connected with it on the angle just above the cap. This date of course
brings this work to very nearly the same period as that of the execution
of the Porta della Carta, and it has been assumed by some that these
capitals were the work of the Bons who built it. Such an assertion is as
wild as that of M. Didron, who says something as to their belonging to
the thirteenth century, for the very shortest inspection of the Porta
della Carta would convince the most sceptical that no part of the
capitals could have been executed by any of the men who wrought at it.
In comparing the merits of the carvers of the earliest and the latest
capitals, it is due to the latter to say that one of the finest of the
whole series is this Trajan capital at the north-west angle, and there
is no internal evidence in it which could lead one to suppose it to be
the work of a man who would ever condescend to copy another’s work.

No one can examine the building without seeing that there is not only in
the detail, but equally in the general design, a marked difference
between the two lower stages and the upper stage. In place of the
extreme boldness which marks every part of the former, we see mouldings
reduced in the latter to the smallest and meanest section possible; the
windows of the upper stage are badly designed, whilst the traceries of
the second stage are as fine as they can possibly be; the angle-shafts
of the upper stage are of the latest type, elaborately twisted and
violently defined, instead of being merely delicate roundings off of the
hard line of wall, as all the early Venetian angle-shafts are; the
parapet, too, is not equal in its design to any of the lower work, and
crowns with an insignificant grotesqueness the noble symmetry of the two
lower arcades; and finally, the chequer-work of marble which forms the
whole of the upper wall is a mode of construction which I have not seen
in any early work, though it is seen in the Porta della Carta (A.D.
1429), and in one other late work, the Palazzo in the Campo Sta. Maria
Mater Domini.[49]

Looking at all the circumstances of the case, I think the fairest
explanation of them is, that the whole sea-front and the six arches of
the Piazzetta (columns 1 to 24 on the plan) were first built, that the
extension to the north (columns 25 to 36 on plan) was then immediately
undertaken by the same artists, and finally that the whole upper story
was built and the sculpture of its capitals completed before 1423. The
capitals of the lower arcade were probably sculptured by degrees, and
certainly not by one hand, between the years 1310 and 1361.

There is a confirmation to some extent of this view in a MS. in the
Bodleian Library of the fourteenth century (the Romance of Alexander),
which contains a curious contemporary view of Venice. This drawing has
been engraved at p. 26 of the second volume of the ‘Domestic
Architecture of the Middle Ages;’[50] here it will be seen, with the
usual amount of licence which characterizes most mediæval

[Illustration: 28--VENICE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

From the Romance of Alexander.

Page 204.]

representations of places or towns, that it has nevertheless been
intended as an absolute representation of what its draughtsman had seen.
The columns with S. Theodore and the lion of S. Mark on their capitals,
the bronze horses and the domes of S. Mark’s, the position by the
waterside, and the representation of the Ponte di Paglia, are all proofs
of this; but the important point for my present purpose is, that he drew
the Ducal Palace as _a building of two stories in height_--the first a
simple arcade, the second an arcade with tracery. In the distance behind
this, his drawing shews a picturesque assemblage of buildings, whilst
figures are represented behind the upper arcade as though it were only a
kind of immense balcony. There can be no doubt whatever that this old
drawing tells in favour of the view that the upper stage was not built
until after a considerable interval; for it is almost impossible--looking
at the way in which the rest of the drawing is made--to believe that all
reference to it would have been omitted, had it been in existence at the
time the artist saw it.

It will be seen that my supposition that the original design of the
Ducal Palace was of considerably less elevation than the present
building, would tend to make it very much more like the Byzantine type
than it is; but even now no one can dispute the family likeness. The
amount of constructive art is as nearly as possible the same. The weight
is supported by a succession of shafts placed at very short intervals
from each other, and in neither is there any approach to the system of
pier, arch, and buttress, so distinctive of Gothic art in the North of
Europe. The pointed arch is used, it is true, in the palace; but, after
all, the mere use of the pointed arch does not make thorough pointed
architecture, and therefore, interesting as it is as a variety of the
style, the Ducal Palace is, I think, not properly to be placed in the
first class of Gothic buildings. Indeed, the second stage, whose
exquisite beauty is the charm of the whole building, does not exhibit
the pointed arch at all in a properly developed form, and is strong
enough to support the great weight of wall above, only by reason of the
massy character of its tracery, and not by the proper application of
constructional arches. I have already said that there is no approach to
buttressing; but the angles require some help, and this is given partly
by increasing considerably the size of the shafts, and partly by iron
ties at the springing of the arches running for some distance in each
direction from the angles.

All the mouldings are very simple; they are generally composed of
three-quarter beads, small fillets, and large flat hollows, constantly
arranged in the same order. The label of the main arcade is a plain
bead. In the string-courses boldly-carved flowers are repeated with a
slight interval between each, and the upper string-course has a row of
nail-heads in one of its members. The cusping of the tracery is quite
square in its section, and the cusps finish with a square end, to which
is attached--and with good effect--a small circular ball of red marble.
The parapet is of the somewhat peculiar kind I have already mentioned,
and I confess I have never been long enough in Venice to accustom myself
to, or to admire, its extreme peculiarity of both outline and design.

And now before we leave this subject let me offer a remark, as every one
who writes on it must, on the admirable story of these sculptures. I
have never sat in front of one of them for any space of time without
seeing some wayfarer stop to study the story of some one of the
capitals. They are a book at which more thousands have looked with
pleasure for some five hundred years than at any other single book in
the world, with the one exception of the Bible. And the lesson to
architects is obvious. Concentrate your labour and your story on some
one part of your building where all men may read it; tell some simple
story and you will interest your readers, if you will but tell it so
simply that by good chance they may be able to read it. Lay out a scheme
so well that if you die your successor may carry it on. Here, as I
believe, the architect completed his two stages of arcades, whilst the
sculptor was changed, but kept generally to the scheme of subjects first
of all laid down. At the three exposed angles are the three archangels,
below them the moral lesson--as much wanted now as then--of the
Drunkenness of Noah, and the Story of Tobit (with S. Raphael); at
another angle The Fall (under S. Michael); and at the last the Judgment
of Solomon (under S. Gabriel). In the lower range of capitals the
stories and catalogues of virtues and vices; the illustrations of
fruits, animals, every-day life; the labours of the months, trades,
sciences, and arts--are all illustrated, and complete a cycle of
subjects which, ill-treated, would always have a certain value, and
which, well treated as most of them are here, have the very highest
charm.

For a building which owes its general impressiveness entirely to the
uniform character of its architecture, it is especially fortunate that
there should be so much also in the detail to attract and reward
constant and minute examination. It is for this reason that the range of
great capitals to the columns of the lower arcade is of so much
importance. They are so large, so close to the eye, so interesting in
their story, and on the whole so carefully and artistically executed, as
to afford the greater pleasure the more the building is known. The
key-plan to these capitals which I give[51] will be useful to shew what
the general arrangement of the subjects is. I have already shewn that
there are repetitions of many of the subjects, but it is equally worth
notice that the foliage which forms the framework for the subjects is
also repeated. There are, I think, only four varieties in its
arrangement. In the first the capitals are arranged very simply--in some
cases rudely--with tufts of foliage or heads. The capitals numbered 2,
3, 6, 13, 16, 20, 23, 27, and 34, are examples of this. In the next the
foliage of the lower part grows up vertically, bending slightly out to
support the sculptured subjects. These are generally the most graceful
of all, and infinitely richer in effect than the first class. The
capitals numbered 1, 7, 9, 12, 18, 24, 26, 28, 33, and 36, are examples
of these. In the third class the foliage is generally marked by the same
feeling, but it rises vertically to the angles, and curls over under the
subject; the 19th and 25th capitals are examples of this class. In the
fourth class the foliage curves over downwards, both at the angles and
under the subject. The neckings below the capitals are wrought on the
shaft itself. They are sometimes moulded, sometimes corded, and
sometimes delicately carved with foliage; these last are by very much
the more beautiful, and generally accompany the best wrought of the
capitals, whilst the inferior capitals have, in all cases, the plainer
necking.

The capitals in the upper arcade have not so much story as those below.
They have generally a head on each side in the midst of foliage, and are
square in plan, though the lower caps are octagonal--a few only have
their names written over them; but on the ground-story most of the
capitals have, or have had, explanatory inscriptions. Some of the upper
capitals close to the north-west angle are among the best. The curves of
the foliage in the angles of the capitals are admirably wrought, and may
be compared, to the damage of the latter, with some of the lower
capitals in the sea-front. The upper range of capitals gradually
deteriorates from the north-west angle as you go to the south-east.
These last are really very bad, having rude gross carving of the human
figure, and foliage feebly massed and treated; but the upper capital of
the south-west angle with the figures of the four winds, and the two or
three capitals near it, must be excepted from this remark, being superb
in design and execution.

The remains of original work in the quadrangle are much less important.
The arcade on the first floor remains, but none of its details are good,
and on the east side it is a poor Renaissance copy of the other sides.
The whole of the lower arcade has been destroyed or altered. But in the
upper walls, which are faced with brick, some of the original windows
remain; they are small, but of the same sort of detail and character as
the larger windows in the outer walls.

The building has lost much by the gradual raising of the pavement. This
is now about twenty inches above the old base of the columns, and their
proportions are so far altered for the worse. And it has lost immensely
also by the destruction of the inlaid marble which once filled all the
spandrels of the main arcade. Two panels only of these remain, and both
in the sea-front. They are charmingly designed, inclosing circles which
exactly touch the labels and strings.

Of the modern additions to this grand building I shall not say anything.
They are not beautiful in themselves nor interesting by reason of their
decorations, if I except those walls on which Tintoretto has lavished so
much of his skill. The architects of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries were artists in very deed, and it is with their work only that
I can feel any real sympathy.

Such, then, is the Ducal Palace: a building certainly in some respects
of almost unequalled beauty, but at the same time of unequal merit; its
first and second stages quite perfect in their bold nervous character,
and in the almost interminable succession of the same beautiful features
in shaft and arch and tracery, forming perhaps one of the grandest
proofs in the world of the exceeding value of perfect regularity and of
a repetition of good features in architecture, when it is possible to
obtain it on a very large scale.

Leaving the Piazzetta, and stepping into the gondola which has been
waiting for us hard by, let us now go in search of other palaces; but
let us not imagine that we are to see anything equal to the Ducal
Palace. There is, it appears to me, a great gap between it and all other
Venetian buildings; and yet all others seem to have been founded on it,
or on the buildings out of which it grew. Their traceries, seldom
absolutely alike, have still so much general similarity that at first
one may well fancy that there is no variety at all; and, as I have
before said, the general arrangement of their windows and doors is so
nearly identical, that this impression is the more likely to grow upon
the mind.

We will not attempt to take the buildings as they come; but rather as we
think of them, and to some extent in the order of their merit, let us
note down a few of the glories of the domestic work of Venice. And first
let us stop in this narrow canal, for we have by our side one of the
most exquisite little pieces of detail in the whole city. It is an
archway, simple and delicate in its proportions, lovely as it is simple,
and appropriately placed hard by the bridge called “del Paradiso.” I
trust that my sketch is clear enough to shew how pure and good the work
is. The main points to be noted are the characteristic flatness of the
details, and the line of dentil-moulding, which defines all the leading
architectural features, originally invented for borders of incrustations
at S. Mark’s, and here, as everywhere in Venice, used for decoration
afterwards. The incrusted circles of marble on each side of the figure
give great life to the spandrel beneath the arch, and the windows seen
behind shew us a late example of the not unfrequent

[Illustration: 29--ARCHWAY, PONTE DEL PARADISO, VENICE. Page 210]

use of the semicircular and ogee arches together in the same window.

Another precious fragment--the Palazzo San Giorgio, I believe--is
reached from the land side by passing under an arch somewhat similar to
that on the Ponte del Paradiso. This arch is turned between the upper
stories of two houses at the end of a _calle_ properly yclept “dell’
arco detto bon,” and is finished with a steep gable. Beyond it is seen a
fragment of wall veneered with marble, with the upper part of an early
two-light window, and two circular medallions; and above this a piece of
wall veneered in diamonds of red and white marble--so far as I know, a
unique example of such a treatment. The window-head is of that earliest
form of ogee, a circle just turned up to a point in the centre, which
has so manifestly an Eastern origin, and which must not be confounded in
date with our English ogee arches.

In another, and rather desolate, canal in the outskirts of the city,
wider than usual, and with a footpath at the side of the water, instead
of having the walls of the houses running down into it, and forming its
boundary, is the Palazzo Cicogna, which I remember gratefully because it
is one of the few exceptions to the general rule of regularity. The
whole design of this building is very irregular: a detached shaft at one
angle supports a portion of the house which overhangs and forms a sort
of open passage-way; to the right of this opening is a four-light
shafted window, and then a plain wall pierced with two windows, each of
a single ogee trefoiled light. The upper story has two single windows
over the others, whilst over the larger windows and the passage-way is a
large window conspicuous from its size and the peculiarity of its
tracery. It is of six lights divided by very good shafts, and properly
arched with pure and good trefoiled arches; above these, and inclosed
within the perpetual indented or billeted string-course, is a
complicated system of intersecting circles pierced at regular intervals
with quatrefoils. The section of this upper part is very much thinner
than that of the arches beneath. This window is in a most shaken and
decayed state, and not likely, I fear, to be long preserved. The whole
elevation is finished with a shallow cornice supported on corbels.

