But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh century the great
consecration of the church took place. It was again injured by fire in
1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall of Venice there was
probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree embellish or alter
the fabric, so that few parts of it can be pronounced boldly to be of
any given date. Two periods of interference are, however, notable above
the rest: the first, that in which the Gothic school had superseded the
Byzantine towards the close of the fourteenth century, when the
pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window traceries were added to the
exterior, and the great screen, with various chapels and
tabernacle-work, to the interior; the second, when the Renaissance
school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian and Tintoret
substituted, over one half of the church, their own compositions for the
Greek mosaics with which it was originally decorated; [Footnote: Signed
Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, etc.] happily, though with no good
will, having left enough to enable us to imagine and lament what they
destroyed. Of this irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter;
meantime, I wish only to fix in the reader's mind the succession of
periods of alteration as firmly and simply as possible.

SECTION VI. We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly
stated to be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the
fourteenth, and the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no
difficulty in distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the
Byzantine; but there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how
long, during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
additions were made to the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily
distinguished from the work of the eleventh century, being purposely
executed in the same manner. Two of the most important pieces of
evidence on this point are, a mosaic in the south transept, and another