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Title: The sea-charm of Venice
Author: Stopford A. Brooke
Release date: December 1, 2024 [eBook #74826]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton and Company
Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE ***
THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE
[Illustration]
THE SEA-CHARM
OF
VENICE
BY
STOPFORD A. BROOKE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND CO.
1907
_All rights reserved._
THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE
When Attila came storming into Europe, his conquests may be said to
have given rise to two great sea-powers. His rush on the north along
the Baltic shores probably caused so much pressure on the continental
English, that many of them, all the Engle especially, left their lands,
found another country in Britain, and gave it the name of England. It
is now, and has been for some centuries, the mistress of the seas, both
in commerce and in war. But when Attila drove his war-plough southward,
he crossed the Alps, and descended on the cities of the plain between
Trieste and the Po. When he reached Altinum, Aquileia, and the other
towns bordering on the lagoon, the Roman nobles, many of whom might
be called merchant princes, and their dependants fled to Torcello, to
Rialto, and to other islands where, before the conqueror came, they had
established depôts for their trading, where the fishermen and boatmen
were already in their pay. When the Goths followed the invading track
of Attila, the emigration of the Roman inhabitants of the mainland to
the lagoon continued year after year; and out of this emigrant flight
grew Venice, the Queen of the Sea.
England was Teutonic, Venice was Roman; and as in England the Teuton
destroyed the influence of Rome, so the Teutonic invasion of Italy,
with all its new elements, never touched Venice. The Gothic influence
left her uninfluenced. She alone in Italy was pure Roman. The English
race was mixed with the Celtic race, but the Teutonic elements
prevailed. But Venice was unmixed. She was always singularly Roman
right down to the dreadful days of her final conquest, so that it may
well be said that Manin was _ultimus Romanorum_. In constitution, in
laws, in traditions, in the temper of her citizens, in manners, in her
greatness, her splendour, even in her unbridled luxury and her decay,
she was Roman to the end. Italy was transmuted by the Goth, but not
Venice.
But owing to her origin she was _Rome at Sea_; and being on the edge
of a sea which naturally carried her war and trade to the East, she
was more of eastern than of western Rome. Byzantium, not the Italian
Rome, was her nursing mother, and poured into her the milk of her art,
her commerce, and her customs. By this, also, she remained outside of
Italy, and her position, anchored in the sea off the Italian coast,
is, as it were, a symbol of her double relation to Western and Eastern
Rome. Whatever change took place in her Roman nature was made by the
spirit of the sea on which she had made her home. Commerce was forced
upon her, and it was not difficult for her to take it up, for the Roman
senators and patricians of Altinum, Padua, Concordia, and Aquileia
who took refuge on the islands, had been traders before they founded
Venice, and only developed more fully in Venice that commerce which
they had practised on the mainland. Aquileia had been for years before
the barbaric invasion the emporium of a trade with Byzantium and the
Danube. The trade was transferred to Venice. It did not, then, arise in
Venice, but it was so greatly increased during the centuries that the
new city held the east in fee. From every port on the Mediterranean,
and from lands and seas beyond that inland lake, the trade of east
and west poured into Venice. To protect her commerce she became a
sea-power. Her struggle for centuries with the pirates formed her
navy and her seamen, both Venetians and mercenaries, into the mighty
instrument of naval war they became when the strife with the pirates
closed in victory. But her captains, her senators, the great dukes who
led the navy into battle, led it for the sake of her commerce, and
were themselves, as Shakespeare made Antonio, “royal merchants,” such
as they had been of old in Padua, Altinum, and Aquileia; and always
Romans. Wherever then we touch Venice we touch the sea out of which she
was born, by which she was nursed, and which when she reached her full
age, she wedded and commanded.
To realize the origins of the city, and this sea-spirit in her history
and her life, to recall in memory the centuries she lasted, and to feel
the sentiment of the splendid sorrow, strife and glory of the tale,
it is well to row to Torcello, to climb to the top of the cathedral
tower, and to look out from the low-arched windows, north and south,
east and west. The door used always to be open, and it was easy to
reach the upper chamber among the bells. Thence, as the voyager gazes
to the north and west, he sees the high dim peaks of the Alpine chain
from whose passes the Hun and the Goth descended. Below him stretches
to the sea the misty plain where the cities of the old Venetia lay,
which Attila advancing from the east gave up to fire and to slaughter,
which Theodoric and Alboin afterwards ruined more completely. From
these and from all the villages of the plain, the Roman nobles with
their dependants fled to the islands of the lagoon which our voyager
sees spreading north and south at his feet for many miles of blue and
silver water. Below the tower are the deep-grassed meadows and dreary
shores of Torcello which the people of Altinum, a third part of whom
took flight from Attila, covered as the years went on with noble
palaces, streets, bridges, and gardens. The cathedral they built was
built with the very marbles which had adorned, and the stones which
had raised, the churches and houses of Altinum. Pillars, capitals,
the pulpits, the chair of the bishop, the marble screen of the choir,
the font, the pavement, belonged to their church on the land. They
were still Venetians. As they increased, and as the emigration from
other cities continued, the dwellers in the older Venetia colonized
Mazzorbo, Burano, Murano, and Malamocco. The islands lie before our
eyes as we look from the southern windows of the tower. And noblest of
all, at the end of the long slow curving line of the deep channel among
the marshes, is Rivo Alto on whose islands the Venetians fixed their
capital at last.
There, tremulous in the sea-mist is the shining expanse of water before
the Ducal Palace, and the towers of the great city, in whose splendour
and power ended the misery and the struggle of the flight. No view
makes a deeper impression on the historian. But when that impression
has been realized, there will steal into his mind, if he have with him
the spirit of imagination, another impression; one of curious charm,
a charm half of nature and half of humanity, a charm not of the land,
but of the sea. In that charm there is the breath of the salt winds
and the life of the dark blue waves which beyond Venice he sees from
Torcello breaking in flashing foam on the Lido which defends the lagoon
and shelters the city. It is a charm that rises to his heart, not only
from the gay tossing of the Adriatic, but from the quiet, glittering,
silver-gray expanse of the tidal lagoon in which the islands sleep like
cattle on the meadows of the land. And of this charm and all it means
and has made Venice, I shall attempt to write.
To write on Venice when many have written so well on her; to describe
her, when she has been described from the Angel that, so short a time
ago, watched over her on the Campanile to the islands on the far
lagoon, seems almost an impertinence. But I have loved Venice for many
years, and the record of any individual impressions received from her
may have the interest which belongs to personal feeling. Moreover, in
this little essay I shall limit myself to one subject--to the charm
and the life which are added to Venice by the presence of the sea, to
the influence which the sea has had on her beauty, on the character of
her art, and on the imagination of those who visit her. What influence
the sea had on her history--that immense subject--does not come within
the scope of this essay. It is only concerned with her beauty, her
charm, as they are bound up with the sea; it is not, save incidentally,
concerned with her history.
In her constitution, in her history, in her people, in her position,
in her art, and in her sea-power and commerce, Venice, among Italian
towns, stands alone. She only is built, not by the sea, but in the
sea, born not on the beach of ocean, but like Aphrodité, from beneath
her heart. It is this difference which, entering into all her lesser
charms, gives them their distinction, their wild, remote, and natural
grace. Other great towns belong to humanity and art; even when they are
sea-ports they are of the land, and are the creation of the land. But
Venice, full of her own humanity, wrought into beauty by the art of
her children, raised from the waves by the labour of those who loved
her, belongs only to the sea, and seems to be the creation, not only of
man, but of great Nature herself. Her streets are streams of the sea,
and were planned by the will of the sea. The great path which, curling
like a serpent, divides her city; by which her palaces of business,
pleasure, and government were built; on which her history displayed
itself for centuries in thanksgiving or sorrow, in pomp or in decay; is
a sea-river ebbing and flowing, and brings day by day, into her midst,
the winds of ocean for her life, the fruits of ocean for her food,
the mystery of ocean for her beauty. This presence and power of the
living sea, running through Venice like blood through a man, makes her
distinctive charm. It is the charm of the life of Nature herself, added
to the life of her art and the life of her humanity.
There are times when this impression is profound. To stand in the dawn,
before the city is awake, on the quay of the Schiavoni, when the East
beyond the Lido is flushing like a bride, and the morning star grows
dim above the sea, is to forget that the stones on which we stand,
the palaces and churches, bridges and towers, were built by man’s wit
or set up for his business and his pleasure. They rose, we think, out
of the will and creative passion of the Sea. The sky and the clouds
descended to bestow on them other light and colour than those of the
sea; the winds, in their playing, flung the bridges over the channels
of the tide and the sunlight knit them into strength; but these were
only the artists that adorned, it was the sea that built, the city.
Lest we should lose the power of this dream, we will not watch the
buildings grow solid in the growing light, but keep our eyes on the
broad expanse of the lagoon, shimmering in silver-gray out to the Port
of Lido, where the silver meets the leaping blue of the Adriatic. The
whole water-surface is alive, though it seem asleep, with the swift
rushing of the tide. Around the angles of the quay, over the marble
steps, all along the smooth stones of the wall, up the narrow canals,
looping past the piles, swirling against the boats, the musical water
ripples; and in every motion, change, and whirl, as in the main
movement of the whole lagoon, the life of Nature in this her kingdom
of the sea, full of force, pleasure, and joy in her own loveliness,
is overwhelming. It masters the spirit of the gazer, and he becomes
himself part of her sea-passion, living in the stream of her sea-being.
There is silence everywhere. The quay is deserted, and if a belated
sailor pass by, the sound of his footstep seems to mingle with the
crying of the sea birds and the plash of the water. And in the silence,
the impression that Nature alone exists, that the city is her work and
that man is nothing, is deepened for the moment into an unforgettable
reality.
A similar impression is made on the voyager who rows at the dead of
night, when the sky is full of stars, out into the lagoon half way
between Venice and the Lido. The city, with its scattered lights,
has no clear outlines; it rises like an exhalation from the sea. The
campaniles are white ghosts that appeal to the dark blue heavens. Below
them, the crowd of buildings wavers in the sea-mist like a shaken
curtain. The city, seen thus in the tremulous starlight, is, we think,
a dream-conception which, in high imagination, the God of the sea,
resting far below on his couch of pearl, has thrown into such form as
his wandering will desires. No human art has made its wonder.
Nearer to our eyes the islands lie outstretched like sea-creatures,
risen from the depths to behold the stars and to rest from their
labours. The boats which lie at anchor against the tide do not belong
to man, but are the chariots of Amphitrite and her crew. And in the
profound silence we hear the deep breathing of the sea, a marvellous,
soft, universal sound; and perceive, half awed and half delighted, the
rise and fall of her restless and pregnant breast. And then man and
his work no longer fill the voyager’s imagination. He is absorbed into
Nature. The starry sky above, the living sea below, are all he knows;
and the sea is the greatest, for it takes into its depths the trembling
of every star, and the white wavering of palace and tower, church and
bridge, and marble quay.
