change
went on simultaneously to the beginning of the seventeenth. The merely
decorative chequerings on the walls yielded gradually to more elaborate
paintings of figure-subject; first small and quaint, and then enlarging
into enormous pictures filled by figures generally colossal. As these
paintings became of greater merit and importance, the architecture with
which they were associated was less studied; and at last a style was
introduced in which the framework of the building was little more
interesting than that of a Manchester factory, but the whole space of
its walls was covered with the most precious fresco paintings. Such
edifices are of course no longer to be considered as forming an
architectural school; they were merely large preparations of artists'
panels; and Titian, Giorgione, and Veronese no more conferred merit on
the later architecture of Venice, as such, by painting on its facades,
than Landseer or Watts could confer merit on that of London by first
whitewashing and then painting its brick streets from one end to the
other.

Sec. XXXVI. Contemporarily with this change in the relative values of the
color decoration and the stone-work, one equally important was taking
place in the opposite direction, but of course in another group of
buildings. For in proportion as the architect felt himself thrust aside
or forgotten in one edifice, he endeavored to make himself principal in
another; and, in retaliation for the painter's entire usurpation of
certain fields of design, succeeded in excluding him totally from those
in which his own influence was predominant. Or, more accurately
speaking, the architects began to be too proud to receive assistance
from the colorists; and these latter sought for ground which the
architect had abandoned, for the unrestrained display of their own
skill. And thus, while one series of edifices is continually becoming
feebler in design and richer in superimposed paintings, another, that of
which we have so often spoken as the earliest or Byzantine Renaissance,
fragment by fragment rejects the pictorial decoration; supplies its
place first with marbles, and then, as the latter are felt by the
architect, daily increasing in arrogance and deepening in coldness, to
be too bright for his dignity, he casts even these aside one by one: and
when the last porphyry circle has vanished from the facade, we find two
palaces standing side by side, one built, so far as mere masonry goes,
with co