444 APPENDIX

“So monstrous, so unspeakable, what example of Christianity is in this?”

More perhaps than in our religion, smoother than oil. Is it best to hold blindness for a calamity only to be inflicted in punishment of treason, or to seek it as a comfort-it and deafness-as the adder stops her ears¹-that we may not hear the word of God, nor see His face? How many of us walk in a willing blindness, our eyes wired as the haggard hawk’s?

That Greek religion, with its fierce deeds and bright traditions, carried her on steadily to the thirteenth century. She had blinded her kings in what she held for justice; and one, blind in age, led her to her greatest glory. Nothing in heathen or Christian history matches the tale of Henry Dandolo.²

6. Yet, read in the depth of it, the omen was too true. He knew not whither he went, nor with whom he warred. He led Venice against her nursing mother. Traitress, corrupt, and hostile now, still the foster-mother of her soul, she stood as Electra against Clytemnestra. So it was doomed for Byzantium-doomed for Venice.

She cast the walls of her tutress city to the ground, and allied herself, for gain, with the Saracen, whose religion she abhorred. And slowly from that day the Greek soul died in her, and the Tyrian was born.

Mystery of mysteries. To this, then, the orphan child who put his hand in the urn to draw forth the command of heaven³-to this the Doge Michael of the Lord,⁴ who furled his ships’ sails to lay them at the feet of their captain, Christ⁵-were at last leading them. Out of the ashes of Tyre, dark phoenix, their own Tyrian infidel spirit rose, and they became the world’s merchants in gold, and in precious stones and in purple.

Pause a moment to think how literally this came to pass. She struck her coinage in gold so pure, that after she herself had fallen, and had no more a name among nations, her coins were yet struck by her enemies, in the name that was no more.⁶ She wrought her robes in gold so massy that the Doge Grimani-he who kneels before the Faith in Titian’s picture⁷-dying as a king should, poor, thinks it enough bequest to his son to say, “Let my mantle be sold”* (was it, then?); and she overlaid her palaces with gold, and inlaid them with porphyry, until only the clouds of her own sunsets were more fair.

Go now into the Academy and learn there what Venice was in her Tyrian time. Look first at Gentile Bellini’s picture of the front of St. Mark’s.⁸

[Ruskin’s second illustrative picture was Carpaccio’s, No. 574 in the Academy; this picture is the subject of the next Appendix.]

* Sanuto, quoted by Edward Cheney: Remarks on Illuminated Venetian Manuscripts, p. 49.

¹ [Psalms lviii. 4.]

² [See Vol. IX. p. 20.]

³ [See St. Mark’s Rest, § 6 (above, p. 212).]

⁴ [For Domenico Michiel, see above, pp. 208 seq.]

⁵ [Richard II., Act iv. sc. 1.]

⁶ [The British Museum has a gold ducat (afterwards known as the zechino or sequin) which was struck in Venice in 1279. The coin continued to be struck by Austria and other countries until quite recent years.]

⁷ [In the Ducal Palace: see Vol. XI. p. 373.]

⁸ [See above, p. 162, and Plate XLVI.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]