This impression, received in twilight or at night, rules the thousand
impressions made in daylight by the art and life of Venice. The “mighty
Being” of the sea, with its eternal mystery, penetrates and pervades,
and is mistress of the humanity of the city. The ancient life of Venice
was in harmony with this, and what remains of that life is still lovely
and inspiring. The modern life of Venice tends day by day to be out of
tune with this, and has violated its beauty with amazing recklessness.
No reverence, no tenderness for the spirit of the place has prevented
a hundred desecrations, which might have been avoided if men had cared
for beauty as well as for commerce, if the men had even known what
beauty was, if they had even for an hour realized the spirit of the
place or the spirit of the sea.
In days before the railway and its bridge had done away with the
island apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance
to drop through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and
come upon the far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing
slowly, see, through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls,
churches, palaces, rise slowly one after another, out of the breast of
the waters--silver and rose and gold out of sapphire, azure, and pale
gray--a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean.
We forgot that fairyland had been driven from the earth, and saw, or
dreamed we saw, the city of Morgan le Fay, or the palaces of the Happy
Isles where the Ever-young found refuge in the sea--so lovely and so
dim the city climbed out of the deep.
That vision is gone, but even now there are few visions more startling
in their charm than that which befalls the weary traveller when coming
out of the dark station he finds himself suddenly upon the marble
quay, with a river of glittering water before his eyes, fringed with
churches, palaces, and gardens; the broad stream alive with black
gondolas, shouts in his ears like the shouting of seamen; and, lower
in note and cry, but heard more distinctly than all other sounds, the
lapping of the water on the steps of stone, the rushing of the tide
against the boats. Midst all the wonders of the city, this it is which
first seizes on his heart. It is the first note of the full melody of
charm which the sea in Venice will play upon his imagination for many a
happy day.
The waters that make her unique are in themselves beautiful. Were
they like those of many lagoons, they might be stagnant, and lose the
loveliness of vital movement. But they are tidal waters, and though
the ordinary tide does not rise much more than a foot or two, yet its
living rush is great, and passes twice a day through the lagoons and
streets of Venice. It streams in at the openings in the _lidi_, at
the ports of Malamocco, Chioggia, Lido and Tre Porti, with the force
and swiftness of an impetuous river, and these four water-systems, in
their meetings and retreats, fill the lagoon with incessant movement,
with clashing, swirling, and sweeping currents. Then, the tide does not
always keep at this low level. When the attractions of the sun and moon
combine, it rises higher and floods and washes out the canals, and when
the angry south, blowing fiercely up Adria, has piled up the waters at
the head of the gulf, they block in the falling tide. It cannot escape
from the lagoon, and it races from the Public Gardens to the Dogana.
There it divides to fill the Giudecca and the Grand Canal to the height
of seven or eight feet. The canals rise, the calli are flooded and the
squares, and the Piazza is a lake, and the Piazzetta. Gondolas ply
up to the doors of Saint Mark’s and to the Ducal Palace. The water
falls as swiftly as it rises. There is no lack of life in the Venetian
lagoon. Freshness, incessant change and joy minister to the beauty of
these waters.
They are of the sea, but the temper of the sea in them is distinctive.
The sea, uncircumscribed, at the mercy of its own wild nature, is
beautiful or terrible, but it is too vast, too noisy, too desirous
of destruction, even in calm too suggestive of anger, to awaken that
peculiar charm in which temperance, quietude, a certain obedience or
sacrifice for use, are always elements. But Venice lies in a gentle sea
which loves to give itself away. Her sea is guarded by long banks of
sand, pierced here and there by those openings through which the tide
arrives. Within these is the wide lagoon, lying in a sheltered place,
dotted with islands sleeping on silver sheets of shining water. And
in the midst is the city with all its towers. It is thus penetrated
and encompassed by the life and beauty of the sea; but it is the sea
tamed to a love of rest; made temperate, even in furious wind, by the
barriers its own force has built to shield its favoured daughter;
keeping its natural freedom and love of movement, but obedient to the
laws of help, and sacrificing its reckless and destroying will in
order to do the work that rivers do for men; preserving thus, along
with its own wild charm, the charm also of the great streams that
bless the earth. The sea, then which makes Venice unique, has lost its
recklessness and terror. But it has not lost its beauty. And its beauty
has become as it were spiritual, for it has subdued itself to be more
beautiful through service. It was then not only in pride, but also in
gratitude and love, that the Doge wedded the sea, and cast into her
breast his ring, and cried, “We espouse thee, sea, in token of true and
perpetual dominion.”
This gentle manner of the sea, in its service through the narrow
streets of the city, in the narrow lanes of the lagoon, and over its
shallow banks, forced the boat the Venetians built up into the shape
of the gondola, and compelled the mode of rowing it. And both these,
being the work of Nature as well as of man, are beautiful. This long,
subtly-curved boat, with its uptossed stem and stern, rigid in reality,
but seeming to be (so swift it is to answer the slightest touch of the
oar) as lithe and undulating as a serpent, leaning somewhat to one
side, so that it wavers a little as it moves as if it were a wave of
the sea, and gliding on its flattened bottom over shallow waters in
silent speed, seems like some creature of the sea herself. Coloured
black, it is brightened with polished brass and steel. The _ferro da
prova_ is the beak of polished steel which looks out from the bows
of the boat, with a blade at the top like a hatchet, and below it
six teeth, like those of the bone of the saw-fish. It flashes over
the water and flashes in the water. It is a sea-ornament, descended
from the rostrum of a Roman warship. Then the brass ornaments of the
arm-rests are most frequently sea-beasts--dolphins, and the sea-horses
of Venice. Everywhere the boat has been the child of the sea.
Yet it is human; it grew like a child, a youth, modified from year
to year into its shape, its character, till it reached its manhood;
absolutely fitted for the work it had to do, for the circumstances
of the city through the narrow water-ways of which it had to move,
and for the wants of all classes of its citizens. The circumstances
were peculiar; the needs of the citizens were most various. It fits
them all. The natural, therefore, and the human mingle in it more
harmoniously than in any other boat. It is distinctive as Venice is
distinctive; it has its own sentiment, its own charm; but it seems
also to share in the sentiment and beauty of the sea. The cries of its
rowers are like the cries of seamen. In its movement is the softness,
ease, and grace of the subdued obedient waters over which it glides.
Then there is the way of rowing it, on one side, by a single rower.
When there are two rowers half the charm is lost. The second rower
labouring at his oar in front of the sitter removes the pleasant,
psychical illusion that the boat moves by its own will. There is almost
an intellectual pleasure in the rowing and steering of a gondola by the
single oar behind. If the gondolier be a master of his craft, he will
make his boat move through a crowded canal, or glide round the angles
of a narrow water lane, as swiftly, as softly as a serpent through the
branches of a tree. He will pass within an inch of a corner without
touching it, as he turns the boat round within its own length. He will
stop it at full speed in a few seconds. It obeys him so magically that
the voyager in it, who does not see the rower, often dreams that the
boat moves of itself according to a spirit in it, like the bark which
bore Ogier the Dane, flying over the sea by its own desire, to Morgana.
This beauty of the boat, its ways and manners, are the result of the
sea-situation, and have the charm of the sea.
Then, again, this strange, soft sea, so tempered into gentlehood,
brings through its quietude another element of charm into Venice. It
reflects all things with a wonderful perfection. Whatever loveliness
is by its side it makes more lovely. Shallow itself, it seems deep;
and the towers and palaces of Venice in all their colours descend and
shine among other clouds and in another sky below. All outlines of
sculpture and architecture, of embossment, in wall and window; all play
of sunshine and shade; all the human life in balcony, bridge or quay,
on barge or boat, are in the waters as in a silent dream--revealed in
every line and colour, but with an exquisite difference in softness and
purity. All Nature’s doings in the sky are also repeated with a tender
fidelity in the mirror of the lagoon--morning light, noonday silver,
purple thunder cloud in the afternoon, sunset vapours, the moon and
stars of night--and not only on the surface, but also, it seems, in an
immeasurable depth. To look over the side of the boat into the water is
to cry, “I see infinite space.”
That is part of this charm of the reflecting water. But this only
belongs to Nature and the feeling her beauty awakens. There is another
charm in this work of the water. Whatever pleasure the living and
varied movement of a great town, whatever interest its activities,
bring to men, is doubled, so far as charm is concerned, in Venice. For
they are exercised on water as well as on land, and their movements and
methods are different on each. The sights of life are doubly varied.
The land has its own way with them; the water has another way with them.
Moreover, the water itself, being always in motion, always reflecting
or taking shadows, always harmonizing itself with its comrades in
land or sky, always making a subtle music in answer to human action
upon it--adds these romantic and lovely elements to the business
and pleasure of the town. Below, in the water, the clumsiest barge
is accompanied by its soft ideal; and the lovers, leaning over the
balcony, see their happiness smile on them from the water.
The same thing, some aver, may be said of a Dutch town full of canals.
Partly, that is true; but the canals only carry the heavy business of
these towns, and in Venice all human life, in its gaiety and beauty as
well as its work, is on the water. Moreover, the water itself, not half
stagnant like the canals of Holland, is always thrilling with its own
ebbing and flowing, has its own fine spirit, and takes, as I have often
thought, its own share and pleasure in all that is done upon it. Life
answers there to life--living Nature to living man.
Not apart from this element of charm are other forms of it. The
mystery and music of moving water, the sense of unknown depths and
its wonder, the impression of the infinite which gathers into us from
the sea, are all brought by the tides in Venice into the midst of a
bustling city, vividly concerned with the material, the finite, and the
practical. We feel the wonder and secret of Nature playing round our
business. In a moment we are touched into imaginative worlds. We may
pass with ease from buying and selling into poetry, from materialism
into mystery. This has its surprising charm.
The element of noiselessness increases this impression of poetic
mystery. The Venetians themselves make noise enough. They are a gay
and passionate people on the surface, and their open-air life makes
them open in speech. The air is full of shouting, but the rattle and
shattering and trampling of wheels and horses over stony roads which
wears out life so rapidly in towns on land, is never heard in Venice.
And there are numberless lanes of quiet water where the crowd of
gondolas never comes, and where the only sound is the wash of water
on the stones and the murmur of the acacias above our head. The quiet
sea has stolen into the streets, and all that is beautiful in their
architecture, their history, and their daily life, creeps into the
study of our imagination with more impressive grace because of the
peace. As to the quiet of the lagoon it is like the solemn quiet of the
desert. In ten minutes from the quay we are in the midst of a silence
deeper even than that of the lonely hills. The silence listens to
itself, and we can scarcely believe in the turmoil of the world or the
battle in our own heart. This has its healing charm.
Then, also, the nearness and universal presence of the waters makes
man more alive to the beauty of the few things which belong to the
land in Venice. There are no woods, no parks, no great gardens, no
wealth of foliage or grass, but what there is of flowers and trees and
grassy spaces is more lovingly observed than on the land. The great
fig trees which drop their broad foliage over the walls, the little
groves of soft acacia which stand beside some of the churches, the tiny
plots of green verdure in the squares, the tall oleanders ablaze with
white and ruddy flowers, the climbing vines that twine amongst the
carved stone work, the rare small gardens with their black cypresses,
white lilies, golden fruit; the one stone pine dark against the sky,
the scarlet flash of the pomegranate, the tumbled wealth of a single
rose tree, might all be thought little of in an Italian town. They are
common there and multitudinous. But here, at Venice, in the midst of
the waters they are strange; they surprise and enchant. They are always
observed; all their beauty is felt.
