place
breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of
the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them
are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such
as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient
sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses
of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the _Ampelopsis
quinquefolia_, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native
of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before
America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in
colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble
banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their
scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times:
the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only
noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint
Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand,
whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond
of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African
by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered
martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy
wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some
barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among
the rude sculptures of the porch called _The Chase of Theodoric_: the dogs
have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider.
Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the
Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early
version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees
the trace of German ideas--at any rate, of Northern thought--everywhere in
the mediaeval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the
North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and
which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One
of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and
adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of
one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande
II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being
extr