Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected
in his room. The great Council Chamber was used for the first time on
the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge--the 3rd of April, 1423,
according to the "Caroldo Chronicle;" the 23d, which is probably
correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum; and the
following year, on the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up
against the old palace of Ziani. That hammer stroke was the first act of
the period properly called the "Renaissance." It was the knell of the
architecture of Venice--and of Venice herself.
The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun; I
date its commencement from the death of Mocenigo. A year had not yet
elapsed since that great Doge had been called to his account; his
patriotism, always sincere, had been in this instance mistaken; in his
zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to
the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces might be built upon her
burdened islands, but none of them could taken the place, or recall the
memory, of that which was first built upon her unfrequented shore. It
fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of fortune, the city never
flourished again.
I have no intention of following out, in their intricate details, the
operations which were begun under Foscari and continued under succeeding
Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I am not in this
work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the architecture of
the fifteenth century; but the main facts are the following. The palace
of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the Piazzetta built, so
as both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of
the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back from the Sea as far as
the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta della Carta, begun in
1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge Foscari; the interior
buildings connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro (the
Othello of Shakespeare) in 1462.
Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left between the
two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or, as is more probable, the last
stones of it may have been swept away after the fire of 1419, and
replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever buildings, old or
new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della
Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so
much of the palace on the Rio that, tho the saloon of Gradenigo, then
known as the Sala de Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to
reconstruct the entire façades of the portion of the palace behind the
Bridge of Sighs, both toward the court and canal.
The palace was not long permitted to remain in finished form. Another
terrific fire, commonly called the great fire, burst out in 1574, and
destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious pictures of the Great
Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the Sea Façade, and most
of those on the Rio Façade, leaving the building a mere shell, shaken
and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the Great Council whether
the ruin should not be thrown down, and an entirely new palace built in
its stead. The opinions of all the leading architects of Venice were
taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or the possibility of
repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given in writing, have
been preserved, and published by the Abbé Cadorin, and they form one of
the most important series of documents connected with the Ducal Palace.
I can not help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental
resemblance to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was
first given in favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others,
especially Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute
designs of their own; but the best architects in Venice, and, to his
immortal honor, chiefly Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for
the Gothic pile, and prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and
Tintoret painted his noblest picture on the wall from which the Paradise
of Guariento had withered before the flames.
The repairs necessarily undertaken at this time were however extensive,
and interfere in many directions with the earlier work of the palace;
still the only serious alteration in its form was the transposition of
the prisons, formerly at the top of the palace, to the other side of the
Rio del Palazzo; and the building of the Bridge of Sighs, to connect
them with the palace, by Antonio da Ponte. The completion of this work
brought the whole edifice into its present form; with the exception of
alterations in doors, partitions, and staircases among the inner
apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and defacements as
have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I suppose, nearly
every building of importance in Italy.
THE LAGOONS[52]
BY HORATIO F. BROWN
The colonization of the Venetian estuary is usually dated from the year
452, the period of the Hunnish invasion under Attila, when the Scourge
of God, as he was named by his terror-stricken opponents, sacked the
rich Roman cities of Aquileia, Concordia, Opitergium, and Padua. In one
sense the date is correct. The Hunnish invasion certainly gave an
enormous increase to the lagoon population, and called the attention of
the mainlanders, to the admirable asylum which the estuary offered in
times of danger.
When Alcuin, the great scholar from Yorkshire, was teaching
Charlemagne's son and heir, Pepin, he drew up for his pupil's use a
curious catechism of questions and answers. Among others this occurs:
"What is the sea." "A refuge in time of danger." Surely a strange
answer, and one which can hardly be reckoned as true except in the
particular case of the Venetian lagoons. For the mainlanders were caught
between the devil of Attila and the deep sea of the Adriatic, and had
they not found the lagoons ready at hand to offer them an asylum and to
prove a refuge in time of danger, it must have fared hard with them.
But this date of 452 is not to be taken as the date of the very earliest
occupation of the lagoon. Long before Attila and his Huns swept down
upon Italy, we know that there was a sparse population occupying the
estuary, engaged in fishing and in the salt trade. Cassiodorus, the
secretary of the Gothic King Theodoric the Great, has left us a picture
of this people, hardy, independent, toughened by their life on the salt
water; their means of living; the fish of the lagoons; their source of
wealth; the salt which they extracted from its waters; their houses,
wattled cabins built upon piles driven into the mud; their means of
locomotion light boats which were tied to the door posts like horses on
mainland.