Amid all this water-world, and the human life which uses it and loves
it, there is one place where it is fairest and most used by man. It
is the great expanse of water at the entrance of the Grand Canal,
opposite the Ducal Palace, in whose surface is reflected the Campanile
of San Giorgio Maggiore on its island, the dome of the Church of Our
Lady of Safety, and the tower of the Dogana. From the Dogana runs out
to the south the broad canal which divides Venice from the islands of
the Giudecca. In the opposite direction the glittering surface spreads
away to the port of the Lido, where between the Lido and San Andrea
the lagoon opens into the main sea. On these waters, in the past and
present, have collected, and still collect, the ships and barks that
have carried on the wars, the commerce, and the fishing life of Venice.
I do not describe the scene, but the glancing, dazzling water, the blue
expanse, seem as if they had been designed by Nature to harmonize with
the swiftness and dash of the warlike spirit and warwork of ancient
Venice, with the splendour of her commerce and the merchandise it
brought, with the magnificence of her religion and the dignity of her
government, whose noblest observances and pageants were displayed on
these shining waters.
It is one of the enchantments of Venice that it is so easy for
imaginative knowledge, impelled and kindled to its work by this
glistening and splendid water-world, to recreate upon it the vivid life
of the past; to see the long war-galleys pass out into the Adriatic,
beating the water into foam; to watch the ships from all the Orient
disembark their costly goods and men from the tribes of the East on
the quays; to picture the many hued and stately processions from the
sea to the palace of the Duke, from San Marco to the sea. A splendid
vision! A little reading, some careful study of the pictures in the
Accademia, and the voyager can crowd, as he stands on the Piazzetta,
that gleaming mirror of sea with a hundred scenes of glory, beauty,
use and charm in war and peace.
Little now remains of that wonderful sea-glory, and the beauty of its
ships is departed. Some merchant boats lie stern to stern along the
quays of the Giudecca, black and built like boxes. Steamboats carrying
heavy goods, now and then a great liner, scream and hiss in the lagoon.
The war-galleys of Venice are replaced by ironclads. All the outward
romance of this great sheet of water is gone. It cannot be helped,
and we must put our regret by, lest we should spoil or under-rate the
present; but some reverence, some care might be given to the memory of
the glorious past, and this scene at least might have been saved from
desecration. It was possible a few years ago for imagination still
to create the glory of the past upon these waters; it was only the
steamers that forced us to remember the present, and when they did not
scream they were not offensive. But not long ago, and right between
the Lido and the public gardens, blocking the most beautiful view of
Venice from the Lido, an iron foundry, with tall chimneys outpouring
black smoke, was established on the Island of Santa Elena. I have
already referred to this contemptuous destruction of loveliness. It is
a miserable comfort that the foundry has failed. But the mischief done
is irreparable.
One part, however, of that past is still existing on Venetian waters.
The fishing boats--the Bragozzi--are much the same as they were in the
days when the city held “the East in fee and was the safeguard of the
West.” They carry us back even to remoter times when only a few huts
had been built on the sandbanks, and the dwellers in the little group
of islands lived by fishing. They have been comrades of the whole
history of Venice.
These barks are still beautiful, and make more beautiful the waters
on which they sail. Their bow still keeps that noble, subtle, and
audacious curve which every artist loves. It is painted on either
side with various designs fitted to carry the eye forward with the
rush of the boat through the waters--angels blowing trumpets, the
virgin leaning forward in impassioned listening--and these, in many
colours, glimmer from far on the sight, and are often seen shining in
the wave below. On the dark sails, of which there are two, the sun,
the stars, angel heads, St. George and the Dragon, St. Anthony, the
Virgin in glory, symbolic designs, a radiant sun, geometrical patterns,
are painted in orange, blue and pale sea-green on the dark body of
the sail, which is generally of deep red. The orange is most often
introduced in bands or patterns among the red: and when the fishermen
take pleasure in their coloured patterns, the blue, green, and white
are added to the orange.
It is a wonderful sight to see these fishing barks drawn up along the
great quay from the public gardens to the Ducal Palace, with all
their sails hoisted after a stormy day, to dry in the gay sunlight.
From end to end the long line burns with the colours of which the
Venetian painters were so enamoured. It is as delightful to stand on
the sea-wall on the Lido, near the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, where
the lagoon opens into the Adriatic, and watch these barks coming in
from the sea, one by one; glowing in the lovely light, changing the
waters below into orange, red, and black, edged with gold. Sometimes,
grouped into a mass, they cluster together in the deep places of the
canals, or lie in a changing crowd together near the mouth of the
Piave, nets, mast and sails one glow of shifting colour. Sometimes,
when fine weather comes after the storm which has driven home the whole
fleet, they all go out together, and the whole lagoon seems full of
their glory, as pushing through the water-lanes, they cross one another
and interweave a dance of colour and of freedom. Sometimes, as the
sun sets, one of them, anchored alone, takes into the hollow of its
sail the whole blaze of the globe of fire as it sinks over the Euganean
hills.
These pictures are taken out of the realm of mere artistic pleasure by
thoughts of the hard labour and the rough struggle of the fishers’ toil
for wife and children as they sail on stormy Adria. Indeed, they are as
full of humanity as of beauty. They have also the charm of historical
sentiment. The first fugitives to Rialto saw these barks much as we
see them. The builders of the city, its early merchants and warriors,
its voyagers and artists, the Dukes that fought the son of Charles
the Great, or harried the nests of the Dalmatian pirates, or subdued
the Orient; the ambassadors who sued or defied the Senate, visitors
from every quarter of the globe, the luxurious wretches who degraded,
and the cowardly crew who sold Venice; the patriots who defended her;
those who mourned under the yoke of Austria, those who rejoiced in the
great deliverance--one and all have looked with many a thought that
charmed their heart upon the fishing boats of Venice. With them Venice
began; by them she has been fed from the beginning even until now. They
are a vital part of her sea charm.
The live lagoon itself is of endless interest. It has quite a little
population of its own. Boys and men, clothed only in a loose shirt,
and with the glowing skin the sun and sea create, move to and fro over
the shallow spaces fishing for sea-spoil, sometimes white against the
purple arch of the stormy sky, sometimes like a pillar of rose in the
setting sun; and their slow, unremitting labour, which means for them
no more than an escape from starvation, makes one ashamed to think so
much of beauty, unless we bind it up with the trouble of the world.
A livelier, more comfortable population is that of the birds. I have
only seen gulls in the lagoon, but they fly, in great delight and
with less talk than in the north, about the cluster of islands near
Torcello, and feed in flocks over the shallows when the tide leaves
the sea-grasses bare; animating, enlivening the desolate shores, and
gossiping so gaily that for the moment of our notice of them, it is
hard to believe that a thousand years of the rise, the glory and the
decay of a great people have been represented on the waters and the
islands they make their pasture and their playground.
The islands in the lagoon are full of charm. I do not speak of Torcello
or Burano, the first of which is famous in the pages of Ruskin, and the
other inhabited by a crowd of fisher-folk and lace-makers; or of those
closely knit to Venice itself, such as Murano, San Giorgio, or those
of the Giudecca; nor even of San Michele, where the dead of Venice
lie washing in the water; though it was once a place I visited every
week when the small blue butterfly was born. The old wall was still
there and its decayed brickwork, and I used to fancy that the souls
of the dead were in the azure insects that never ceased to flit in
whirling, silent flight among the wild grass and over the tombstones
of that solitary place--souls so small, so courteous to one another,
so beautiful in colour and in movement that I thought the charm of the
sea had entered into their nature, that they desired to charm, but were
unconscious of their charm.
Among the islands, though perhaps it cannot justly be called an island,
_The Lido_ claims the greater interest. It extends, right opposite to
Venice, for five miles--a long low ridge of heaped-up sand, a quarter
of a mile broad--from San Nicolo to Malamocco. It is the chief guard
of Venice from the Adriatic. At each end is a passage to the open sea
whose dark blue waves break on the white, brown, and yellow sand of
its sea-ward side; on the other, the ripples of the lagoon lap the
low wall which looks out on Venice across the quiet water. At the
northern end stands the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, one of the patron
Saints of the city; in its apse the Venetians lodged the bones of the
saint they had stolen with all the cleverness of Ulysses. His spirit
watched for their welfare and defended the great port of their town.
At a short distance from the Church we come to the very point of the
Lido. Opposite is the Fort of San Andrea and the long island of San
Erasmo, the first of a succession of Lidi curving inwards like a bow
to the mainland near the mouth of the Piave, and sheltering Torcello,
Burano and other islands in the northern lagoon. In days gone by,
this succession of low-lying shores was clothed with pines--as the
coral islands of the Pacific are with palms--a dark, green, narrow,
flower-haunted wood, which, rising as it were out of the breast of the
sea, must have charmed the mind with a hundred fantasies. Not a tree of
it is left, though the soil is rich and fertile. Between San Erasmo
and the Lido the deep sea-channel opens out to Adria--an historic
strait of waters--through which a thousand thousand ships have gone
out for war and trade and pleasure in all the splendour of the past,
and returned with music, victory and treasure. It was through this
opening that the Doge, attended by all the warriors, ecclesiastics,
counsellors, statesmen and great merchants of Venice, in his gorgeous
galley, moved by some hundred oars, and surrounded by all the boats
of Venice, with music, and shouting and triumph, went forth to wed
the sea, and dropped along with holy-water his ring over the stern
with equal humility and pride. It was here that on a night of furious
storm the three great saints who cared for the safety of the Republic,
St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicolas, delivered Venice from the
demon-ship which was bringing from the sea pestilence and destruction
on the faithful city. Everyone knows the legend, and a noble picture
in the Accademia tells the story of how the fisherman--whose boat St.
Mark had hired to take him at dead of night through a roaring gale to
San Giorgio Maggiore and then to San Nicolo--brought to the Doge in
the morning the ring St. Mark, before he embarked on this expedition,
had taken from the treasury of his Church. “Give that,” he said, as
returning, he landed on the Piazzetta, “to the Doge, and bid him send
it back to my Church.” And the Doge, knowing the ring, believed the
story of the night. Nor is this the only record in art of the legend.
There is an unfinished picture attributed to Giorgione of the three
Saints in their fishing boat meeting at the mouth of the Lido the
ship of hell, and repelling it with the Cross. The sea is tossed into
violent surges, huge masses edged with fiery foam, over which the
deep-bellied purple clouds are driven by the tempest. The demons man
the racing ship that seems to shiver as it is suddenly stayed in the
very entrance of the port. Clouds and sea in raging storm, lit by the
flashing of the lightning in the collied night, are represented in so
modern a manner, and with so modern a feeling for nature, that it seems
as if Turner’s spirit had entered into the pencil of Giorgione.
