Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three
thrones, of mark beyond all other, have been set upon its sands; the
thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the first of these great
powers only the memory remains; of the second, the ruin; the third,
which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led
through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.
[Footnote 37: From Chapter I of "The Stones of Venice."]
The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the
prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read
them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their
warning; for the very depth of the fall of Tyre has blinded us to its
reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks
between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the
garden of God."
Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, tho less in endurance
of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of
her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so quiet--so
bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we
watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was
city and which the shadow.
I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be forever
lost and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves that beat like
passing bells against the stones of Venice.
It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might
be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and
mighty city; a history which, in spite of the labor of countless
chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline--barred with
brightness and shade, like the far-away edge of her own ocean, where
the surf and the sand-banks are mingled with the sky....
Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a
period less than the half of her existence, and that including the
days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing
severe examination, whether that decline was owing in anywise to the
change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in
great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was
composed.
The state of Venice existed thirteen hundred and seventy-six years,
from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of
the Rialto to the moment when the general-in-chief of the French army
of Italy[38] pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of
this period, two hundred and seventy-six years were passed in a
nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua,
and in an agitated form of democracy of which the executive appears to
have been entrusted to tribunes, chosen one by the inhabitants of each
of the principal islands. For six hundred years, during which the
power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an
elective monarchy, her king or doge possessing, in early times at
least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign,
but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened
almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and
incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the
image of a king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice
reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed them--and expired.
[Footnote 38: Napoleon Bonaparte.]
Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian state
as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred, the
second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what was
called the "Serrar del Consiglio"; that is to say, the final and
absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the
establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike
of the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of
the doge on the other.
Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the
most interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into
order and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the
worthiest and noblest man whom they could find among them, called
their Doge or Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely
forming itself around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was
chosen; an aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers,
influence, and wealth of some among the families of the fugitives from
the older Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and
heroism, into a separate body.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest
achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and
position among European powers; and within its range, as might have
been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes--of Pietro
Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and
Enrico Dandolo.
The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most
eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--opprest by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of
her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired
five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with
pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory
were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace,
significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at
Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first
of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk; in the
same year was established the Inquisition of State, and from this
period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under
which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion
spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the league of
Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the
decline of the Venetian power; the commercial prosperity of Venice in
the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the
previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength....
Throughout her career the victories of Venice, and, at many periods of
it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the man who
exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king, sometimes a
noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter nor to her; the real
question is not so much what names they bore, or with what powers they
were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made masters
of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress,
impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from
the time when she could find saviors among those whom she had cast
into prison to that when the voices of her own children commanded her
to sign covenant with death....
The most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of
religion in private life and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the
enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe,
Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness
impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret
spring. That spring was her commercial interest--this the one motive
of all her important political acts, or enduring national animosities.
She could forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her
commerce; she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value,
and estimated their justice by their facility. The fame of success
remains when the motives of attempts are forgotten; and the casual
reader of her history may perhaps be surprized to be reminded that the
expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her princes, and
whose results added most to her military glory, was one in which,
while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion,
she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety
for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her
own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her
religion....
There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we have
to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto.
We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual
religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar
and immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the
conduct even of their commercial transactions, and confest by them
with a simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation
with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in
reality) that religious feeling has any influence over the minor
branches of his conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all
this, a healthy serenity of mind and energy of will exprest in all
their actions, and a habit of heroism which never fails them, even
when the immediate motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With
the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly
correspondent, and with its failure her decline....
I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the roots
of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five orders:
but there are only two real orders; and there never can be any more
until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex: those
are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the
other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,
Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional
form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the center or root
of both. All other orders are varieties of these, or fantasms and
grotesques, altogether indefinite in number and species.
This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was clumsily
copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they
began to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity:
seized upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it:
invented a new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all
over the Roman Empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest
at hand, to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman
Christian architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of
the time, very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many
respects ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of
imagination, which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the
shores of the Bosporus and the Ægean and the Adriatic Sea, and then
gradually, as the people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes
corpse-like. The architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange,
gilded, and embalmed repose: it, with the religion it exprest; and so
would have remained forever--so does remain where its languor has been
undisturbed. But rough wakening was ordained for it.
The Christian art of the declining empire is divided into two great
branches, western and eastern; one centered at Rome, the other at
Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque,
properly so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative
perfection by Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine.
But I wish the reader, for the present, to class these two branches of
art together in his mind, they being, in points of main importance,
the same; that is to say, both of them a true continuance and sequence
of the art of old Rome itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the
fountain-head, and entrusted always to the best workmen who could be
found--Latins in Italy and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches
may be ranged under the general term of Christian Romanesque, an
architecture which had lost the refinement of pagan art in the
degradation of the empire, but which was elevated by Christianity to
higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed with
brighter forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in
its various branches over all the central provinces of the empire,
taking aspects more or less refined, according to its proximity to the
seats of government; dependent for all its power on the vigor and
freshness of the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and
purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless
rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed, and incapable of
advance or change.
Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in Rome and
Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate influence,
this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its refinement, an
impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by inferior
workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of this
patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their
youth; and while, in the center of Europe, a refined and purely
descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a
barbarous and borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and
consistency. The reader must therefore consider the history of the
work of the period as broadly divided into two great heads; the one
embracing the elaborately languid succession of the Christian art of
Rome; and the other the imitations of it executed by nations in every
conceivable phase of early organization, on the edges of the empire,
or included in its now merely nominal extent.
Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible of this
influence; and, when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the Huns,
as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated
Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they
mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual character. But
others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence,
back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice
creeks of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the
influence was of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two
nations, preeminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of
derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the
orbs of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality
and idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was
laid asleep in a glittering sepulcher, the living light rose upon
both horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were
shaken over its golden paralysis.
The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the
enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was
to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The
Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war. The Arab
banished all imagination of creature form from his temples, and
proclaimed from their minarets "There is no god but God." Opposite in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy,
they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and
the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman
empire; and the very center of the struggle, the point of pause of
both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed
fragments of the Roman wreck, is Venice.
The ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly
equal proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central
building of the world.