DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0273
GUIDE-BOOKS.
261
not to know—how much his lot was the common lot,
or how usual it is with men and women, as well as with
mankind, to make the progress from a trecento to a
cinquecento in due time. What befel him was, to him,
unheard of, even though he was giving all his years to
the study of a like movement in history, for he brought
to every change his own incomparable freshness and the
surprises of an authentic experience. He made his
great discoveries with an enterprising spirit, and when
he had taken his fill of his Renaissance he retraced his
own eager and urgent footsteps, and sought the earlier
of the Venetian painters (much earlier in spirit and a
little earlier in time), and, far behind them, the mosaics
of the Byzantine Greeks. It was not that he had not
studied these in the past. The Stones of Venice proves
with what admiration he had read that “ Bible of
Venice” — St Mark’s — on his first visit to the city of
“ tremulous streets ”; but now, in a third phase of
thought, he rediscovered all things, being greatly and
freshly moved, and thinking, like the disciple in the
Imitation, all he had done, until then, to be nothing.
The reading-lesson begins at the farthest side of St
Mark’s from the sea, at a panel set horizontally — a
sculpture of twelve sheep, a throne between six and six,
a cross thereon, a circle, and within the circle “ a little
caprioling creature,” the Lamb of God. This is true
Greek work, the work of the teacher of the Venetian
(as in another place we saw the Greek work that in-
structed the Pisan), and Ruskin has done no more
261
not to know—how much his lot was the common lot,
or how usual it is with men and women, as well as with
mankind, to make the progress from a trecento to a
cinquecento in due time. What befel him was, to him,
unheard of, even though he was giving all his years to
the study of a like movement in history, for he brought
to every change his own incomparable freshness and the
surprises of an authentic experience. He made his
great discoveries with an enterprising spirit, and when
he had taken his fill of his Renaissance he retraced his
own eager and urgent footsteps, and sought the earlier
of the Venetian painters (much earlier in spirit and a
little earlier in time), and, far behind them, the mosaics
of the Byzantine Greeks. It was not that he had not
studied these in the past. The Stones of Venice proves
with what admiration he had read that “ Bible of
Venice” — St Mark’s — on his first visit to the city of
“ tremulous streets ”; but now, in a third phase of
thought, he rediscovered all things, being greatly and
freshly moved, and thinking, like the disciple in the
Imitation, all he had done, until then, to be nothing.
The reading-lesson begins at the farthest side of St
Mark’s from the sea, at a panel set horizontally — a
sculpture of twelve sheep, a throne between six and six,
a cross thereon, a circle, and within the circle “ a little
caprioling creature,” the Lamb of God. This is true
Greek work, the work of the teacher of the Venetian
(as in another place we saw the Greek work that in-
structed the Pisan), and Ruskin has done no more