New-York tribune., 1901-03-10
RESTORING ST. MARKS.
THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENTS WORK TO
SAVE THE VENETIAN CHURCH.

Venice correspondence Of the London Globe.
L think no better proof of the progress Italy
has made during the last twenty years in true
artistic taste and sentiment is needed than the
fact that, whereas not so very long ago ItuSkin
appealed to England for a fund To enable copies
to be made of the invaluable mosaics and cary
ings in st. Marks Church. Venice. before they
fell into complete ruin. il is now the Italian
Government itself that has taken in hand their
saving and their restoration, and England has
now only 10 look on with approval Ruskin, in
his later days. apt to imagine that he had
preached in the desert, but We're he alive now
he would that here in Venice his teaching
has not been thrown away. The Ministry Of
PUhltc Works has realized that 20 restore ans
10 restore, and that to destroy ancient thing
and to replace it by a modern one is not 70 re-
store it. Before the new order of things. when
nything was considered unSiShtly it was pulled
down, often thrown away, and common work
Of the period set up in its stead. with the
suit that the thing restored" was not ancient
nor valuable. nor beautiful, nor dUrd ble-nOt
even Il good copy, since The workers then had
neither artistic eye nor taste. Now, however
this is all changed. and the government. by the
appointment Of the right men for the work. has
insured that St Marks should be preserved and
restored as nearly perfectly is humanity pos
sible
Any one who sees st. Marks after an absence
OF a few months VIII at once be struck by the
manner in which the old opus AlexanIrinum"
mosaic work. with which the church orig
inally paved. and of which little remained.
haS spread itself out the flooring. All
round the great white slabs under the central
Q'ilit, IN the TWO trInSeEtS. and down the right
aisle. all is rich in suhdurd color. The d.sfg-
urementS Of the last two centuries have d.sap-
E'-areG. The hundreds of bits Of common. rub
bishy. Verona, Erescia and Carrara. with which
thu original valuable tes,.r@ had been replaced.
have bel cInlticd into th- yard behind the
church. ard the lovely teSS-r;e OF porphyry and
Ncrd antique. jasper and malachite. once more
occupy their riehtfu placr-pTiceess material
lately eNcavated from the ruins at AquiIeia,
ConCordia and Cyrad0 II is not so much how
ever the beauty - the material that is So St-ik-
ln- as the mast rly manner in which The work
l5 do1c- Il is really hard L. believe that the
Inequalities of the pavement and the worn ap-
pearanCe cf tn" tcSSerse - not the work Of time
and OF the tre eadi1GS Of many feet instead of
being the result of Ingenious AMI anxious study.
learn that thc hjt.ct, before UrdOin-, any
part of the pavement takes plaster cast Of il
numbering the position II each OF the ancient
teSserse and from this he forms his restoration
having each separate bit hard cut and ground %
the exact size and shape of the one il iS 70
place. Where a pattern is half old and half
new II is Impossible To tell where the one begins
and the other ends It is really what some one
mas called The Philosophy Of Restoration" II
any one wishes to see in what disEraCcful con-
oiition the whole pavement was in up to very