X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 357

be useful in illustration of him; and to see these rightly, you must compare with them things of the same kind in another church where there are no Carpaccios,-namely, St. Pantaleone, to which, being the nearer, you had better first direct your gondolier.

For the ceilings alone of these two churches, St. Pantaleone and St. Alvise, are worth a day’s pilgrimage in their sorrowful lesson.

190. All the mischief that Paul Veronese did may be seen in the halting and hollow magnificences of them;-all the absurdities, either of painting or piety, under afflatus of vile ambition. Roof puffed up and broken through, as it were, with breath of the fiend from below, instead of pierced by heaven’s light from above; the rages and ruins of Venetian skill, honour, and worship, exploded all together sky-high. Miracles of frantic mistake, of flaunting and thunderous hypocrisy,-universal lie, shouted through speaking-trumpets.

If I could let you stand for a few minutes, first under Giotto’s four-square vault at Assisi, only thirty feet from the ground, the four triangles of it written with the word of God close as an illuminated missal,¹ and then suddenly take you under these vast staggering Temples of Folly and Iniquity, you would know what to think of “modern development” thenceforth.

191. The roof of St. Pantaleone is, I suppose, the most curious example in Europe of the vulgar dramatic effects of painting.² That of St. Alvise is little more than a caricature of the mean passion for perspective, which was the first effect of “science” joining itself with art. And under it, by strange coincidence, there are also two notable pieces of plausible modern sentiment,-celebrated pieces by Tiepolo.³ He is virtually the beginner of Modernism: these two pictures of his are exactly like what a first-rate Parisian Academy student would do, setting himself to conceive the

¹ [See Vol. XXIII. p. xlii.]

² [Built in 1668. On the roof is an enormous painting of the Glorification of St. Pantaleone by A. Fumiani (1690).]

³ [Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]