“_Beautiful Venice._”
FROM Florence we went to Venice—eight days thereafter, to Bologna.
We “did” Venice leisurely and with great delight.
“The one place on the Continent that bored me!” I once heard a young
lady declare at an American watering-place;—a sentiment heartily
seconded by several others. “You can do everything there in two days!”
continued the critic. “After that, it is the stupidest old hole in
creation. I thought I should have died!”
Our friend, Miss M—- had been in Venice in December, and described
the blackened fronts of palaces dripping and streaming with rain; low
clouds excluding the sea-view; lead-colored drains where poets had seen
canals, and a depressing silence through which the gondolier’s cry was
like—“Bring out your dead!”
We were prepared to behold the ghost of a city, whispering hollowly of
a sublime Past;—a monotonous succession of ditches washing the slimy
foundations of crumbling walls;—almost the stillness and desolation of
a desert. We left Florence on a hot day; the railway train was crowded;
the long, dusty ride the least picturesque we had had in Italy. It was
late in the afternoon when we alighted at the station-quay and saw
our first gondola. It was wedged in with fifty others against the
pier, so tightly that the manner of its extrication was a mystery. A
bend of the gondolier’s wrist did it all. He had held up his hand, and
Caput had nodded. In a minute more he had brought his craft close to
our feet, and balanced himself by means of a long pole with a paddle
at the end, while he raised his cap and offered his services. He had
a family gondola, black as a hearse, a murderous-looking battle-axe,
edge outward, fastened to the prow, and seats for six upon the cushions
under a striped awning. Our luggage was quickly disengaged from the
confused mass discharged from the baggage-car, and stowed away in the
bows; we settled ourselves among the cushions and shot out into the
canal out of sight and hearing of the noisy station.
We were in Venice! The Bride of the Sea! Venice of the Doges—of the
thousand isles—of the cloudy-winged thousand years! Heat, dust, fatigue
went out of our minds with the play of the cool air over our faces, the
ripple of the salt-water under the keel of our boat. For this was also
the Venice of our old-time poetic fancies—not the sad city photographed
upon imagination by our friends’ descriptions. The lofty palaces were
ancient, blurred and seamed, but not ruinous—the smooth sunniness of
the canals allured the eye on to the sea, the highway and bulwark of
the city. Groves of masts streaked it here and there, line and spar
delicately defined against the flushing west. At longer intervals,
government buildings or warehouses sat blackly upon the breast of the
water, the tide lapping their thresholds twice a day. Purplish banks,
lying close to the horizon in the hazy amber distances, were the _lidi_
and _murazzi_—(sand hills and embankments)—protecting the Lagune
from oceanic irruptions in tempestuous weather. All this was lost,
presently, by the narrowing of the watery highway and closer line of
buildings. The canals were dull tracks but for the tossing wake in the
middle of each as our gondolier cleft a path with his long-armed sweep.
His call before turning a corner was a guttural dissyllable, not easy
of imitation. Poets—and Mark Twain—say gondoliers used to sing. We
never heard them. Our Antonio, our first acquaintance, and our faithful
boatman and guide until he deposited us at the station, the morning of
our departure—could not sing a note. Nor could any of his professional
brethren, he said.
“It was perhaps the sea-fogs that spoiled their throats. Or the
exposure in all weathers, signore. The signora would observe that a
gondolier’s life was one of hardship, summer and winter. He had no
breath to spare for singing. _Misericordia_, not a great deal! Nor
heart for it when the _sposa_ and _bambini_ must have their mouths
filled with food. And _polenta_ dearer every season!”
We were Antonio’s friends before we landed at the Hôtel Luna, and had
engaged him for a moonlight excursion upon the Grand Lagune that very
night. We hired him for the day, next morning, and upon several other
successive forenoons.
For Venice did not bore us. The Piazza S. Marco was just around the
corner from our quiet but excellent hotel—a matter of a hundred steps,
perhaps, on dry land—and the Basilica of S. Marco—_the_ attraction of
Venice to us. Prancing over the great entrance are the four bronze
horses, stolen from the triumphal arch of Nero by Trajan to adorn
_his_; from Trajan by Constantine for the new city of his founding and
name; from Constantine by Doge Dandolo for the Venetian Cathedral; from
Venice by Napoleon I. for the arch in the Place Carrousel, finally,
restored by the Emperor Francis to St. Mark’s. They are sturdy
roadsters, with good “staying” qualities, if one may judge from their
build and history, in no wise jaded by their travels and changes of
climate, and look fresh, but not impatient for another start.
