THE GRAND CANAL. I: FROM THE DOGANA TO THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, LOOKING TO
THE LEFT
The river of Venice--Canal steamers--Motor boats--Venetian nobility
to-day--The great architects--A desirable enactment--The custom house
vane--The Seminario and Giorgione--S. Maria della Salute--Tintoretto's
"Marriage in Cana"--The lost blue curtain--San Gregorio--The Palazzo
Dario--Porphyry--The story of S. Vio--Delectable homes--Browning in
Venice--S. Maria della Carità.
To me the Grand Canal is the river of Venice--its Thames, its Seine, its
Arno. I think of it as "the river." The rest are canals. And yet as a
matter of fact to the Venetians the rest are rivers--Rio this and Rio
that--and this the canal.
During a stay in Venice of however short a time one is so often on the
Grand Canal that a knowledge of its palaces should come early. For
fifteen centimes one may travel its whole length in a steamboat, and
back again for another fifteen, and there is no more interesting
half-hour's voyage in the world. The guide books, as a rule, describe
both banks from the same starting-point, which is usually the Molo. This
seems to me to be a mistake, for two reasons. One is that even in a
leisurely gondola "all'ora" one cannot keep pace with literature bearing
on both sides at once, and the other is that since one enters Venice at
the railway station it is interesting to begin forthwith to learn
something of the city from that point and one ought not to be asked to
read backwards to do this. In this book therefore the left bank, from
the custom house to the railway station, is described first, and then
the other side returning from the station to the Molo.
The Grand Canal has for long had its steamers, and when they were
installed there was a desperate outcry, led by Ruskin. To-day a similar
outcry is being made against motor-boats, with, I think, more reason, as
I hope to show later. But the steamer is useful and practically
unnoticeable except when it whistles. None the less it was an
interesting experience in April of this year (1914) to be living on the
Grand Canal during a steamer strike which lasted for several days. It
gave one the quieter Venice of the past and incidentally turned the
gondoliers into plutocrats.
But there is a great difference between the steamers and the motor-boat.
The steamer does not leave the Grand Canal except to enter the lagoon;
and therefore the injustice that it does to the gondolier is limited to
depriving him of his Grand Canal fares. The motor-boat can supersede the
gondola on the small canals too. It may be urged that the gondolier has
only to become an engineer and his position will be as secure. That may
be true; but we all know how insidious is the deteriorating influence of
petrol on the human character. The gondolier even now is not always a
model of courtesy and content; what will he be when the poison of
machinery is in him?
But there are graver reasons why the motor-boat should be viewed by the
city fathers with suspicion. One is purely æsthetic, yet not the less
weighty for that, since the prosperity of Venice in her decay resides in
her romantic beauty and associations. The symbol of these is the gondola
and gondolier, indivisible, and the only conditions under which they can
be preserved are quietude and leisure. The motor-boat, which is always
in a hurry and which as it multiplies will multiply hooters and
whistles, must necessarily destroy the last vestige of Venetian calm. A
second reason is that a small motor-boat makes a bigger wash than a
crowded Grand Canal steamer, and this wash, continually increasing as
the number of boats increases, must weaken and undermine the foundations
of the houses on each side of the canals through which they pass. The
action of water is irresistible. No natural law is sterner than that
which decrees that restless water shall prevail.
Enjoyment of voyages up and down the Grand Canal is immensely increased
by some knowledge of architecture; but that subject is so vast that in
such a _hors d'oeuvre_ to the Venetian banquet as the present book
nothing of value can be said. Let it not be forgotten that Ruskin gave
years of his life to the study. The most I can do is to name the
architects of the most famous of the palaces and draw the reader's
attention to the frequency with which the lovely Ducal gallery pattern
recurs, like a theme in a fugue, until one comes to think the symbol of
the city not the winged lion but a row of Gothic curved and pointed
arches surmounted by circles containing equilateral crosses. The
greatest names in Venetian architecture are Polifilo, who wrote the
_Hypnerotomachia_, the two Bons, Rizzo, Sansovino, the Lombardis,
Scarpagnino, Leopardi, Palladio, Sammicheli, and Longhena.
In the following notes I have tried to mention the place of practically
every rio and every calle so that the identification of the buildings
may be the more simple. The names of the palaces usually given are those
by which the Venetians know them; but many, if not more, have changed
ownership more than once since those names were fixed.