A doorway on the Ponte San Tomà is quite worthy of a visit. It has the
usual square opening of reddish marble, and above this is a pointed arch
of moulded brick; the tympanum is filled in with a square carved centre
panel, and the ground beyond this with quatrefoils of brick or tile very
prettily disposed, and quite deserving of illustration.

And now let us go back to the Grand Canal; we shall enter it by the side
of the Palazzo Foscari, which, with two other contiguous palaces,
occupies quite the post of honour at the bottom of the principal reach
of the canal, and commands the whole view of its noble and ever-busy way
to where the arch of the Rialto and another bend in the canal close in
the view. We will go a few strokes only towards the Rialto, and then
turn round to look at the palaces we have just passed. They certainly
form a most magnificent group, and are in every way worthy of their
conspicuous position. The palace at the junction of the two waters is
that of the Foscari; the others belonged, I believe, to two of the
Giustiniani family; and but a few yards up the canal, which runs by the
side of the former, is one of the smaller remnants of Byzantine work
already referred to. This group is so well known as scarcely to need any
description--suffice it to say, therefore, that throughout these palaces
the windows are shafted, and the glass is fixed in wooden frames behind
the stonework. This is beyond all doubt what we ought to do; it is the
only sensible and rational mode of adapting the system of traceried and
shafted windows for domestic purposes, and

[Illustration: 30. DOORWAY. PONTE S.TOMA. VENICE. p. 212.]

has here, as elsewhere, the prestige of ancient authority to recommend
it to the consideration of those amongst us who will do nothing without
it. I have enlarged on this point elsewhere, and will, therefore, say no
more upon it now, save that in Venice such a thing as an English monial
ordinarily is, was never known. Windows were invariably shafted from the
earliest period to the latest, and so far invariably of the highest
order, inasmuch as they admitted of the definite expression of the point
at which the monial terminated and the arch commenced, and inasmuch,
too, as the coloured surface of the detached marble shaft must ever be
far more lovely than the lines of tracery mouldings carried down even to
the sill.

The angle-shafts of the Palazzo Foscari have caps and bases in each
stage of the building; those of the other palaces continue up without
interruption.

The date of the smaller palaces, and probably of the large one also, is
very early in the fifteenth century; and the latter had, in 1574, the
honour of being the grandest palace that the Venetians could find in
which to lodge Henry III. of France. They are all three very similar in
their design. Their water-gates are pointed, and the windows in the
water-stage small and unimportant. The second stage is more important,
and has cusped ogee window-heads and balconies. The third stage is,
however, the _piano nobile_, all the windows having deep traceried heads
and large balconies. The fourth stage is very nearly like the first,
save that instead of balconies there is a delicate balustrading between
the shafts of the windows, which is very frequent in good Venetian work,
and always very pretty in its effect. All the windows in these three
palaces have ogee-heads generally finished with carved finials, and
inclosed within a square outline formed by the small dentilled moulding,
and giving what I have before had to refer to--to some extent the
effect of a panel with a window pierced in it, veneered on the front.
The Foscari Palace is the only one of these three that has any
string-courses. The arrangement of the windows--large in the centre and
smaller at the sides--is so nearly regular and of a sort of two-and-two
kind of uniformity, that one scarcely notices that nevertheless, when
internal arrangements make it necessary, a departure from this strict
rule is allowed.

The back entrance to the Foscari Palace is on the side canal. It is of
some interest as retaining, in a very perfect state, an example of a
very picturesque treatment in brick of the Venetian battlement. This
consists of a series of piers finished with a steep gabled outline, and
pierced with trefoiled openings. A good example of this sort of
battlement remained near the Fondaco de’ Turchi, and deserves
illustration. It is quite a Venetian invention, and errs on the side of
quaintness.

[Illustration: BRICK BATTLEMENT--VENICE.]

In a small courtyard, desolate and dreary, reached after crossing the
Ponte di Paglia and one or two other bridges on the Riva dei Schiavoni,
is the Palazzo Badoer, a fourteenth-century palace, the ogeed arches of
the windows in which are more than usually good; whilst the beauty of
the central window, inclosed within a square line of moulding, within
which the wall is incrusted with marble relieved by medallions, is very
great. The structure of this, as of most Venetian palaces, is brick
which has been frescoed; but it is now in a very lamentable state of
decay. The balconies of the lower windows are clearly modern, but there
is a trace of the original balustrade between the shafts of the windows
in the second stage; and in front of the side-lights to the upper window
is a grille of iron-work taking the place of a balcony, and composed of
a combination of quatrefoils. The arrangement of the windows in this
front is not absolutely regular, but still the centre is very marked;
and though it is of early date, the true use of the arch nowhere
appears. The usual[52] dog-tooth cornice finishes the walls under the
eaves. In the courtyard of this house are two of the wells which give so
much character to all the courts in Venice. They appear generally to be
of early date, and look, frequently, like the capitals of large columns,
taken down and placed upon the ground. Those in front of the Palazzo
Badoer are perhaps more like fonts.

Another palace, also said to belong to one of the Badoer family, placed
at the junction of two canals very near the Scuola di San Giorgio and
the Greek Church, is remarkable as being now one of the very few houses
in which the red brick walls are still in their original state, and not
defiled by compo, paint, or whitewash. This house has three fronts, with
one old doorway on the canal, and two on the land. The back facing the
Campo San Severo has an unusually fine and lofty entrance, a square
doorway with a pointed arch above (which I suppose once held tracery),
and a group of five windows with circles or disks of marble in their
spandrels above. Amongst other things it is remarkable as an instance
of the way in which windows were sometimes placed absolutely at the very
angles of the building. Judging by the similarity of its tracery to that
above the Porta della Carta in the Ducal Palace, this angle window must
date from about 1400 to 1430. It has a very bold shaft at the angle,
whilst the jambs have pilasters ornamented at their angles by a twisted
cord-like moulding, which is frequently met with in the later work.
There is a small angle-shaft elaborately twisted just above this window,
and very much like the angle-shafts of the Ducal Palace.

The composition of the main window in the front of this house is, I
think, very striking. The lower window of four lights (one of which is
larger and loftier than the others--a curious instance of the junction
of regularity with irregularity), and whose arches are ogee trefoils, is
surmounted by another window of four lights, with delicate balustrading
between the shafts; and on each side of this upper window, and forming
part of the composition, is a single light, with projecting balcony. The
effect of the whole arrangement is pleasing, and is frequently repeated
in other palaces. The marble incrustation over this window is very much
like that in the other Palazzo Badoer; and from the centre of the
medallions of marble small balls of marble project, fixed with metal,
and giving great life and beauty to the medallions, and I think without
any sacrifice of truth. The main fabric of this building must be of the
latter part of the fourteenth century--the arches of the principal
window being of a very excellent though simple type. Venetian balconies,
of which this palace affords such good examples, are very beautiful and
very characteristic. Nowhere else are they seen in such perfection;
nowhere else, perhaps, were they ever so absolutely necessary. The
palaces rose out of the dark water which washed against their
foundations, and no ground

[Illustration: 31.--ANGLE WINDOW, VENICE. Page 216.]

[Illustration: BALCONY--VENICE.]

could be given up for shady arcades as in other Italian cities, nor were
there any paths to be strolled along; the only resource was, therefore,
to gain from the air that which the land could not afford, and by
projections in front of the windows to obtain that power of enjoying the
delicious evening atmosphere, so cool and pleasant after the fatigues of
the too sultry day. These balconies are almost always very similar,
consisting of a number of delicate shafts with carved capitals,
supporting a piece of stone whose under side is notched up in a series
of trefoils (generally ogee), resting upon the capitals of the shafts.
These are divided occasionally by pilasters, under which are corbels
jutting out boldly to support their weight; and above which sit,
generally, quietly and placidly eyeing the gondolas as they shoot
silently by, small lions, dogs, or other animals--a quaint finish which
one soon learns to like; their angles are often marked by corded
mouldings, and the edges of their floors and copings are almost always
moulded and specked with the perpetual notchings of the nail-head, and
their under sides or soffeits are frequently carved or panelled.

There was great variety in the planning of these balconies. In the
Palazzo Persico, for instance, in which the central windows of the
second and third stages form one great panel, the lower balcony is
continuous across all four lights of the window, whilst the outer lights
only of the upper window have balconies, the two middle lights having
instead a balustrade between their shafts. In other cases the balconies
extend to four lights only of a six-light window, whilst in most they
are confined to the central windows, to which they give much additional
dignity. The Ca’ Fasan affords an almost solitary example[53] of tracery
in a balcony; and the effect of this is so vastly inferior to the usual
shafted balconies, that it seems scarcely necessary to pause to consider
why it should be so. Obviously, however, it is not very convenient to
have the fretful points of cusps and traceries set, as it were, to catch
every projection or point of your dress whenever you lean over the edge
of the balcony to inhale the fresh air or scan the busy scene below.

In the Casa Persico, to which reference has already been made, the
central window is an elaborate composition of the same kind; but the
lower one is of more importance, and has a continuous balcony; and here
I may notice the finials with which the ogee arches of Venetian windows
are so often finished. They appeared to me to be invariably tasteless
and poor in execution, and very mean in their outline. I did not see one
finial in Venice which was satisfying, even when found in conjunction
with otherwise fine work; and I used to wish heartily, when I reached
some palace not before seen, that I might find its arches finished
without them. There was some reason for the wish, too, in the fact that
it is in the later work that these tasteless ornaments are commonest. I
saw them first at Verona, and lamented over them there, but at Venice I
was positively annoyed by the persevering and endless thrusting of their
poverty and badness upon my wearied eyes.

And now let us go again into the Grand Canal, and we shall not have gone
very far up the broad water above the Rialto before we shall find, on
our right hand, one of the most striking groups of mediæval palaces and
houses which can be seen anywhere, even in Venice; this is where the
famous Ca’ d’Oro unites with some three or four other houses, of rather
earlier date, and gives a very fair idea of what the water-scenery of
the ancient city once was. There is some difficulty in criticizing the
Ca’ d’Oro, because, in the first place, it has been restored to render
it fit for the occupation of Mdlle. Taglioni; and, in the next place,
much of the elaborate decoration from which it derived its name, has
perished or been destroyed. As it is, however, it is still a very
sumptuous example of the later fourteenth-century Gothic. Its whole face
is inlaid with squares of red and white marble, and a great amount of
carving is spread over the entire surface, round and between the
windows. This is very flat, but good in its effect. The arcade on the
water-story, and the traceried arcades above, all open into recessed
courts--an arrangement peculiar, I think, among Gothic houses, and
similar in its purpose to the arcades in the Byzantine palaces. Some of
the balconies are good, and the carving of the capitals and moulding of
the window-traceries are very characteristic of Venetian pointed. The
whole design is one-sided, and gives the impression of a house to which
an additional wing has been added. The water-stage consists of an open
arcade of five arches, the central arch round, the remainder pointed,
and on one side of these are two windows with a continuous balcony. The
second and third stages have, above the five open arches, elaborately
traceried windows, of no less than eight lights in width, filling almost
the entire front, the outside lights having balconies, whilst the others
have balustrading. Over the two windows of the water-stage are
single-light windows in each stage. There are throughout this front many
medallions of dark marble, which, let into a field of light marble, are
most brilliant in their effect.

The most remarkable features in the Ca’ d’Oro are, however, the triple
and elaborately carved and chevroned angle-shafts, which I have nowhere
else seen,[54] and the very singular parapet. The height of this is
greater about the centre and at the two ends than elsewhere; but this
appears to have been done rather with the intention of carrying up to
the very top the noticeable division in the building itself than for any
other reason. A very small portion only of the parapet is perfect, and
this it is rather difficult to get at. The small balls of marble affixed
to the outer edge of the trefoils are like those in the tracery of the
Ducal Palace, and in the centre of the medallions of marble everywhere
throughout the city. Their effect is certainly very piquant.

[Illustration: CAPITAL OF WINDOW-SHAFT--VENICE.]

By the side of the Ca’ d’Oro there are three ancient houses of
considerable interest, and the second from the Ca’ d’Oro,

[Illustration: 32. PALAZZZO SEGREDO. VENICE. p. 221.]

the Palazzo Segredo, was a very good example indeed; it has unhappily, I
believe, all been restored and painted, so that now few would believe
that it could ever have been (as it was) one of the very best works in
Venice of its age. It quite deserves illustration, on account of the
extreme vigour and beauty of its great window, which has more of the
flavour of the arcade in the Doge’s Palace, than anything else in
Venice. These three houses are all more than usually irregular in the
arrangement of their windows.

