This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay.
I shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader
with successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of
the earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features
with those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and
pause, in the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as
I have made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon
two distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by
particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the
builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be
bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite
in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of
the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may
be immediately useful in fixing in the reader's mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.
SECTION XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above
attached to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The
tomb of that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of
the same general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the
period, and it is one of the last which retains it.
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