VI. THE CAMPO SANTO 355

kind of zithern-harp, held upright as he stands, to the dance of four sweet Pisan maids, in a round, holding each other only by the bent little fingers of each hand. And one with graver face, and wearing a purple robe, approaches him, saying-I knew once what she said, but forget now; only it meant that his joyful life in that kind was to be ended. And he obeys her, and follows, into a nobler life.

I do not know if ever there was a real St. Ranieri;¹ but the story of him remained for truth in the heart of Pisa as long as Pisa herself lived.

121. I got more than outline of this scene: a coloured sketch of the whole group, which I destroyed afterwards, in shame of its faults, all but the purple-robed warning figure; and that is lost, and the fresco itself now lost also, all mouldering and ruined by what must indeed be a cyclical change in the Italian climate: the frescoes exposed to it (of which I made note before 1850) seem to me to have suffered more in the twenty years since, than they had since they were painted: those at Verona alone excepted, where the art of fresco seems to have been practised in the fifteenth century in absolute perfection, and the colour to have been injured only by violence, not by time.

There was another lovely cloister in Pisa, without fresco, but exquisite in its arched perspective and central garden, and noble in its unbuttressed height of belfry tower;-the cloister of San Francesco: in these, and in the meadow round the baptistery, the routine of my Italian university life was now fixed for a good many years in main material points.²

122. In summer I have been always at work, or out walking, by six o’clock, usually awake by half-past four; but I keep to Pisa for the present, where my monkish

¹ [The legend of San Ranieri (said to have been born of a noble family in Pisa about A.D. 1100) may be read in Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, 1850, p. 448.]

² [Ruskin’s letter to his father from Lucca, May 6, 1845, describes a typical day: Vol. IV. p. xxviii. He gives a similar account at Pisa, with descriptions also of the frescoes: Vol. IV. pp. xxx., xxxi.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]