So wild a sea is rarely seen breaking on the Lido. On the whole, the
long low shore, save when the Scirocco drives the sand in a river
through the air, is peaceful enough; and there are few chords of
colour stranger or more strangely attractive than the dark sapphire
sea leaping in joy and with the sound of trampling horses on the pale
yellow belt of sand fringed with the green meadows, with acacia, maize,
and fig trees, with the pale leaves of the Canne, and with the low
plants, sea-holly, dry reeds, and thistles which grow on the edge of
the sand where the last breath of the foam-drift plays upon them--blue,
yellow, and various green, mingling together, for so it often seemed
to me, into a mystic harmony.
The meadows near San Nicolo, dotted with low acacia shrub, are
lovely--a place of beloved repose and beauty. Between them and the
landing stage at Sant’ Elisabetta was once the rude neglected Jewish
Cemetery. The grave-stones are all collected now and placed within an
ugly walled-space with a small chapel, and an iron-railed gate. No
history, no sentiment can collect round this hideous enclosure. It was
but right and reverent to redeem the tombstones from careless neglect;
but it might have been done with some feeling for beauty. When first
I knew Venice, the grave-stones lay entangled and overgrown with tall
lush grasses, dwarf acacias white with blossom, and wild-flowers. In
spring the daffodils were gay and golden there; in summer the wild rose
threw its trailers and its starry flowers over their desolation. Some
stones stood erect, others had fallen. The flat stones lay at every
angle; and on all of them long inscriptions in Hebrew recorded the love
and honour paid to the departed by the persecuted race, who were forced
to lay their dead on this wild and uninhabited shore. The place was
full of history. It symbolised the unhappy fortunes of the race in the
days of enmity and persecution. Here Shylock and Tubal, I thought, were
housed at last. Here rested many a Jew, whose life was as noble as that
of Shylock was base. The flowers had taken care of them, and woven over
them a web of beauty. Nature had repaired the cruelty and intolerance
of man. I should have bought the whole ground and surrounded it with a
low wall, had I been a Jew; and tended the flowers, and left the place
to itself. The birds and the insects loved it. It was as pathetic as it
was beautiful.
Beyond it is the Church of St. Elizabeth where the bathers land. Five
minutes’ walk takes one across from the lagoon to the seashore,
bordered by hillocks of shifting sand “matted with thistles and
amphibious weeds,” and itself close to the blue incoming of the waves,
luminous with shells, and hard enough to ride on with a great pleasure,
such pleasure as Byron and Shelley had day by day
for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aereal merriment.
So, as we rode, we talked.
So Shelley wrote, and then described how he crossed the Lido to the
lagoon and looked on the sunset. And to this day there are few changes
more impressive than when the traveller leaves the seashore, with the
freshness of the waves and the solitude of the sea-beach in his heart,
and, crossing to the other side, looks forth on the still slumber of
the lagoon, and on the towers and peopled houses of the white and
golden city, such a city--at the evening hour when all the sky behind
is in a glory of crimson, pearl, and azure--as Galahad beheld when
from the lofty cliff above the Ocean, he rode across the waves to be
received at the glimmering gates with trumpets sounding, with songs and
welcome by the angelic and the saintly host.
The Lido has its interest, but the greater charm belongs to the remoter
islands, each alone in the waste of water, and with attractive names.
It is their habit on slumbrous days to float in air and not on the
water. A silver line of sunny mist stretches right across the base
of the island, and on this it rests, as if it wished to join the
sky. This sportive ethereality is one of the wanton wiles with which
they bewilder the voyager’s imagination. Their names are romantic.
San Lazzaro, Santa Elena, San Giacomo del Palude, San Francesco del
Deserto, Il Spirito, La Grazia, San Giorgio in Alga. Each had its
monastic church in ancient days, and from every part of the lagoon the
bells then sweetly rang over the receptive water at morning, noon, and
evening. Of all these monasteries only two remain, San Francesco del
Deserto and San Lazzaro. Only in these is the Church still served,
the cloister and the cells still intact, the garden still cultivated,
the cypress and poplar garth still a place of musing; and only at San
Francesco, by the corner of the isle that looks to Venice, is there one
stone pine, a Tuscan stranger in the alien north. The rest of the small
islands and their churches are desecrated, used for state and municipal
purposes, with the exception of Torcello and Burano.
There is perhaps no more beautiful row in Venice than, as the sunset
begins in September days, to take the gondola out of the mouth of the
Giudecca and make our winding way to St. George of the Seaweed, set
lovely in the lonely waters that look towards the Euganean Hills.
Around it lie the shallower sea-marshes near the mainland, and when the
gold of the sunset strikes them, they flame like emerald beds of fire.
The tower of the island church used to rise, thin and black, with two
upper windows through which the sun poured two shafts of light, against
the south-western glow--a beacon seen far and wide, a memorial tower
that in its silence held a thousand thoughts. It is now destroyed. It
was not in the way; it might have been kept for the sake of beauty by
a few clamps; but this was too much for modern Venice. I resented its
departure bitterly. One consolation remained. When the boat drew near
the angle of the island, there stood, and still stands, set high on
the angle of the wall, an image of the Virgin, rudely carved, but with
grave simplicity and faith. She held her son in her arms. On her head
was an iron crown, engrailed, and over her head an iron umbrella with
a fringe of beaten iron. She looked towards Venice with blessing and
protection, and claimed her right in Venice. She was a Virgin for the
people and of the people, a gentle, lowly born, working woman, with
a face of sorrow and strength, such as we may see every day in the
small squares of Venice when the people gather round the well. And yet
there was such nobility, love, motherhood, and so much sweet spirit
in her air, so much of watching to protect and guard the sea and its
fisher-folk, that I cried when I saw her first, and afterwards in my
soul when I passed her, Ave Maria, Maris Stella!
There is somewhere another Virgin on another island, with also her lamp
at night and her canopy, but I forget where she stands. Wherever she
is, she is the same benign and lonely person, the Madonna Protectrix of
the sailor and the lagoon.
The row home from this island as the sun descends to its rest on
autumn evenings, is of an extraordinary splendour and beauty. The
little wavelets of the lagoon are ebony in shade and blazing gold on
the side where the light falls. The sea-banks turn a golden brown, and
their grasses seem to change into the warm green of the deep sea. The
sky drops from liquid and pellucid blue to pearl, and then to orange,
crimson and gold. The wild lights fall on the city which grows slowly
on the eyes, and every tower is a tower of fire. And behind, beyond St.
George of the Seaweed, but towards the left, are the triangled Euganean
Hills, down the sides of the greatest of which I have often seen the
sun roll like a wheel, such a wheel as Ezekiel saw in vision. Shelley
saw them at this sunset hour.
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles--
And then--as if the Earth and Sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent.
Again and again I have seen this apparent transparency of the peaks.
That Shelley recorded it is one example of how closely he observed
nature, and how accurately he recorded her doings. Much more might be
said of the islands; but this seems enough. Each of them, right away to
the Piave on one side and to Chioggia on the other, has its history,
its religion, and its ruin.
Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of the lagoon is sailing on it.
A gondola is scarcely a safe boat to sail, except in a following wind.
It has no keel, and it turns over easily, but with one of the great
oars behind it steers steadily. Once, with two rowers, I took more than
two hours to row from Venice to Torcello against the wind. I sailed
back in forty minutes. The lagoon was rough with short tossing waves
edged with foam, indescribably fresh and gay. The long boat, with its
flat bottom, flew over the surface of four or five waves together,
at a torrent speed. I never was so conscious of swiftness, and the
boat itself was alive beneath, all its will in its movement, pulling
and leaping like an Arab steed. This was delightful; nor is it less
delightful, having made friends with the owners of one of the larger
boats, to sail up and down the sea-streets of the lagoon, when the
wind is fresh and the tide running fast, and the night is dark, save
for glimpses of the hurrying moon. The steersman is silent, the sky is
silent, the soul itself is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind in the
sail and the water round the rushing prow, and these sounds deepen the
silence. That which men feel who stand sentinel on the bow of a ship in
the midst of the great Oceans, one may feel here close to a busy town.
And in the vast solitude and peace the infinite Spirit of Nature comes
home to our spirit, and we feel our own infinity.
But quiet is not always the seal of the lagoon. I have seen it
tormented and torn with wind, so ravaged that it was impossible to
cross from the Piazzetta to San Giorgio Maggiore, so furious that
the waves leaped up the quay and ran along the pavement to the space
between the orient pillars whence St. Theodore and the Lion of St.
Mark watch over the heart of Venice. Nor can I refrain from telling
here what once I saw of deadly storm out on the lagoon close by the
island of St. James of the Marsh. We had been rowing back from Torcello
under a terrible sky, very lofty, of dark purple cloud, smooth as the
inside of a cup. Across this, in incessant play, the lightning fled to
and fro, not in single flashes, but in multitudes at the same time,
ribbons and curling streamers and branching trees of white violet and
crimson light. So far away and high they were that the thunder of
their movement sent no sound to us. Towards the Alps a white arch
seemed to open under the pall of cloud, and in it were whirlings of
vapour. The gondolier bent forward and said--We must take refuge. We
must land at the island. I laughed, and said--No, we will go on; and
I heard him mutter to himself--These English have no fear. And then I
thought that he was certain to know far more than I of the lagoon, and
I turned and said: “It is not courage we have, but ignorance; do what
you think right”; and we drew the boat to the landing of San Giacomo,
and crossed the little island to the rampart that looked forth to the
mainland; and then, issuing out of the white wrath that seemed to dwell
in the cloud-arch, a palm tree of pale vapour formed itself and came
with speed. It reached the lagoon near Mestre, and towered out of it
to the heaven, its ghostly pillar relieved against the violet darkness
of the sky, its edge as clear as if cut down by a knife, and about a
yard apparently in breadth. It came rushing across the lagoon, driven
by the Spirit of wind which within whirled and coiled its column into
an endless spiral. The wind was only in it; at its very edge there was
not a ripple; but as it drew near our island it seemed to be pressed
down on the sea, and, unable to resist the pressure, opened out like
a fan in a foam of vapour. Then, with a shriek which made every nerve
thrill with excitement, the imprisoned wind leaped forth, the sea
beneath it boiled, and the island, as the cloud of spray and wind smote
it, trembled like a ship struck by a great wave. Then the whirlwind
fled on to Burano and smote the town. Next morning a number of persons
were brought into the Hospital at Venice who had been wounded by the
whirl-storm. There is wild weather in Venice and on its waters.
I have known Venice so dark under black wind and rain that it was
impossible to read at three in the afternoon in August. I have stood
on the Rialto in so heavy a snowstorm that not a single boat crossed
the empty, desolate river of the Grand Canal. The palaces were clear in
the cold light, their marbles shining in the wet. The tiled roofs were
white with snow, and the dark ranges of gondolas moored to the quays
were relieved by the snow that lay thickly upon them. The Campaniles
rose out of the mist with a touch of snow on their windward side. A
gloomier sight, a more unhappy day I never saw. Yet even in this wild
weather Venice wore her beauty like a robe and exercised her incessant
fascination. I have walked over the Piazza, crunching through the ice
that covered its inundated marbles. I have sheltered from the furious
rain and wind of a roaring Scirocco under the door of the Hospital in
the Square of SS. John and Paul, and seen through the driving slant of
rain Colleone proudly reining in his horse, his bâton in his hand, his
noble casque outlined like a falcon, and his eager and adventurous
face in profile against the dun sky. He looked as he may have looked
many a time, leading his men, when wild weather was roving over
Lombardy.
