ed the battle from a
distance, or who passed the greater part of their lives in the
council-chamber, soon came to regard the shield as nothing more than a
field for their armorial bearings. It then became a principal object of
their Pride of State to increase the conspicuousness of these marks of
family distinction by surrounding them with various and fantastic
ornament, generally scroll or flower work, which of course deprived the
shield of all appearance of being intended for a soldier's use. Thus the
shield of the Foscari is introduced in two ways. On the sarcophagus,
the bearings are three times repeated, enclosed in circular disks, which
are sustained each by a couple of naked infants. Above the canopy, two
shields of the usual form are set in the centre of circles filled by a
radiating ornament of shell flutings, which give them the effect of
ventilators; and their circumference is farther adorned by gilt rays,
undulating to represent a glory.

Sec. LXXVI. We now approach that period of the early Renaissance which
was noticed in the preceding chapter as being at first a very visible
improvement on the corrupted Gothic. The tombs executed during the
period of the Byzantine Renaissance exhibit, in the first place, a
consummate skill in handling the chisel, perfect science of drawing and
anatomy, high appreciation of good classical models, and a grace of
composition and delicacy of ornament derived, I believe, principally
from the great Florentine sculptors. But, together with this science,
they exhibit also, for a short time, some return to the early religious
feeling, forming a school of sculpture which corresponds to that of the
school of the Bellini in painting; and the only wonder is that there
should not have been more workmen in the fifteenth century doing in
marble what Perugino, Francia, and Bellini did on canvas. There are,
indeed, some few, as I have just said, in whom the good and pure temper
shows itself: but the sculptor was necessarily led sooner than the
painter to an exclusive study of classical models, utterly adverse to
the Christian imagination; and he was also deprived of the great
purifying and sacred element of color, besides having much more of
merely mechanical and therefore degrading labor to go through in the
realization of his thought. Hence I do not know any example in sculpture
at this period, at least in Venice, which has not conspicuous faults
(not faults of imperfection, as in early s