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Title: Venice
Author: Beryl de Sélincourt
May Sturge Henderson
Illustrator: Reginald Barratt
Release Date: September 13, 2021 [eBook #66295]
Language: English
Produced by: Charlie Howard and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENICE ***
VENICE
[Illustration:
_By permission of the late Thomas Threlfall, Esq._
THE CAMPANILE.]
VENICE
BY
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT
AND
MAY STURGE HENDERSON
ILLUSTRATED BY
REGINALD BARRATT
OF THE ROYAL WATER-COLOR
SOCIETY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1907
_Copyright, 1907_,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published, October, 1907
CONTENTS
_Page_
I
INTRODUCTORY 1
II
PHANTOMS OF THE LAGOONS 16
III
THE NUPTIALS OF VENICE 54
IV
VENICE IN FESTIVAL 74
V
A MERCHANT OF VENICE 98
VI
VENICE OF CRUSADE AND PILGRIMAGE 124
VII
TWO VENETIAN STATUES 160
VIII
VENETIAN WATERWAYS (PART I) 187
IX
VENETIAN WATERWAYS (PART II) 253
X
ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE 275
XI
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES 317
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Campanile _Frontispiece_
PAGE
View from the Gallery of San Marco 7
Santa Maria della Salute 23
The Clock Tower 37
Riva Degli Schiavoni 57
The Doorway of San Marco 71
View from Cà d’Oro 81
Courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale 91
San Giorgio 107
The Dogana 119
The Shadow of the Campanile 127
The Clock Tower from Gallery of San Marco 137
The Horses of San Marco, looking South 147
The Horses of San Marco, looking North 155
In the Piazza 175
View on the Grand Canal from San Angelo 189
Piazzetta, The Library 195
Corner of the Palazzo Dario 201
A Venetian Bridge 219
Palazzo Sanudo 231
A Side Canal 241
The Gondoliers’ Shrine 247
Entrance of the Grand Canal 257
View on the Grand Canal 269
Palazzo Rezzonico 281
Towards the Rialto San Angelo 291
Bronze Well-Head by Alberghetti--The Courtyard of Palazzo Ducale 305
Evening in the Piazzetta 313
A Palace Door 323
Zattere 331
VENICE
Chapter One
INTRODUCTORY
“Venice herself is poetry, and creates a poet out of the dullest clay.”
It was a poet who spoke, and his clay was instinct with the breath
of genius. But it is true that Venice lends wings to duller clay; it
has been her fate to make poets of many who were not so before--a
responsibility that entails loss on her as well as gain.
She has lived--she has loved and suffered and created; and the echoes
of her creation are with us still; the pulse of the life which once
she knew continues to throb behind the loud and insistent present. The
story of Venice has been often written; the Bride of the Adriatic,
in her decay as in her youthful and her mature beauty, has been the
beloved of many men. “Wo betide the wretch,” cries Landor through
the mouth of Machiavelli, “who desecrates and humiliates her; she
may fall, but she shall rise again.” Venice even then had passed her
zenith; the path she had entered, though blazing with a glory which
had not attended on her dawn of life, was yet a path of decline,
the resplendent, dazzling path of the setting sun. And now a second
Attilla, as Napoleon vaunted himself, has descended upon her. She has
been desecrated, but she has never been dethroned. She could not,
if she would, take the ring off her finger. No hand of man, however
potent, can destroy that once consummated union, however the stranger
and her traitor sons may abase her from within.
It is to her own domain, embraced by her mutable yet eternally faithful
ocean-lover, that we must still go to see the relics of her pomp. The
old sternness has passed from her face, that compelling sovereignty
which gave her rank among the greatest potentates of the Middle Age;
her features, portrayed by these latter days, are mellowed; a veil of
golden haze softens the bold outlines of that imperious countenance.
We are sometimes tempted to forget that the cup held by the enchanter,
Venice, was filled once with no dream-inducing liquor, but with a
strong potion to fire the nerves of heroes. Viewing Venice in her
greater days, it is impossible to make that separation between the
artist and the man of action so deadly to action and to art. The
portraits of the Venetian masters, supreme among the portraits
of the world, could only have been produced by men who beyond the
divine perception of form and colour were endowed with a profound
understanding and divination of human character. The pictures of
Gentile Bellini, of Carpaccio, of Mansueti, are a gallery of portraits
of stern, strong, capable, self-confident men; and Giovanni Bellini,
who turned from secular themes to concentrate his energy on the
portrayal of the Madonna and Child, endowed her with a strength and
solemn pathos which only Giotto could rival, combined with a luminous
richness of colour in which perhaps he has no rival at all.
No mystics have sprung from Venice. Her sons have been artists of
life, not dreamers, though the sea, that great weaver of dreams,
has been ever around them. Or rather it is truer to say that the
dreamers of Venice have also been men of action; strong, capable and
intensely practical. They have not turned their back on the practice
of life; they have loved it in all its forms. Even when they speak
through the medium of allegory, of symbols, the art of Carpaccio and
of Tintoretto is a supreme record of the interests of the greatest
Venetians in the actions of everything living in this wonderful world,
and in particular--they are not ashamed to own it--in their supremely
wonderful city of Venice. There are dreamers among those crowds of
Carpaccio, of Gentile Bellini; but their hands can grasp the weapons
and the tools of earth; their heads and hearts can wrestle with the
problems and passions of earth. Compare them with the dreamers of
Perugino’s school: you feel at once that a gulf lies between them; the
fabric of their dream is of another substance. The great Venetians
are giants; like the sea’s, their embrace is vast and powerful,
endowed also with the gentleness of strength. The history of Venetian
greatness in art, in politics, in theology, is the history of men who
have accepted life and strenuously devoted themselves to mastering
its laws. They were not iconoclasts, because they were not idolaters:
the faculties of temperance and restraint are apparent in their very
enthusiasms. Venice did not fall because she loved life too well, but
because she had lost the secret of living. Pride became to her more
beautiful than truth, and finally more worshipful than beauty.
Much has, with truth, been said about the destruction of Venice. Even
in those who have not known her as she was, who in presence of her
wealth remaining are unconscious of the greatness of her loss, there
constantly stirs indignant sorrow at the childish wantonness of her
inhabitants, which loves to destroy and asks only a newer and brighter
plaything. But much persists that is indestructible; and though Venice
has become a spectacle for strangers, for those who are her lovers the
old spirit lingers still near the form it once so gloriously inhabited,
wakened into being, perchance, by a motion, an echo, a light upon the
waters, and once wakened never again lost or out of mind. Does not
the silent swiftness of the Ten still haunt the sandolo of the water
police, as it steals in the darkness with unlighted lamp under the
shadow of larger craft moored beside the fondamenta, visible only when
it crosses the path of a light from house or garden? It is in her water
that Venice eternally lives; it is thus that we think always of her
image--elusive, unfathomable, though plumbed so often by no novice
hand. It is the wonder of Venice within her waters which justifies the
renewal of the old attempt to reconstruct certain aspects of a career
which has been a challenge to the world, a mystery on which it has
never grown weary of speculating. And as the light falling from a new
angle on familiar features may reveal some grace hidden heretofore
in shadow or unobserved, so, perchance, the vision of Venice may be
renewed or kindled through the medium of a new personality.
Venice is inexhaustible, and it is from her waters that her mine
of wealth is drawn. They give her wings; without them she would be
fettered like other cities of the land. But Venice with her waters is
never dead. The sun may fall with cruel blankness on calle, piazza
and fondamenta, but nothing can kill the water; it is always mobile,
always alive. Imagine the thoroughfare of an inland city on such a
day as is portrayed in Manet’s _Grand Canal de Venise_; heart and eye
would curse the sunshine. But in the luminous truth of Manet’s picture,
as in Venice herself, the heat quivers and lives. Above ground, blue
sky beating down on blue canal, on the sleepy midday motion of the
gondolas, on the brilliant blue of the striped gondola posts, which
appear to stagger into the water; and under the surface, the secret
of Venice, the region where reflections lurk, where the long wavering
lines are carried on in the deep, cool, liquid life below. When Venice
is weary, what should she do but dive into the water as all her
children do? If we look down, when we can look up no longer, still
she is there; a city more shadowy but not less real, her elements all
dissolved that at our pleasure we may build them again;
And so not build at all,
And therefore build for ever.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE GALLERY OF SAN MARCO.]
And if in the middle day we realise this priceless dowry of Venice, it
is in the twilight of morning or evening that her treasury is unlocked
and she invites us to enter. Turner’s _Approach to Venice_ is a vision,
a dream, but not more divinely lovely than the reality of Venice in
these hours, even as she appears to duller eyes. Pass down the Grand
Canal in the twilight of an August evening, the full moon already high
and pouring a lustre from her pale green halo on the broad sweeping
path of the Canal. The noble curves of the houses to west and south
shut out the light; day is past, the reign of night has begun. Then
cross to the Zattere: you pass into another day. A full tide flows
from east to west, blue and swelling like the sea, dyed in the west
a shining orange Where the Euganean hills rise in clear soft outline
against the afterglow, while to the east the moon has laid her silver
bridle upon the dim waters. Cross to the Giudecca and pass along the
narrow, crowded quay into the old palace, which in that deserted
corner shows one dim lamp to the canal. The great hall opens at the
further end on a bowery garden where a fountain drips in the darkness
and the cicalas begin their piping. Mount the winding stair, past the
kitchen and the great key-shaped reception room, and look out over the
city--across the whole sweep of the magnificent Giudecca Canal and the
basin of San Marco. The orange glow is fading and the Euganean hills
are dying into the night, while near at hand one great golden star is
setting behind the Church of the Redentore, and the moon shines with
full brilliance upon the swaying waters, upon the Ducal Palace and the
churches of the Zattere, with the Salute as their chief. The night of
Venice has begun; she has put on her jewels and is blazing with light.
At the back of the house, where the lagoons lie in the shimmering
moonlight, is a silent waste of waters under the stars, broken only
by the lights of the islands. This also is Venice, this mystery of
moonlit water no less than the radiance of the city. And it is possible
to come still nearer to the lagoon. Passing along a dark rio little
changed from the past, we may cross a bridge into one of the wonderful
gardens for which the Giudecca is famous. The families of the Silvi,
Barbolini and Istoili, banished in the ninth century for stirring up
tumult in the Republic, when at last they were recalled by intercession
of Emperor Ludovico, inhabited this island of Spinalunga or Giudecca
and laid out gardens there. This one seems made for the night. The
moonlight streams through the vine pergolas which cross it in every
direction, lights the broad leaves of the banana tree and the dome
of the Salute behind the dark cypress-spire, and stars the grass with
shining petals. The night is full of the scent of haystacks built along
the edge of the lagoon, beside the green terrace which runs the length
of the water-wall. Then, as darkness deepens, we leave to the cicalas
their moonlit paradise, and glide once more into the Grand Canal. It is
at this hour, more than at any other, that, sweeping round the curves
of that marvellous waterway, it possesses us as an idea, a presence
that is not to be put by, so compelling, so vitally creative, is its
beauty. Truly Venice is poetry, and would create a poet out of the
dullest clay.
Every one will remember that a few years ago an enterprising man of
business attempted with sublime self-confidence to transfer Venice to
London, to enclose her within the walls of a great exhibition. Many
of us delighted in the miniature market of Rialto, in gliding through
the narrow waterways, in the cry of the gondoliers, and the sound of
violin and song across the water. But one gift in the portion of Venice
was forgotten, a gift which she shares indeed with other cities, but
which she alone can put out to interest and increase a thousandfold.
The sky is the roof of all the world, but Venice alone is paved with
sky; and the streets of Venice with no sky above them are like the
wings of the butterfly without the sun. Tintoret and Turner saw Venice
as the offspring of sky and water: that is the spirit in which they
have portrayed her; that is the essence of her life. It has penetrated
everything she has created of enduring beauty. Go into San Marco and
look down at what your feet are treading. Venice, whose streets are
paved with sky, must in her church also have sky beneath her feet. It
is impossible to imagine a more wonderful pavement than the undulating
marbles of San Marco; its rich and varied colours bound together
with the rarest inspiration; orient gems captured and imprisoned and
constantly lit with new and vivid beauty from the domes above. The
floor of San Marco is one of the glories of Venice--of the world; and
it is surely peculiarly expressive of the inspiration which worked in
Venice in the days of her creative life. San Marco, indeed, in its
superb and dazzling harmonies of colour, is almost the only living
representative of the Venice of pomegranate and gold which created
the Cà d’Oro, of the City of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, whose
cornice-mouldings were interwoven with glittering golden thread,
while every side canal gave back a glow of colour from richly-tinted
walls. The banners of the Lion in the Piazza no longer wave in solemn
splendour of crimson and gold above a pavement of pale luminous red; in
their place the tricolour of Italy flaunts over colourless uniformity.
The gold is fading from the Palace of the Doges, and only in a few rare
nooks, such as the Scuola of the Shoemakers in the Campo San Tomà,
do we find the original colours of an old relief linger in delicate
gradation over window or door.
Day after day some intimate treasure is torn from the heart of Venice.
Since Ruskin wrote, one leaf after another has been cut from the Missal
which “once lay open upon the waves, miraculous, like St. Cuthbert’s
book, a golden legend on countless leaves.” Those leaves are numbered
now. Year by year some familiar object disappears from bridge or
doorway, to be labelled and hoarded in a distant museum among aliens
and exiles like itself. And here, in Venice itself, a sentiment of
distress, the _fastidio_ of the Italians, comes over us as we ponder
upon the sculptured relics in the cortile of the Museo Civico. What
meaning have they here? It is atmosphere that they need--the natural
surroundings that would explain and vivify their forms. Many also of
the Venetian churches are despoiled, and their paintings hung side
by side with alien subjects in a light they were never intended to
bear. The Austrian had less power to hurt Venice than she herself
possesses. In those of her sons who understand her malady there flows
an undercurrent of deep sadness, as if day by day they watched the
ebbing of a life in which all their hope and all their love had root.
They cannot sever themselves from Venice: they cannot save her. Venice
pretending to share in the vulgar life of to-day, Venice recklessly
discarding one glory after another for the poor exchange of coin, still
has a power over us not wielded by the inland cities of Italy, happier
in the untroubled beauty of their decay. For, as you are turning with
sorrow from some fresh sign of pitiless destruction, of a sudden she
will flash upon you a new facet of her magic stone, will draw you
spell-bound to her waters and weave once more that diaphanous web of
radiant mystery:
Za per dirtelo,--o Catina,
La campagna me consola;
Ma Venezia è la sola
Che me possa contentar.
Each of us, face to face with Venice, has a new question to ask of her,
and, as he alone framed the question, the answer will be given to him
alone. Every stone has not yielded up its secret: in some there may
still be a mark yet unperceived beneath the dust. Here and there in her
manuscript there may lurk between the lines a word for the skilled or
the fortunate. Venice is not yet dumb: every day and every night the
sun and moon and star make music in her that has not yet been heard:
with patience and love we may redeem here and there a chord of those
divine musicians, or at least a tone which shall make her harmony more
full.
O Venezia benedetta,
No te vogio più lassar.
Chapter Two
PHANTOMS OF THE LAGOONS
We have called them the phantoms of the lagoons, those islands that
lie like shadows among the silver waters; for it is in this likeness
that they appear to us of the city--strangely mirrored, remote, a group
of clustering spirits, whose common halo is the sea. They are a choir
of spirits, yet each has a mute music of its own, and accosting them
one by one--slowly and in the silence entering into their life--we may
come to know and love the several members of this company of the blest,
till our senses grow alive to their harmony as they sing together,
sometimes in the clear, cold light of the spreading dawn, sometimes in
the evening twilight--when peak after peak is lit with the flame of
sacrifice and, in the Titanic memory of the sunset cloud, the great
fire lit on earth burns up with solemn flames into the sky.
All the languors, the fierce passions, of Venice, her vitality and
her mysticism, are mirrored in the lagoons; there is no pulse of
Venice that does not beat in them; in swift sequence, as in a lighter
element, they reflect the phases of her being. And the islands of the
lagoons are, as it were, the footsteps of young Venice. As she was
passing into her kingdom, she set her feet here and there among the
waters, and where she trod a life was born. Her roots are far back in
the past, far up upon the mainland, where still remain some fragments
of the giant growth, which, grafted in the lagoons, was to expand there
into a new fulness of beauty and life. It is as if the genius that
conceived Jesolo, Torcello, the Madonna of San Donato, had undergone
a sea-change as it moved towards the Adriatic, as if some vision had
passed before it and shaken it, as if the immutable had felt the first
touch of mutability--had been endowed with a new sense born of the
ebb and flow of ocean tides. In Malamocco she stepped too near the
sea, and left behind the mystery of a city submerged; but no one can
receive into his mind the peerless blue and green of the open water
beyond the Lido, with the foam upon it, or the sound of its incessant
sweep against the shore, without feeling that the spirit that had thus
embraced the sea had received a new pulse into her being--a nerve of
desire, of expansion, of motion, which her mountain infinitudes had
not inspired. And with the new life came new dreams to Venice, dreams
she was not slow to realise, and into them were woven materials for
which we should seek in vain among the islands, except in so far as
the reflex of her later activities fell also upon them. The Madonna of
San Donato is the goddess of the lagoons; and if there are children of
Venice who creep also for blessing and for protection to the borders of
her dusky garment, they are but few. The mystic beauty of that Madonna
was not the beauty that inspired Venice when she built upon the seas.
The robe of her divinity was more akin to the dazzling incomparable
blue of the bay that lies within the curve of the Schiavoni, as we
may see it from the Palazzo Ducale on a morning of sunshine and east
wind; that indomitable intensity of colour, unveiled, resplendent,
filled to the brim with the whole radiance and strength and glory of
the day--that is the girdle of Venice, the cup she drank of in her
strength. But it is clear that she had bowed to a new dominion: with
the ocean she wedded the world.
The lagoons are full of mysteries of light; they are a veritable
treasure ground of illusion. They are not one expanse of water over
which the light broods with equable influence; they form a region
of various circles, as it were, of various degrees of remoteness or
tangibility. Almost one feels that each circle must be inhabited by
a spirit appropriate to itself, and that a common language could not
be between them, so sharp are the limits set by the play of light.
On an early autumn morning when the sky is clear and the sun streams
full and level upon the clear blue expanse that separates Venice and
Mestre, we seem to have a firm foothold on this dancing water. It is
a substantial glory; but as our eye flits on from jewel to jewel in
the clear blue paving, a sudden line is drawn beyond which it may not
pass. The rich flood of vital colour has its bound, and beyond it
lies a region bathed in light so intense that even colour is refined
into a mystic whiteness--a mirror of crystal, devoid of substance,
infinitely remote; and above it, suspended in that lucent unearthly
atmosphere, hover the towers of Torcello and Burano, like a mirage
of the desert, midway between the water and the sky. They hang there
in completest isolation, yet with a precise definition, a startling
clearness of contour. There is no vestige of other buildings or of the
earth on which they stand, only the dome and campanile of Murano, the
leaning spire of Burano and Mazzorbo’s lightning-blasted tower, their
reflections distinctly mirrored in a luminous medium, half mist, half
water. There is an immense awe in the vision of these phantoms, caught
up into a region where the happy radiant colour dares not play; and
yet not veiled--clearer in what they choose to reveal than the near
city strong and splendid in the unreserve of the young day, but so
unearthly, so magical, that our morning spirits scarcely dare accost
them. What boat shall navigate that shining nothingness that divides
them from our brave and brilliant water?
Venice, indeed, at times falls under the phantom spell. In those
mornings of late autumn when the duel between the sun and the scirocco
seems as if it could not end till day is done and night calls up
her reinforcements of mist, Venice is herself the ghost, her goblet
brimming with a liquor that seems the drink of death, a perilous, grey,
steely vapour. One only of her islands looms out of the enfolding,
foggy blanket: it is San Michele, the island of the dead. On such a
morning we may visit this abode of shadows, not at this hour more
strange, more ghostly, than the city. To-day a veil is hung upon the
hard, bare outline of its boundary wall, which in sunny weather is a
glaring eye-sore as you travel towards Murano over the lagoon. Here,
in the cloisters where once Fra Mauro dreamed and studied his famous
Mappamondo, there is nothing to terrify the spirit on this morning
of the mist. The black and tinsel drapings, the strange, unprofitable
records of devotion and bereavement, the panoply of death--all these
are veiled, and only the wild grasses glisten with their dewdrops on
the graves of the very poor, or autumn leaves and flowers gleam from
less humble graves, while the cypresses raise their solemn spires
into the faintly dawning blue. But the cemetery island of San Michele
together with the islands of the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore,
of San Pietro di Castello and Sant’ Elena, with many lesser islands
close to Venice, have become absorbed for us in the life of the city
itself. Their bells and hers sound together; we see them as one with
her, and from them look out to the wider lagoon, where the remoter
islands, the true phantoms, wander. Many of those near to Venice have
had their vicissitudes, their sometime glorious past, their pomp and
solemn festival. But, bit by bit, it has been stolen from them, and
the treasures which once they stored have been destroyed or gathered
into the city. Now they serve only as shelters for those whose life
is done--as places of repose for the dead or for the sick in mind and
body. One only has passed from humble service into a fuller and happier
present. San Lazzaro, once the shelter of lepers from the East, has
become under the Armenian Benedictines a haunt of active, cultured
life. It has a living industry, printing the ancient trade of Venice,
and is in daily commerce with the East.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE.]
Torcello is a _città morta_, but scarcely a cemetery or a ruin. Relics
of a past older than even Torcello has known are gathered into the
humble urn of her museum; beside it stands abandoned, but not in ruins,
the group of the cathedral buildings and the vast secular campanile;
beyond this there is nothing but the soil--the golden gardens of vine
and pomegranate, the fields of maize and artichokes between their
narrow canals. The intervening period has entirely vanished; it is like
a dream. The page of populous palatial Torcello has been blotted out as
if it had had no existence. No vestige remains of the churches which in
the old maps flourished along the chief canal, of the names which in
the documents have no unsubstantial sound. None now can remember the
time when the spoiler was busy among the ruined palaces; he too has
passed into the shadows, and the very stones of Torcello are scattered
far and wide. There is something mysterious in this complete wiping out
of a page of history, so that not time only, but even the mourners of
time have disappeared. There is something unique in the isolation of
the cathedral and the campanile, rising thus out of the far past--this
mighty masonry alone among the herbs of the field. Of her great history
Torcello brings only the first page and the last, the duomo, the
peasants’ houses and the thatch shelters of their boats. Wandering
along the grassy paths beside the vineyards, the pomegranates, the
golden thorn bushes of Torcello, we seem in a sleepy pastoral land
where the sun always shines. Torcello seems ripe, rich ground for a new
life rather than the cemetery of an old; and we may feed the fancy as
we will, for she does not refuse her doom; she has no hard contrasts of
the old and new.
The few natives whom foreign gold supports upon this island of malaria,
have their chief haunts in the cathedral campo, keeping guard over
the treasures of the past. For here upon the campo stands the urn
where Torcello keeps the ashes of her ancestors--strange relics of old
Altinum, pathetic household gods, forks and spoons and safety-pins,
keys and necklaces, lamps and broken plates and vases, chains and
girdles and mighty bracelets, some of delicate and some of coarser
make, with more ambitious works of mosaic and relief, Greek and Roman
and Oriental. There is little in all; yet as we stand here in the
museum, looking out through the sunny window on the hazy autumn
gold of earth and the shimmering water beyond, this little speaks
eloquently to the mind. Even to Torcello, the aged, these things are
ancestral; their life was in the old Altinum when Torcello lay still
undreamed-of in the womb of time. Climb the campanile, and you will
wonder no more at the passing of the city at its feet; it is so mighty,
so self-contained and now so voiceless with any tongue that earth can
hear and understand; almost it seems as if that iron clapper, lying
mute below the bell, were symbol of Torcello’s farewell to the busy
populous world that needs the call to prayer. The great tower is given
up to mighty musings, and we upon its summit speculate no more on the
forgotten Middle Age; we are content in the golden earth beneath our
feet, in the soft dreamy azure of the encircling lagoon, where in the
low tide the deep tracks wind and writhe like glistening water-snakes,
or lie, like the faint transparent veining of a leaf, upon that smooth
expanse of interchanging marsh and water, the uncertain dominion over
which Torcello towers. For the campanile, in its vast simplicity of
structure, its loneliness, its duration, is of kin with those great
sentinels of the desert in which the Egyptians embodied their giant
dreams of power. It is here that the soul of Torcello still abides, to
dream out upon the mystery of day and night to the mountains and the
city and the sea. And even if the sunlight is rich and jubilant in the
yellow fields below, where the autumn has such fitting habitation, it
spreads upon the waters a broad path of silver that gleams mysteriously
like moonlight upon the distant spaces of the ocean shield, waking
points of light out of the immense surrounding dimness. And it is most
of all in the deep night that the gulf of the centuries may be bridged.
The monotonous piping of the cicalas rises even to this height in
the darkness, but no other sound is heard. It is a strangely moving,
melancholy landscape, half hidden, half revealed, still holding in
its patient, silent heart the tragic sorrows, the hopes and shattered
longings, the courageous struggle of the past ages, the fierce cry of
desolation, the flames of cities doomed to destruction in the darkness
of night, and their ruins outspread beneath the unsparing sun. It has
lain now so long deserted, a presence from which the stream of life has
flowed away, carrying with it all the agitations of joy and sorrow,
that among the fluctuating marshes the key for its deciphering has been
lost.
As we have said, whole pages are torn from the history of Torcello.
Fragments only remain. But here and there is a word or two that may
be gathered into a sentence. If we approach the island from the east,
by the waterway between Sant’ Erasmo and Tre Porti instead of by the
narrow channels of the inner lagoon, we may receive some impression
of the relation it once bore to the mainland. We may see how Torcello
stands as the entrance of the lagoon north of Venice, the last outpost
of the mainland, the first-fruits of a new career--recognise that she
was once through the Portus Torcellus in closest touch with the high
seas. In the ninth century it was one Rustico of Torcello who combined
with Buono of Malamocco to carry the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria
to Venice. In 1268 Torcello is specially mentioned by da Canale among
the “Contrees, que armerent lor navie, et vindrent a lor signor Mesire
Laurens Teuple (Lorenzo Tiepolo) li haut Dus de Venise, et a Madame la
Duchoise” on the occasion of Tiepolo’s election. Torcello contributed
three galleys completely equipped for the Genoese war, and in 1463 sent
one hundred crossbowmen in the service of the Republic against Trieste.
What is left of this city, which shared the early glory if not the
later pomp of Venice? Where are her palaces, her gardens, her bridges,
her waterways? Where are her piazzas and calles and fondamentas, her
churches and rich convents? We pass their names in the old chronicles:
Piazza del Duomo, Rio Campo di San Giovanni, Fondamenta dei Borgognoni,
Calle Santa Margherita, Fondamenta Bobizo, Ponte di Chà Delfino, Ponte
de Pino, and the rest. Many of these were of very old foundation: their
stones and traces of their construction have been discovered from time
to time under the mud of the canals. In the poor houses of the peasants
traces still remain of original windows, cornices and pillars; the main
canal is still spanned by the beautiful ruined bridge of the Diavolo.
But for the rest the grass piazza with its little group of buildings,
its museum flanked by the cathedral, is the sole echo, itself no more
than an echo of the past.
When Altinum and her neighbouring cities roused themselves from the
crushing desolation of conquest which had driven them forth to the
remote borders of the mainland, they began to desire to live anew
in the lagoons. There is no reason to question Dandolo’s statement
that Torcello and the group of surrounding islands, Burano, Mazzorbo,
Constanziana, Amoriana and Ammiana, were named from the gates of
Altinum--a pathetic attempt to perpetuate the ruined city. Nuovo Altino
was indeed the name for Torcello, and when the terror of invasion had
momentarily passed, the fugitives ventured back to the mainland, and
brought down to the soft-soiled island the stones of their ancient
city. Torcello was built from the stones of Altinum; her very stones
were veterans, the stamp of old times was upon them, the stamp of
thoughts that were often sealed for those men of a later day who built
them anew into their temples. The steps up to the pulpit in the duomo
are perhaps the most striking instance of this ingrafting of the old
upon the new, the naïve earnestness, perhaps the urgent haste and need
of builders who did not fear to set an old pagan relief to do service
in this temple of their Christian God. There are various theories as
to the meaning of the wonderful relief which forms the base of the
pulpit stair, cut like its companion slabs to meet the requirements
of the stair without regard to its individual existence. We cannot
help pausing before it; for it is unique among the monuments of the
estuary, so unique that it seems incredible it should have been the
work of those late Greek artists who executed the wonderful beasts
and birds of the sanctuary screen. On the right is a woman’s figure,
of Egyptian rather than Greek or Roman mould, standing with averted
face and head resting on her arms, in melancholy thought. Beside her
a man, like her resigned and meditative in attitude, but not yet with
the resignation of despair, raises his left arm as if to ward off a
blow. The blow is dealt left-handed by one who in his right hand holds
a pair of scales and advances swiftly on winged wheels. He, again,
is met in his advance by a fourth figure whom we only see in part,
his right side having been almost completely cut away. He is fronting
us, however--his feet planted firmly on the ground, his right hand
folded on his breast, while with his left he grasps the forelock of
the impetuous figure of the winged wheels and balances. Thanks to the
happy discovery by Professor Cattaneo of part of the fragment missing
to the design, we know that a woman’s figure stood beyond him, holding
in her left hand a palm and in her right a crown which she raises to
the stalwart conqueror’s head. It is a simple but daring and most
spirited composition. It seems to belong to a far remoter past than
that of the earliest building of Torcello. Professor Cattaneo explains
it as an allegory of the passage of Time, who on his winged wheels has
already passed one man by, as he stands stroking his beard, while
tears and sorrow await him in the form of the woman on his right in
mourning guise and posture; the stalwart man on the left is he who
faces Time and takes him by the forelock, and for him the crown and
palm of victory are in waiting. But Professor Cattaneo seems to give a
needlessly limited significance to the idea of Time. It is to him the
Time which God offers to man that he may do what is just and combat his
own evil passions; this seems to him to be expressed by the scales and
the stick he grasps in his hand. Perhaps it is enough to think merely
of the club as that with which a more familiar Time is wont to deal
back-handed blows at those who are so idle or so sluggish as to let him
pass. At any rate the men of Torcello could comprehend this language
of the rough stone. What matter if the oracles were dumb? Which of
them had not wept to see the face of Time averted, which of them had
not felt the weight of his backward blow? And yet this symbol of old
Time must have been mute to them before the great solemn Madonna in
the dusky, golden circle of the apse; she looks beyond all fortunes
and vicissitudes of man. How should they dare to pray to her? Worship
they may, and rise with strength to contend with Time and conquer
him, with a weapon to face the mystery of life; but they meet here no
smile of comfort, no companionable grace. To those men who dreamed this
figure, to us who look upon her and worship, the dominion of Time is a
forgotten thing; we ask no pity for our human woes; they have passed,
they have crumbled: she gives us a better gift than pity, insight into
the hidden things of life and of art; she wings with hope, if with
stern hope, our dream of beauty. The mosaics on the west wall of the
cathedral have the same stern character, with less of beauty than the
Madonna of the apse: the great angels on either side the weird central
Christ in the upper division have a strangely oriental effect. They
might be Indian gods. They hold the Christian symbols, but with how
abstracted, how remote a gaze they look out from their aureoles! They
are at one with the noble simplicity and strength and greatness of the
spirit of the building they adorn. Somehow they seem to us the oldest
thing within it; we begin to be drawn by them into mysteries older
than the caves of Greece whence the pillars of this duomo came; we
begin to share their watch over a vast desert where all the faiths and
imaginings of men may move and mingle, and find a common altar under
the dome of the evening sky.
Greater than Torcello, and still maintaining, as near neighbour to
Venice, something of its old activities, Murano lives, none the less,
a phantom life. We would choose, as a fitting atmosphere for Murano, a
day of delicate lights and pale, lucent water, with faint fine tints
within the water and the sky: a day of the falling year, not expectant,
only acceptant, pausing in the dim quiet of its decay. Even the hot
sunshine, though it irradiates the features of Murano, cannot penetrate
to that spent heart. The marvellous fascination of its Grand Canal,
with its swift and unaccustomed current of blue waters, cannot draw us
from the sadness, or disperse the spectral melancholy which invades the
spirit and surrounds it as an atmosphere. The sun infects the dirty
children with a desire to shine, and prompts somersaults for a soldino;
but the weary women, the old, crouching men, still creep about the
fondamenta impervious to his rays. Murano is not less disinherited, not
less phantasmal, because the daylight comes to pierce the semblance of
her life. It is strangely invasive and possessing, this sentiment of a
life outlived, a body whose soul is fled. The long vine gardens that
spread to the lagoon, dispossessed, but still apparently doing service
and rich in vegetables and fruit, seem as if they would persuade us
of their reality; but their walls are ruined, their ways are low and
narrow; it was not thus they looked when Bembo and Navagero paced here
in an earthly paradise, a haunt of nymphs and demigods. The living
population of Murano seems to have fallen under the same spell. If
we bestow on them more than a cursory glance as we pass along the
fondamenta, we seem to detect in their faces an indescribable sense of
weariness and sorrow and decay. There seem many old among them, and on
the young toil and privation have already laid their hand. The strange
habitual chant of priest and women and young girls, going up from
tired nerveless throats in the twilight of San Pietro Martire, seemed
a symbol of the voice of Murano, melancholy, mechanical, the phantom
of a voice--an echo struck with the hand or by a breath of wind from
a fallen instrument, an instrument that has lost its virtue and its
ring, an instrument unstrung. We have seen Murano in festa. She can
pay her tribute to free Italy. Ponte Lungo was hung with lamps, and
the desolate campi had their share in the illumination. In the very
piazza of San Donato a hawker was winding elastic strings of golden
treacle, while women and children in gay dresses hurried to and fro.
In another square, under the clock tower, a demagogue addressed the
crowd excitedly: there was plentiful noise, plentiful determination to
enjoy. The campanile looked down and wondered. _O Roma o morte._ Had
it been Rome then and not death? Rome and freedom, freedom to destroy
the historic and the old? It was a grand triumph, a triumph justly
commemorated, and yet the conquerors themselves might grieve over the
Italy of to-day. Mazzini, we know, struck a note of melancholy out of
that proud exultation. Italy, if she lives, lives among ruins, and for
the most part she is careless of her decay.
[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER.]
Murano, like Torcello, is bound by one glorious link with her Byzantine
past, and this one of the noblest monuments, not of the lagoons only,
but of all Italy; simple, stern, august. San Donato has not, indeed,
gone unscathed by time, nor by modernity. The wonders of its pavement
are becoming blackened and obscured; holes are being worn in it,
missing cubes leave gaps in the design. In winter it is constantly
flooded by high tide, and even in other seasons the damp is ruining
a pavement which rivals, if it does not surpass, that of San Marco.
It is impossible to describe the beauty of the designs, the exquisite
harmonics of its precious marbles, porphyry and verd-antique, Verona,
serpentine and marmo greco, with noble masses of colour among the
smaller fragments, and a most precious gem of chalcedony, which, if we
may believe the poor old sacristan, whose complaints concerning his
precious floor wake no response, an English visitor would have wished
to steal. The sacristan can show to all who will lament with him the
ruin wrought by sacrilegious man. But no profane hand has dared to
raise itself against the Madonna of the apse. This Madonna of San
Donato is even grander, more august, than that other who in Torcello
conquers Time, and surely it is not without reason that we have called
her the goddess of the lagoons. In perfect aloofness and secrecy she
stands, but with luminous revelation in her strangely significant eyes;
her white hands uplifted, her white face shining out of the darkness,
the long, straight folds of her dark robe worked with gold, her feet
resting, it seems, upon a golden fire. The gaze of this marvellous
Madonna seems to comprehend the world. She is a sphinx who holds the
key of every mystery. In her presence we are overcome by the impulse to
kneel and worship. She is not, like many Byzantine Madonnas, grotesque,
forbidding in her immensity, in her aloofness; for even while she
rebukes and subdues our littleness of soul, she draws all our senses as
a being of absolute, inexplicable beauty. She holds us rapt and will
not let us go. The memory of the Duomo of San Donato is concentrated in
the single magical figure of her Madonna, leaning in benediction from
the golden apse.
