air; little by little all has become distinct; those points of dark
green turn into gardens; that mass of deep red is the line of the
ship-building yards, with their leprous-looking houses and with the
dark-colored stocks on which are erected the skeletons of polaccas and
feluccas in course of construction; the white line showing so bright in
the sun is the Riva dei Schiavoni, all alive with its world of
gondoliers, fruit-sellers, Greek sailors, and Chioggiotes in their
many-colored costumes. The rose-colored palace with the stunted
colonnade is the Ducal Palace. The vessel, on its way to cast anchor off
the Piazzetta, coasts round the white and rose-colored island which
carries Palladio's church of Santa Maria Maggiore, whose firm campanile
stands out against the sky with Grecian clearness and grace. Looking
over the bow, the traveler has facing him the Grand Canal, with the
Custom House where the figure of Fortune veers with the wind above her
golden ball; beyond rise the double domes of the Salute with their great
reversed consoles, forming the most majestic entrance to this watery
avenue bordered by palaces.
He who comes for the first time to Venice by this route realizes a
dream--his only dream perhaps ever destined to be surpassed by the
reality; and if he knows how to enjoy the beauty of nature, if he can
take delight in silver-gray and rose-colored reflections in water, if he
loves light and color, the picturesque life of Italian squares and
streets, the good humor of the people and their gentle speech which
seems like the twittering of birds, let him only allow himself to live
for a little time under the sky of Venice, and he has before him a
season of happiness without alloy.
THE APPROACH BY TRAIN[43]
BY THE EDITOR
After leaving Padua the land for several miles is flat sand. No grass or
tree grows here. Lagoons and canals intersect the land. At the right are
marshes bordering the Adriatic. Along the horizon, light smoky clouds
blend imperceptibly with the water. Other clouds, floating overhead, are
reflected in the brown and waveless water. Far across this expanse
glides here and there a small boat, propelled by a man standing erect.
Through dim mists, settled over the bay, we sight flying birds that call
loudly as they increase their flight. Absolutely without motion is this
water. The sole objects that move are boats and birds. The water
shimmers and sparkles wherever the sun, passing in and out of clouds,
lights it up. The shallow bay broadens until our view includes no land.
Everywhere extends a realm of waveless waters, in which fishing stakes
stand erect, and tall plants grow.
How strangely all this differs from the blue Mediterranean we saw a
fortnight ago when riding from Genoa to Leghorn, under that cloudless
sky of blue; in that stirring breeze, and an almost tropical
temperature, tho it was late in December; along that rocky,
tunnel-pierced coast, with deep olive groves bordering the way; the sea
a boundless vision of water moving and resounding against the shore;
whitecaps everywhere visible on its broad expanse. Here on this road to
Venice is complete repose, lifeless, sleepy repose--as of the dead--not
without poetry, but of the Orient and of mystics, rather than of
Provence, or the Ligurian shore and active, stalwart men.
We sight in the distance over the lagoon, the white walls and roof line
of Venice. The railway starts on its long course over one of the noblest
bridges in the world. It is more than two miles long. Some 80,000 piles
were used in its foundations, the superstructure entirely of stone, with
arches of 33 feet span each, and 222 in number. Along the roadway, on
either side is a stone balustrade. At each pier a balcony curves
outward. For four years a thousand men were engaged in building this
viaduct, and the total cost was $10,000,000. Having crossed, we reach an
island; then cross another, but shorter, bridge and pass to another
island. Our train thereafter comes to a stop for we have reached Venice
and enter a magnificent station, built of stone, with high semi-circular
roof, lofty waiting rooms, mosaic floors. We pass out through a spacious
doorway, and directly below, and in front, see the Grand Canal, bordered
on its farther shore by palaces and other noble structures of white
marble. A wide and broad plaza here fronts the water, and a stairway at
its edge leads downward to where are waiting a score of gondolas.
We step into one of these boats, and begin our first gondola ride in
Adriatic waters. It is late afternoon. The western sun lies dying in a
mass of yellow and soft brown clouds. On the high walls of the great
white station its rays fall with startling brightness and cast long
shadows of waiting gondoliers upon the plaza floor. The white palaces
opposite are shrouded in somber hues. A warm mist seems to rise from the
water. All is still as in the mid-Atlantic. When a sound is made, echoes
sharp and clear come from shore to shore.
