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, hidden behind the altar,

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

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

irritated wish. You stand at 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 be sure

it’s 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 shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce

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

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

repainted. You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fullness

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 works 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 your eyes fail to deal with 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 him, 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 works of

the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty

more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an

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, finding themselves again,

with a sense of release from danger, a sense that the _genius loci_ was

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 can turn to 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 enter at about one o’clock, when

the tourists have flocked off 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 sealight. Everyone 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 splendid 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, multiplies himself there with the

fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the

blue. He was the happiest of painters and 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

masterpiece I here recall 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 work just cited

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, its

rosy fingers parted, on 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 we must confess that the spectator gets from it at first 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 extremely

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?