DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0274
262
JOHN RUSKIN.
important work in the history of art than this linking
of the antique with the new. Is it perhaps Gibbon
with his Fall of Rome that so darkens the air of
some eight hundred years with a squalid dust-storm of
demolition as to obscure our sight of the unquenched
lights of the mind of man ? Ruskin joins day to
human day again, as the days of nature and the sun
followed one another undimmed.
After the Byzantine panel, then, come the two sculp-
tures that are the earliest real Venetian work found by
Ruskin in his search amongst Venetian stones. These
are no longer purely symbolical, no longer “a kind of
stone-stitching or samplerwork, done with the innocence
of a girl’s heart,” but ardently and laboriously sculptural;
it is Venetian work of the early thirteenth century; it is
traceable through sixteen hundred years to the sculp-
tors of the Parthenon; and it is the first Venetian
St George.
This immortal symbol-story—story of Perseus before
it was a story of a saint — Ruskin follows up to the
heights of the great time of sculpture before the close
of the fifteenth century. The house that bore this work
of culmination has been destroyed since Ruskin led his
traveller, with so much delight, to the study of its panel.
Not so the Scuola of St Theodore, carrying the sculpture
of the mid-seventeenth century with its Raphaelesque
attitude and its drapery “ supremely, exquisitely bad ” ;
nor that which bore the yet later decoration—the last
of all done by Venice for herself and not for tourists :
JOHN RUSKIN.
important work in the history of art than this linking
of the antique with the new. Is it perhaps Gibbon
with his Fall of Rome that so darkens the air of
some eight hundred years with a squalid dust-storm of
demolition as to obscure our sight of the unquenched
lights of the mind of man ? Ruskin joins day to
human day again, as the days of nature and the sun
followed one another undimmed.
After the Byzantine panel, then, come the two sculp-
tures that are the earliest real Venetian work found by
Ruskin in his search amongst Venetian stones. These
are no longer purely symbolical, no longer “a kind of
stone-stitching or samplerwork, done with the innocence
of a girl’s heart,” but ardently and laboriously sculptural;
it is Venetian work of the early thirteenth century; it is
traceable through sixteen hundred years to the sculp-
tors of the Parthenon; and it is the first Venetian
St George.
This immortal symbol-story—story of Perseus before
it was a story of a saint — Ruskin follows up to the
heights of the great time of sculpture before the close
of the fifteenth century. The house that bore this work
of culmination has been destroyed since Ruskin led his
traveller, with so much delight, to the study of its panel.
Not so the Scuola of St Theodore, carrying the sculpture
of the mid-seventeenth century with its Raphaelesque
attitude and its drapery “ supremely, exquisitely bad ” ;
nor that which bore the yet later decoration—the last
of all done by Venice for herself and not for tourists :