Our boat glides away from this scene. Adjusting ourselves to its motion,
we roll from side to side in our little house of glass on a downy seat
and could pass the whole night here contentedly. Such rest, such
appalling silence, we never knew before. Those gondoliers do their work
with consummate skill. They have all the ease that comes of practise in
any calling however difficult. The sharp cut of an oar as it enters the
water is for a moment heard, but never a splash. The boat rolls
constantly, but we feel no strain. It moves as if it were a toy swan
drawn by a magnet in a child's hand.
From the Grand Canal we enter a narrow street. Sharp corners are turned
quickly, swift-moving boats are passed, narrow passages entered, and we
glide into deep shadows under bridges, but never a collision, or danger
of one, occurs. The gondolier at crossings cries out his warning. We
hear, but do not see, another who calls aloud in similar tones. The two
voices are heard again, each in an echo. Far away in this watery but
populous solitude, a church bell tolls.
We have had a quarter-hour's ride when the gondola comes to rest before
broad stone steps leading upward to a wide doorway. Here is our hotel,
an ancient palace, rich in marble and granite, with broad corridor, a
noble stairway, and mosaic floors. It is Sunday on St. Mark's Place--a
bright, warm Sunday it has been, such as winter can not give in our own
country. Here, indeed, is a foreign land, its life and spirit more
foreign than Rome. No scene in the wide world can rival this St. Mark's
scene, with the islands across the way in the broad lagoon--a
magnificent piazza, bordered by the façades of splendid palaces, by
statues, columns, and ornate capitals, another piazza near it surrounded
on three sides by noble arcaded structures and on the fourth by the half
Gothic, half Byzantine Church of St. Mark's, the most resplendent
Christian edifice in Europe. In one corner rises the stupendous
Campanile, high above palace roofs, arcades and church domes, its bells
sounding their notes upon an otherwise silent world.
A TOUR OF THE GRAND CANAL[44]
BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The Grand Canal of Venice is the most wonderful thing in the world. No
other city affords a spectacle so fine, so bizarre, so fairy-like. As
remarkable bits of architecture, perhaps, can be found elsewhere, but
nowhere located under such picturesque conditions.
There each palace has a mirror in which to gaze at its beauty, like a
coquettish woman. The superb reality is doubled by a charming
reflection. The water lovingly caresses the feet of these beautiful
façades, which a white light kisses on the forehead, and cradles them
in a double sky. The small boats and big ships which are able to ascend
it seem to be made fast for the express purpose of serving as set-offs
or ground-plans for the convenience of the decorators....
Each bit of wall narrates a story; every house is a palace; at each
stroke of the oars the gondolier mentions a name which was as well known
in the times of the Crusades as it is to-day; and this continues both to
left and right for a distance of more than half a league. We have made a
list of these palaces, not of all, but the most remarkable, and we do
not dare to transcribe it here on account of its length. It covers five
or six pages: Pierre Lombard, Scamozzi, Sansovino, Sebastiano Mazzoni,
Sammichelli, the great architect of Verona; Selva, Domenico Rossi,
Visentini, have drawn the plans and directed the construction of these
princely dwellings, without reckoning the unknown artists of the Middle
Ages who built the most picturesque and most romantic of them--those
which give Venice its stamp and its originality.
On both banks, façades altogether charming and beautifully diversified
succeed one another without interruption. After an architecture of the
Renaissance with its columns comes a palace of the Middle Ages in Gothic
Arab style, of which the Ducal Palace is the prototype, with its
balconies, lancet windows, trefoils, and acroteria. Further along is a
façade adorned with marble placques of various colors, garnished with
medallions and consoles; then a great rose-colored wall in which is cut
a large window with columnets; all styles are found there--the
Byzantine, the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Roman, the Greek,
and even the Rococo; the column and the columnet; the lancet and the
semicircle; the fanciful capital, full of birds and of flowers, brought
from Acre or from Jaffa; the Greek capital found in Athenian ruins; the
mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity and elegant fantasy of
the Renaissance. It is an immense gallery open to the sky, where one can
study from the bottom of his gondola the art of seven or eight
centuries. What treasures of genius, talent, and money have been
expended on this space which may be traversed in less than a quarter of
an hour! What tremendous artists, but also what intelligent and
munificent patrons! What a pity that the patricians who knew how to
achieve such beautiful things no longer exist save on the canvases of
Titian, of Tintoretto, and du Moro!