Although for the most part the palaces of the Grand Canal have declined
from their original status as the homes of the nobility and aristocracy
and are now hotels, antiquity stores, offices, and tenements, it not
seldom happens that the modern representative of the great family
retains the top floor for an annual Venetian sojourn, living for the
rest of the year in the country.
I wish it could be made compulsory for the posts before the palaces to
be repainted every year.
And so begins the voyage. The white stone building which forms the thin
end of the wedge dividing the Grand Canal from the Canale della Giudecca
is the Dogana or Customs House, and the cape is called the Punta della
Salute. The figure on the Dogana ball, which from certain points has
almost as much lightness as Gian Bologna's famous Mercury, represents
Fortune and turns with the wind. The next building (with a green and
shady garden on the Giudecca side) is the Seminario Patriarcale, a great
bare schoolhouse, in which a few pictures are preserved, and,
downstairs, a collection of ancient sculpture. Among the pictures is a
much dam-aged classical scene supposed to represent Apollo and Daphne in
a romantic landscape. Giorgione's name is often associated with it; I
know not with what accuracy, but Signor Paoli, who has written so well
upon Venice, is convinced, and the figure of Apollo is certainly free
and fair as from a master's hand. Another picture, a Madonna and Child
with two companions, is called a Leonardo da Vinci; but Baedeker gives
it to Marco d'Oggiano. There is also a Filippino Lippi which one likes
to find in Venice, where the prevailing art is so different from his.
One of the most charming things here is a little relief of the manger;
as pretty a rendering as one could wish for. Downstairs is the tomb of
the great Jacopo Sansovino.
And now rises the imposing church of S. Maria della Salute which,
although younger than most of the Venetian churches, has taken the next
place to S. Mark's as an ecclesiastical symbol of the city. To me it is
a building attractive only when seen in its place as a Venetian detail;
although it must always have the impressiveness of size and accumulation
and the beauty that white stone in such an air as this can hardly
escape. Seen from the Grand Canal or from a window opposite, it is
pretentious and an interloper, particularly if the slender and
distinguished Gothic windows of the apse of S. Gregorio are also
visible; seen from any distant enough spot, its dome and towers fall
with equal naturalness into the majestic Venetian pageant of full light,
or the fairy Venetian mirage of the crepuscle.
The church was decreed in 1630 as a thankoffering to the Virgin for
staying the plague of that year. Hence the name--S. Mary of Salvation.
It was designed by Baldassarre Longhena, a Venetian architect who worked
during the first half of the seventeenth century and whose masterpiece
this is.
Within, the Salute is notable for possessing Tintoretto's "Marriage in
Cana," one of the few pictures painted by him in which he allowed
himself an interval (so to speak) of perfect calm. It is, as it was
bound to be in his hands and no doubt was in reality, a busy scene. The
guests are all animated; the servitors are bustling about; a number of
spectators talk together at the back; a woman in the foreground holds
out a vessel to the men opposite to show them the remarkable change
which the water has undergone. But it is in the centre of his picture
(which is reproduced on the opposite page) that the painter has
achieved one of his pleasantest effects, for here is a row of pretty
women sitting side by side at the banquetting table, with a soft light
upon them, who make together one of the most charming of those rare
oases of pure sweetness in all Tintoretto's work. The chief light is
theirs and they shine most graciously in it.
Among other pictures are a S. Sebastian by Basaiti, with a good
landscape; a glowing altar-piece by Titian, in his Giorgionesque manner,
representing S. Mark and four saints; a "Descent of the Holy Ghost," by
the same hand but under no such influence; and a spirited if rather
theatrical "Nativity of the Virgin" by Lucia Giordano. In the outer
sacristy the kneeling figure of Doge Agostino Barbarigo should be looked
for.
The Salute in Guardi's day seems to have had the most entrancing light
blue curtains at its main entrance, if we may take the artist as our
authority. See No. 2098 in the National Gallery, and also No. 503 at the
Wallace collection. But now only a tiny side door is opened.
[Illustration: THE MARRIAGE AT CANA
FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO
_In the Church of the Salute_]
A steamboat station, used almost wholly by visitors, is here, and then a
canal, and then the fourteenth-century abbey of S. Gregorio, whose
cloisters now form an antiquity store and whose severe and simple apse
is such a rebuke to Longhena's Renaissance floridity. Next is a
delightful little house with one of the old cup-chimneys, forming one of
the most desirable residences in Venice. It has a glazed loggia looking
down to the Riva. We next come to a brand new spacious building divided
into apartments, then a tiny house, and then the rather squalid Palazzo
Martinengo. The calle and traghetto of S. Gregorio, and two or three old
palaces and the new building which now holds Salviati's glass business,
follow. After the Rio del Formase is a common little house, and then
the Palazzo Volkoff, once Eleonora Duse's Venetian home.