Lower down the Grand Canal, and nearly opposite the Post-office, is the
Palazzo Pisani-Moretta--a very late building, in which all the balconies
are Renaissance, with ordinary balustrading; but this occurs so often in
connection with the latest examples of Gothic work, that I am disposed
to believe that they were possibly, after all, contemporary in their
erection. This palace, too, is remarkable for its double entrance-doors,
with ogee arches, and for the manner in which the central window is
carried up in an uninterrupted way to the very cornice; the lower
traceries being very fair, those in the upper story very weak and bad.

The Palazzo Falcanon (alla Riva Tonda) is another fine house. It has two
water-gates; is four stories in height, the third being the principal
floor; the angle shafts are all spiral, and the string-courses all
ornamented with cable mouldings, which, as is usual, are twisted in
reverse ways from the centre of the front.

The Palazzo Celsi, near the Frari, is, like the Badoer Palace, an
example of a fine regularly designed house with its brickwork left in
its natural state; and the Palazzo Orfei is an instance of the finest
(and a very fine) front being turned towards a _campo_ and not towards a
canal. The long group of mediæval houses which formed one side of the
Campo Sta. Maria Formosa was equally worthy of admiration, but has
lately been modernized--a fate which is only too rapidly overtaking
most of what one used to admire in this once fortunately neglected city!

The window of which I give an illustration, on the Ponte del Fornaro, is
a rare but extremely good example of the combination of sculpture and
tracery. Here the carvings are good examples of the emblems of the four
Evangelists very ingeniously treated, and the whole window has more
force than most of the traceried windows.

With notices of two more buildings, the Palazzi Cavalli and Barbaro, I
shall conclude my remarks upon the existing examples of Venetian
domestic work. Neither of them calls for much remark. The traceries of
the Cavalli Palace are heavy and unsatisfactory, and contrast
unfavourably with the greater simplicity of the windows in the Palazzo
Barbaro. The two palaces stand, however, in a very fine position on the
Grand Canal, commanding the view from the Foscari Palace in one
direction to the church of the Salute and the mouth of the canal in the
other. Nearly opposite them is a very striking house, the Ca’ Dario,
built, I imagine, about the commencement of the sixteenth century,
before the revived Classic feeling had fully possessed the Venetians,
and displaying some effective and beautiful arrangements of
constructional decoration with coloured marbles. It is, in fact, an
attempt to revive, to some extent, the art of incrustation, as practised
at S. Mark’s; and so successful is it, that I wonder much that more
examples are not met with.

In the Grand Canal, and near this spot, are many other buildings, all
worthy of illustration, but adding, I think, nothing to what we already
know. The Ca’ Fasan is the most unlike the other mediæval houses of any;
but it pleased me so little that I could not bring myself to waste time
by sketching it. It is only fair to say that in its traceried balconies
it approaches more nearly to the latest

[Illustration: 33. WINDOW. PONTE DEL FORNARO. VENICE. p. 222.]

[Illustration: 34. CASA GOLDONI. VENICE. p. 223.]

northern pointed than any other building in Venice, and that it has
perhaps at the same time less breadth and dignity than any.

Two fine palaces[55] are now turned into hotels, and that at which I
stopped was full of remains of pointed windows; indeed traces of pointed
work are singularly plentiful, and I might go on to an interminable
length were I to attempt to describe them all. The Arsenal is old, I
believe, but has been modernized. It may be visited now for the sake of
the grand and quaint old lions which sit before its entrance.

Of the interiors of these houses I cannot say very much. They usually
have a great hall in the centre of each floor, into which the various
rooms open; and the windows of these halls are generally the most
important in the elevation. The frames of the windows were of wood,
placed behind the traceries, and the original ceilings were the moulded
beams of the floors. I have only seen one good Gothic staircase in
Venice. This is in the Casa Goldoni, and has for its balustrade a series
of shafts with piers at intervals. Its detail in short is that of the
balcony, but sloped up to suit the rise of the steps. Pointed arches of
brick carry the steps. This house may well be visited by other than
architectural pilgrims, and will be found near the Ponte San Tomà. A
fine early Renaissance staircase remains in the Palazzo Minelli, near
San Paterniano. This is circular, with continuous open arcades following
the rise of the steps, the usual shafted balustrade filling the lower
part of the openings between the columns. The chimneys of these palaces
are very singular. Not many old examples remain, but they are still
copied, and that some of them are really old is proved by the extent to
which they are shown in early Venetian paintings, as e.g. in the works
of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. In my illustration the examples Figs.
2 and 3 are copied from paintings, and Fig. 1 is from a palace near the
Ponte Bernardo.

[Illustration: CHIMNEYS--VENICE.

_fig. 1_      _fig. 2_      _fig. 3_]

And now that we have so far passed in review a series of the finest
remains of mediæval architecture in Venice, it is time to inquire how
much is to be learnt by what we have seen, and in what degree it differs
from the developments of pointed architecture with which we are familiar
in Northern Europe.

I think the very first point to be observed is that in Venice
architecture was never essentially constructional in the sense in which
it was in our own land. The pointed arch is rarely used except in
churches, and in its place traceries, increased in size and scale to do
their work, are made to carry the entire weight of walling above them,
as is the case, to take the foremost example, in the second stage of the
Ducal Palace. And it is remarkable that, when the arch was used, from a
very early date it was the ogee arch, and not the arch formed by two
simple curves; indeed it may almost be said that the pure pointed arch
was never used, save where it would have been quite impossible with any
other contrivance to bridge the necessary gap, or provide sufficiently
for the weight to be supported. How striking a contrast this is to the
way in which in England men worked with and exhibited the pointed arch,
evidently as if, and because, they loved it!--using it not only as a
sturdy servant to do heavy work, but as the friend of whose friendship
they were ever the most anxious to boast. I do not complain of the
flatness and lack of breaks or recesses in the masses of the great
Venetian buildings, because this no doubt arose in part from the value
of every foot of ground so hardly gathered from the sea, and the
difficulty of throwing out buttresses into the narrow depths of the
canals out of which they rise. And the same conditions which enforced
this flatness are grateful because they involved the charming balconies
which are so peculiarly Venetian, and gave a breadth and simplicity to
the outline which has its own artistic charm.

In the science of moulding I cannot but think that it is quite useless
to compare works executed for the sunny skies of Venice with those
fitted for the gloomy sunlessness of a northern climate. The one kind
are as properly soft, gentle in their alternations of light and shade,
and delicate, as the other are piquant and sharp, rejoicing in the dark
shade of deep hollows and endless intricacy of outline and arrangement.
But I feel no doubt whatever that, unfair as it may be to compare one
school with the other, seeing that each worked for its own wants, it is
yet most clear that the Northern architects were developing a much
deeper art, and working with much more consummate skill, than were the
Venetian. The endless variety of the arrangement of; capitals, and the
necessary grouping of mouldings to fit, their varying outlines, was
carried to the extreme point of perfection by the one school, whilst in
the other not only was there much less depth and relief, but also very
much less variety. The abacus of the Italian capital was almost always
square in plan, and, as an almost necessary consequence of this,
mouldings retained very much the same arrangement and shape for the
whole period of the prevalence of the pointed style, and generally
rather leaned to the side of heaviness than of delicacy. Venetian
mouldings are composed of the constant combination of a three-quarter
bead and a shallow hollow, divided by small fillets, and so invariably
arranged in almost exactly the same order, that it requires very great
care to decide upon the date of buildings by their mouldings with any
sort of approach to certainty.

In addition to simple mouldings, there are also the ever-recurring
ornamented mouldings which are so peculiarly characteristic of Venetian
works of all dates. These consist generally of sections which in England
we should consider Romanesque, but which in Venice appear to be much
more common in the latest works than in the earliest; chevrons,
cable-mouldings, billets, and the like, are seen everywhere, and suggest
the question whether this class of ornamented mouldings, so largely used
in the early days of architecture in England and so little afterwards,
might not with some advantage be rescued from the contempt into which it
has fallen with modern builders. They have the advantage of being within
the power of any ordinary workman to execute, and do not, therefore,
require the handiwork, which is so rare and so precious, of thoroughly
good carvers. Add to this, that some features originally invented for
use in the way of holding together marble incrustations, were afterwards
used universally for their own sakes as ornamental mouldings, for which
office they were in no way fitted, and I think nearly as much has been
said as can be of Venetian mouldings in stone. Those in brick are even
less satisfactory; but they occur mainly about the churches, and, as I
do not recognize anything at all distinctively Venetian in their design
or arrangement, it will be better to say more about them after we have
seen the brickwork in other cities in the North of Italy, compared with
which that at Venice is not of the first order.

In the practice of carving, as in that of moulding, I see no reason for
yielding the palm to the Venetian. It is true indeed, that the Byzantine
capitals--of which such magnificent examples exist at S. Mark’s--are
some of the most exquisite I have ever seen, true and precise in their
sculpture, revelling in the utmost delicacy of intricate work, and
always refined and elaborated with great evidence of care and
thoughtfulness; but after the earliest school, and those later examples
in which they were copied and regarded as models, there appears to me to
be much less to admire. There is a confusion and want of fixed purpose
about many of those which are commonly referred to as the best types of
Gothic sculpture, which is at best not satisfactory; and I confess that
I came away much more pleased with some of the Byzantine capitals than
with any others. They have some notable points of difference from those
to which we are used. They are generally much larger in proportion to
the shaft than ours; and instead of having a regular neck-moulding, they
rise out of the shaft with a kind of swell, which, as being less
definite, is to me less satisfactory than our neck-moulding. The
capitals of all dates are very generally similar in their outlines--this
in part arising from the constant occurrence of circular columns with
capitals whose abaci are square, and in part from the imitation, more or
less closely, of Byzantine models. Indeed, it is impossible not to see
how great an influence the earliest remaining work--that of the eleventh
century--had in Venice until the end of the fourteenth and far into the
fifteenth century; the most beautiful and striking arrangements of the
former age are reproduced and only slightly modified in the finest work
of the latter to a very remarkable extent: and so much more decidedly
and frequently than are the traces, in northern pointed, of any
hankering after the features of Romanesque buildings, that I think but
one conclusion can fairly be drawn from the sculpture of Venice as well
as from its architecture, viz. that pointed architecture was never
developed as purely and thoroughly in Venice as in the North of Europe;
and that, though it retained its sway there nearly as long as it did
elsewhere, it never thoroughly understood or felt its own strength, and
worked and toiled tied down and encumbered by Byzantine fetters and
Classic sympathies. There is much, notwithstanding this, to admire--and,
above all else, the greatest beauty of the style, wherein it so far left
us behind, the thorough appreciation and unsparing use of the shaft. It
is quite astonishing how very little this was ever used in England.
Occasionally, indeed, it was freely used in grand buildings, and in some
individual features it was frequently seen in thirteenth-century
buildings; but at the very period when, if ever, architecture was in its
perfection--in the early part of the fourteenth century--it was almost
entirely forgotten and thrown aside. All honour, therefore, to the men
who so perseveringly and determinedly used it as did the builders at
Venice for three centuries! And all shame to us if we do not attempt for
the future so far at any rate to follow in their steps! So rare are any
but shafted windows in Venice, that at present I hardly remember a
single instance of a window with monials formed by the continuous
mouldings of the tracery; and it is obvious that this gave occasion, not
only to the use of beautiful marbles--never so well used as in
shafts--but also to the constant use of carved capitals. In domestic
buildings, as I have before remarked, this arrangement of shafted
windows is very valuable, because it suggests one obvious way in which
we may unite traceried windows with the very newest arrangement of
window-frames or sashes in the most comfortable nineteenth-century
houses; for in these Venetian palaces the glass was always contained in
a separate wooden frame set within the marble shafts and tracery.[56]

Besides the use of the shaft in the ordinary way, I must not forget to
say that parapets frequently (or perhaps it were better to say
balustrades)--as, e.g., at S. Mark’s--and balconies everywhere, are
composed of a vast number of very delicate shafts, set very close to
each other, and surmounted by long pieces of stone cut out in imitation
of arching, and not really to be regarded as a succession of
arch-stones, but rather as coping-stones to hold the shafts together.
And, again, they are used very beautifully for the support of open
pinnacles, one at each angle, inclosing a figure, just as in the
monuments of the Scaligers at Verona. Examples of this are to be seen in
the pinnacles which have been added between the gables of S. Mark’s,
which are exceedingly good in their effect; and again in the pinnacles
which terminate the church of the Madonna dell’ Orto.

