ight to the little church of S.
Giovanni Crisostomo where there are two unusually delightful pictures: a
Sebastiano del Piombo and a Bellini, with a keen little sacristan who
enjoys displaying their beauties and places you in the best light. The
Bellini is his last signed work, and was painted when the old man was in
his eighty-fifth year. The restorer has been at it, but not to its
detriment. S. Christopher, S. Jerome, and S. Augustine are sweetly
together in a delectable country; S. Christopher (as the photograph on
the opposite page shows) bearing perhaps the most charming Christ Child
of all, with his thumb in his mouth. The Piombo--another company of
saints--over the high altar, is a fine mellow thing with a very
Giorgionesque figure of the Baptist dominating it, and a lovely
Giorgionesque landscape spreading away. The picture (which I reproduce
opposite page 116) is known to be the last which Sebastiano painted
before he went to Rome and gave up Giorgione's influence for Michael
Angelo's. It has been suggested that Giorgione merely supplied the
design; but I think one might safely go further and affirm that the
painting of the right side was his too and the left Piombo's. How far
Piombo departed from Giorgione's spell and came under the other may be
seen in our National Gallery by any visitor standing before No. 1--his
"Raising of Lazarus". Very little of the divine chromatic melody of
Castel Franco there!

S. Giovanni Crisostomo has also two fine reliefs, one by Tullio Lombardi
with a sweet little Virgin (who, however, is no mother) in it, and the
twelve Apostles gathered about. The sacristan, by the way, is also an
amateur artist, and once when I was there he had placed his easel just
by the side door and was engaged in laboriously copying in pencil
Veronese's "Christ in the House of Levi" (the original being a mile
away, at the Accademia) from an old copper plate, whistling the while.
Having no india-rubber he corrected his errors either with a penknife or
a dirty thumb. Art was then more his mistress than Pecunia, for on this
occasion he never left his work, although more than one Baedeker was
flying the red signal of largesse.

Continuing on our way we come soon to a point where the Calle Dolfin
meets a canal at right angles, with a large notice tablet like a
gravestone to keep us from falling into the water. It bears an ancient,
and I imagine, obsolete, injunction with regard to the sale of bread by
unauth