"The admirable Piazza, bordered with porticos and palaces, extends rectangularly its forests of columns, its Corinthian capitals, its statues, its noble and varied arrangement of classic forms. At its extremity, half Gothic, half Byzantine, rises the Basilica, under bulbous domes and tapering belfries, its arcades festooned with figures, its porches laced with light columns, its arches wainscoted with mosaics, its pavements incrusted with colored marbles, and its cupolas scintillating with gold; a strange mysterious sanctuary, a sort of Christian mosque in which cascades of light vacillate in ruddy shadows like the wings of genii within the purple, metallic walls of subterranean abodes. All this teems with sparks and radiance. A few paces off, bare and erect like a ship's mast, the gigantic Campanile towers in the air, and announces to distant mariners the time-honored royalty of Venice. At its base, closely pressed to it, the delicate _loggetta_ of Sansovino seems like a flower, so many statues, bas-reliefs, bronzes, and marbles, whatever is rich and imaginative of living and elegant art, crowd around it to adorn it... "Like a magnificent diamond in a brilliant setting, the Ducal Palace effaces the rest.... Never has the like architecture been seen; all here is novel. You feel yourself drawn out of the conventional: you realize that outside of classic or Gothic {261} forms, which we repeat and impose on ourselves, there is an entire world; that human invention is illimitable; that, like Nature, it may break all the rules, and produce a perfect work after a model opposed to that to which we are told to conform." Ruskin's words rush out, and seem to tumble one over the other in their haste to express his seething thought:-- "A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into fine great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,--sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves and lilies and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.