DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY in a splendid old palace on the Grand Canal, its ceilings covered with fine old faded frescoes and everything about
had been in the fifteenth century. Strange to all phases of ancient art, relate, though he was quite up on he had another and very different calling he was a butcher it
just as
it
!
It is
hard to understand
how he
could reconcile himself to
His daughter usually sat in occupations so incongruous. the shop and did the selling, and as I wanted badly a reI would offer her twentypousse brass plate which they had, five francs for it whenever I happened in, but she always The day before I left Venice I walked in the declined. francs daughter was sitting there I put down twenty-five under the with off walked my arm. on the counter and plate She threw up both hands and exclaimed: " " Mano di Dio
Mano
di
Dio
!
!
Venice a very unusual marriage-chest It is made of walnut, huntsmen and horses of carved in low relief with figures returning from a boar-hunt, black with age, but brightened with the remains of gilding in spots here and there. DeCase woodciding to treat it as a shelf, I got the Capo le I
also
bought
in
front, of the fourteenth century.
carver to add a grotesque head at each end and a shelf above, and later I had it built into a mantelpiece at Danskammer
with good
effect.
One
I
day, wandering into an ancient Venetian palazzo, saw hanging in the hall an etching by Albert Diirer-
the horse with a mailed figure walking by its side bought it for ten francs. I don't know whether it original or not but
and is an
good enough to be. Perhaps it is by Marc Antonio, who engraved Diirer's things in Venice. I remember in Padua asking an antiquity dealer if he had any old books. He said, yes, that he would show me a few, and took me to an old palace where the garret was it is
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