"And so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus." If as the shores
of Asia lessened upon his sight, the spirit of prophecy had entered
into the heart of the weak disciple who had turned back when his hand
was on the plough, and who had been judged, by the chiefest of Christ's
captains, unworthy thenceforward to go forth with him to the work,[143]
how wonderful would he have thought it, that by the lion symbol in
future ages he was to be represented among men! how woful, that the
war-cry of his name should so often reanimate the rage of the soldier,
on those very plains where he himself had failed in the courage of the
Christian, and so often dye with fruitless blood that very Cypriot Sea,
over whose waves, in repentance and shame, he was following the Son of
Consolation!
That the Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the ninth
century, there appears no sufficient reason to doubt, nor that it was
principally in consequence of their having done so, that they chose him
for their patron saint. There exists, however, a tradition that before
he went into Egypt he had founded the church at Aquileia, and was thus
in some sort the first bishop of the Venetian isles and people. I
believe that this tradition stands on nearly as good grounds as that of
St. Peter having been the first bishop of Rome[144]; but, as usual, it is
enriched by various later additions and embellishments, much resembling
the stories told respecting the church of Murano. Thus we find it
recorded by the Santo Padre who compiled the _Vife de' Santi spettanti
alle Chiese di Venezia_,[145] that "St. Mark having seen the people of
Aquileia well grounded in religion, and being called to Rome by St.
Peter, before setting off took with him the holy bishop Hermagoras, and
went in a small boat to the marshes of Venice. There were at that
period some houses built upon a certain high bank called Rialto, and
the boat being driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy place, when
St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to
him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest.'" The angel
goes on to foretell the building of "una stupenda, ne più veduta
Città"[146]; but the fable is hardly ingenious enough to deserve farther
relation.
But whether St. Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not, St. Theodore
was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be considered as
having entirely abdicated his early right, as his statue, standing on a
crocodile, still companions the winged lion on the opposing pillar of
the piazzetta. A church erected to this Saint is said to have occupied,
before the ninth century, the site of St. Mark's; and the traveller,
dazzled by the brilliancy of the great square, ought not to leave it
without endeavouring to imagine its aspect in that early time, when it
was a green field cloister-like and quiet,[147] divided by a small canal,
with a line of trees on each side; and extending between the two
churches of St. Theodore and St. Gemanium, as the little piazza of
Torcello lies between its "palazzo" and cathedral.
But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally removed to
the Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the present one
stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it,[148] gave a very different
character to the Square of St. Mark; and fifteen years later, the
acquisition of the body of the Saint, and its deposition in the Ducal
Chapel, perhaps not yet completed, occasioned the investiture of that
chapel with all possible splendour. St. Theodore was deposed from his
patronship, and his church destroyed, to make room for the
aggrandizement of the one attached to the Ducal Palace, and
thenceforward known as "St. Mark's."[149]
This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the Ducal Palace
was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976. It was partly
rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo, on a larger scale; and, with
the assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on under
successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building being
completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till
considerably later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085,[150]
according to Sansovino and the author of the _Chiesa Ducale di S.
Marco_, in 1094 according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and
1096, those years being the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I
incline to the supposition that it was soon after his accession to the
throne in 1085, though Sansovino writes, by mistake, Ordelafo instead
of Vital Falier. But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh
century the great consecration of the church took place. It was again
injured by fire in 1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall
of Venice there was probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree
embellish or alter the fabric, so that few parts of it can be
pronounced boldly to be of any given date. Two periods of interference
are, however, notable above the rest: the first, that in which the
Gothic school had superseded the Byzantine towards the close of the
fourteenth century, when the pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window
traceries were added to the exterior, and the great screen with various
chapels and tabernacle-work, to the interior; the second, when the
Renaissance school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian
and Tintoret substituted, over one half of the church, their own
compositions for the Greek mosaics with which it was originally
decorated;[151] happily, though with no good will, having left enough
to enable us to imagine and lament what they destroyed. Of this
irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter; meantime, I wish
only to fix in the reader's mind the succession of periods of
alterations as firmly and simply as possible.
We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly stated to
be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the fourteenth, and
the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no difficulty in
distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the Byzantine; but
there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how long, during the
course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, additions were made to
the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily distinguished from the
work of the eleventh century, being purposely executed in the same
manner. Two of the most important pieces of evidence on this point are,
a mosaic in the south transept, and another over the northern door of
the façade; the first representing the interior, the second the
exterior, of the ancient church.
