peculiar force and character are best explained. Of these niceties the architect takes little cognizance, as he must in some sort calculate on the effect of ornament at all times: but to the artist they are of infinite importance, and especially for this reason; that there is always much detail on buildings which cannot be drawn as such, which is too far off, or too minute, and which must consequently be set down in short-hand of some kind or another; and, as it were, an abstract, more or less philosophical, made of its general heads. Of the style of this abstract, of the lightness, confusion, and mystery necessary in it, I have spoken elsewhere; at present I insist only on the arrangement and matter of it. All good ornament and all good architecture are capable of being put into short-hand; that is, each has a perfect system of parts principal and subordinate, of which, even when the complemental details vanish in distance, the system and anatomy yet remain visible, so long as anything is visible; so that the divisions of a beautiful spire shall be known as beautiful even till their last line vanishes in blue mist; and the effect of a well-designed moulding shall be visibly disciplined, harmonious, and inventive, as long as it is seen to be a moulding at all. Now the power of the artist of marking this character depends not on his complete knowledge of the design, but on his experimental knowledge of its salient and bearing parts, and of the effects of light and shadow, by which their saliency is best told. He must therefore be prepared, according to his subject, to use light steep or level, intense or feeble, and out of the resulting chiaroscuro select those peculiar and hinging points on which the rest are based, and by which all else that is essential may be explained.

The thoughtful command of all these circumstances constitutes the real architectural draughtsman; the habits of executing everything either under one kind of effect or in one manner, or of using unintelligible and meaningless abstracts of beautiful designs, are those which most commonly take the place of it and are the most extensively esteemed.1

'I have not given any examples in this place, because it is difficult to explain such circumstances of effect without diagrams; I purpose entering into fuller discussion of the subject with the aid of illustration.

§ 28. Architectural painting of Gentile Bellini

and Vittor Carpaccio ;

Let us now proceed with our review of those artists who have devoted themselves more peculiarly to architectural subject.

Foremost among them stand Gentile Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio, to whom we are indebted for the only existing faithful statements of the architecture of Old Venice; and who are the only authorities to whom we can trust in conjecturing the former beauty of those few desecrated fragments, the last of which are now being rapidly swept away by the idiocy of modern Venetians.

Nothing can be more careful, nothing more delicately finished, or more dignified in feeling than the works of both these men; and as architectural evidence they are the best we could have had, all the gilded parts being gilt in the picture, so that there can be no mistake or confusion of them with yellow colour or light, and all the frescoes or mosaics given with the most absolute precision and fidelity. At the same time they are by no means examples of perfect architectural drawing; there is little light and shade in them of any kind, and none whatever of the thoughtful observance of temporary effect of which we have just been speaking; so that, in rendering the character of the relieved parts, their solidity, depth, or gloom, the representation fails altogether, and it is moreover lifeless from its very completion, both the signs of age and the effects of use and habitation being utterly rejected; rightly so, indeed, in these instances (all the architecture of these painters being in background to religious subject), but wrongly so, if we look to the architecture alone. Neither is there anything like aërial perspective attempted; the employment of actual gold in the decoration of all the distances, and the entire realization of their details, as far as is possible on the scale compelled by perspective, being alone sufficient to prevent this, except in the hands of painters far more practised in effect than either Gentile or Carpaccio. But with all these discrepancies, Gentile Bellini's church of St. Mark's is the best church of St. Mark's that has ever been painted, so far as I know; and I believe the reconciliation of true aërial perspective and chiaroscuro with the splendour and dignity obtained by the real gilding and elaborate detail, is a problem yet to be accomplished. With the help of the daguerreotype, and the lessons of colour given by the later Venetians, we ought now to be able

to accomplish it; more especially as the right use of gold has been shown us by the greatest master of effect whom Venice herself produced, Tintoret; who has employed it with infinite grace on the steps ascended by the young Madonna, in his large picture in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto. Perugino uses it also with singular grace, often employing it for golden light on distant trees, and continually on the high light of hair, and that without losing relative distance.

