That I may finish all I have to say of the Place of St. Mark, I will tell you that the foundations of the great Campanile date as far back as 888, but the present walls were not begun till the year 1148. What the foundations were doing for two hundred and sixty years I cannot tell. The arches in the upper part, with the attic above them, and the spire, are said to have been commenced in 1150, but not completed till 1517, under the direction of Bartolommeo Buono. At the foot of this towering mass is a loggia, now a lottery office, erected by Sansovino. The style would not do well for a larger building, and is rather what might be called monumental, than _palatial_, but it is good in its way, and for its object.
Sansovino was a sculptor as well as an architect, and very much employed at Venice in both arts; he died in 1570, at the advanced age of ninety. Buono abandoned Gothic details, but preserved much of the ancient disposition: Sansovino and Sanmicheli were the first who fairly introduced modern Italian architecture into this part of Italy, and both of them brought it from Florence.
I shall not pretend to give you observations on all Sansovino’s works, but I will mention two of his churches. That of San Martino is a square room with three recesses on each side, one of which, rather deeper than the others, forms the choir. The details are rather poor, but the distribution does not seem ill-chosen. The outside of S. Giorgio de’ Greci is altogether bad. The inside is an oblong room, not I think, very well proportioned or well decorated. Yet Moschini appeals to the judgment of his predecessors in confirmation of his own, that it is the finest of Sansovino’s works, full of “majesty and magnificence, and as, on the score of elegance, the artist has here touched perfection, so, in point of solidity, he seems to have erected a richly adorned castle.” It was thirty years in building, and the expense was defrayed entirely by subscription among the Greek inhabitants of Venice, and those who frequented that city. On the division which separates the sanctuary from the body of the church, are some paintings coated with silver, and having crowns, and other ornaments of gold attached to them, and leaving hardly any thing visible but the heads. I was assured that the painting was complete beneath this covering, and that the parts which were figured in low relief on the silver plate, corresponded exactly with the drawings behind it.