But this was not all the punishment
put upon him by the Turks for daring to hold out so long. First his nose
and ears were cut off; then for some days he was made to work like the
lowest labourer. Then came the flaying, after which his skin was stuffed
with straw and fastened as a figure-head to the Turkish admiral's prow
on his triumphant return to Constantinople. For years the trophy was
kept in the arsenal of that city, but it was removed by some means or
other, purchase or theft, and now reposes in the tomb at which we are
looking. This monument greatly affected old Coryat. "Truly," he says, "I
could not read it with dry eyes."

Farther on is the pretentious Valier monument, a triumph of bad taste.
Here we see Doge Bertucci Valier (1656-1658) with his courtly abundant
dame, and Doge Silvestro Valier (1694-1700), all proud and foolish in
death, as I feel sure they must have been in life to have commissioned
such a memorial. In the choir are more Doges, some of sterner stuff:
Michele Morosini (1382), who after only a few months was killed by a
visitation of the plague, which carried off also twenty thousand more
ordinary Venetians, but who has a tomb of great distinction worthy of
commemorating a full and sagacious reign; Leonardo Loredan (1501-1521)
whose features we know so well by reason of Bellini's portrait in the
National Gallery, the Doge on the throne when the League of Cambray was
formed by the Powers to crush the Republic; and Andrea Vendramini
(1476-1478) who has the most beautiful monument of all, the work of
Tullio and Antonio Lombardi. Vendramini, who came between Pietro and
Giovanni Mocenigo, had a brief and bellicose reign. Lastly here lies
Doge Marco Corner (1365-1368), who made little history, but was a fine
character.

In the left transept we find warlike metal, for here is the modern
statue of the great Sebastian Venier whom we have already seen in the
Ducal Palace as the hero of the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and it is
peculiarly fitting that he should be honoured in the same church as the
luckless Bragadino, for it was at Lepanto that the Turks who had
triumphed at Cyprus and behaved so vilely were for the moment utterly
defeated. On the death of Alvise Mocenigo, Venier was made Doge, at the
age of eighty, but he occupied the throne only for a year and his end
was hastened by grief at another of those disastrous fires, in 1576,
which destroyed some of the finest pictures that the world then
con