IV

NOTES ON LATER VENETIAN

SCULPTURE

1.¹First, look carefully at the sculptures over the entrance; quite among the most important monuments in Venice.

They are dated, bearing the following inscriptions [see above, pp. 173, 174]. And they are among the earliest pieces of real Venetian sculpture extant.

Venetian, native, observe; not Greek imported. And they are as good as, at this time, Venice could do.

Very rude and comic, you think. They are so. But Venice in the midfourteenth century had no better sculpture in her than that, and (because the art of sculpture always precedes that of painting) she had no painting in her at all! While already, in France and England, the great thirteenth-century schools of sculpture were on the decline, and while Niccola and Giovanni Pisano were dead, in Florence; while Giotto’s day of work was over, Orcagna’s in its full prime. And this is all we have to boast of in poor Venice. What means this lateness in her awakening?

2. Well, until the thirteenth century, you must think of her simply as a nation of sailors borrowing both religion and art from the Greeks. Sailors literally, as well as in the ideal sense of the English slang phrase,² “old Trojans,” but knowing themselves only how to live, fish, fight, and die, and taking all their news of the next world and ornaments of this one, from the East, by tradition, patronage, and pillage. Christians of the most orthodox faith, without any troubles of conscience, superstitious terrors, or dispositions to buy their salvation with their fish. They believed the Pope implicitly in all he taught, defended him when oppressed, and resisted him when oppressing. They found the Greeks could build beautifully, and set them to work when the city was to be beautified, keeping their own hands for the oar and sword.

3. And all this went on very comfortably and brilliantly, till, in the

¹ [Here Ruskin begins his examination of the third epoch, that of native Venetian art, at the Accademia (compare the opening of the Guide, above, p. 149).]

² [See, too, in Butler’s Hudibras, i. 1: “There they say right, and like true Trojans.”]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]