VI

THE VINE-TREE ANGLE, DUCAL

PALACE¹

1. FROM the Piazzetta columns go to the Ponte della Paglia. Standing here, you are close to the sculpture of the Drunkenness of Noah, which forms the eastern corner-stone of the Ducal Palace.²

It is fourteenth-century sculpture of most precious documentary interest.

It is the best work which Venice could command when she built the great sea-front of the Ducal Palace. I do not think it is by its designer; the Adam and Eve of the east angle is in far grander manner, and I doubt not by his own hand; this has the look to me of being by a sculptor working under him, and straining to do his best.

2. Now there are two ways of straining to do your best-one, which is the noble way, of which comes all good, is trying to do it for the sake of doing it, and because it should be always done; and the other is trying to do it that you may get praised for doing it. In which case you are sure to do the work partly as you think will please the public and not with absolute rightness. Now this man has worked simply in desire to do his best, and has put detail into his work which nobody ever looks at. With ten times less trouble he could have carved a complete pergola of vine-leaves for his Noah, projecting all round the palace, and everybody would have said, “How wonderful!” and “What a great sculptor he was!” and would have said so to this day.

But he was working under a grand master, or was one himself, and knew he would spoil the palace front by a projecting pergola. He gave just as much branch of vine as there was need for to tell his story, and to give noble fretted outline to his corner-stone. He gave the thick stem to mark the angle grandly, then subdivided and undercut to his heart’s content, in the canopy of leafage and bough which answer to what, in Northern Gothic of the same period, would have been a fretted niche.

But look at the surface of the vine-leaf, which by caprice of time and fate has been left uninjured. Every vein is carved in it, and, mind you, not with any trick or hasty incision of chiselling, but with laborious finish, like wood-carving, leaving the lines in relief.³

¹ [This Appendix is given from a printed proof; there are also, among the St. Mark’s Rest MSS., two drafts of some of it in Ruskin’s hand.]

² [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. pp. 359 seq., and Plates XIX. and I.).]

³ [Here the printed proof has a footnote: “I have left a cast of this leaf”; it would thus appear that this was written for a lecture. The MS. is headed “Young People. Noah Sculpture. My own, meant for St. Mark’s Rest.”]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]