One more point is worthy of remark--the treatment, namely, of the angles
of buildings. These were almost always marked either by a roll-moulding
or by a succession of nook-shafts, sometimes extravagantly chevroned or
otherwise ornamented. This, when done simply, was always satisfactory,
but, in its later and more elaborate form, was, I think, as
unsatisfactory. The delicate rounding off of the angles of walls was a
point not unthought of in England. In the thirteenth century a
nook-shaft was the common contrivance; in the fourteenth, a chamfer; and
in the fifteenth men reverted entirely to the square form. Here,
however, there is a great and very interesting variety in this
apparently simple feature. The most satisfactory plan of all is where a
quarter-circle forms the angle, and is finished with a small incision in
the form of a V on either side, as it unites simplicity with strength of
construction and softness of contour, and does not force itself too
prominently upon our observation; and, next to this, the most
satisfactory form is where, instead of the moulding being round, it is
pointed at the angle. The twisted shafts of the upper stage of the Ducal
Palace, and the triple and chevroned shafts of the Ca’ d’Oro, are not
improvements upon the refinement of the earlier mode.

I have already spoken of the exquisite beauty of the inlaid marbles in
S. Mark’s; nothing can be better than their effect, and nothing seems
more wonderful than that they should not have been used more frequently
in later buildings. I was, perhaps, a little disappointed in not
finding, as I had expected, the marble arranged generally in geometrical
patterns; but this is quite the exception; and one sees only, in a
medallion here and there, the exquisite beauty which their arrangement
in this way may produce. As a rule the walls are faced with thin slabs
of marble, each of the size in which it came to hand, sawn into as many
slices as its substance would allow, and then riveted to the walls and
held in place securely by projecting thin lines of stonework built into
the wall, and cut with indented or billet ornaments along their edges.
There is, however, a degree of real as well as apparent weakness which
is not at all satisfactory in this system of incrustation, and I thought
how much more noble such work might well become, were it to be inlaid
only where no strong work was required to be done--as, e.g., in
spandrels of arches,[57] or within arches--and not as here to the
concealment of every one of the necessary constructional features. It is
to be observed, however, that the slabs of marble are generally higher
than they are wide, so as at once to destroy any thought of their being
really constructional.

The south side of S. Mark’s is, perhaps, the place above all others in
Venice where this inlaid work may be seen to the greatest advantage.
Some of the great arches which stand in place of gables are divided into
four or five square-headed lights by shafts supporting semicircular
arches, the tympana of which are filled in with delicate and perpetually
varied filigree-work in marble, whilst above them a succession of panels
or medallions shews all the resources of the rich materials which were
to be exhibited. In another case, just over the entrance from the
Piazzetta to the church, the tympanum of the arch is filled in with
large medallions, one exquisitely carved, the others plain; whilst the
arch of the window below the tympanum has its beautiful marble spandrels
adorned on either side with medallions which, for exquisite arrangement
of vari-coloured marbles in geometrical patterns, are perfectly
admirable. There is enough, therefore, in the Venetian system of
incrustation, though much unhappily be lost, to give ample food for our
study and admiration; and its only weak point is, as I have said, its
too frequent neglect or concealment of the constructional features of
the buildings it adorns.

It is easy, however, to cavil at particular details, and scan with a
critical eye the architectural beauties of Venice; but let it not be
thought for an instant that all the wonderful pictures which every new
turn or new point of view brings before the eyes are unappreciated. A
few days spent there suffice almost to fill a lifetime with
reminiscences of all that is novel, beautiful, and strange; and days
such as I have spent, year after year, rejoicing in the daytime in the
full brilliancy of a September sun, and at night in the calm loveliness
of a Venetian night, have been just the most delightful in every way
that could be passed.

We were at Venice on the festival of the Nativity of the Blessed
Virgin--a great feast-day, which it had been my fortune to spend some
two or three times before in Roman Catholic countries. I confess that
here we were not edified. We came in, as we went from church to church,
for rather more than the usual number of the _désagrémens_ which always
seem to attend the decoration of the churches, and especially the
altars, for such festivities abroad. The strongest impression left on my
mind was one of wonder at the paltry character of the long array of what
by courtesy are called, I suppose, wreaths of flowers, manufactured of
pink gauze, or some equally unnatural material. These, with vulgar
draperies hung outside the church doors, and in additional quantity
about the altars, with the most noisy and gladsome ringing of bells,
completed the external demonstrations; all the shops were most
studiously closed, and the churches and open places were thronged with
people. At S. Mark’s we heard[58] some abominably light opera-music,
which sounded, as may be imagined, very discordant within its solemn
walls.

One morning we devoted partly to the ascent of the campanile in the
Piazza. The ascent is entirely by inclined planes; the outer walls of
the tower are in fact double, and in the space between them these
inclined planes are formed; and it is worth notice that to this day, in
all buildings which we have seen in progress in this part of the world,
inclined boards are used instead of ladders for obtaining access to
scaffolding; and in one of the mosaics in the entrance-porch of S.
Mark’s, where the building of the Tower of Babel is depicted, precisely
the same kind of arrangement is shewn. This is interesting, as shewing
the tenacity with which old customs are adhered to. The view, when the
top is reached, quite repays the labour of the ascent, as it gives the
best possible idea of what Venice really is. We get an impression of a
very densely populated town, hemmed in on all sides by water, and
looking very flat and low; in the distance small islands pave the way to
the mainland, or shelter us from the sea; these, where they are more
distant, look like mere black spots on the smooth, unrippled expanse of
water: and in the far horizon we see to the west the purple outline of
the mountains about Vicenza; and to the north of these, and rising
grandly into the sky, the snowy peaks of the southern range of the
Friulan Alps. Below and around are countless churches, all placed
confusedly without respect to orientation--a neglect, if anywhere
excusable, surely so here, where land is the exception and water the
rule.

The last day we spent in Venice was most enjoyable. We had been all day
in our gondola, now stopping to sketch some Gothic palace, anon shooting
into some narrow canal to escape the bright heat of the sun, winding our
way now here, now there, just as the fancy of the moment seized us, and
realizing more than ever that “the longest summer’s day was all too
short” for a last day in so fair a place. In the evening, just before
sunset, we went out into the Lagoon, and, rowing round the small island
of Giudecca, watched the gradually waning light reflected on the smooth,
calm water, which seemed too silent and too soft to be disturbed by a
word from any of us; and then at last, turning back and coming suddenly
through a short canal into the main stream just opposite the Dogana, we
moved on gently till we came abreast of the Ducal Palace. It was just
dark; the moon was rising behind us in all her beauty, and in front,
lamp after lamp was suddenly lit along the Piazzetta, then along the
palace-front, all along the Riva dei Schiavoni, until at last, before we
landed, as far as we could see, the bright lights, reflected in a
hundred gleaming, flashing lines, were fitfully dancing in long streams
of light upon the bosom of the waters.

We stepped on shore to find ourselves led on by the sound of military
music, and to be tempted by the luxury of ices eaten _al fresco_ in the
Piazza; and then, when the crowd gradually dispersed, we too, among the
last, found our way to our hotel, charmed so much with our last night in
Venice that it is impossible not to recollect that evening with the
deepest pleasure.

It is not without purpose that I have held silence with regard to the
churches and buildings generally of the Renaissance school in Venice.
These have had in their time many more admirers than have the examples
of architecture which it was alike my business and my delight
particularly to examine; and to the present day I doubt not that nine
people out of ten, led by their valets-de-place, go to see what is worst
in point of taste, and so reap the reward of allowing themselves to be
made to see with another’s eyes, instead of enjoying the intense
pleasure of working out and exploring for themselves all the treasures
of this mine and storehouse of ancient art. It is partly because I feel
the greatest repugnance to the buildings themselves, and partly because
I fear to make my notes, already lengthy, far too long for the patience
of my readers, that I do not venture upon this additional field of
study; but not in the least degree because I doubt the result, for I
believe firmly that, tried by the fair rules which must regulate merit
in a constructive art, the Renaissance buildings of Venice would be no
nearer perfection than those of any other city. Something perhaps there
is in the gloomy grandeur of their vast masses rearing their rusticated
walls and deeply recessed windows darkly above the comparatively
cheerful and bright-looking walls of the neighbouring Gothic palaces,
which may impress the minds of some, but they must be of a sombre
temperament who really love them. Still more must they be of a tasteless
temperament who can endure with patience the succession of
eccentricities with which Palladio and his disciples have loaded their
churches. I pretend not, however, to discuss the point. I had not time
for everything, and preferred giving up the attempt to like what from my
heart I have ever disliked, and what nothing that I saw in Venice would
make me dislike at all less heartily.

Neither do I pretend to say anything about Venetian pictures; guides
without number may be found of more service and more knowledge, and to
their hands I leave their proper charge. A word only upon one
point--their adaptation, namely, to the sacred edifices of which they
are the most notable ornaments.

Now I must at once say that there is no church, so far as I saw, in
Venice, with the single exception of S. Mark’s, which is to be compared
in this respect (in its effect, that is, as heightened by colour) with
such buildings as the Arena Chapel at Padua or the church of Sta.
Anastasia at Verona--the one an example of the very noblest art working
under strict architectural limitations; the other, of simple decorative
painting. The fact is, that the Venetian pictures give the impression
that they might do elsewhere as well as in a church, and therefore
entirely fail in identifying themselves with the walls on which they
hang; whilst no one can ever think of the noble works of Giotto at
Padua, without recalling to mind the religious order of his works and
their identification with the building which contains them; and at
Verona the result of the system adopted in the painting is marvellously
to enhance the effect of the architecture without in any way concealing
or damaging it. In Venice the case is quite different. The church of San
Sebastiano, in which Paul Veronese is buried, and which internally is
almost entirely covered with his paintings, is an example of what I
suppose I must call the best Venetian treatment. This consists, however,
of immense oil-paintings covering entire walls, and absolutely
requiring, in order that they may be at all properly appreciated, that
the spectator should stand in a particular spot--in some cases by the
side of the altar--and that the windows should first have blinds drawn
down, and then, when he goes to look at another painting, have them
drawn up again. This is all very unpleasant. But besides this, there is
no very sensible advantage to the colour of the buildings from these
decorations; certainly they are far behind mere decorative paintings as
vehicles for bringing out the architectural features; and so they are
visited very much as pictures in a gallery, and without in any case
being identified with the churches in which they are preserved. The
mosaics at S. Mark’s are, on the other hand, some of the very grandest
examples of the proper mode of decorating interiors with representations
of religious subjects, all conceived and arranged with some order and
relation to each other. But of the other Venetian churches there does
not seem to me to be any one whose artists at all succeeded in equalling
the example so early set them.

I do not pretend in these pages to speak at all of paintings
irrespective of architecture, or I might find much to say upon the store
of works, of a very noble school, in which this great city is so rich.
The immense rooms of the Ducal Palace, covered as their walls and
ceilings are with the works of Tintoretto, Titian, and Paul Veronese,
cannot be forgotten; still less can the many works of Giovanni Bellini,
and of other painters in the churches, and in the collection in the
Accademia--rich among others in the works of that great and interesting
painter Carpaccio--be passed over; whilst the decorated walls of the
various Scuole are in many cases of hardly inferior interest. I am sorry
that I was obliged to take the great merits of some of the grandest
works somewhat on faith; it was in vain to think of actually studying
them in a short time, and, educated as I have been to love the works of
an earlier date and another school more heartily than these, I must
confess, barbarous as the confession may appear to be, that I was not
thoroughly pleased with what I saw. The magnificence of the chiaroscuro
and colouring of these great pictures scarcely atoned to me for the
degree to which--owing generally to the immense array of figures and
confusion of subject--I failed to carry away distinct conceptions of the
story intended to be told. It may be said that this is the result of
want of taste or education, but still the feeling is so different when
for the first time pictures by Fra Angelico, Giotto, Raffaelle,
Perugino, or Francia are looked at, that it is hard to avoid believing
that, though their power over colour may have been somewhat less, their
power of attaining to the highest point of the true painter’s art--that
of leaving indelible impressions on the minds of all beholders--was
immeasurably higher. Thus much only by way of excuse for not saying more
about what the world in general rightly conceives to be one of the great
glories of Venice.

And now I must say farewell, and, doubtful though I may be as to the
claims of Venetian art in the Middle Ages to be considered as at all
equal to that of the same period in Northern Europe, I am very grateful
for many new ideas gathered and much intense pleasure enjoyed in the
examination of its treasures; and so, rather sadly laying myself down to
sleep for the last time in Venice, I began to deem that my journey
henceforward must be rather less interesting than it had been; with
Venice a thing of the past, instead of, as it was on my outward course,
full of all the beauties with which the liveliest fancy could crowd its
walls and palaces by anticipation.

CHAPTER IX.

                              “A sea
    Of glory streams along the Alpine height
    Of blue Friuli’s mountains.”
              _Childe Harold._

     New Roads to Venice--The Pusterthal--Innichen--Dolomite
     Mountains--Heiligenblut Kötschach--Kirchbach--Gail
     Thal--Hermagor--Ober Tarvis--Predil
     Pass--Gorizia--Aquileja--Grado--Udine--Pordenone.

