ST. MARK’S REST

CHAPTER I

THE BURDEN OF TYRE

1. Go first into the Piazzetta, and stand anywhere in the shade, where you can well see its two granite pillars.

Your Murray tells you that they are “famous,” and that the one is “surmounted by the bronze lion of St. Mark, the other by the statue of St. Theodore, the Protector of the Republic.”¹

It does not, however, tell you why, or for what the pillars are “famous.” Nor, in reply to a question which might conceivably occur to the curious, why St. Theodore should protect the Republic by standing on a crocodile; nor whether the “bronze lion of St. Mark” was cast by Sir Edwin Landseer,-or some more ancient and ignorant person;-nor what these rugged corners of limestone rock, at the bases of the granite, were perhaps once in the shape of.² Have you any idea why, for the sake of any such things, these pillars were once, or should yet be, more renowned than the Monument, or the column of the Place Vendôme, both of which are much bigger?

2. Well, they are famous, first, in memorial of something which is better worth remembering than the fire of London, or the achievements of the great Napoleon. And they are famous, or used to be, among artists, because they are beautiful columns; nay, as far as we old artists know,

¹ [Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, 13th edition, 1874, p. 333.]

² [For another reference to these bases, see below, pp. 289-290.]

207

[Version 0.04: March 2008]