"Thus you live in your sea-birds' home," he exclaims, "rich and poor
under equal laws; a common food supports you; house is like unto house;
and envy, that curse of all the world, hath no place there." No doubt
this early population of the lagoons, already intimately associated
with its dwelling-place, modified by it and adapted to it, helped to
form the basis upon which the latter strata of population, the result of
the Hunnish invasion, could rest; and in all probability some of the
characteristics of this early population, its independence and its
hardihood, passed into the composition of the full-grown Venetian race.
But beyond the brief words of Cassiodorus we know little about these
early lagoon-dwellers. It is really with the Hunnish invasion that the
history of Venice begins its first period of growth.
The population which flocked from the mainland to seek refuge in the
estuary of Venice came from many different cities--from Aquileia, from
Concordia, from Padua; and tho the inhabitants of all these, no doubt,
bore the external stamp which Rome never failed to impose, yet, equally
doubtless, they brought with them their own particular customs, their
mutual hates and rivalries.
While living on the mainland these animosities had wider space in which
to play, and were therefore less dangerous, less explosive. But in the
lagoons, under stress of suffering, and owing to confinement and
juxtaposition, they became intensified, exaggerated, and perilous. There
was a double problem before the growing Venetian population which
required to be solved before Venice and the Venetians could, with any
justice, be considered a place and a people. First, the various and
largely hostile populations who had taken refuge in the lagoon had to be
reconciled to each other; and secondly, they had to be reconciled to
their new home, to be identified with it and made one with it.
The lagoon achieved both reconciliations; the isolation of its waters,
their strangeness, gradually created the feeling of unity, of family
connection, among the diverse and hostile components of the population,
till a fusion took place between the original and the immigrant
inhabitants, and between the people and their home, and Venice and the
Venetians emerge upon the history of the world as an individual and
full-grown race. But this reconciliation and identification were not
accomplished at once. They cost many years of struggle and of danger.
The unification of Venice is the history of a series of compromises, an
historical example of the great law of selection and survival.
THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR[53]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
Venice the beautiful city ended, pagan-like, as did its sisters the
Greek republics, through nonchalance and voluptuousness. We find,
indeed, from time to time, a Francis Morosini, who like Aratus and
Philopoemen, renews the heroism and victories of ancient days; but,
after the seventeenth century, its bright career is over. The city,
municipal and circumscribed, is found to be weak, like Athens and
Corinth, against powerful military neighbors who either neglect or
tolerate it; the French and the Germans violate its neutrality with
impunity; it subsists and that is all, and it pretends to do no more.
Its nobles care only to amuse themselves; war and politics with them
recede in the background; she becomes gallant and worldly....
But the evening of this fallen city is as mellow and as brilliant as a
Venetian sunset. With the absence of care gaiety prevails. One
encounters nothing but public and private fêtes in the memoirs of their
writers and in the pictures of their painters. At one time it is a
pompous banquet in a superb saloon festooned with gold, with tall
lustrous windows and pale crimson curtains, the doge in his simarre
dining with the magistrates in purple robes, and masked guests gliding
over the floor; nothing is more elegant than the exquisite aristocracy
of their small feet, their slender necks and their jaunty little
three-cornered hats among skirts flounced with yellow or pearly gray
silks.
At another it is a regatta of gondolas and we see on the sea between
San-Marco and San-Giorgio, around the huge Bucentaur[54] like a
leviathan cuirassed with scales of gold, flotillas of boats parting the
water with their steel becks. A crowd of pretty dominos, male and
female, flutter over the pavements; the sea seems to be of polished
slate under a tender azure sky spotted with cloud-flocks while all
around, as in a precious frame, like a fantastic border carved and
embroidered, the Procuraties, the domes, the palaces and the quays
thronged with a joyous multitude, encircle the great maritime Venetian
sheet....
In truth they never concern themselves with religion except to repress
the Pope; in theory and in practise, in ideas and in instincts, they
inherit the manners, customs and spirit of antiquity, and their
Christianity is only a name. Like the ancients, they were at first
heroes and artists, and then voluptuaries and dilettanti; in one as in
the other case they, like the ancients, confined life to the present. In
the eighteenth century they might be compared to the Thebans of the
decadence who, leagued together to consume their property in common,
bequeathed what remained of their fortunes on dying to the survivors at
their banquets. The carnival lasts six months; everybody, even the
priests, the guardian of the capucins, the nuncio, little children, all
who frequent the markets, wear masks. People pass by in processions
disguised in the costumes of Frenchmen, lawyers, gondoliers, Calabrians
and Spanish soldiery, dancing and with musical instruments; the crowd
follows jeering or applauding them. There is entire liberty; prince or
artizan, all are equal; each may apostrophize a mask. Pyramids of men
form "pictures of strength" on the public squares; harlequins in the
open air perform parades. Seven theaters are open. Improvizators declaim
and comedians improvize amusing scenes. "There is no city where license
has such sovereign rule." ...