Even before reaching the Rialto, you have, on the left, in ascending the
Canal, the Palace Dario, in Gothic style; the Palace Venier, which
presents itself by an angle, with its ornamentation, its precious
marbles and medallions, in the Lombard style; the Fine Arts, a classic
façade joined to the old Ecole de la Charité and surmounted by a figure
riding upon a lion; the Contarini Palace, in architectural style of
Scamozzi; the Rezzonico Palace with three superimposed orders; the
triple Giustiniani Palace, in the style of the Middle Ages, in which
resides M. Natale Schiavoni, a descendant of the celebrated painter
Schiavoni, who possesses a gallery of pictures and a beautiful daughter,
the living reproduction of a canvas painted by her ancestor; The Foscari
Palace, recognizable by its low door, by its two stories of columnets
supporting lancets and trefoils, where in other days were lodged the
sovereigns who visited Venice, but now abandoned; the Balbi Palace, from
the balcony of which the princes leaned to watch the regattas which took
place upon the Grand Canal with so much pomp and splendor, in the palmy
days of the Republic; the Pisani Palace, in the German style of the
beginning of the fifteenth century; and the Tiepolo Palace, very smart
and relatively modern. On the right, there nestles between two big
buildings, a delicious little palace which is composed of a window and a
balcony; but such a window and balcony! A guipure of stone, of scrolls,
of guillochages, and of open-work, which would seem possible of
execution only with a punching machine upon one of those sheets of paper
which cover baptismal sugar-plums, or are placed upon globes of lamps.
We greatly regretted not having twenty-five thousand francs about us to
buy it, since that was all that was demanded for it....
The Rialto, which is the most beautiful bridge in Venice, with a very
grandiose and monumental air, bestrides the canal by a single span with
a powerful and graceful curve. It was built in 1691, under the Dogeship
of Pasquale Cigogna, by Antonio da Ponte, and replaced the ancient
wooden drawbridge. Two rows of shops, separated in the middle by a
portico in the form of an arcade and permitting a glimpse of the sky,
burden the sides of the bridge, which can be crossed by three paths;
that in the center and the exterior passageways furnished with
balustrades of marble.
Around the Bridge of the Rialto, one of the most picturesque spots of
the Grand Canal, are gathered the oldest houses in Venice, with
platformed roofs, on which poles are planted to hang banners; their long
chimneys, their bulging balconies, their stairways with disjointed
steps, and their plaques of red coating, the fallen flakes of which lay
bare the brick walls and the foundations made green by contact with the
water. There is always near the Rialto a tumult of boats and gondolas
and of stagnant islets of tied-up craft drying their tawny sails, which
are sometimes traversed by a large cross....
Below and beyond the Rialto are grouped on both banks the ancient
Fondaco dei Tedeschi, upon the colored walls of which, in uncertain
tints, may be devined some frescoes of Titian and Tintoretto, like
dreams which come only to vanish; the fish-market, the vegetable market,
and the old and new buildings of Scarpagnino and of Sansovino, almost
fallen in ruins, in which are installed various courts....
On the right rises the Palace della Cà d'Oro, one of the most charming
on the Grand Canal. It belongs to Mademoiselle Taglioni,[45] who has
restored it with most intelligent care. It is all embroidered, fringed,
carved in a Greek, Gothic, barbaric style, so fantastic, so light, so
aerial, that it might be fancied to have been built expressly for the
nest of a sylph. Mlle. Taglioni has pity for these poor, abandoned
palaces. She has several of them en pension, which she maintains out of
pure commiseration for their beauty; we were told of three or four upon
which she has bestowed this charity of repair....
In going to a distance from the heart of the city, life is extinct. Many
windows are closed or barred with boards; but this sadness has its
beauty; it is more perceptible to the soul than to the eyes, regaled
without cessation by the most unforeseen accidents of light and shade,
by buildings so varied that even their dilapidation only renders them
more picturesque, by the perpetual movement of the waters, and that blue
and rose tint which composes the atmosphere of Venice.