I have felt as if the very waters trembled, like the palaces, with the
appalling roar and shattering clash of such a thunderstorm as I have
never known elsewhere; but the most impressive aspect of savage weather
is when, in tremendous rain, one stands sheltered under the colonnade,
at the corner where the Piazzetta turns into the Piazza. The enormous
roof of St. Mark’s, and that of the Procuratie, collect the rain and
pour it forth by the great spouts more than a yard in length which
project over the pavement from the parapets. From each of these, from
hundreds of them, a cataract leaps like a tigress, and falls resounding
on the pavement. The noise is deafening, the pavement is half a foot
deep in turbulent water, the wind screams, the men are blown across
the square, the gondolas rock at the steps and beat against the piles,
the thunder roars till the two giant columns, where St. Theodore and
the Lion stand in proud serenity, seem to shake, and through the black
sap of rain, the lightning flares the Ducal Palace into momentary
colour. It is a sight, a sound, not to be forgotten. Tintoret, with his
sympathy for the wild work of nature, has seized and recorded this in
his picture of the bearing of the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria.
The Alexandrian Square he has made into the Piazzetta of Venice. The
rain is falling in torrents, the waterspouts cascade to the pavement.
The pavement is so deep in the running water that it is looped around
the legs of the bearers of the body, fiercely swirling. It is a
splendid picture of a Venetian storm, and in the background of it, that
we may not lose the sea, the waves of the lagoon are breaking over the
quay.
But these impressions are endless. In other towns there is some
constancy in the doings of nature. The general aspect of the weather is
much the same for a month at a time. In Venice not a day passes without
many changes. The various and mutable sea-goddess has her own wild and
fickle way with her peculiar people.
Once more, before I leave the lagoon and the islands, I will record
a day I spent, when partly by gondola and partly walking, I made the
circuit of Venice in pursuit of her sea-charm. Early in the morning
I left the Piazzetta and rowed down the Riva dei Schiavoni till I
reached the public gardens. Their sea-wall dipped from a path shaded
by acacias, thick with white blossom in the spring, into the lagoon,
and at the point of the peninsula the gardens make, I looked south
along the quay into the very mouth of the Grand Canal, with the Palace
and the Campanile on one side, and the Church of the Salute and of St.
Giorgio on the other, a glorious group of buildings which seemed to
borrow splendour and delight in their own existence from the dancing,
sparkling, rippling, glancing, laughing water which surrounded them.
It was like an Empire’s gate, and the Empire was the Empire of the
Sea. Right opposite, between me and the Lido, lay the Island of Sant’
Elena, like a jewel of emerald and pearl set in the blue enamel of the
sea. Its little church was nestled in trees, and over its sea-wall hung
dark green and tangled boughs of ilex, and pale acacia, and the golden
wealth of fig trees; and all along the parapet roses trailed and the
gadding vine, and scented the sweet soft wind. I little thought that,
as I write now, there would not be left one trace of all this beauty. I
rowed out to it there and landed. The church was used as a granary, but
beside it the tiny cloister was still exquisite even in its ruin--paved
with marble and brick; its small Gothic arches and the roofs of its
remaining rooms garmented and entangled with roses. A carved well
stood in the centre, and all around the low wall of the arcades, every
leaf and flower gleaming in the sunlight, tall oleanders, pink and
white, grew in deep red pots of clay--a place so fair, so sweet and
solitary, so noiseless save for the bees, that the delicate soul of St.
Francis, whose was the church, would have prayed in it with joy, and
praised the Lord who made the world so lovely.
Then I rowed round the wall of the Arsenal to San Pietro di Castello.
Behind that church and the Arsenal is the most wretched part of Venice,
where the people are poorest and wildest, and the lanes most unkempt
and uncared for. Yet it was here, on this outlying island, that for
many centuries the Cathedral of Venice claimed the reverence of the
city. The old church has long perished, and its unhappy successor
stands now in a deserted square with plots of dry and melancholy grass
where the fishermen dry their nets, nor has it any dignity or beauty
of its own. But I loved the place for its loneliness, and for its wide
view across the shining lagoon to the misty plain of the mainland, and
beyond to the “eagle-baffling” rampart of the Alps. That wide-expanding
view is no longer visible, for the Arsenal has been extended, and shut
out its glory. The square is now quite desolate, but it is still worth
visiting for its associations. Here every year the Brides of Venice
were dowered by the State; here their ravishment by the pirates took
place. It was Magnus, Bishop of Altinum, that set up here the first
Church of Venice, the same Magnus to whom the Lord appeared in vision
and told him to build a Church (St. Salvador) in the midst of the city
on a plot of ground above which he should see a red cloud rest. A
different vision built San Pietro. St. Peter himself appeared to Magnus
and commanded him to set up a Church in his name, where he should find
on Rivo Alto oxen and sheep feeding on the meadows. The grass of the
Campo still recalls the ancient legend.
Even now, as I write, I see the Tower and the paved square, and the
gardens behind, and recall a favourite picture in the church which,
amid the desolation of the island, is like a lovely maid in a deserted
wood. It is said to be by Basaiti, and pictures St. George and the
Dragon. It is arched at the top, and the arch is filled with a pale
evening sky of rosy light, soft as a dream, and faintly barred with
lines of vaporous blue. Into this tender sky rises on the left a
mountain, broad and alone, and below the mountain a ranging hill, and
below the hill the walls, towers and gates of a city, and below the
city a two-arched bridge, and below the bridge a flowing river, and on
the bank of the river St. George on his horse, his head bent down to
his horse’s neck with the couching of his spear, and on the spear the
formless dragon, and above the dragon on the right, Sabra, clinging in
lingering flight to the trunk of a great fig tree that flings into the
rosy sky three long branches sparsely clothed with leaves. They hang,
as if to crown the victor, over the head of St. George, whose face,
young, yet full of veteran experience and holiness, is of the same
grave tenderness as the sky. This is Basaiti in his noblest vein and
manner, and the picture has on the whole escaped the restorers.
I left the square, with this noble painting in my mind, and rowed
on to the Sacca della Misericordia beyond the Canal, which leads to
the Church of SS. John and Paul. This is a great square piece of the
lagoon, surrounded on three sides by sheds and houses, where all the
wood used for building in Venice is brought from the mainland, and left
floating on the water. The place has always fascinated me, I scarcely
know why--for the view of San Michele and Murano and the Alps beyond
is seen as well from other points--but I think it partly is that the
great trunks and beams, and the sawn planks seasoning in the water,
bring back to me the mountain valleys, torrents and knolls of rock
where the trees were hewn down, and fill the sea-city with images of
the wild landscape of the land; and partly that one seems to see in
the waiting wood all that human hands will make of it--houses, roofs,
furniture, bridges, gondolas, barks that will meet the beating of the
Adriatic waves, piles that will build foundations for new buildings.
The coming human activity moves like a spirit over the floating masses
in this tract of water.
Then I rowed on till, crossing the southern entrance of the Grand
Canal, I touched on the low wall of the little grassy campo in front of
the Church of San Andrea. It looked over the lagoon, the water of which
lapped its sea-wall, to the mainland. Opposite it was the Island of San
Giorgio in Aliga, its dark tower black against the pale pearl and rose
of the late afternoon sky; on its left, seeming to lie on the water,
the violet range of the volcanic Euganeans, so far, so delicate, so
ethereal, that they appeared to be made of the evening sky. The rest of
the heaven was cloudy, but the sweetness of solitude, and the peace of
this deserted place, and the spirit of the coming evening, were so full
of grace that I landed, dismissed my gondola, and stood under the porch
of the late Gothic church, enjoying the silence. There is a carving
over the door, so simple and childlike in feeling that it is hard to
believe it is Renaissance work. It is of St. Peter walking on the water
and of St. Andrew close at hand in his boat, with a gondolier’s oar
floating in the water, and beyond a piece of broken landscape. This
little invention into which the sculptor had put his soul suited the
quiet square, not larger than a large room. Thought and imagination
seemed to be limited by the narrow space, but only seemed, for in front
opened out to the south the broad lagoon and the wide plain of the
mainland, and I knew that to the north rose into an infinite sky the
peaks of the Alps, aspiring to reach the celestial City. I lingered
long, hoping that the clouds would clear away, but it was not then
I had that revelation. Afterwards, when walking somewhere near San
Sebastiano, I came to a small bridge and there I beheld what seemed to
be the gates of Paradise. The clouds had lifted to the north and the
south-west. They rolled away like a folding scroll, and what I saw was
the clear light of the setting sun on one side, and on the other the
whole range of the Julian Alps, with the rose of the sunset on their
freshly fallen snows. I crossed a muddy canal and found myself with an
unimpeded view on the grassy and deserted ground of the Campo Marte.
It ran out then into the lagoon, and I stood on its wild beach looking
out upon the waters. Sea-marsh and lonely piles and flitting sea birds
and a solitary fishing boat on the rippling surface, growing gold and
crimson, led my eyes to the black tower of San Giorgio and to the hills
of Padua, and then to the purple bases of the Alps rising into tender
gray and shadowy blue; and above, tossed and recessed and fretted into
a thousand traceries, the great waves of the snow peaks, all suffused
with a divine rose. Slowly the evanescent tenderness departed, but with
ceaseless change of rose and violet and gray. Only above the engrailed
summits the pale azure was steadfast, the clear shining after rain. I
watched the sun go down, I listened to the roar of the Adriatic as it
came to me, a low murmur over the solitary field; I heard the Ave Maria
peal sweetly from all the bells of Venice, and I thought of the Mother
and the Child who saved the world. And then I went away, having seen a
vision.[1]
I visited then a garden and friends I knew and when night fell rowed
home down the Grand Canal. The moon had risen, and her light, in a sky
now clear save of flying clouds, was intensely brilliant. The great
sea-river, strangely quiet, almost magical in its stillness and in the
flood of white luminousness that seemed poured upon it in streams,
shimmered like liquid cornelian, a milky expanse among ghostly palaces
on either hand. The mighty masses of the Renaissance palaces which,
in losing all their irritating and confusing ornaments in the dim
and melting moonlight, reveal their noble and beautiful proportions,
supplanted the smaller palaces of Byzantine and Gothic form which
depend so much for the impression they make on their lovely ornament
and colour, both of which disappear in the moonlight. Above me, as I
rowed, the glorious blue of the sky, across which darted now and then
a shooting star, appeared to watch over its beloved city. The moon
seemed racing in it, so swift in the fresh sea-wind was the motion
of the white clouds across her disk. Each as it crossed took rainbow
colours, and threw a mystic shadow on the world below. Only one gondola
passed me by, a lantern burning on its prow, and its rower, silent as
his boat, looked like a spirit in the moonlight. Then the deep shadow
of the Rialto hid the moon, and I found my lodging.
