hich are the result of
distance, together with perfect expression of the peculiarities of the
design, requires the skill of the most admirable artist, devoted to the
work with the most severe conscientiousness, neither the skill nor the
determination having as yet been given to the subject. And in the
illustration of details, every building of any pretensions to high
architectural rank would require a volume of plates, and those finished
with extraordinary care. With respect to the two buildings which are the
principal subjects of the present volume, St. Mark's and the Ducal
Palace, I have found it quite impossible to do them the slightest
justice by any kind of portraiture; and I abandoned the endeavor in the
case of the latter with less regret, because in the new Crystal Palace
(as the poetical public insist upon calling it, though it is neither a
palace, nor of crystal) there will be placed, I believe, a noble cast of
one of its angles. As for St. Mark's, the effort was hopeless from the
beginning. For its effect depends not only upon the most delicate
sculpture in every part, but, as we have just stated, eminently on its
color also, and that the most subtle, variable, inexpressible color in
the world,--the color of glass, of transparent alabaster, of polished
marble, and lustrous gold. It would be easier to illustrate a crest of
Scottish mountain, with its purple heather and pale harebells at their
fullest and fairest, or a glade of Jura forest, with its floor of
anemone and moss, than a single portico of St. Mark's. The fragment of
one of its archivolts, given at the bottom of the opposite Plate, is not
to illustrate the thing itself, but to illustrate the impossibility of
illustration.

Sec. XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger scale;
and yet even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp folds and
points of the marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness. The ground
of it is gold, the sculpture in the spandrils is not more than an inch
and a half deep, rarely so much. It is in fact nothing more than an
exquisite sketching of outlines in marble, to about the same depth as in
the Elgin frieze; the draperies, however, being filled with close folds,
in the manner of the Byzantine pictures, folds especially necessary
here, as large masses could not be expressed in the shallow sculpture
without becoming insipid; but the disposition of these folds is always
most beautiful, and often opposed