The Chiogga campaign is the last act of the old heroic drama; there, as
in the best days of the ancient republics, a besieged people is seen to
save itself against all hope, artizans equipping vessels, a Pisani
conqueror undergoing imprisonment and only released to renew the
victory, a Carlo Zeno, surviving forty wounds, and a doge of seventy
years of age; a Contarini, who makes a vow not to leave his vessel so
long as the enemy's fleet is uncaptured, thirty families, apothecaries,
grocers, vintners, tanners admitted among the nobles, a bravery, a
public spirit like that of Athens under Themistocles and of Rome under
Fabius Cunctator. If, from this time forth, the inward fire abates we
still feel its warmth for many long years, longer kept up than in the
rest of Italy, and sometimes demonstrating its power by sudden
outbursts.
The nobles, on their side, are always ready to fight. During the whole
of the sixteenth century, even up to the seventeenth and beyond, we see
them in Dalmatia, in the Morea, over the entire Mediterranean, defending
the soil inch by inch against the infidels. The garrison of Famagouste
yields only to famine, and its governor, Bragadino, burned alive, is a
hero of ancient days. At the battle of Lepanto the Venetians alone
furnish one half of the Christian fleet. Thus on all sides, and
notwithstanding their gradual decline, peril, energy, love of country,
all, in brief, which constitutes or sustains the grand life of the soul
here subsists, while throughout the peninsula foreign dominion, clerical
oppression and voluptuous or academical inertia reduces man to the
system of the antechamber, the subtleties of dilettantism and the babble
of sonnets.
But if the human spring is not broken at Venice, it is seen insensibly
losing its elasticity. The government, changed into a suspicious
despotism, elects a Mocenigo doge, a shameless speculator profiting on
the public distress, instead of that Charles Zeno who had saved the
country; it holds Zeno prisoner two years and entrusts the armies on the
mainland to condottieri; it is tied up in the hands of three
inquisitors, provokes accusations, practises secret executions and
commands the people to confine themselves to indulgences of pleasure. On
the other hand luxury arises. About the year 1400 the houses "were quite
small;" but a thousand nobles were enumerated in Venice possessing from
four to seventy thousand ducats rental, while three thousand ducats were
sufficient to purchase a palace.
Henceforth this great wealth is no longer to be employed in enterprises
and in self-devotion, but in pomp and magnificence. In 1495, Commine
admires "the grand canal, the most beautiful street, I think, in the
world, and with the best houses; the houses are very grand, high and of
excellent stone--and these have been built within a century. All have
fronts of white marble, which comes from Istria, a hundred miles away,
and yet many more great pieces of porphyry and of serpentine on them;
inside they have, most of them, at least two chambers with gilded
ceilings, rich screens of chimneys with carved marble, the bedsteads
gilded and the 'ostevents' painted and gilded and well furnished
within." On his arrival twenty-five gentlemen attired in silk and
scarlet come to meet him; they conduct him to a boat decked with crimson
silk; "it is this most triumphant city I ever saw."
Finally, while the necessity of pleasure grows the spirit of enterprise
diminishes; the passage of the Cape in the beginning of the sixteenth
century places the commerce of Asia in the hands of the Portuguese; on
the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the financial measures of Charles V.,
joined to bad usage by the Turks, render abortive the great maritime
caravans which the state dispatches yearly between Alexandria and
Bruges. In respect to industrial matters, the hampered artizans, watched
and cloistered in their country, cease to perfect their arts and allow
foreign competitors to surpass them in processes and in furnishing
supplies to the world.
Thus, on all sides, the capacity for activity becomes lessened and the
desire for enjoyment greater without one entirely effacing the other,
but in a way that, both commingling, they produce that ambiguous state
of mind similar to a mixed temperature which is never too severe and in
which the arts are generated. Indeed, it is from 1454 to 1572, between
the institution of state inquisitors and the battle of Lepanto, between
the accomplishment of internal despotism and the last of the great
outward victories, that the brilliant productions of Venetian art
appear. John Bellini was born in 1426, Giorgone died in 1511, Titian in
1578, Veronese in 1572 and Tintoretto in 1594. In this interval of one
hundred and fifty years this warrior city, this mistress of the
Mediterranean, this queen of commerce and of industry became a casino
for masqueraders and a den of courtezans.
THE DOVES OF ST. MARK'S[55]
BY HORATIO F. BROWN
In Venice the pigeons do not allow you to forget them, even if one
desired to forget a bird that is so intimately connected with the city
and with a great ceremony of that ancient republic which has passed
away. They belong so entirely to the place, and especially to the great
square; they have made their homes for so many generations among the
carvings of the Basilica, at the feet of the bronze horses, and under
the massive cornices of the New Procuratie, that the great Campanile
itself is hardly more essential to the character of the piazza than are
these delicate denizens of Saint Mark's.
