A story is told of Poussin, the French painter, that when he was asked
why he would not stay in Venice, he replied, "If I stay here, I shall
become a colourist!" A somewhat similar tale is reported of a
fashionable English decorator. While on a visit to friends in Venice, he
avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the
sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste.
It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a
certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether
even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one
ray of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have
so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic
passion to a London drawing-room. Anyhow, it is exceedingly difficult to
escape from colour in the air of Venice, or from Tintoretto in her
buildings. Long, delightful mornings may be spent in the enjoyment of
the one and the pursuit of the other by folk who have no classical or
pseudo-mediaeval theories to oppress them.
Tintoretto's house, though changed, can still be visited. It formed part
of the Fondamenta dei Mori, so called from having been the quarter
assigned to Moorish traders in Venice. A spirited carving of a turbaned
Moor leading a camel charged with merchandise, remains above the
water-line of a neighbouring building; and all about the crumbling walls
sprout flowering weeds--samphire and snapdragon and the spiked
campanula, which shoots a spire of sea-blue stars from chinks of Istrian
stone.
The house stands opposite the Church of Santa Maria dell'Orto, where
Tintoretto was buried, and where four of his chief masterpieces are to
be seen. This church, swept and garnished, is a triumph of modern
Italian restoration. They have contrived to make it as commonplace as
human ingenuity could manage. Yet no malice of ignorant industry can
obscure the treasures it contains--the pictures of Cima, Gian Bellini,
Palma, and the four Tintorettos, which form its crowning glory. Here the
master may be studied in four of his chief moods: as the painter of
tragic passion and movement, in the huge Last Judgment; as the painter
of impossibilities, in the Vision of Moses upon Sinai; as the painter of
purity and tranquil pathos, in the Miracle of S. Agnes; as the painter
of Biblical history brought home to daily life, in the Presentation of
the Virgin. Without leaving the Madonna dell'Orto, a student can explore
his genius in all its depth and breadth; comprehend the enthusiasm he
excites in those who seek, as the essentials of art, imaginative
boldness and sincerity; understand what is meant by adversaries who
maintain that, after all, Tintoretto was but an inspired Gustave Dore.
Between that quiet canvas of the Presentation, so modest in its cool
greys and subdued gold, and the tumult of flying, ruining, ascending
figures in the Judgment, what an interval there is! How strangely the
white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her lamb in the picture of S.
Agnes, contrasts with the dusky gorgeousness of the Hebrew women
despoiling themselves of jewels for the golden calf! Comparing these
several manifestations of creative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp
of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for whom his art was the
medium for expressing before all things thought and passion. Each
picture is executed in the manner suited to its tone of feeling, the key
of its conception.
Elsewhere than in the Madonna dell'Orto there are more distinguished
single examples of Tintoretto's realising faculty. The Last Supper in
San Giorgio, for instance, and the Adoration of the Shepherds in the
Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred
history in a novel, romantic frame-work of familiar things. The
commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray
in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll
of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that
upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are assembled
in a group translated from the social customs of the painter's days.
Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, where Christ lies
sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through the room beneath.
A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the central
figure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around, may be
observed in the Miracle of S. Agnes. It is this which gives dramatic
vigour to the composition. But the same effect is carried to its highest
fulfilment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode of Christ before
the judgment-seat of Pilate, at San Rocco. Of all Tintoretto's religious
pictures, that is the most profoundly felt, the most majestic. No other
artist succeeded as he has here succeeded in presenting to us God
incarnate. For this Christ is not merely the just man, innocent, silent
before his accusers. The stationary, white-draped figure, raised high
above the agitated crowd, with tranquil forehead slightly bent, facing
his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man. We cannot say perhaps
precisely why he is divine. But Tintoretto has made us feel that he is.
In other words, his treatment of the high theme chosen by him has been
adequate.
We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto's
liveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attention to
harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in the
power of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the border-land of
the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkable instances
in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his
Temptation of Christ. It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the
genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings,
and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts
aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated
beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto
could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering
flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half-hidden among laurels, as she
stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but
Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah,
summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrous fish
rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his trump-shaped
nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary
ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril of the deep,
although the whale's jaws yawn around him. Between him and the
outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there runs a
spark of unseen spiritual electricity.
To comprehend Tintoretto's touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turn
our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running
river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek the Accademia,
and notice how he here has varied the Temptation of Adam by Eve,
choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one so powerfully
rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we may take our station,
hour by hour, before the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne. It is well to
leave the very highest achievements of art untouched by criticism
undescribed. And in this picture we have the most perfect of all modern
attempts to realise an antique myth--more perfect than Raphael's
Galatea, or Titian's Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne, or Botticelli's
Birth of Venus from the Sea. It may suffice to marvel at the slight
effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as these produce upon
the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one Sunday morning,
opposite the Bacchus, four Germans with a cicerone sauntered by. The
subject was explained to them. They waited an appreciable space of time.
Then the youngest opened his lips and spake: "Bacchus war der
Wein-Gott." And they all moved heavily away. _Bos locutus est._ "Bacchus
was the wine-god!" This, apparently, is what a picture tells to one man.
To another it presents divine harmonies, perceptible indeed in nature,
but here by the painter-poet for the first time brought together and
cadenced in a work of art. For another it is perhaps the hieroglyph of
pent-up passions and desired impossibilities. For yet another it may
only mean the unapproachable inimitable triumph of consummate craft.
Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice--in
the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the Temptation of S.
Anthony at S. Trovaso no less than in the Temptations of Eve and Christ;
in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the Paradisal
vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is one of
his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we return to
the Madonna dell'Orto. I have called him "the painter of
impossibilities." At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer
imaginative force. If we wish to realise this phase of his creative
power, and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most
hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this
church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious
fancy--aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining
to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking
to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative
sympathy in the spectator--such men will not take the point of view
required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the Worship of
the Golden Calf and in the Destruction of the World by Water. It is for
them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in
his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai
in lightnings.
The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more
impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bid
him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia.
This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore and
the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white house,
standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the Casa
degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it was
the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night's rest before
their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. So many generations
of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting
home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano,
where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful
churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for
centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at
present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to
cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the
custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres
is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous
walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in
slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash
of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust.
The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding the
vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst.
Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men dredging for
shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be
lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil,
sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of the Bersaglio, new
landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into sight at
every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-train comes lumbering along the
railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike
down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and
noble strangers, entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before
the Austrians built their causeway for the trains. Some of the rare
scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left
in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner
of the sixteenth century. From these and from a few rosy fragments on
the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading
figures in a certain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion
how Venice looked when all her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile
Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of
restoration. And here and there, in back canals, we come across coloured
sections of old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a
moment seem to realise our dream.
A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with
Carpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor would it
suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces and
churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow
panellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the
delicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-white Istrian
stone. It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage:
warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a dark chapel of the
Frari; Fra Francesco's fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in
distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in S.
Zaccaria; Palma's majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; San Giobbe's
wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso,
with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace
after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full
of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of
fancy.
Rather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me one day
past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, San Pietro
di Castello. The novella is related by Bandello. It has, as will be
noticed, points of similarity to that of "Romeo and Juliet."