To those who wish to find new roads to old haunts let me recommend the
road to Venice described in this chapter. A more interesting way for any
one who has already travelled through Lombardy to Venice cannot be
desired. It affords a sight not only of charming scenery, primitive
people, and churches of some interest, but gives an opportunity for a
visit to Aquileja, Grado, and Udine, all of them places well worthy to
be known by all lovers of architecture. Leaving the Brenner railway at
Franzensfeste, we made our way first of all to Innichen. Here I found a
very fine Romanesque church which, placed as it is not very far to the
north of the distant mountains which one sees from Venice, and full as
it is of Italian influence in its general design, may well be included
in my notes. It is a cruciform church with a central raised lantern,
three eastern apses, a lofty south-western tower, and a
fifteenth-century narthex in front of the rest of the west end. The nave
is divided from the aisles by columns which are, (1) ten-sided, (2) four
half columns attached to a square, and (3) octagonal. The first and
third are massive columns decreasing rapidly in size from the base to
the capital. The central lantern has an octagonal vault upon very simple
pendentives, and the apses have semi-dome roofs. A fine south doorway
has the emblems of the four Evangelists, sculptured around Our Lord in
the tympanum. Innichen is a small and unimportant village, but boasts, I
think, of no less than five churches; and fine as is the mother-church,
I suppose most travellers would agree with me in thinking the background
of mountains to the south of it, the most delightful feature of the
place. Truly I know few things more lovely than the evening view of the
church and village, with the tall fantastic peaks of the Dolomite Drei
Schuster behind, lighted up with the glowing brilliancy which is so
characteristic a result of the Dolomite formation, by the last rays of
the setting sun. Below all was gloomy, dark, and shaded; above the whole
series of towering peaks seemed to be on fire, and most unearthly did
they look. The attraction of such sights as I had seen before compelled
me to give a day to an excursion southwards to the Kreuzberg pass, to
have a glimpse, at any rate, of the Auronzo Dolomites, and I had no
reason to repent the day so spent.

Leaving Innichen and going eastward, we went first to Lienz; then, after
a _détour_ to Heiligenblut, we crossed from the Pusterthal to the Gail
Thal, and from thence across the Predil pass to the Adriatic at Gorizia.
From Innichen till we reached the Italian sea-board, we saw and were
much interested in a series of churches, generally of the fifteenth
century, and all built apparently by the same school of German
architects. They are small mountain churches, and are mainly remarkable
for the complicated and ingenious character of their groined roofs. They
have usually aisles, columns without capitals, and no distinct arches
between them, but only vaulting-ribs. The panels between the ribs are
often ornamented with slightly sunk quatrefoils, or in some cases
regularly filled with tracery.

One of the best of these churches is that at Heiligenblut, in Carinthia.
Here, where the main object of every one is the exploration of the
mountains grouped around the beautiful snow-peak of the Gross-Glockner,
it is not a little pleasant to find again, as at Innichen, a remarkable
church just opposite the inn-door. This was built as a pilgrimage church
to contain a phial of the sacred blood, and is extremely interesting
architecturally as a church, built with a regular system of stone
constructional galleries round the north, south, and west sides of the
nave. The aisles are narrow and divided into two stages in height--both
groined--and the upper no doubt intended for a throng of people to stand
in, and see the functions below. Now, however, just as in most modern
galleries, raised tiers of seats are formed in them, and their effect is
destroyed. A pretty Retable at the end of the north gallery suggests
that originally perhaps they were built in part to make room for side
altars, but this was clearly not the primary object. The fronts of the
galleries are covered with paintings of no merit, which illustrate the
beautiful legend of S. Briccius, who is said to have brought the phial
of blood from the East, and to have perished with it in the snow just
above Heiligenblut. There is a crypt under the choir, entered by a
flight of steps descending from the nave; a grand Sakramentshaus north
of the chancel where the holy blood is kept (not over the altar); and
there is a lofty gabled tower and spire on the north side of the
chancel, whose pretty outline adds not a little to the picturesqueness
of the village.

From Heiligenblut, looking at churches by the same hands on the way at
S. Martin Pockhorn and Winklern, we made our way back to Lienz, and
thence, crossing the mountains, descended on Kötschach in the Gail
Thal, passing a good church on the road at S. Daniel.

Kötschach is in one of the most charming situations for any one who can
enjoy mountains of extreme beauty of outline, even though they are not
covered with snow to their base, nor are more than some nine thousand
feet in height. To me this pastoral Gail Thal, with its green fields,
green mountain sides, wholesome air, and occasional grand views of
Dolomite crags, among which the Polinik and Kollin Kofel are the finest
peaks, is one of the most delightful bits of country I have ever seen.
At Kötschach the architectural feature is a fine lofty gabled steeple
with an octagonal spire. It is very remarkable how German these Germans
are! Here, close to the Italian Alps, we have a design identical with
those of the fine steeples of Lübeck, and as vigorously Teutonic and
unlike Italian work as anything can possibly be.

From Kötschach a pleasant road runs down the valley to Hermagor, another
charming little town beautifully placed, and with--no small
attraction--a capital hostelry. On the road, at Kirchbach, the drivers
of the country waggons in which we were travelling pulled up their
horses, to my no small delight, in front of a most interesting mediæval
churchyard-gate; this is a simple archway overshadowed by a shingled
pent-house roof, to whose kindly guardianship we owe it that a
fifteenth-century painting of S. Martin dividing his cloak with the
beggar, and several saints under craftily-painted canopies, are still in
fair preservation on the wayside gate, making one of the most lovely
pictures possible on the road.

At Hermagor, where the grand and massive mountain range of the Dobratsch
to the east, and the Gartner Kogel to the west, give never-failing
pleasure to the eyes whichever way they turn, there is another fine
church, very much of the same character as that at Heiligenblut, but
without galleries.

Between Hermagor and Ober Tarvis the churches are not important, but one
in the village of S. Paul has the unusual feature of a cornice under the
external eaves effectively painted in the fifteenth century, with
elaborate and very German traceries in red and buff, which are still
fairly perfect.

At Ober Tarvis the Predil Pass is reached; and starting from thence in
the morning, passing on the ascent the pretty Raibl See, and on the
descent some of the most stupendous and aweful rocky precipices I have
ever seen, we reached Flitsch to sleep, and on the following afternoon
emerged from the mountains at Gorizia, not far from the head of the
Adriatic, after a long and beautiful drive down the valley of the
Isonzo.

I found absolutely nothing old to see here. It is a smart town, in which
the hand of the improver has been particularly busy in the work of
destruction; but it is the most convenient starting-place for a visit to
Aquileja and Grado, and provides good horses and vehicles.

It is a drive of about a couple of hours from Gorizia to Aquileja. The
country is perfectly flat, but teeming with vegetation, and it is not
until the end of the journey is reached that one realizes under what
baleful conditions life or existence is endured here. A Roman capital
and a fragment or two of Roman columns or mouldings are all that one
sees at first to show that one is driving into one of the greatest of
the old Roman seaports. Here, where before its destruction by Attila in
A.D. 452 the population is said to have been about a hundred thousand in
number, there are now only a few poor houses, and a sparse population,
pauperized and invalided by fever and swamps on every side, whilst the
sea has retreated some three miles, and left the place to its misery
without any of the compensating gains of commerce. Certainly Torcello is
a degree more wretched and deserted, but these two old cities have few
compeers in misery, and I advise no one but an antiquary to make the
pilgrimage to Aquileja, who is not quite prepared to tolerate dirt,
misery, and wretchedness with nothing to redeem them.

[Illustration: PATRIARCH’S THRONE.--AQUILEJA.]

The one great interest in the city now is the cathedral. This is a great
cruciform basilica, with a central and two small apses east of the
transept, and eleven arches between the nave and aisles. The
arrangements of the apse are interesting; two flights of steps lead up
to it from the nave, and in the centre of the east wall is the
patriarch’s throne of white marble, well raised on a platform above the
seat which goes round the apse. The whole arrangement is singularly well
preserved, and looks very well in spite of the destruction of most of
the mosaic pavement with which originally no doubt the floor was laid,
of which only a few tesseræ now remain, and in spite also of the
modernization of the rest of the apse. This throne appeared to me to be
not earlier than circa 1150, though the church is said to have been
built between 1019 and 1042. These dates must, I think, be taken with
large allowance for alterations. With the exception of the apse and the
crypt under it, I believe the greater part of the church was rebuilt in
the fourteenth century; for though the Roman capitals (which were
everywhere ready to the hand) were used on the ancient columns, the
arches carried by them are pointed, and the clerestory is evidently of
the same age. This combination of Classic columns and sculpture with
pointed arches is so very unusual, that it is quite worth while to give
an illustration of the interior. The columns, capitals, and bases are of
varied shapes and sizes, and evidently a mere collection of old
materials which happened to be handy for the builder’s use; the arches
are rudely moulded, and the clerestory of cinquefoiled windows, each of
a single light, is as insignificant as possible, and yet withal there is
so grand an area inclosed that the effect is good and impressive. The
nave is divided from its aisles by eleven arches on each side, and
measures about one hundred and fifty feet in length, by one hundred and
five in width. The aisle roofs are modern, but the nave still retains
its old roof, a fine example of a cusped ceiling, boarded and panelled
in small square panels. The whole of this ceiling is painted, and with
extremely good effect, though the only colours used are black, white,
and brownish yellow. Each panel is filled with a small painted hexagon
filled with tracery painted in black and white, and all the ribs and
leading lines are yellow and black. The purlines, which are arranged so
as to form the points of the cusps, are very decidedly marked with
black. Simple as the treatment is, the effect is admirable, and it
appeared to me

[Illustration: 35. DUOMO. AQUILEJA. p. 244.]

to be owing to the large amount of white in the panels. Near the west
end of the north aisle is a singular circular erection, which is said by
the cicerone to be the receptacle for the holy oil, but which without
this information I should have taken for the baptistery. It is a
perfectly plain circular mass of stonework about fifteen feet across,
with a doorway on the west side, a moulded base and cornice, and above
the latter a series of detached shafts carrying a second cornice of
marble. A square projection on the north side abuts against the aisle
wall, and seems to have been the special receptacle for the vessel which
held the oil. At present it seems to be as little used and understood by
the people of Aquileja as it would probably be if it were in some
country beyond the Roman pale; a remark by the way on old church
arrangements which one finds oneself making almost everywhere, when one
contrasts the intentions of the old builders with the uses to which more
modern ideas--reformed or deformed, whichever they may be--are in the
habit of applying them.

At Aquileja the appropriation of pagan fragments was carried so far that
we found Classic capitals doing service as holy-water stoups.

The interior of the eastern part of the church is more interesting than
that of the nave. It is all probably of the original foundation, and
retains most of the old arrangements. The floor of the choir is raised
some ten or twelve steps, with two flights of steps on each side of the
centre. At the top of these steps, projecting sideways into the
transepts, are tribunes with open balustrades which seem to have served
as ambons. The apse has two rows of seats, with the patriarch’s seat
raised in the centre, and the altar stands in front of this on the chord
of the apse. It is curious that this, which is an apse internally, is a
square projection from the transept externally.

A descent on each side under the tribunes leads to the crypt under the
raised choir. This is very small, but is divided into three aisles in
width, and four bays in length. The central space is screened round
jealously with close grilles reaching from floor to vault, so as to
protect the shrine of S. Hermacora, which occupies the centre. But
little light steals into this crypt, and that little has to find its way
between rank weeds which grow up round the windows; but there is quite
enough to reveal vaults covered with paintings of subjects, and to show
as picturesque and beautiful an _ensemble_ as one need wish to see.
Kneeling desks were placed round the shrine, but the cultus of S.
Hermacora seems to be no longer popular, and the only pilgrims are
curious visitors like ourselves. The paintings on the groining appeared
to me to be of not earlier date than the fourteenth century, and are
very cleverly contrived to suit the early vaults.

The transepts remain to be mentioned. Each has a small eastern apse near
the extreme end, and a tomb or shrine between this apse and the
choir-tribune. These are of the thirteenth century, and are enormous
blocks of stone, panelled and carved in front, and supported on four
detached shafts. In the south transept there are fragments of a
Byzantine screen round the altar in the small apse, which are of rare
beauty and intricacy. The screen consisted of a solid base, breast-high,
covered with carving, and upon which columns stood originally at
intervals of six feet, just as in the screen at Torcello, of which I
have given a view.

There is an early painting of Our Lord, seated on a throne in the semi
dome of this apse, and there are remains of an early wall-painting in
the choir-apse, partly covered by a fifteenth-century picture in a good
frame. The choir stalls are of elaborate intarsiatura work, and date
from the end of the sixteenth century.

