nt figure appears resting
upon it. By the time that the sculptors had acquired skill enough to
give much expression to this figure, the canopy attains an exquisite
symmetry and richness; and, in the most elaborate examples, is
surmounted by a statue, generally small, representing the dead person in
the full strength and pride of life, while the recumbent figure shows
him as he lay in death. And, at this point, the perfect type of the
Gothic tomb is reached.

Sec. XLIX. Of the simple sarcophagus tomb there are many exquisite
examples both at Venice and Verona; the most interesting in Venice are
those which are set in the recesses of the rude brick front of the Church
of St. John and Paul, ornamented only, for the most part, with two crosses
set in circles, and the legend with the name of the dead, and an "Orate
pro anima" in another circle in the centre. And in this we may note one
great proof of superiority in Italian over English tombs; the latter
being often enriched with quatrefoils, small shafts, and arches, and
other ordinary architectural decorations, which destroy their
seriousness and solemnity, render them little more than ornamental, and
have no religious meaning whatever; while the Italian sarcophagi are
kept massive, smooth, and gloomy,--heavy-lidded dungeons of stone, like
rock-tombs,--but bearing on their surface, sculptured with tender and
narrow lines, the emblem of the cross, not presumptuously nor proudly,
but dimly graven upon their granite, like the hope which the human heart
holds, but hardly perceives in its heaviness.

Sec. L. Among the tombs in front of the Church of St. John and Paul
there is one which is peculiarly illustrative of the simplicity of these
earlier ages. It is on the left of the entrance, a massy sarcophagus
with low horns as of an altar, placed in a rude recess of the outside
wall, shattered and worn, and here and there entangled among wild grass
and weeds. Yet it is the tomb of two Doges, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo,
by one of whom nearly the whole ground was given for the erection of the
noble church in front of which his unprotected tomb is wasting away. The
sarcophagus bears an inscription in the centre, describing the acts of
the Doges, of which the letters show that it was added a considerable
period after the erection of the tomb: the original legend is still left
in other letters on its base, to this effect,

"Lord James, died 1251. Lord Laurence, died 1288."

At the