ST. MARK'S CHURCH[46]
BY JOHN RUSKIN
Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the
earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind
of awe, that we may see it far away--a multitude of pillars and white
domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a
treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and
mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches,
ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as
amber and delicate as ivory--sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm
leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and
fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless
network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of
angels, sceptered and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other
across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the
golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like
the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when
first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.
And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated
stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with
flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the
sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss"--the shadow, as
it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation,
as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with
interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of
acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the
Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of
language and of life--angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of
men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these,
another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged
with scarlet flowers--a confusion of delight, amid which the breasts of
the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength,
and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars,
until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a
marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and
wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had
been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them
with coral and amethyst.
Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There
is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the
restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak
upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among
the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living
plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely,
that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.
And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it? You may
walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St.
Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance
brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and
poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the
porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the
foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats--not "of them that
sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the venders of toys and caricatures.
Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a
continuous line of cafés, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes
lounge, and read empty journals; in its center the Austrian bands[47]
play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the
organ notes--the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd
thickening round them--a crowd, which, if it had its will, would
stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the
porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed
and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded
children--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and
stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing--gamble, and
fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised
centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of
Christ and His angels look down upon it continually....
Let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to
which the eye must be accustomed for some moments before the form of the
building can be traced; and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn
out into the form of a cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many
pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through
narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray or two from
some far away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a narrow
phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a
thousand colors along the floor. What else there is of light is from
torches, or silver lamps burning ceaselessly in the recesses of the
chapels; the roof sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered with
alabaster, give back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to
the flames; and the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints
flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom.
Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one
picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and
terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of
prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running
fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the pleasures
of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption;
for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always at
last to the cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every
stone; sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes
with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its
feet; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the
church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of
the apse. And altho in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the
mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure
traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman standing with her eyes
raised to heaven, and the inscription above her, "Mother of God," she
is not here the presiding deity. It is the cross that is first seen, and
always, burning in the center of the temple; and every dome and hollow
of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised
in power, or returning in judgment.
Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people. At every
hour of the day there are groups collected before the various shrines,
and solitary worshipers scattered through the darker places of the
church, evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and, for the most
part, profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater number of the
renowned shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their appointed
prayers with wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the step of the
stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark's;
and hardly a moment passes from early morning to sunset in which we may
not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast
itself into long abasement on the floor of the temple, and then rising
slowly with more confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of
the arms given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn
always in the northern aisle, leave the church, as if comforted....
It must therefore be altogether without reference to its present
usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and meaning of
the architecture of this marvelous building; and it can only be after we
have terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on abstract
grounds, that we can pronounce with any certainty how far the present
neglect of St. Mark's is significative of the decline of the Venetian
character, or how far this church is to be considered as the relic of a
barbarous age, incapable of attracting the admiration, or influencing
the feelings of a civilized community. Now the first broad
characteristic of the building, and the root nearly of every other
important peculiarity in it, is its confessed incrustation. It is the
purest example in Italy of the great school of architecture in which the
ruling principle is the incrustation of brick with more precious
materials. Consider the natural circumstances which give rise to such a
style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any quarries of
available stone, and having precarious access to the mainland where they
exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely with brick, or to
import whatever stone they use from great distances, in ships of small
tonnage, and for the most part dependent for speed on the oar rather
than the sail. The labor and cost of carriage are just as great, whether
they import common or precious stone, and therefore the natural tendency
would always be to make each shipload as valuable as possible. But in
proportion to the preciousness of the stone, is the limitation of its
possible supply; limitation not determined merely by cost, but by the
physical conditions of the material, for of many marbles pieces above a
certain size are not to be had for money. There would also be a tendency
in such circumstances to import as much stone as possible ready
sculptured, in order to save weight; and therefore, if the traffic of
their merchants led them to places where there were ruins of ancient
edifices, to ship the available fragments of them home. Out of this
supply of marble, partly composed of pieces of so precious a quality
that only a few tons of them could be on any terms obtained, and partly
of shafts, capitals, and other portions of foreign buildings, the island
architect has to fashion, as best he may, the anatomy of his edifice.
HOW THE OLD CAMPANILE WAS BUILT[48]
BY HORATIO F. BROWN