Whatever the reasons may be, here is a point to be remembered when we study such a bridge as the Rialto, at Venice, which carries three little streets on an arch twenty-four feet six inches high, and ninety-one feet in span, with a soffit about seventy-two feet wide. To-day the Rialto shops are trivial and mean, but in the great time of the Republic they displayed the most luxurious oddments of fashion, and delighted the idle rich. Very often it is said that the Rialto was built from a design by Michelangelo, as if this wonderful master of a tragic and supreme dignity could have amused his leisure with such a pretty whim in ornate building! Modern criticism shows a very poor taste when it repeats this old fallacy, or when it describes the Rialto as a masterpiece of architecture dating from the Renaissance. In comparison with the bridges of Isfahan, which belong to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Rialto is a mere toy. Its origin is the subject of Rondelet’s “Essai Historique sur le Pont de Rialto,” where we watch a great competition between Palladio and Antonio da Ponte. Palladio was the greater man, but the Senate rejected his designs,[84] and in 1588 Antonio da Ponte built his arched scaffold or centring and laid the first blocks of Istrian marble. In Brangwyn’s picture the Rialto is gay enough to belong to the joyous times of the Republic; and by comparing this picture with the pen-drawings of the bridges at Isfahan, in Persia, it is easy to note the difference in spirit between two cities that attained in the same age their greatest prosperity. In 1590, Isfahan became the capital of Persia; and by this year Venice had recovered from the destructive fire of 1577, and was beautifying herself in many ways, as with the Piazza di San Marco. [Illustration: THE RIALTO, VENICE DESIGNED IN 1588 BY ANTONIO DA PONTE, ARCHITECT]