ovations of
English and German residents restore Venice in his imagination to
some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him,
looking from Lido or Fusina, replace in the forest of towers those of
the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him
sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with
gold,[12] cleanse from their pollution those choked canals which are now
the drains of hovels, where they were once vestibules of palaces, and
fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him
withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain
as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a
century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto; whose
miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the
representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and
acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and
deadened intellect of the nation at that time; a numbness and darkness
more without hope than that of the grave itself, holding and wearing yet
the sceptre and the crown like the corpses of the Etruscan kings, ready
to sink into ashes at the first unbarring of the door of the sepulchre.

[Illustration: CASA CONTARINI FASAN, VENICE.
From a drawing by Ruskin.]

The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole
range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it
imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it gives no one
single architectural ornament, however near, so much form as might
enable us even to guess at its actual one; and this I say not rashly,
for I shall prove it by placing portions of detail accurately copied
from Canaletto side by side with engravings from the Daguerreotype; it
gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their
ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age
in Canaletto's touch; which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled
penmanlike line, as far removed from the grace of nature as from her
faintness and transparency; and for his truth of color, let the single
fact of his having omitted _all record, whatsoever, of the frescoes_
whose wrecks are still to be found at least on one half of the
unrestored palaces, and, with still less excusableness, all record of
the magnificent colored marbles of many whose greens and purples are
stil