; while
in the very picture of Tintoret in which he has dwelt so elaborately on
the carpet, he has substituted a piece of ordinary renaissance
composition for St. Mark's, and in the background has chosen the
Sansovino side of the Piazzetta, treating even that so carelessly as to
lose all the proportion and beauty of its design, and so flimsily that
the line of the distant sea which has been first laid in, is seen
through all the columns. Evidences of magnificent power of course exist
in whatever he touches, but his full power is never turned in this
direction. More space is allowed to his architecture by Paul Veronese,
but it is still entirely suggestive, and would be utterly false except
as a frame or background for figures. The same may be said with respect
to Raffaelle and the Roman school.

Sec. 30. Fresco painting of the Venetian exteriors. Canaletto.

If, however, these men laid architecture little under contribution to
their own art, they made their own art a glorious gift to architecture,
and the walls of Venice, which before, I believe, had received color
only in arabesque patterns, were lighted with human life by Giorgione,
Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian,
nothing now, I believe, remains; two figures of Giorgione's are still
traceable on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly
uninjured, is seen from far above and below the Rialto, flaming like the
reflection of a sunset. Two figures of Veronese were also traceable till
lately, the head and arms of one still remain, and some glorious
olive-branches which were beside the other; the figure having been
entirely effaced by an inscription in large black letters on a whitewash
tablet which we owe to the somewhat inopportunely expressed enthusiasm
of the inhabitants of the district in favor of their new pastor.[11]
Judging, however, from the rate at which destruction is at present
advancing, and seeing that, in about seven or eight years more, Venice
will have utterly lost every external claim to interest, except that
which attaches to the group of buildings immediately around St. Mark's
place, and to the larger churches, it may be conjectured that the
greater part of her present degradation has taken place, at any rate,
within the last forty years. Let the reader with such scraps of evidence
as may still be gleaned from under the stucco and paint of the Italian
committees of taste, and from among the drawing-room inn