NOTES ON LATER VENETIAN SCULPTURE 437

thirteenth century, the Dominican and Franciscan brothers got into the town, built their two churches there,¹ and began to talk to these pilots of the Adriatic lake,² and to explain to them what Christianity meant. How sin was in all men, and how riches were a snare, and so on, till at last the wild sailors began to bethink themselves, and have stirrings of a new heart and conscience.

And then they directly begin to want to speak for themselves. Greek angels were very good for ornament, and Greek story-telling in mosaic charming, but this new passion in the breasts of us must speak for itself.

And they begin carving for themselves in this rude way that you see.

I will take up the sculpture by itself and carry the history of it forward separately, in another chapter.

[This Ruskin never completed, but the MS. includes the following notes on Venetian sculpture.]

4. San Giobbe.-The Campanile and the three Gothic traceries within the single remaining arcade of the cloister, are remains of an earlier church, of which I find no account in the Guide Books, circa 1350. The Campanile is among the most interesting in Venice in its foliated brick-pointed arches. The round arches of the cloister arcade are modern makeshifts. They were originally pointed and ran round the little square, fully, doubtless, buttressed to the canal, and looking out from the monk’s rooms to the Lagoon. A manufactory chimney, and the savage horror of its accompanying destitution, are the modern pious improvements on the quiet scene of the fourteenth century.

The entrance door of the church ought to be seen by afternoon sunlight. There is no work in Venice more characteristic of the fine middle Renaissance.³ Its freedom and softness of leafage are very far carried; the skulls of cattle, with serpents through the eyeholes for ornaments, on the capitals are true symbols of the sculptor’s mind.

The bas-relief above is St. Francis of Assisi and St. Job, but of little merit; the single statues-St. Bernardino of Siena in the centre, St. Louis of Toulouse and St. Anthony at the sides-are refined portraits of real monks, nobly expressive of the characters impressed on the features of men of good breeding by a religious life.

Selvatico⁴ calls them “Stupende,” and they may in their kind be finer than I can see in the time I have given them.

The Triptych, Annunciation with [blank]⁵ over the altar of the Sacristy, is a beautiful example of Venetian painting of the sacred time. Destroyed as it is, knocked about by every rough service boy, burnt and dropped

¹ [The Dominicans, SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1234); the Franciscans, the Frari (1250). See Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. p. 26).]

² [For Milton’s phrase, “pilot of the Galilean lake,” of which Ruskin is thinking, see Sesame and Lilies, Vol. XVIII. p. 69.]

³ [Ruskin had placed a photograph of it in the Educational Series (No. 92) at Oxford (Vol. XXI. p. 83).]

⁴ [Guida Artistica e Storica di Venezia, by P. Selvatico and V. Lazari, 1852, p. 159.]

⁵ [St. Anthony and the Archangel Raphael.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]