Murano is full of corners where Gothic and Byzantine have combined to
beautify portico, pillar and arch. In the Asilo dei Vecchii are two of
the most ancient fireplaces known in Venice, and at Venice fireplaces
were very early in use. One is a deep square hollowed in the wall, and
furnished with doors that shut upon it like a panelling, while two
little windows, as usual, open out behind. The other projects into the
room, with sloping roof and little seats within on either side. Murano,
it is well known, was the pleasure-ground of the Venetians in happier
days; it was here that the men of the Great Republic had their gardens
elect for solace and for beauty. But with the Republic Murano fell; the
patrimonies of the patricians were scattered--gradually their palaces
were snatched away, piece by piece, and fell into irrecoverable ruin.
One only now retains some image of its former splendour, the famous Cà
da Mula, upon the fine sweep of the Grand Canal. The Madonna of San
Donato has looked down on the spoliation of her temple; she still looks
on its slow decay. She has shared the proud sorrows of the campanile;
in colloquy through the night what may he not have told of the passing
of Murano? They have little, these solemn guardians of the past, in
common with the exuberant Renaissance, but perhaps a common fate, the
unifying hand of Time, may have bound their spirits in a confraternity
of grief. The heart of the old campanile would be stirred with pity
for the fate of those deserted palaces, the sublime Madonna would turn
an eye not of scorn but of sorrow on the fading forms of those radiant
women, so splendid on the frescoed palace fronts, so alluring in the
smooth mirror of the canal. The work of the spoiler, so far as it was a
work of violence, of a human spoiler, is done; but the slower work of
nature still proceeds.
Long before Murano became a Venetian pleasure-ground, she had been
famous for her painters, for her ships, for her furnaces. Like
Torcello, she sent vessels to the triumph of the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo,
and she was conspicuous among the others, as da Canale says: “For you
must know that those of Murano had on their vessels living cocks, so
that they might be known and whence they came.” Molmenti thinks that
Carpaccio himself belonged to a shipbuilding family of Murano, and
this is the more interesting in view of the frequency and detail of
shipping operations in his pictures. Murano was indeed the birthplace
of Venetian art, and the riches of its furnaces glow in the garments
of those early painters, Vivarini, Andrea and Quirico. From the end
of the eleventh century the glass works had begun to flourish; by the
thirteenth the industry was transferred wholly to Murano. The legend
runs that a certain Cristoforo Briani, hearing from Marco Polo of
the monopoly of agates, chalcedony and other precious stones on the
coast of Guiana, set about imitating them. With Domenico Miotto to
help him he succeeded, and the latter carried the art to still greater
perfection, which resulted at last in the imitation of the pearl.
In 1528 Andrea Vidoare received a special mariegola or charter for
the fame of his wonderful pearls, polished and variegated by him to
a degree unknown before. In the middle of the fifteenth century the
first crystals came from the furnaces, and the following century was
the golden period of the art--a period coinciding with the greatest
patrician glory of the island. Murano still burns with its secular
fire, winning from the old world its secrets, the old, wise world that
worshipped fire, to fuse them once more in its crucible for the wonder
of the new; secrets of crystal, pearl and ruby, and of the blue of the
deepest ocean depths or the impenetrable night sky, imprisoning them
in those transparent cenotaphs in forms of infinite harmony and grace.
And it is not only in the revival of ancient memories and forgotten
mysteries that the furnaces of Murano play their part; they contribute
also to the present renewal of Venice: for it is here that the units of
the mosaicist’s art are made. In Murano is laid the foundation-stone
of its success--the quality of the colour, the depth and richness of
the gold. The period of decadence in the Venetian arts is accurately
reflected in its mosaics; with the decadence of conception we note also
the decadence of colour. Those hard blatant tones that characterise the
late mosaics of San Marco are records, too permanent, alas! of a time
when the furnaces had lost their cunning, or rather when the master
minds were blunted and the secret of the ancient colourists allowed to
lie unquestioned under the dust of time.
There is a humbler department of the glass works which we must not pass
by. It lies away from the furnaces devoted to rare and subtle texture
and design, behind San Pietro Martire, among the gardens: a manufactory
of common glass for daily use, tumblers and water-bottles and other
humble ware. Here there is the swift operation of machinery, at least
among the coarser glasses, and a noise of the very inferno with
countless sweating fiends--little black-faced grinning boys, grateful
for a package full of grapes or juicy figs; there is little mystery
in the production of this coarser glass, or rather few of the obvious
accessories of mystery, the delicate slow fashioning, the infusion
of colours. Instead, the constant noise of machinery, deafening and
exhausting in its incessant motion, though even here the reign of
machinery is limited: the finer tumblers must go a longer journey to be
filed by a slower, more gradual process, the direct handiwork of man.
There is an upper circle to which we gladly pass from this inferno,
almost a paradise if we contrast it with the turmoil and heat below;
to reach it we pass by the troughs of grey sand which all day men are
trampling with the soles of their bare feet, to mould into fit temper
for the furnace. The floor of the room above is covered and the walls
lined with strange creations of cold, grey earth, fashioned by hand,
roll after roll of clay, ungainly forms to be inhabited by fire. This
upper attic, with its company of mute grey moulds, opens out upon the
vineyards of Murano, with water shimmering through the long golden
alleys, and the city visible beyond. The gardens of the Palazzo da Mula
and of San Cipriano are beside us. The bustle of the new world has
invaded the peaceful seclusion of a spot once sacred to the student
aristocracy of Venice.
For this island, famed for so glorious an industry, was beloved and
honoured by the noblest of Venetian names, Trifone Gabriele and Pietro
Bembo and Andrea Navagero. Here Navagero founded one of the first
botanic gardens of Europe--“a terrestrial paradise, a place of nymphs
and demigods”; here Gabriele wandered for hours under the thick vine
pergola walled with jessamine against the sun. And it was not only as
a temporary pleasure-ground that they loved Murano: they clung to it
as their resting-place in death. Bernardo Giustiniani desired to be
buried by his palace, at the foot of Ponte Lungo, and Andrea Navagero
in the church of San Martino in the same quarter where his house was
built. Murano was honoured by at least one royal guest. It was here
that Henry III of France, on his passage through Venice from Polonia,
was given his first lodging, and the palace which witnessed the first
transports of this rapturous monarch, the palace of Bartolomeo Capello,
still exists, close beside the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, at
the extreme western point of the city. It would thus form the most
convenient landing-place, besides commanding a view of extreme beauty;
to the left, the fine torrent-like sweep of the chief canal, with the
noble Cà da Mula a little lower on the opposite bank and its gardens
immediately over the water; Venice filling the horizon clear across
the lagoon, where the south curve of Murano ends to-day in a meadow
of rough grass and fragrant herbs; to the right the Convent of the
Angeli, leading on the eye across the lagoon to the mainland and the
distant mountains beyond. Traces of fresco remain on the outer walls
of the palazzo, and the upper hall still stretches through the whole
breadth of the house. It is on the balcony of this central hall that
Henry must have stood when he appeared before dinner to gratify the
crowds on the fondamenta and in the boats below. The view of Venice in
the evening light is exquisitely lovely, with the lagoon spread like a
mirror to reflect the delicate opaline of the sunset sky. In this hall
hung with cloth of gold and cremosine, and perhaps with the colours of
Veronese, looking over a paradise of gardens and water to the immortal
city, Henry kept his court, received the legates from the Pope and said
a thousand graceful things about His Holiness, rejoiced the natives by
his noble bearing, his perfumed gloves, his frank pleasure in their
tribute, his decision to go on foot to the Angeli to morning Mass.
Thus was he initiated to the magical city and its enchantments by
that wise providence of the Venetians, who made their islands always
stepping-stones, outer courts of the central shrine, where their
pilgrim must pause awhile to shake the dust of the mainland off his
feet, that the spell might permeate his being and fill his senses with
desire.
The fondamenta below Henry’s palace, leading to the church of the
Angeli, is one of the most desolate in Murano; the wide green campo
of the cemetery which opens from it is deserted and bare, save for a
few fowls that humbly commemorate the proud old shield. The dirt of
the children is indescribable, as they press close begging a soldino.
But their dirt is dearer to them. A bargain for a washed face, even
when the reward rings cheerily on the pavement, brings no response but
laughter and surprise. We are reminded by contrast of the tribute of
Andrea Calmo, a popular poet of the sixteenth century:
E voio tanto bene a quel Muran,
Che, per diroelo certo in veritæ,
Son in pensier de vender le mie intræ.
E venir la per starmene pì san.
Quei horti a pieni de herbe uliose
E quel canal cusi chiaro e pulio
Con quelle belle casi si aierose,
Con tante creature che par riose
Liogo che l’ha stampao Domenedio.
(And I wish so well to that Murano, that to tell you the sober truth
I am thinking of selling my takings and coming there to live more
healthily. The gardens there are so full of olive trees, and the
canal so clear and clean, the houses so beautiful and so airy, with
so many fair creatures that it seems a place of joy stamped by the
Lord God.) Beside the Cà da Mula, hidden among some outbuildings, from
which it has in the last years been partially released, is one of
Murano’s finest treasures, the convent front of San Cipriano, which
in the ninth century, when Malamocco was on the point of submersion,
was brought here by order of Ordelafo Faliero. Andrea Dandolo dates
the building from 881; it was rebuilt in 1109 and restored in 1605,
and its exquisite façade, still bearing the stamp of several ages,
freed somewhat from the earth about its base, stands up nobly from the
tangled garden around it. The central arch is outlined with the finest
Byzantine tracery lined with Gothic, surrounded once with coloured
marbles of which only fragments now remain, and above this is a frieze
of the best Roman of the Renaissance: slender columns, some Byzantine,
some Gothic, adorn it on either side, and fantastic Byzantine symbols
are sculptured in the stone discs that are embedded in the walls
between the arches of the cloister. A campanula on the ruined wall
to the left of the arch stands out clear and pale against the brick
building behind, where once the cloister opened out, an exquisite
harmony of lavender and rose. Fragmentary though it is, this façade of
the famous monastery is one of the most precious relics of the islands
of the lagoons.
There is an island where we cannot think of death, where decay dare
not come; though the water plants smell faint upon its shores, and the
cypresses that clothe it rise black against the sky. It is the island
that sheltered one of the most joyful spirits that has ever walked the
world, the island where the larks once sang in such prolonged impulsive
harmony of joy that the sound of their singing has never passed away;
it may seem to lie silent as a veil upon the water, but the tremor
of the sunshine will waken it to renewed harmonics of delight--San
Francesco del Deserto. We rejoice to think that the Poverello set
foot in the lagoons, that he left here in the lonely waters the
blossom of his love. St. Francis of the Desert can wake no thoughts of
melancholy, and indeed this is no deserted place, nor in the morning
of his coming, after the night of storm, can it have seemed a place
of desolation; for nothing is more wonderful, more prodigally full
of the mysterious rapture of life, than the flowing in of day upon
the lagoons after the tumult of rain and hurricane. They say that St.
Francis, coming from the Holy Land on a Venetian ship, was driven by
the storm to cast anchor near Torcello; that as he prayed, the storm
subsided, and a great calm fell on the lagoon. Then as the Poverello
set foot upon this cypress-covered shore, the sun came out--the sun
of the early summer dawn--and shone through the dripping branches of
the cypresses, covering them with glistening crystals, and shone on
the damp feathered creatures among the branches and on the larks among
the reedy grass, and as he shone a choir of voices woke in the lonely
island and a chorus of welcome burst from ten thousand throats. And
the sun shone in the heart of St. Francis also, and it overflowed with
joy; and St. Francis said to his companion, “The little birds, our
brothers, praise their Creator with joy; and we also as we walk in
the midst of them--let us sing the praises of God.” And then as St.
Bonaventura relates the legend, the birds sang so clamorously on the
branches that St. Francis had to entreat their silence till he had
sung the Lauds; but we may read another story if we will, and say that
the dewy matin song of the birds was not so clamorous as to disturb
the quiet morning gladness of the Poverello, that they sang together
in the dawn. San Francesco del Deserto is not an island of sorrow. In
the little convent inhabited still by a few quiet Franciscans, the
narrow gloomy corner is to be seen which they name St. Francis’s bed:
in the convent garden there rises a stone memorial round the tree that
flowered from the Saint’s planted staff. We know these familiar symbols
of the Franciscan convents: the brothers cling to them as to some
fragmentary testament that their eyes can read and their hand grasp
when the living spirit has fled away; everywhere among the mountain or
the valley solitudes where St. Francis dwelt, the same dark relics of
that luminous spirit are to be found, the story even of birds banished
for ever by the command of that prince of singers, as if his own voice
chanting eternal litanies could be his sole delight. They are strange
stories; we pass them by, and go out to find the Poverello where the
cones of the cypresses gleam silver-grey against the blue. His spirit
has taken happy root among the waters of the lagoons; a new joy and
glory is added to the mountains as they rise in the calm dawn, clear
and luminous from the departing rain cloud; there is joy and peace in
the raised grass walk between the cypress trees; the island is indeed
a place of life and not of death for those who have felt the suffering
and the joy of love, and who worship beauty in their hearts.
O Beata Solitudo,
O Sola Beatitudo.
There are still solitudes in the desert of the lagoon where some of us
have dreamed of beginning a new day. In the hour when the last gold has
faded from the sun-path--when those dancing gems he flings to leap and
sport upon the water have been slowly gathered in, when the churches
and palaces of the city are folded under one soft clinging veil, which
softens the outline that it does not obscure, when Torcello and Burano
lean in pallid solitude above the level disc of the marsh, and the Lido
lies like a sea-serpent coiled on itself, its spires reflected in the
motionless mirror far south to Chioggia--they steal out, these island
phantoms, faint, alluring, upon the still mosaic of the lagoon, like
black pearls in that shell-like surface of tenderest azure and rose.
Shall we not dare to wander among those lovely paths, those dimly
burning gems? None visits them, unless it be the golden stars and the
dreaming lover of Endymion: their roof is the broad rainbow spread
above them by the setting sun. They seem sometimes to welcome a spirit
that should come and dwell among them silently; one that should tread
them with loving reverence and quiet hope, seeking to set free the
fantasies with which earth has stored it, but which no power of earth
may help it to disburden.
Chapter Three
THE NUPTIALS OF VENICE
Until the fall of the Venetian Republic the rite of the _Sporalizio del
Mare_, the wedding of Venice with the sea, continued to be celebrated
annually at the feast of the Ascension. Long after the fruits of the
espousal had been gathered, when its renewal had become no more than
a ceremonious display, there stirred a pulse of present life in the
embrace; and in a sense, the significance of the ceremony never can be
lost while one stone remains upon another in the city of the sea.
For the earliest celebration of the nuptials there was need of no
golden Bucintoro, no feast of red wine and chestnuts, no damask roses
in a silver cup, not so much as a ring to seal the bond. For it was no
vaunt of sovereignty; it was a humble oblation, a prayer to the Creator
that His creature might be calm and tranquil to all who travelled over
it, an oblation to the creature that it might be pleased to assist
the gracious and pacific work of its Creator. The regal ceremony of
later times was inaugurated by the Doge Pietro Orseolo II who, having
largely increased the sea dominion of Venice and made himself lord of
the Adriatic, welded his achievement into the fabric of the state by
the ceremony of the espousal. The ring was not introduced till the year
1177, when Pope Alexander III, being present at the festival, bestowed
it on the Doge, as token of the papal sanction of the ceremony, with
the words, “Receive it as pledge of the sovereignty that you and your
successors shall maintain over the sea.” But the true importance of the
festival, whether in its primitive form or in its later elaboration, is
the development of Venetian policy which it signified--a development
which, for the purposes of this chapter, will best be considered in
relation to events separated by nearly two centuries, but united in
their acknowledgment of the growing importance of Venice on the waters.
The first is Pietro Orseolo’s Dalmatian campaign, followed in 1001
by the secret visit of the German Emperor Otho III, and the second
the famous concordat of Pope Alexander III and the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa, concluded under the auspices of Venetian statecraft in 1177.
Pietro Orseolo II appears as one of the most potent interpreters of the
Venetian spirit. He combined qualities which enabled him to gather
together the threads which the genius of Venice and the exigencies
of her position were weaving, and to fashion from them a substantial
web on which her industry might operate. He was a soldier, a great
statesman and a patriot. All the subtlety, all the ambition, all the
dreams of glory with which his potent and spacious mind was endowed,
were at his country’s service, and the material in which he had to
work was plastic to his touch. Venice lay midway between the kingdoms
of the East and West, and from the earliest times this fact had
determined her importance: she might rise to greatness or she might
be annihilated; she could not be ignored. The Venice of Orseolo was
instinct with vitality and teeming with energies, but she was divided
against herself. The foundations of her greatness were already laid,
but her general aim and tendency were not determined. She was in need
of a leader of commanding mind and capacious imagination, who could
envisage her future, and who should possess the power of inspiring
others with confidence in his dreams. Such a man was Pietro Orseolo II.
Venice had been threatened with destruction by the division of the two
interests which, interwoven, were the basis of her power. Before the
final settlement at Rialto she had been torn hither and thither by
the factions of the East and West, the party favouring Constantinople
and the party favouring the Frankish King; and at any moment still the
Doge’s policy might be wrecked by the rivalries of the two parties, if
he proved lacking in insight or capacity for uniting in his service the
interests of both.
[Illustration: RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI.]
For some time Dalmatia had been a thorn in the side of Venice, a
refuge for the disloyal, and, through the agency of the hordes of
pirates infesting the coast, a real menace to her commerce. Venice had
attempted to purchase immunity from the pirates by payment of an annual
indemnity. Orseolo decided at once to put an end to this payment, but
he realised that the price of the decision was a foothold in Dalmatia
that would need to be obtained by force of arms. For this end it was
necessary to secure harmony within the city itself, and, knowing this,
he exercised his powers to obtain approval of his expedition from
the authorities of East and of West, from the Emperors of Germany
and Byzantium. He was successful in this, and circumstances combined
further to aid his designs. The Croatians and Narentines, by wreaking
on Northern Dalmatia their anger at the loss of the Venetian indemnity,
had prepared the minds of the Dalmatians to look on the prospect of
Venetian supremacy as one of release rather than of subjugation. It
is said that they even went so far as to send a message to Orseolo
encouraging his coming. Their province was nominally under the Emperor
of Byzantium, but their overlord had decided to look favourably on a
means of securing peace and safe passage to his province at so small an
expense to himself. Orseolo set sail on Ascension Day, after a service
in the Cathedral of Olivolo (now San Pietro di Castello), fortified by
the good will of East and of West, and the united acclamations of all
parties in Venice. Pride and vigorous hope must have swelled the hearts
of these warriors. It was summer, and their songs must have travelled
across the dazzling blue of the great basin of St. Mark, and echoed
and re-echoed far out on the crystal waters of the lagoon. Triumph was
anticipated, and triumph was their portion. Orseolo’s expedition was
little less than a triumphal progress; the coast towns of Dalmatia from
Zara to Ragusa rendered him their homage. A new and immensely rich
province was acquired by Venice, and the title of Duke of Dalmatia
accorded to himself.
Soon after Orseolo’s return from this campaign, Venice, unknown to
herself, was to receive the homage of one of the emperors she had made
it her business to propitiate. There is something that stirs the
imagination in this secret visit of Otho III to the Doge. According
to the ingenuous account of John the Deacon, Venetian ambassador at
the Emperor’s court, it was merely one of those visits of princely
compliment which the age knew so well how to contrive, and loved
so well to recount--a visit in disguise for humility or greater
freedom, like that of St. Louis to Brother Giles at Perugia, where
host and guest embrace in fellowship too deep for words. The Emperor,
John the Deacon tells us, was overcome with admiration of Orseolo’s
achievements in Dalmatia, and filled with longing to see so great a
man, and the chronicler was despatched to Venice to arrange a meeting.
The Doge, while acknowledging the compliment of Otho’s message, could
not believe in its reality, and consequently kept his own counsel
about it--“tacitus sibi in corde servabat.” However, when Otho on his
travels had come down to Ravenna for Lent, John the Deacon was again
despatched, and this time from Doge to Emperor.
It was ultimately arranged that after the Easter celebration Otho with
a handful of followers should repair, under pretext of a “spring-cure,”
to the abbey of Santa Maria in the isle of Pomposa at the mouth of the
Po. He pretended to be taking up his quarters here for several days,
but at nightfall he secretly embarked in a small boat prepared by John
the Deacon, and set sail with him and six followers for Venice. All
that night and all the following day the little boat battled with the
tempest, and the storm was still unabated the next evening, when it put
in at the island of San Servolo and found itself harboured at last in
the waters of St. Mark. Venice knew nothing of this arrival; her royal
guest had taken her unawares, and her waterways had prepared him no
welcome. We may picture the anxiety of Orseolo, alone with the secret
of his expected guest, on the island of San Servolo. The journey may
well have been perilous for so small a boat even within the sheltering
wall of the Lido, and we may imagine his relief when it could at last
be descried beating towards the island through the tempestuous waters
of the lagoon. In impenetrable night, concealed from one another’s eyes
by the thick darkness, Emperor and Doge embraced. Otho was invited to
rest for an hour or two at the convent of San Zaccaria, but he repaired
before dawn to the Ducal Palace and the lodging made ready for him in
the eastern tower. There is a fascination in attempting to imagine the
two sovereigns moving amid the shadows of Venetian night, in thinking
of the Emperor watching from the vantage of his tower for daybreak
over the city. There are wonders to be seen from this eastern aspect,
but after the discomfort of his voyage to Venice the royal captive
may well have felt a longing for a sight of the city from within. It
is all rather like a children’s game--Orseolo’s feigned first meeting
with an embassy from Otho, his inquiry as to the Emperor’s health and
whereabouts, and the public dinner with the ambassadors. Venice is
robbed of a pageant, and one most dear to her, the fêting of a royal
guest; the guest is deprived of all festivities beyond a christening
of the Doge’s daughter; yet the pleasurable excitement of John the
chronicler communicates itself and disarms our criticism; and it is not
till gifts have been offered and refused--“ne quis cupiditatis et non
Sancti Marci tuæque dilectionis causa me hac venisse asserat”--till
tears and kisses have been exchanged, and the Emperor, this time
preceding his companions by a day, has set sail once more for the
island of Pomposa, that we break from the spell of the chronicler and
begin to cavil at the strange conditions of the visit.
Modern historians have laid a probing hand on the sentimentality of
John the Deacon’s tale; they do not doubt the kisses or the tears, but
the unparalleled eccentricity of secrecy seems to demand an urgent
motive. Why this strange coyness of the Emperor? Might he not have
thought more to honour Venice and her Doge by coming with imperial
pomp than by stealing in and out of the triumphant city like a thief
in the night? And why did the persons concerned make public boast
of the success of their freak immediately after its occurrence?
For John tells us that when three days had passed, the people were
assembled by the Doge at his palace to hear of his achievement, “and
praised no less the faith of the Emperor than the skill of their
leader.” The probable solution of the various enigmas rather rudely
shatters the romance. Gfrörer lays on Orseolo the responsibility of
the _incognito_, attributing it partly to a memory of the fate that
overtook the Candiani’s personal relations with an imperial house,
partly to his desire to treat with the Emperor unobserved. He recalls
point by point the precautions taken by Orseolo to preclude Otho from
contact with other Venetians, and comes to the conclusion that in those
private interviews in the tower the “eternal dreamer” was feasted
on the milk and honey of promises, food of which no third person
could have been allowed to partake. “What lies,” he exclaims, “were
invented, what assurances vouchsafed of the most unbounded devotion
to imperial projects in general and the longed-for reconstitution of
the Roman Empire in particular! Never was prince so shamefully abused
as Otho III at Venice.” It is not necessary to abandon our belief in
Otho’s personal feelings for the Doge, augmented by Orseolo’s recent
campaign, to realise that there must have been another side to the
picture. Gulled the royal guest in all probability was, but there
is little doubt that he had an axe of his own to be ground on this
visit to Venice--that the journey had for its aim something beyond
his delectation in a sight of the Doge and his obeisance to the Lion.
For the furtherance of his schemes of empire Otho needed a fleet. He
had, Gfrörer tells us, “an admiral already in view for it. Nothing was
wanted but cables, anchors, equipments; in short there were not even
ships, nor the necessary money, and above all, there were no sailors.
I believe that Otho III undertook the journey to Venice precisely
to procure for himself these necessary trifles. Who knows how many
times already he had urged the Doge to hasten his sending of the
long-promised fleet; but in place of ships nothing had yet come but
letters or embassies carrying specious excuses.” If the historian’s
motivisation is accurate, Otho must have found, like so many after him,
Venice more capable of exercising persuasion than of submitting to it.
For our uses, however, the original or the revised versions of the
tale serve the same purpose. As an act of spontaneous homage or an act
of practical policy, the visit of Otho, full as it is of speculative
possibilities, was an imperial tribute to the position Orseolo had
given to Venice, an imperial recognition of her progress towards
supremacy in the Adriatic.
Orseolo’s achievement and the rite which symbolised it were confirmed
two centuries later when, in the spring and summer of 1177, Venice
was the meeting place of Pope Alexander III and the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa. Tradition has woven a curious romance round the fact of
the Pope’s sojourn in Venice before the coming of the Emperor. By
a manipulation of various episodes, he is brought as a fugitive to
creep among the tortuous by-ways of the city, sleeping on the bare
ground, and going forward as chance might direct till he is received
as a chaplain--or, to enhance the thrill of agony, as a scullion--in
the convent of Santa Maria della Carità, and after some months have
elapsed is brought to the notice of the Doge, when a transformation
scene of the Cinderella type is effected. It is inevitable that
melodramatic touches should have been added to so important an
episode, and the accounts of the manner of Alexander’s arrival and
his bearing in Venice are many and varied. None the less, it is clear
that splendour and not secrecy, ceremony not intimacy, are the general
colouring of the event. Frederick had shown himself disposed to make
peace and to accept the mediation of Venice, and in the early days
of the Pope’s visit the Venetians had acted as counsellors, pending
the agreement as to a meeting place. Significant terms are used by
the chroniclers to account for the ultimate choice, and the note
which they strike is repeated again and again in the chorus of praise
that throughout the centuries was to wait upon Venice. “Pope and
Emperor sent forth their mandates to divers parts of the world, that
Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Ecclesiastics and secular Princes should
repair to Venice; for Venice is safe for all, fertile and abounding
in supplies, and the people quiet and peace-loving.” Secure among the
lagoons, Venice is aloof from the disturbances of the mainland cities,
and though her inhabitants are proved warriors they are peaceable
citizens. Many of the glories of Gentile Bellini’s _Procession of
the Cross_ would be present in the procession in which the Doge
and the magnates of Venice formally conducted Alexander III to the
city--patriarch, bishops, clergy, and finally the Pope himself, all in
their festival robes. Ecclesiastical and secular princes of Germany,
France, England, Spain, Hungary and the whole of Italy were crowding
to Venice. The occasion gave scope for her fascinations, and they were
exerted. No opportunity for display was neglected; ceremony was heaped
upon ceremony.
For over a fortnight Venice was the centre of correspondence daily
renewed between Emperor and Pope, of embassies hastening to and fro,
of endless postponements and uncertainties. The Pope retires for a
few days to Ferrara; then he is back again to be received as before.
But Venice, the indomitable, is secure of her will, and preparations
for the coming of the Emperor are growing apace. In July the Doge’s
son is despatched to meet the royal guest at Ravenna and conduct him
to Venice by way of Chioggia. No tempests disturbed his arrival. He
was conducted in triumph up the lagoon by the galleys of “honest men”
and Cardinals who had gone forth to Chioggia to meet him. Slowly the
islands of the Lido would unfold themselves to his eyes, Pellestrina
in shining curves, Malamocco with its long reaches of bare shore
and reeds. The group clustered round Venice itself--San Servolo, La
Grazia, San Lazzaro, Poveglia--would be green and smiling then, living
islands, not desolated as now for the most part by magazine or asylum.
San Nicolo del Lido welcomed the guest, and he was borne thence on the
ducal boat to the city and landed at the Riva. Through the acclamations
of an “unheard-of multitude” his way was made to San Marco, where the
Pope in all his robes, amid a throng of gorgeous ecclesiastics and
laymen, was waiting on the threshold. As he passed out of the brilliant
and garish day into the solemn mosaiced glory of San Marco and moved to
the high altar between Pope and Doge singing a Te Deum, “while all gave
thanks to God, rejoicing and exulting and weeping,” even an emperor and
a Barbarossa may well have surrendered his pride. Even we, spectators
removed by time, find ourselves exalted on the tide of colour and of
sound, and crying to the Venetians, with the strangers who thronged in
their streets, “Blessed are ye, that so great a peace has been able
to be established in the midst of you! This shall be a memorial to
your name for ever.” Peace was secured and Venice had accomplished
her task. She had devoted the subtleties of her statecraft to its
performance, but perhaps the splendour of this hour in San Marco was
her crowning achievement. She asked the recognition of a Pope, and she
brought the temporal sovereign to his side in a church which is one of
the wonders of Christendom. She polished and gilded every detail of
her worldly magnificence, and poured it as an oblation at the altar.
Her reinforcements to the cause of Alexander III were drawn from far
back in the ages, from the inspiration of the men who had fashioned her
temple; and may there not be some deeper signification than merely that
of Frederick’s stubbornness in the “Not to thee, but to St. Peter,”
traditionally attributed to him as he prostrated himself at his enemy’s
feet?
[Illustration: THE DOORWAY OF SAN MARCO.]
To Venice there remained, beside the praise of all Christendom, many
tangible tokens of the events of the summer. Emperor and Pope vied
with each other in evincing their gratitude. Alexander formally
sanctioned and confirmed the title of Venice as sovereign and queen
of the Adriatic, and bestowed on the Doge a consecrated ring for use
at the Nuptials. And henceforth the ceremony at San Nicolo del Lido,
the place of arrival and departure for the high seas and for Dalmatia
and the East, was increased in magnificence. No trace now remains
of the church where the rites were performed; but the grassy squares
of San Nicolo and the wooded slopes of its canal, looking on one side
to the city, on the other to the sea, are beautiful still. The ocean
calls to the lagoon, and the calm waters of the lagoon sway themselves
in answer; while, outside the Lido, line beyond line of snowy-crested
waves, ever advancing, bear in to Venice, Bride of the Adriatic, the
will of the high sea.
Chapter Four
VENICE IN FESTIVAL
The treaty signed in 1573 between Venice and Constantinople, though
it marked no real rise in her fortunes, gave her a respite from
the petty and fruitless warfare with the Turk, in which she had so
long been engaged. That conflict had drained the resources of the
Republic without affording compensating gains. The loss and horrors of
Famagosta might seem to have been revenged by the battle of Lepanto,
where the triumph of Venice and her allies was complete; but owing
to the dilatoriness and inaction of Don John of Austria, brother of
Philip of Spain, the opportunity of annihilating the Turkish forces
was allowed to escape, and victory was reduced to little more than
the name. So flagrant had been the character of Don John’s disloyalty
that the Venetians no longer could mistake his intentions. Spain was
an ally of Venice; but Tommaso Morosini was but voicing the general
conviction when he exclaimed, “We must face the fact that there will
be no profitable progress, seeing that the victory already gained by
the forces of the League against the Turk was great in the number of
ships captured, rare in the number of slaves set free, famous by reason
of the power it broke, formidable for the numbers killed by the sword,
glorious for the pride it laid low, terrible in the fame acquired
by it. And, none the less, no single foot of ground was gained. Oh,
incomparable ignominy and shame of the allies, that whatever honour
they obtained in consequence of the victory, they lost by not following
it up!” Though nominally in league with her against the Turk, Spain,
owing to her jealousy of Venice, was unwilling that the war should be
ended. The League of Cambray, formed in 1508 by the European powers
unfriendly to Venice, should have made it clear to the Republic that
she had over-reached her own interests by interference in the politics
of Europe. Moreover, a severe blow had been dealt to the commerce of
Venice by the discovery of the Cape route to the East. Yet, though her
decline had begun, she still formed a subject for envy, and there is
justice in Morosini’s conclusion as to the causes of the growing enmity
of Spain. “Ruling,” he says of the Spaniards, “a good part of Europe,
having passed into Africa, having discovered new territory, dominating
most of Italy, and seeing the Republic, the single part, the only
corner of Italy, to be free and without the least burden of slavery,
they envy it, envying it they hate it, and hating it they lay snares
for it.”
Though the terms of the peace with Constantinople were humiliating
in the extreme (Venice relinquished the whole of Cyprus, a fortress
in Albania, and agreed within three years to pay an indemnity of one
hundred thousand ducats) it set her hands free for awhile and gave
her a breathing space in which to return to her pageants. And for the
next few years she laid herself out more completely than ever before
to impress the world by her splendour. It is not easy to determine the
beginnings of decadent luxury in Venetian history. Venice had always
been a pleasure-house, a place of entertainment for kings and emperors,
a temple of solemn festival. Perhaps the broad difference between the
splendours of the early and late Renaissance is that one achieved that
perfection of taste which robes luxury in apparent simplicity, while
the other was more obvious and expansive--the difference between the
Madonnas of Bellini and of Titian, between the interiors of Carpaccio
and Paul Veronese. There is a real and discernible difference in
aspect between Venice of the fifteenth and Venice of the sixteenth
century, but it is not the difference between asceticism and luxury.
Venice was never ascetic, no prophet ever drew her citizens round a
sacrificial bonfire on the Piazza. On the other hand it is said that
a Venetian merchant was burnt in effigy on Savonarola’s pile because
he had attempted to purchase some of the doomed Florentine treasures.
In the course of the fifteenth century isolated voices were indeed
raised in protest against the luxury of Venice, and the authorities
themselves, as the State coffers grew empty, tried by oratorical appeal
and detailed legislation to curb the extravagance of private citizens.
But their protests were, in the main, quite ineffectual. Venice could
not resist the influences that wove for her each day a magical dress;
she could not refuse the treasures of the East: it was her function to
be beautiful, to accept and love every wonder, to turn her face against
nothing that could glorify. She had always appeared as a miracle to
men, she had always lavished her treasures on her guests; the vital
difference between the period of her decline and that of her greatness
lies in the gradual relaxation of the ties binding her to the sources
of her wealth. With the ebbing of her trade her citizens begin to
barter their landed estates and their treasures. Morosini’s acute and
interesting prophecy as to the private banks into which Venetian money
began to be diverted provides us with a background to some of the
almost fabulous expenditure of the Cinquecento--“The banker,” he says,
“with a chance of obliging many friends in their need, and acquiring
others by such a service, and with power to do so without spending
money, simply by making a brief entry, is easily persuaded to satisfy
many. When the opportunity arises of buying some valuable piece of
furniture or decoration, clothes, jewels and similar things of great
price, he is easily persuaded to please himself, simply ordering a line
or two to be written in his books--reassuring, or rather, deceiving
himself with the thought that one year being passed in this way, he can
carry time forward, and pass many years in the same manner, scheming
that such an affair or such an investment as he has in hand, when it
has come to perfection, ought to prove most useful, and that through
its means he may be able to remedy other disorders; which hope proving
fallacious shows with how little security walks one who places his
thoughts and hopes in the uncertain and inconstant issues of events.”
The fabric of sixteenth-century Venice was too largely founded on the
“uncertain and inconstant issues of events,” but none the less it was
as radiant a fabric as any that man has yet fashioned. Something
at least of its nature may be learned from the details of the
entertainment of Henry III in Venice, and his lodging and reception
in the then fashionable suburb of Murano. Henry came to Venice in
the early summer of 1574, on his way from Poland to take possession
of the throne of France vacated by the death of his brother Charles
IX. He came at a moment when Venice was rich in artists to do him
honour--Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Palladio and Claudio Merulo: he was
crowned with the laurels of war; while the Republic was able to clothe
herself in the glory of Lepanto and the respite of her newly concluded
peace with the Turk and, superficially at least, appeared peculiarly
fitted to welcome him. The young King was gracious, and greedy to drink
his fill of life, and Venice was unique in her celebration. The visit
was one of the most spontaneous, the most joyful to host and guest, of
any that are recorded in her annals. All the territory of Venice was
prepared to honour him, and his journey was a triumphal progress. There
is something joyous still about the little inland cities of his route,
echoes of festival still linger in their streets, romance still dwells
in their hearts. At Treviso, where the young King was welcomed with
peculiar pomp, the Lion of St. Mark, portrayed by three successive
ages, rules still, his majesty sustained by the sturdiness of life that
moves in the city. The winding cobbled streets are full of bustle and
interchange, the arcades are full of people, vital and busily employed.
