Note 242 — SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC MORALS: PART II

Mr. Ruskin has somewhere maintained that the decline of Venice was not due to this cause, but to fornication. He should read the record given by Mutinelli (Diari Urbani, p. 157), of Venetian fornication in 1340, at the time when the Ducal Palace was being covered with its sculpture. The public prostitutes were reckoned then at 11,654. Adulteries, rapes, infanticides were matters of daily occurrence. Yet the Renaissance had not begun, and the expansion of Venice, which roused the envious hostility of Europe, had yet to happen.