VI

The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece

lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many

a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a

scantily-visited altar; some of them, indeed, are hidden behind the

altar, in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered

you for approaching the picture, in such cases, are a kind of mockery of

your irritated desire. You stand on tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you

climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the

_custode_. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to

perceive that it is beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of

a fig-tree against a mellow sky; but the rest is impenetrable mystery.

You renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima

da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the

immaculate purity that dwells in the works of this master, you renounce

it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar, in that church, there

hangs a Baptism of Christ, by Cima, which, I believe, has been more or

less repainted. You can make the thing out in spots; you can see that it

has a fulness of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff

neck, and promise yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna

dell' Orto, where two noble pictures, by the same hand--pictures as

clear as a summer twilight--present themselves in better circumstances.

It may be said, as a general thing, that you never see the Tintoret. You

admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but,

in the great majority of cases, you don't see him. This is partly his

own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are

positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where

there are acres of the Tintoret, there is scarcely anything at all

adequately visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It

is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many

pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures, but a wealth of

episodes; and you pass from one of these to the other as if you were

"doing" a gallery. Surely, no single picture in the world contains more

of human life; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite

beauty. It is one of the greatest things of art; it is always

interesting. There are pictures by the Tintoret which contain touches

more exquisite, revelations of beauty more radiant, but there is no

other vision of so intense a reality and execution so splendid. The

interest, the impressiveness, of that whole corner of Venice, however

melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a

strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers

go to see appears to suffer less from the incursions of travellers. It

is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, and the author of these

lines has always had the good fortune, which he wishes to every other

traveller, of having it to himself. I think most visitors find the place

rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the

fitful figures that gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as

it were) with which the painter has hung all the walls, and then,

depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of these objects,

by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely

footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure, and

find themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, and of the

_genius loci_ having been a sort of mad white-washer, who worked with a

bad mixture, in the bright light of the _campo_, among the beggars, the

orange-vendors, and the passing gondolas. Solemn, indeed, is the place,

solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall

scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area an

equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it, and dense and

difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as

it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we

breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality.

Fortunately, however, we have the Ducal Palace, where everything is so

brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite

of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is, of

course, the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a

wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment

of Venice is a question of dodging--and go at about one o'clock, when

the tourists have gone to lunch and the echoes of the charming chambers

have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter place in

Venice; by which I mean that, on the whole, there is none half so

bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from

the glittering lagoon, and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and

ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid, stately past,

glows around you in a strong sea-light. Every one here is magnificent,

but the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before

you in a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue

sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white

colonnades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen

and ladies in the world both render homage and receive it. Their

glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea, and their sun-lighted

faces are the very complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety,

of politics and religion, of art and patriotism, gives a magnificent

dignity to every scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did

an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of

breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of perpetual success.

He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, with the fluttering

movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the blue. He

was the happiest of painters, and he produced the happiest picture in

the world. The "Rape of Europa" surely deserves this title; it is

impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art

is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity

combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and

brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth,

health, movement, desire--all this is the brightest vision that ever

descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could

entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the

"Rape of Europa" is painted. The Tintoret's visions were not so bright

as that; but he had several that were radiant enough. In the room that

contains the "Rape of Europa" are several smaller canvases by the

greatly more complex genius of the Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost

simple in their loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity. They have

kept their brightness through the centuries, and they shine with their

neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a piece of painting in one of

them which is one of the sweetest things in Venice, and which reminds

one afresh of those wild flowers of execution that bloom so profusely

and so unheeded in the dark corners of all of the Tintoret's work.

"Pallas chasing away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to the

picture; and it represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance

administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as if to tell

him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push that I

speak, the charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a single

bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, with its rosy fingers parted,

upon his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting head with the

effort--a head which has all the strange fairness that the Tintoret

always sees in women--and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these

members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as

pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the

Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great "Paradise," which unfolds

its somewhat smoky splendour, and the wonder of its multitudinous

circles, in one of the other chambers? If it were not one of the first

pictures in the world, it would be about the biggest, and it must be

confessed that at first the spectator gets from it chiefly an impression

of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the

dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of

the details of this composition are supremely beautiful. It is

impossible, however, in a retrospect of Venice, to specify one's

happiest hours, though, as one looks backward, certain ineffaceable

moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to

forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they

may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the

treasure of that apartment?