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-mediæval 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 waterline 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 Doré. Between that quiet canvas of the
'Presentation,' so modest in its cool greys and subdued gold, and the
tumult of flying, running? doesn't make much sense, but can't figure
out a plausible alternative, 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 framework 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 borderland
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 Oasa 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 mediæval symbolism, some fierce
impossible Renaissance freak of fancy.
Bather 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.'