A little way to the north of the church stands its campanile, a tall
plain mass of masonry, with the date MDXLVIIII. on the upper stage, and
the inscription “_Tadeus Luranus hoc o. fecit_.” It is worth the climb
to the top to get the view over the flat surrounding country, which
reveals what one fails to see from the dead level of the road, that the
Adriatic is not far off--far enough, it is true, to have ruined the port
of Aquileja--but so near as to be a very important element in the fine
prospect. From here we saw through the haze the island of Grado, on
which I cast longing eyes in vain. My information as to the distance had
been all at fault, and I thought that in a long day from Gorizia, I
might see both Aquileja and Grado. This is, however, quite impossible,
as the boatmen required, they said, three hours for the _trajet_ each
way. It was a misfortune to miss the church at Grado, which contains
much that is worth seeing, and has considerable historical interest, as
the seat of a patriarch, whose jurisdiction included Malamocco, Venice,
Torcello, and Chioggia--and whose importance is vouched for by its old
titles, “Venetæ oræ Istriæque Ecclesiarum caput et mater,” and “Aquileja
nova.”

The patriarch’s throne and the ambon or pulpit, which still remain in
the church at Grado, are evidently extremely fine examples of Byzantine
furniture. The former corresponds with that of Aquileja, but has the
rare addition of a flat canopy or tester supported in front by two
columns, which rest on the side walls of the steps leading up to the
seat. Probably there was a similar canopy at Aquileja. The dignity of
the patriarchal throne is not a little increased by the addition, simple
as it is in its decorative features. The pulpit is even more striking;
it is six-sided, all the sides being arranged in a series of bold
circular projections, with sculptures of the Evangelistic emblems on
their face. The pulpit is supported by a central shaft, and six smaller
columns alternately plain and spiral, and above the pulpit a series of
octagonal shafts are provided to support a canopy or dome over the head
of the preacher. These columns carry arches which are of the common
Venetian ogee trefoil outline, and, there can be little doubt, are later
than the pulpit. The combination is, however, very picturesque, and not
the less interesting in that it has a most strangely Eastern look.[59]

The rest of my party went, whilst I was sketching in the cathedral at
Aquileja, to look at the baptistery. They reported it to be as
completely modernized inside as it certainly is outside, and so I failed
to enter it. I believe I lost nothing, though at one time it was well
worthy of a visit.

A rapid drive back to Gorizia was made with the advantage of a view of
the mountains before us all the way; and we arrived in time to avail
ourselves of the last train to Udine, which we did not reach until after
dark.

I arrived here in entire ignorance of what might be in store for me in
the way of my art. I had seen no drawings of any of its buildings, and I
suspect that most of my readers are in the same state of ignorance. It
was with no little pleasure, therefore, that my earliest stroll in the
morning brought me to a Palazzo Publico, which if not exactly
magnificent in scale is at least very important, and has the special
merit in my eyes of being all Gothic, and almost unaltered on the
outside since its erection. It stands in a piazza which some sixteenth
or seventeenth century scenic architect has treated with considerable
skill. One or two public buildings and a steep hill behind them have
been dealt with in such a way as to call to mind such a disposition of
buildings as one sees, e.g., on the Capitol at Rome, and no doubt so as
to increase very much the apparent importance

[Illustration: 36. PALAZZO PUBLICO. UDINE. p. 248]

[Illustration: 37. PALAZZO PUBLICO. UDINE. p. 249.]

of this little city. The Palazzo Publico is a building of two stages in
height, the lower entirely open with pointed arches resting on columns,
and the upper presenting on its principal front a large balconied
window, or Ringhiera, in the centre, and smaller windows on each side of
it, and at the ends. The cornice and roof are modern, otherwise the
whole design is intact, and exactly in the state in which its architect
left it. The character of the design is clearly Venetian, and the date
about the beginning of the fifteenth century, but still it is not
slavishly Venetian as the houses of Vicenza are, but on the face of it
the work of a local architect who knew enough of what was being done in
Venice to profit by it without absolutely copying.

The lower or ground story is open on three sides, and has ten arches in
front, and five at each end. The space inclosed is irregularly divided
by a longitudinal line of columns, carrying semicircular arches, which
support the walls of the rooms above, the access to which is by a
modernized staircase in the rear. The materials of the walls are
generally red and white marble. The balustrades between the columns and
the staircases leading to them are so good and complete as well to
deserve illustration. The upper part of these, including the cusped
heads to the openings, is of white marble, whilst the shafts are
alternately of the same material and of serpentine. The upper story is
modernized within; but one learns to be grateful for small mercies, and
it was certainly with every feeling of gratitude to later architects
that I sketched this really beautiful building, which they have been
good enough to leave so nearly unaltered on the outside.

The state of the cathedral is less a subject for thankfulness! The whole
building has been completely modernized within and without, with the
exception of the west front and the lower. The former was the façade to
a nave with two aisles on either side, or perhaps with one aisle and
chapels beyond. All the roofs are of the same flat pitch, and stepped
regularly so as to give a broken and bad outline to the mass. The work
is mainly of brick, with some good detail in the windows of the outer
aisles, of which I give an illustration. The west doorway is of the
fourteenth century, with a very steep crocketed gable between pinnacles,
and a badly sculptured tympanum with a curious assortment of subjects;
in the centre the Crucifixion, right and left of this the Resurrection
and an Agnus Dei, and above it the Nativity. Three circular windows
light the three centre divisions of the front, and the two lower are
connected by a broad band of brick arches which crosses the entire front
just below the central circular window. There is not a word to be said
in favour of such a design. It _is_ old, and that is its only virtue!

[Illustration: AISLE WINDOWS--DUOMO, UDINE.]

[Illustration: 38. DUOMO. UDINE. p. 250.]

The tower is more interesting, though it is only an incomplete fragment.
The lower stage is of stone built in dark and light courses, with a
large sunk recess on each side. On the west side is a fine doorway built
of alternate courses of white marble and serpentine, and there are small
circular windows in the cardinal sides just above the lowest stage.
Above these the whole is a plain mass of brickwork, of which a very
small portion only seems to be original. This tower is no less than
fifty-two feet in outside diameter, and its lowest stage is finely
groined, with no provision for the passage of bells. It might almost as
well have been intended for a baptistery as for a tower! It stands close
to the north side of the choir, and by its side is a rather fine doorway
leading into the transept, with a good deal of late Gothic sculpture and
architectural detail. There are niches and figures in the jambs and
round the arch, the Coronation of the Virgin under the latter, and
figures of the Annunciation stuck against the wall on either side in a
very haphazard fashion. The strange contrast in style between these two
doorways will be seen in the illustration which I give. Here we have,
side by side, examples of the most pronounced kind of two national
styles of Gothic; the door into the tower being as clearly Italian in
its beautiful colour and refined simplicity, as that into the church is
German in its cleverness, want of repose, and hard angularity of detail.

The only other old churches I could find in Udine were San Giacomo and
that of the Ospidale. The former is modernized, but retains an early
square brick belfry, arcaded below, and with simple pointed windows of
two lights above. The church of the Ospidale is also modernized. The
façade has a gable with an old brick eaves-arcade, and the only too
common feature of a large circular window inclosed within a square
border.

A picturesque Renaissance well-canopy (dated 1487) over the Fonte di
San Giovanni was the only other feature I could find worth sketching or
making a note of; and having seen everything, I took the railway on
again to Venice.

The views of the Friulan Alps, under which one travels for some
distance, are very exquisite. We passed Conegliano, where I once left
the railway for a journey through the heart of the Dolomite country to
Cortina d’Ampezzo, and, to my regret, hurried past Pordenone, having
forgotten that at any rate a tall brick campanile was there, which
seemed to promise some reward to the visitor. It is of plain arcaded
brickwork below, and the upper stage is slightly battered out with very
tall machicoulis, from within the parapet of which a smaller octagonal
stage rises, covered with a low spire. The whole composition as one sees
it from the railway is unusual and very good, and recalls just a little
the campanile of the Palazzo Publico at Siena.

CHAPTER X.

    “With all its sinful doings, I must say
       That Italy’s a pleasant place to me,
     Who love to see the sun shine every day,
       And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to tree
     Festoon’d.”
                    _Beppo._

     Venice to Verona--Verona to Mantua--Villa Franca--Mantua: its
     Churches and Palaces--The
     Theatre--Montenara--Campitello--Casalmaggiore--Longadore--Cremona:
     the Cathedral--Churches and Public Buildings--Lodi--Pavia: its
     Churches--Castle of the Visconti--The Certosa--Drive to Milan.

Our gondolier, anxious not to be too late for us in the morning, slept
in his gondola beneath our windows, and did his best, when the sun rose,
to rouse the sleepy porter of our hotel, but in vain; and at last, when
I awoke, I found we should have a very narrow escape, if indeed we did
not absolutely lose our train. The thing was, however, to be done, and
was done. We shot rapidly--only too rapidly for the last time--along the
smooth waters on which we had been so pleasantly loitering before, and
soon found ourselves at the railway station. Our journey was much like
what such journeys usually are: as far as Verona we were only retracing
our steps, but now the hot sun had quite cleared away the clouds which,
when we passed before, hid the Tyrolese Alps from our sight, and these,
whenever the high acacia hedges which line the railway allowed us a
sight of them, made the journey so far beautiful.

The names of the engines on this railway are very unlike the kind of
nomenclature indulged in at home; we were drawn to Verona, I believe, by
the Titian, and saw, as we rushed along, engines named after Dante,
Sansovino, and other artistic and literary celebrities.

We reached Verona at ten o’clock; the station, however, is so much out
of the town, and the day was so intensely hot, that we gave up the idea
of again going into it, and, contenting ourselves with the general view
of its quaint and picturesque walls rising over the rugged hills which
girt the city on its northern side, we sat down to a breakfast of iced
lemonade and some of those deliciously light cakes which are never had
in such perfection as in Italy, and amused ourselves by watching the way
in which the guards and drivers of the train by which we had travelled
proceeded to solace themselves with a game at billiards, upon a table
provided, I suppose, by the very considerate directors of the railway
company.

The railway from Verona to Mantua crosses a country which is thoroughly
uninteresting in point of scenery; it carried us on well into the great
plain of Lombardy, rich, teemingly rich, in its produce, but flat, arid,
and sultry to a degree. This was altogether one of our hottest days, and
took us fairly into a kind of district in which the heat is most
oppressively felt.

On the road we passed Villa Franca, a small town which has a rather
striking castle, with battlemented walls and a good many square towers,
still very fairly perfect; the whole built in brick, and with
battlements finished square at the top, and not forked like those at
Verona.

We reached the station at Mantua by twelve o’clock, but, as this was
very far from the city, it was nearly an hour later before we were
fairly landed at one--I forget which--of the abominably dirty and bad
inns to which sojourners

[Illustration: 39.--DUCAL PALACE, MANTUA. Page 255.]

within its walls have to submit with the best grace that they can.

Mantua is nearly surrounded by water; two large shallow and
unwholesome-looking lakes giving it this far from pleasant kind of
isolation. Over a long mediæval bridge between these waters the way into
the city from the terminus lies. One of the lakes is higher than the
other, and accordingly twelve mills, each adorned with a statue of an
apostle, are formed upon the bridge, and give it its name of Ponte
Mulina.

The general aspect of Mantua is very dreary and unpleasing, not less
forlorn in its appearance than Padua, and possessing but little
attraction for an architect. The chief architectural feature of the city
is the Ducal Palace, which contains, in the midst of a mass of
Renaissance work of the poorest and most unsatisfactory kind, some very
good remains of pointed architecture.

The finest portion is a long building of vast height, and retaining more
or less of Gothic work throughout, but especially remarkable for the
range of windows in its upper stage. Its front faces on one side towards
the Piazza di San Pietro, and on the other with a very nearly similar
elevation towards the Piazza del Pallone, one of the courts in the vast
palace of the Gonzagas, of which it forms a part. This building is said
to have been commenced about A.D. 1302 by Guido Buonacolsi, surnamed
Bottigella, third sovereign of Mantua, and this date quite agrees with
the character of all the detail. The interior has been completely
modernized, mainly by Ginlio Romano, who carried out very extensive
works in other parts of the palace. The windows in the upper stage of
this portion of the palace deserve notice as being about the most
exquisite examples of their class that I anywhere met with, though those
in the campanile of Sant’Andrea, hard by, are only second to them. The
main arch is of pure pointed form, and executed in brick with
occasional voussoirs of stone--one of which forms a key-stone--and over
it there is a label of brick effectively notched into a kind of
nail-head. The same kind of label is carried round the arches of the
window-openings, and down the jamb as a portion of the jamb-mould, and
again round a pierced and cusped circle of brick in the tympanum. In the
sub-arches the key-stones and cusps are formed of stone. The whole of
the jambs are of brick, but instead of a monial there is a circular
stone shaft, with square capital and band and base. The whole is so
exceedingly simple as to be constructed with ease of ordinary materials,
and it is quite equal in effect to any stone window of the same size
that I have ever seen.

The accompanying drawings will, I trust, sufficiently explain the merit
of this magnificent piece of brickwork. The arcading upon which it
rests, and the perfectly unbroken face of the whole, are very
characteristic of Italian work.

On the opposite side of the Piazza di San Pietro is the cathedral, the
only ancient portion of which is a small part of the south aisle. It is
of very elaborate character, entirely built in brick, and so far as it
remains appears to have been part of an aisle finished with a succession
of gables, one to each bay, a common arrangement in German and French
churches, where additional aisles are so frequently met with, but
uncommon in Italy, where, as in England, churches have seldom more than
one aisle on either side of the nave.[60] The brickwork in this small
fragment of the cathedral, though elaborate, was not pleasing, being of
rather late date.

On the same side of the Piazza as the cathedral is the Vescovato, a
large pile of ancient building, but very much modernized. There still
remain, however, some good three-light windows in the upper stage,
inclosed within a circular arch, without tracery, and divided by marble
shafts. Some

[Illustration: 40. MANTUA

Window in Ducal Palace.]

[Illustration: 41.--CASTELLO DI CORTE, MANTUA. Page 257]

old arches remain also in the lowest stage, which, though now built up,
are still valuable as examples of the best mode of treating brickwork.
They consist of three orders--the two inner formed of alternate
voussoirs of brick and stone, carefully and regularly counterchanged,
and the outer of a moulded terra-cotta ornament. Between each of these
lines a brick of deep red colour is set edgeways, shewing a dark line of
little more than an inch and a half in width, and valuable as very
clearly defining the lines of the arch. All these courses are on the
same plane; and probably another rim of the arch is concealed by the
walling which has been filled in underneath.[61]

Going on from the Piazza San Pietro, and passing under an archway, we
came upon the Castello di Corte, also a part of the ancient palace of
the Gonzaga family, who were for a long time lords of Mantua. It is
certainly a very remarkable piece of mediæval fortification, but its
effect is much damaged by the erection of walls between the battlements,
which in my view I have thought it much better to shew in their original
state, which is evident enough upon careful inspection. The heavy
machicolations which run round the main building have a peculiar and
rather grand effect, particularly in the flanking towers. This portion
of the palace is said to have been erected just at the close of the
fourteenth century.

Close to the Castello di Corte is the Ponte di San Giorgio, one of the
entrances to the city, and built between the Lago di Mezzo and the Lago
Inferiore.

Retracing our steps, we soon found ourselves at the great Palazzo della
Ragione, or town-hall. It has been very much altered, but one gateway
remains in a very perfect state, and is quite worthy of illustration.
The marble shafts in the upper stage of the building are coupled one
behind the other with very beautiful effect. Brick and stone are used
alternately in the main arch of this gateway, with thin dividing lines
of brick, as in the Vescovato. In a wall close to the gate is a sitting
figure, intended, it is said, to represent Virgil, of whom the Mantuans
are still, as in duty bound, very proud. I cannot say much for the
figure or its canopy, both of which are, however, mediæval.

[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.]

We found nothing else worthy of notice in this building; but close to it
stands the church of Sant’Andrea, a hideous Renaissance edifice tacked
on to a most beautiful brick campanile.

The detail of this is throughout very fine. The tracery

[Illustration: 42.--GATEWAY, PALAZZO DELLA RAGIONE, MANTUA. Page
258.]

[Illustration: 43.--CAMPANILE, S. ANDREA, MANTUA. Page 259.]

is all of a kind of plate-tracery, consisting, that is to say, of cusped
circles pierced in a tympanum within an inclosing arch; the shafts
between the lights are of polished marble, and coupled one behind the
other. The relative proportion of the cusps in this and in most other
Italian buildings is very good. In trefoils, for instance, the upper
cusp is usually smaller than the lower; and in all good cusping it must
be so. Modern men generally reverse the order, and, at the present day,
so little is the subject really understood that at least ninety-nine out
of every hundred cusped window-openings are designed without feeling,
and quite unlike the best old examples; and this, though apparently a
point of very small importance, is really of great consequence to the
perfection of any pointed work.

The faulty portions of this campanile are the elaborate arcadings in
brick beneath the string-courses, and the awkward and abrupt manner in
which the octagonal stage and the round tile spire are set upon the
square tower. The present appreciation of the building by the good
people of Mantua is shewn by the opening pierced in its lower stage, in
front of which the modestly withdrawn folds of a green curtain disclose
the interior devoted to a barber’s shop, and in which the patient,
seated in the middle of the shop, and looking into the Piazza, submits
to the painful operation of shaving--a common picture in almost every
street of an Italian town, but not pleasant when the place is a portion
of a church.

[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.]

The guide-books speak of the church of Sant’Andrea as “among the finest
existing specimens of an interior in the revived Roman style.” If it
really is so, I advise all architects interested in the failure of the
said style to venture, notwithstanding the forbidding west front, into
the nave, when they will perhaps find comfort in seeing how miserable a
building “one of the finest” of its class may nevertheless be!

The people at Mantua seemed to be excessively disturbed by my attempts
at sketching, and at Sant’Andrea they mobbed me so thoroughly that I was
really beginning to think of giving up the attempt in despair, when a
kindly-disposed hatmaker, seeing my distress, came down to the rescue,
and gave me and my party seats in a balcony on the first floor of his
house, in which, sitting at my ease above my persecutors and listening
to the good man’s wife and daughters, I finished my sketch with great
comfort.

In Mantua there are two or three other churches with brick campanili,
but they are very inferior in their character to that of Sant’Andrea,
and hardly worth special notice. We owe it to the French that there are
not more interesting churches, for, having succeeded in capturing the
city after a very prolonged siege, they sacked it, and are said to have
destroyed no less than about fifty of them.

Here, as elsewhere in this part of Italy, most of the streets are
arcaded on either side, affording pleasant shelter from the hot sun, but
every twenty yards we come upon one of an unpleasant class of shops, in
which cheese, oil, and the like comestibles are sold, with most
objectionable effects on all people blessed with noses.

In the evening we found an Italian performance going on at the theatre,
and so thither we went, anxious to see how far Italian comedy might be
amusing. I fear our inquiry was not much to our edification, for the
favourite performers were mainly remarkable for the prodigious rapidity
with which they uttered their facetious sayings, and so we lost more
than half the dialogue. The theatre was almost entirely filled with
Austrians, but still there was a sprinkling of Italians among them,
which did away with the absurdly martial appearance of the only other
theatre we had been into--that at Verona.

The next day was Sunday, but we were obliged to push on; and so,
resigning ourselves to the diligence which left Mantua at about nine, we
booked ourselves for Cremona, under the promise that we should be
delivered there punctually by five o’clock.

We lost sight of Mantua almost immediately, for, travelling along a dead
flat and by roads whose sides are lined with high hedges of acacia or
orchards thickly planted, you never see any place or building until you
have absolutely arrived at it. There was not much to interest me on the
road, and the weather, at first cloudy only and sultry, gradually became
worse, and, before we had gone far, settled into a steady pouring rain;
so we read, wrote, and occupied the many hours in the rumbling diligence
as best we might.

At Montenara, which we passed on our road, the church has a brick
campanile, with pilasters at the angles, and in the belfry two-light
windows, with marble central shafts and round arches. It has one of the
usual brick conical spires, with small angle-pinnacles--a finish to
these campanili which certainly does not improve upon acquaintance. They
are constructed of bricks with semicircular ends laid side by side, the
joints being broken in each course, and so making a very jagged kind of
cone.

The only noticeable point about the church at Montenara is that it has
been lately rebuilt in the very worst taste, and at an angle of
forty-five degrees with the old steeple!

At Campitello there are several remains of interest.

There is a small domestic building, with four pointed windows of two
lights at the side; the windows have central shafts of stone, but are
otherwise entirely of rough brickwork. The church has a kind of double
belfry-stage, arcaded similarly in each stage with round arches. There
are also here the remains of a castle by the river, with a fine tower of
the same type as the angle-towers of the Castello di Corte at Mantua,
and covered with a very flat-pitched roof.

[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--CAMPITELLO.]

[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--NEAR CASALMAGGIORE.]

At Casalmaggiore, a town of some importance on the Po, we stopped for
dinner; but it was too wet to attempt to look at the river, and the only
note I made was of a large new church now in course of erection,
Renaissance in style, and with a large dome, and a choir and transepts,
all terminated with circular ends. The redeeming feature about it was
that it was entirely constructed in brick with considerable care, though
probably ere long this will be covered with a coat of plaster, of which
modern Italians are not one whit less enamoured than are modern
Englishmen.

At a village, the name of which I did not learn, between Casalmaggiore
and Cremona, the church had a remarkably good simple brick campanile.
The belfry windows were pointed, of two lights, with a small pierced
circle in the head, the shafts being of stone of course. Beneath the
string-courses there was arcading, and the tower was finished with three
forked battlements of the Veronese type on each face, and behind these
rose a circular brick spire. This tower was to the south-east of the
church.

At Longadore we saw another church with a good early campanile, of which
I made a sketch. This was Romanesque, with angle pilasters, and a
central pilaster carried up as high as the belfry-stage. The belfry
windows were of three lights and shafted. The battlement was most
peculiar--a quarter circle at each angle and a half circle in the centre
of each side, with a narrow space between them; the whole executed in
brick and covered in with a flat modern roof. The angle pilasters
finished under arcaded string-courses. Generally speaking, in these
churches the only ancient features seem to be the campanili, and these
are always of brick and nearly similar in their general design, with
pilasters at the angles, a succession of string-courses--generally
arcaded underneath--and windows in the belfry-stage only.

It was quite six by the time we reached Cremona, and, depositing our
passports at the gate, we trotted on along the smooth granite (which in
these towns is always laid in strips between the rough ordinary paving
for the wheels to travel on), and after traversing a long tortuous
street, and getting a glimpse only of the cathedral as we passed near
its east end, we were soon deposited at the Albergo del Capello. a
comfortable hostelry, which we enjoyed the more by contrast with the
miserable quarters with which we had to put up at Mantua.

Cremona is a city full of interest. The piazza in front of the cathedral
is equal in effect to almost any small piazza I know of. On one side is
the great marble west front of the Duomo, backed by its immense brick
campanile, whose wide fame is proved by the old rhyme, of which the
Cremonese are still so proud--

    “Unus Petrus est in Roma,
     Una turris in Cremona.”

On another side is the Lombard baptistery, a grand polygonal building;
on the third, a most interesting domestic building--the palace of the
Jurisconsults--and the Gothic Palazzo Publico; whilst on the fourth, a
narrow, busy street makes up, by the diversity of colour and costume of
the crowd which is always passing along it, for what it wants in
architectural beauty.

The cathedral must be first described, and it is rather difficult to do
this clearly; but so far as can now be made out it seems much as though
it had at first been built upon a simple plan, with nave, north and
south aisles, and three semicircular eastern apses; and that then to
this, in the fourteenth century, had been added, with hardly any
disturbance of the original fabric, immense transepts, loftier even than
the nave, and so long and large as to give the impression now that two
naves have been placed by some mistake across each other. The groining
of the nave is original in its outline, but barbarously painted in sham
panelling so as entirely to spoil its effect, but otherwise there is
little to notice in the interior, the whole of the church having been
converted with the plasterers’ help into Renaissance in the most
approved manner. The walls are covered with painting, and round the
columns, when we were there, were hung great tapestries, all of which
gave the building a rich though rather gloomy colour.

The west front (if you can forget that it is a great mask only to the
real structure) is rather grand from its large plain surface of arcaded
wall; it has been grievously damaged by alterations, but the old design
is still not difficult to trace. The doorway is very noble, and the
open porch in front of it is carried up with a second stage, in which,
under open arches, stand a very fine figure of the Blessed Virgin, and
figures of other saints of more modern character on either side of her;
above this is a great circular window, whilst the wall on either side of
the porch and window is nearly covered with small arcading. The marbles
in the wall, where the arcading does not occur, are arranged very
regularly in horizontal lines alternately of red and white, each course
being about ten inches or a foot high, and divided from the next by a
strip of white marble about two or three inches in height. The great
rose window is all of red marble, with the exception of one line of
moulding which looks like green serpentine. There are some round windows
in the lower stage on each side of the entrance, but they are quite
modern.

On the north side of the nave rises the Torrazzo, as the campanile is
called here--the “una turris in Cremona”--rising about four hundred feet
from the pavement of the piazza. Its design is much like that of all the
other brick campanili in this district--a succession of stages of nearly
equal height, divided by arcaded string-courses, and marked with
perpendicular lines by small pilasters, and almost without windows until
near the summit. The dark red outline of this magnificent tower tells
well against the deep blue Italian sky, which shone brightly behind it
when we saw it; and the effect of its immense and almost unbroken
outline, rising to such an extraordinary height, is so utterly unlike
that of any of our Northern steeples that we need not trouble ourselves
to compare them. Both are fine in their way; but the Italian campanili
are made up of the reiteration of features so simple and so generally
similar that we cannot fairly class their builders with the men who
raised in England such a multitude of steeples, all varying one from
another, and yet all so lovely.

A door in the east wall of the north transept leads into a small
courtyard, sacred now to the cathedral clergy, from which the original
scheme of the eastern part of the church may be fairly well seen. It
appears to have been a stone building treated in the common fashion of
Lombard churches, but with buttresses and a passage through them round
the apse in front of the windows. There is a modernized crypt under the
choir. The side walls of the north transept are seen very well from the
same courtyard; they are well arcaded in brick, and entirely concealed
from sight elsewhere by the enormous false transept-fronts, the backs of
which as seen from here are certainly among the most ungainly works ever
erected for the mere sake of being beautiful.

The rest of the exterior of the Duomo is almost all of brick. The most
remarkable features are the two transept fronts, which are certainly
magnificent in their detail, though most unreal and preposterous as
wholes; they are, both of them, vast sham fronts, like the west front,
in that they entirely conceal the structure of the church behind them,
and pierced with numbers of windows which from the very first must have
been built but to be blocked up. They have in fact absolutely nothing to
do with the building against which they are placed, and in themselves,
irrespective of this very grave fault, are, I think, positively ugly in
their outline and mass. And yet there is a breadth and grandeur of scale
about them which does somewhat to redeem their faults, and a beauty
about much of their detail which I cannot but admire extremely. Both
transepts are almost entirely built of brick and very similar in their
general idea; but, whilst only the round arch is used in the south
transept, nothing but the pointed arch is used in the northern, and it
is quite curious to notice how very much more beautiful the latter looks
than does the

[Illustration: 44.--NORTH TRANSEPT, CATHEDRAL, CREMONA. Page 266.]

former. The filling-in of stilted round-arched windows with ogee pointed
tracery and much delicate cusping gives the south transept a singularly
Eastern look, and it is impossible not to feel that some such influence
has been exercized throughout its design. It would indeed be most
interesting to find out what this was, but I am not aware that there is
likely to be any clue to it. The date of the work is in all probability
somewhere about the latter part of the fourteenth century. The detail
and management of the whole of the brickwork are exceedingly delicate
and effective, surpassing in their way anything I have yet seen.

[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW--CREMONA CATHEDRAL.]

The putlog-holes are left unfilled, as they almost always are in Italy.
The only stone used is in the doorway and the window-shafts, and these
last are almost always coupled in depth. The windows are elaborately
moulded, and courses of chevrons, quatrefoils, and other ornaments are
introduced occasionally as a relief to what might otherwise be the
tedious succession of mouldings which are necessarily rather similar.
The cusping of brick arches is always managed in the same way; the
bricks all radiate with the arch (not from the centre of the cusp), and
look as though they might have been built, allowing plenty of length of
brick for the cusps, and then cut to the proper outline, the edges of
the cusps being almost invariably left square. Some of the terra-cotta
arch ornaments and diapers are exceedingly good of their kind. The most
remarkable feature, however, about these transepts is the prodigiously
heavy open arcade which runs up the gables under the eaves-cornice--so
heavy and so rude-looking, that, taken by itself, it would probably be
put down as being of much earlier date than it really is. The façade
finishes with three heavy pinnacles arcaded all round, and finished with
conical caps.

To the north transept very nearly the same description would apply, save
that the doorway is much finer, and entirely of marble.[62] It is part
of the original Lombard church, and has no doubt been taken down and
rebuilt where we now see it. The tracery of the rose windows is all
finished in brick, and the detail generally is better and more delicate
in its character than that of the south transept. In both the bricks are
all of a pale red colour, and no dark bricks are anywhere used.

[Illustration: ROSE WINDOW--CREMONA CATHEDRAL.]

The baptistery--which, as has been said, stands south-west of the
Duomo--is entered by a doorway with a projecting porch, whose shafts
rest on the backs of animals. It is

[Illustration: 45.--PALACE OF THE JURISCONSULTS, CREMONA. Page 269.]

octagonal in its plan, built of brick with the exception of the side in
which the door is placed, this being of marble, and is very simple in
all its detail. There are three altars in it, and an immense erection of
masonry in the centre, which, though not open, is evidently a font,
amply large for immersion. Each side has three recessed arches on marble
columns, above which the whole is of red brick with stone string-courses
between the stages. These have corbel-tables under them, which are the
only enrichments in the building. All the brickwork is left to view
inside, and the light is admitted by a pierced arcade very high up in
the walls. The whole is domed over with an octagonal vault of brick, in
the centre of which is a small lantern, and the effect is exceedingly
fine and solemn, and enhanced very much by the grave sombre colour of
the bricks.

[Illustration: WINDOW-JAMB--PALACE OF JURISCONSULTS, CREMONA.]

Close to the baptistery is a building, called in Murray’s Handbook the
Palace of the Jurisconsults, turned when I first saw it into a school
for a not very polite set of children and teachers, who all apparently
felt the most lively interest

[Illustration: CHIMNEY AND BATTLEMENT--CREMONA.]

in my architectural pursuits. It was originally open below, but the
arches on which it stood are now filled up. This upper stage is very
simple and beautiful, and the whole is finished at the top with a
cornice and parapet, with battlements pointed at the top like those in
the Torrazzo, and not forked as we have been lately so accustomed to see
them. At one end of this parapet a chimney rises above the battlement,
which is, so far as I have seen, a unique example of the ancient Italian
contrivance for this very necessary appendage.[63] It is exceedingly
good in its detail, and coeval with the rest of the work. There is a
simplicity and truthfulness of construction about this little building
which make it especially pleasing after the unreal treatment of the
great transept-fronts of the Duomo.[64] By its side stands the Palazzo
Publico, out of one side of which rises one of those singular and very
tall brick towers, without any openings whatever in its walls, which
give such peculiar character to some Italian cities, and of which we
afterwards saw good store at Pavia. The whole of the building shews
either traces of arcades or perfect arcades upon which the upper walls
are supported; they are, however, so much modernized as to be
comparatively uninteresting, though enough remains to shew that their
detail was once very good. The building incloses a quadrangle, which is
rather small, but arcaded on three sides, and opens from the piazza by
open arches under the principal façade, and probably dates from the
middle of the thirteenth century, the date 1245 being given in an
inscription in the courtyard.

There are many churches in Cremona, all more or less appearing to be
founded upon the work in the transepts of the cathedral, but generally
very inferior to them in merit.

San Domenico has a west front singularly like theirs, but debased in its
detail. It has, however, a very fine campanile, lofty, very simple, and
pierced with pointed windows in each stage, one above the other. The
interior is completely modernized, and not worth notice.

SS. Agostino and Giacomo in Breda is another church of the same class,
with a west front which is again a very bad second edition of the
cathedral, and which has been horribly mutilated and modernized inside.
It is, however, to be remembered gratefully for a most lovely picture by
Perugino, representing the Blessed Virgin with Our Lord seated, with
SS. Augustine and James on either side. The Virgin is very calm,
dignified, unearthly, and very simple and stately. Our Blessed Lord, in
her arms, has perhaps rather too much the character of an ordinary
infant; and the two saints have more than is quite pleasant of the bend
in their figures of which he was so fond; the heads stooping forward,
and the knees considerably bent, are a little too evidently straining
towards a reverential posture. Such a criticism is a bold one to venture
upon with the recollection of so glorious a picture fresh in my
mind--one from which I really derived intense pleasure. The date of this
very fine work is A.D. 1494.

Sta. Agata is another church which still has its old campanile intact,
with round-arched windows, very simple and not large. The church which
has been built against it tells its story so well, that at first we all
mistook it for a theatre! So much for Classic symbolism.

Another church, dedicated in honour of Sta. Margherita, is a very poor
erection of brick, with a simple campanile. One or two other churches we
saw with fair brick campanili, which were not otherwise remarkable; and
one there was, San Luca, close to the Milan gate, which seemed to be
very singular in its arrangements. It had a projecting western porch,
with its columns supported on beasts; and at the north-west angle an
octagonal building of brick, of exceedingly late date, which appeared to
be a baptistery.

I enjoyed the architectural remains in Cremona very much indeed: its
rich array of buildings in elaborate brick-work is very striking; and
the campanile of the cathedral, towering up high above the many other
steeples, combines well with them in the general views, and helps to
convert into a fine-looking city what is, perhaps, in its streets and
houses generally, very far from being anything of the kind. The way in
which the old walls and towers of the Palazzo Publico combine with the
steeple of the cathedral is extremely fine, a large piazza a short
distance to the west of the palazzo affording perhaps the best point of
view.

From Cremona we went to Lodi, on our way to Pavia, and had a very
pleasant drive. The heat was intense when we started, and the drivers of
all the carts we passed were prudently ensconcing themselves in the
baskets swung beneath their carts, to escape its effects. Throughout the
Lombardo-Venetian territory there is a great traffic always going on,
and there is a much nearer approach to English arrangements, in the way
of harness and tackle, than it is at all usual to see on the Continent;
though, indeed, it ought in fairness to be said, that their carts are
much more scientific than ours generally are. Any vehicle with more than
two wheels is rarely if ever seen; and these two wheels are sometimes of
prodigious size--I should say quite ten feet in diameter--whilst the
length of the cart from end to end is immense. The extent to which they
are loaded is almost incredible, and of course it requires great care in
order to make the trim exact; but when loaded, the draught must be light
for the weight. It is impossible to talk about horses and carts without
thinking of the magnificent cream-coloured oxen which are everywhere
doing hard work on the roads and in the fields. They have most
magnificent, large, calm eyes; and this, with their great size and slow
and rather dignified motion, makes them look very grand. They are always
yoked to a pole, which rises up above their heads at the end, and has a
carved crosspiece attached to it, against which they press their
foreheads.

At Pizzighettone we crossed the Adda, here a very fine and full stream,
and then, changing horses, went on rapidly towards Lodi. Leaving the
main road, we travelled along a less frequented byroad, infinitely more
pleasant, and in many places very pretty indeed. We followed the course
of a small river, which was turned to good account for irrigation; its
stream being at times divided into no less than three channels, in order
to water the pasture-land on which are fed the cows whose milk is to
produce the far-famed Parmesan cheese. Some part of the road reminded us
pleasantly of English lanes and English scenery, but here and there a
distant glimpse of the Apennines far behind us, and of the Alps beyond
Milan before us, made us aware that we were indeed in Italy.

There is little to be seen in Lodi. It has a large and rather
shabby-looking piazza, at one corner of which is the cathedral, whose
only good feature is its doorway, which is, however, very inferior to
the western doorway of the cathedral at Cremona, to which it bears some
little resemblance.

Another church has a Gothic brick front. The real roof is one of flat
pitch, spanning nave and aisles; but in the façade the central portion
is considerably higher than the sides, so as to give the idea of a
clerestory. This is a foolish sham, and unhappily only too common in
late Gothic work in Italy. The centre division of the front is divided
into three by pilasters, which are semicircular in plan. In the central
division are a door and a circular window, in each side division is a
pointed window, and a brick cornice finishes the gable, crowned with
five circular brick pinnacles.

Another church in Lodi has a very beautifully painted ceiling; this has
been engraved by Mr. Grüner, but unluckily I did not know of its
existence until I returned home; it seems to be an admirable piece of
colour, and to be well worth careful study.

There seemed to be nothing else worthy of notice in Lodi; but, as in
duty-bound we walked down to the bridge,--a rough, unstable-looking
wooden erection over the broad rapid Adda, with nothing about it to
recall to mind the great event in its history, its passage by Napoleon
in 1796.

We left very early in the morning for Pavia: our way led us through a
country most elaborately cultivated, and irrigated with a great display
of science and labour; every field seemed to have some two or three
streams running rapidly in different directions, and the grass
everywhere was most luxuriant. No view, however, was to be had on either
side, as the road found its way through a very flat line of country, and
all the hedges were lined with interminable rows of Lombardy poplars. It
was a country which would have done more good to the heart of a
Lincolnshire farmer than to that of an architect!

The only remarkable building passed on the road was a castle at
Sant’Angelo; a great brick building, with square towers set diagonally
at the angles. The walls were finished with a battlement of the Veronese
kind, and there were several very good early pointed brick windows with
brick monials in place of shafts. A campanile, detached near one angle,
has fine machicolations in stone, now, however, partly destroyed. The
effect of the whole building was very grand.

We soon reached Pavia, and were, as we expected to be, well rewarded by
its churches. The general aspect of the city is singular, owing to the
number of tall slender brick towers which seem to have formed a
necessary appendage to almost every house in the Middle Ages. They are
entirely without openings or ornaments of any kind beyond the
scaffold-holes, and one can compare them to nothing that I know so well
as to the great shot-tower at Waterloo Bridge, save that they are always
square and not circular.

We did our best to see the cathedral, but were unsuccessful; it was
being repaired, and was so full of scaffolding that we could see