"At the top of the staircase open the two halls, the government {355} and state saloons, and both are lined with paintings; here Tintoretto, Veronese, Pordenone, Palma the younger, Titian, Bonifazio, and twenty others have covered with masterpieces the walls of which Palladia, Aspetti, Scamozzi, and Sansovino made the designs and ornaments. All the genius of the city at its brightest period assembled here to glorify the Republic in the erection of a memorial of its victories and an apotheosis of its grandeur. There is no similar trophy in the world: naval combats, ships with curved prows like swan's necks, galleys with crowded banks of oars, battlements discharging showers of arrows, floating standards amidst masts, a tumultuous strife of struggling and engulfed combatants, crowds of Illyrians, Saracens, and Greeks, naked bodies bronzed by the sun and deformed by contests, stuffs of gold, damascene armor, silks starred with pearls, all the strange medley of that heroic, luxurious display which transpires in Venetian history from Zara to Damietta, and from Padua to the Dardanelles; here and there, grand nudities of allegorical goddesses; in the triangles the 'Virtues' of Pordenone, a species of colossal virago with herculean, sanguine, and choleric body; throughout, a display of virile strength, active energy, sensual gayety, and, preparing the way for this bewildering procession, the grandest of modern paintings, a 'Paradise' by Tintoretto, eighty feet long by twenty wide, with six hundred figures whirling about in a ruddy illumination, as if from the glowing flames of a vast conflagration." {356} CHAPTER XIX. THE ACCADEMIA; CHURCHES AND SCUOLE. The Accademia delle Belle Arti, although on the Grand Canal, may be reached by a short walk from the Piazza, passing San Moisè and Santa Maria Zobenigo, and through the Campo San Stefano to the ugly bridge which leads directly to the Campo della Carità. The Convent of Charity was one of the edifices upon which Palladio lavished the greatest care and study. Much, of it was burned in 1630, and the pride of the old architect no longer remains. After the suppression of the convent it was used as a barrack; but in 1807 Napoleon decreed the establishment of an Academy of Art, and the spacious buildings of La Carità were devoted to its use. Here are pictures from the very earliest days in which even the glimmerings of a Venetian Art could be discerned; and this was as late as the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Vivarini of Murano painted their dry, meagre Virgins and other figures in colors so rich as even then to foreshadow the glorious blooming time which followed. As we are not writing of Art with any special method, we will speak only of a few works of interest to all,--to the picture-lover as well as to the connoisseur and student,--merely saying, _en passant_, that one who has time will do well to spend a good share of it here.