The pigeons feed in the Piazza at two o’clock every day. It is “the
thing” for strangers and native-born strollers to congregate here at
that hour to witness the spectacle. About ten minutes before the bell
strikes, the birds begin to assemble, crowding the roofs, eaves and
window-sills of the surrounding buildings, preening and billing and
cooing, with the freedom of privileged guests. At the stroke of the
bell they rise, as one bird, into the air for a downward swoop upon the
scattered grain. The pavement is covered in an instant with a shifting
mass of purple and gray plumage, and the noise of fluttering and
murmuring, of pecking bills and clicking feet fills the square. A bevy
of their remote ancestors brought, six hundred years ago, dispatches of
such importance from the besieged island of Candia to Admiral Dandolo’s
fleet, that he sent the carrier-pigeons to Venice with the tidings of
his success in taking the island, and the aid they had rendered him.
They were put upon the retired list and fed at the public expense—they,
their heirs and assigns forever.
The best photographs—and the cheapest—in Italy are to be bought upon
the Piazza San Marco. Florian’s celebrated _café_, is there, and
countless shops for the sale of Venetian glass and beads—_bijouterie_
of all sorts, and for the general robbery of travelers—the rule
being to ask twice the value of each article when the customer is a
foreigner, and to “come down” should the victim object to the proposed
fleecing.
The mosaic floor of San Marco billows like the _Mer de Glace_, having
settled in many places. The decorations of façade and interior are
oriental in character and color. St. Mark, after much _post mortem_
travel, rests under the high altar. The altar-piece is of enameled
silver and gold plate, fretted with jewels. A canopy of _verde antique_
overshadows the holy sepulchre. A second altar is behind the chief
shrine. The canopy of this rests upon four columns, curiously twisted.
The two forward ones are of alabaster, and semi-translucent.
“Brought hither from Solomon’s Temple after the destruction of
Jerusalem,” affirmed our cicerone.
“By whom?”
The inevitable shrug and grimace, embodying civil surprise at the
query, and personal irresponsibility for the tradition.
“Ah! the signora can answer that as well as I who have never thought of
it until now. Doubtless”—flashing up brilliantly—“San Marco, himself!
Who more likely?”
The _Battisterio_ is a gloomy chapel, and as little clean as it is
bright. It has more the appearance of a lumber-chamber than a place of
worship. But the relics are priceless—the rubbish unique. The bronze
font, big enough for a carp-pond, dates from the 16th century, and is
presided over by John the Baptist. His head was cut off upon the stone
one sees at the left of the altar. Above the latter is another bit
of precious quartz or granite, from Mt. Tabor. St. Mark’s has drawn
heavily upon the Holy Land, if one-half the valuables stored within
the Cathedral are genuine. Sturdy old Doge Dandolo, who pensioned the
pigeons after the capitulation of Candia; who, old and purblind, led
the Venetians in the recapture of rebellious Zara, and to victory
in the siege of Constantinople; who accomplished what Pietro Doria,
two hundred years later, boasted that he would do after humbling the
arrogant Republic,—bridled the bronze horses and led them whithersoever
he would—is entombed in the Baptistery.
With all of what some call its barbaric redundance of ornament and
color, and the neglected richness that seems incompatible with the
reputed veneration of the Venetians for their renowned Basilica, St.
Mark’s works powerfully upon those who are conversant with its history
and can appreciate the charm of its quaint magnificence. Talk of
“restoration” in this connection is a project to coat the dusky bloom
of a Cleopatra with “lily-white.”
One hundred-thirty-and-four years was this thousand-year-old temple
in building, and, pending its erection, all homeward-bound vessels
were compelled to bring some tribute to the rising structure. The
five hundred columns of the façade are of rare marbles thus imported,
principally from the Orient. The wall between these is gorgeous with
mosaics—not frescos. The domes are begirt with a frontlet of pinnacles.
Sultana of the Sea, to whom all kingdoms have paid tribute, she sits
upon the shore in calm imperiousness befitting the regal estate
confirmed by a decade of centuries. The hack of chisel, the corrosion
of acids here will be sacrilege. Yet they say it is ordained that she
shall endure the outrage. They may smite,—they cannot belittle her.
We disbelieved in the fragment of the true cross set in a silver column
exhibited in the “Treasury;” were disposed to smile at the splinter, or
chip, of St. John’s frontal bone “adorning” an agate goblet. We shook
our heads over St. Mark’s Episcopal throne as we had at St. Peter’s in
Rome, and would not look at the crystal urn said to contain some of the
Saviour’s blood. Nor were we credulous as to the authenticity of the
capitals brought from the Temple at Jerusalem crowning the pillars of
the Entrance-Hall.
But we always stayed our steps at the red porphyry slabs embedded
in the floor of the vestibule. Here, Frederic Barbarossa, Emperor of
Germany, and twice-crowned King of Italy,—once by Pope, again by the
anti-pope of his own setting-up; Conqueror of Poland and Lombardy;
the most accomplished, as he was the most heroic warrior in an era
when heroism was knightly duty,—knelt to Pope Alexander III., at
the pacific instance of Sebastiano Ziani, Doge of Venice. Ten years
of excommunication; the disastrous battle on Lake Como, desertion,
treachery and disease had tired out, not quelled the haughty spirit. A
twenty years’ war, resulting in irrevocable defeat, probably wrought
more potently upon reason and will than the Doge’s arguments. His face
was of a more burning red than the hair and beard that earned his
nickname, as his knee touched the ground.
Schiller makes Marie Stuart protest, after her betrayal into the like
act of subserviency to Elizabeth, that she “knelt not to _her_, but to
GOD!” The poet may have borrowed the equivocation from Barbarossa’s
kingly growl—“_Non tibi—sed Petro!_”
Alexander was pontiff, diplomatist and magnanimous.
“_Et mihi, et Petro!_” he said,—raising the humbled monarch and giving
him the kiss of peace.
Ah! the languorous noons, when we loitered among the shadows of the
great Entrance-Hall, the “court of the Gentiles,” “thinking it all
over,” the pigeons cooing and strutting on the hot stones outside,
while St. Theodore, on his tall shaft, the Winged Lion of S. Marco on
his, stood guard over the deserted Piazzetta, and the breeze came up
past them from the Adriatic, the Bride of the Doges!
“_In signum veri perpetuique dominii!_” Thus ran the ceremony of
espousal. The King of all Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele, paid a flying
visit to the royal palace on the Grand Canal while we were in the
city, and the wedded Adriatic took the event as quietly as she had
regarded the usurpation of Austrian and French conquerors. “Perpetual”
is a term of varied meanings in this world and life.
Three stately cedar masts arise from ornamental pedestals before the
church. They were set up in 1505, and the captured banners of Candia,
the Morea and Cyprus used to flaunt there upon state festa-days while
the doges ruled Venice and the sea. The flag of United Italy is raised
upon each on Sabbaths and holidays. On a certain May morning, more than
two-and-half centuries agone, other trees adorned the Piazza S. Marco.
They had sprung up during the night, and each bore fruit, at the seeing
of which men fled affrighted and women swooned. Many of the spectators
had been guiltily cognizant of a conspiracy, headed by Spanish agents,
to murder Doge, nobles and Council, when they should come to S. Marco
on Ascension-Day. The faces of the strangled men swinging, each from
his gallows, revealed the awful truth that the Council of Ten had also
known of the plot and marked the ringleaders.
We walked across the Rialto; stopped to cheapen Venetian glasses in the
tiny shops crowding the streets leading to and from the bridge; bought
here ripe, luscious oranges for a reasonable sum from one Jew, and paid
three prices to another for a woven grass basket to hold the fruit. It
is a Bowery neighborhood, at the best, from the cheap flashiness of
which Antonio would withdraw his aristocratic patronage were he now a
merchant of Venice. The Rialto is a steep, covered bridge, lighted by
green Venetian blinds, that help to make it a common-looking structure.
A bright-eyed Italian offered caged birds for sale on the pier where
our Antonio and the gondola waited for us. Upon a tray beside him were
heaped white cuttle-fish bones for the use of the canaries.
“I do not want a bird,” I said. “But I will buy some of those”—pointing
to the cuttle-fish—“as a souvenir of the Rialto.”