* * * * *
It is time now to turn to a different matter--What was the influence,
towards the power to charm, of this water-life of the sea on the arts
in Venice?
First, architecture was made different by it from all that it was in
other Italian towns. The commerce and the wars of Venice in the East
caused her nobles and merchant princes to study the buildings of the
East. Rome did not influence them so much as Constantinople, Asia
Minor, and the Holy Land. It was long before the northern Gothic,
chiefly Franciscan, had any power in Venice, and when it had, it
was apart from the spirit of the city. The Church of St. Mark is an
Eastern not a Western Church. Many of the palaces along the Grand Canal
were built in imitation of palaces the merchants had seen when they
anchored in Orient ports. Often, as one wanders in the narrow streets,
a window, a door-head, a disc in the wall, will remember us of the
Byzantine Empire. There is a disc near San Polo where the Emperor of
Eastern Rome sits in full imperial robes and crown, just as Justinian
is represented in the mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. At Ravenna, we
are still closer to the architecture of that Empire, but here, and this
is characteristic of early Venetian architecture, there is a greater
liberty, a more individual choice and treatment of buildings than there
is at Ravenna. It is scarcely imitation which we see, but Eastern
ideas of architecture freely modified and recreated into new forms
by the architects. It is as if the free life of the sea itself had
instilled its wild originality, variety and beauty into the imagination
of the builders.
The continual change of the sea and its novelty entered not only into
public but domestic architecture. All along the canals, the private
houses built by the earlier architects of Venice change incessantly
their form. In every house the ornament is individual. Moreover, in the
work itself, there is a finish, a delicate delight in perfection of
minute carving, a lavish invention which belongs to the best Oriental
work. Its finish was always precious; and this ideal of finish entered
also into the first buildings of the Renaissance in Venice, and made
their sculpture and decoration more lively and more exquisite than
elsewhere in Italy. This charm in ornament belonged to Venice, because
it was the Queen of the Mediterranean Sea, the mistress of the East.
The Orient brought over the sea the subtlety, the delicate finish, and
the golden beauty of its art to Venice.
From the East also--and learnt because Venice was a sea-power--came
the extraordinary love of colour which must have made mediaeval Venice
like a city built of rainbows. It passed, as I have said, into the
fishing boats and their sails. It belonged to the poorest houses on
the distant islands. It made the Venetian painters the first masters
of colour. We have some notion of it from the exterior of St. Mark’s,
which even by moonlight blazes like a breast-plate of jewels; from
its interior, which, subdued into dark but glowing sanctities of
colour, solemnizes the spirit. But in ancient days the colour-glory of
St. Mark’s was extended over the whole city. It shone with gold and
crimson, with azure and burning green, with deep purple and the blue of
the sea waves. The sailors and merchants of the East when they visited
Venice saw in her architecture colour as brilliant as that of their
own cities, and felt themselves at home. The architects, lavishing
colour everywhere, made a water street in Venice as decorative as the
title-page of a Missal.
Again, that element of charm arising from the double life of all
things through reflection in still water, entered, I believe, into the
soul of every architect in Venice, and modified his work. He knew, or
unconsciously felt as he built, that each palace, church, tower, and
dwelling house would often have, in unconscious nearness, each its own
image and a second heaven in a mirrored beauty; that each would be in
the centre of another fair world of its own in the water beneath it. He
was inspired to greater excellence than in a city on the land, by the
knowledge that all his work, reflected by the sea, would be seen for
ever in a twofold loveliness.
Two other peculiarities, not found in the other cities of Italy,
give a distinct charm to the architecture of Venice; and they are
both caused by her position in the sea. The first of these is that
all her important buildings are covered from cornice to foundation
with precious and lovely marbles. The foundations were laid with
mighty blocks of Istrian marble, brought from the mainland; but it
was impossible to bring from so far enough of solid stone to build
the palaces, churches, and dwellings of Venice. With rare exceptions,
then, the walls were of brick; but, for beauty’s sake, the brick was
overlaid, outside and inside, with thin slabs of veined and various
marbles, with alabaster, with discs of porphyry, with mosaic, or with
frescoes. The oversheeting marbles were brought from across the sea.
The frescoes were done by the Venetian artists. Imagination, flying
high, can scarcely represent to itself the glorious aspect of the
Fondaco dei Tedeschi, as seen from the Rialto, covered from top to
bottom with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione. These have perished, but
the inlaid and marble covered walls of the Venetian palaces remain,
and they are like a lovely mosaic of rich colour. On their marble and
alabaster the sea-winds and the sunlight have so acted that the surface
has a sheen of flying and evasive colour, and a patina which I have
not seen elsewhere, even in Genoa. Those accursed restorers have taken
the trouble, notably in St. Mark’s, of scraping this away. It is like
cleaning the patina away from a Greek bronze. Nature--sea and sun and
wind--had adopted the buildings for her own, and given centuries of
work to enhance the beauty of their original colour. Italy has despised
and destroyed this labour of Nature. But in many places the charm
remains, and it is the work, directly and indirectly, of the sea.
There is a second thing to say of the influence of the sea position of
Venice on her architecture, and of the charm of it. In the mediaeval
towns of the Italian mainland, the palaces of the nobles and merchants,
even the ordinary houses, present to the street lofty and blind walls
of enormous strength, especially along the lower story. They have the
aspect of prisons, and they were made in this fashion for the sake
of defence in the incessant quarrels waged by the opponent families
and parties in the city. There is no openness, no story of hospitable
receptions, no brightness of life, no sense of peace, impressed on us
by the great buildings of the inland towns of Italy. Even when we visit
a little hill town like San Gimignano, we see that the common houses,
as well as those of the nobles, wear the appearance of fortresses. It
is quite different in Venice. The main entrance of the houses, of rich
and poor, was on the seaside, on the canal. A wide door, leading to
a long hall, opened by steps on the water. The glancing of the water
plays on the roof of the hall which goes back to a small garden. The
great staircase mounts to the first story from this hall, and that
story has wide, open-hearted windows with a deep balcony. Everything
suggests peace, fearlessness, and the welcome of humanity. The steps
seem made for the reception of crowds of guests. Tall piles, coloured
in bands of red, white, and blue, tell what hosts of warless gondolas
were moored there by the visitors. The whole of the lower story was
often an arcade. The palace seems to throw itself open to the air, the
light, and the populace. Its aspect is the aspect of friendship and
hospitality, of a city whose citizens were at peace one with another.
This makes the appearance of Venice quite different from that of any
other Italian town, and its charm is great. Nothing indeed can be
prettier or more full of the delight of changing sunshine and shade,
and of pleasant human life doing its work and having its joys in the
sun, than to row through the narrower canals, and look into these wide
open doors, and see in the glint and glimmer of the light reflected
from the water the shadowy spaces full of men and women at work, of
boys and girls playing, of tiny fishermen and tiny bathers making the
bright waters that lap their open doors their playing and their working
place. The freshness, the breadth, the joyous movement of the sea, fill
their dwelling, regulate their life, mould their character, and set the
seal of the witchery of the sea on all they feel and all they do.
* * * * *
This is the charm which the Architecture of Venice derives from the
sea. How far Venetian Painting was influenced by the position of Venice
on the sea, what charm it derived from the life of the sea, and how far
the sea was the subject of the artists, is now the question. It is not
easy to answer it, for the influence of the sea position was not direct
but indirect. It did not make the painters of Venice desire to paint
the sea or to care for it as our modern temper does, but it created,
I think, a certain spiritual or imaginative influence in their soul,
other than that produced by the landscape of the land, which, it may be
quite unconsciously, entered into their art-work and had power over it.
The landscape that Cima, Basaiti, Giovanni Bellini, Catena, loved and
painted, that Giorgione, Bonifazio, and Veronese placed in the distance
of their pictures, was that of the mainland, of the spurs of the hills
as they dipped into the Lombard plain, of the lovely network of rock
and plain, river and woodland, of scattered castles and of white towns
on the hilltops, which one sees from the heights of Verona. On the
other hand, Titian painted the landscape of his native land, where
the torrent comes down through the massive chestnuts of Cadore; where
the gray limestone peaks leap upwards thousands of feet, and follow
one another, like the waves of the sea in the tempest; and the huge
boulders, ablaze with coloured lichen lie like resting beasts on the
short sweet grass in the green shade of walnut trees, and the rude
farmhouses stand beside the groves of oak and beech. These were his
delight, but the sea is not in his work nor in that of his fellows.
What does touch the sea in their pictures are the skies they painted
above this inland landscape. Their freedom, their diffused softness,
their lofty arch, their bright and vast expanse, their lucid
atmosphere, their silver subtlety, and their involved and mighty
storm-clouds, are the creation of the wide and moving sea. Carpaccio
and Catena paint the pale and trembling azure above the afternoon on
the seacoast. Giorgione has recorded the dark purple thunder-clouds
which climb with eager speed from the horizon of the sea to threaten
the works of men. Cima of Conegliano paints the clustered flocks of
white cloudlets in a clear pale sky which are common in the Venetian
heavens, and which are born of the sea. Veronese paints the pure,
cloudless, deep blue sky swept clean by the sea-wind, and under which
the sea is radiant. In other pictures he paints a sky often seen over
the Adriatic. It is indeed a seaside sky--blue with flat white stratus
across the blue, calm, and trembling with reflections cast up from
the sea. But Titian stands apart. His skies are of his own mountain
valley. The splendours of the mountain rain, the whirling of the
mountain-clouds belong to him alone.
The “softness and freedom,” so characteristic of the art of the great
Venetian colourists that the phrase has almost passed into a proverb,
did not belong to the earlier schools of Venice. These qualities came
into her art with the advent of the New Learning, which reached Venice
even earlier than it reached Florence, though it was less developed
there than in Florence. As to freedom, the Spirit of the Renaissance
set free the imagination of the artists, and kindled in them a more
vivid interest in humanity, even in natural scenery. The intellectual
freedom it brought belonged to every city which it touched. It belonged
above all to Venice. The spirit of a sea-people is by nature more free
than the spirit of the people of the plains. It is as free as the
spirit of a mountain folk. And such a spirit entered into the painting
of the artists of Venice, as it did into the life of its citizens.
They painted with more boldness, originality and fire than the inland
schools. The passion of the various, even of the reckless, sea was in
their heart. And this passion was in tune with the intellectual freedom
the New Learning brought to Venice.
As to the softness which distinguished the Venetians, it was chiefly
shown in a passion for various, noble, and harmonized colour, suffused,
even to its darkest shadow, with soft and glowing light. And Venice
was already, from its eastern associations, the lover of rich colour,
softly gradated, in buildings, boats, and dress. And then, beyond this,
the colour of its seas and skies, as indeed always near the southern
coasts, was tender, subtle, delicate alike when it was strong or
evanescent, soft as a child’s cheek in slumber, but always glowing. Day
by day, this warm softness of colour was instilled into the artists
and nourished by the sea-nature of the place. It was a spirit in their
pallet and their pencil.