It has just been stated that the existing building was consecrated by
the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to that act of
consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what appears to
have been one of the best arranged and most successful impostures ever
attempted by the clergy of the Romish church. The body of St. Mark had,
without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976; but the revenues
of the church depended too much upon the devotion excited by these
relics to permit the confession of their loss. The following is the
account given by Corner, and believed to this day by the Venetians, of
the pretended miracle by which it was concealed.
"After the repairs undertaken by the Doge Orseolo, the place in which
the body of the holy Evangelist rested had been altogether forgotten;
so that the Doge Vital Falier was entirely ignorant of the place of the
venerable deposit. This was no light affliction, not only to the pious
Doge, but to all the citizens and people; so that at last, moved by
confidence in the Divine mercy, they determined to implore, with prayer
and fasting, the manifestation of so great a treasure, which did not
now depend upon any human effort. A general fast being therefore
proclaimed, and a solemn procession appointed for the 25th day of June,
while the people assembled in the church interceded with God in fervent
prayers for the desired boon, they beheld, with as much amazement as
joy, a slight shaking in the marbles of a pillar (near the place where
the altar of the Cross is now), which, presently falling to the earth,
exposed to the view of the rejoicing people the chest of bronze in
which the body of the Evangelist was laid."
Of the main facts of this tale there is no doubt. They were embellished
afterwards, as usual, by many fanciful traditions; as, for instance,
that, when the sarcophagus was discovered, St. Mark extended his hand
out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers, which he permitted a
noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and delightful story
was further invented of this ring, which I shall not repeat here, as it
is now as well known as any tale of the Arabian Nights. But the fast
and the discovery of the coffin, by whatever means effected, are facts;
and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved mosaics of the
north[152] transept, executed very certainly not long after the event
had taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of the Bayeux
tapestry, and showing, in a conventional manner, the interior of the
church, as it then was, filled by the people, first in prayer, then in
thanksgiving, the pillar standing open before them, and the Doge, in
the midst of them, distinguished by his crimson bonnet embroidered with
gold, but more unmistakably by the inscription "Dux" over his head, as
uniformly is the case in the Bayeux tapestry, and most other pictorial
works of the period. The church is, of course, rudely represented, and
the two upper stories of it reduced to a small scale in order to form a
background to the figures; one of those bold pieces of picture history
which we in our pride of perspective, and a thousand things besides,
never dare attempt. We should have put in a column or two, of the real
or perspective size, and subdued it into a vague background: the old
workman crushed the church together that he might get it all in, up to
the cupolas; and has, therefore, left us some useful notes of its
ancient form, though any one who is familiar with the method of drawing
employed at the period will not push the evidence too far. The two
pulpits are there, however, as they are at this day, and the fringe of
mosaic flowerwork which then encompassed the whole church, but which
modern restorers have destroyed, all but one fragment still left in the
south aisle. There is no attempt to represent the other mosaics on the
roof, the scale being too small to admit of their being represented
with any success; but some at least of those mosaics had been executed
at that period, and their absence in the representation of the entire
church is especially to be observed, in order to show that we must not
trust to any negative evidence in such works. M. Lazari has rashly
concluded that the central archivolt of St. Mark's _must_ be posterior
to the year 1205, because it does not appear in the representation of
the exterior of the church over the northern door;[153] but he justly
observes that this mosaic (which is the other piece of evidence we
possess respecting the ancient form of the building) cannot itself be
earlier than 1205, since it represents the bronze horses which were
brought from Constantinople in that year. And this one fact renders it
very difficult to speak with confidence respecting the date of any part
of the exterior of St. Mark's; for we have above seen that it was
consecrated in the eleventh century, and yet here is one of its most
important exterior decorations assuredly retouched, if not entirely
added, in the thirteenth, although its style would have led us to
suppose it had been an original part of the fabric. However, for all
our purposes, it will be enough for the reader to remember that the
earliest parts of the building belong to the eleventh, twelfth, and
first part of the thirteenth century; the Gothic portions to the
fourteenth; some of the altars and embellishments to the fifteenth and
sixteenth; and the modern portion of the mosaics to the seventeenth.
This, however, I only wish him to recollect in order that I may speak
generally of the Byzantine architecture of St. Mark's, without leading
him to suppose the whole church to have been built and decorated by
Greek artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the
seventeenth-century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to
the original fabric that the general effect is still that of a
Byzantine building; and I shall not, except when it is absolutely
necessary, direct attention to the discordant points, or weary the
reader with anatomical criticism. Whatever in St. Mark's arrests the
eye, or affects the feelings, is either Byzantine, or has been modified
by Byzantine influence; and our inquiry into its architectural merits
need not therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or
arrested by the obscurities of chronology.
And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St. Mark's
Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English
cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral.
Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we
can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low
grey gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in
the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing
goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the
chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by
neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and
excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out
here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream colour
and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of
cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables
warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger
houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind
them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines,
the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on
the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth
grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny
side, where the canons' children are walking with their nursery-maids.
And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the
straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a time, looking up
at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars
where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there,
of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a
king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago
in heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of
rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, and grisly
with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling
winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured on their stony scales by
the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still,
to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the
bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only
sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering,
and now settling suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and
flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with
that strange clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the
cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliffs and sea.
Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its
small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense
and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by
the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on
all who have passed through the lonely square at their feet for
centuries, and on all who have seen them rising far away over the
wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the
sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at
the bend of the river. And then let us quickly recollect that we are in
Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calla Lunga San Moisè, which
may be considered as there answering to the secluded street that led us
to our English cathedral gateway.
We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is
widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant
salesmen,--a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of
brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high
houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over-head,
an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and
chimney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows
with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here
and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some
inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high
over all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be,
occupying, in fact, intervals between the square stone shafts, about
eight feet high, which carry the first floors: intervals of which one
is narrow and serves as a door; the other is, in the more respectable
shops, wainscotted to the height of the counter and glazed above, but
in those of the poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares
laid on benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases
entering at the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the
threshold into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but
which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the
back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less
pious shopkeeper sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented
with a penny print; the more religious one has his print coloured and
set in a little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a
faded flower or two on each side, and his lamp burning brilliantly.
Here, at the fruiterer's, where the dark-green water-melons are heaped
upon the counter like cannon balls, the Madonna has a tabernacle of
fresh laurel leaves; but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out,
and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull gleam of the
studded patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in the
darkness. Next comes a "Vendita Frittole e Liquori,"[154] where the
Virgin, enthroned in a very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a
back shelf, presides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too
ambiguous to be defined or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at
the regular wine-shop of the calle, where we are offered "Vino
Nostrani a Soldi 28-32," the Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above
ten or a dozen large red casks of three-year-old vintage, and flanked
by goodly ranks of bottles of Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and
for the evening, when the gondoliers will come to drink out, under her
auspices, the money they have gained during the day, she will have a
whole chandelier.
A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and,
glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply moulded,
in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines resting
on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side; and so
presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moisè, whence to the
entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of
the square), the Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first by the
frightful facade of San Moisè, which we will pause at another time to
examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the
piazza, and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging
groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into
the shadow of the pillars at the end of the "Bocca di Piazza," and then
we forget them all; for between those pillars there opens a great
light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of
St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field of
chequered stones; and, on each side, the countless arches prolong
themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses
that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back
into sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements
and broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly
sculpture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone.
And well may they fall back, for 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 coloured 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, sceptred, 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"[155]--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 labours 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, amidst 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 splendour 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"[156] for sacrifice, but of the vendors 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 centre the
Austrian bands 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.
[143] _Acts_ xiii, 13 and xv, 38, 39. [Ruskin.]
[144] The reader who desires to investigate it may consult
Galliciolli, _Delle Memorie Venete_ (Venice, 1795), tom. 2, p. 332,
and the authorities quoted by him. [Ruskin.]
[145] _Venice_, 1761 tom. 1, p. 126. [Ruskin.]
[146] A wonderful City, such as was never seen before.
[147] St. Mark's Place, "partly covered by turf, and planted with a
few trees; and on account of its pleasant aspect called Brollo or
Broglio, that is to say, Garden." The canal passed through it, over
which is built the bridge of the Malpassi. Galliciolli, lib. I,
cap. viii. [Ruskin.]
[148] My authorities for this statement are given below, in the
chapter on the Ducal Palace. [Ruskin.]
[149] In the Chronicles, _Sancti Marci Ducalis Cappdla_. [Ruskin.]
[150] "To God the Lord, the glorious Virgin Annunciate, and the
Protector St. Mark."--Corner, p. 14. It is needless to trouble the
reader with the various authorities for the above statements: I
have consulted the best. The previous inscription once existing on
the church itself:
Anno milleno transacto bisque trigeno Desuper undecimo fuit facta
primo,
is no longer to be seen, and is conjectured by Corner, with much
probability, to have perished "in qualche ristauro." [Ruskin.]
[151] Signed Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, etc. [Ruskin.]
[152] An obvious slip. The mosaic is on the west wall of the south
transept. [Cook and Wedderburn.]
[153] _Guida di Venezia_, p. 6. [Ruskin.]
[154] Fritters and liquors for sale.
[155] _Antony and Cleopatra_, 2. 5. 29.
[156] Matthew xxi, 12 and _John_ ii, 16.