The great group of Venetian painters who brought landscape art, for that time, to its culminating point, have left, as we have already seen, little that is instructive in architectural painting. The causes of this I cannot comprehend, for neither Titian nor Tintoret appears to despise anything that affords either variety of form or of colour, the latter especially condescending to very trivial details,— as in the magnificent carpet painting of the picture of the doge Mocenigo; so that it might have been expected that in the rich colours of St. Mark's, and the magnificent and fantastic masses of the Byzantine palaces, they would have found whereupon to dwell with delighted elaboration. This is, however, never the case; and although frequently compelled to introduce portions of Venetian locality in their backgrounds, such portions are always treated in a most hasty and faithless manner, missing frequently all character of the building, and never advanced to realization. In Titian's picture of Faith, the view of Venice below is laid in so rapidly and slightly, the houses all leaning this way and that, and of no colour, the sea a dead grey green, and the ship-sails mere dashes of the brush, that the most obscure of Turner's Venices would look substantial beside it; while Tintoret, in the very picture in which he has dwelt so elaborately on the carpet, has substituted a piece of ordinary Renaissance composition for St. Mark's; and in the background has chosen the Sansovino side of the Piazzetta, treating even that so carelessly as to lose all the proportion and beauty of its design, and so flimsily that the line of the distant sea which has been first laid in, is seen through all the columns. Evidences of magnificent power of course exist in whatever he touches, but his full power is never turned in this direction. More space is allowed to his architecture by Paul Veronese, but it is still entirely

§ 29. And of generally.

the Venetians

§ 30. Fresco painting of the Venetian exteriors. Canaletto.

suggestive, and would be utterly false except as a frame or background for figures. The same may be said with respect to Raffaelle and the Roman school.

If, however, these men laid architecture little under contribution to their own art, they made their own art a glorious gift to architecture; and the walls of Venice which, before, I believe, had received colour only in arabesque patterns, were lighted with human life by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian, nothing now, I believe, remains. Two figures of Giorgione's are still traceable on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly uninjured, is seen from far above and below the Rialto, flaming like the reflection of a sunset. Two figures of Veronese were also traceable till lately; the head and arms of one still remain, and some glorious olive branches which were beside the other; the figure having been entirely effaced by an inscription in large black letters on a whitewash tablet, which we owe to the somewhat inopportunely expressed enthusiasm of the inhabitants of the district in favour of their new pastor.1 Judging, however, from the rate at which destruction is at present advancing, and seeing that in about seven or eight years more Venice will have utterly lost every external claim to interest, except that which attaches to the group of buildings immediately around St. Mark's Place, and to the larger churches, it may be conjectured that the greater part of her present degradation has taken place, at any rate, within the last forty years. Let the reader, with such scraps of evidence as

The inscription is to the following effect,—a pleasant thing to see upon the walls, were it but more innocently placed :

CAMPO DI S. MAURIZIO.

DIO

CONSERVI A NOI

LUNGAMENTE

LO ZELANTIS. E REVERENDIS.

D. LUIGI PICCINI

NOSTRO

NOVELLO PIEVANO.

GLI ESULTANTI

PARROCCHIANI.

may still be gleaned from under the stucco and paint of the Italian committees of taste, and from among the drawing-room innovations of English and German residents, restore Venice in his imagination to some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace, in the forest of towers, those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold1, cleanse from their pollution those choked canals which are now the drains of hovels, where they were once vestibules of palaces, and fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto; whose miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and deadened intellect of the nation at that time; a numbness and darkness more without hope than that of the Grave itself, holding and wearing yet the sceptre and the crown, like the corpses of the Etruscan kings, ready to sink into ashes at the first unbarring of the door of the sepulchre.

The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it gives no single architectural ornament, however near, so much form as might enable us even to guess at its actual one; and this I say not rashly, for I shall prove it by placing portions of detail accurately copied from Canaletto side by side with engravings from the daguerreotype: it gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's touch; which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled penmanlike line, as far removed from

The quantity of gold with which the decorations of Venice were once covered could not now be traced or credited without reference to the authority of Gentile Bellini, The greater part of the marble mouldings have been touched with it in lines and points, the minarets of St. Mark's, and all the florid carving of the arches entirely sheeted. The Casa d'Oro retained it on its lions until the recent commencement of its restoration.