296 ST. MARK’S REST

113. And this is the writing over them.

PONTIFICES. CLERUS. POPULUS. DUX MENTE SERENUS.*

The Priests. The Clergy. the People. the Duke, serene of mind.¹

Most Serene Highnesses of all the after Time and World,-how many of you knew, or know, what this Venice, first to give the title, meant by her Duke’s Serenity! and why she trusted it?

The most precious “historical picture” this, to my mind, of any in worldly gallery, or unworldly cloister, east or west; but for the present, all I care for you to learn of it, is that these were the kind of priests, and people, and kings, who wrote this Requiem of St. Mark, of which, now, we will read what more we may.

114. If you go up in front of the organ, you may see, better than from below, the mosaics of the eastern dome.

This part of the church must necessarily have been first completed, because it is over the altar and shrine. In it, the teaching of the Mosaic legend begins, and in a sort ends;-“Christ, the King,” foretold of Prophets-declared of Evangelists-born of a Virgin in due time!

But to understand the course of legend, you must know what the Greek teachers meant by an Evangelion, as distinct from a Prophecy. Prophecy is here thought of in its narrower sense as the foretelling of a good that is to be.

But an Evangelion is the voice of the Messenger, saying, it is here.

* The continuing couplet of monkish Latin,

“Laudibus atque choris

Excipiunt dulce canoris,”

may perhaps have been made worse or less efficient Latin by some mistake in restoration.

¹ [A sketch by Ruskin of these figures is No. 170 in the Reference Series at Oxford (Vol. XXI. p. 43); the drawing here reproduced (Plate LIX.) is by Mr. Fairfax Murray, and is in the Sheffield Museum. For other references to the inscription, see above, p. xl., and Notes on Prout and Hunt (Vol. XIV. p. 416).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]