CHAPTER X

THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES*

159. COUNTING the canals which, entering the city from the open lagoon, must be crossed as you walk from the Piazzetta towards the Public Gardens, the fourth, called the “Rio della Pietà,” from the unfinished church of the Pietà, facing the quay before you reach it, will presently, if you go down it in gondola, and pass the Campo di S. Antonin, permit your landing at some steps on the right, in front of a little chapel of indescribable architecture, chiefly made up of folish spiral flourishes, which yet, by their careful execution and shallow mouldings, are seen to belong to a time of refined temper. Over its door are two bas-reliefs. That of St. Catherine leaning on her wheel seems to me anterior in date to the other, and is very lovely; the second is contemporary with the cinque-cento building, and fine also; but notable chiefly for the conception of the dragon as a creature formidable rather by its gluttony than its malice, and degraded beneath the level of all other spirits of

* [PREFACE (now printed as a footnote).-The following (too imperfect) account of the pictures by Carpaccio in the chapel of San Giorgio de’ Schiavoni, is properly a supplement to the part of St. Mark’s Rest in which I propose to examine the religious mind of Venice in the fifteenth century; but I publish these notes prematurely that they may the sooner become helpful, according to their power, to the English traveller.

The next chapter contains the analysis by my fellow-worker, Mr. James Reddie Anderson, of the mythological purport of the pictures here described. I separate Mr. Anderson’s work thus distinctly from my own, that he may have the entire credit of it; but the reader will soon perceive that it is altogether necessary, both for the completion and the proof of my tentative statements; and that without the certificate of his scholarly investigation, it would have been lost time to prolong the account of my own conjectures or impressions.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]