He plucked off his tattered cap in a low bow.
“But the signora should not pay for a souvenir of the Rialto! I will
give her as many as she wants—gladly.”
He pressed three of the largest upon me, and absolutely refused to
accept so much as a centime in return.
“_Buono mano!_” insisted Caput, holding out a coin.
The Italian put his hands behind his back. “It is nothing! Let it be a
souvenir of the Rialto to the signora from a Venetian.”
“Unaccountable!” sighed Caput, as we dropped upon our cushions under
the awning.
“Refreshing!” said I, gazing back at the bird-vender until a turn in
the canal hid him.
He stands in the foreground of my mind-picture of the Rialto,—hung
about from neck to waist-band with rude wooden cages of chirping
linnets, canaries and the less expensive goldfinch, the petted
“cardellino” of the lower classes. Their fondness for the lively
little creature and his comparative worthlessness in the esteem
of bird-fanciers gives meaning to Raphael’s lovely “Madonna del
Cardellino,” and interprets the tenderness in the eyes of the Divine
Child as He arches His hand over the nestling offered him by John.
S. Giovanni e Paolo ranks second to S. Marco in size, impressiveness
of architecture and historical interest. It is the burial-place of the
Doges. The last of their number, Manini, sleeps in the more modern
church of the Gesuiti (the Jesuits). “_Æternitati suo Manini cineres_”
is his only epitaph. His predecessors repose pompously in the old
church, begun in the 13th century and completed in the 15th. It feels
and smells like an ocean cave. So strong is the briny dampness of
flavor that one would hardly wonder to find sea-weed washed up in the
chapel-corners. Pietro Mocenigo,—as great in war as Tomaso Mocenigo
was in statecraft and finance, has a liberal share of the right aisle.
Fifteen statues surround the mausoleum constructed “from the spoils
of his enemies.” In the grave he could not relax his hold upon their
throats.
“The only horses in Venice!” said a friend to me, once, in showing a
photograph of St. Mark’s “team.”
He had been twice to Venice, but he must have skipped SS. Giovanni
e Paolo. Whether or not the Doges were, in life, adepts in noble
horsemanship, they are addicted to equestrian statues after death. Very
high amid the prevailing dampness, stand and paw their marble coursers
on the lids of sarcophagi, as stamping to arouse their slumbering
masters, and upon wall-shelves and niches. The Chapel of the Rosary,
founded in 1571, as a thank-offering of the Republic for the victory
of Lepanto, is now a smoke-blackened shell,—the valuable contents,
including the original of Titian’s “Death of St. Petrus, Martyr,”
having been destroyed by fire in 1868.
The pictured wealth of Venice had not been conceived of by us prior to
this visit. Fresh from Florentine galleries as we were, our day in the
Accademia delle Belle Arti was a banquet enjoyed the more because it
was unexpected. Our surprise was the result of a want of reflection,
since we knew that Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Paul Veronese were
Venetians. Still, as men and prophets go, that was hardly a reason
why we should behold their master-pieces in honored places in their
native, or adopted city. Titian’s “Presentation of Mary in the Temple,”
and “John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” Bonifazio’s “Banquet of
Dives,” “Jesus in the House of Levi” by Paul Veronese—(how well we
all know artists and subjects through the “blessed sun-pictures,” and
engravings!) are in the Academy of Fine Arts, a suppressed monastery of
modest dimensions and appearance, devoted now to better uses than of
yore.
The Bridge of Sighs is another covered bridge, but with a level floor
and grated, instead of shuttered windows. A row of gargoyles grin upon
the lower arch. An allegorical figure which, we guessed, was St. Mark,
occupies the centre of the frieze,—a lion on each hand. The Bridge
looks like a place accursed. We did not quite like to pass under it.
It spans a narrow canal, shut in from the sunshine by the Palace of
the Doges on one side, a dingy, darksome prison on the other. The
water is inky-black in their shadow. A chill wind draws through the
passage on the hottest day. The last glimpse of the world framed by
the barred windows, could not have heightened the hardship of leaving
it. The prisons are empty dungeons, the walls exuding cold sweats;
badly-lighted and worse-ventilated. There is nothing in them to
recompense one for the discomfort and depression of a visit.
