told.
He must therefore be prepared, according to his subject, to use light,
steep or level, intense or feeble, and out of the resulting chiaroscuro
select those peculiar and hinging points on which the rest are based,
and by which all else that is essential may be explained.

The thoughtful command of all these circumstances constitutes the real
architectural draughtsman; the habits of executing everything either
under one kind of effect or in one manner, or of using unintelligible
and meaningless abstracts of beautiful designs, are those which must
commonly take the place of it and are the most extensively esteemed.[10]

Sec. 28. Architectural painting of Gentile Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio;

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

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

Nothing can be more careful, nothing more delicately finished, or more
dignified in feeling than the works of both these men; and as
architectural evidence they are the best we could have had, all the
gilded parts being gilt in the picture, so that there can be no mistake
or confusion of them with yellow color or light, and all the frescoes or
mosaics given with the most absolute precision and fidelity. At the same
time they are by no means examples of perfect architectural drawing;
there is little light and shade in them of any kind, and none whatever
of the thoughtful observance of temporary effect of which we have just
been speaking; so that, in rendering the character of the relieved
parts, their solidity, depth, or gloom, the representation fails
altogether, and it is moreover lifeless from its very completion, both
the signs of age and the effects of use and habitation being utterly
rejected; rightly so, indeed, in these instances, (all the architecture
of these painters being in background to religious subject,) but wrongly
so, if we look to the architecture alone. Neither is there anything like
aerial perspective attempted; the employment of actual gold in the
decoration of all the distances, and the entire realization of the