This last photograph is not of St. Mark’s but is of the inscription which I discovered, in 1877, on the Church of St. James of the Rialto. It is of the 9th or 10th century (according to the best antiquarians of Venice), and is given in this series, first, to confirm the closing paragraph in my notes on the Prout drawings in Bond Street;[157] and secondly to show the perfect preservation even of the hair-strokes in letters carved in the Istrian marble used at Venice a thousand years ago. The inscription on the cross is—
“Sit crux vera salus huic tua Christe loco.”
(Be Thy Cross, O Christ, the true safety of this place.)
And on the band beneath—
“Hoc circa templum sit jus mercantibus æquum,
Pondera nec vergant nec sit conventio prava.”
(Around this temple let the merchants’ law be just,
Their weights true, and their contracts fair.)
The bearing of this inscription on the relations of Antonio to Shylock may perhaps not be perceived by a public which now—consistently and naturally enough, but ominously—considers Shylock a victim to the support of the principles of legitimate trade, and Antonio a “speculator and sentimentalist.” From the series of photographs of St. Mark’s itself, I cannot but think even the least attentive observer must receive one strong impression—that of the singular preservation of the minutest details in its sculpture. Observe, this is a quite separate question from the stability of the fabric. In our northern cathedrals the stone, for the most part, moulders away; and the restorer usually replaces it by fresh sculpture, on the faces of walls of which the mass is perfectly secure. Here, at St. Mark’s, on the contrary, the only possible pretence for restoration has been, and is, the alleged insecurity of the masses of inner wall—the external sculptures remaining in faultless perfection, so far as unaffected by direct human violence. Both the Greek and Istrian marbles used at Venice are absolutely defiant of hypæthral influences, and the edges of their delicatest sculpture remain to this day more sharp than if they had been cut in steel—for then they would have rusted away. It is especially, for example, of this quality that I have painted the ornament of the St. Jean d’Acre pillars, No. 107, which the reader may at once compare with the daguerreotype (No. 108) beside it, which are exhibited, with the Prout and Hunt drawings, at the Fine Art Society’s rooms.[158] These pillars are known to be not later than the sixth century, yet wherever external violence has spared their decoration it is sharp as a fresh-growing thistle. Throughout the whole façade of St. Mark’s, the capitals have only here and there by casualty lost so much as a volute or an acanthus leaf, and whatever remains is perfect as on the day it was set in its place, mellowed and subdued only in color by time, but white still, clearly white; and gray, still softly gray; its porphyry purple as an Orleans plum, and the serpentine as green as a greengage. Note also, that in this throughout perfect decorated surface there is not a loose joint. The appearances of dislocation, which here and there look like yielding of masonry, are merely carelessness in the replacing or resetting of the marble armor at the different times when the front has been retouched—in several cases quite wilful freaks of arrangement. The slope of the porphyry shaft, for instance, on the angle at the left of my drawing, looks like dilapidation. Were it really so, the building would be a heap of ruins in twenty-four hours. These porches sustain no weight above—their pillars carry merely an open gallery; and the inclination of the red marble pilasters at the angle is not yielding at all, but an originally capricious adjustment of the marble armor. It will be seen that the investing marbles between the arch and pilaster are cut to the intended inclination, which brings the latter nearly into contact with the upper archivolt; the appearance of actual contact being caused by the projection of the dripstone. There are, indeed, one or two leaning towers in Venice whose foundations have partly yielded; but if anything were in danger on St. Mark’s Place, it would be the campanile—three hundred feet high—and not the little shafts and galleries within reach—too easy reach—of the gaslighter’s ladder. And the only dilapidations I have myself seen on this porch, since I first drew it forty-six years ago, have been, first, those caused by the insertion of the lamps themselves, and then the breaking away of the marble net work of the main capital by the habitual clattering of the said gaslighter’s ladder against it. A piece of it which I saw so broken off, and made an oration over to the passers-by in no less broken Italian, is in my mineral cabinet at Brantwood.
Before leaving this subject of the inclined angle, let me note—usefully, though not to my present purpose—that the entire beauty of St. Mark’s campanile depends on this structure, there definitely seen to be one of real safety. This grace and apparent strength of the whole mass would be destroyed if the sides of it were made vertical. In Gothic towers, the same effect is obtained by the retiring of the angle buttresses, without actual inclination of any but the coping lines.
In the Photograph No. 5 the slope of the angles in the correspondent portico, as it stood before restoration, is easily visible and measurable, the difference being, even on so small a scale, full the twentieth of an inch between the breadth at base and top, at the angles, while the lines bearing the inner arch are perfectly vertical.
There was, indeed, as will be seen at a glance, some displacement of the pillars dividing the great window above, immediately to the right of the portico. But these pillars were exactly the part of the south front which carried no weight. The arch above them is burdened only by its own fringes of sculpture; and the pillars carried only the bit of decorated panelling, which is now bent—not outwards, as it would have been by pressure, but inwards. The arch has not subsided; it was always of the same height as the one to the right of it (the Byzantine builders throwing their arches always in whatever lines they chose); nor is there a single crack or displacement in the sculpture of the investing fringe.
In No. 3 (to the right hand in the frame) there is dilapidation and danger enough certainly; but that is wholly caused by the savage and brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old. The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of “making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad, and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones, little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible rigidity of the modern mechanic.
This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence of himself[159] in the Standard, has at once the dulness and the audacity actually to boast of as “plus exacte”!