We retrace our steps to the Scala dei Censori, beyond which is a suite of rooms, once the private apartments of the Doges, now used as an archæological museum. In the corridor are two fine allegorical pictures of St Mark's Lion by Jacobello del Fiore and Carpaccio; and Bart. Buoni's remarkable head of Francesco Foscari. The beautiful rooms with their gilded ceilings and fine chimney-pieces by the Lombardi, contain Greek, Roman and Venetian sculpture, Renaissance bronzes, coins, old maps and other objects, many of them of high merit but only of interest to the more leisured student. In the Stanza degli Stucchi are a voting urn from the Scuola della Carità, and another from the Great Council. Before he leaves this room the visitor should ask to be shown one of the most interesting paintings in the palace--an unrestored fresco by Titian of St Christopher, with a view of Venice in the bottom background, at the foot of the staircase leading up to the Doge's chapel. The Piombi have long since disappeared owing to structural alterations; such of the Pozzi and other cells that are shown may well be left unvisited.
Before descending the Giant's Staircase permission may be had, on application to the "Ufficio Regionale per la Conservazione dei Monumenti del Veneto," to inspect the "Cobden Madonna" at the E. end of the S. gallery overlooking the Grand Canal. It is a fine marble relief of the Virgin and Child with attendant angels, wrought probably by Pietro Lombardo to commemorate the reduction of the duties on corn during a severe famine in the reign of one of the Mocenighi towards the end of the fifteenth century. When Richard Cobden was in Venice in 1847, during the course of his triumphant journey through Europe, he wrote his name, which is still visible, over one of the ears of corn beneath the Latin inscription.
After the fall of the Venetian Republic the French government expropriated a group of buildings belonging to the church, monastery and guild of S. Maria della Carità, and there housed the collection of paintings selected from the public offices, the suppressed religious orders, guilds and churches of Venice, by their commissioner, Peter Edwards, who had formerly been chief picture restorer to the Republic. Some conception may be formed, after visiting the Ducal Palace and the magnificent collection treasured in these rooms, of the enormous wealth of paintings existing in the city in the latter half of the eighteenth century; for the commission then appointed to overhaul the artistic possessions of the government decided to restore only the best and allowed the remainder to rot. The Guild of Our Lady of Charity, the earliest of the six greater _Scuole_[96] of Venice, was founded in 1260 to ransom Christian captives from the Moors and other pirates. Over the portal of the outer cloister are three early reliefs in stone, St Leonard, patron of captives and slaves; the Virgin and Child with kneeling guildsmen; and St Christopher. In the inner court, entered from the corridor of the Istituto delle Belle Arti, may be seen Palladio's unfinished cloisters, one of the most beautiful examples of the use of brick in N. Italy. Of the old rooms of the guild two only remain, Room XX., the former Guest Chamber, and Room I. Both have magnificent fifteenth-century ceilings; that of the latter is by Giampietro of Vicenza, a famous wood-carver whose figures of eight-winged cherubs have been ingeniously but erroneously interpreted as a rebus on the name of a supposed brother, Cherubino Aliotto (eight-winged), who was believed to have paid for the decoration of the ceiling.