Treviso is not a museum. Its ancient palace of the Cavallieri is still
in use, though its loggia with traces of rich fresco is filled with
lumber. But we are not critical of small details at Treviso; we thank
it for its winding streets and for its leaping azure river; we thank
it for its countless ancient roofs and painted rafters; for its houses
high and low, harmonious though endless in variation, for the remnants
of fresco, shadows no doubt of what once they were, but companionable
shadows--horses with still distinguishable motions, graceful maidens
both of land and sea. These glories are fading but they have substance
still, and on a day of mid-autumn we are well able to imagine a kingly
procession on the road from Treviso to Mestre. It seems a pageant,
a progress of pomp and colour, as we pass between the vineyards and
maize fields and the great gardens and pastures of the villas, down
the avenue of plane trees set like gold banners on silvery flagstaffs
with carpets of fallen leaves at their feet. Behind them are ranked
dark cypresses, pale groups of willow, or companies of poplar. And
these are often garlanded to their very summits by crimson creepers,
and interspersed with statues, not perhaps great in workmanship, but
tempered and harmonised into beauty by the seasons. Here and there is
a lawn flanked by dark shrubbery, or a terrace ablaze with dahlias and
salvia. And, among them, Baron Franchetti of the Cà d’Oro has a home
even more worthy of the golden title than is his palace on the shores
of the Grand Canal--a place where the sun reveals miraculous hangings
in the shrubberies, sumptuously furnished with scarlet and crimson and
gold.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM CÀ D’ORO.]
Some such festival of colour, in banners and trappings, would be
Henry’s preparation for the pageant of the lagoons. For he was met at
Marghera, half way between Mestre and Venice, by a troop of senators
and noblemen and ambassadors, and escorted to the palace of Bartolomeo
Capello at Murano. Of the young King’s lodging at Murano we have spoken
elsewhere--of the hall hung with gold brocade, with golden baldaquin,
green velvet and silk, its entrance guarded by sixty halberdiers armed
for the occasion with gilt spears borrowed from the chambers of the
Council of Ten. Forty noble youths, in glorious attire, had been told
off to wait on the King. But, “although a most sumptuous supper was
prepared, none the less His Majesty, when the senators were gone,
showed himself a short while at the windows dressed in cloth of gold
and silk; after which he went to supper, and the princes arrived, so
that it was most glorious with abundant supply of exquisite viands
and most delicate foods.” The hearts of the Venetians were won by the
King’s beauty and youth, by his delicate person and grave aspect, by
his majestic bearing and his eagerness to please and be pleased. He was
in mourning for his brother, but his mourning did not shadow Venice by
its gloom. “His Majesty appeared in public dressed all in purple (which
is his mourning) with a Flemish cloak, a cap on his head in the Italian
mode, with long veil and mantle reaching to his feet, slashed jerkin,
stockings and leather collar, and a large shirt-frill most becomingly
worn, with perfumed gloves in his hand, and wearing on his feet shoes
with heels _à la mode française_.”
It would be tedious to relate the details of the splendid
entertainments that each day were provided for his delectation; of
salutes that made the earth and water tremble, of fireworks glowing
all night beneath the windows of the Cà Foscari, of the blaze of light
from the candles set in every window and cornice and angle of the
buildings along the Grand Canal, of the gilded lilies and pyramids and
wheels reflected in the water, “so that the canal seemed like another
starry sky.” It was a veritable gala for Henry; he paid a private
visit to the Doge to the great satisfaction of that prince and his
senate, he went about _incognito_ in a gondola alone with the Duke of
Ferrara, “so that when they thought he was in his room, he was in some
other part of the city, returning home at an exceedingly late hour
accompanied by many torches, and immensely enjoying the liberty of this
town; and on account of his charm and courtesy, the whole place gave
vent to the lasting joy and satisfaction it felt in continually seeing
him.” He spent three hours in the Arsenal, engrossed in viewing the
vast preparation for war and the spoils won from the Turk “in the sea
battle on the day of the great victory”; and then in the chamber of the
Council of Ten, within the Arsenal, he was provided with a Sugar Feast,
with sugar dishes, knives and forks, so admirably counterfeit that His
Majesty only realised their nature when his sugar napkin crumbled and
a piece of it fell to the ground. Is there not something contributive
to our picture of Venice the entertainer, in this feast of sugar given
by the terrible Council of Ten within the walls of the Arsenal itself?
There is naturally much vague repetition in the chronicles of the time,
but here and there are vital touches which bring the young King to life
before our eyes. At the banquet given in his honour in the Sala del
Gran Consiglio, having eaten sufficiently himself, he brought the meal
to an end before half of the courses had appeared, by adroitly causing
the Dukes of Savoy and Ferrara to rise in their places at his side, and
calling for water for his hands during the disturbance caused by the
lords and ambassadors as they followed the example of the dukes. He
told Giovanni Michele that of all the entertainments he had witnessed
in Venice none had pleased him more than the “Guerra dei Ponti,” and
that if he had known of it earlier he would have prayed to have had
the spectacle repeated several times, for he “could have asked nothing
better than this.” The Guerra dei Ponti were wrestling matches that
took place on certain bridges over the canals, and pages of description
might not have told us as much of the nature of the man who lived
behind the scented gloves and purple mantle, as this single expression
of preference.
Two episodes in the visit of Henry that seem worthy of fuller record
stand out from the rest: his reception at the Lido and the Ball in
the Ducal Palace; and they represent the achievements in his honour
of two departments of Venetian activity, the City Guilds and the
Court. While he was still in his lodging at Murano barges of immense
splendour, vying with each other in symbolism and ingenuity of design,
and each representing one of the trades of Venice, had arrived to
accompany him to the Lido. If we imagine the Lord Mayor’s Procession,
with splendour a thousandfold enhanced and with drapery and design of
artistic excellence, removed from the streets to the glittering surface
of the lagoon, we may have some idea of the spectacle. Among the most
splendid of the barges was that of the Druggists, with an ensign of the
Saviour riding on the world. “The outer coverings themselves were of
cloth of gold, and below them and below the oars were painted canvases.
The poop was hung within with most beautiful carpets, and on the four
sides four pyramids were erected of sky blue with fireworks inside
them, at the feet of which were four stucco figures representing four
nymphs, and there were set two arquebuses and a musket and two flags
white and red and a flag of battle. And on the outside were divers
sorts of arms, spears and shields and six arquebuses. On the prow was
a pyramid with fireworks, on the top of which was an angel--for this
and the Golden Head were the badges of the two honoured druggists who
had decked the said vessel--and in the midst of it was a design of a
pelican with a motto round it in letters of gold, _Respice Domino_,
representing the pelican as wounding its breast to draw blood from it
to nourish its offspring, just as they, the druggists, faithful and
devoted to their prince and master, gave and offered to him, not only
their faculties but their blood itself, which is their own life in his
service; and at the foot of the pyramid was a little boy beating a
drum.” The Looking-Glass Makers also had prepared a magnificent barge
glittering with symbols of their profession. But perhaps the device of
the Glass-Workers of Murano out-rivalled all others in ingenuity and
pomp. “On two great barges, chained together and covered with painted
canvases, they had erected a furnace in the form of a sea-monster;
and following the train of vessels, flames were seen issuing from its
mouths, and, the masters having given their consent, the Glass-Workers
made most beautiful vases of crystal, which were cause of great
pleasure to the King.”
The Convent of Sant’ Elena was the vantage point chosen for looking on
Venice, and at the moment the army of barges and brigantines reached
it, they spread out in front of His Majesty, and a salute broke from
them all; “to which the galleys in the train of the King replied
in such ordered unity that His Majesty rose to his feet with great
curiosity to see them, praising exceedingly so wonderful a sight,
admiring to his right the fair and famous city marvellously built upon
the salt waters, and on the left a forest of so many ships and vessels
with so great noise of artillery and arquebuses, and of trumpets and
drums, that he remained astounded; while he openly showed himself not
less merry than content, seeing so rare a thing as was never before
seen of him.” Henry’s arrival at the Lido is portrayed in the Sala
delle Quattro Porte in the Ducal Palace. He is seen advancing with
sprightly step, between two dignitaries of the Church, up a temporary
wooden bridge towards the Triumphal Arch and Temple of Palladio. This
arch was decorated with paintings by Paolo and Tintoretto, and in
connexion with it Ridolfi tells a delightful story of the painting of
Henry’s portrait. “Tintoretto,” says Ridolfi, “was longing to paint the
King’s portrait, and in consequence begged Paolo to finish the arch by
himself; and, taking off his toga, Tintoretto dressed himself as one
of the Doge’s equerries, and took his place among them in the Bucintoro
as it moved to meet the King, thus furtively procuring a chalk sketch
of the proposed portrait, which he was afterwards to enlarge to life
size; and having made friends with M. Bellagarda, the King’s treasurer,
he was introduced with much difficulty, owing to the frequent visits
of the Doge, into the royal apartments to retouch the portrait from
life. Now whilst he stood painting, and the King with great courtesy
admiring, there entered presumptuously into the apartments at smith of
the Arsenal, presenting an ill-done portrait by himself, and saying
that, while His Majesty was dining in the Arsenal, he had done the
likeness of him. His presumption was humbled by a courtier who snatched
it from his hand, and ripping it up with his dagger threw it into the
neighbouring Grand Canal: which incident, on account of the whispering
it produced, made it difficult for the painter to carry out his
intention. Tintoretto had also observed on that occasion that from time
to time certain persons were introduced to the King, whom he touched
lightly on the shoulder with his rapier, adding other ceremonies. And
pretending not to understand the meaning, he asked it of Bellagarda,
who said that they were created knights by His Majesty, and that he,
Tintoretto, might prepare himself to receive that degree; for he had
discussed the matter with the King, to whom Tintoretto’s conditions
were known and who had shown himself disposed, in attestation of his
powers, to create him also a knight; but our painter, not being willing
to subject himself to any title, modestly rejected the offer.” When the
portrait was finished and presented to the King, it was acclaimed by
him as a marvellous likeness, and we may safely conclude from this that
it was fair to look on. The King presented it to the Doge. Perhaps the
picture from the first had been intended as a present for Mocenigo, and
this was the explanation of the secrecy observed in regard to it.
[Illustration: COURTYARD OF PALAZZO DUCALE.]
The climax of entertainment was reached in the festa at the Ducal
Palace on the second Sunday after Henry’s arrival (his visit lasted
ten days). The glories of Venice were gathered in that marvellous hall
still hung with the paintings of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, and
the exquisite Paradise of Guariento; for it was yet a year previous to
the great fire which was to give scope to the contemporary giants. The
later victories of Venice were as yet unchronicled except in the hearts
of living men. There was no thought of sumptuary laws on this day at
least of the great festival. Ladies were there clothed all in ormesine,
adorned with jewels and pearls of great size, not only in strings on
their necks, but covering their head-dresses and the cloaks on their
shoulders. “And in their whiteness, their beauty and magnificence,
they formed a choir not so much of nymphs as of very goddesses. They
were set one behind the other in fair order upon carpeted benches
stretching round the whole hall, leaving an ample space in the centre,
at the head of which was set a royal seat with a covering of gold and
entirely covered with a baldaquin from top to bottom, and round it
yellow and blue satin.” All the splendours of Venetian and Oriental
cloths were lavished on the Hall of the Great Council and the Sala del
Scrutinio adjoining. The King as usual entered whole-heartedly into the
festivity. His seat was raised that he might look over the company,
“but he chose nevertheless to go round and salute all the ladies with
much grace and courtesy, raising his cap as he went along.” After a
time musical instruments were heard, the ladies were carried off by the
gentlemen, and forming into line they began to dance a slow measure,
passing before the King and bowing as they passed. “And he stood the
whole while cap in hand.” The French courtiers were permitted by their
master to lay aside their mourning for the time, and they danced with
great merriment, vying with the most famous dancers of Venice. But the
great feature of the evening was the tragedy by Cornelio Frangipani--a
mythological masque in honour of the most Christian King and of Venice
herself--with Proteus, Iris, Mars, Amazons, Pallas and Mercury as
protagonists. To the first printed edition of his masque Frangipani
prefixed an apology for his title of tragedy, with the usual appeal to
classic precedent. “This tragedy of mine,” he says, “was recited in
such a way as most nearly to approach to the form of the ancients; all
the players sang in sweetest harmony, now accompanied, now alone; and
finally the chorus of Mercury was composed of players who had so many
various instruments as were never heard before. The trumpets introduced
the gods on to the appointed scene with the machinery of tragedy, but
this could not be used to effect on account of the great concourse of
people; and the ancients could not have been initiated into the musical
compositions in which Claudio Merulo had reached a height certainly
never attained by the ancients.” The masque is in reality a mere masque
of occasion, comparable to countless English productions in the
Elizabethan age, though lacking in the lyrical grace they generally
possess. Henry is addressed as the slayer of monsters, the harbinger of
peace, the herald of the age of gold--
Pregamo questo domator de’ mostri
Ch’eterno al mondo viva,
Perchè in pregiata oliva
Ha da cangiar d’ alloro
E apportar l’ antica età del’ oro.
The masque is without literary merit, but we need not regard it in
the cold light of an after day, caged and with clipped wings. To that
glorious assembly, illumined by the great deeds fresh in men’s minds
and the presence of a royal hero, Frangipani’s words may well have been
kindled into flame. For if time and place were ever in conspiracy to
wing pedestrian thoughts and words, it must have been at this fêting of
the most Christian King of France in the City of the Sea.
Pens were busy in Venice during the days of Henry’s stay. Unsalaried
artists, independent of everything except a means of livelihood,
exacted toll from the royal guest. From the 16,000 scudi of largess
distributed by the King, payments are enumerated “to writers and poets
who presented to His Majesty Latin works and poems made in praise of
his greatness and splendour.” Gifts, as well as compliments were
exchanged on all hands. The Duke of Savoy presented the Doge’s wife
with a girdle studded with thirty gold rosettes each containing four
pearls and a precious jewel in the centre, worth 1,800 scudi. And
Henry’s final token of gratitude to his entertainers was to send after
the Doge, who had accompanied him to Fusina, a magnificent diamond
ring, begging that Mocenigo should wear it continually in token of
their love. Most of these offerings and acknowledgments, without doubt,
would be merely ceremonial. Yet the young King’s delight in his visit
had been genuine, and his frank enjoyment of all Venice offered had won
him her sympathy and even her affection. Memories of the freedom of
his stay went with him to the routine of his kingship, and he looked
backwards with delight to her winged pleasures. She had spread gifts
out before him, as she does before all, but in his own hands he had
carried the key of her inmost treasures; for his spirit was joyful and
joy is the key to the unlocking of her heart.
Chapter Five
A MERCHANT OF VENICE
“Siamo noi calcolatori” was the confession of a modern Venetian, quoted
lately as expressive of the spirit that governs Venice to-day and has
lain at the root of her policy in the past. The confession is striking;
for most men, however calculating in practice, acknowledge an ideal
of spontaneous generosity which causes them to shun the admission of
self-interested motives. The charge, if charge it can be termed, is an
old one. Again and again it has been brought against Venice by those
to whom her greatness has been a stumbling-block--“sono calcolatori.”
But perhaps if the indictment be rightly understood it will be found
to need, not so much a denial as an extension, a fuller statement of
meaning. And this Professor Molmenti has supplied in his _Venice in the
Middle Ages_.[1] “The Venetians,” he says, in commenting on the support
they lent to the Crusades, “never forgot their commercial and political
interests in their zeal for the faith; they intended to secure for
themselves a market in every corner of the globe. But their so-called
egoism displayed itself in a profound attachment to their country and
their race; and these greedy hucksters, these selfish adventurers, as
they are sometimes unjustly called, had at bottom a genuine belief
in objects high and serious; the merchant not seldom became a hero.
These lords of the sea knew how to wed the passion of Christianity to
commercial enterprise, and welded the aspirations of the faith with the
interests of their country, proving by their action not only how vain
and sterile is an idealism which consumes itself in morbid dreams, but
also that the mere production of riches will lead to ruin unless it be
tempered, legalised, almost, we would say, sanctified, by the serene
and lifegiving breath of the ideal.” But because she was supremely
successful in her undertakings, Venice won for herself much perplexed
and hostile comment from those who were jealous of a mastery sustained
with such apparently effortless self-possession--of an organisation so
complete, so silent, so pervasive. She has been accused of perfidy, of
cruelty, in short, of shameless egoism. A nation, a state, is pledged
to the preservation of its identity, its conceptions must be bounded
and constantly measured by the power of other states. The neighbours of
Venice in the days of her glory were selfish and calculating also; her
prominence was due not so much to special weapons as to her skill in
wielding weapons everywhere in use.
[1] Translated by Mr. Horatio Browne.
And what can we say of the ends to which she directed her success, the
scope of her arts, the nature of her pleasures? It must be admitted by
all that the soul of Venice was capacious, unique in its harmony of
imagination and political acumen; unique in its power of commanding
and retaining respect. A great soul was in the men of Venice; it was
present in all their activities, in their commerce as in their art.
The two were most intimately allied. Again and again the chroniclers
of Venice crown their catalogue of her glories with the reminder that
their foundation is in commerce, that the Venetians are a nation of
shopkeepers, and “you have only come to such estate by reason of the
trade done by your shipping in various parts of the world.” Even in
the fifteenth century it was deemed complimentary to say to a newly
elected Doge, “You have been a great trader in your young days.” The
greatness of Venice was coincident with the greatness of her trade.
She was lit, it is true, with the ancient stars of her splendour after
the mortal blow had been struck at her commerce by the discovery of
the Cape route to the East, but the old unity of her strength had been
lost--the firm foundations of the days when the nobles of Venice had
been the directors of her enterprise. And at the end of the fifteenth
century they no longer sat, in their togas, behind the counters in
Rialto, or made the basements of their houses into stores. They had
ceased to apprentice their sons to the merchants on the sea-going
galleys. They still acted as commanders of the ships in times of war,
but in intervals of peace the gulf between noble and merchant was
constantly being enlarged. The commercial traveller was no longer
considered one of the most distinguished of citizens. The corner stone
had been taken from the building of Rialto; it had begun to crumble to
the dissolution lamented by Grevembroch in his strange book on Venetian
costumes. In the great days of Venice her commerce was great, and she
knew how to robe it in glory, how to attract to it the noblest, and not
the meanest, of her sons. Her shops were the objects of her proudest
solicitude, and the well-being of her merchants the first of her cares.
The hostels provided for foreign traders ranked with the most sumptuous
of her palaces, and the rules framed for their guidance were amongst
the most liberal in her legislature.
The calculations of Venice, growing with her growth, impressed on her
national consciousness the importance of her position midway between
the East and the West--her geographical qualification for becoming the
mart of the world. With steady and concentrated purpose she devoted her
energy to opening up fresh channels of communication. Sometimes by the
marriage of a son or daughter of the Doge with the heir of a kingdom or
a prince of Constantinople, sometimes by the subjugation of a common
foe, Venice wove new threads of intercourse with the East. She always
took payment for benefits she conferred in wider trading advantages.
Her merchant vessels were not private adventures, they represented
state enterprise and were under the control of the central government,
travelling with the fleet and capable of reinforcing it at need. Seven
merchant convoys left Venice annually for Roumania, Azof, Trebizond,
Cyprus, Armenia, France, England, Flanders, Spain, Portugal and Egypt.
By means of these vessels the glories of the Orient found their way to
the lands of the West; Venice was mistress of the treasures of Arabia,
and became their dispenser to Europe. And she was not merely a mart,
a counter of interchange; she tested the goods at their source; she
was not at the mercy of valuers, her citizen travellers came into
touch with the goods on the soil that produced them. The East, to
which the art of Venice owes much of its material--its gold, its gems,
its colours--was not an unfathomed mine but, in a certain sense, a
pleasure-ground for her citizens; they passed to and fro familiarly,
guests of its greatest potentates. They stood face to face with Cublay
Kaan, the monarch of mystery.
The journeys of the famous Poli are among the most thrilling and
significant records of Venetian history. Through them we are able to
realise something of the Republic’s debt to the lands of the East--a
debt not to be summed up in enumeration of embroidery and jewels and
perfumes and secrets of colour. In part at least it consisted of
legends and traditions that filtered into Venice through the hearing
and speech of her travellers--age-old lessons in wisdom, which must
have invested some of the common things of Venetian life with new
meaning and done something to break down the barriers which ignorance
erects between man and man, knowledge and knowledge. In the beautiful
Persian rendering of the story of _The Three Magi_, as told by Marco
Polo, she came into touch with comparative theology, the familiar
Christian tale drawn from an earlier source. Marco Polo tells how
he first found at Sara the beautiful tombs of Jaspar, Melchior and
Balthasar, with their bodies completely preserved; how the people of
that place knew nothing of their history save that they were the bodies
of kings; but three days’ journey onward he had come to the city of
the fire-worshippers and been informed of the three who had set out
to worship a newly born Prophet, carrying with them gifts to test
the extent of his powers--gold for the earthly King, myrrh for the
physician, incense for the God. “And when they were come there where
the Child was born, the youngest of these three Kings went all alone
to see the Child, and there he found that it was like himself, for
it seemed of his age and form. Then he went out much marvelling, and
after him went in the second of the Kings, who was near in age to the
first, and the Child seemed to him, as to the first, of his own form
and age, and he also went out much perplexed. Then went in the third,
who was of great age, and it happened to him as to the other two, and
he also went out very pensive. And when all the Kings were together,
they told one another what they had seen; and they marvelled much and
said they would go in all three together. Then they went together into
the Child’s presence, and they found Him of the likeness and age that
He really was, for He was only three days old. Then they adored Him
and offered Him their gold and incense and myrrh. The Child took all
their offerings and gave them a closed box, and then the three Kings
departed and returned to their country.” Marco Polo goes on to relate
how the Kings, finding the box heavy to bear, sat down by a well to
open it, and, when they had opened it, they found only stones inside.
These, in their disappointment, they threw into the well and lo! from
the stones fire ascended which they gathered up and took home with
them to worship. With it they burned all their sacrifices, renewing it
from one altar to another. Other tales he told them from the wisdom of
the East--of the idealist who found no joy in earthly existence, and
the chagrin of his father the King, who surrounded him with luxury and
with beautiful maidens, but could not persuade him. One day he rode
out on his horse and saw a dead man by the way. And he was filled with
horror at a sight which he had never seen before, and he asked those
who were with him the meaning of the sight, and they told him it was a
dead man. “What,” said the son of a King, “then do all men die?” Yes,
truly, they say. Then the youth asked no more, but rode on in front
in deep thought. And after he had ridden some way he met a very old
man who could not walk, and who had no teeth, for he had lost them all
by reason of his great age. And when the King’s son saw the old man he
asked what he was and why he could not walk, and his companions told
him that he could not walk from age, and that from age he had lost his
teeth. And when the King’s son understood about the dead man and the
old man, he returned to his palace, and said to himself that he would
live no longer in so evil a world, but that he would go “in search of
Him who never dies, of Him who made him. And so he departed from his
father and from the palace, and went to the mountains, that are very
high and impassable, and there he lived all his life, most purely and
chastely, and made great abstinence, for certainly if he had been a
Christian, he would be a great saint with our Lord Jesus Christ.” Did
he find his answer in the mountains? Perhaps in some dawn or sunset he
learned of the nature of “Him who made him, of Him who never dies”;
perhaps among the wild creatures he learned before he was old to sing
the lauds of our sister Death. But Polo’s comment on the story is
interesting, for the Venetians would have little natural sympathy
with its hero. They would prefer Carpaccio’s fairy prince who forsook
his kingdom to follow Ursula and her virgins. The tale of one who dared
not look on life in company with his kind, would strike a chill across
the full-blooded natures of Venice, so eager to grasp at all that
ministered to enjoyment and vitality.
[Illustration: SAN GIORGIO.]
But Marco’s pack held stories of a more tangible kind--tales of the
Palace of Cublay Kaan, with its hall that held six thousand men, the
inside walls covered with gold and silver and pictures of great beasts,
and the outside rainbow-coloured, shining like crystal in the sun, and
a landmark far and wide. And within the circuit of the palace walls
was a green pleasure mound covered with trees from all parts and with
a green palace on its summit. “And I tell you that the mound and the
trees and the palace are so fair to see that all who see them have joy
and gladness, and therefore has the great Sire had them made, to have
that beautiful view and to receive from it joy and solace.” He tells of
the wonderful Zecca where coins of the Great Kaan are stamped--not made
of metal, but of black paper--which may be refused nowhere throughout
the Kaan’s dominions on pain of death. All who are possessed of gold
and treasure are obliged to bring goods several times in the year, and
receive coins of bark in exchange; and therefore, Marco explains, “is
Cublay richer than all else in the world.” He describes the posting
system, the rich palaces built for the housing of messengers, the trees
planted along the merchant routes to act as signposts on the road;
“for,” he says, “you will find these trees along the desert way, and
they are a great comfort to merchant and messenger.” Visitors to the
chapel of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni will recall the use that Carpaccio
has made of these palm-tree signposts in the _Death of St. Jerome_ and
the _Victory of St. George_. Marco tells of magnificent feasts made by
the Great Kaan on his birthday and on New Year’s Day. He delights in
stories of the chase within the domain of Cublay’s palace of Chandu
(perhaps the Xanadu of Coleridge) the walls of which enclosed a
sixteen-mile circuit, with fountains and rivers and lawns and beasts
of every kind. He describes in detail, as of special interest to his
hearers, the size and construction of the rods of which the Palace of
Canes was built and the two hundred silken cords with which it was
secured during the summer months of its existence. He speaks of the
“weather magic” by which rain and fog are warded off from this palace;
and of the Great Kaan’s fancy that the blood of a royal line should
not be spilt upon the ground to be seen of sun and air, and of his
consequent device for the murder of his uncle Nayan, whom he tossed to
death in a carpet. Baudas (Baghdad), he says, is the chief city of the
Saracens. A great river flows through it to the Indian Ocean, which
may be reached in eighteen days. The city is full of merchants and of
traffic; it produces _nasich_ and _nac_ and _cramoisy_, and gold and
silver brocades richly embroidered with design of birds and of beasts;
and the woods of Bastra, between Baudas and the sea, produce the finest
dates in the world. He recounts the taking of this Baudas in the year
1255 by Alaü, the Great Kaan’s brother, who, when he had taken it,
discovered therein a tower belonging to the Caliph full of gold and
silver and other treasure, so that there never was so much seen at
one time in one place. When Alaü beheld the great heap of treasure,
he was amazed and sent for the Caliph into his presence and asked him
why he had amassed so great a treasure and what he had intended to do
with it. “Did you not know that I was your enemy and coming to lay you
waste?” he demanded. “Why, therefore, did you not take your treasure
and give it to knights and soldiers to defend you and your city?” The
caliph replied nothing, for he did not know what to answer. So Alaü
continued, “Caliph, I see you love your treasure so much, I will give
you this treasure of yours to eat.” So he had the Caliph shut up in the
tower and commanded that nothing should be given him to eat or drink,
saying, “Caliph, eat now as much treasure as you will, for you shall
never eat or drink anything else.” And he left the Caliph in the tower,
where, at the end of four days, he died. Marco must have opened up to
his listeners in Venice horizons of lands almost comparable in extent
to the sea-spaces familiar to their thoughts from infancy. He spoke of
deserts of many days’ journey, of the port of Hormos at the edge of
one of the most beautiful of the plains--a city whence precious stones
and spices and cloths of silver and gold brought by the merchants from
India were shipped to all parts of the world.
But the Poli brought more tangible trophies than the most
circumstantial of tales in their pack. Foolish artists might have held
themselves rich with these, but the honour of their family would demand
better credentials before welcoming fantastically arrayed strangers
into its bosom. The courtyard of the house behind the Malibran, at
which on their return from their travels they demanded admission,
is known still as the Corte del Milione, and its walls are still
enriched with Byzantine cornice and moulding, and with sculptured
beasts as strange as any to be met with in Cublay’s preserves. The
three travellers had the appearance of Tartars, and from long disuse of
their language they spoke in broken Italian. Tradition tells of the way
in which they heaped exploit upon exploit in the attempt to convince
their incredulous relatives of their identity; and at last, according
to Ramusio, they invited a number of their relations to a superb
banquet, at which they themselves appeared in long robes of crimson
satin. When the guests were set down, these robes were torn into strips
and distributed amongst the servants. Through various metamorphoses of
damask and velvet they came at last to the common dresses in which they
had arrived. And when the tables were moved and the servants had gone,
Marco, as being the youngest, began to rip up the seams and welts of
these costumes and take out from them handfuls of rubies and sapphires,
carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds. There was no longer any doubt or
delay; the shaggy tartar beards had lost all their terrors. These men,
who had suddenly displayed “infinite riches in a little room,” must
undoubtedly be what they claimed to be; happy the family to which the
magicians belonged; the Doge’s Palace need not be afraid to welcome
them; they must be set high in the State.
Yet the accumulation of treasure was by no means the most noteworthy
act of their drama. The Poli had been more than mere traders; from the
first they had been diplomatists of a high order. Their career seems
to give us the key to some of the wonderful faces that appear in the
crowds pictured by Venetian painters, especially those of Carpaccio.
They are the faces of men who have met the crisis of life unalarmed,
by virtue of a combination of daring and wisdom which is no common
possession. They are not cold; if they are severe they are full of
feeling--sensitive to the pathos and humour as well as the sternness
of reality. The Poli had been obliged to furnish themselves with
patience in lands where the transit of a plain is measured in weeks;
three years’ residence in a city of Persia is mentioned as a matter
of detail. We are not told the reason of delay, only that they could
not go before or behind. They had travelled in the true spirit of
adventure. On that first journey, when Marco was not of the company,
the Great Kaan’s messengers, who came to request an interview for
their master, who had never set eyes on a Latin, had found the two
brothers open-minded and trustful. They had acquitted themselves
well in Cublay’s presence, answering all his questions wisely and in
order. He had inquired as to the manners and customs of Europe, and
particularly as to Western methods of government and the Christian
Church and its Head. He had been “glad beyond measure” at what he had
heard of the deeds of the Latins, and decided to send a request to the
Christian Apostle for one hundred men learned in the Christian law and
the Seven Arts and capable of teaching his people that their household
gods were works of the devil and why the faith of the West was better
than theirs. The thought of the lamp burning before the sepulchre of
God in Jerusalem had stirred his imagination, and he craved some of its
oil for the light of his temple, or, maybe, his pleasure dome. So the
two Venetians had set out for Europe on his strange embassy. They were
provided with a golden tablet on which the Kaan had inscribed orders
for the supplying of their needs, food, horses, escorts in all the
countries through which they should pass. At the end of three years,
after long delays on account of the snows, they arrived at the port
of Layas in Armenia, and from Layas they had come to Acre in April of
the year 1269. At Acre they had found that Pope Clement IV was dead,
and no new election had as yet been made. Venetian history teems with
dramatic situations, but it would be difficult to find any stranger
than that in which the Polo brothers now found themselves placed.
Merchants of Venice, they came as ambassadors from the Lord of All
the Tartars to demand missionaries from the Father of Christendom,
who was not able to supply them because he was not in existence. In
their dilemma at Acre they consulted Theobald of Piacenza, Legate
of Egypt, who advised them to await the new Pope’s election and
meanwhile to return to their homes. His advice was accepted, and the
two brothers made their way onwards to Venice, where one of them,
Nicolas, discovered his son, young Marco, a lad of fifteen years old.
They remained in Venice for two years, but when, at the end of that
time, no Pope had yet been elected, the brothers felt their return to
the Kaan could be deferred no longer. There is something touching in
their fidelity to the pledge they had given and the constancy of their
merchant faith. They prepared to set out again. This time little Marco
went with them on an absence that lasted for seventeen years, and was
to gather a greater treasure for the world than any diamonds and rubies
and velvets to be prodigally scattered on the floor of the Corte del
Milione. At Acre they obtained Theobald’s permission to fetch some
of the holy oil desired by the Kaan from Jerusalem. The journey to
Jerusalem performed, they returned once more to Acre, and finally set
forth on their return journey to the Kaan with a letter from Theobald
testifying that they had done all in their power, “but since there was
no Apostle, they could not carry the embassy.” But when they had gone
as far on their journey as Layas, they were followed by letters from
Theobald, who was now Pope Gregory of Piacenza, begging their return.
They complied with great joy and set sail for Acre in a galley provided
for their use by the King of Armenia. This was the hour of their
triumph, for they were received by the Pope with great honour, given
costly presents for the Kaan, and provided with two friars of very
great learning. The names of these two are possibly better withheld,
for they were more learned than courageous. When they had come as far
on their journey as Layas, their incipient fears of the land of the
Tartars were wrought to a pitch by the sight of the Saracen Army which
was being brought against Armenia by the Sultan of Babylon, and they
insisted on handing their credentials over to the Poli and returning
at once to Italy. And the brothers were forced to go on their way
with worse than no preachers of their faith, with tidings of their
defection.
For three and a half years they journeyed on, detained often by floods
and bad weather. The news of their coming travelled before them to the
Kaan, and he sent his servants forty days’ journey to meet them. The
Kaan received them with joy, was graciously pleased with the letters
and credentials sent by the Pope, and accepted young Marco as his
liegeman and responsible messenger. Marco sped well in learning the
language, customs and writing of the Tartars, but it is clear he must
have acquired other than scholastic accomplishments. He was endowed
with tact and power of observation, and returned from his first embassy
full of news of the men and customs he had encountered; “for he had
seen on several occasions that when the messengers the Great Kaan had
sent into various parts of the world returned and told him the results
of the embassy on which they had gone, and could tell him no other
news of the countries where they had been, the Kaan said they were
ignorant fools.” For seventeen years young Messer Marco was employed in
continual coming and going. He was learned in many strange and hidden
things, and was placed in honour high above the barons--the darling of
Cublay’s heart. Again and again the three Venetians asked for leave of
absence to visit their country, but so great was the love Cublay
bore to them that he could not bear to be parted from them; until at
last an embassy arrived from Argon, King of Levant, asking for a new
wife of the lineage of his dead wife Bolgana, and the Kaan is persuaded
by Argon’s messengers to allow Marco and his two uncles to depart with
them in charge of the lady. They set out by sea, and after some twenty
months’ sailing and many disasters arrived at their destination. King
Argon was dead, and the lady Cocachin was bestowed on his son. Of the
six hundred followers who had set out with them on their journey only
eighteen had survived it. Their mission accomplished, the Poli made
their way to Trebizond, from Trebizond to Constantinople and from
Constantinople to Venice. This was in the year 1295.
[Illustration: THE DOGANA.]
And how would Venice, the place of his birth, reveal herself to Marco,
now he had seen so many wonders and glories in distant lands? We may
imagine the sun to have been setting as the travellers turned into the
Lido port, dropping a globe of molten fire vast and mysterious through
the haze, while the last dim rays gleamed golden on the windows of the
Riva degli Schiavoni. Venice lay among her waters, blue and glittering,
interspersed with jewelled marsh. The last gulls of those that so
gallantly had dipped and sailed all day upon the water were flying
home, their breasts and wings radiant in the level sunlight round the
home-coming ship. Many citizens of Venice must have been at the Lido
port, thronging to meet the merchant vessels, to greet their friends
or to have news of them from others. But none came to meet these three
travellers; alone they embarked in a gondola bearing their cargo
with them. Venice had clothed herself in all her beauty to give them
welcome. Which of Cublay’s glories could rival this splendour of the
lagoon with its countless treasures of light? The marsh lay in unequal
patches, each outlined with a luminous silver rim--a magic carpet of
dusky olive, threaded with strands of radiant azure and sprinkled with
ruby and amethyst. As their gondola moved slowly down towards the city,
the boats of the night fishers passed with the silence of shadows
between them and the glow. And when here and there a fisher alighted on
the marsh or moved across it like a spirit stepping on the waters, he
must have seemed to Marco the very memory and renewal of those strange
Eastern stories of which his mind was full. So, under the mystic glow
of the desert, he had seen figures of the caravan rise and move against
the tinted haze of the oasis. Onwards glided the boat towards the
Basin of San Marco--westward the luminous wonder of lagoon and marsh,
and a cold, clear intensity of stirring water to the east. And as they
drew nearer and ever nearer, our travellers’ hearts beat high with the
wonders of the city of their birth. The stars were piercing the night
sky in countless numbers: the yellow lights of the city quivered along
the Riva: the masts of the fishing-fleet swung clear against the pale
western glow in the waterway of the Giudecca: the flowing tide wound
silver coils about the black shadows of their hulls. Past the Dogana,
keystone of Venice to the Eastern traveller, their little boat moved
down the quiet waters of the Grand Canal, deep into the heart of that
great shadowy city, apparent Queen over all the glories of the Cities
of the East.
