iazza of Santa Maria Formosa from whose
windows the festa of the Maries has ever been seen: of the church in
which they worshipped, not a stone is left, even the form of the ground
and direction of the neighboring canals are changed; and there is now
but one landmark to guide the steps of the traveller to the place where
the white cloud rested, and the shrine was built to St. Mary the
Beautiful. Yet the spot is still worth his pilgrimage, for he may
receive a lesson upon it, though a painful one. Let him first fill his
mind with the fair images of the ancient festival, and then seek that
landmark the tower of the modern church, built upon the place where the
daughters of Venice knelt yearly with her noblest lords; and let him
look at the head that is carved on the base of the tower,[37] still
dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful.

Sec. XV. A head,--huge, inhuman, and monstrous,--leering in bestial
degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be
beheld for more than an instant: yet let it be endured for that instant;
for in that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to which Venice
was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that
we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot, and know what
pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty, until it
melted away like the white cloud from the ancient fields of Santa Maria
Formosa.

Sec. XVI. This head is one of many hundreds which disgrace the latest
buildings of the city, all more or less agreeing in their expression of
sneering mockery, in most cases enhanced by thrusting out the tongue.
Most of them occur upon the bridges, which were among the very last
works undertaken by the republic, several, for instance, upon the Bridge
of Sighs; and they are evidences of a delight in the contemplation of
bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe,
the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall. This spirit
of idiotic mockery is, as I have said, the most striking characteristic
of the last period of the Renaissance, which, in consequence of the
character thus imparted to its sculpture, I have called grotesque; but
it must be our immediate task, and it will be a most interesting one, to
distinguish between this base grotesqueness, and that magnificent
condition of fantastic imagination, which was above noticed as one of
the chief elements of the Northern Gothic mind. Nor is this a