I. A LETTER TO COUNT ZORZI 407

think the mechanical regularity meritorious¹ (which a true artist hates as a musician does a grinding organ); and makes it the interest of the superintendent to employ rather numbers of men educated in a common routine-so so as to be directed with little trouble, yet whose collective labour will involve larger profit-than the few whose skill could be trusted, but whose genius would demand sympathy, and claim thoughtful guidance, regarding not the quantity of their work, but its excellence.

While, therefore, it is impossible to speak with too much sorrow of the destruction brought upon St. Mark’s, it must always be kept in mind that this is not the fault of the Venetian workman, but of the modern system by which, throughout Europe, the money-profit resulting from the extensive employment of mechanical labour, becomes a motive for persons who have no real art-faculty to occupy themselves in the direction of imitative work, for which, of course, no genius in design is required. Thus the nations are made to pay for the ruin of their ancient monuments, instead of the raising of new ones. And in France and England, during the last twenty years, the destruction wrought by this cause alone has an hundredfold exceeded all the ruin of former time, neglect, and revolution.

5. But this catastrophe in Venice surpasses all in its miserableness. St. Mark’s was the most rich in associations, the most marvellous in beauty, the most perfect in preservation, of all the eleventh-century buildings in Europe; and of St. Mark’s, precisely the most lovely portions were those which have been now destroyed.

Their mosaics especially were of such exquisite intricacy of deep golden glow between the courses of small pillars, that those two upper arches² had an effect as of peacock’s feathers in the sun, when their green and purple glitters through and through with light. But now they have the

¹ [See below, p. 421.]

² [Of the south side, which had then been “restored”: see Introduction, p. lx.]

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