Chapter Six
VENICE OF CRUSADE AND PILGRIMAGE
The story of Venice and the Crusades forms one of the most interesting
pages of her history in relation to the East. The gradual awakening of
her consciousness to the fact that the pilgrimages to the Holy Land
might be of close significance to herself culminates in her attitude
towards the great Fourth Crusade at the opening of the thirteenth
century. The Crusades were, in fact, a commercial speculation for
Venice, but a speculation into which she infused all the vitality and
fulness of her nature. And she became, not merely a place of passage
for the East, but a superb depository of relics to detain pilgrims
on their outward way; a hostel so royally fitted with food for their
senses, their religious cravings and their mystic imaginings, that one
and another may well have been beguiled into delaying their departure
for more strenuous sanctities. The narratives of the pilgrims,
with their enthusiasms, their details of relics, their records of
Venetian ceremonies, religious, commercial or domestic, coloured by
their quaintly intimate personal impressions, form one of the most
picturesque pages of Venetian chronicle.
Pietro Casola, a Milanese pilgrim of the late fifteenth century, gives
us a picture of a city that is sumptuous and rich in all its dealings,
yet pervaded by a harmony and decorum that has stamped itself on the
face of each individual citizen. We feel that Pietro Casola has really
had a vision of the meaning of Venice, when, among the inventory of
wonders of the Mass for the pilgrims on Corpus Christi day, of the
velvets, crimson and damask and scarlet, the cloth of gold and togas
sweeping the ground, each finer than the last, he pauses to add, “There
was great silence, greater than is ever observed at such festivals,
even in the gathering of so many Venetian gentlemen, so that you could
hear everything. And it seemed to me that everything was ruled by one
alone, who was obeyed by each man without resistance. And at this I
wondered greatly, for never had I seen so great obedience at such
spectacles.” In the record of this arresting impression, more even than
in the description of many coloured drapery and white cloths spread
on the piazza, of the groves of oak-trees bordering the route of the
procession and the candles lit among them, we seem to see before us
the rhythmic solemnity of that unique _Procession_ on the Piazza of
Gentile Bellini. We need only Casola’s other observant characterisation
of the Venetian gentleman to complete the picture. “I have considered,”
he says, “the quality of these Venetian gentlemen, who for the most
part are fair men and tall, astute and most subtle in their dealings;
and you must needs, if you would treat with them, keep your eyes and
ears open. They are proud; I think it is on account of their great
rule. And when a son is born to a Venetian, they say among themselves,
‘A Signor is born into the world.’ In their way of living at home
they are sparing and very modest; outside they are very liberal. The
city of Venice retains its old manner of dress, and they never change
it; that is to say, they wear a long garment of whatever colour they
choose. No one ever goes out by day without his toga, and for the most
part a black one, and they have carried this custom to such a point
that all nations of the world who are lodging here in Venice, from
the greatest to the least, observe this style, beginning from the
gentlemen to the mariners and galleymen; a dress certainly full of
confidence and gravity. They look like doctors of law, and if any were
to appear outside his house without his toga he would be thought a
fool.” Without doors the women also belonged to this sober company,
or at least the marriageable maidens and those who were no longer of
the number of the “belle giovani”; so sombrely were they covered when
outside their houses, and especially in church, that Casola says he at
first mistook them all for widows, or nuns of the Benedictine Order.
But for the “belle giovani” it is another matter; they give relief to
the week-day sobriety of these Venetians, so decorous and black when
off duty, though revelling in such richness of velvet and brocade when
the trumpet of a public function stirs their blood.
[Illustration: THE SHADOW OF THE CAMPANILE.]
We are indebted to Casola for a picture of a Venetian domestic festival
at the birth of a child to the Delfini family. He realised fully that
he was admitted, together with the orator of the King of France, in
order that he might act as reporter of Venetian magnificence. It was
in a room “whose chimney-piece was all of Carrara marble shining as
gold, so subtly worked with figures and leaves, that Praxiteles and
Pheidias could not have exceeded it. The ceiling of the room was so
finely decorated with gold and ultramarine, and the walls so richly
worked, that I cannot make report of it. One desk alone was valued
at five hundred ducats, and the fixtures of the room were in the
Venetian style, such beautiful and natural figures, so much gold
everywhere, that I know not if in the time of Solomon, who was King of
the Jews, when silver was reputed more vile than carrion, there was
such abundance as was here seen. Of the ornaments of the bed and of the
lady ... I have thought best rather to keep silence than to speak for
fear I should not be believed. Another thing I will speak the truth
about, and perhaps I shall not be believed--a matter in which the ducal
orator would not let me lie. There were in the said room twenty-five
Venetian damsels, each one fairer than the last, who were come to
visit the lady who had borne a child. Their dress was most discreet,
as I said above, _alla veneziana_: they showed no more than four to
six finger breadths of bare neck below their shoulders back and front.
These damsels had so many jewels on their heads and round their necks
and on their hands--namely, gold, precious stones and pearls--that it
was the opinion of those who were there that they were worth a hundred
thousand ducats. Their faces were superbly painted, and so also the
rest of them that was bare.” The account of this sumptuous interior is
peculiarly valuable when we realise the date to which it belongs, the
period of the first greatness of Venetian Art, a period which has been
sometimes regarded as one of almost naïve simplicity. Casola, with his
customary exactitude, dwells on the frugality of Venetian gentlemen in
the matter of food--a frugality that caused the guest to reflect that
the Venetians cared more to feed the eye than the palate. It was not
yet the period of the sumptuous living deplored by Calmo only half a
century later.
Casola was a more secularly minded pilgrim than the priest of Florence,
Ser Michele, who paid five visits to the bones of the Holy Innocents at
Murano, and only at the fifth visit was counted worthy, as he humbly
deemed, to see the relics: Providence, in the form of the sacristan,
having till then failed him. The more festive Casola--who paid
repeated visits to Rialto, “which seemed to be the source of all the
gardens in the world,” who spent one day in vain attempts to count the
multitudinous boats in and about the city, and who was so frivolous,
for all his long white beard, as to buy a false front on the piazza--in
the midst of his expatiations on the Venetian maidens, pulls himself
suddenly together with a sense of incongruity between his diversions
and his goal, and shakes himself free from the allurements of Venice,
crying: “But I am a priest, in the way of the saints; I did not try
to look into their lives any further. To me it seemed better, as I
have said above, to go in search of the churches and monasteries and
to see the relics of which there are so many. And this seemed to me a
good work for a pilgrim who was awaiting the departure of the vessel
to go to the Holy Sepulchre, bringing the time to an end as well as he
could.” In the Accademia at Venice there is a curious little painting,
attributed to Carpaccio, of the assembly of the martyrs of Mount
Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello, which stood once on
the site of the Public Gardens. It was a familiar sight for Venice,
the dedication of pilgrims that is represented here; and there is a
strange pathos in the slim, small figures as they move in two lines
half-wavering up the aisle, each wearing a crown of thorns, perhaps
in prophecy of coming martyrdom. They are not marching confidently to
victory like an army; their crosses are held at all angles, forming
errant patterns among themselves. Some are girt for their journey
in short vestments under their long robes. It is curiously unlike a
procession native to the city; there is a dreamlike, mystic quality
about it and a lack of body in its motion which is enhanced, perhaps,
by the extreme detail with which the interior of the church is
transcribed--the models of vessels in the rafters; the votive limbs
and bones hung on the wooden screen, offerings of the diseased cured
by miracle, as they may be seen in San Giovanni e Paolo to-day; the
coiled rope of the lamp-pulley; the board with a church notice printed
on it; and everywhere, winding in and out of the picture, seen through
the portal of entrance, disappearing behind the sanctuary screen, the
interminable procession of the ten thousand little pilgrims.
In 1198 the lords of France flocked with enthusiasm to a crusade
preached by Foulques de Nuilly under the authority of Innocent III.
After much discussion of practical ways and means, with which they
were less amply provided than with spiritual enthusiasm, they made
choice of six ambassadors who should procure the necessities of the
enterprise, Jofroi de Villeharduin, Mareschal of Champagne, Miles li
Brabant, Coëns de Bethune, Alars Magnarians, Jean de Friaise, and
Gautiers de Gaudonville. Venice was decided on by them as the State
most likely to provide what they stood in need of--ships for the
journey--and they departed to sound the mind of the Republic, arriving
in the first week of Lent in the year 1201. Venice, in the person of
the Doge, Henry Dandolo, opened the negotiations; the messengers were
made to feel it was no light thing they asked. They were received and
lodged with highest honour, but they were made to wait for a Council
to assemble, which should consider the matter of their request. After
some days they were admitted to the Ducal Palace to deliver their
message; and its purport was this: “Sir, we are come to you from the
high barons of France who have taken the sign of the Cross to avenge
the shame of Jesus Christ, and to conquer Jerusalem if God will grant
it them; and because they know that no people have such power as you
and your people, they pray you for God’s sake to have pity on the land
over seas and the avenging of the shame of Jesus Christ, so that they
may have ships and the other things necessary.” The spiritual and
sentimental appeal is left unanswered by the Doge. He asks simply, “In
what way?” “In all ways,” say the messengers, “that you recommend or
advise, which they would be able to fulfil.” Again the Doge expresses
wonder at the magnitude of what they ask, bidding them not marvel
if another eight days’ waiting is required of them before the final
answer can be given. At the date fixed by the Doge they returned to the
Palace. Villeharduin excuses himself from telling all the words that
were said and unsaid, but the gist of the Doge’s offer was this, that
it depended on the consent of the Great Council and the rest of the
Republic. Venice should provide vessels of transport for four thousand
five hundred horses and squires and twenty thousand foot soldiers, and
viands to last the whole company nine months. The agreement was to
hold good for a year from the time of starting, and the sum total of
the provision was to be eighty-five thousand marks. But Venice would
go further, for the love of God, and launch fifty galleys at her own
expense on condition of receiving the half of all the conquests that
were made by land and sea. Nothing remained but to win the consent of
the Great Council and ask a formal ratification from the people. Full
ten thousand persons assemble in “the chapel of San Marco, the fairest
that ever was,” and the Doge recommends them to hear the Mass, and to
pray God’s counsel concerning the request of the envoys. It will be
seen that all is practically accomplished before the question is put
to the people or God’s grace asked on the undertaking, but no item of
the formality is omitted. The envoys are sent for by the Doge that they
may themselves repeat their request humbly before the people, and they
came into the church “much stared at by the crowd who had never seen
them.” Again the appeal is made, Jofroi de Villeharduin taking up the
word by the agreement and desire of the other envoys. We can picture
the strange thrill that ran through the great multitude as that single
voice broke the silence of St. Mark’s with its burden of passionate
tribute to the greatness of Venice: “‘Therefore have they chosen you
because they know that no people accustomed to going on the seas have
such power as you and your people; and they commanded us to throw
ourselves at your feet and not to rise until you had consented to have
pity on the Holy Land beyond the seas.’ Now the six messengers knelt,
weeping bitterly, and the Doge and all the others cried out with one
voice and raised their hands on high and said, ‘We grant it, we grant
it.’ And the noise and tumult and lament of it were so great that never
had any man known a greater.” Then the Doge himself mounted the lectern
and put before the people the meaning of the alliance that had been
sought with them in preference to all other peoples by “the best men of
the world.” “I cannot tell you,” says Villeharduin, “all the good and
fair words that the Doge spoke. At last the matter was ended, and the
following day the charters were drawn up and made and sealed.”
[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER FROM GALLERY OF SAN MARCO.]
The time of gathering for the pilgrims was fixed for the following
year 1202, at the feast of St. John, and amid many tears of piety and
devotion the Doge and deputies swore to abide by their charters, and
the envoys of both parties set out for Rome to receive the confirmation
of their covenant from Innocent III. But the drama which had begun
amid such moving demonstrations of good will and Christian sentiment
necessarily had its dilemmas and its complications. It was essential
to the fulfilling of the pact that all the crusaders should assemble
at Venice to pay their toll, and embark on the ships; otherwise the
crusaders could not hope to provide the money due to the Venetians.
The Republic, for its part, had amply fulfilled its compact. All who
arrived were received with joy and lodged most honourably at San Nicolo
del Lido. The chronicle can find no parallel for the richness of the
provision made for the would-be crusaders. But there were, alas, three
times as many vessels as there were men and horses to fill them.--“Ha!
it was a great shame,” bursts out Villeharduin, “that the rest who
went to the other ports did not come here.” The dilemma was a serious
one. Even of those who were there, some declared themselves unable to
pay their passage, and the money could in no way be made up. Some were
for sacrificing their whole estate that the Venetians should not lose
by the defection of the others, but the counsel found small support
among those who now wished to be rid of their bargain. But the small
party who felt themselves, in a sense, the conscience of the Crusade
carried the day. “Rather will we give all we possess and go poor among
the host, than that it should disperse and come to naught; for God
will render it to us at His good pleasure.” So the Counts of Flanders,
Loys, Hues de St. Pol and their party began to collect together all
their goods and all they could borrow. “Then you might have seen a
vast quantity of gold and silver borne to the palace of the Doge to
make payment. And when they had paid, there still was lacking from
the covenant thirty-four thousand marks of silver. And those who had
kept back what they possessed and would give nothing were very glad at
this, for by this means they thought the expedition would have failed.
But God who counsels the disconsolate would not so suffer it.” The
Doge put before his people that not only would their just claim remain
unsatisfied though they should exact from the crusaders the utmost
they could collect, but they would bring discredit on themselves by
acting as strict justice would permit. He suggested the combining of
two advantages, a material and moral. Let them, he suggests, demand the
reconquest of Zara as substitute for the debt, that they may not only
have the fame of possessing the city but the praise of generosity.
And Dandolo, the old wise doughty Doge, has yet another suggestion
to propose. There was a great festival one Sunday in San Marco, and
the citizens and barons and pilgrims were assembled before High Mass
began. Then amid the silent expectation of the great gathering the
Doge mounted the lectern and made the famous offer of his own person
as leader of the host. “‘I am an old man,’ he said, ‘and feeble, and
should be feeling need of repose, for I am infirm in body. But I see
there is none who could so well rule and lead you as I who am your
lord. If you will consent that I take the sign of the Cross to preserve
and guide you, and that my son remain in my stead and keep the city,
I would gladly go to live and die with you and with the pilgrims.’
And when they heard, they cried all with one voice: ‘We pray you for
God’s sake to grant us this, and to do so and to come with us.’ And the
people of the city and the pilgrims, felt deep compassion at this, and
they wept many tears, thinking how that valiant man had so much need
to stay behind, for he was an old man, and though his eyes were still
fair to look on he could not see with them on account of a wound which
he had received in his head. Nevertheless he had a great heart. Ha! how
little they resembled him who had gone to other ports to avoid danger!
So he came from the pulpit and went to the altar and knelt down,
weeping bitterly, and they sewed the cross for him on a great cotton
cap because he desired that the people might see it. And the Venetians
began to take the cross in great numbers, and many on that very day,
and still the number of crusaders was few enough.” It was no wonder
that the pilgrims had great joy in the crusaders for the good will and
valour they felt to be in them. Whatever aim may previously have been
uppermost as an incentive to enthusiasm and self-oblation, there was no
doubt that Venice now was giving of her best. This retiring of the old
Doge from his ducal throne to embark on a more arduous leadership is
one of the most moving episodes in the annals San Marco.
But at this moment an event occurred that changed, or rather diverted
into a new channel the current of the Crusade, providing in fact,
as our chronicler Villeharduin remarks, the true occasion of his
book. Into the midst of the pilgrims assembled at Verona on their
way to Venice there came Alexius, son of Isaac the deposed Emperor
of Constantinople, in quest of help against his usurping uncle. What
more opportune than the neighbouring host of “the most valiant men
on earth” for aiding in the recovery of his lost kingdom and the
reinstatement of his tortured father. To the crusaders, and especially
we may believe, to the Venetians, this new motive did not come amiss.
It is startlingly like life, this Fourth Crusade, with its original
aim thus gradually becoming but a secondary purpose in a far more
complicated scheme, a middle distance in an increasingly extended
horizon. The relief of the Holy Sepulchre, the avenging of the shame of
Christ, assume in fact a rather shadowy outline in a prospect dominated
by Zara and Constantinople.
The departure from Venice did not mark the term of the obstructions
to which the Crusade was fated. The disgraceful contest between the
French and the Venetians within the streets of Zara, the defection of
a number of the pilgrims, the death of others at the hands of the wild
inland inhabitants of Dalmatia--all these causes reduced the already
meagre company before it had well started on its way. The Pope was
placed in the dilemma of strongly disapproving the secular turn given
to the Crusade, while realising that the Venetian fleet was the only
means for accomplishing his ends in Palestine. His solution was to
absolve the barons for the siege of Zara, permitting them still to use
the fleet--though the devil’s instrument--while Venice, the provider,
remained under interdict. We here come into contact with an element
of singular interest in the relations of Venice and the East--her
attitude towards the Papacy. The independence of San Marco was one of
the essential articles of the Venetian creed. In spiritual matters
none could more devoutly bow to the Apostle of Christendom; but the
spiritual supremacy was an inland sea to Venice: it must be stable,
fixed, defined; it must not flow with a tide upon the temporal shores
where her heart and treasure lay. The authority of San Marco was a
political principle. All state ceremonies were bound up with San Marco;
the Ducal Palace itself was subsidiary to the Palace of St. Mark. How
should a State that had sheltered, traditionally at least, a Pope
“stando occulto propter timorem” that had acted as mediator between
Pope and Emperor and seen the Emperor’s head bowed to the ground on the
pavement of San Marco--how should such a State be subordinate to any
rule but its own complete self-consciousness? Venice always followed
the eminently practical rule of allowing much freedom in non-essentials
in order to preserve more closely her control over the really material
issues. The attitude always maintained by her with regard to the
Inquisition is so closely parallel to her relations with the East and
the pagans of the East, constantly deprecated by the Pope, that we may
fitly quote here Paolo Sarpi’s admirable reply to the papal protests
against conferring the doctorate in Padua on Protestants; the principle
is the same, though limited in that instance to a particular and
seemingly divergent issue. “If anyone openly declared his intention
of conferring the doctorate on heretics, or admitted anyone to it who
openly and with scandal professed himself to be such, it might be said
that he had failed to persecute heresy; but, it being the opinion of
the most Serene Republic that heretics and those who are known for
such should not be admitted to the doctorate, and it being our duty
to consider Catholic anyone who does not profess the contrary, no
smallest scandal can accrue to the religion even though it should
chance that one not known for such were to receive the doctorate. The
doctorate in philosophy and medicine is a testimonial that the scholar
is a good philosopher and physician and that he may be admitted to the
practise of that art, and to say that a heretic is a good doctor does
not prejudice the Catholic faith; certainly it would prejudice it if
anyone were to say that such a man was a good theologian.” This was the
position of Venice with regard to her pagan allies, the meaning of her
superbly fitted lodges for Turk, infidel and heretic. The Saracen, the
Turk and the Infidel might not be a good theologian, but he was a good
trader, a channel for the glories with which Venice loved to clothe
and crown herself. He was a part of her life more essentially and more
irrevocably than the prelates of holy Church; his ban would have been
more terrible to Venice than papal thunders. It was not primarily as
hot sons of the Church, consumed with fire for the shame of the Holy
Sepulchre that the Venetians with such generous provision prepared
their ships for the Crusade: it was as men of business with no small
strain of fire in their blood and a high sense of the glorious worth
and destiny of their city.
[Illustration: THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO, LOOKING SOUTH.]
There were moments of inspiration for the Crusaders amid all their
toils and internal strife, and not least was the first view of
Constantinople which had been for so long the emporium of Venice. The
fleet had harboured at the abbey of St. Etienne, three miles from
Constantinople, and Villeharduin describes the wonder and enthusiasm
of those who saw then for the first time the marvellous city “that
was sovereign over all others,” with its rich towers and palaces and
churches and high encircling walls. “And you must know there was no
heart there so daring but trembled.” We are reminded of this picture
of Constantinople when we stand face to face with Carpaccio’s city in
the _Combat of St. George_. It so successfully combines solidity and
strength with the airy joy of watch-towers and towers of pleasure, that
at first we have only the impression of fantastic play of architecture;
but by degrees we come to feel the seacoast country of Carpaccio, that
at first seemed so wild and unmanned, to be in fact bristling with
defence and preparation. It is immensely strong in fortifications, no
dream or fairy citadel. It is begirt with towers and walls along the
water; strongholds lurk among the loftiest crags; towers of defence and
battlements peer over the steep hillside; and, if we look closer, we
see the towers are thronged with men. We remember Villeharduin’s note,
“There were so many men on the walls and on the towers that it seemed
as if they were made of nothing but people.” It is a sumptuous city,
too, that we see in glimpses through the gateway, the city of a great
oriental potentate.
We cannot follow Villeharduin through the vicissitudes of the siege
and counter-siege. He himself confesses in the relation of one point
alone that sixty books would not be able to recount all the words
that were spoken, and the counsels that were given and taken. In the
simple, terse and trenchant style that Frenchmen, and especially the
Frenchmen of the old chronicles, know how to wield so perfectly, he
tells us of the Doge’s wise counsel that the city should be approached
by way of the surrounding islands whence they might gather stores; of
the lords’ neglect of this counsel, “just as if no one of them had
ever heard of it”; of their investment of the palace of Alexius in
the place named Chalcedony, that was “furnished with all the delights
of the human body that could be imagined befitting the dwelling of a
prince”; of the capture of the city and the ravishing of its treasures
that were so great “that no man could come to an end of counting the
silver and the gold and plate and precious stones and samite and silken
cloth and dresses _vaire_ and grey, and ermines and all precious
things that were ever found on earth. And Jofroi de Villeharduin, the
Marshall of Champagne, will bear good witness that to his knowledge
since the centuries began there was never so great gain in a single
city.” The division of the booty necessarily occasioned heart-burning
and revealed certain vices of “covetoise” undreamed before. And as time
went on and still the passage to Palestine was delayed the sanctuaries
of the Greek Church were treated with barbarous irreverence and
despoiled of their treasure and sacred vessels. Then with the retaking
of Constantinople from Marzuflo there followed a time of abandonment
of men and leaders to their fiercest passions and the almost total
destruction of the city. Here again Venice stepped in, as the merchant
had stepped in to rescue treasure from the pile of Savonarola, to
enrich herself from the ruins of Constantinople.
The taking of Constantinople opened another door into the Eastern
garden from which Venice had already begun to gather so rich an
harvest. Picture the freights that Venetian vessels were bearing home
in these years of crusade and conquest, to be gathered finally into
the garner of St. Mark’s! It is strangely thrilling to imagine the
first welcome of the four bronze horses, travel-dimmed no doubt, who
only found their way to their present station on the forefront of St.
Mark’s after standing many times in peril of being melted down in the
Arsenal where they first were stored. But at last, says Sansovino,
their beauty was recognised and they were placed on the church. It
is only by degrees that we come to accost and know the exiles one by
one. The more outstanding spoils, the Pala d’Oro, the great pillars
of Acri, the bronze doors, the horses, the four embracing kings,
these are among the first letters of St. Mark’s oriental alphabet; but
there are many lesser exiles which have found a shelter in the port of
Venice, which as we wander among the glorious precincts of San Marco
impress themselves upon us one by one; such is the grave-browed, noble
head of porphyry that keeps solitary watch towards the waters from
the south corner of the outer gallery of San Marco, as if it had been
set down a moment by its sculptor and forgotten on the white, marble
balustrade. The whole being of San Marco is bound up with the East,
and it is another token of the magic of Venice that she has been able
to embrace and furnish with a life-giving soil those plants that had
been ruthlessly uprooted and had made so long and perilous a journey.
The official records, that tell of the arrival from one expedition and
another of Eastern vestures for the clothing of San Marco, are not mere
inventories to us who have walked upon the variegated pavement between
the solemn pillars and seen the sunlight illumine one by one the
marbles of the walls, with their imbedded sculpture and mosaic, or gild
the depths of the storied cupolas and the luxuriant harmonies of colour
and design on the recesses of the windows. They are significant, these
records, like the entry in a parish register of the birth of some one
whom we love; for the church of San Marco, though in fact a museum of
many treasures, is not a museum of foreign treasures. Her spoils are
not hung up in her as aliens like the spoils that conquerors bore to
ancient temples; they found her a foster-mother of their own blood and
kin. She herself is sprung from a plant whose first flowering was not
among the floating marshes of the lagoon.
[Illustration:
_By permission of the Hon. John Collier._
THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO, LOOKING NORTH.]
Turn, on a sunny day, from the Molo towards San Marco, passing below
the portico of the Ducal Palace adjoining the Piazzetta. Framed by the
pointed arch at the end is a portion of the wall which once formed
the west tower of the Ducal Palace. This delicate harmony of coloured
marbles and sculptured stone seems a rare and beautiful creation, not
of stone but of something more plastic, more mobile, so responsive is
it to the light, so luminous, so full of feeling. As we draw nearer and
it becomes more clearly defined, we see great slabs of marble sawn and
spread open like the pages of a book, corresponding in pattern as the
veining of a leaf. They are linked by marble rope-work, and between
them are inserted smaller slabs of delicately sculptured stone and a
wonderful coil of mosaic. It is a veritable patchwork wall, but no
less beautiful in its effect of harmony than in its details--the four
porphyry figures of embracing kings its corner-stone. This wall is
truly a key to the fabric of the church itself; it is like a window
into St. Mark’s, that treasury of Eastern spoil; the East is in every
vein, in every heart-beat of it. The spoil of the temples of ancient
gods furnished forth the Church of San Marco as it furnished the saint
himself. In this one angle we have cipollino and porphyry, serpentine
and verd-antico, marmo greco and eastern mosaic, pillars of granite
profound and glittering, breccia africana and paonazetto. The weight
of centuries is upon it all; ages of lives have gone to its making,
and it came to Venice only when generations had passed over its head.
For the human race it has never been but old; the mind loses itself in
speculation on that stupendous past that lies between us and the time
when stone was not. And yet how strangely through that long, enchanted
silence, when the centuries were endowing it with an immensity of
strength and hardness and endurance for which we have no word of
parallel but in its own nature, it has kept the similitude and mobility
of life, at once withholding and revealing the riches of its beauty.
How can we wonder that da Contarini, the strange and learned dreamer
of the Cinquecento, burst out into a rapture of mystic joy in the
presence of San Marco, “that golden church, built by the eternal gods,
of our protector, Messer San Marco”? He celebrates the pinnacles and
shining columns, the throng of glittering figures that burn like golden
spirits in the sunlight, the sculptured marbles polished with soft
Ethiopian sand. “It might be said that it has been gathered together
from all parts of the world.” He then proceeds to seek among the
marbles of San Marco those mysterious correspondences which the wonder
of men has always felt to exist between human nature and the nature of
the stone; he loses himself in contemplation of one after another of
the precious marbles that in wide surface or minute mosaic form the
priceless garment of St. Mark’s temple: diaspro, which must be seen in
broad extent to realise its strange radiance, like flocks of cloudlets
fleeting before the wind in the full illumination of the setting sun,
dazzling our eyes with light; or that other adamantine marble of
Africa, the breccia adriana di Tegoli, a harmony of greens before which
serpentine and verd-antico must bow; or the most precious porpora of
deep and glowing red; or that queen of all the stones, imperial in its
beauty, a magnetic stone indeed, drawing the spirit into its luminous
depths, weaving round it an enchanted web of secrecy, of divine
inter-relations, till the human soul seems to commune with the very
soul of colour--_diaspro sanguinoso_. What would not Sir Thomas Browne
have read in those eloquent and secret pages where wave follows wave of
colour, deep ocean green, pure carmine, translucent amethyst. Diaspro
sanguinoso! in the setting of a ring, in the mosaic of a pavement, it
is seen a dense green stone spotted with crimson--bloodstone. It is
as if you saw the human eye in one of those weird, symbolic paintings
of old time, isolated in its socket without the illumination of the
human countenance about it. This sanguinary jasper is too subtle, too
delicate, too mystical to belong to that titanic family of the stones
of Africa. The dreaming soil of Egypt might have given it birth; it
might own kinship with the myth of Aurora’s kiss; but to us it seems
fraught with the magic of a more distant East.
There have been many vindicators of the freedom of Venice; many
assertors that, though in appearance subject some time to Byzantium,
she has always been politically independent. To us it seems a matter
of lesser moment; but whether, in fact or in form, Venice were or
were not ever politically dependent on Byzantium, the fact of her
artistic dependence is one which she cannot deny without perjuring
herself before a thousand witnesses. Document after document more
durable than parchment--though many have already perished and many
perish daily--attests the debt of Venice to the East. Till she perish
altogether at the hands of a relentless, unregarding tyrant--a bastard
child of Time misnamed Progress--she must continue to bear witness to
her debt. So long as she breathes, each breath confesses it and the
East will lay her tribute on the tomb of Venice dead--lamenting as for
one of her own children.
Chapter Seven
TWO VENETIAN STATUES
In two of the public squares of Venice the statues, in bronze, of two
of her heroes are set up, the one of a man of war, the other of a
comedian: in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo the statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni, in the Campo di San Bartolomeo that of Carlo Goldoni. The
first is a warrior on horseback in full armour, uplifted high above
the square, disdaining the companionship of the puny mortals who
saunter without a purpose to and fro under his feet. Horse and rider
stand self-sufficient and alone; one spirit breathes in both: in the
contour of the stern face of the warrior, with its massive chin and
proudly disdainful lip, in his throat with the muscles standing out
like ropes upon it, and in the sweep of his capacious brow, under which
the keenly penetrating eyes hold their object in a grip of iron; and,
for the horse, in every line of his superbly curving neck, in the acute
serenity of his down-looking eye, and in each curling lock of his mane
that seem as if moved together by one controlling impulse. How clear
the outline of his skull, everywhere visible beneath its fine covering
of flesh and muscle! and his body, like the body of his master, how
perfectly responsive an instrument it is! There is nothing here of
that wild disorder of the beast untamed, which is mistaken sometimes
for strength. The hand of Colleoni is light upon the bridle, the horse
glories in a subjection that is itself a triumph: he and his master are
one. Do but compare this for a moment with the prodigious mass, the
plunging man and beast, that overlook the Riva degli Schiavoni--Victor
Emanuel on horseback. It is not altogether an arbitrary contrast; the
two great monuments seem to represent Venice before the fall and Venice
after. What unity of purpose, what hope of conquest is there in those
monstrous figures on the Riva? Beneath this redundancy of flesh and
armour how shall they prevail against the world? They are not only
different in degree, they are of a different species from Verocchio’s
horse and rider. The spirit of the first Renaissance is in every line
of his great statue--its strength, agility and decorative skill. How
studied is the symmetry, the static perfection of the whole! how
strongly and yet how delicately he emphasises the rectangular framework
of the design! The rod of Colleoni, the trappings of his horse, the
tail and legs and body-line--each is made contributive, while the
backward poise of the rider balances the forward motion of the horse,
and all is thus drawn into the scheme. It is all willed, but with that
spontaneity of will which men call inspiration.
This statue, which so marvellously sums up in sculpture the central aim
of Venice as a state in the fifteenth century, offers an instructive
contrast to that in the Campo di San Bartolomeo, where the comedian
Goldoni, though raised above the level of the square, still seems a
companionable part of the life that passes around him, moving in its
midst as he moved amid the life of the eighteenth century in Venice,
meditating upon it, observing, loving it, faithfully and fearlessly
recording it. Marked by a realistic fidelity and insight worthy of a
greater age, Dal Zotto’s statue of Goldoni is in its own way itself a
masterpiece and one of the noblest works of modern art in Venice, full
of sympathy and understanding and admirable in execution. The sculptor
might seem to have lived as an intimate with Goldoni, and the realism
of his treatment suits the subject singularly well. The comedian is not
aloft upon a pedestal, remote from men, in glorious aloofness; he is
raised but slightly above our heads, not much observed of the crowd,
but observing all. Briskly he steps along, in buckled shoes, frilled
shirt and neckerchief, his coat flying open, and a book or manuscript
bulging from the pocket of it, his waistcoat slackly buttoned, his
cocked hat tipped jauntily upon his forehead over his powdered periwig.
As he goes he crushes his gloves with one hand at his back and with the
other marks progress with his cane. It is a strong, taut little figure,
tending to roundness, with a world of suggestiveness in every motion,
an admirable mingling of thought and humour in the face that laughs
down on this strange, grotesque, conventional, lovable Venice. What
a strange contrast is this, of the slippered sage of the eighteenth
century, who houses the swallows in the loose folds of his slouch hat,
and the armed hero of the fifteenth, whose every muscle is alert,
responsive to the stern controlling will! Goldoni is a sage upon a
different platform, meditating upon a different world. His Venice is
the Venice of Longhi; she has become pedestrian; she has become a
theme for comedy. Comedy might have found plentiful food, no doubt,
in the Venice that employed Colleoni, the Venice of the first great
painters. There is a fund of humour and whimsicality in the strangely
fascinating faces of Carpaccio’s citizens. Yet try to picture them held
up to ridicule by one of themselves upon the stage, and the imagination
faints; the thing is inconceivable. In Goldoni’s age the interest of
life was shifted to another field, and he stands as the central figure,
the leader in a new campaign, representative not of its vices or its
vanities or its follies, but of the solid virtues of which these are
the shady side. He is one of those happy spirits which the reactionary
age of small things produced, not only in Italy but everywhere in
the eighteenth century; a spirit of clear, calm insight and capable
judgment, neither enamoured of the life of his small circle nor
embittered against it, content to live in the midst of it in serenity
and truth.
Goldoni, Colleoni, each is representative of a period in the history
of the Republic, periods widely separated in temper and in time, and
yet related intimately; so intimately indeed that the period of which
Goldoni is the master-spirit is actually foreshadowed in the very
presence of the superb warrior of the other public square. To study the
process of the growth and the decadence of the Republic is to find that
there is no convenient preconceived theory with which it will fit in;
it rebels against such manipulation, as everything individual rebels
against the ready-made. We need rather to look upon Venice as upon a
plant that springs and comes to its perfection and fades slowly away,
changing and developing in indefinable gradations, showing at every
stage some surprising revival from the past, some strange anticipation
of the future. In the fifteenth century itself, while the earliest
artists were at work for Venice at Murano, and Carpaccio was as yet
unborn, Venice already bore about with her the seeds of her decay.
In fact, the growth of her art coincides with the slow relaxation of
her hold upon the bulwarks of her policy both at home and abroad.
