THE VINE-TREE ANGLE, DUCAL PALACE 443

3. You will feel the peculiar character of this clumsy native school better by going to the sixth capital decorated with projecting heads,¹ in which you will see that while the workman is quite incapable of carving anything of the rudest features, he delights in finishing the plaits of hair, and does so with extreme skill.

This would be bad work in an accomplished sculptor, but in a rising school it means that the men are doing all they can, and will come to carve features in time. Already they can give character and expression, though not beauty: go on to the [seven]th capital, and you will find the faces of the smaller figures cut with extreme life and spirit, the little drill-hole used for the pupils of the eyes being a characteristic of the early schools, and founded originally on the Greek habit of inlaying with a dark green.

Then look at the plumage of the birds [on the eleventh capital]; see how graceful and living the bend of their necks and the rounding of their breasts and wings.

4. You think that can’t be fourteenth-century work? It could not be but in Florence or Venice, where the Etruscan and Greek traditions of bird-carving remained unbroken. Look at the eagle’s beak on the coins of Argos, and you will see the beginning of tradition which passes down through the Byzantines to this stone of Venice.

If you think the birds too good for fourteenth century, do you think the Noah so? or the Ham and Shem, or more distant Japheth? Stiff and crude in form, hard in feature, to me the wonder only is that Venice could, as late as 1360, do no better. Quite unspeakably retarded in following the great schools of Pisa-and never to overtake them.

For here again-though the unknown sculptor still does his best-it is a shallow best. As the ribs in the vine-leaf, so the veins and wrinkles in the limbs of Noah are carved elaborately; but there is no power yet of rendering contours of flesh. Every lock of hair in the flowing beard worked like a Dürer engraving, but with so little power of expression that the features scarcely indicate sleep, much less drunkenness.

I do not, however, know any other piece of sculpture of the period [in which] this fancy of vein delineation is so far carried; and my own conviction is that the sculptor meant to make us think of the fruit of the vine as the sacred stream in the veins of man.²

5. What was then the course of the religion of Venice? It was first intense, simple, savage Christianity, such as was possible to men Phrygian by race, and taught by the Greeks in their decline, and contending in wrath and pain with the Gothic desolations.

Her life also simple and savage, maintained chiefly by fishing and sale of salt. Fiercely debating was her government, with hand and thought,-duke after duke deposed-and blinded, like Zedekiah³-his own people judging him for having rebelled against them-with Babylonian cruelty.

¹ [See Vol. X. p. 389: the old capital is now replaced by a new one.]

² [Here the MS. ends, but the printed proof continues, though the connexion is not clear.]

³ [See 2 Kings xxv. 7.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]