Next is the splendid fifteenth-century Palazzo Dario, to my eyes perhaps
the most satisfying of all, with its rich colouring, leaning walls,
ancient chimneys and porphyry decorations. Readers of Henri de Régnier's
Venetian novel _La Peur de l'Amour_ may like to know that much of it was
written in this palace. We shall see porphyry all along the Canal on
both sides, always enriching in its effect. This stone is a red or
purple volcanic rock which comes from Egypt, on the west coast of the
Red Sea. The Romans first detected its beauty and made great use of it
to decorate their buildings.
Another rio, the Torreselle, some wine stores, and then the foundations
of what was to have been the Palazzo Venier, which never was built.
Instead there are walls and a very delectable garden--a riot of lovely
wistaria in the spring--into which fortunate people are assisted from
gondolas by superior men-servants. A dull house comes next; then a
_stoffe_ factory; and then the Mula Palace, with fine dark blue poles
before it surmounted by a Doge's cap, and good Gothic windows. Again we
find trade where once was aristocracy, for the next palace, which is now
a glass-works' show-room, was once the home of Pietro Barbarigo,
Patriarch of Venice.
The tiny church of S. Vio, now closed, which gives the name to the Campo
and Rio opposite which we now are, has a pretty history attached to it.
It seems that one of the most devoted worshippers in this minute temple
was the little Contessa Tagliapietra, whose home was on the other side
of the Grand Canal. Her one pleasure was to retire to this church and
make her devotions: a habit which so exasperated her father that one day
he issued a decree to the gondoliers forbidding them to ferry her
across. On arriving at the traghetto and learning this decision, the
girl calmly walked over the water, sustained by her purity and piety.
The next palace, at the corner, is the Palazzo Loredan where the widow
of Don Carlos of Madrid now lives. The posts have Spanish colours and a
magnificent man-servant in a scarlet waistcoat often suns himself on the
steps. Next is the comfortable Balbi Valier, with a motor launch called
"The Rose of Devon" moored to its posts, and a pleasant garden where the
Palazzo Paradiso once stood; and then the great and splendid Contarini
del Zaffo, or Manzoni, with its good ironwork and medallions and a
charming loggia at the side. Robert Browning tried to buy this palace
for his son. Indeed he thought he had bought it; but there was a hitch.
He describes it in a letter as "the most beautiful house in Venice." The
next, the Brandolin Rota, which adjoins it, was, as a hotel, under the
name Albergo dell'Universo, Browning's first Venetian home. Later he
moved to the Zattere and after that to the Palazzo Rezzonico, to which
we are soon coming, where he died.
Next we reach the church, convent and Scuola of S. Maria della Carità,
opposite the iron bridge, which under rearrangement and restoration now
forms the Accademia, or Gallery of Fine Arts, famous throughout the
world for its Titians, Tintorettos, Bellinis, and Carpaccios. The
church, which dates from the fifteenth century, is a most beautiful
brown brick building with delicate corbelling under the eaves. Once
there was a campanile too, but it fell into the Grand Canal some hundred
and seventy years ago, causing a tidal wave which flung gondolas clean
out of the water. We shall return to the Accademia in later chapters:
here it is enough to say that the lion on the top of the entrance wall
is the most foolish in Venice, turned, as it has been, into a lady's
hack.
The first house after the Accademia is negligible--newish and dull with
an enclosed garden; the next is the Querini; the next the dull Mocenigo
Gambara; and then we come to the solid Bloomsbury-blackened stone
Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni and its neighbours of the same
ownership. Then the Rio S. Trovaso, with a pretty garden visible a
little way up, and then a gay new little home, very attractive, with a
strip of garden, and next it the fifteenth-century Loredan. A tiny
calle, and then the low Dolfin. Then the Rio Malpaga and after it a very
delectable new residence with a terrace. A calle and traghetto, with a
wall shrine at the corner, come next, and two dull Contarini palaces,
one of which is now an antiquity store, and then the Rio S. Barnaba and
the majestic sombre Rezzonico with its posts of blue and faded pink.
This for long was the home of Robert Browning, and here, as a tablet on
the side wall states, he died. "Browning, Browning," exclaim the
gondoliers as they point to it; but what the word means to them I cannot
say.