The election of Foscari as Doge in 1423 marks a moment of change in
Venetian life and government, indicated by the substitution of the
title Signoria for that of Commune Venetiarum, and by the abolition of
the _arengo_--yet Carpaccio has still his grave citizens to portray,
and Ursula sleeping the sleep of infancy. Among the exhortations which
tradition has handed down to us as addressed from time to time to the
Venetians by Doge or by ambassador is that supposed to have been spoken
on his death-bed by Foscari’s precursor, the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo. It
might have been spoken for our instruction, instead of as a reminder
to his own subjects of what they knew so well, so vivid an impression
is to be derived from it of the inner life of Venice during the first
thirty years of the fifteenth century. Whether legendary or not, these
exhortations have something significant and individual about them
which really illuminates; it is as if a light were suddenly flashed
into a vast room, pressing our vision upon one point, providing a
nucleus of knowledge about which scattered ideas and impressions may
group themselves intelligibly. Whatever they are, they are not the
fabrication of a later time which has lost understanding of the spirit
that animated the past. If the portrait they give is imaginary, they
have seized upon the salient features and endowed them with a vitality
which the photograph, however literal, too often lacks. Mocenigo’s
farewell address is an impressive portico opening upon a new period
in the career of Venice, a strange trumpet-note of ill omen on the
threshold of her greatest glory. Behold, he says, the fulness of the
life you have achieved, of the riches you have stored; turn now and
preserve it; there is peril in the path beyond; there is twilight and
decay and death. Your eyes, full of the light, have no knowledge of the
shadow; but mine, dim now with age, have known it, and its grip is
upon my limbs. Venice heard but might not heed his warnings. The sun
himself must rise and fulfil his day and set. Decay is in each breath
that the plant draws in; it cannot crystallise the moment; inexorably
it is drawn onwards to maturity and death. It was inevitable for Venice
that as her strength increased her responsibilities should increase
with it; perforce she must turn her face to land as well as sea. She
could not remain alone, intent only on nourishing and developing her
individual life. In proportion to her greatness she must attract others
to her, and the circle of her influence must widen till it passed
beyond her own control. The dying words of Mocenigo came too late.
A temporary delay there might have been; there was no turning back.
Venice had been drawn already into the vortex of European mainland
politics, and she could not stand aside. In our own colonial policy we
are continually confronted with the problem of aggression and defence.
In reality there is no boundary between the two, or the boundary, if
it exists, is so fine that the events of a moment may obliterate it.
St. Theodore carries his shield in his right hand and his spear in the
left; and an old chronicler of Venetian glory interprets the action as
symbolising the predominance of defence in his warrior’s ideal. Doge
Tommaso Mocenigo would have approved the interpretation. But spear and
shield cannot exchange their functions. Until the spear is laid aside,
it will insist on leading; and Venice had not laid aside the spear, she
had furnished herself anew.
“In my time,” says Mocenigo, after a pathetic preliminary avowal of
his obligations to Venice and of the humble efforts he had made to
discharge them, “in my time, our loan has been reduced by four millions
of ducats, but six millions still are lacking for the debt incurred in
the war with Padua, Vicenza, Verona.... This city of ours sends out at
present ten million ducats every year for its trade in different parts
of the world, with ships and galleys and the necessary appointments to
the value of not less than two million ducats. In this city are three
thousand vessels of from one to two hundred anforas burden, carrying
sixteen thousand mariners: there are three hundred vessels which
alone carry eight thousand mariners more. Every year sail forty-five
galleys, counting small and great craft, and these take eleven thousand
mariners, three thousand captains and three thousand calkers. There
are three thousand weavers of silk garments and sixteen thousand of
fustian.... There are one thousand gentlemen with incomes ranging from
seven hundred to four thousand ducats. If you go on in this way, you
will increase from good to better, you will be lords of riches and of
Christendom. But beware, as of fire, of taking what belongs to others
and making unjust war, for these are errors that God cannot tolerate
in princes. It is known to all that the war with the Turk has made you
brave and valorous by sea, ... and in these years you have so acted
that the world has judged you the leaders of Christendom. You have
many men experienced in embassies and government, men who are perfect
orators. You have many doctors in diverse sciences, lawyers above all,
and for this reason many foreigners come to you for judgement in their
differences and abide by your decisions. Take heed, therefore, how you
govern such a state as this, and be careful to give it your counsel
and your warning, lest ever by negligence it suffer loss of power. And
it behoves you earnestly to advise whoever succeeds me in this place,
because through him the Republic may receive much good and much harm.
Many of you incline to Messer Marino Caravello; he is a worthy man and
for his worthy qualities deserves that rank. Messer Francesco Bembo
is an honest man, and so is Messer Giacomo Trevisan. Messer Antonio
Contarini, Messer Faustin Michiel, Messer Alban Badoer, all these
are wise and merit it. Many incline to Messer Francesco Foscari, not
knowing that he is an ambitious man and a liar, without a basis to his
actions. His intellect is flighty; he embraces much and holds little.
If he is Doge, you will always be at war. The possessor of ten thousand
ducats will be master but of one. You will spend gold and silver. You
will be robbed of your reputation and your honour. You will be vassals
of infantry and captains and men-at-arms. I could not restrain myself
from giving you my opinion. God help you to choose the best, and rule
and keep you in peace.”
Mocenigo’s warning was disregarded. But although Foscari was made Doge,
Venice did not rush into war. In spite of repeated efforts on the part
of the Florentines to secure an alliance, the traditions of the old
peace policy were tenaciously adhered to during the first years of the
new reign. It was the temptation to secure Carmagnola as leader of
her forces which finally overcame her scruples. Foscari’s discourse
on this occasion, as reported by Romanin, is a curiously specious
mingling of philanthropy and self-interest. Reading between the lines,
we understand from it something of Mocenigo’s fears at the prospect
of his election. The passion of empire is in his heart. Venice, whom
eulogists loved to represent as the bulwark of Europe against the
infidel, is now to be the champion of down-trodden Florence. It is the
sword of justice that she is to wield. We are reminded of Veronese’s
allegory--Venice seated upon the world, robed in ermine and scarlet,
her silver and her gold about her, her breast clasped with a jewelled
buckler, round her neck the rich pearls of her own island fabric, on
her head the royal crown. Her face is in the shadow of her gilded
throne and of the folds of the stiff rose satin curtain, as she looks
out over the world, over the universe, from her lofty seat on the dark
azure globe. The lion, the sword and the olive branch are at her feet.
What is she dreaming of, this Venice of the soft, round, shadowed face?
Is it of peace, or of new empire? Is it to the olive bough or to the
sword of justice that she inclines? In a neighbouring fresco, Neptune,
brooding in profound abstraction beside his trident, deputes to the
lion his watch; but Mars of the mainland is alert, on foot, and his
charger’s head from above him breathes fire upon his brow.
“You will be the vassals of captains and men-at-arms.” There was a note
of prophecy in Mocenigo’s closing words, and it is indeed a question,
in face of Verocchio’s superb warrior--who was the prince and who
the vassal, who the servant and who the master. Colleoni’s triumph
at his grand reception in Venice can scarcely have been the triumph
of a mere man-at-arms. Studying the magnificent reserve of strength
in his grandly moulded face and neck, we feel Venice must rather
have acknowledged that an Emperor had descended in her midst. Little
wonder that such a man dared ask a place on the Piazza of St. Mark
itself! The period of his command embraced some of the most brilliant
successes of the Venetian arms on land. Difficulties and perils that
seemed insurmountable were yet surmounted by a mind possessed of
supreme qualities of judgment, daring and nobility. Singularly akin,
indeed, to Venice herself was this man who had a key to the minds of
his antagonists, who read their secrets and forestalled their actions:
it is not strange that he was dear to her. Though a professional
soldier and no Venetian born, he could act as a worthy representative
of Venice, and there might seem small fear of ruin for a Republic that
could so choose her servants. But Colleoni had fought against the Lion
and set his foot upon its neck, and the Lion had been constrained to
turn and ask his service of him, the highest tribute it could offer,
the completest confession of its defeat. And Colleoni could respect
and be faithful to such a paymaster: for twenty years he led the
Republic on land, and was never called to render an account before her
judgment-seat. Magnanimously at his death he absolves her of all her
debts to him, makes her two grand donations, then, by his own wish,
towers over Venice, a paid alien, her virtual master, yet such a master
as she was proud to serve. We wonder if this thought came ever to the
mind of Verocchio, the Florentine, as he moulded the great figure of
the hero: did the imagination please him of Venice the vassal, Venice
subjected beneath the horse and his rider?
There was a fête given in honour of Colleoni at Venice in 1455, on
the occasion of the bestowing on him the staff of supreme command.
To Spino, Colleoni’s enthusiastic biographer and fellow citizen, the
episode was portentous, as to one unfamiliar with Venetian traditions
in this respect. It had, indeed, a significance he did not dream of;
it was the reception not of a victorious fleet, not of an admiring
monarch or fugitive pope, but of an army of mercenaries and their
leader. Spino tells how Colleoni was accompanied by an escort of the
chief citizens of Bergamo, Brescia and other cities of the kingdom that
had been committed to his charge; how barges over a thousand were sent
from Venice to fetch him and his party from Marghera; how the Venetians
came out in flocks to meet him in gondolas and sandolos to the sound
of trumpets and other instruments of music, preceded by _three_ ships
called _bucintori_, “of marvellous workmanship and grandeur,” in which
were the Doge and Signoria, the senate and other magistrates; and
how ambassadors of kings and princes and subject states came to do
homage to the new Serenissimo Pasqual Malipiero. He tells, as all the
chroniclers of festivals at Venice tell, of the throngs, not only on
windows and upon the fondamentas, but upon the house roofs along the
Grand Canal; of Colleoni’s reception at San Marco and the display of
the sacred treasures at the high altar; and how, as he knelt before
the Doge, the staff of his office was bestowed upon him with these
words, “By the authority and decree of the most excellent city of
Venice, of us the Doge and of the Senate, ruler and captain-general of
all our men and arms on land shalt thou be. Take from our hands this
military staff, with good presage and fortune, as emblem of thy power,
to maintain and defend the majesty, the faith and the judgments of
this State with dignity and with decorum by thy care and charge.” For
ten days the festivals continued with jousts and tournaments and feats
of arms. But all was not fêting and merriment. Colleoni held grave
discourses also with the Padri, and “their spirits were confirmed by
him,” says Spino, “in safety and great confidence.”
[Illustration: IN THE PIAZZA.]
The Venice who could thus do honour to Colleoni her general was a
superb Venice, superb as Colleoni himself who in his castle of Malpaga
received not only embassies from kings but kings themselves; who, at
the visit of Cristierino, King of Dacia, came out to meet him “on
a great courser, caparisoned and equipped for war, and he, all but
his head, imperially clad in complete armour, attended only by two
standard-bearers carrying his helm and lance, while a little further
behind followed his whole company of six hundred horse in battle array,
with his condottieri and his squadrons, all gloriously and most nobly
armed and mounted, with flags flying and the sound of trumpets”; who,
besides making rich provision for all his children, built churches,
endowed monasteries and left to the Venetians, after cancelling all
their debts to him, one hundred thousand ducats of gold. The Venice
that employed Colleoni was superb--we have a record of her living
features in Gentile Bellini’s marvellous presentment of the procession
in St. Mark’s square--the brain as flexible, the jaws as rigid as
those of the mighty warrior Verocchio conceived. Yet Spino’s comment
on the last tribute paid by the Venetians to their general gives us
pause--“confessing to have lost the defender of their liberty.” It was
a confession which could still clothe itself triumphantly in the great
bronze statue, but there is an omen in the words. In this confession of
1496 is foreshadowed the fall of 1796.
Much has been written of the social life of this Venice of the Fall;
there are countless sources for its history in the letters, diaries
and memoirs of its citizens and of its visitors, reputable and
disreputable; richest sources of all, there are the pictures of Longhi,
the comedies of Goldoni. But of the Venice that lay behind this small
round of conventions and refinements, laxity and tyranny, perhaps
less has been said. Of many avenues by which it might be approached
we shall choose one, and since the praise of Colleoni has drawn our
attention to the foundations of Venetian power on land, nothing will
better serve our purpose than the foundation of her power by sea, that
Arsenal which Sansovino described as “the basis and groundwork of the
greatness of this Republic, as well as the honour of all Italy.” The
Arsenal was, next to San Marco, perhaps the sanctuary of Venetian
faith. It was far more than a mere manufactory of arms and battleships.
In the celebration of the Sensa its workmen held the post of honour,
the rowing of the Bucintoro. Its officers were among the most reputed
in the State. The Council of Ten had a room within its precincts. It
was entered by a superb triumphal arch, a sight which none who visited
Venice must miss. The condition of the Arsenal may well be taken as an
index to the condition of Venice herself.
We may set side by side two pictures of the Arsenal, one drawn from
a curious little work of early seventeenth century, a time at which,
though Venice was moving down the path of her decay, the glorious
traditions of the past still found renewal in her present life, and the
Venetian fleet was still a triumphant symbol of Venetian greatness; the
other from the reports of her officials in the last years before her
death. Luca Assarino was one of many guests who had to say to Venice,
or to the Doge her representative, “My intellect staggers under the
weight of a memory laden with surpassing favours. You received me into
your house, did me honour, assisted me, protected me. You clothed
yourself in my desires, and promoted them on every occasion; and this
not only without having had of me any cause to honour me so highly,
but even without having ever seen me.” He feels he cannot better
discharge the burden of his gratitude than by shaping some of the
emotions inspired in him by his visit to the Arsenal. There is a touch
of sympathy and sometimes even a touch of truth and insight under the
extravagantly symbolic garb of his appreciation. “Admiring first of all
an immense number of porticoes, where as in vast maternal wombs I saw
in embryo the galleys whose bodies were being framed, I realised that
I was in the country of vessels, the fatherland of galleons, and that
those masses were so formidable as to show themselves warriors even in
their birth, fortifying themselves with countless nails and arming thus
their very vitals with iron. I considered them as wandering islands,
which, united, compose the continent of Venetian glory, the mainland
of the rule of Christendom. I admired with joy the height of their
masts and the size of their sailyards, and I called them forests under
whose shade the Empire of the sea reposed and the hopes of the Catholic
religion were fortified. And who, I said to myself, can deny that this
Republic has subjugated the element of water, when none of her citizens
can walk abroad, but that the water, as if vanquished, kisses his feet
at every step?” Like all recorders of the glories of Venice, he is
struck dumb at certain points by fear of the charge of fabling, but,
collecting himself, he proceeds to speak of the trophies and relics,
the rows of cuirasses, helmets and swords that remained as “iron
memorials to arm the years against oblivion of Venetian greatness. What
revolutions of the world, what accidents, what mutations of state, what
lakes of tears and blood did not the dim lightnings of those fierce
habiliments present to the eye of the observer?... I saw the remains of
the Venetian fleet, vessels, that, as old men, weighted no less with
years than glory, reposed under the magnificence of the arches which
might well be called triumphal arches. I saw part of those galleons to
which Christianity confesses the debt of her preservation.... And last,
I saw below the water so great a quantity of the planks from which
vessels afterwards are made, that one might truly call it a treasury
hidden in the entrails of a lake. I perceived that these, as novices
in swimming, remained first a century below the surface, to float
after for an eternity of centuries; and I remarked that they began
by acquiring citizenship in that lake, to end by showing themselves
patricians throughout the seas, and that there was good reason they
should plant their roots well under water, for they were the trees
on which the liberty of Venice was to flower.” In his peroration the
eulogist strikes a deeper note. “May it please Almighty God to preserve
you to a longest eternity; and as of old the nations surrounding you
had so high an opinion of your integrity and justice that they came to
you for judgment of their weightiest and most important cases, so may
heaven grant that the whole of Christendom may resort always to your
threshold to learn the laws of good government.”
We think sadly of his prayer among the records of abuse and corruption
in the Arsenal of two centuries later; the Venetian lawyers were still
renowned among the lawyers of the world, but the State was no longer
capable of teaching the laws of good government to Christendom. The
theatre, the coffee-house, the _ridotto_, the gay _villeggiatura_ were
now the main channels of her activity; the tide of life had flowed
back from the Arsenal and left it a sluggish marsh. In the arts of
shipbuilding no advance had been made, and the cause lay chiefly in
an extraordinary slackness of discipline by which workmen were first
allowed to serve in alternation and in the end were asked for only
one day’s service in the month. Many youths who had not even seen the
Arsenal were in receipt of a stipend as apprentices, in virtue of
hereditary right. Martinelli tells of porters, valets, novices and even
of a pantaloon in a troop of comic actors who were thus pleasantly
provided for. There was a scarcity of tools, and even the men in daily
attendance at the Arsenal spent their time in idle lounging and often
in still more mischievous occupations for lack of anything better to
do; disobedience and disloyalty were rife. The Arsenal was used by many
as a place of winter resort, as workhouses by the tramps of to-day,
and the wood stored for shipbuilding was consumed in fires for warming
these unbidden guests, or made up into articles of furniture for sale
in the open market. The report of the Inquisitors of the Arsenal,
dated March 1, 1874, which Martinelli quotes, is indeed a terrible
confession: “One sad experience clearly shows that the smallest
concession ... becomes rapidly transformed into unbridled licence.
Not to mention the immense piles of shavings, from sixty to seventy
thousand vast bundles of wood disappear annually. The wastage of so
great a mass of wood, more than the equivalent of the complete outfit
of ten or twelve entire ships of the line, is not to be accounted for
under legitimate refuse of normal work, but points plainly to the
voluntary destruction of undamaged and precious material.” It is
scarcely surprising that with so little care for the preservation of
discipline in the Arsenal and for the efficiency of its workmen Venice
fell behind. The Arsenal had indeed become, as Martinelli says, “a
monument of the generous conceptions of the past--a monument, like the
church and campanile of San Marco, beautiful, admirable, glorious, but
as completely incapable as they of offering any service to the State.”
Similar abuses existed also in the manning of the ships. The officers
were for the most part idle and incompetent, and the despatches of the
Provveditori are a tissue of lamentable statements as to the depression
of that which had been, and while Venice was to retain her supremacy,
must ever be, the mainstay of her power. There is desertion among the
crews and operatives; the outfit provided for them is unsuitable and
inadequate. Nicolò Erizzo, Provveditor Extraordinary to the Islands of
the Levant, concludes a despatch, dated October 30, 1764, as follows:
“Thus it comes about that your Excellencies have no efficient and
capable officers of marine, and if an occasion were ever to arise
when it were necessary to send them to some distant part, let me not
be deemed presumptuous if I venture frankly to assure you that they
would be in great straits. I had a proof of the truth of this when I
launched the galley recently built; for the officers themselves begged
me to put a ship’s captain on board, since at a little distance from
land they did not trust themselves, nor did they blush to confess it in
making this request.”
It was ten years earlier, in 1744, that the Ridotto, or great public
gaming-house, was closed in Venice by order of the Great Council, and
the Venetians, their chief occupation gone, were reduced to melancholy
peregrination of the Piazza. “They have all become hypochondriacs,”
writes Madame Sara Gondar. “The Jews are as yellow as melons; the
mask-sellers are dying of starvation; and wrinkles are growing on the
hands of many a poor old nobleman who has been in the habit of dealing
cards ten hours a day. Vice is absolutely necessary to the activity of
a state.” This then is the Venice against which Goldoni stands out;
and after all, the essential difference between the world reflected
in his comedies and that world of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio,
which was Colleoni’s world, is a difference of horizon. There is an
epic grandeur about Carpaccio’s world: heroes stride across it, with
lesser men and lesser interests in their train. The small affairs of
life are not neglected. There is the Company of the Stocking, who
discuss their peculiar device and the articles of their order with the
grave elaboration of State councillors. Venice was always interested
in matters of detail. But in Colleoni’s day the same seriousness of
purpose was available when larger issues were discerned: in Goldoni’s
the power to discern larger issues has disappeared. The Venetians,
lords once of the sea, can still take interest in their stockings,
but they can take interest in nothing else. The Lilliputians are
in possession. Goldoni does not quarrel with his age for not being
monumental, and we shall do well to follow his example and make our
peace with it. He looks upon the clubs of freemasons, the pedantic
literary reformers, the false romanticists, the bourgeois tyrants and
masquerading ladies, with a serene and indulgent smile. In his famous
literary dispute with Gozzi he maintains before his fiery opponent the
calm and level countenance of truth. The battles rage around him, but
he stands firm and unassailable, as Colleoni himself may once have
stood in the midst of battles how different, waged in how different a
world!
Chapter Eight
VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART I)
In Venice it is difficult to make choice of one route rather than
another, when the means of transit is indeed an end in itself, and
in some degree the same delight awaits us on every way we choose. We
may pass hours on the Grand Canal merely combining enjoyment of its
changefulness with a welcome monotony of rest; every moment the water
is expressive, every moment it lives under some new impulse and reveals
itself afresh. Carpaccio’s picture, _The Miracle of the Holy Cross_, is
a marvellous rendering of the life of the Grand Canal; we are reminded
of it again and again as we turn into the noble sweep of the waters at
the angle of the Cà Foscari. The spirit and motion of Venice seem to be
concentrated in the picture--the dark water alive with many gondolas,
the fascination of the rhythmic movements of the rowers, at rest or
sharply turning or slowly propelling. It has caught and embodied the
genius of the canal--that ceaseless change and variation of angle
which keeps it springing and full of life; that flowing spirit which
unifies the palaces and waters of Venice in a conspiracy of beauty.
Our gondola in some mysterious way enrols us in this conspiracy;
through its motion we consent to the spirit of the place. We are not
onlookers merely; the gondola pulses with the life of Venice; it is an
instrument of her being. We feel as we move along that we are needed
in the spectacle of Venice, that we have a share in the equilibrium
which is of the essence of her power. There is no means of city transit
that we can imagine to rival the gondola in its freedom from noise
and jostling, in its realisation of comfort. But there are other
reasons why it must remain the essential means of passage in Venice.
From the gondola alone can we hope to realise how the city stands
amid its waters, how living the relation between land and water is.
These are not canals in the common sense of the word; they are living
streams flowing among islands, each of which is individual, irregular,
unique. Venice is not a tract of land cut into sections, large or
small, by water, as is an inland city by its streets. A most vigilant
watch was kept over the building of the houses that they should not
transgress the law of the waters nor interfere with the relation of
their currents to the islands. And this vigilance, perhaps, combined
with the desire of each owner of land to make use of it to the last
fragment, is responsible for the irregularities and varieties of angle
which make the houses of Venice more individual than those of any other
city. Usually a wall when it has once displayed to us its surface has
finished its confidences; it has no reserves, no allurements; it is
rigid and uncompromising. But one that breaks from the level, inclining
its proud profile in response to the tide of the waterway below it,
is a wall of far greater and more individual resources. It is only
by gondola that we can appreciate this strong element of personality
in the houses, and only by journeying in a gondola that we can learn
to appreciate the individuality of the different quarters of Venice.
It is not merely that one is peopled by the rich, another by the
poor; that one region abounds in ancient palaces, another in modern
buildings; nor that peculiar treasures of art are associated with
each. Their characters are divergent. From the canals we realise that
Venice is built upon separate islands and we see their diversity. The
parochial divisions of the sestieri do not exactly follow the shape of
the islands, but roughly speaking we shall find the waterways in the
district covered by each sestiere distinctive in character. Castello
and Cannaregio, San Polo and Dorsoduro, each has its own recognisable
method of curve, broad or narrow, wayward or orderly.
[Illustration: VIEW ON GRAND CANAL FROM SAN ANGELO.]
The last joy of one who has lived long in Venice, as well as the
first of the new-comer, will be a gondola journey. It is impossible
to exhaust the certain beauties of even a side canal, not to speak
of its casual surprises. If we are in haste and time is precious, we
do better to make our way over bridge and calle with what dexterity
and speed we can; for it is an insult to ask haste of the gondola.
Yet, if we accept in the right spirit the extraordinary delays and
dilemmas of traffic--immense, interminable barges suddenly blocking
the entire canal, or a flock of gondolas and sandolos in seemingly
inextricable confusion--we shall always have our reward; not only the
pleasure of watching the riddle of passage solve itself, thanks to
the seeming elasticity of the rio, but a glint of sun-jewels on a new
angle of the waters, some richness of ornament on house or bridge, some
relic of ancient Venice, some name of calle or rio will break upon
us with a fresh revelation. We cannot come to the end of Venice; she
is inexhaustible: stealing about among the sudden shadows and broken
lights of her waterways, sweeping in full, swift tide round unexpected
corners and under diminished bridges, some new idea breaks upon us
unawares with irresistible persuasion. We cannot define its meaning;
we cannot say why details in Venice have so great a significance. A
window opened suddenly in one of the palaces at night--why does it
seem so portentous? It is another of the manifold gifts of the waters
to Venice, this gift of distinction. Venice is not like other cities
in which a thousand acts pass unnoted. She has the distinction of a
unique individual whose smallest action is fraught with a strange
immaterial fragrance that is unmistakably its own. We cannot analyse
the fragrance; we only recognise that it is a spiritual gift; it
emanates only from subtle and penetrating natures; it is the aroma of
life itself. To it we owe the strange excitement that invades us in
Venetian waters, and makes a gondola tour far more than a novel mode of
traversing a city. As we watch the citizens of Venice from the water,
see them crossing a bridge, pausing to lean over, or carried in the
stream of passengers, they too seem endowed with a singular vitality;
their passing and their standing still appear alike purposeful and
portentous. What history might not be written by questioning the
windows that look out on the side canals, or the tides that have ebbed
and flowed in their channels? It would be a work of many volumes; for
the private records of Venice are not lacking in fulness. The Piazza
of Bellini’s _Procession of the Cross_ represents one side of Venetian
life, its solemnity, its assurance, its pomp and colour; but the narrow
waters know another side, the domestic festivities, the courtings,
weddings and banquetings, and private hates. For she was strong in
deeds of darkness as in deeds of light, and echoes of them still wash
against the basements of her houses. Water is a safer confidant of
blood than earth, and the waters of Venice have received their full
share of such confidences. Ebbing tides washed out to sea the stains
of violence and flowed in to pave the city anew, yet the atmosphere of
the dark waterways is more enduring than material stains, and there is
no dark deed of ancient Venice to which they may not still supply a
realistic setting.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY, PIAZZETTA.]
The gondolier’s stock of knowledge will carry us but a small way on the
lesser rios. His catalogue is ready for the Grand Canal; he can carry
the reader to the obvious points of interest the guide-book enumerates,
but his information does not usually comprise even the most beautiful
of the palaces of the side canals, and on the more familiar routes
there is much to discover for oneself. Moreover there are aspects of
a gondola tour which the guide-book cannot include, but which are none
the less important for those who really wish to know the physiognomy of
Venice. And one is the time of day at which it is to be taken. Venice
is the city of light--more luminous than any other city; and if it is
true that new light or shadow everywhere alters the aspect of familiar
objects, it is infinitely truer in Venice where each moment witnesses
the birth of some new and wonderful offspring of the light. If one,
who has known the statue of Colleoni against the intense blue of the
midday sky, comes on him suddenly when the Campo is in shadow and the
Scuola di San Marco alone still receives the light upon the rare marble
of its upper façade, he will find that, as the definition of the stern
features is lost, a note of tenderness steals into the proud assertion
of the face. It seems a fresh revelation of character, this change
wrought by a new light in the known and familiar, and it is one of the
peculiar creative gifts of Venice.
In considering some of the most noteworthy subjects in the city as
she now is, we may imagine a gondola tour on a day of the high tides
in December, when the water washes in long smooth waves almost up to
the feet of the Lion and St. Theodore, and gives to the Molo the
exhilarating effect of a sea-shore. The spring tide spurts and bubbles
through the gratings in the Piazza and Piazzetta, to unite in a lake
which covers the whole pavement till it deepens in the atrium of San
Marco and the heavy outer doors are closed. As the waters rise, the
dominion of light is extended; the chequered marbles of the Ducal
Palace take on a new brilliance, and the agate eyes of the Lion glow
and sparkle as he looks across the sun-paths to the sea. We will
imagine ourselves embarking at the Piazzetta and turning into Venice
from the Basin of San Marco, under the Ponte della Paglia and the
Bridge of Sighs. The entrance into the Rio del Palazzo is flanked on
one side by what was formerly the eastern tower of the Ducal Palace.
Relics of a Byzantine frieze are all that now remain of it; the rest
is lost in the grand eastern wall of the palace--a superb monument
of the first Renaissance. This wall would provide material for many
hours of study in the rich variety of its sculptures. Not a capital or
column is left unadorned, and each is particularised with an apparently
inexhaustible variety of design. The two massive, projecting balconies
of the Anti Sala dei Pregadi, overhanging the rio, which presented to
the sculptor some at least of the problems of ceiling decoration, are
richly carved beneath with deep circular roses. The remotest corners
are worked with the same conscientious detail as the more conspicuous,
and each with a view to its position above the rio. As our eyes grow
accustomed to the comparative darkness of the canal, we see that lions
look down on us from the arches of the topmost windows, and that some
of the upper columns are surrounded by a band of sculpture similar to
that on the pillars of the façade of the Scuola di San Rocco. Amid
the wealth of sculptured stone there is an impressive severity in the
discs of porphyry set at intervals along the wall; but perhaps its
greatest beauty is the ducal shield bearing the Barbarigo arms. This
shield, placed over a low water-door, is upheld by two winged pages
with lighted torches in their hands, who are themselves like songs of
light in their graceful and spirited beauty. Massiveness and grace are
magnificently combined in this east wall of the Ducal Palace; it is at
once solemn and brilliant; and as we look back to its angle with the
Riva, the rose and snowy marbles gleam as if they were transparent.
A little further and the waters have us in their power. The Ponte
di Canonica denies us passage; the tide is too high for us to pass
beneath it, and we are forced to return to the Riva degli Schiavoni.
But before we turn we may see one of the most beautiful of Renaissance
palaces rising in clear whiteness against the blue of the sky. The
Greek marble of its surface is inlaid with circles of serpentine and
porphyry; on either side of the central building two scrolls, inlaid
with palm leaves, bear the words, _Honor et gloria Deo solo_, and
higher in the wall are marble slabs most delicately designed with
animals, birds and foliage. A mitre, crown, and crosier, and various
other articles of head-dress are represented in the stone, but the
Capello family had many branches in Venice, and of the owners of this
particular palace even Tassini has no record. The most beautiful of its
features is set high up, almost too high to be comfortably seen from
the water--two young companion figures of the first Renaissance, full
of grace and imagination and strength, each with spear, and scales, and
casque surmounted by three heads. These twin warrior angels look out
with serene strength into the day; they are lightly armed, but poised
and ready for battle. The duplication of their winged figures, and the
height at which they are placed, makes us think of them primarily as
decorative sculptures; they cannot possess the intimate charm of the
young warrior of the Palazzo Civran, but they endow the harmonious
marbles of this palace front with a distinction and character which
give it rank among the first houses of the greatest period in Venice.
After the rains, these precious marbles shine with a peculiar lustre,
and the Palazzo Capello as it appears to-day is worthy of comparison
with the Palazzo Dario, which glows with serpentine and porphyry beside
the Grand Canal, fresh and fine and delicate as on the day of its
completion.
[Illustration: CORNER OF THE PALAZZO DARIO.]
As the water is still rising and the Ponte di Canonica will not allow
room to pass, we must move along the shining waters of San Marco till
we find a more hospitable waterway. With difficulty we get under the
Ponte del Sepolcro and thence down the Rio della Pietà in which,
at the distance of a few strokes, we may land if we will at a low
sotto-portico leading to San Giovanni in Bragora, where Cima’s noble
picture, _The Baptism of Christ_, is imprisoned behind a stifling
modern altar which makes it impossible to study the composition as a
whole. A little farther, passing a fine ogival palace on our right,
we halt before a plastered barocco house with remnants of Byzantine
window-posts on an upper story. But our chief interest lies this time
in the basement, in a low, narrow arch, the crowns of whose pillars,
richly worked in marmo greco with griffins and lions, are, even in
time of normal tides, little above the level of the water, though
probably the arch once rested on pillars not less than ten feet high.
This buried arch is eloquent of the rising of the waters on Venice.
It arrests us by the beauty of its workmanship; but it is one of many
that we must pass on each canal, though not all have placidly accepted
submergence; many have kept above the water by accepting the addition
of a capital or crown. Elsewhere there are notable examples of this
patchwork of which Venice never is ashamed and which has produced
much in her of the greatest interest. In the Salizzada di San Lio, in
the sestiere of San Giustina, is a pillar, supporting one side of a
sotto-portico, in which a whole page of Venetian history is comprised.
Looking into it, we see that it is composed of two distinct portions,
that it has in fact two capitals--a capital of the early Renaissance
superimposed on a Byzantine column which retains its own. They stand
happily united, these children of two ages, but we naturally ask
ourselves the reason of their juncture, and the answer is that the
Byzantine pillar was once sufficient to itself; it had no need of a
crown to complete its dignity or service. No weight of years has shrunk
it to these dwarfed proportions. It is the rising of earth from below,
not pressure from above, which has reduced it. The soil of Venice has
been raised, inch by inch and foot by foot, in defence against her
submergence. Many basements have become uninhabitable, and Galliccioli
records that in the church of SS. Vito e Modesta an ancient pavement
was discovered eight feet below the existing one, while in SS. Simone
e Giuda three levels were found one above another. In San Marco a
confessional similar to that still at Torcello, after having been lost
sight of for several centuries, was found three feet below the soil and
one and a half feet below the ordinary level of the water. Our pillar,
therefore, which at one time planted its foot firmly on the ground, has
been gradually buried alive, and to preserve the serviceableness, as
well as the dignity of the portico--in fact, to secure its existence
as a sotto-portico at all--a new head had to be added to the Byzantine
pillar to supply the theft at its foot. The incident is rich in
suggestion of the achievement of the Venetian builders, of the delicate
counterpoise and equilibrium, the ceaseless give-and-take required in
this city of the sea. Venice was crowned queen, but her dominion could
only be maintained by understanding and reverence of the element she
ruled. To be glorious she had to be most humble; for the element she
constrained is one no human power can subdue; it would kiss her feet,
it would endow her with glory, but it would not surrender its life.
A thousand times more glorious should be her dominion, but a thousand
times more subtle must be her insight and her sway. Her finger must
be ever on the pulse of this living force, she must hold the key of
its temperament in her hand, she must know when to submit. The wedding
of Venice and the sea was not the submersion of one personality in
another, it was a union involving infinite tact, infinite insight and
acceptance.
We move forward again under the Ponte di Sant’ Antonin beside the
Fondamenta dei Furlani or Friulani, to the little building at its
further end, a sombre little building with heavily barred windows,
but with a sculptured façade. Its outer door is never more than half
open; it appears to admit visitors reluctantly, and, however bright
the sunshine in the world outside, our first impression of San Giorgio
dei Schiavoni is always gloomy. Only for two short hours, from ten
to twelve in the morning, the chapel is open--short, because the
sacristan keeps jealous watch upon the clock and, as if it were with
the booming of the great gun from the royal palace that his true day
began, hurries to close the remaining wing of the outer door, and
bar the chapel into solitude and darkness. Carpaccio’s pictures were
painted for the light. Their original home was not the Schiavoni
chapel, but the School which, till 1451, the Confraternity of St.
George and St. Triphonius owned in the convent of San Catterina in the
northern extremity of Venice near the Fondamenta Nuova. The chapel of
the Schiavoni needs more daylight, and even such as is obtainable is
not freely enough admitted; but Carpaccio is a magician whose spell
can release us from all consciousness of discomfort. The chapel is
an intimate revelation of one of the most fascinating characters
in Venetian history. It is the completest record of Carpaccio that
exists, the series of paintings in which his imagination has the
fullest range. It is not as a portrait painter of Venice and the
Venetians that Carpaccio is here employed, his scope is wider and the
whole spirit of his treatment is different. The _St. Ursula_ series
is not lacking in subtle personal touches; but it is not intimate in
the same degree as the _St. George_, and it does not touch the level
of personal intensity of the _St. Jerome_. There are psychological
touches in this chapel of the Schiavoni which it would be hard to rival
in modern art; we are companioned here by one of the most humorous,
tender, profound and understanding of natures, one who reflects upon
life in the spirit of joy and whose painful experiences never prevailed
against his assurance of beauty. As is always the case with Carpaccio,
each picture, though one of a series, is complete in itself. Except
with St. Jerome, the painter shows even a certain carelessness of the
preservation of identity in his hero: St. George becomes steadily
younger from the time of his combat with the dragon, till, in the third
of the series, a mere boy is represented as presiding at the baptism of
the king and princess. The figure of St. George in the fight with the
dragon is magnificent. No comparisons are necessary to convince us of
its greatness of conception; but if we consider for a moment Basaiti’s
treatment of this subject, we shall understand better the material of
which Carpaccio is made. Basaiti’s St. George is a sentimentalist even
in this moment of stress; his sword-thrust and the spirit expressed in
his face are disconnected. With Carpaccio the source of St. George’s
action is his will. The spirit of the sword-thrust is revealed in the
thrilling purpose of his armoured limbs, which no metal can obscure. He
is not thinking of graces, but the purpose with which he is instinct
creates its own harmony; he is one who must prevail. When the stress
of the action is past, his face hardly seems striking, but here it is
so pierced with light, as it gleams in paleness against the aureole
of hair, that it has become a living flame. Rarely has such glory of
purpose and burning intensity of will been conveyed in a human face
upon canvas. And all the details of this picture are invested with
an accordant beauty. Even the grotesque fancy that seems to riot in
the horrors of material death has had to give way before it. The face
of the maiden, who lies, half-eaten, close to the dragon’s feet, is
as exquisite in her death-sleep as that of St. Ursula in her royal
chamber; and the mutilated youth under the body of the horse is not
less lovely. The horse’s face is wonderful; his large eyes drink in the
purpose of his master; his tongue lolls; his mane streams wildly as he
rushes against the wind. Like Colleoni’s horse he triumphs under his
rider, not so much ridden as a sharer in his progress; but he, like
his master, moves in another and more romantic world than Colleoni.
