388 ST. MARK’S REST

Gods was the standard classical dictionary of those days in Italy. It tells us how the Cyprian Venus-a mortal princess in reality, Boccaccio holds-to cover her own disgrace led the maidens of her country to the sea-sands, and, stripping them there, tempted them to follow her in shame. I suspect Carpaccio had this story in his mind, and meant here to reveal in true dragon aspect the Venus that once seemed fair, to show by this shore the fate of them that follow her. It is to be noticed that the dead man is an addition made by Carpaccio to the old story. Maidens of the people, the legend-writers knew, had been sacrificed before the Princess; but only he, filling the tale-like a cup of his country’s fairly fashioned glass-full of the wine of profitable teaching, is aware that men have often come to these yellow sands to join there in the dance of death-not only, nor once for all, this Saint who clasped hands with Victory. Two ships in the distance-one stranded, with rigging rent or fallen, the other moving prosperously with full sails on its course-symbolically repeat this thought.*

228. Frogs clamber about the corpse of the man, lizards about the woman. Indeed, for shells and creeping things this place where strangers lie slain and unburied would have been to the good Palissy a veritable and valued potter’s field.¹ But to every one of these cold and scaly creatures a special symbolism was attached by the science-not unwisely dreaming-of Carpaccio’s day. They are, each one, painted here to amplify and press home the picture’s teaching. These lizards are born of a dead man’s flesh, these snakes of his marrow:† and adders, the most venomous, are still only lizards ripened witheringly from loathsome flower into poisonous fruit. The frogs ‡-symbols, Pierius tells us,²

* “The many fail, the one succeeds” [Tennyson’s The Day Dream.]

† “The silver cord” not “loosed” in God’s peace, but thus devilishly quickened.

‡ Compare the “unclean spirits come out of the mouth of the dragon,” in Revelation.

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 6, § 6.]

² [Pierius Valerianus: Hieroglyphica, lib. xxix.]

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