culpture, but of purpose and
sentiment), staining such beauties as it may possess; and the whole
school soon falls away, and merges into vain pomp and meagre metaphor.

Sec. LXXVII. The most celebrated monument of this period is that to the
Doge Andrea Vendramin, in the Church of St. John and Paul, sculptured
about 1480, and before alluded to in the first chapter of the first
volume. It has attracted public admiration, partly by its costliness,
partly by the delicacy and precision of its chiselling; being otherwise
a very base and unworthy example of the school, and showing neither
invention nor feeling. It has the Virtues, as usual, dressed like
heathen goddesses, and totally devoid of expression, though graceful and
well studied merely as female figures. The rest of its sculpture is all
of the same kind; perfect in workmanship, and devoid of thought. Its
dragons are covered with marvellous scales, but have no terror nor sting
in them; its birds are perfect in plumage, but have no song in them; its
children lovely of limb, but have no childishness in them.

Sec. LXXVIII. Of far other workmanship are the tombs of Pietro and
Giovanni Mocenigo, in St. John and Paul, and of Pietro Bernardo in the
Frari; in all which the details are as full of exquisite fancy, as they
are perfect in execution; and in the two former, and several others of
similar feeling, the old religious symbols return; the Madonna is again
seen enthroned under the canopy, and the sarcophagus is decorated with
legends of the saints. But the fatal errors of sentiment are,
nevertheless, always traceable. In the first place, the sculptor is
always seen to be intent upon the exhibition of his skill, more than on
producing any effect on the spectator's mind; elaborate backgrounds of
landscape, with tricks of perspective, imitations of trees, clouds, and
water, and various other unnecessary adjuncts, merely to show how marble
could be subdued; together with useless under-cutting, and over-finish
in subordinate parts, continually exhibiting the same cold vanity and
unexcited precision of mechanism. In the second place, the figures have
all the peculiar tendency to posture-making, which, exhibiting itself
first painfully in Perugino, rapidly destroyed the veracity of
composition in all art. By posture-making I mean, in general, that
action of figures which results from the painter's considering, in the
first place, not how, under the circumstances, they would actu