Never was horse more gloriously or more worthily caparisoned; his
trappings are of scarlet, stamped with classic heads and chased with
bronze; his bridle of the richest gilded leather set with gems. And the
dragon too is beautiful. If we compare this trampling, vivid creature
of the luminous eyes with the crawling worm against which St. George
raises his sword in the succeeding picture, we shall feel something of
the meaning of the breath of life. The very colour of his skin seems
to have flowed through him with his blood; he is abjectly grey when
dragged on to the Piazza. This transformation of the dragon is a great
feat, the greater when we remember that even when he first appears, the
virtue is beginning to go out of him, his claws are already beating
the air with growing impotence. This first picture of the St. George
series is the most complete lyric of Carpaccio’s that we possess; it
is an episode of high romance, and its landscape is conceived in the
spirit of romantic fantasy. We have noted elsewhere the treatment
of the buildings, the way the city, which at first sight seems of a
dreamlike quality, like the port whence St. Ursula’s prince sets out,
defines itself gradually as a solid, fortified citadel, half hidden
behind oriental watch-towers. But we have still to note the inspiration
with which Carpaccio has unified these defences with the grand sweep
of the coast-line. The huge cliffs which enclose the bay on the left,
stretching out to the yellow light, are worthy to rank with those in
Turner’s _Ulysses and Polyphemus_. The landscape to the right of the
bay is freer and more fanciful. A cupolaed duomo crowns the cliff
behind the princess. Men and horses move on the huge projecting rock,
joined to the main cliff only by a natural arch and by a high-swung
delicate bridge. The houses among the trees and the horsemen moving
over the dizzy bridge enhance the romantic strangeness of effect. The
framing by this rugged arch of a full-rigged vessel upon the open sea
is one of Carpaccio’s happiest fancies. The devastated shore, the
sea flowing into the city, the yellow of the sky above the horizon
passing into a troubled paleness of cloud-flecked blue, the wind-driven
vessel on the high sea, the suggestion of vast ocean spaces--all these
combine in the imaginative grandeur of effect. The second picture of
the series, _St. George’s Return_, is very different in atmosphere.
It is filled with sunlight, the trampling of victory and the sound of
music. Its keynote is victorious joy and pomp of festival, sounded
in the spacious sunniness of the Piazza and the horizon of slope and
mountains beyond; sustained in the buildings that surround the square
and the airy pinnacles and balconies crowded with onlookers, and in
the flags that fly round the octagonal building winging it with air.
The radiant flowered brocades compete with the trappings of the horses
to perfect the scene; and through it, and round it, sounds the music
of drum and trumpet from the turbaned band which forms a background
to the royal party, drawing them, as it were, into the sweep of the
central square where St. George officiates. All moves to the measure
of glad yet solemn music; here is no lightning stroke, no sudden
motion; the muscles of action are relaxed, in slow measure the horses
paw the ground. The third picture, _The Baptism of King and Princess_,
is still pervaded with music. The musicians lead in the scene; the
three foreground trumpeters, conspicuous on the carpeted dais, seem
to be trumpeting for their lives. The golden, cavernous trumpet-mouth
pointing directly at us has a strangely inspiring effect, seeming to
invade us with sound breaking on the heavy roll of the meditative
drummer. The music connects itself with the background and helps to
widen the horizon. There is not one of these pictures which is not
enlarged by the suggestion, at least, of some wide background of
nature. Sometimes, as in these jubilant scenes, it enhances and extends
the gladness of the festival, sometimes it wings our spirits amid
conditions that burden and confine. In the first of the _St. Jerome_
series, for instance, where the lion arrives, the first point that
strikes us is the obvious humour of the scene, the effect of the entry
of this gentlest and most companionable of beasts on the Brethren
of the cloister. They do not wait to determine its intentions: it
is a lion. It is wounded and asking sympathy, but the Brothers have
attention for nothing but their fears. But below the humour there is
tragedy. It is not the quaintness of the lion, or the scattering monks,
or the beasts on the grassy square, or all the varied monotony of that
beautiful frescoed cloister, that claim our attention as the heart of
the picture. It is the bent and aged figure of St. Jerome. His features
are the same as in the study scene, but his mature youth has given
place to snowy age. And another change has come over his face; the
radiance of the study scene is replaced by bewildered sorrow slightly
touched with contempt. A loneliness is now in his face. In his study
he was at peace communing with other minds or with the mind of God.
But here with the monks he is bewildered--bewildered and oppressed.
We seem to see him ageing as he eyes his foolish companions. Is this,
he seems to question, the fruit of his long sojourn? He has asked the
sympathy of the Brothers, and they are beside themselves with fear.
There is deep pathos in this aged figure making his appeal in vain, and
if the cloister filled the horizon, the effect on our spirits would
be stifling. But there is a great sky overhead, there is an orange
tree, “that busy plant,” there is a winding way amidst the vista of
palm trees and blue hills, there is the great desert whence the lion
has come. _The Death of St. Jerome_ affords a still more impressive
example of this kind of relief. Here we are not walled in, the desert
is around us; we see it through the gateway by the well and through
the porticoes of the buildings, and above it in purple outline rise
the snow-capped mountains. And this wide horizon is peculiarly welcome
as an escape from the confinement of spirit expressed in the funeral
procession. The gladness of the open country, the hills and mountains,
the palm-tree signposts along the desert way, are a relief to the
lion’s agony. For the lion is the keynote of the picture, though it
is struck so quietly that at first we may even be unconscious of its
sounding. In the foreground on a narrow strip of pavement lies the
body of St. Jerome. His head rests upon a stone and his long beard
lies straight and smooth upon his breast. It is quite lifeless, this
body, but the kneeling Brothers think their master is before them.
There are wonderful character studies among these Brothers, sensual and
simple and devout. Those Carpaccio has chosen to read the Office for
the Dead are the most lifeless. The skull on the blasted tree trunk,
which his love of the grotesque has inserted in the angle of the wall,
seems a fit symbol of the sovereignty they acknowledge. But we have
already noted the existence of another actor in the scene. In front
of a little group of buildings under a broad rustic portico lies the
lion, not inert like his master or like the monks who perform the rites
of the dead, not now a suppliant, deprecating lion. His paw tears the
ground, his head is raised; he roars in the agony of his bereavement.
He is no longer feared, it seems; custom has staled the terrors of him.
To the Brothers he is merely another animal of the menagerie, one of
the last whims of Brother Jerome. Yet he understands that his master is
not here in this square of the convent. He has long been content; but
now the desert calls to him and he answers with the voice of the desert
that he had unlearned for a while. We have mentioned only a few of the
series of paintings in this wonderful chapel, and even of them the
greater part has been left unsaid. Each picture requires the whole of
the two hours, the Scuola allows, for study of them all; but, in coming
to them from time to time for a few moments only, we may constantly
discover some new token of their artist’s insight and understanding,
some richness of composition, some delicacy of colour, some intimate
detail of workmanship which makes us feel Carpaccio’s presence. The
beauties of St. Jerome’s study are almost inexhaustible; the details of
this exquisite room will reveal to us much of Carpaccio and of Venice.
Nothing is in it by chance or because space has to be filled. The gold
and rose of the apse, the marble of its pillars, the painted ceiling
and richly bound manuscripts, the delicate bronzes, the colouring of
the walls, the tiny white dog (forerunner of the lion), the crosier and
crimson cushion, all are expressive. And there is one touch--for which
we give thanks to the artist--unobtrusive but surely significant; the
candles on either wall are held in the bronze fore-paws of a lion. This
Chapel of the Schiavoni has not gone unscathed; during a fire that two
years ago destroyed a warehouse on the opposite bank of the canal, the
water from the engines poured through the roof of the chapel, injuring
the pictures on the wall nearest the rio--the _Combat of St. George_
and his _Return with the Dragon_.
Leaving the sestiere of Santa Giustina, with its relics of ancient
Venice and its famous Palace of the Contarini, on our right, and also
on our right, the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, where in the
darkness of the Giustiniani Chapel are preserved some of the most
beautiful sculptures of the Lombardi, we turn sharply to the left into
the Rio del Pestrin, and again to the left into the Rio San Lorenzo.
This Rio San Lorenzo is the scene of one of Gentile Bellini’s most
famous pictures. We are parallel here with the Rio di Sant’ Antonin, by
which we came from the basin of St. Mark. The miracle represented by
Bellini as taking place here is one of those connected with a fragment
of the true Cross belonging to the School of San Giovanni Evangelista.
Some of the finest artistic power of Venice was lavished in honouring
the virtues of this relic, and we owe to it inestimably precious
records of the city in the days of her splendour. We understand
in watching Bellini’s procession something of the nature of those
ever-recurring ceremonies which made Casola feel that the Venetians
must needs be specially beloved of God. The three-arched bridge of San
Lorenzo, which is the structural centre of the composition, is thronged
with a white-robed confraternity bearing splendid candles which glint
among the trees that are tied upon the bridge, and that we see receding
into the campo of the church which is hidden from us. In the centre
of the bridge is fixed the banner of the Confraternity, waving in the
wind. The throng upon the bridge is by no means idle; there is the
effect of that incessant movement of which one is conscious in the
densest crowd, and those at its edge are eagerly watching the doings
in the water. It is indeed the water that excites our chief interest;
Bellini has contrived to perpetuate numberless familiar graces and
dignities in the rowers whom we see framed by the central arch of
the bridge, or holding up their boats alongside of it. But it is the
novel element of the swimmers in the canal which gives the picture a
unique place in our regard. In the space of water between the bridge
and the temporary platform in the immediate foreground, where kneels
a monumental little company of Venetian gentlemen--tradition says the
family of the Bellini--is an aquatic display of the most delicate
order. Four of the Brothers swim in the clear green water, upheld by
their flowing robes like a water-lily by its leaves, and one, the
Grand Guardian--as he treads water with admirable equilibrium and an
easy grace that is beyond all praise--holds up on high the precious
Cross. No words can describe the delight that these swimmers afford
us. Their whole heart is in the quest; two of them, an old man and a
young, who have been pursuing the elusive trophy in vain, have seen
the discovery and slackened their strokes; but one, who has evidently
just dived off the fondamenta, is striking boldly out and trying with
down-turned face to penetrate the depths of the green water. The negro,
stripped, and ready for a plunge, who stands quaking on the lowest
step of a wooden landing-stage opposite, affords a delightful foil to
the Brothers who swim with such careless proficiency despite their
encumbering robes. If he would but look up, he would see that his
courage need not be put to the test--that the lost treasure is already
sailing triumphantly ashore.
[Illustration: A VENETIAN BRIDGE.]
To identify the exact scene of the picture, we shall do well to
pass into the Rio San Lorenzo from the Rio del Pestrin and take up
our stand a little beyond the Ponte San Lorenzo at about the point
of Bellini’s wooden bridge. Looking back we have now in front of
us the present Ponte San Lorenzo in place of Bellini’s beautiful
three-arched bridge, spanning the canal between the long fondamenta
on our left, and the campo and Church of San Lorenzo, which are
still--as in the picture--wedged between the buildings on our right.
The minute private fondamenta also, where in the picture kneel two of
the foremost of the procession, is still in existence. On our left is
the fondamenta in front of Bellini’s beautiful frescoed house, and
beyond it several houses of irregular heights, as in the picture,
while the horizon on this side is still filled by the main features
of Bellini’s background--another Palazzo Capello bounded on three
sides by water, the Rio Pestrin, the Rio San Lorenzo, and the Rio
San Giovanni Laterano. The palace retains some of its grandeur; it
is easily recognisable by its shape, though to-day it is one storey
higher. The Capello arms are still to be seen on it, but it has been
robbed of most of its glories of marble and colour. There is a certain
melancholy as well as a fascination in attempting to reconstruct the
scene of the picture. In the Gallery, when we are face to face with the
frescoed houses that we may only see foreshortened, we long to join the
spectators across the rio and complete those tantalising fragments of
centaurs and figures on horseback that combine with more conventional
ornaments to decorate the palace on the fondamenta. But now we are face
to face with reality, the frescoes are no more. With the exception of
the Palazzo Capello it is only the shape and relative position of the
houses that assures to us their identity.
In Bellini’s time this corner by San Lorenzo was splendid indeed. The
Capello family, which, according to the chroniclers, was numbered
among the patricians in 1297, played a prominent part in all Venetian
activities, but chiefly in war. It is a member of this family--Vittore
Capello, generalissimo of Venice in the Turkish campaign of 1462
and 1465, who is represented as kneeling before Sant’ Elena in
the beautiful relief above the façade of Sant’ Aponal. Another
Capello--Vincenzo--in the succeeding century filled five times the
office of Admiral, and in 1541 erected the façade of Santa Maria
Formosa. Notoriety of a different kind was brought to the family by
Bianca, who married for love and freedom, and was cheated of both, but
who died Grand Duchess of Tuscany. This palace of the Capello family
at San Giovanni Laterano was worthy of their fame. The superb side
wall that faces us in Bellini’s picture is like a tapestry in diamonds
of dusky crimson and gold. It is bordered by a design of gold below
the bands of colour, which are most effectively placed immediately
under the projecting roof. A beautiful design in red and green, like
rich embroidery, forms a kind of flag, enclosing the Capello symbols
on a shield painted in different shades of blue. Everything that
conventional ornament could do to beautify the house has been done.
Ornamental borders and squares are set among the bricks, and the smooth
marble facings of the ogival windows are inlaid with coloured discs and
knobs. The lower square house at the end of the fondamenta, divided
from the Capello palace by the rio, has the same beauties of ornamental
band and stripes of alternating colours beneath the roof. The single
window in the wall that faces us is magnificent, grated and enclosed
by gilt rope-work; the capitals of its pillars and its ogival arch are
richly gilded, and in the surface of the stone above are set discs of
porphyry with centre and rim of gold. Over the massive wooden entrance
door is a painted frieze of green leaves, and discs with Byzantine
birds are inserted in the wall above. A grand surface of wall is still
left for the fresco painter, and Tintoretto was yet to come. Perhaps
the most notable feature in this lower house is the carving of its
chimneys; each has an individual form. The fondamenta in the picture is
thronged with citizens, and the conspicuous row of stalwart ladies, who
kneel on its extreme edge above the water, tradition calls Catterina
Cornaro and her train. Certainly this representation of the Queen of
Cyprus and her train is different from that which Bembo has given us in
his delightful letters to Lucrezia Borgia from Asolo. Catherine, it is
true, was no longer a girl when she went to her captivity at Asolo; but
there is a lightness and freedom in Bembo’s picture of the party who
told tales of love and philosophy and idled among the gardens, which
leaves us unprepared for the solidity and uncomeliness of this uniform
row of figures. We know little of this Queen of Cyprus, but we expect
more grace of her than is possible to these matrons. They have studied
so little how to please in the wearing of their sumptuous robes, that
despite their jewels they produce an effect of almost conventual
dulness. It is difficult to imagine anything more magnificent than
the dresses of these ladies; they are literally covered with jewels.
Excessively virtuous they may be, but they are also excessively lavish;
they might well give ground for the legislation as to women’s dress
quoted by Sanudo; but they have not taught their jewels to shine. The
matron who heads the row is robed in dark velvet: her sleeves and
the front of her bodice are of gold, slashed with white and trimmed
with pearls. An edging of solid gold, studded with jewels, passes
from her shoulders to her waist; rich lace completes the decoration
of her bodice. Strings of pearls cross on her breast, and a thickly
turned gold cord is round her neck and hangs in front. She wears a
gold coronet set with gems, and beneath it a broad ornamental band. A
transparent veil falls down her back, and is draped about her forehead
and neck, covering her long ear-rings. A jewelled cross hangs on her
breast, and a chain round her waist. Rings are the only possible
splendour she and her ladies are without. The Venetian ladies and
gentlemen standing behind this Queen of Cyprus and her train are
hardly less sumptuous than they, but their robes are less rigid and
uniform, and very much more gracefully worn. The men are dressed in a
splendour of brocade and cloth of gold that gives out a rich and sober
glow.
We may well feel the inadequacy of words as We attempt to revive this
wonderful painting. Bellini faithfully recorded Venice, but we cannot
so faithfully record Bellini. We can only hope to call attention to the
detail of what is undoubtedly one of the most valuable portraits of the
Venice of the first Renaissance by one of the greatest of her citizens.
When we have paused long enough on the site of the picture and go down
the Rio San Giovanni Laterano, immediately in front of the Capello
Palace, the high water again denies us passage; but it gives more than
it withholds in compelling us to return to our former junction with
the Rio Pestrin and to pass out among the coal barges making the wider
circuit of the lagoon. It is a wonderful moment when we come suddenly
from the narrow water into the wide expanse of the lagoon; and on this
December morning a marvellous vision awaits us. The long brown line of
Sant’ Erasmo lies like a dark cloud on the water; Burano, San Francesco
and Torcello are isolated in a strange translucency of mist; whilst
from the low tones of the water one red sail rises like a column of
flame. Above Murano the smoke coils languidly; the cypresses over
the cemetery wall stand out in startling blackness. A flock of gulls
incessantly flickers and glitters on the surface of lucent aquamarine
that stretches away to the shore where the mountains lie like purple
shadows crowned with a radiancy of snow. The sunlight of the lagoon
in this wintry clearness seems other than that which falls on the
waterways of the city; this outer robe of Venice to-day is of so
immaterial a texture that we feel the material city slipping from our
grasp. We turn back into it, but by a way that can feed the visionary
sense, by the Rio dei Mendicanti. It might seem, indeed, that all
vision would die in the dreary, plastered uniformity of the building
that stretches along the fondamenta on our left. This building was
formerly the Scuola di San Marco; but the superb façade erected by the
Confraternity on the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo has little in common
with these white-washed walls and dreary sunless corridors. For this
most famous School is now the Hospital of the Mendicanti, and it is as
a visitor to the wards that we are admitted. Yet amidst these chill
cloisters and corridors is kept one of the most luminous and visionary
treasures of Venice--Tintoretto’s _Procession of St. Ursula and The
Virgins_. It is the more precious as being, with _Bacchus and Ariadne_
and _The Paradise_, almost the only work of Tintoretto that we can
make sure of fully seeing. There is abundant light in the cold, grey
church to illumine a picture which is in itself a song of light in the
daybreak.
This stream of wonderful maidens moves all to one rhythm, winding with
sweeping trains down out of the misty dawn to end and centre in the
glorious figure of St. Ursula waiting the bishop’s consecration of her
mission. She is so entrancingly radiant that the young cross-bearing
bishop who stands beside her seems, as he gazes, to be illumined by
her fire and joy. The ships in which the company is to embark lie like
phantoms on the misty sea-line, and the long lights of dawn are above
the water--pale rose and gold and purple--while the curtain of night
is slowly withdrawn, leaving spaces of darker blue and glowing cloud.
The early morning mists still hang about the shadowy hulks of the huge
vessels and the figures near the shore, making as it were two spheres
of action. The grassy slope down which the travellers come, seems in
its undulations to yield itself to their motion, to reflect and echo
it, and is luminous as all the figures are. The faint rainbow raiments
of those distant companies that sweep forward nearer to the shore are
like wings lit from the dawn and half-folded, while the foremost ranks
of the procession are in the full golden light of day. Note with what
daring Tintoretto has placed the strong rose-robed angel with the palms
of martyrdom across the picture directly overhead. Her figure cuts
across the phantom ships; one arm hides part of the procession; yet far
from obscuring or diverting from the central theme, she leads the eye
more directly to St. Ursula. There are no spectators of this morning
procession, unless it be the marvellous group on the left. The central
figure is that of a woman, meditative, gathered into herself; she
scarcely seems to belong to the procession; she is dreaming apart with
downbent face, and is very close in feeling to Carpaccio’s sleeping
St. Ursula. Beside her is a radiant youth, his face one of Giorgione’s
faces, in a helm shaped like a shell and set with pearls. There are
many types of Venetian ladies in the procession, such as were idealised
by one and another of the painters; all are here, in marvellous
richness of raiment and jewelled headgear. We do not question whether
they are fitly robed for a great journey; we only share in their joy.
The wine of dawn seems to have entered into them, and to sing in
every motion, every colour of the superb lyric--the intoxication of
embarking on a mystic voyage in the pale radiance of dawn.
We pass out again through the long corridors under the great sculptured
portal. On our left is the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, a storehouse
of Renaissance art, and before us the friend of whom we never grow
weary--Colleoni astride of his war-horse in the centre of the square.
This paid servant, this adopted son of Venice, is not on the Piazza
where it was his wish to be; but he stands even more fitly here upon
this small campo beside the canal. Anywhere he would be monarch; but
we are admitted here into his private presence-chamber, while the
great stirring Piazza would seem but the crowded outer court. If,
before leaving the campo, we make a short journey on foot along the
Salizzada which passes on the south of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, we may
find a treasure buried in dirt and neglect. None would guess its
presence; but those who care for unfrequented paths may venture under
the unattractive sotto-portico which leads to the outer staircase of
a once beautiful Renaissance palace. It is given over to the poor,
but a sculptured doorway still surmounts the stair; its chief beauty
however is a series of delicately sculptured arches in the brickwork
below, and a fine well-head half imprisoned by the chimney of a
neighbouring bakery. The wall of the bakery is so near the staircase
of the palace that we can get no complete conception of the arches,
and the dirt and ill odours of this neglected corner are likely to
daunt all but the most enthusiastic seekers after treasure. Yet
these fragments, in elegance and beauty of design, may rank with the
worthiest remains of the Venetian Renaissance.
[Illustration: PALAZZO SANUDO.]
Returning to Colleoni’s square, we again embark and continue our way
down the Rio dei Mendicanti, past courtyards flooded by still rising
water, and turn soon to the right, into the Rio Santa Marina--a
picturesque canal, ever varying in width and angle. At the corner
of the Palazzo Pisano we are confronted again by the problem of the
high water. If we would include in our tour the Palazzo Sanudo,
with its riches of many ages, Byzantine, early Gothic and Ogival,
its two courtyards, its beautiful garden on the fondamenta and its
dolphin-shaped knocker, we must turn to the right along the Rio delle
Erbe. But it is useless to hope that this morning any gondola will
be able to pass under its low bridges, and in consequence we must
continue our way to the church of the Miracoli, by skirting the other
side of the lozenge-shaped island on which it stands. We soon turn at
right angles into the Rio dei Miracoli, and in a few moments we see
the sun shining on the cupola of the church, gilding the marbles of
the circular east tower and lighting the traceries of serpentine and
porphyry and cipollino on the west front. It is a joyous and radiant
aspect, this of the Miracoli, with its broad spaces of Greek marbles
and its bands of Verona, its plaques of verd-antique and porphyry, its
sculptured angels and grave apostles. It stands in quiet beauty on the
brink of the canal. From its little campo opens the beautiful inner
courtyard of the Sanudo Palace, while on another side it is bordered
by the spacious and noble Corte delle Muneghe, formerly known as the
Corte Cà Amadi, from the family whose arms are still to be seen on the
brickwork. Close to the well in this court stood originally the image
of the Madonna, thanks to whose miracles we now possess this most
beautiful church built in her honour. The chronicles relate that a
certain Francesco Amadi, an inhabitant of Santa Marina, had piously set
up an image of the Virgin close by his house. The fame of this image
as a worker of wonders grew so great that it was transferred by Angelo
Amadi, in 1480, to the Corte di Cà Amadi, and set up there for popular
veneration. In his Venetian Annals for 1480, Malipiero thus briefly
relates the occurrence: “This year began the cult of the Madonna of
Miracles which was at the door of Corte Nuova, opposite the door of
the Amai in the narrow calle, and because of the crowd of people it
became necessary to move the image, and carry it to the courtyard of
Cà Amai, and immense offerings have been made of wax, statues, money
and silver, insomuch that it has reached four hundred ducats in one
month. And in process of time it amounted to three thousand ducats of
alms, and with them we bought Corte Nova from the houses of the Bembo,
Querini and Baroci, and there was built a most beautiful temple and
convent, into which we put the nuns of Santa Chiara of Murano.” The
foundation-stone was laid on February 25, 1481, when the image was
moved with great pomp from the court to the little wooden shelter on
the site chosen for the church. An interesting account of the move
is contained in the _Memorie_ of Angelo Amadi. It affords a vivid
verbal picture of religious festivals in Venice at the time they were
finding their most splendid expression on canvas. “On the day of the
twenty-fifth of February,” begins Amadi, “in the name of Messer Jesus
Christ and of the glorious Virgin Mary, we removed the image from our
house to transfer it to the hut or house of wood where the chapel or
church is to be made; at which removal were present all the Schools
or Fraternities, the Battudi, that is, the School of Madonna Santa
Maria della Misericordia, to which I belong, and the School of the
Carità, and of San Marco, and that lately founded of San Rocco, whose
brothers go about in sackcloth, beating themselves continually with
scourges and iron chains.” All the Procurators of San Marco, he says,
were present, with countless cavaliers and doctors and a great part of
the Signoria, the Patriarch in his pontificals, and a host of vicars
and canons and other clerics, all richly and splendidly clothed. The
Amadi insisted on themselves carrying the portable stand that had been
made for the image, covered with cloth of gold, cremosine and cloth
of silver, and adorned with silver candelabra and oriental censers.
“Nor would we allow any other to carry it, that we might demonstrate
publicly that it belonged to us and had been made by our ancestor.”
Four citizens accompanied the image-bearers, carrying poles on which
to support the stage as it mounted bridges or stopped in the streets.
It was followed by the dignitaries already enumerated and almost the
whole Venetian populace. The procession left the house of the Amadi
to the sound of trumpet and pipe; it made a circuit of the bridges,
streets and squares of the city as far as Santa Maria Formosa, halting
in the parish church of the Amadi for many lauds to be sung. “And
along all the calli and in the squares of the churches all the people
kneeling on the ground prayed devoutly with tears and hands joined
on their breasts, calling aloud and raising a great outcry.” In this
manner the procession returned to the shelter, and the foundation-stone
was laid by the Patriarch amid the chanting of lauds. After a final
_Te Deum_ the image was left to the devotions of the people who, till
night fell, continued to pour out their offerings for the building.
There is something stirring in this ceremony with its popular outcry
and petitions for mercy. It reminds us of that strong element of piety
which in Venice went side by side with its strong commercial instincts.
The church of the Miracoli seems to belong peculiarly to Venice in the
light of these stories of its birth. It is itself one of the miracles,
this little Roman temple; with its quadrangular-domed choir, raised
high above the nave, its marble ambones, its dark painted roof, and
walls lined with marbles, it impresses us with a sense of sublimity.
All here is perfectly proportioned and decorated with simple and
absolute fitness. It is impossible to mount the flight of marble
steps leading from nave to choir, past the wonderful little figures
of St. Clare and St. Francis with his profound contemplative smile,
past the Annunciation Angel and the Virgin draped like a Roman matron,
into the choir where the great cross of porphyry and serpentine hangs
in the apse, without feeling that we are mounting to sacrifice in a
temple full of the Deity. But what part has that marvellous little
company of sea youths and maidens in the tale of the Passion? They are
the offspring of some delicate fantasy careless of all save itself,
yet they seem to need no other passport than beauty to their place in
the temple. Work of the same imaginative quality is to be seen on a
pillar in the nave: not here a dream of mermaids with delicate breasts
and arms and glittering tails, but a purely naturalistic subject.
The artist has conspired with the stone to sing his delight in the
life of the fields, and he has achieved his purpose so that the very
spirit of the wild creatures lives again. A lizard with smooth scales
and lithe, restless tail, ears of corn, a serpent holding a bird by
its look as it rears itself for a spring, birds fighting and birds
preening their breasts,--all these delicate beings, that move amid a
design of admirable grace, are a field pilgrim’s scrip laid open for
all who will read. These old artists were not afraid. To them all
things of nature appeared symbols worthy to lay on the altar. And it is
because of this permeating imaginative vision that the Church of the
Miracoli is one of the jewels of Venice, instinct with life, from the
grave mystery of its marble-lined walls, slab alternating with slab,
Carrara cream and white, paonazetto, marmo greco, marbles of Verona red
and almond, to lizard and serpent, siren and infant, from the dusky
gold and colour of the ceiling to the eloquent figures that stand in
constant ministration on the ambones.
Santa Maria dei Miracoli might well mark the limit of our tour; but
if we go a short distance further into the Rio San Canciano we shall
come on three examples of the earlier domestic architecture of Venice,
which we shall do well not to miss. The first is a house by the Ponte
Widmann, dating from the ninth century. It is exceedingly picturesque,
with its long, low portico, and a profusion of Byzantine ornaments of
most varied device on the walls--weird lions and birds and oriental
beasts. The capitals of the window columns also are Byzantine, though
the balconies are Renaissance. We can also distinguish, though it is
immured, the ancient solario, or sun-terrace, which, in this house of
old Venice, was evidently of considerable beauty and extent. Passing
under another bridge after the Ponte Widmann, we come to the Ponte
Pasqualigo, and landing at the calle on the left, we have on the right
of us, only a few steps down, one of the oldest houses in Venice. So
well cared for is it by its present owners that we seem not to be
examining a relic, but to move in a living page of the past. On the
morning we saw it, the sun was streaming into the court and falling
on the Signora, who, in scarlet shawl, and with a brilliant kerchief
round her head, was dozing in the sun. She rose and gave us a cordial
welcome, and we climbed the outer stair, under an immense projecting
roof, into the garden hanging above the court, full of sunshine and
flowers; higher still, on the altana, was a bright line of clothing
hung out to dry. The structure of the ancient roof overhanging
the stair is very remarkable, with its secondary beams that jut
horizontally under a long cross-beam running the whole length of the
gallery. The rooms, which open out of one another from the terrace, are
rich also in beams, though now for the most part covered with a foolish
uniformity of ceiling. The floor of the reception room is, as usual,
paved with small variegated stones, but it is remarkable for occasional
little islands of mosaic, one of which, a tiny square of deep blue
and gold set diamond-wise, is a veritable gem of colour. Worthy to rank
with this hospitable, ample house of ancient Venice, is a courtyard
opening on the water, into which we pass immediately from the Ponte
Pasqualigo. The wooden barbicans of the projecting roof adjoining the
portico rest on pillars of fine earliest Gothic, grave and strong and
simple in their build. The sense that they are individuals bearing
the burden of the beams is increased by the fact that it is not
geometrically adjusted to their shoulders. It rests there because they
are willing; there is an understanding, a _combinazione_ between beam
and pillar, but the two were not mechanically made to fit.
[Illustration: A SIDE CANAL.]
Returning to the Rio dei Miracoli we leave the church on our left, and
crossing the Rio Santa Marina and the Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo,
we pass directly into the Rio del Teatro, leaving the water-entrance
to Marco-Polo’s palace on our right. This corner is one of the most
beautiful in the canals of Venice. It is rich in palaces and fragments
of ancient ornament, and full of strange interplay of lights from the
many tortuous ways that converge here. There is a constant fascination
in the broad sweep of water at the crossways, in the problems of
traffic, in the warning cries that herald boat or barge passing
under the many bridges. There is perhaps no spot in Venice so full of
ancient mystery, of the gloom, the light, the sound and stillness of
her waterways. A little further on we pass into the Rio della Fava,
full also of delightful and unexpected corners; and looking back
from the Ponte di San’ Antonio we see the site of Mansueti’s picture
commemorating another miracle of the Holy Cross; or rather we see one
corner of the picture; for Mansueti has cut away the whole length of
a calle and all the houses between this bridge of San’ Antonio and
the Campo di San Lio, so that in his painting, for obvious artistic
reasons, the waters of the canal flow directly in front of the campo,
which he has narrowed to little more than a fondamenta. In a sketch
for this picture now in the Uffizi at Florence, Mansueti has more
faithfully transcribed the actual surroundings of the Campo di San
Lio. His picture illustrates a miracle of the Cross that would seem to
offer small scope for artistic treatment. A member of the Confraternity
of San Giovanni Evangelista, on being invited by another Brother to
attend the Cross in procession, impiously replied, “I will neither
accompany it, nor do I care whether it accompanies me.” Within a short
while, continues Flamino Corner, the perverse man died and the School
assembled for his burial; but when the procession reached the Ponte
di San Lio, the parish of the dead man, the Holy Cross became so heavy
that no force could avail to move it. While all stood appalled and
dismayed by such an occurrence, the friend of the dead man recalled the
impious words he had spoken, and made known the reason of the refusal
of the Cross. It was removed from the procession, and, the chronicler
informs us, withheld henceforth from any but public solemnities. In
Mansueti’s composition a number of Brothers are gathered on the bridge
attempting to drag the Cross, and the clergy of San Lio and a group
of citizens are waiting on the campo to receive it. There is much
quaintness in the rendering of this rather humorous incident, and
the picture is full of rich and homely detail, in the houses and in
the doings of their inhabitants, the chase of a cat, the hanging of
a clothes line, the stacking of the pliant rods on which the clothes
are hung. The windows, with closed or open gratings, are thronged
with onlookers, chiefly splendid ladies. In Bellini, the windows are
unpeopled, but here there is scarcely one uncarpeted, and without
its contingent of festive heads and shoulders; whilst in one of the
windows, in the house we can still identify, a fascinating infant
prances against the grating and pokes a fist through the bars. The
bridge in the picture is obviously too low for any gondola to pass
under it; it is merely a temporary private way thrown across the rio,
which it is easy to believe that Mansueti has substituted in order
that we may see above it the procession winding out of the Rio del
Piombo. As we look back from the Ponte San’ Antonio we may get, in
spite of Mansueti’s changes, a distinct impression of his scene; the
sun, shining through the small circular ogival window in the house
that still bounds our horizon, lights up a gay interior of green walls
draped in crimson and gold with singular richness of effect.
[Illustration: THE GONDOLIERS’ SHRINE.]
The name of the Rio della Fava, the Canal of the Bean, boasts a
traditional derivation that throws a curious light on Venetian pieties.
It appears that in 1480, the same year in which was initiated the cult
of the Madonna dei Miracoli at the Cà Amadi, another wonder-working
image, under the patronage of the same family, was thought worthy
of a chapel in San Lio. This chapel was named Santa Maria della
Consolazione, or della Fava, from its proximity to the Ponte della
Fava. “The ecclesiastical writers,” says Tassini, “recount that the
bridge was so named because a man living by it, who had hidden some
contraband salt under some sacks of beans, a vegetable he dealt
in, when warned that the police were approaching threw himself at
the feet of the said miraculous image for succour and obtained this
favour--that the Justices, despite their search, found nothing in the
house but simple beans.” This naïve faith in the willingness of the
Madonna to meet all contingencies survives among the humbler citizens
of Venice to-day. A proof is provided by the personal experience of
a friend who had bespoken overnight a gondola for the station in the
dark early hours of the next morning. The gondolier duly arrived and
set out with his fare from San Marco. But they had gone no further than
the church of the Salute when his lamp gave out and he halted and asked
leave to replenish it. No place for procuring oil was apparent, but the
gondolier knew one. He went to the shrine of the Madonna and addressed
the figure thus, “Blessed Madonna, thou thinkest harm of no man and
thou wouldst not that harm should come to any. I turn to thee for help
in my need. The police are not like thee. They will have no pity in
their fine if they see me at the station with my lamp unlit. I beg thy
lamp for this little while.” And, as there was-no sign of refusal, the
Madonna’s lamp was taken to the station and returned on the homeward
journey.
