This statue, which so marvellously sums up in sculpture the central aim of Venice as a state in the fifteenth century, offers an instructive contrast to that in the Campo di San Bartolomeo, where the comedian Goldoni, though raised above the level of the square, still seems a companionable part of the life that passes around him, moving in its midst as he moved amid the life of the eighteenth century in Venice, meditating upon it, observing, loving it, faithfully and fearlessly recording it. Marked by a realistic fidelity and insight worthy of a greater age, Dal Zotto’s statue of Goldoni is in its own way itself a masterpiece and one of the noblest works of modern art in Venice, full of sympathy and understanding and admirable in execution. The sculptor might seem to have lived as an intimate with Goldoni, and the realism of his treatment suits the subject singularly well. The comedian is not aloft upon a pedestal, remote from men, in glorious aloofness; he is raised but slightly above our heads, not much observed of the crowd, but observing all. Briskly he steps along, in buckled shoes, frilled shirt and neckerchief, his coat flying open, and a book or manuscript bulging from the pocket of it, his waistcoat slackly buttoned, his cocked hat tipped jauntily upon his forehead over his powdered periwig. As he goes he crushes his gloves with one hand at his back and with the other marks progress with his cane. It is a strong, taut little figure, tending to roundness, with a world of suggestiveness in every motion, an admirable mingling of thought and humour in the face that laughs down on this strange, grotesque, conventional, lovable Venice. What a strange contrast is this, of the slippered sage of the eighteenth century, who houses the swallows in the loose folds of his slouch hat, and the armed hero of the fifteenth, whose every muscle is alert, responsive to the stern controlling will! Goldoni is a sage upon a different platform, meditating upon a different world. His Venice is the Venice of Longhi; she has become pedestrian; she has become a theme for comedy. Comedy might have found plentiful food, no doubt, in the Venice that employed Colleoni, the Venice of the first great painters. There is a fund of humour and whimsicality in the strangely fascinating faces of Carpaccio’s citizens. Yet try to picture them held up to ridicule by one of themselves upon the stage, and the imagination faints; the thing is inconceivable. In Goldoni’s age the interest of life was shifted to another field, and he stands as the central figure, the leader in a new campaign, representative not of its vices or its vanities or its follies, but of the solid virtues of which these are the shady side. He is one of those happy spirits which the reactionary age of small things produced, not only in Italy but everywhere in the eighteenth century; a spirit of clear, calm insight and capable judgment, neither enamoured of the life of his small circle nor