be taken to the church of the Frari. Landing just beyond it, your gondoliers will show you the way, up the calle beside it, to the desolate little courtyard of the School of St. John the Evangelist.² It might be one of the most beautiful scenes among the cities of Italy, if only the good Catholics of Venice would employ so much of their yearly alms in the honour of St. John the Evangelist as to maintain any old gondolier, past rowing, in this courtyard by way of a Patmos, on condition that he should suffer no wildly neglected children to throw stones at the sculptures, nor grown-up creatures to defile them; but with occasional ablution by sprinkling from garden water-engine, suffer the weeds of Venice to inhabit among the marbles where they listed.

How beautiful the place might be, I need not tell you. Beautiful it is, even in its squalid misery; but too probably, some modern designer of railroad stations will do it up with new gilding and scrapings of its grey stone. The gods forbid;-understand, at all events, that if this happens to it, you are no more to think of it as an example of Giocondine art. But, as long as it is let alone there, in the shafts and capitals you will see on the whole the most

* If you have already seen the School of St. John, or do not like the interruption, continue at page 176.

¹ [Genesis xi. 7.]

² [For another notice of this Scuola, see Vol. XI. p. 388; and for details of it (by Boni), No. 108 in the Rudimentary Series (Vol. XXI. p. 201).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]