Continuing our way down the Rio della Fava we pass almost immediately,
on the left, the Palazzo Gussoni, a palace the great beauty of which
cannot be overlooked. It is a building of the first Renaissance
combining extreme richness of detail with simplicity of general effect.
The basement is beautifully and variously sculptured and surmounted
by a band of Verona marble; above it rises a design of leaves and
ears of corn growing and spreading like a plant, and full of graceful
and delicate fancy. The unique feature of the palace is the richly
sculptured stone barbacan that supports the projecting portion of the
upper storey overhanging the Calle della Fava. There is in Venice an
abundance of fine wooden barbacans, but this is the only example we
remember of the sumptuous casing in stone.
A little further and we pass below a palace of the Transition, from
whose graceful balcony keep watch a row of sculptured lions in
half-relief. As we come into the Rio della Guerra, the midday light
plays reflectively on the water, striking out of it a thousand fitful
diamonds, and the now ebbing tide washes with a soft caressing sound
against the houses. At the juncture of the Rio della Guerra with the
Rio del Palazzo is the Casa dell’ Angelo so named from the beautiful
sculptured angel on the wall that faces us. It stands erect, with
wings spread, holding in the left hand a globe signed with the Cross,
which it seems in the act of blessing. The lower part of its body is
covered with two shields bearing, according to Tassini, the arms of the
Narni family. It is sheltered by a pent-roof, supported on graceful
pillars, most delicately and nobly worked. In the lunette above the
angel, in the immediate shadow of the roof, is discernible a painting
of the Madonna and Child between two kneeling angels, which still
retain traces of soft and beautiful colouring. But the most precious
possessions of this palace front are the remnants of fresco under
the broad projecting roof at the further end of the building. The
beautiful figure of a woman, with head resting on her hand and braided
golden hair, is still intact. There is another fine figure between the
windows, and there are many fading fragments in the plaster below.
Tradition unanimously attributes these frescoes to Tintoretto, and it
is difficult to believe that the lovely woman could have come from any
other hand.
The Ponte Canonica, which adjoins our first Capello Palace, now allows
us an easy passage, and we can take our way on the ebbing tide down
the Rio del Palazzo. Below the sombre weight of the Bridge of Sighs,
between the palace and the prison, we pass again into the aureole of
Venice. Within the brilliant bay formed by the Riva degli Schiavoni the
gulls are making festa, and away towards the city they whirl and drift
like shining snowflakes in the radiance of the Grand Canal. As we pass
the Piazzetta to land at the Molo, the golden sword of Justice gleams
superbly luminous in the blue above San Marco. Venice has put on her
glory.
Chapter Nine
VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART II)
The centre of our second tour is an ancient and comparatively
unfrequented region in the north of Venice--that part of Cannaregio
over which watches the Campanile of the Madonna dell’ Orto, with its
crowning image of snowy stone and four solemn apostles looking out
over city and lagoon. The beautiful figure of the Madonna, round whose
feet, between the tiles of her ruddy cupola, spring little plants
the birds have sown, rises day after day triumphant out of the duel
between sun and mist, a pledge of the victory of light; and through all
vicissitudes of weather she is seen, sometimes in dazzling outline upon
the deep blue, or against a canopy of grey, sometimes herself tempered
to shadowy greyness by the brilliance of the cumuli that out-rival even
her snowy purity.
We will enter from the Grand Canal by the Rio San Marcuola, nearly
opposite the Correr Museum, and pass below the Ponte dell’ Anconetta
on the Strada Nuova, or more properly the Corso Vittorio Emanuele,
which in its broad and ungracious uniformity is one of the most
forbidding streets in Venice. It seems at first to have no reserves
into which by a little tact or sympathy we may ingratiate ourselves;
yet many activities generally to be encountered in other raiment
and under other auspices, lurk behind its mask. On this very Rio
San Marcuola is a workshop where antiquities are fabricated for the
show-rooms of the Grand Canal. We see them here in their early stages,
a rude stone well-head awaiting an ancient sculpture, a Renaissance
chimney-piece, a Byzantine lion in Verona marble; and the forger is no
villain but an honest, genial workman skilled to do better, but content
to supply what he is asked for. A little beyond the bridge we come
on one of the oldest squeri or boat-building yards of Venice. Black
sprites of boys pass to and fro, plunging their torches into cauldrons
of burning pitch, to draw them in the wake of flaming branches along
the upturned sides of the gondolas; and men, with something of the fire
and of the blackness in their eyes and faces, swink like the skilled
demons in Spenser’s cave of Mammon. It is outside, on the squero,
that this coarser work with pitch and cauldron goes on; in the inner
workshop are the frames of gondolas in making, exquisite skeletons with
subtle apportioning of oak, elm, nut and larch, and long unbroken sides
of beech. Opposite the squero, on our right, is the ugly new brick wall
of Paolo Sarpi’s convent. Above it may be seen a weed-grown fragment of
the ancient building with its relief above the door. Boni has suggested
that a more appropriate memorial to Sarpi’s memory than the erection
of a bronze statue might have been the preservation or renewal in its
original beauty of the old convent with which he was so closely and
intimately connected.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE OF GRAND CANAL.]
We strike almost immediately into the Rio della Misericordia, and as
we look down the long vista to right and left of us, under the low
bridges, we begin to realise the peculiar character of this district.
It is entirely different from that of our first tour; long parallel
canals run from east to west, cutting the land into narrow strips and
giving the strips a curious effect of isolation. These canals are
bounded on the west by the lagoon, and the effect of sunset light
flooding the long waterways is strikingly beautiful. If we were to
follow the Rio della Misericordia to the left, we should come to the
curious wedge-shaped island of the Ghetto Nuovo and the tall deserted
houses of the Ghetto Vecchio. But we will tend only slightly to the
left, and passing under a low bridge continue our former course into
the Rio della Sensa. This name has in it echoes of historic festivals;
it originated in the fact that the stalls for the great Ascension
fête on the Piazza were stored in the warehouses that stood on its
banks. As late as the last celebration of this famous offshoot of the
Sposalizio festival, in the year 1776, fifty-seven thousand ducats were
spent on erecting the enclosure in which the stalls were set up. The
Rio della Sensa has many links with the past. Above a door in a humble
wall on the fondamenta hangs a shield on which is sculptured an arm
cased in steel. This shield belonged to the Brazzo (Braccio) family,
of Tuscan origin, who had settled in Venice and acquired much land in
this district. The name is worthy of preservation; for one at least
of the family has left an enduring mark in the annals of the city.
“In 1437,” we read in Tassini’s _Curiosità Veneziane_, “a Geoffrey da
Brazzo, with some companions, founded, in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e
Paolo, the Scuola di San Marco of which he was the Grand Guardian.”
Within the unpaved court the house of the worthy Geoffrey is still
standing, and it preserves its early Gothic and Byzantine features
but little obscured by later additions. It is not altogether gloomy
though evidently inhabited by very poor people; little gardens still
blossom from the leads and window boxes, and tables and chairs are set
out under the vine in the yard below. In the seventeenth century the
family became extinct, its history being closed by a rather sordid
domestic tragedy; and it is pleasanter to revert to the earlier days
of this simple, dignified citizen’s dwelling when Geoffrey and his
associates discussed in it the hopes and fears of their School. Another
page of Venetian history lies open for us at the Campo dei Mori further
along the same rio to the right. Our attention is attracted at once
by a curious figure in oriental turban, with a pack upon its head,
at the corner of the square which strikes the fondamenta. Two more
figures in the same style of dress are stationed at other corners of
the square. The crowd of urchins who throng round us the instant we
alight will tell us that these are Sior Rioba and his brothers. The
key to these figures is to be found in a palace, the inner court of
which opens on our right hand as we turn inwards from the canal. It
belonged to three Greek brothers, by name Rioba, Sandi and Afani, of
the family Mastelli, who leaving the Morea in the twelfth century, on
account of disturbances there, came with great wealth to Venice and
built themselves this house by the campo which has preserved their
origin in its name. This family also has a noble record in Venetian
annals. It took part in the Crusade of 1202, and received citizenship
for its reward. Later it rested from its labours and set up a spice
shop in Cannaregio at the sign of the Camel. From these avocations
it passed to a more reposeful existence on the banks of the Brenta,
and, like the da Brazzo family, it became extinct in the seventeenth
century. The courtyard of the palace, known now as the Palazzo Camello,
possesses many fascinating reminders of its past, though some of its
old beauties have been taken from it even in recent years. The open
arches of the sotto-portico have been filled in, and a corkscrew stair
is now only recognisable by the pillars we see immured in a circular
tower. The pillars that once supported the arches of the entrance
portico, now half buried in the ground from the constant raising of
its level, are fine and uncommon examples of the transition from
Gothic to Renaissance. Above the portico are two striking projections
of carved stone, once serving perhaps to support a lantern or coat
of arms, and in the angle of this wall and the main building are the
relics of a Gothic pedestal on which, without doubt, some image has
stood. The low-beamed court to the water is still intact with its
finely-carved architraves and early Gothic pillars; but beyond the
point of its present habitation it has been allowed to fall into decay
from the invading damp. If we venture along this outer court to the
water’s edge, we shall find ourselves in the Rio della Madonna dell’
Orto almost opposite the campo and church. By the help of a barge
which we may reasonably hope to find moored alongside the water-door
of the court, we obtained a view of the most characteristic aspect of
the Palazzo Camello. The passer-by on the fondamenta cannot fail to
be impressed by its beautiful decorative balcony and windows and the
Byzantine frieze in a lower storey, but above all by a camel and driver
sculptured in admirable relief on the wall.
Returning to the Campo dei Mori, we make our way again to the
Fondamenta della Misericordia, where we disembarked. Almost immediately
on our left, backing the Palazzo Camello, and perhaps originally
forming a part of it, is the house of Tintoretto. It is still unspoiled
of its ancient decorations of small sculptured figures and formal
designs; and, above all, it is interesting architecturally for its
elaborate carved wooden cornice on the two upper storeys to which
time has given the appearance of stone. Howells, in his description of
Tintoretto’s house, conveys an impression of sordid desolation in the
building and its inmates. It may lately have fallen on better days; for
there is now nothing forbidding about it, and indeed it is a welcome
refuge from the swarms of dirty and discordant children whom the
presence of a stranger on this campo seems to have a peculiar power of
attracting. Its upper windows look out across the rio on a garden with
a majestic cypress tree, and down the long canal to the wide waters of
the lagoon. And some of the inmates of the house still have a share
in the ancient, though humbler, arts of Venice. There are beadmakers
working, as usual in almost total darkness, in an airless room in
the basement. After we have seen these rows of patient, crouching
workers, bending hour after hour over their gas jets, the beads of
the lamp-lit Merceria will call up irresistibly the low benches, the
glittering wires, the glazed and darkened windows. For there seems a
strange irony in the birth of these shining toys out of the gloom. Many
unacknowledged artists have worked upon these beads; much, no doubt, of
their workmanship is mechanical; but if we look into them we shall find
many little originalities in the gradation of line and colour, many
touches of taste and feeling in their graceful and various designs. The
house is much as it might have been in Tintoretto’s day, but the walls
seem empty and unresponsive and to have less part in him than those
palace fronts in which some faded fresco bears witness to the magic of
his hand. But there is a building near by that may rightly be called
the house of Tintoretto, where we may more faithfully commune with his
mind--the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, in which, Ridolfi tells us,
Tintoretto worked for his keep alone “because his fertile brain was
constantly boiling with new thoughts,” and thereby roused the wrath
of his fellow artists. It was here that Meissonier, coming in his old
age to Venice, set himself down at the feet of the master and copied
Tintoretto’s _Last Judgment_ in the choir. But it is not primarily for
the artist’s great works in the choir that we return again and again
to the Madonna dell’ Orto. It is for a painting no less the work of a
giant, but of a giant gifted with tenderness equal to his strength.
The _Presentation of the Virgin_ has been moved from its original
place on the organ to a side chapel in which both light and space are
inadequate, so that, coming on it first out of the daylight, we receive
only a vague impression of its greatness. It is only gradually that
it breaks on us in its combination of vigorous motion and life with
sublime repose, and that we come to distinguish the elements that make
up its power and to appreciate the singleness and intensity of vision
which, amid all its wealth of resource, never wavers in loyalty to the
central idea. In Titian’s _Presentation_, the mountain background, the
crowd of Venetian citizens, the old egg woman, the Virgin, the High
Priest, appear as separate interests; in Tintoretto’s _Presentation_
all the elements are unified; there is but one moment, one point, to
which everything tends. The lovely women in the foreground, the mighty
figures reclining on the stair, the mysterious trio behind in the
shadow of the balustrade, all subserve the quiet, yet passionate drama
enacted above in the meeting of the High Priest and Virgin. At last, as
at first, these two figures fill our mind; their mutual contemplation
is compelling. The Virgin is set against the sky, near the top of
the stair she is ascending with blithe and childlike confidence, her
right hand over her heart. She has no eyes except for the High Priest.
She moves up to him without hesitation or drawing back. And he is
bent on her entirely. From the height of his great stature, with the
supreme majesty of his office about him, the High Priest, between his
robe-bearers, extends his hands above the ascending childish figure--a
world of thought, of awe, of worship, in that mysterious and lofty
benediction.
We will go back again along the Rio della Sensa to the point where
we entered it, turning now to the right under the Ponte Rosso into
the Rio dei Trasti which soon Widens into a broad way of unbridged
water leading out to the lagoon and dividing the island of the Madonna
dell’ Orto from that of Sant’ Alvise. The rio into which we have
now come is the third long parallel waterway we have struck in our
journey through this district. It stretches on either side of us,
spanned by wooden bridges, between the west lagoon and the Sacca della
Misericordia. We will follow it for a short distance to the left to
the little campo of Sant’ Alvise from which it takes its name. Here,
in the church hangs that series of strange little canvases that Ruskin
did not hesitate to attribute to Carpaccio. They are hung on a wall
near the entrance door without order or precaution, signed in great
sprawling childish characters Vetor Carpacio. Perhaps our pleasure at
penetrating the by-ways of the city to this remote little island makes
us at first uncritically appreciative of the quaint square canvases.
Ruskin thought them the works of Carpaccio at eight or nine years
of age, but he was confessedly writing from memory, and face to face
with the reality might have reconsidered his verdict. The paintings
seem too sophisticated for a young Carpaccio, too feeble for an older
one. The architectural details belong in many respects to a period
of the Renaissance later than that which Carpaccio knew, and though,
behind their technical incompetence and absurd anachronisms, we seem
to catch glimpses of the masterful imaginativeness of Carpaccio, we
shall probably feel Molmenti’s verdict against their authenticity to
be more substantial than Ruskin’s reminiscence which was framed in the
enthusiasm of his discovery of one of the greatest of Venetian artists.
One of the paintings, _The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba_,
has an interest apart from its quaint fancy. We may conjecture that
the artist was drawing on a memory of some work from the east; for the
wooden bridge and the figures wavering at each end of it, the winding
river, the little round Renaissance building to symbolise Jerusalem,
and, above all, the swans in the stream below, and the tall blue peaks
in the background, remind us of nothing so much as the willow pattern
plate familiar to our childhood. We will leave on one side the scenes
from Christ’s Passion by Tiepolo, which by some incongruous chance
also are preserved in this humble aisleless church, merely remarking
that it is necessary to arrive here early; for the sacristan, whose
duties extend to both the churches on the two neighbouring islands,
hurries off at half-past nine for the office at the Madonna dell’ Orto,
and Sant’ Alvise is shut.
We will return along the rio, past the Madonna dell’ Orto and the
Palazzo Camello to the Sacca della Misericordia. We shall have occasion
elsewhere to speak at length of this unfrequented square of water. It
looks out to Murano and the mountains, and is bounded on the south
and west by the Abazia della Misericordia and the garden of the Casa
degli Spiriti. The Abazia della Misericordia is one of the most
beautiful ruins in all Venice. It has its roots far back in the past;
for the abbey church was built in 939 and handed over to hermits and,
later, to Augustinian Brothers, who added to it a convent. A school
was erected beside the church in 1308, and this was later enlarged
and extended by a hospital and chapel. In the sixteenth century the
old hospice was given over to the silk-weavers, and another, more
spacious and magnificent, was substituted. On the Fondamenta dell’
Abazia, close beside the Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia,
is a wonderful relief, over the entrance to the hospice for poorer
members of the confraternity, bearing the date 1505. It represents the
Virgin with robes outspread to enclose and shelter a little company
of hooded Brothers who kneel around her; the relief is beautiful in
workmanship, and there are traces of lovely colour in the folds of the
Virgin’s garments. An exquisite square campanile rises in the part of
the abbey buildings that is still inhabited by Franciscan Brothers,
but the northern front which overlooks the Sacca is a long, roofless,
two-storeyed wall of brick with closed shutters--the façade of a
weed-grown ruin. This isolated northern wall is exquisite in colouring:
its pink plaster has been partly worn away to the red bricks, partly
tempered to soft coral where it still lies on the hoary stone. Sparse
weeds cover the top, outlined against the sky, and plants which no hand
of man has sown spring from the crevices in the brick. In the early
morning the Abazia is in shade, and its image in the smooth, shining
water is gifted with a new beauty and strength. Looking back upon the
east wall, part of which is in ruins, we see the broad Rio di Noale
branching in two smaller channels right and left of the garden wall of
the police station. This wall has a central window looking out to
the lagoon, and often towards evening two figures may be seen through
it, framed against the green and taking their pleasure in the garden as
in some old picture.
[Illustration: VIEW ON GRAND CANAL.]
The Sacca della Misericordia has a majestic corner-stone in the Casa
degli Spiriti, the long garden of which is joined to the island of
the Abazia by the Ponte della Sacca, a beautiful bridge of pale rose
stone bound and lined with white marble. To those who live overlooking
the Sacca, the House of the Spirits becomes an inseparable part of
the landscape of the lagoon. Modern incredulity has preferred to talk
of smugglers instead of spirits, or to find in the weird echoes which
inhabit the Sacca and the neighbouring waterways an explanation of
its name. Others maintain that it owes it to the companies of wit
and intellect that gathered there in the days of Titian and Aretino;
no proofs, however, have been offered in support of this alluring
suggestion. But if modernity has driven out the spirits, the house
itself has become a ghost. In the midst of the thunderstorms which from
time to time break over the lagoon the Casa degli Spiriti stands out
a ghostly landmark, framed suddenly by a sickle of gold or flashing
silver, or illuminated by a level flood of purple, a place of revel
for the spirits of the storm. In the calm moonlight it appears more
pallid than the moon herself; in the black starless night still the
huge corner-stone looms out on the edge of the lagoon. And there is no
watch-tower to equal the Casa degli Spiriti for the spectacle of dawn
upon the mountains. Those who wake within Venice under a glimmering
grey sky, with rifts of remote, transparent blue, hear talk of coming
rain. But the House of Spirits which kept watch all night upon the
north lagoon, has had its day already in one short hour of dawn. It
has seen the Alps rise blue and clear behind the low green line of the
mainland; it has seen the ruby fire drawn from them by the dawn; it has
seen the crystal path of the lagoon fade to the dove’s neck with its
waves of peacock green; it has seen the fishing-boats come pressing
with their many-coloured sails against the sunrise, each, as it turned
before the wind, sealed with a golden blessing from the god of day.
But the House of the Spirits which dominates these, the immaterial
glories of the lagoon, rules over a domain of vivid colour and
activity. For from the early hours of the morning there is continual
traffic down the Sacca of fruit barges bound for Rialto from Sant’
Erasmo, the garden of Venice, and of milk barges from the mainland. It
is not always an easy life, that of the feeders of the city--in which,
as Sansovino says, nothing grows, but everything is found. There are
many days when cold and rain and adverse winds mean real suffering to
the sellers of fruit and milk. Again and again one is reminded of T. E.
Brown’s wonderful description of the fishing-boat, with its dirt, its
noise, its foul-mouthed crew transformed beneath “the broad benediction
of the west” as one sees a milk barge toiling up the channel against
wind and tide, with its crowd of men and women. The men begin to hoist
the sail with loud excited cries; the women crouch low for shelter,
smoking or munching their crusts. They seem lumpish leaden combatants
in the lists against the elements, with small hope of conquest. Then,
suddenly, as it rounds the corner of the Casa degli Spiriti, the
ponderous boat with its dejected crew spreads its sails like a bird, a
thing of swift delight lifted into the strong hand of the wind.
If we halt but for an hour in the shadow of the Abazia, we may have a
glimpse of many aspects of the city’s floating life; joy and mourning
follow in unplanned succession, strong passion and the merchandise of
every day jostle each other. Now there passes down the Sacca a gondola
bearing a coffin to San Michele, now a slow-creeping barge under a
mountain of planks, now a little company of lowing calves who can
have but one destination in this city without pasture, now a barge of
necklaces from Murano that lie coiled together like shining fish of
many colours.
There is a moment of late August when all seasons seem to meet and
lavish their brightest colours on Rialto, and on the many fruit-stalls
of Venice and on the barges that creep leisurely up and down the
canals. If we turn again to the heart of the city in the wake of one of
those fruit barges, we may imagine ourselves sharing in ancient pomps
and festivals. For their tapestry is gorgeous; pyramids of peaches
bound about with green leaves, of tomatoes and brilliant pepper pods,
huge watermelons cut open to show the crisp, rosy pulp; piles of figs,
brown and green; pears, apples, grapes; and choicest of all, the
delicious red _fragola_ or strawberry-grape. All these and many more
make up the brilliant burden of the barges from Sant’ Erasmo. We may
follow them as they wind through the lesser waterways, now in sun, now
in shadow, till the pageant is welcomed in the full flowing day of the
Grand Canal and the barges empty themselves at Rialto.
Chapter Ten
ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE
It can be no matter for wonder that colour was the elected medium of
expression for Venice: endowed, by reason of her water, with a twofold
gift of light, she was also perhaps more splendid than any other city
in the details of her daily life. Colour was its substance. Everything
was pictorial and rich and festive. Even on a dark day the rooms of the
Accademia seem full of sunshine from the treasure they hold of ancient
Venice. If Bellini’s _Procession of the Cross_ on the Piazza of San
Marco were missing from its place, we should feel that a light had
been put out. The Venetians had always been decorators. The pictures
of the first masters--Vivarini, d’Alemagna, Jacobello del Fiore and
many others--seem literally spun out of the furnaces of Murano. They
are no primitives in their mastery of colour. Consider for a moment
the _Madonna and Saints_ of Vivarini and d’Alemagna in the Sala della
Presentazione. The natural life of the fields has been made to serve
a design of amazing richness. The Virgin’s golden throne is carved
With acorns and roses, and luxuriant oak foliage forms its decorative
fringe; the fruits of the garden in which she sits are lavished round
her; the grass is gemmed with countless tiny flowers, trefoil and
strawberry, milkwort and potentilla, and the infant Christ has burst
open a golden pomegranate, displaying its burden of rich crimson
seeds. There is scarcely a harmony of colour unattempted, scarcely a
jewel unset, from the rainbow of the angels’ wings, and the rim of
fluctuating colours on the Virgin’s green robe folded back over peacock
blue, to the mosaics in the burning gold of the angels’ haloes, in the
Virgin’s crown, and in the mitres of the Fathers. There too is the
very vermilion of Veronese, that wonderful salvia scarlet to which the
_Feast in Levi’s House_ owes so much of its decorative significance.
We shall be better equipped for understanding the early colour-masters
if we realise that their dowry came to them not only from the lagoon.
The marvellous rainbow of Venice the “Ambiguous One” was not their only
light nor the deep azure and emerald and gold, which she hung about
her, the only jewels they knew. The garment of Venetian art is inwoven
with threads of mountain glory, of rich harvests of grape and golden
grain: we must go up into the mainland of Venice to understand the art
of the first masters no less than that of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto
and Veronese, whose conceptions were penetrated with the very sunshine
of earth, a warmer-bodied, fuller sunshine than Venice of the waters
could know, full of secret throbbings of the hidden springing life for
light and ripening. Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe
of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and
silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia.
These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated
with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as
their allotted span grows less. The passion of the spring is of another
kind; it needs the present magic of the sun to draw out its exquisite,
incipient radiance; it cannot lavish glory except when his countenance
is bent upon it. But in the radiance of autumn foliage there is a
daring that darkness is impotent to quell: it is like a shout of
triumph in the face of death, a procession of all the glory of earth
into the kingdom of the dead, not reluctant, not made fearful by the
rumours that have floated to it in the grey-mantled dawn, in the fierce
trumpeting of rain and wind; boldly, gloriously it marches, scattering
joyfully the gems it cannot hold, that nothing shall be saved. We sing
no dirge, but a triumph song, as the golden trophies fall--a gold more
refulgent than Bellini’s façade of San Marco, though this was gold of
the purest even Venice, the golden city, could win from her furnaces.
We may still see these mainland autumns where the colour-masters
gathered their treasures; on the borders of the mountains we may sit
in such a garden of the Madonna as Vivarini and his fellows record. In
the late autumn the sun is slow to win his way; but when he comes there
is no splendour to rival the fire of the salvia-beds, round cups of
concentrated light springing up into spires and tongues of flame among
the arrow-shaped green leaves. No words can describe the brilliance of
this leaping flame, devouring the sunshine like fuel, and scattering it
abroad in myriad gems of penetrating brightness. In the long luminous
grass of the lawn will be scattered here and there a rose-bush of the
Madonna’s crimson, and tall gold-edged lilies may be seen through the
close-hung flaps of the medusa leaves. This splendid tapestry is spread
upon a poplar background of flickering gold and green, the steadier
gold of low mulberries, and grey-bodied autumn apple-trees on which the
leaves glow blood-red, while behind all rise the grassy slopes of the
mountain outposts crossed by the shadow of some jutting rock.
Often among the humbler Venetian painters, less versed in the deeper
significance of human life and religious symbol, we find a singular
mastery of perspective and many signs of familiarity with the interplay
of light and shade among the mountains. We are reminded again and again
of their apprenticeship to nature as we see one of the countless ruined
towers on the outposts of the Alps rising against the golden sunset
light within its threadbare rampart of dusky branches. The face of
the mountains was a vital and intimate fact to them, not an accepted
piety. We are, for instance, often tempted to consider the persons of
Cima’s sacred themes less as the essential interest than as a finely
designed harmony of colour in the foreground of a landscape. In his
native city of Conegliano he stored his mind with mountain wonders,
and in his wide and delicate horizons there are many touches inspired
by a living memory of the scene. We have known the joy of that limpid
atmosphere after days of mist and rain, those floating sunlit clouds
upon the transparent blue, that jewel-like gleam of a deep pool,
the delicacy of autumn trees passing into gold, the foretaste of an
untrodden stronghold in the winding paths that lose themselves and
come again to view as they coil up the castled heights. The landscape
is conventionalised of course, but its spirit is there--its rare
shades of colour, its marvellous varieties of depth; and ever behind,
there is the vision of the mountains cutting into the sky in a sharp,
clear, azure coldness, or with a luminous haze round their base in
the mellowness of an autumn day. As backgrounds we see them only, for
Venice had other needs than of mountains; but many of these painters
knew them as near realities; they had stept home in the glory of
an autumn sunset amid the revel of the vintage, their whole being
intoxicated with the wine and the splendour of life; they had drunk
that fresh-trodden, unfermented juice, the _vino mosto_, sufficient to
stir those whose senses are alert and in whom the passion of the world
runs high. It needed indeed a Titian to transform the vintage of Cadore
into the bacchic rout of his _Ariadne_, but it is there, in the wooded
mountain slopes, in the pageantry of evening, when the fancy soars to
Ariadne’s crown faintly dawning in the warm blue, and sweeps round some
mist-clad inland lake to float among the turreted heights.
[Illustration: PALAZZO REZZONICO.]
Or if we take our stand on the keep of the ruined Roman citadel
of Asolo, when the evening light streaming down into the shadowy
undulations of the valley, which tosses in ceaseless waves round the
mountain’s base, illuminates a land of rich and golden peace, we feel
again the painters of Venice at our side; the vague, rich spirit of
the winding valleys, allied with the solemn grandeur of the mountains,
above whose dark barrier we have glimpses of remote and shining peaks,
the tiny citadels half gathered into the folding mist, the alternate
radiance and keen obscurity of the lower peaks now visited and now
forsaken by the inconstant sunset light, the sudden illumination
of a solitary peasant or a single tree in sharp relief against the
twilight--all these have passed into the canvas of Giorgione: in him,
above all, we seem to drink that wondrous potion compact of evening
vapour and golden light which the sunset pours into the dim goblet
of the mountain valleys. And we may record here, how, in the last
period of the Venetian Renaissance, the great decorator Veronese
found a field of activity under the shadow of Asolo. When Marcantonio
Barbaro, Procurator of San Marco, and his brother the Patriarch of
Aquileja, bade Palladio build their villa at the little village of
Maser, they called on their friend Paolo to decorate it within. And
this perfect villa is one of the happiest monuments to the two artists;
the excellent skill of both is brought into congenial play, and to the
courtly old patrician Barbaro we owe a debt which perhaps we partly
cancel in the coin of our pleasure. The simple yet sumptuous villa lies
so dexterously disposed below its cypress hill, that it seems almost
to consist of the loggia alone as we climb up the garden slope from
the road, through the judicious mingling of smooth lawn and scythe-cut
grass full of scabious and delicate Alpine flowers. Delicious scents
float down from the late roses along the terrace and the brilliant
flower-beds in the grass; the medusa tree stands luminous against the
evergreen shrubs and cypress, and against the yellow wall a huge cactus
raises its mysterious purple sword-blade. The villa is spacious and
full of air and light; the suite of rooms above the loggia, containing
the great part of Paolo’s work, open one out of the other, and each has
a glass door that leads directly to the lawn and grotto in the cleft
of the hill behind, while the central hall lies open on each side to
wide stretches of mountain country. There were no stern censors here to
ask Paolo if his homely details were quite in keeping with the gravity
of his theme; the artist was working for a friend in a house that was
full of light and sunshine and the clear mountain air, and he has put
his soul with most lucid fantasy into the allegories of autumn and
springtime, of Cybele and Juno, Vulcan and Apollo, of dogs and boys
and girls at play among the mimic balconies, of sprays of fig and vine
leaf; into the figures of Michelangelesque strength reclining above the
doors, and the tiny processions of men and beasts in chiaroscuro on
the friezes; into the clear, radiant faces of women and sinewy forms
of men; the eloquent dogs and lions; and not least into the lithe and
gallant figure of himself, advancing from the mimic door at one end of
the long vista to meet the lady who trips out from the opposite end,
_l’amica dell’ artista_--or, as the guide-book discreetly says--his
wife. The portrait of himself is done with much imagination and even
pathos. He was a dreamer, too, this Veronese. These figures of the
painter and his dog give us pause; they make us feel that he would
have been good to walk the mountains with; that if he could step out
now from the room where he keeps continual watch, on to the exquisite
grass plot, with its happy tuft of white anemone and pale Michaelmas
daisy, we might win from him some mountain confidence which he has not
entrusted to canvas or fresco. It is a pleasure to picture Veronese at
his work upon Marcantonio’s villa. Every midday he must have had good
progress to show; for these blithe works that have kept their colour so
fresh and strong are executed with a few brave master strokes: they
are no less potent in their swift presentment than in their conception.
We can see him dismounting from his scaffold at the summons of Barbaro,
returned from his morning round among his stables or his orchards; we
can see him still keen and stirred by the creative impulse, full of
that excited pleasure which accompanies expression, standing a little
aside while Barbaro bears his admiration to and fro--now confessing
that time and office have rusted his mythology and asking the meaning
of some emblem; now on the lookout for a freak of his friend, some
beast or bird put in perhaps to give him joy; now in raptures over the
old shoes and broom, which he swears he has just thrashed the maid for
leaving on the cornice, while Paolo stands by brimming with mirth at
the deception; now called upon to guess the significance of the fair
lady bridled by her lord, which the guide-book ungallantly interprets
as the victory of virtue over vice, but which to Marcantonio no doubt
seemed capable of less abstract explanation. With all their nobility
of design and execution, there is something about these frescoes so
intimate and sympathetic as to impart to us the actual joy and health
of spirit which conceived them. Given the skill and the robust and
prodigal genius of Veronese, how should they not be joyous in these
halls full of light and air and sunshine, the song of birds and of
trickling water, the sounds of meadow and mountain. We may take leave
of the mountains in the midst of one of those brave companies which
must often have gathered in this earthly Paradise of Marcantonio
Barbaro round the long table spread in the loggia--such a loggia as
Paolo himself so often painted--looking out, through the arches to the
vista of creepered wall and over the green meadows studded with golden
fruit-trees, to the undulating country and tracts of woodland, now
bathed in liquid sunshine, now gathered into a soft-enfolding haze--a
wide ocean from which the campaniles rise like masts of ships, and over
which the distant villas are scattered like shining fishing-boats.
“These workmen,” says d’Annunzio of the Venetian artists of the
Renaissance, “create in a medium that is itself a joyous mystery--in
colour, the ornament of the world, in colour, which seems to be the
striving of the spirit to become light. And the entirely new, musical
understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their
creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents
and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony.”
Colour--which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light.
These words recur to us again and again face to face with the Venetian
masters. By the primitives the colours are laid on as accessory to
the scene, as it were fine enamel; in the Renaissance painters, they
are not only woven into the fabric of the picture, it grows and moves
through them. We may choose, in illustration, Giovanni Bellini’s
small picture of the _Madonna with St. Catherine and the Magdalen_
in the Accademia, because, though it is in one sense less completely
representative of the distinguishing features of the Venetian school
than, for instance, his masterpiece of the _Frari_, it realises perhaps
more fully than any that “new and musical understanding of colour”
which was the peculiar gift of the Venetians. It is literally informed
with radiance; flesh itself has become spirit, no longer a covering,
but an atmosphere--a directly perfect expression. There is no denial
or emaciation of the flesh; the forms are strong, the habitations of a
potent earth-spirit. The faces are pondering, penetrating, profound,
and withal extremely individual; they might seem impassive, were it
not that every feature is kindled by the pervading colour till we seem
to feel it as a sensuous presence. It is a quality of colour that so
subtly determines the poise of their hands, that makes their touch so
sensitively penetrating that feeling seems to flow from it without
pressure. The solemn harmony of red and green and blue, and of the
diffused radiance of the flesh tints, is not only lit from without by
the sunlight, it seems literally to burn from within, depth behind
depth, with light.
The peculiarly luminous treatment of the flesh perfected by Bellini in
repose, it remained for Tintoretto to realise in motion; this we may
venture to illustrate from a work too immense for our discussion in any
but a limited aspect--his last great work, _The Paradise_, in the Ducal
Palace. The quality we are seeking in it becomes the more remarkable on
account of its loss of superficial colour, so that at first it seems
cold and faded as if a mist had fallen upon it; then, very slowly,
like day breaking out of the veil, colour reveals itself as a fresh
property in the forms. We cannot penetrate the depth of it; rank behind
rank the luminous faces define themselves like mysterious shapes of
the atmosphere, some mere ghosts in the depths which daylight cannot
pierce, some radiant already with the light; and across and through
them all, through the flame-winged throng of Cherubim, piercing all
companies and ranks of being to the extremes of the vast canvas, shoot
the rays from the central source of light in the seat of Christ. It is
a symphony of colour become almost vocal; we perceive it not only with
the eye but in all our senses, this music of the spheres which one man
has dared to gather into a single canvas. Who but Tintoretto could have
dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and
faces? Into all the mysteries of life--those echoes of experience which
we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable
correspondencies--into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from
behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe,
and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great
symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing
created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour.
At times it overpowers us, and then amid the maze of divine musicians
and Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones and Principalities and Powers,
some single harmonious human form, strong in beauty, with wings of
light, some tender, lovely face of youth or woman, the solemn gesture
of saint or bishop, the rainbow of an angel’s wing, gives our intellect
a resting-place. For it is not through obscuring of outlines that this
wonder of music in colour is accomplished; the human form, on which all
the notes are played, is become indeed a perfect instrument, but not
by forfeiting its material strength or substance; the structure is
massive, solid--if to our notion of solidity we may unite the gift of
perfect ease within an element whose progress only is by flight, where
each moment is poised but slightly in its passage to the next, where
there is no time because no stable unit to serve as pedestal for time.