The capacity for receiving such an impression was strengthened by the
circumstances under which it was received. There is no place where the
reception of the elements of beauty derived from Nature is so easy,
undistracted, and uninterrupted as in Venice. Gliding in a gondola
is very different from riding, driving, or walking. It ministers to
receptivity.
Then there is the deep silence of the lagoon, in which the spirit of
Nature most speaks to man, not only by night but by day. We may be
as quiet on the Venetian lagoons--with all the sense of sight open to
receive, with the soul undisturbed by the challenge of human sounds--as
we should be in the heart of a Highland glen. All that Nature displays
of colour, form, or fancy; her mystery, her wild or mocking charm,
her solemn silence fraught with thought--sinks deep into the heart
when sunrise or sunset or starlight find us far out on the lagoon. A
whole boatful of gay people are hushed as by a spell. This ease, then,
in the reception of impressions on the senses, the quietude in which
they are received, the soft magic in the quietude, the freedom of the
waters, filled the soul of the Venetian artists, and made, as it were,
the atmosphere which their art breathed, and the inner spirit of their
pictures. It was one of the forces which made their work not only
softer and freer, but more vivid and passionate than that of any other
school in Italy.
Again, every one knows that the Venetian painters brought colour to a
greater perfection than it attained elsewhere. It came to them from the
lavish colouring of the city of which I have already written, from the
gorgeousness of the pageants, but chiefly from the natural scenery of
their home. It is true, they painted man rather than Nature. But they
felt her loveliness, and the deepest impression they received from her
daily work was of the glory and ravishment, glow and depth of colour,
varied from the most delicate to the most sombre hues in sea and sky
and along the distant range of Alpine summits. In the city itself,
from canal to canal, all the shadows are transfused with a glimmer
of blue light, or full of crimson and green fire. It is the presence
and power of the water which produces this. Over the sea, the blue of
the waters is like that of the sapphire throne Ezekiel saw above the
terrible crystal of the firmament. It is not terrible here, but deep
and tender; and, when storm is at hand, of a purple so solemn that
Tintoret often uses it for the garments of those in tragic sorrow.
But it was chiefly on the lagoon that the artists saw the richest and
softest colour. In subdued sunlight, such as is frequent in the haze of
the sea, the soft silvery, pearly grays vary infinitely over the smooth
waters. In fresher and brighter days when the wind brings the flying
clouds, the colour is that which is native to a sea-atmosphere, often
clear, often thrilling through veils of ruby, sapphire, and emerald
vapour, steeped always in the diffused light which is felt, like joy,
over wide spaces of water, and under a vast expanse of sky. To these
constant impressions we owe in part the extraordinary luminousness,
glow, interfusion, subtlety, tenderness, splendour in height and depth
of colour in the pictures of the great Venetians.
Another characteristic of Venetian painting is also derived from the
charming of the sea. It is the intense glow of the flesh colour. The
deep warmth and ruddy light which seem to come from within the body to
the skin in the figures of these painters, were studied direct from
Nature. It is the colour of the naked body of the Venetian fishers to
this day. And nothing that I know of produces it but the influence of
the sea-winds combined with sunlight, and of the sunlight reflected
from the waters in a soft and gracious climate. We may see something
like this colour, in its coarse extreme, in the faces and hands of the
boatmen on our coasts. Sea and sun have there worked with a fierce
and racking climate to produce the colour, but to destroy its beauty
by destroying the texture of the skin. But, at Venice, these natural
forces work in a climate which does not injure the skin; and they
overlay its surface with a glow of red and golden colour which is one
of the loveliest hues in the world, and has the special qualities of
depth and life, even of a certain passion.
There is more opportunity in Venice for its formation than in other
southern sea-ports. All through the summer and autumn the Venetian
youths of the people spend their time all but naked in the water.
They walk, ankle-deep, over the shallows of the lagoons, fishing for
sea-plunder. The men work on the embankments only in their shirts. Half
their life they are practically naked;--and to look at one of these
young Venetian fishers, standing in the blaze of the sun, with the
greenish water glistening round him, its reflections playing on his
glowing limbs, and all his body flaming soft as from an inward fire--is
to see the very thing which Giorgione painted on the walls of palaces,
which Bellini and Giorgione handed on to their followers, which Titian
and Tintoret laid on their canvas and emblazoned in their fresco. They
worked into their painting of the human body what they saw every day,
and other schools of art did not attain the glory of flesh-colour
Venice attained, because they did not see it.
The naked body of the Bacchus of Tintoret, who comes wading through the
lagoon water to meet Ariadne, is differently, but as richly and nobly,
coloured as that of the Bacchus of Titian in the National Gallery.
Reflections from the water glow and quiver on his limbs. He is truly a
creature of dew and fire. There is a young and naked St. Sebastian by
Titian at the Salute which might stand for one of the fishers of the
lagoon. His long wet hair streams dark on his shoulders. In his face is
all the freedom of the sea, and the soft warm rich glow of his body and
limbs is indescribable. He is not St. Sebastian, but one of the gods of
the peaceful sea.
When Giovanni Bellini painted the naked body, there is nothing better
in colour in the whole world. In San Grisostomo the Saint sits in front
of the bending stem of a great fig tree, on which he rests his book.
His white beard flows down over his breast. Bellini’s certainty,
firmness, enduringness of colour, are here at their very best. The glow
and subdued flaming of the flesh, varied from point to point with an
exquisite joy in the work, is beautiful beyond all praise. The glow
of Giorgione’s flesh-colour is as deep, but thrilled through with a
greater softness. In Tintoret’s hands the flesh-colour became more
sombre, and in the faces of his many portraits had a curious dignity,
as if, I have often thought, the royalty of the Sun had entered into it.
With his women, a difference arose. At first he painted them in the
full Venetian manner. But afterwards, with his impatience of monotony
or repetition, he changed the type. It alters from the full, opulent,
rose-coloured women of Titian, Palma, Veronese, to a lithe, lissome,
tall, rather thin woman, alive with youthful energy of fire, of the
most gracious and subtle curves, exquisitely made, with a small head
and lovely face. With his invention of this type, he invented a
new method of colouring, marked by a temperance in its use and glow
which is strange in one so often accused, and sometimes guilty, of
intemperance. He sent across the naked body alternate shafts of
sunlight and of shade, and amused himself by painting the colour of
flesh under these varied conditions. The result--since in all the
shadow as in the light there was colour, and colour at its subtlest--is
the loveliest, freest, and most delightful thing in Venetian art. “The
Graces” in the Ducal Palace are an example of this. Any one can see
another example in the picture of the “Origin of the Milky Way” in the
National Gallery. It may be only a fancy of mine, but I cannot help
thinking that Tintoret had seen such girls bathing from the Lido on
days when the sunlight was broken over the sea by racing clouds. There
is a freshness, an open-air purity and light in these images of his
which it pleases me to think would be absent if these lovely bodies
had been painted in the rooms of palaces or in their gardens. The winds
of heaven appear to blow around them from the unencumbered sea. The
light of an ocean sky, the dance of reflected light from moving water
seem to play upon them.
Again, the Venetian painters saw day by day the human body in graceful
and incessantly changing movement, and the charm of it was derived from
the sea-life of Venice. There are few attitudes and movements in any
human work more graceful than those of the single rower of a gondola.
He is so placed, and his peculiar method of rowing is such, that his
labour educates him in lovely movement, and of movement altering almost
at every instant to meet new circumstances. He is unable to take an
awkward attitude. If he does, so lightly poised is he, he is tossed
out of the boat; and it is only, I believe, because the attitudes are
so various, so momentary, so hard to see before they change, that
sculptors have not reproduced them. It is plain that this incessantly
beautiful movement of the human body had a great influence on the
painters of Venice. Their eye was unconsciously trained from youth to
realize the body of man in lovely poise and change.
Their eye was also trained to realize the aspect of stately, grave,
and reverent signiors and merchants in the rich robes of the days of
pageants; or in the quiet robes of councillors and citizens; and there
are no more noble, dignified representations of men of honour, weight,
and civic business, than those made by the Venetian artists. The only
way in which this view of their art can be connected with the sea is
that, owing to the commerce of Venice on every sea, there existed in
the town a wise, wealthy, honoured middle class, different from the
middle class in the other sea-towns of Italy, having worthy connections
with the East, and sharing in a greater degree than elsewhere in the
government and culture of the city.
Moreover, the wonderful splendour of the pageants and triumphs of the
town, most of which were bound up with the sea, enabled painters like
Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and Veronese, to display in decorative art
the most gorgeous colour in dress and festive show. The processions in
Venice, the festal days at the Salute and the Redentore, the marriage
of Venice to the sea, were a varied blaze of radiant colour.
Finally, on this matter of painting, there are very few direct
representations of sea-scenery in Venetian art. I have said that Titian
painted the woods, rocks, and mountains of his native Cadore. Once
only, if I remember rightly, he drew the lagoon and the plain below
the Alps, and Antelao above the mist, soaring as if it would pierce
the very rampart of heaven. Every day and evening he saw, from his
garden at Casa Grande, the lagoon near San Michele filled with joyous
gondolas and alive with light and colour, but it never occurred to him
to paint it. The mountain valleys, their groves and torrents were his
home. They did not permit him, in their jealousy, to perceive the sea.
Only one among the greater Venetian painters seems to have cared at
all, and that very little, for the sea in the lagoons--and he lived
all his life in Venice. This was Tintoret. Sometimes, as in one of
the Halls of the Ducal Palace, the background of his picture is made
by the green waves of the lagoon beating on its scattered islands, or
in another picture by the glittering surface of its water with the
boats crimson in the sunlight. The green sea of the lagoon, prankt
with flitting azures, soft, and shot with changing hues, is painted by
him with a rapturous pleasure in his picture of Bacchus and Ariadne.
A sea-going ship with its sails set is making its way, behind the
figures, out to Malamocco. There is a picture of his in Santa Maria
Zobenigo where St. Justina and Augustine are kneeling on the seashore,
and the gray-blue lagoon, in short leaping waves, is enriched by the
scarlet sail of a Venetian bark. The sea in the St. George in the
National Gallery breaks in low waves of bluish green, edged with foam,
gloomy under a dark sky, upon a desolate coast. It is as like the water
of the lagoon when storm is drawing near as it can be painted. Then he
painted on the ceiling of the great hall in the Ducal Palace, Venice
enthroned as the Queen of the Sea. A huge, globed surge of oceanic
power and mass rises at her feet, and on it are afloat the sea-gods
and goddesses, Tritons and monsters of the deep who bring the gifts
of the sea to the feet of the Sea-Queen. It might be an illustration
of the subject of this Essay, and it proves that the subject was not
unconceived by Tintoret.
Indeed, if the soaring figure, which in the picture of the Paradise at
the Ducal Palace, rises with uplifted arms and face from the angle
above the Chair of the Doge as he sat in council, towards the figure
of Christ at the summit of the canvass, be in truth, as some have
conjectured, the Angel of the Sea, whose nursling was Venice--Tintoret,
setting this incarnation of the history of the city above its senate in
council, among the saintly host, and aspiring to the throne of God, did
most nobly and religiously conceive the sea as the mother and guard and
glory of Venice.
