438 APPENDIX

over by candles, blistered by damp and frost, it is yet a hundred-fold better to see it thus than re-gilt and brightened up for public show.¹

5. The little chapel of the Rosario, on the Zattere,² 1500-1530, is of extreme interest in showing the last degradation of the Giocondo school,³ which yet retained its grace and vitality. The door of this chapel is covered with light arabesque, executed in its marble exactly as a writing-master flourishes with his pen; with no more meaning or enjoyment of art than a writing-master’s, but with a wonderful-I had nearly written exquisite, but the delicate word would be wholly false-I may say, a rare freedom and felicity of vulgar grace. It is truly “free-hand” sculpture, the chisel flying along into faultless-vulgar-curves on the marble, as a good skater draws them on ice. But when you look close at them they are all as senseless (insensitive is what I mean, only that is rather said of the hand than its work), as if indeed they were cut with a foot instead of a hand. There is no thought of nature, or care in art, shown in any touch of them; the man seems never to have looked at a real leaf or flower in his life, but only at the Giocondo arabesque, and he wants to show what power he has, and gain what money he can, by doing what will look like Giocondo arabesque as fast as a writing-master in writing.

6. Yet he is still a workman belonging to the school; still a living Lapicida, not a mere senseless ape. A trained artist, though of loath-somely lost savour; mere dregs and washings of the old bottle, but yet with the faintest colour of something in him that once was wine. Not a mere pinch of red ochre in bilge water-like a modern workman in this kind of stuff, trained at Kensington. The two flat-cut sphinxes on each side of the keystone show still the dexterity of their undercutting, which we first admired in Rizzo’s genii,⁴ but they are as hard as pieces of pasteboard. They wriggle their tails with a spirited flap round the stalks of the nearest leaves, and may be contemplated, they and the lance-pointed, dewless leafage together, as an absolutely perfect type of what Raphael’s arabesques were to end in throughout Europe. Nonsense, sick on an empty stomach; seeing nothing outside of itself to represent, and finding nothing inside of itself to say.

7. From this chapel go to St. Sebastian, which is the exactly central type of transition from the school of Giocondo to that of Palladio.

From its blank front all the evidence of delicately fantastic pleasure in the designer has vanished, the few pieces of coloured marble we merely put in as things that would be expected; but the mind of the architect is occupied with a new thought, that of the solid Corinthian pillar, as the essential element of Greek design. In the flat arabesque and fresco of his façades, Giocondo thought always of Roman wall-painting. This builder is thinking of Greek columnar temples, as he could hear of them, or get idea of them. He uses grand masses of marble for his shafts, and designs his capitals with almost classic purity; the last traces of the Giocondo treatment remain in the varied sculpture of the eave-leaf, varied,

¹ [Ascribed to the school of Bologna.]

² [Near the church of the Rosario.]

³ [For which, see Vol. XXI. p. 199 and n.]

⁴ [For Antonio Rizzo, see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 354), but the particular reference here must be to some missing part of the MS.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]