In this great picture, that faculty of the Venetian painters which we
are now illustrating, found perhaps its completest realisation--the
power of winging flesh with colour so that it is endowed with the very
properties of atmosphere.
[Illustration: _By permission of Arnold Mitchell, Esq._
TOWARDS THE RIALTO, SAN ANGELO.]
This luminous quality of the Venetian painters is realised by them
in many more general ways than in the treatment of the human form.
We may consider it in Carpaccio in relation to the significance of
landscape in his compositions. It is his power of treating a scene
atmospherically that supplies one chief charm of his work. It is
never on a day of splendour that either he or Gentile Bellini depicts
Venice; but constantly on a cold, colourless day of late autumn the
waters of Carpaccio seem to live again for us as we have seen them
through the perspective of his arches or in the background of a city
picture. We may see the Grand Canal wind into the dark city under
the pale familiar gold of his Rialto sunset, and scattered sails on
the cold, clear lagoon in weird contrast of orange with the steely
waters or with the pale rose or white of buildings. There is a peculiar
fascination in this clear neutrality of light in sky and water and
buildings; it is no less a property of Venice than her more refulgent
harmonies. Whatever hour of day it comes, it has the strange revelation
of the dawn about it, a curious remoteness in which the works of men
arrest attention as if fraught with a new purport. The emotional
significance of landscape was understood by Carpaccio in a wonderful
degree. How much depends, for instance, in the scene where Ursula’s
father dismisses the English ambassadors, on the vista of canal across
which lights fall from dividing waterways! It is the narrowest strip;
but the sunlight on the houses, the exquisite arch of pale blue sky
fading into white above the distant buildings, give a new value to the
interior; the outside world, on which the sun is shining, seems to
look into the room with the streaming light. A still more beautiful
illustration of Carpaccio’s understanding of light is to be found in
the room where St. Ursula lies asleep. It seems, in fact, scarcely an
indoor room; through its open doors and windows it is in close touch
with the air and sky; and the effect of contact with wind and sky is
heightened by the real plumage of the angel’s grey wings, while the
back-sweep of his robe suggests a sudden alighting after flight with
the current of air still about him. We know of no picture to surpass
this of Carpaccio in conveying the atmosphere of a room into which the
first light is breaking--the exhilaration of an illumined wall, the
waking of colour on window-ledge, chair and bedcover, the blending of
luminous and shadowy. It is the light of the first dawn, the infancy
of day, with a suggestion of unillumined sky, just creeping out of
shadow in the expanse of open, untrellised window behind the plants,
a soft, wonderful stealing green, that has not yet come into its
kingdom. Even buildings are made by Carpaccio to serve an atmospheric
effect. We might illustrate from almost every picture in San Giorgio
degli Schiavoni, but confining ourselves to the St. Ursula series, we
shall find a notable illustration in the buildings seen through the
water-gate in the _Return of the Embassy_, and in the great Renaissance
loggia which fills so conspicuous a place in the foreground, and to
which airiness and light have been imparted by its great arches, by
the water washing round its base, and by the spring of the bridge that
connects it with the campo where the King sits under his canopy. Most
striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle architectural treatment by
which, in the great threefold scene of the Prince’s departure, his
meeting with Ursula and their blessing by the King, Carpaccio has
bestowed an atmosphere of remoteness, almost of fairy strangeness on
the English harbour with its castles and walls and motley buildings
soaring far up the rocky hillside into the sky, an atmosphere entirely
distinct from the upper-world light and joyousness of the contrasting
court of Ursula’s father.
There is an element of his native landscape that Carpaccio incorporated
with singular felicity, and which is peculiarly prominent in his
pictures--namely the shipping of Venice. In the great trilogy of the
Prince’s departure the vessels are a masterpiece: there is nothing to
surpass them in this kind. Carpaccio seems to have realised to the
full their varied elements of beauty: their static properties, their
weight and substance and the symmetry of their frame, combined with
all the radiant light and spring of swelling sail and rigging and flag
and countless trappings: all that goes to make a sailing ship a thing
of music. And it is not only vessels rigged and ready to float in
triumph on the high seas that Carpaccio depicts: there is a vessel also
_in squero_, with all the song gone from it, one might think, lying
uneasily on its side with its huge mast aslant across the harbour
tower. It is noteworthy that all the vessels of the English King
seem in course of repair; there is something in their semi-skeleton
condition which singularly reinforces the dream effect that we have
noticed in this portion of the picture, and the triumphant vessel that
would seem to belong to the gay town on our right is united in feeling
to the shadow city on the left by the exceeding mystery and beauty
of its reflection. This picture supplies us with another instance of
the way in which Venice operated as an inspiration in the work of
Carpaccio, even when he was not directly portraying the city itself.
The beautiful effect of a drawbridge over a great water, such as he
knew familiarly in Venice, had impressed itself on his mind: adapting
it to the requirements of his scene, he reproduces the bridge of Rialto
in the city of the English King, not forgetting the significance of
a crowning figure in white at the apex of the arch. We cannot indeed
afford to miss a detail in Carpaccio: there is never any crowding nor
taking refuge in vagueness. The varieties of shipping, the flags hung
from the windows, the most distant figures, are all treated with the
same clearness and precision: to each its value is assigned. This
fulness of meaning is one of the sources of his fascination for us:
the fact that he has done a little thing means sometimes more to us, if
we can come at the prompting purpose, than a pageant of main figures.
It is like the side-flash of light which a seemingly irrelevant act
casts sometimes on a personality.
The fidelity of Bellini and Carpaccio to the facts of Venice fills
us continually with fresh wonder: it is not the fidelity of copyists
standing outside the scene they paint; their very heart is in its
stones. As we watch Gentile’s gorgeous procession sweep like a stream
from the gate of the Ducal Palace round the border of the Piazza,
with the sound of trumpets, the rustle and swing of noble garments
and the gleam of banners, we feel that the painter had heard and
felt the triumph of the music, so marvellously has he conveyed its
influence in these moving figures; we too hear the jubilation of it
as the long tubes pass out and in. With the pictures of Carpaccio and
Gentile Bellini before us we may do more than conjecture what manner
of men they were who filled the foreground of contemporary Venice.
We have not masses or dispositions of colour merely: we seem to move
through a crowd of living beings or a gallery of portraits. No one
could paint loungers as Carpaccio paints them; there is no monotony
in their inaction; the faces are as various as the men--wonderful
faces, some coarse, some refined, but almost all with that indefinable
quality of pathos in their strength which is one of the essentials
of beauty. There are perhaps comparatively few among them that would
satisfy a conventional canon of beauty: their fascination lies in the
rich combination of whimsical humour and strength, melancholy and wit;
so eloquent are they, so quick with intelligence that we are little
disposed to question their material perfection or imperfection. These
citizens of Gentile Bellini, Mansueti and above all Carpaccio--since in
him are realised a far greater variety of types--impress us profoundly
as men of calm and steady purpose, who have lived, felt and prevailed.
They are men of action, yet they are dreamers. And this was not from
incapacity in Carpaccio to express vivid motions in feature or form.
When he is more freely composing, as in the _Death of St. Ursula_, it
would be hard to rival the brilliance and vivacity with which he has
treated the turmoil of the one-sided fray. But these citizens--whether
of Venice or of Ursula’s court is immaterial--seem to be governed by
some internal harmony; there is a rhythm in their motions and in their
standing still, which reflects the spirit of their time. We have only
to compare them with the characters in Longhi’s eighteenth-century
interiors to understand that a great change has taken place. Imagine
Carpaccio and Bellini set to paint as primary interests the choosing of
a dress, the stopping of a tooth, the guessing of a riddle, a dancing
lesson, a toilette. These things were part of life, and superbly they
would have done it; they painted lesser acts than these in the corner
of their pictures, for every detail of the city life so jealously
guarded by its rulers was precious to them. But the difference lies in
the centre of interest. In the eighteenth century, the detail, the side
light, the accessory of life has swelled into the principal subject,
and the faces of the actors are vacant as never in Carpaccio. It is not
so much that they are less beautiful, that they are often witless; but
they are lacking in purpose, in subordination to a common control. The
pulse of a great civic life no longer beats in them.
We have considered hitherto the manner in which Venice used her elected
medium of expression, how her painters had understood and interpreted
the life of the city. We will turn now to ask what attitude towards the
facts of life is reflected in their canvases. And here we will attempt
again to illustrate, by certain examples, what aspects of life found
most ready acceptance by the Venetian artists of the Renaissance. We
may venture to seek an illustration of two of its broader aspects--one
foreign, the other native to the mind of Venice as reflected in her
life and in her art--in two sculptured figures by Antonio Rizzo in the
courtyard of the Ducal Palace. These two figures, of Adam and Mars,
are most original in conception. Adam holds the apple in his hand; it
seems that he has just partaken of it and that, partaking, he has been
initiated into a new vision. His beautiful clear-cut face is upturned;
his lips are open; his hand seems to hold in the tumult of his heart.
There is as yet no shame, no contrition, no sense of sin in Adam’s
look, nor in his attitude, but the immense wonder of a new experience
with its yet undetermined import; and through the ecstasy of his
vision there breaks that strange pain of the mortal man whose body can
scarcely support its spiritual burden. It seems almost as if Adam were
receiving now that vision of the ages at whose threshold he stood; he
has opened a door which can never again be shut; he has let in a flood
which is beyond his control, and he is rapt in the contemplation. The
other figure who fills with Adam a niche in the Arco Foscari is Mars,
the god of war. His body is grandly moulded, stalwart and disciplined
and ready for action; but there are no tempests in his look; there
is no herculean development of muscle nor trampling vehemence as in
the fresco of Veronese. Rizzo’s war-god is young, full of grace and
beauty, with the dream also of a poet on his sensuous lips. He is
majestic; his face is grave and thoughtful, with a strange sadness in
its vigilant wisdom. He and Adam seem to strike together the accord of
the Renaissance, the union of a great expectancy, an uncomprehended
newness, with controlled and ordered purpose and the conviction of
conquest. It is the latter aspect which seems to find reflection in the
mind of Venice not the mystic promise, the troubled vision, which the
Renaissance held for some of those on whom its influence fell. In the
Venetians of the first Renaissance there is always the note of calm and
assured knowledge; we may find it again and again in their artistic
annals. In the Casa Civran--the so-called Casa dell’ Otello beside the
Campo dei Carmini--we again recognise Rizzo’s hand in one of the most
lovely and characteristic figures of the first Renaissance, which has
fortunately survived the various restorations and spoliations of the
house and stands still intact in its lonely niche on the plastered
wall. It is impossible to convey in words the vivacity, the nobility
and grace of this young warrior: the proud and magnificent control
governing each motion of his spirited form, the rhythm in response
to which each member of him moves, so that the effect on us is indeed
that of a song, a victorious, joyful melody. Again and again we may
meet them, Mars and his young disciple, and others of their kin, in
Carpaccio’s crowds. The young Civran warrior might have stept on to his
niche from the _Death of St. Ursula_; moreover, the life that thrills
in him is felt not in single figures only, but in the entire conception
of series after series of Carpaccio, in Bellini’s _Procession of the
Cross_, in Tintoretto’s _St. Ursula and the Virgins_ in the Church of
the Mendicanti.
It was thus the Venetians confronted life. In portrait, allegory
or story, realised in varying degrees of naïvety, splendour and
refinement, with more or less penetration and psychological insight, we
find the same balance and control--a unique harmony of strength, grace
and serenity. And if we turn to the religious art of Venice we shall be
struck by a lack of anything like mystic rapture or absorption in the
sufferings of Christ. We have but two examples in Venice of Bellini’s
portrayal of the facts of Christ’s mature life, but he has treated the
theme of the Madonna and Child with a unique profundity. The mystery of
life seems to be shadowed in the face of his Madonnas; his saints and
apostles, so striking in their individuality, so virile in their piety,
have a significance beyond their perfect act of worship. No Venetian
religious painter before Tintoretto equalled Bellini in solemnity and
depth of conception; but in all we find the same pervading calm, the
same absence of tumult or the disturbing element of pain or agony.
We will choose an example from Basaiti--the most perfect, perhaps,
of all his works--in illustration of what seems to us a prevailing
characteristic of the Venetian mind both for strength and weakness--his
_Gesu morto con due Angeli_. It is striking in its originality of
conception and full of noble and tender sentiment. There are no weeping
women, no agonised apostles round the body of Jesus; only the very
young keep watch beside him, two winged infants, at his head and at
his feet. They have found him here, this young dead god, laid out as
if asleep upon the flat stone by the rock--no blasted rock, its crags
are covered with living shrubs and plants. And he is in the light:
there is no ghostly pallor in his face upturned to the sky, upon his
long, dark hair; so beautiful a brow, such tender cheeks, so strong
and brave a neck they have never seen. And he is so still, he lies
without fear, not heeding them. They must not wake him from his sleep.
The infant at his head, whose exquisitely moulded face is full of
that strangely pathetic, antique wisdom of the very young, half-elfish,
half-infantile, feels the burden of his sagacity upon him. Why had
that brow a crown of thorns instead of flowers about it? This youth
to whom they will now bear company had not chosen well his pillow or
his crown--though he is so beautiful he was not wise enough to know
that thorns are not for those who would be at rest. In the picture the
wise infant has taken off the prickly crown that it may not pierce and
rend the dream that holds the sleeper there so long; he is full of the
knowledge of his triumph, half-fearful lest it should not be complete.
The crown of thorns hangs on his own left arm, which he raises half in
warning, half in wonder, feeling as his elbow bends the thorns upwards
on his arm from what pain he has saved that beautiful but foolish
youth. And with his right hand he fondles the hair of Jesus, drawing
it a little back from his forehead to be sure that in his stealthy
theft he has not left some scratch, some mark of pain. But there are
no traces of the crown in any sign of pain, only a faint, faint band
beneath the hair he has drawn back--a shadow, as it were, of Christ’s
regality. _He saved others, Himself He cannot save._ Now with this
little Saviour, this guardian of his pillow, he can at last sleep
in peace. The infant at the feet is more babylike, less wise, more
gleefully wondering. He has found no thorns on that beautiful, still
body, but he has found another wonder at the feet. The toes of one he
holds in his tiny hand, stroking it in his delight: he has found, it
seems, a little hole upon the instep bone that the feet of humans are
not wont to wear, and he points in musing, half-delighted wonder to the
other foot, where he spies the same strange mark. It is a game to this
curly headed cherub. He has not yet dreamed of contact with something
beyond the reach of his baby wisdom. There is not yet in his chubby
face that look which has stolen into the face of his brother and which
now seems to put a world between them, a look that amid all its elfish
aloofness is akin to the solicitude of human love. What dream was this
of Basaiti--the figure of this young God of Light--perfect in form,
luminous and strong, unspoiled and untroubled in his sleep of death?
His eyes if they were open would be fountains fed from the beauty of
the world, but he has borne no burden of humanity. There is power to
suffer in that strong and beautiful young face, but it is not the power
of the Man of Sorrows. This is not Jesus who agonised in the garden,
or who wrote upon the ground; it is not the man from whom Pilate
turned away his face.
[Illustration: BRONZE WELL-HEAD BY ALBERGHETTI, COURTYARD OF PALAZZO
DUCALE.]
There is one only--the last and greatest of the Venetians of the
Renaissance--who could sound all notes of tragedy and pathos as well as
notes of joy. Tintoretto, the supreme Venetian, the greatest exponent
of the essential spirit of Venice, is the son of a wider kingdom
than hers and of a greater age than the Renaissance. Unsurpassed as
designer and colourist, he is endowed throughout with the peculiar
gifts of Venice; but during those years of passionate study, in which
he was winning here and there the secrets of his art, hungry for
knowledge, careless of gain, and bargaining only for material in which
to realise his conceptions--during those years in which he lived alone
in continual meditation on some fresh labour, he was probing the deep
and passionate things of humanity as no Venetian artist had ever probed
them before. The streets and churches of the city seem to echo still to
the steps of this genius at once so robust, so tender, so profound and
so joyous. Ridolfi laments the lavishness of his production, arguing
that restraint of his overflowing fantasy would have strengthened his
conceptions. But Tintoretto had to work in his own way; the instinct
that flowered in the Scuola di San Rocco, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
and the _Paradiso_, might be trusted to choose the manner of its
relaxation as well as of its labour. No painter, perhaps, has so
wonderfully combined the dramatist and lyrist; for Tintoretto with all
his vast imaginative strength had power also over the tenderest springs
of melody. There is hardly a picture of his in which some exquisite
face of youth or woman will not strike a note of tenderness, and we
need only call to mind the _Visitation_ in the Scuola di San Rocco,
to know what Tintoretto’s tenderness could be. He had that power, the
gift only of the greatest, so intensely to imagine his central theme
that the most perfectly executed and conspicuous detail does not divert
us into lesser issues. It is exactly here that his distinguishing
greatness reveals itself He is completely sincere. His vision is too
comprehensive to overlook what really filled the foreground; his skill
of hand too great to allow its inclusion to be other than an element in
the realisation of his central theme; his concentration too intense to
make him fear lest an accessory should become a primary interest. We
may pause for a moment in consideration of his greatest tragic triumph,
the _Crucifixion_, in the Scuola di San Rocco. The theme is immense,
and, like the _Death of Abel_, it is treated in a great elemental
spirit. Amid all the throes of nature and the sufferings of the Son of
Man, the world goes on its way. The ghostly figure of the Arab on his
camel, and the caravan winding down from the city to depart into the
desert, the two splendid knights who gaze without pity or understanding
on this spectacle of the death of slaves, the man who leans from his
donkey behind the Cross of Christ, all are as prominent to their little
circle as they would be in life; and they have just that prominence for
us--the immediate participators in the tragedy--that they would have
in life. As always in Tintoretto, the horizon is vast. Wide ranges of
blue, undulating country extend to the mountains, above which breaks
his peculiar, tender, yellow light of dawn; he has made them recede
into unimagined distance by setting across the mountains and the light
the raised arm of a mounted figure. There is a great calm in this
horizon, while in the middle distance above the Arab the wind has set
the leaves quivering on a tree whose thin and twisted branches sway
wildly against the blackness of the storm. The most impressive light
for this picture is obtained when the setting sun illuminates the
marvellous group of mourners at the foot of the Cross, so that they
stand out in startling brightness against the heightened depths of
the vast background, while Christ hangs above them dark within the
darkness.
[Illustration: EVENING IN THE PIAZZETTA.]
The Scuola di San Rocco is the supreme monument to Tintoretto’s poetic,
as to his plastic genius. If we are justified in feeling that his
understanding of the life of Christ may be a true touchstone of a
man’s philosophy, it will become a matter of first interest to us to
know how so profound a thinker as Tintoretto approached the subject.
There is no lack here indeed of tragic depth. _The Temptation of
Christ_ is sufficient alone to vindicate Tintoretto as gifted with
understanding above his fellows. Another might have compassed the
tumultuous, beautiful earth-spirit, with muscular, proud, uplifted
arms, and face burning with desire; but who else could have added that
touch of impotence to his restless, aspiring gesture, or have dreamed
the tenderness in the lovely, sorrowful face of Christ that looks
down on this radiant creature of desire, entirely without judgment or
stern denial, but as if too remote from the appeal to make reply? The
exceeding pathos of this picture would have been missed if Lucifer,
the brightest of the spirits that fell, were a whit less radiant;
if Christ’s face had one shade less of compassion in its wondering
aloofness. And for our last example we may choose a picture in which
the strength of Tintoretto is realised in quietness so complete
that a hush seems to lie about it. No painting of his is greater in
conception than that of _Christ before Pilate_. The moment he has
chosen is that in which Pilate performs his vain ablution before the
multitude who lightly accept the guilt he attempts to transfer, in
the awful cry, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Tintoretto
has set Pilate’s face in shadow: a single ray falls across the pillar
behind his head. He looks away from Christ but not towards the crowd:
he has spoken: he would fain make an end of this drama. It is the
fine, thoughtful, astute face of a Venetian councillor that Tintoretto
has depicted. Christ stands before him in the full light--removed
only by a single step--a motionless white figure above the restless
crowd, complete in control, gathered into himself and folded in a
great silence and calm; yet not now more alone than when the crowds
cried after him day and night for a sign. His head is bowed upon his
breast: his closely folded robe follows the slight curve of his body:
his bound hands lie nerveless in their cords: yet beside the strength
of this bound prisoner the animation of the foreground figure who
grips the cord is impotence indeed. Most wonderful of all perhaps is
the contrast of a busy scribe at his table below the judgment-seat,
pausing with suspended pen for the words that shall convict, with
the majestic, motionless figure of Christ. We seem to hear the words
proceeding from those closed lips: he would utter them so, not moving.
It is less the originality of this picture that impresses us than
its profound directness and truth, comparable only to the story it
illustrates. In understanding none has surpassed the conception of
that single, solitary figure, face to face with the vast fabric of
the judgment-hall, weighted with its burden of custom and tradition;
none has more profoundly imagined the tragic triumph in that entire
loneliness of the great and good before the tribunal of man.
Chapter Eleven
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES
On an evening of late September Venice revealed herself to one of
her lovers amidst a spectacle beyond any range of dreams. Evening
was closing in upon the city with cloud and breeze. In the church of
San Giorgio Maggiore the Tintorettos gleamed dimly from the walls;
daylight was gone. But in the tower high overhead, clear of the shadows
of confining buildings, the day had still a course to run. The tide
was low, and land and water stretched out in interchanging coils of
olive and azure beneath a purple storm-cloud, whilst ever against the
bar of the Lido rolled the sea, dyed with that celestial blue that
sometimes steals from the Adriatic into the basin of San Marco to
prostrate itself at the conquering Lion’s feet. And there lay Venice,
her form outlined against a flood of pearl, the water bending in a
tender, luminous bow behind her towers. Far away, across the mysterious
expanse of low lagoon, Torcello and Burano gleamed out in startling
pallor against the storm, amid a wild confusion of dark earth and
glittering water. The Northern Alps were hidden in darkness at the
horizon, but westward across the mainland the clear, sharp peaks of
the Euganean hills rose up behind the city’s pearly halo, behind the
deep blue of the surging lowlands, in almost unearthly outline against
the sunset sky. In front of them a livid fire rolled sullenly along
the valley, sending up purple smoke into the cloud. The storm genie,
summoned by nether powers, was descending to his fearful tryst behind
the Euganeans, but, as he sank, he bent his face upon the pale form
of Venice, his enchantress, and the fire of his wonder and of his
adoration kindled in all her slumbering limbs a glow of responsive
life. A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and
her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy
petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which
sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their
retinue--this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a
temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her
immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her
great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures. For
Venice is not a dead body: she is a living soul. Overflowing all
moulds in which we may think to contain her, she reveals herself
continually in new mystery, new wonder. We spoke of Venice as being
paved with sky, and every day there is cast upon her pavement a
fresh revelation of changefulness and beauty. A thousand forms and
patterns move in procession over the water, passing each instant
into something “rich and strange,” a fleeting succession of aerial
designs drawn with tremulous pencil in colours which never lived
on the palette of a mortal artist. There is a body of truth at the
root of the old fancy which gifted water-maidens with subtler, more
perilously powerful allurements than their sisters of the land. Their
element is mutability, but they are not soulless, as men have said: it
is only that their soul is as the soul of water--luminous, flowing,
mutable, reflective, musical, profound: for, though they are mutable,
they are not shallow; it is a part of their being that they should
be susceptible of change. They cannot tire their victims, they whose
beauty is continually renewed; and yet it may be that men do well to
fear them, for they have secret communings with things men do not dream
of. Venice has held men, she holds them still, with the fascination
of a water spirit; they yield to her, they grasp her, but she is
still before them, never mastered, never fully known. Let those for
whom conquest is the ideal in love beware of Venice the incomparable,
the uncompassable: they who would win her must have power to worship
what they cannot comprehend, they must desire to leave her spirit
free. Then she will unfold her heart to them, she will give herself
in a moment when the pursuit is still. And to those who can receive
the gift, she will give herself again and yet again; only they must
come freshly expectant of each fresh revelation, not clinging to past
impressions, not claiming a memory to be revived. For each renewal is
a transformation, and we must bring new senses to receive it, senses
alive and fresh as earth each morning to the touch of the old sun ever
new.
Venice, when she was most glorious, did but catch and imprison in her
stones those matchless harmonies of fleeting colour which the sun still
lavishes upon her waters. And there is a season of the year which,
with sun and mist co-operating, hangs once again her pale walls with
their ancient splendour, and plays a noble part in the revival of
the past. With the first days of autumn the scirocco begins to wind
about the heart of her plants and creepers, and to steal into their
veins. Swiftly they yield to the intoxication. Under the folds of the
grey mist-mantle, they drink draught after draught of her brave wine.
But another touch is needed to draw out the virtues of that liquor:
after Circe, Apollo. He bends his look upon them, and they yield
their stores, decking once more the walls of Venice with frescoes of
scarlet, green and gold, paving once more her waterways with their
old-accustomed pomp. In the Sacca della Misericordia this natural
fresco has a peculiarly beautiful effect; for upon the spaces of water
between the rafts that float there, the rich creepers, interwoven among
the trees of the garden of the Spiriti, fling an enchanted carpet
of chequered crimson and green upon a pale rose ground, covering
the whole expanse, save for one space whereon is set the pale blue
watermark of the sky. One may make rare studies here of the carpets
and bright mats that are to be seen hung out in the pictures of the
old Venetian masters. They did not copy from the East alone, or rather
they copied from a greater East, whose treasures travel through a
rarer element than water day after day to the shores of the western
world. The complete stillness of the pools in the Sacca, undisturbed
by any passing steamboat, and even unruffled by the motion of a
gondola, through the protection of the intervening rafts, gives the
rich pattern a durability unattainable in the waters of the canals.
There is only, as it were, a faint breathing of the surface, enough to
give perpetual interchange and commerce among the bold brush-strokes
of colour--incessant, subtle weaving of new harmonies upon the
ground-bass--the shadows deepening or relaxing, when sometimes an
insect dips or a fish rises and starts a fairy circle at a touch that
spreads among the colours until its delicate life is lost.
[Illustration: A PALACE DOOR.]
And if at times we may thus see the past in the present, at other
times we may dream the present back into the past. Night, the worker
of so many miracles, holds a key with which we may unlock in Venice
the secret of bygone times. There are hours on the lagoons when even
in daylight the forgotten ages live again and we may keep company
with whom we will, but in the heart of the city it is by night that
we may lay hand on the pulse of her ancient life, and feel it warm
to our touch, beating slow but constant behind the commotion, often
the desecration, of later times. The flow of the Grand Canal is less
troubled than by day: it has intervals of peace in which it may sink
into the broad, dark calm of Carpaccio’s waters. Palace after palace,
in fearless and unstudied alternations of Byzantine, Gothic, Ogival,
Renaissance, Barocco, tower above us, their pillars and balconies
gleaming in faint light of moon or lamp: we seem almost to trace upon
their surface the forms of men and beasts, and to clothe them once more
in the gold and colour which Venice learned of her lagoons. By day we
feast upon the tints still left to fall upon the waters, we praise
the aged snow of crumbling stone or the shades of twisted columns,
or the rich profusion of the pale Cà d’Oro. But what do we know of
Venice when she shone upon the waters in true regality, a monument of
all the glory that the heart or eye of man could conceive? No one has
left us any detailed record of the frescoed façades of the Venetian
palaces, whether on the Grand Canal or in the remoter waterways;
only here and there we catch a glimpse of them on the canvases of
contemporary painters. It is provokingly general among the travellers
or native-lovers of Venice, who set themselves to praise her in words,
to find that they have chosen a medium incapable of achieving what
it was asked to do, and to throw down their weapon in the moment of
trial, struck dumb by the immense wonder of their theme. They cease
from their task before, it seems to us, they have well begun it, always
anticipating the stinging tongue of the dragon, Incredulity. We could
well forgive them their inadequacy, so frankly recognised, had they
but attempted a mere catalogue of some of the frescoes on the walls.
Now, it is at night alone that we can repeople them; that, as we pass
along, we can look up and read into the shadowy spaces those brilliant
chronicles of beauty, power and pride. It is, indeed, a heavy fate that
awaits in Venice the artist who must work in words; colour and music
can draw nearer, can almost attain to the reality itself; and yet by
words also there is something to be conveyed of her enduring beauty.
The fact which words can compass may be so told that there is born
from it a sentiment of that rich atmosphere which is beyond the reach
of words; they may remind or may awaken wonder, itself a new sense
with which to apprehend. Even words may tell of the water snake of
green and gold that writhes and gleams hour after hour in the faintly
stirred depths of the canal, a creature that in the world above is a
dull grey upright pole; or of golden treasures, once the refuse of the
calli, transformed to splendour as they float out over the lagoon; or
of the sudden lapping of the water under the wind down the north lagoon
at midnight, that breaks the smooth image of the moon into a thousand
ripples and passes in a wave that makes the dim lamps tremble into the
narrow waterways of the city.
But it is not only the waterways of Venice that at night are eloquent
of the past, that seem to take once more their ancient shape and
venture near for colloquy: the streets and squares and churches are
full of spirits, not unkindly, not afraid, less silent and secretive
than in the busy day, when they are lonely among a people careless of
them, with other thoughts, other needs and other destinies. Many a
porch or gable or wide-projecting roof, or sculpture of fantastic beast
or naïve saint or kneeling angel, seems to step out and call upon us in
the night, catching in us perhaps as we pass by some touch of sympathy
with the enduring soul of the past. One must be late indeed in Venice
to secure untroubled peace. Ever and again, even after midnight, the
silence of the great white campos is broken by a group scattered here
and there before the door of a café; voices in eager talk will echo
under a low portico, a sleepy child will clatter by in wooden pattens.
But in the low-beamed, dimly lighted courts, or on the dark steps at
the water-side, under some deserted sotto-portico, the sounds of the
present strike across us like distant voices in a dream. The one night
that lies over all the ages draws our spirit into harmony with these
stones and lapping waters, that have stood through change and stress of
time, that have outlived solemnity and joyous festival and have passed
from gentle usage and glorious vesture into the custody of the poorest,
into neglect and decay. What talk have not these courtyards overheard,
what rich vesture has not swept through them, what noble thoughts and
high hopes have not confided in their silence? And on the dirty steps
where the children sit and play and throw their refuse into the water,
what carpets have not been spread, what proud feet have not pressed to
pass into the gondola and join the triumphant processional of Venice in
her prime?
But what of ancient Venice? We sometimes despair of re-creating her.
We ponder on Rialto, we watch her lights from the lagoons, we go in
and out among her calli, peering into door and courtyard, climbing an
outer stair, penetrating the recesses of sotto-portico or cellar; and
many records we find of the life which once she lived, but all belong
to the Venice of that second age, when she was already an established
city. We cannot depopulate her and see again that company of islands
gathered together in the lagoon, of various shapes and sizes, some
covered with wood and undergrowth, others rising with bare backs from
the water, with large and lonely outposts lying at greater distance
here and there. Yet now and again come days when the spirit even of
this remoter period returns to its well-nigh forgotten grave, the days
when Venice lies under the rule of the rain-clouds. The inner waterways
of the city lie dead like opaque marble under the dancing drops; but
down the ways that lead from the lagoons the wind pours strong and
restless from the sea, beating the water against the walls and into
the damp vaults, a challenge from the sea to the city, from the sea
unbridled and insurgent--yet not insurgent, for it has never submitted
to her sway. Within Venice, along the slippery streets, there is gloom
and desolation; the sun is the only visitor to whom her heart stands
ever open; she would shut her gates if she could to these wild beings
of cloud and wind, these houseless, grey pilgrims that, at no bidding
of hers, come and claim lodging with her as they take their nomad way.
I know not what of the old, wild fisher heart comes to visit Venice in
these days; phantoms of old time are borne in on the gusty winds from
the sea and the lagoon, and the commanding voice of the sea wind they
must have known so well seems to clothe them with substantial life.
Into the mist vanishes the frescoed Venice of high pomp and festival,
the Venice of regal Bucintoro and banqueting of kings, of brilliant
policy and stem civic control. A still deeper oblivion receives the
Venice of small joys and small sorrows, of Longhi and Goldoni; and the
excitement of the formless past creeps into us, when yet the future was
to make--the hard life of the first dwellers upon the islands, acute
and mobile in their hourly traffic with wind and sea.
[Illustration: ZATTERE.]
There is a corner of Venice little known to the stranger, or even
to Venetians themselves, except as a passage to the cemetery of San
Michele, but not less loved on that account by those who are happy
enough to have their lot cast there. The breezes blow with a freshness
that is rare in the more confined spaces of the city or on the Grand
Canal; the tide sets into the Sacca della Misericordia full and fresh
from the northern lagoon, still beating with the pulse of the open sea.
This favoured, this unique corner of Venice is a large square basin of
water, open on one side to the lagoon. Venice, at one time, could boast
of many such, but one by one they have been filled in with earth, and
in the sixteenth century, when the neighbouring Fondamente Nuove were
built, the Sacca della Misericordia itself narrowly escaped inclusion
in the paved parade that was to unite the whole of North Venice from
Santa Giustina to Sant’ Alvise. The fiat had gone forth, but happily it
remains as yet unfulfilled, and the Sacca is still a harbour for the
_zattere_, the timber rafts that are brought down from the mountains,
and set here to season awhile, in sight of their old home, till at
last they are borne away to do service in the works of man. A tiny hut
of planks without a door is set up here and there upon the rafts, and
a couple of dogs are continually upon the prowl. Something in this
woodyard, the building of the rafts, the lapping of the inflowing
tide against them, its waves twisted in some angle into a petulant
restlessness, seems to carry us back to the primeval days before the
historic settlement of the fugitives from the great mainland cities,
back to the manners of the humble fishermen who lived a hard and frugal
life among the low islands of the Adriatic, in constant commerce with
their patron the sea, in constant vigilance against his aggression.
The night-lapping of the waves against the Sacca della Misericordia
calls to mind the two toiling fishermen of Theocritus, whose life must
have been strangely like that of the first dwellers on the Rivo Alto.
Let us quote from Mr. Andrew Lang’s translation. “Two fishers on a
time together lay and slept: they had strown the dry sea-moss for a
bed in their wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall.
Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the
fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with
sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the
seines, two oars and an old coble upon props. Beneath their heads was
a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailor’s caps. Here was all
their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door, nor
a watch-dog: all things, all to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty
was their sentinel. They had no neighbour by them, but ever against
their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.” This is a page for the
history of Venice in her infancy, or rather for the history of that
earlier time when Venice was as yet unborn. Out among the islands
of the lagoon, which on a calm, vague day of summer seem to hover
in the atmosphere upon a silver haze, among those luminous paths of
chrysophrase and porphyry, mother-of-pearl and opal, we shall still
find some footsteps of these first Venetians unerased by tract of time.
Perhaps it is at Sant’ Erasmo that the print is clearest; there are few
materials that we cannot find here for reconstruction of the primeval
settlement. There are the rush-roofed shelters of the boats and the
rude landing-stages; there are the low, white _capane_ roofed with
thatch or tiles, the long, narrow, stagnant waterways, the high, grassy
levels bordering the water; there are fields of reeds, and thickets or
fringes of rustling poplars; there are _valli_ where the fish stir and
leap and gleam continuously, breaking the smooth water into a thousand
ripples; there is the broad, central waterway, and countless lesser
channels and pools among the reeds, where one may see a boat slowly
winding, guided perhaps by children, their little figures standing
out against the desolate landscape, the silence broken by no voice
but theirs. Thus must Venice have been in her infancy. And if from
among these lonely waterways and grassy flats of Sant’ Erasmo we look
forward into the future, we can anticipate the gradual evolution of a
city such as Venice was afterwards to be. The building of the first
mud-huts; the driving of the first close-set clumps of piles to support
more solid structures; the filling of marsh-pools and strengthening of
foundations; the light wooden bridges thrust across the water, as one
may see them on the Lido to-day; the transition from houses of wood
to houses of brick and stone, from thatch to tiles; the building of
churches on the higher ground, each with its plot of grass about it;
the paving of the most frequented ways, the construction of wells and
chimneys, of paved campo and fondamenta; till we reach at last the city
of palaces, of temples and of towers, the city of sumptuous and varied
colour, the _Venezia nobilissima_ of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini.
Transcriber’s Notes
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