In the structure of the ducal palace, the wants of the pigeons have been
taken into account, and near the two great wells which stand in the
inner courtyard little cups of Istrian stone have been let into the
pavement for the pigeons to drink from. On cold, frosty mornings you may
see them tapping disconsolately at the ice which covers their drinking
troughs, and may win their thanks by breaking it for them. Or if the
wind blows hard from the east, the pigeons sit in long rows under the
eaves of the Procuratie; their necks drawn into their shoulders, and the
neck feathers ruffled round their heads, till they have lost all shape,
and look like a row of slate-colored cannon-balls.
From Saint Mark's the pigeons have sent out colonies to the other
churches and campi of Venice. They have crossed the Grand Canal, and
roost and croon among the volutes of the Salute, or, in wild weather,
wheel high and airly above its domes. They have even found their way to
Malamocco and Mazzorbo; so that all Venice in the sea owns and protects
its sacred bird. But it is in Saint Mark's that the pigeons "most do
congregate;" and one can not enter the piazza, and stand for a moment at
the corner, without hearing the sudden rush of wings upon the air, and
seeing the white under-feathers of their pinions, as the doves strike
backward to check their flight, and flutter down at one's feet in
expectation of peas or grain. They are boundlessly greedy, and will
stuff themselves till they can hardly walk, and the little red feet
stagger under the loaded crop. They are not virtuous, but they are very
beautiful.
There is a certain fitness in the fact that the dove should be the
sacred bird of the sea city. Both English "dove" and Latin "columba"
mean the diver; and the dove uses the air much as the fish uses the sea,
it glides, it dives, it shoots through its airy ocean; it hovers against
the breeze, or presses its breast against the sirocco storm, as you may
see fish poised in their course against the stream; then with a sudden
turn it relaxes the strain and sweeps away down the wind. The dove is an
airy emblem of the sea upon which Venice and the Venetians live, but
more than that--the most permanent quality in the color of the lagoons,
where the lights are always shifting, is the dove-tone of sea and sky;
a tone which holds all colors in solution, and out of which they emerge
as the water-ripples or the cloud-flakes pass--just as the colors are
shot and varied on a young dove's neck.
There is some doubts as to the origin of these flocks of pigeons which
shelter in Saint Mark's. According to one story, Henry Dandolo, the
Crusader, was besieging Candia; he received valuable information from
the interior of the island by means of carrier-pigeons, and, later on,
sent news of his successes home to Venice by the same messengers. In
recognition of these services the government resolved to maintain the
carriers at the public cost; and the flocks of to-day are the
descendants of the fourteenth-century pigeons. The more probable
tradition, however, is that which connects these pigeons with the
antique ceremonies of Palm Sunday.
On that festival the Doge made the tour of the piazza, accompanied by
all the officers of State, the Patriarch, the foreign ambassadors, the
silver trumpets, all the pomp of the ducal dignity. Among other largess
of that day, a number of pigeons, weighted by pieces of paper tied to
their legs, used to be let loose from the gallery where the bronze
horses stand, above the western door of the church. Most of the birds
were easily caught by the crowd, and kept for their Easter dinner; but
some escaped, and took refuge in the upper parts of the palace and among
the domes of Saint Mark's. The superstition of the people was easily
touched, and the birds that had sought the protection of the saint were
thenceforth dedicated to the patron of Venice. The charge of supporting
them was committed to the superintendents of the corn stores, and the
usual hour for feeding the pigeons was nine o'clock in the morning.
During the revolution of 1797, the birds fared as badly as the
aristocracy, and were left to take care of themselves; but when matters
settled down again the feeding of the pigeons was resumed by the
municipality, and takes place at two in the afternoon, tho the incessant
largess of strangers can leave the birds but little appetite for their
regular meal.
In spite of the multitudes of pigeons that haunt the squares of the
city, a dead pigeon is as rare to see as a dead donkey on the mainland.
It is a pious opinion that no Venetian ever kills a pigeon, and
apparently they never die; but the fact that they do not increase so
rapidly as to become a nuisance instead of a pleasure, lends some color
to the suspicion that pigeon pies are not unknown at certain tables
during the proper season.
TORCELLO, THE MOTHER CITY[56]
BY JOHN RUSKIN
Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the
city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level,
and hoist themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and
there into shapeless mounds, and interrupted by narrow creeks of sea.
One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among
buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburned weeds whitened with
webs of fucas, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool beside a plot of
greener grass covered with ground-ivy and violets. On this mound is
built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which if
we ascend toward evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of
its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from
it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours.