nsummate care and skill, but without the slightest vestige of
color in any part of it; the other utterly without any claim to interest
in its architectural form, but covered from top to bottom with paintings
by Veronese. At this period, then, we bid farewell to color, leaving the
painters to their own peculiar field; and only regretting that they
waste their noblest work on walls, from which in a couple of centuries,
if not before, the greater part of their labor must be effaced. On the
other hand, the architecture whose decline we are tracing, has now
assumed an entirely new condition, that of the Central or True
Renaissance, whose nature we are to examine in the next chapter.

Sec. XXXVII. But before leaving these last palaces over which the
Byzantine influence extended itself, there is one more lesson to be
learned from them of much importance to us. Though in many respects
debased in style, they are consummate in workmanship, and unstained in
honor; there is no imperfection in them, and no dishonesty. That there is
absolutely _no_ imperfection, is indeed, as we have seen above, a proof of
their being wanting in the highest qualities of architecture; but, as
lessons in masonry, they have their value, and may well be studied for the
excellence they display in methods of levelling stones, for the
precision of their inlaying, and other such qualities, which in them are
indeed too principal, yet very instructive in their particular way.

Sec. XXXVIII. For instance, in the inlaid design of the dove with the
olive branch, from the Casa Trevisan (Vol. I. Plate XX. p. 369), it is
impossible for anything to go beyond the precision with which the olive
leaves are cut out of the white marble; and, in some wreaths of laurel
below, the rippled edge of each leaf is as finely and easily drawn, as
if by a delicate pencil. No Florentine table is more exquisitely
finished than the facade of this entire palace; and as ideals of an
executive perfection, which, though we must not turn aside from our main
path to reach it, may yet with much advantage be kept in our sight and
memory, these palaces are most notable amidst the architecture of
Europe. The Rio Facade of the Ducal Palace, though very sparing in
color, is yet, as an example of finished masonry in a vast building, one
of the finest things, not only in Venice, but in the world. It differs
from other work of the Byzantine Renaissance, in being on a very large
scale; and it still re