But more remarkable than these few reminiscences of the sea were the
skies which Tintoret painted from those he saw over the sea and the
lagoon. Sometimes the sky is pure, but the blue is full of white light,
such as the sea mists make when they rise into the heaven. Sometimes
his sky is full of dark gray cloud, threatening ruin or heavy sorrow.
When Christ descends through the sky to welcome his martyrs or answer
the prayers of Venice, he bursts through the clouds as through a sea,
and they ripple away from Him in rosy concentric circles. It is an
effect he may have seen from a seashore, but not on land. But, chiefly,
with his stormy and stern nature, Tintoret--who had seen the skies of
Venice when the tempest had come in from the sea--filled his heaven,
especially when he paints the tragedies of earth, with the heavy bars
of purple, mingled with angry gold which I have often seen after a
thunderstorm at Venice, descending like stairs from the zenith to
the horizon. And once at least, below the clouds, he has painted the
lagoon, black and tortured by the wind.
I have said nothing of Canaletto or of Guardi. They seem to belong
to another world than that of the great Venetians. But it would be
uncourteous to omit them. Canaletto, or Il Canale, was really fond
of the waters of Venice, much fonder of them than his predecessors
were; and when he painted the long reaches of the Grand Canal, he
managed to represent one aspect at least of that wonderful sea-street,
when under a faint wind it trembles into multitudinous small curving
ripples that annihilate all reflections. He does not often vary from
this, and when he varies he does not succeed so well. But he painted
the buildings with a real desire to impress us with their nobility and
largeness of design, with no special care for accuracy of detail, but
with great care to give fully a sense of their splendour of situation
and of architecture. And he drew over the scene--and this he did
excellently--a clear, pure, luminous, tenderly gradated, but rather
hard atmosphere, in which the buildings were frankly visible, and the
waters almost austere. The pictures are so decorative that many of them
tend to weary the eyes, and we turn with some relief to those other
pictures of his in which the sky is dark, and a more grave and homelier
representation is made of the Venice of his time. I have not seen any
pictures by him of the lagoons. But I have seen a set of drawings of
the islands in the lagoon done in Indian ink, which in their slight
and careless drawing pleased me because he seemed to love what he was
doing, and to feel delicately the magical reflectiveness and charm of
the waters of the lagoon.
Guardi cares more than Il Canale for the waters of Venice. He did his
best to represent their lovely trembling in the light, and the images
they made in their mirror of the buildings above them and of the life
which moves upon them. It is easy, when one does not require the best,
to admire, even to have a special liking for, his pictures. As to what
the moderns have done for the Venetian waters, what the sea-charm of
the city has impelled on their canvas--it would require an essay as
long as this to tell the tale of it.
* * * * *
These things, with regard to Venetian painting, are part of the charm
which the sea exercised on the artists. One other charm is also derived
from the sea. The sea and its life have largely made the character of
the Venetian people. That is too great a matter to discuss fully, but
if those who visit Venice will make friends with the fisher people,
they will soon discover the historical character of the Venetian
people as distinguished from the upper classes. It is salted with the
nature of the sea. A wild, free, open, dashing, quiet and tempestuous
character, too much the sport of circumstance and impulse, yet capable
of a steady exercise of power when it loves or desires greatly--it
is the human image of the sea on which they live. It is one of the
pleasantest charms of Venice to know it, and be friends with it.
It is always a romantic character, and the sea has always fathered its
romance. The history of the city, legendary and actual, is steeped
in the romance of the sea. Wherever we wander through the town, in
the churches, by the monuments, squares, bridges and quays, among the
islands in the lagoon, on the sea-beaten sand of the Lido, when we
hear the beat of the hammers in the Arsenal, in the very names of the
streets--we meet the sea, and stories of the sea, and have all the
pleasure and charm a boy has when he reads of ocean adventure, and
feels on his cheek the salt wind from the sea. I will only take one
well-known example. Walking in the neighbourhood of the Church of Santa
Maria Formosa, I happened to look up to the name of the street. It was
called after the guild of workers who made the bridal chests and jewel
boxes for the Venetian maidens. It was here they lived and wrought. But
they were not only workmen, but sailors trained for war. And as I saw
the name, I remembered the story of the brides of Venice, twelve of
whom were each year, on the Feast of the Purification, dowered by the
State. It happened one year that pirates from Trieste, knowing this
custom, stole in at night to the Island of San Pietro di Castello, and
hid in the low bushes near the water. When the brides, carrying their
boxes of gems and money, were among the peaceful throng in the Church,
these bold bad men seized them and bore them away to the port of
Caorle, and there, landing with the spoil, lit their fires and took to
feasting. All Venice rose to pursue them, but the Chest and Box-Makers
were the first, with that fierce swiftness which belonged to Venetian
war, to take to their boats and pursue the ravishers; and outsailing
all the rest, rescued the damsels and slew the villains as they were
drinking round their fires. Returning with the rest, the Doge Candiano
asked them what reward they would have from the State--and they
answered: “Only that the Doge should visit in procession their Church
of Santa Maria Formosa on the anniversary of the Day of the Brides.”
Everywhere in the city such romantic stories spring up from church and
square, palace and bridge; and their historical charm is born of the
sea.
In conclusion, I may write a little word on the sensational charm of
Venice seated in the hearing of the sea waves, and adorned for worship
by the beauty of her water-world. The word sensational here brings no
reproach; it only means that the vivid impressions made on the senses
are more numerous, varied, and intense in Venice than elsewhere.
Each of them is accompanied with a spiritual passion as intense as
the sensible impression. The imagination is incessantly kindled into
creation by what it sees.
I will bring together, to illustrate this, what I saw in one day
when I went to Torcello. We started early, on a lovely morning. As
we rounded the angle of Murano we saw far away, and filling the line
of the horizon, the rare vision of the peaks of the Dolomites. Snow
lay on them, but snow transfigured by distance into ethereal light.
Fine bars of vapour lay across them, floating free, as if they were
the battlements of fairyland. Below, their buttresses and flanks fell
into the plain, blue as the heaven above them. Seen thus, across the
dazzling lagoon, they made that impression of farness and mystery, of
a land of enchanting secrets, of ethereal hope taking ethereal form,
which is part of the magic which rises like a wizard vapour from the
lagoons. The mountain glory is transfigured into a spiritual glory, and
the soul loses its conscious life in a drift of dreams.
Then, through the winding of the dark piles, through the shallows
haunted by sea birds, we came to Torcello. Torcello has been described
by a master hand, and I will not follow him; but when we had visited
the well-known places we went down along the banks to the large arm of
the sea beside the island. There was not a sound, save the cry of a
scythe in the coarse reeds, as we sat on the flowery grass. The place
was once full of human life, of wealth, and labour; it was now the
very home of desolation. Deep sadness--the sense of all the might and
splendour of the earth passing away into the elements, of nature only
living, and living in regret--filled the heart. And the sensation was
as different from that with which we had begun the day, as the glory
of the mountains was from the wild sea-marsh where we sat, and the
sorrowful salt water stealing by.
We left Torcello and went on to Burano, a small island about a mile
from Torcello. The men are fishers, the women lace-makers. A few canals
traverse it, and it has a large population. It belongs to itself alone,
and the indwellers have kept their distinct type for centuries. For
centuries they have been poor, rough, and helpful to one another. A
British working man would think their life starvation. It is an austere
struggle for existence; but on the day I went to see them they had a
festa. Baldassare Galuppi, whom Browning celebrated, was a native of
the island, and this was his centenary. To honour this half-genius all
the inhabitants cheerfully struck work, and turned out in their best
array. The canals, the streets, were crowded; the market-place was full
of booths and rejoicing folk. In the church the preacher was improving
the occasion. A local poet had written a sonnet on Galuppi, and it was
hung up at the corner of every street. Illustrated broadsheets with
Galuppi’s portrait and his life were sold on every stall; the men and
women were singing snatches from his music. A cripple, on gigantic
crutches, seized hold of me and carried me off to the Municipio to
show me the musician’s bust, as excited as the rest of the crowd
to celebrate the artist of their town. We forgot the mountains, we
forgot Torcello, in the gaiety, brightness, good humour, and artistic
excitement of humanity. Nothing can well be more wretchedly poor than
the life of these hard-working people, and yet, to celebrate one dead
for a hundred years, every memory of their misery perished in pleasant
joy.
When we left Burano we rowed on another mile to visit the Island of St.
Francis in the Desert. Ever since the fourteenth century, with a few
intervals, it has been held by the Franciscans. A marble wall surrounds
the tiny island, a marble pavement leads up to the small convent with
its church and garden. Cypresses and tall poplars stand in the garden,
and one stone pine looks out from the corner of the wall over the waste
lagoon. It is a solitary and lovely place, like an island in the sea of
the world.
We found service going on; the little bell was ringing, and we knelt
among the monks. All the spirit of the silence, of the peace of
obedience, chastity, and poverty, of the love that ruled St. Francis,
fell upon us. The depth of the religious life was here. I looked up
as I knelt, and saw, rudely painted on the wall, the charming legend
of the place--how St. Francis, returning from the East, took boat at
Venice to reach the mainland, and as night fell was drifted to this
island, slept, and woke in the morning among the low bushes which
clothed its shore. And as the sun rose he began to chant the Matins.
But who, said he, will sing the responses? At which all the little
birds came flocking into the bushes, and when he paused sang the
responses for him.[2] And Francis, rejoicing, struck his staff into the
ground, and it became a tree where the birds had plenteous shelter.
Part of the trunk of that tree is still kept in the cloister--small
and poor, paved with brick, and a deep well in the centre. Vervain
and roses and balsams grew round its low pillars in pots of red
earthenware, and the scent of them was sweet and solitary. And we
forgot the noise and excitement of Burano, and remembered only the
peaceful sainthood of the world, and the secret of obedience, and the
love of God to poverty.
When we left the island the sun had set over the Euganean Hills, and
again, as in the morning, but of how different a note, a new impression
out of the life of Nature was made upon us. We rowed in silence through
the teaching of evening. And when night came and the only light was the
light of stars, the silence deepened into mystery. There is a sense
of the infinite on the lagoon at night, and speech seems to break its
spell. It is half awe, half pleasure; the excitement it brings is not
for words; it is translated within into the language of the personal
soul, the tongue which no one knows but one’s self alone.
This was our day. There is no other place I know of where so many
varied impressions may be awakened in the imagination. They are bound
up with the sea and their charm is from the sea.
This perfect evening slowly falls
Without a stain, without a cloud;
The sun has set--and all the bells
Of Venice in the skies are loud,
Clashing and chiming far and near
“Ave Maria,” while the moon
Large-globed and red, climbs through the mist
To loiter o’er the dark lagoon.
[Illustration]
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The view from both these places, San Andrea and the Campo Marte, is
now blocked out by the great Fondamenta, built for the Orient Liners
and the Adriatic trade of Venice.
[2] There is another form of the legend, but I prefer this.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
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