a
piece of noble and inventive grotesque, a head of the lion-symbol of St.
Mark, from the Veronese Gothic; the other is a head introduced as a
boss on the foundation of the Palazzo Corner della Regina at Venice,
utterly devoid of invention, made merely monstrous by exaggerations of
the eyeballs and cheeks, and generally characteristic of that late
Renaissance grotesque of Venice, with which we are at present more
immediately concerned.[43]

Sec. LXXII. The developement of that grotesque took place under different
laws from those which regulate it in any other European city. For, great
as we have seen the Byzantine mind show itself to be in other
directions, it was marked as that of a declining nation by the absence
of the grotesque element; and, owing to its influence, the early
Venetian Gothic remained inferior to all other schools in this
particular character. Nothing can well be more wonderful than its
instant failure in any attempt at the representation of ludicrous or
fearful images, more especially when it is compared with the magnificent
grotesque of the neighboring city of Verona, in which the Lombard
influence had full sway. Nor was it until the last links of connexion
with Constantinople had been dissolved, that the strength of the
Venetian mind could manifest itself in this direction. But it had then a
new enemy to encounter. The Renaissance laws altogether checked its
imagination in architecture; and it could only obtain permission to
express itself by starting forth in the work of the Venetian painters,
filling them with monkeys and dwarfs, even amidst the most serious
subjects, and leading Veronese and Tintoret to the most unexpected and
wild fantasies of form and color.

Sec. LXXIII. We may be deeply thankful for this peculiar reserve of the
Gothic grotesque character to the last days of Venice. All over the rest
of Europe it had been strongest in the days of imperfect art;
magnificently powerful throughout the whole of the thirteenth century,
tamed gradually in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and expiring in the
sixteenth amidst anatomy and laws of art. But at Venice, it had not been
received when it was elsewhere in triumph, and it fled to the lagoons
for shelter when elsewhere it was oppressed. And it was arrayed by the
Venetian painters in robes of state, and advanced by them to such honor
as it had never received in its days of widest dominion; while, in
return, it bestowed upon their pictures that f