II. MEMORIAL STUDIES OF ST. MARK’S 421

wholly caused by the savage and brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old. The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of “making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad, and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones, little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible rigidity of the modern mechanic.¹

12. This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence of himself in the Standard,² has at once the dulness and the audacity actually to boast of as “plus exacte”!

Imagine a Kensington student set to copy a picture by Velasquez, and substituting a Nottingham lace pattern, traced with absolute exactness, for the painter’s sparkle and flow and flame, and boasting of his improvements as “plus exacte”! That is precisely what the Italian restorer does for his original; but, alas! he has the inestimable privilege also of destroying the original as he works, and putting his student’s caricature in its place! Nor are any words bitter or contemptuous enough to describe the bestial stupidities which have thus already replaced the floor of the church, in my early days the loveliest in Italy, and the most sacred.

13. In the Photograph No. 7 there is, and there only, one piece of real dilapidation-the nodding pinnacle propped on the right. Those pinnacles stand over the roof gutters, and their bracket supports are, of course, liable to displacement, if the gutters get choked by frost or otherwise neglected. The pinnacle is not ten feet high, and can be replaced and secured as easily as the cowl on a chimney-pot.

¹ [See above, Introduction, p. lxi.]

² [See the Standard (December 3, 1879) in an article on “St. Mark’s, Venice” from Rome, quoting a letter by Commendatore G. B. Meduna (for whom see above, p. lix.) in the Venetian Rinnovamento of November 22. M. Meduna was the architect who carried out the “restoration” of the south façade of the Cathedral.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]