We entered the Palace of the Doges by the Giant’s Staircase:—
“The gory head rolled down the Giant’s stairs.”
Of course we quoted the line; knowing the while, that Marino Falieri’s
head nor foot ever touched the stately flight. He was beheaded, at
eighty years of age, at the top of another staircase the site of which
is occupied by this. We saw the place where his name should be in the
Great Hall of the Doges. The walls are covered with miles of historical
canvas. Tintoretto’s gigantic picture,—said to be the largest
oil-painting in the world—of “Paradise” fills one end of the chamber.
On the other sides are scenes from the history of the Crusades,—notably
of the Venetians’ participation in the Holy Wars. The portraits of the
Doges are upon the frieze close to the ceiling. We gave none a second
glance. The whole procession of ermine and purple mantles and peaked
beards did not interest us one-hundredth part as much as did a sable
blank directly over the coronation of Baldwin of Flanders by one of the
Dandolos.
“_Hic est locus Marino Falieri, decapitati pro criminibus._”
Another Doge, whose craft, or inoffensiveness kept his head upon his
shoulders, takes up the indefinite series beyond the accusing tablet.
Many of the historical pictures are by noted artists. Paul Veronese
and his pupils appear most prominently in the catalogue, although
Tintoretto and Bassano did their part, under princely patronage,
toward commemorating the glories, civic, ecclesiastic, and naval, of
Venice. So much Doge and Pope drove us from the field of observation
by the time we had spent an hour in the immense room. The Voting Hall,
visited next, afforded neither change nor relief. Thirty-nine Doges
could not be forced into the Council Chamber. The faithful Venetians
have made a frieze of them, also, at the end of which we read aloud and
thankfully, the name of Manini. We had seen his tomb, and remembered
him as the last of the worthy old gentlemen. Here we read the history
of the Republic again on ceiling and walls, except where a “Last
Judgment”—pertinent, but not complimentary—over the entrance, broke the
line of battle, which was, invariably, Venetian victory.
The notorious _Bocca di Leone_ is a slit by the side of a door in a
second-story room. We were passing it, without notice, when the guide
pointed it out. It is no larger than the “slide” in a post-office
door, and like it in shape. If it could give breath to all the secrets
it swallowed when the Bridge of Sighs was a populous pathway to the
dungeons that meant death; when nocturnal hangings, with no public
preamble of trial or sentence, were legal executions—the little hole in
the wall would be as the mouth—not of the lion—but of hell!
This Palace, whose foundations were laid A. D. 800, is a superb
fabric. It was finished in the fourteenth century. It faces the sea
on one side, upon another the Piazzetta, where St. Theodore stands
aloft, shield and spear in hand, the crocodile under his feet, and
the Winged Lion holds open the Book of the Gospels with his paw. A
double colonnade of more than a hundred columns, runs around both of
these sides. We counted carefully from the main entrance to the ninth
and tenth pillars. They are of rich red marble, and between them, in
the prosperous days of the Republic, stood the herald while he cried
aloud the sentences of death just decreed in the Great Hall. The Doges
were crowned upon the upper landing of the Giant’s Staircase. An inner
stairway is known as the Scala d’Oro, or Golden Stairs, and in the
same Republican age, none could tread it who were not registered among
the nobility. We saw the table around which convened the Council of
Ten,—perhaps the same over which the Spanish conspiracy was discussed,
and on which the death-warrants were penned.
Then we rejoined patient Antonio at the foot of the Piazzetta, and
were rowed—or spirited—by winding ways, to the beautiful church of the
Franciscans, to see Canova’s monument. It was erected five years after
his death, from his own design for Titian’s tomb. The artist within
whose soul the exquisite conception grew into form should rest in this
mausoleum and none other. The door of the pyramidal tomb is pushed
open by a bending figure, (life-size,) in trailing weeds, who looks
longingly, yet fearfully, into the inner darkness. She is followed up
the short flight of steps by a procession of mourners,—Poetry, and
Sculpture, and Painting, among them,—bearing laurels and funereal
emblems. Titian’s monument, in another aisle, is a tasteless
monstrosity, in comparison with this “rejected” design.
The Franciscan Monastery adjoining the church, contains the archives of
Venice since 883. There are not less than fourteen _million_ documents
in the collection. So boast the custodians. Three hundred rooms are
appropriated for their accommodation.