ON FOOT. IV: FROM THE DOGANA TO S. SEBASTIANO
The Dogana--A scene of shipping--The Giudecca Canal--On the Zattere--The
debt of Venice to Ruskin--An artists' bridge--The painters of
Venice--Turner and Whistler--A removal--S. Trovaso--Browning on the
Zattere--S. Sebastiano--The life of Paul Veronese--S. Maria de
Carmine--A Tuscan relief--A crowded calle--The grief of the bereaved.
For a cool day, after too much idling in gondolas, there is a good walk,
tempered by an occasional picture, from the Custom House to S.
Sebastiano and back to S. Mark's. The first thing is to cross the Grand
Canal, either by ferry or a steamer to the Salute, and then all is easy.
The Dogana, as seen from Venice and from the water, is as familiar a
sight almost as S. Mark's or the Doges' Palace, with its white stone
columns, and the two giants supporting the globe, and the beautiful
thistledown figure holding out his cloak to catch the wind. Everyone who
has been to Venice can recall this scene and the decisive way in which
the Dogana thrusts into the lagoon like the prow of a ship of which the
Salute's domes form the canvas. But to see Venice from the Dogana is a
rarer experience.
No sooner does one round the point--the Punta della Salute--and come to
the Giudecca canal than everything changes. Palaces disappear and
shipping asserts itself. One has promise of the ocean. Here there is
always a huddle of masts, both of barges moored close together, mostly
called after either saints or Garibaldi, with crude pictures of their
namesakes painted on the gunwale, and of bigger vessels and perhaps a
few pleasure yachts; and as likely as not a big steamer is entering or
leaving the harbour proper, which is at the far end of this Giudecca
canal. And ever the water dances and there are hints of the great sea,
of which the Grand Canal, on the other side of the Dogana, is ignorant.
The pavement of the Zaterre, though not so broad as the Riva, is still
wide, and, like the Riva, is broken by the only hills which the Venetian
walker knows--the bridges. The first building of interest to which we
come is the house, now a hotel, opposite a little alfresco restaurant
above the water, which bears a tablet stating that it was Ruskin's
Venetian home. That was in his later days, when he was writing _Fors
Clavigera_; earlier, while at work on _The Stones of Venice_, he had
lived, as we have seen, near S. Zobenigo. Ruskin could be very rude to
the Venetians: somewhere in _Fors_ he refers to the "dirty population of
Venice which is now neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor
fisherman," and he was furious alike with its tobacco and its
steamboats; yet for all that, if ever a distinguished man deserved
honour at the hands of a city Ruskin deserves it from Venice. _The
Stones of Venice_ is such a book of praise as no other city ever had. In
it we see a man of genius with a passion for the best and most sincere
work devoting every gift of appraisement, exposition, and eulogy,
fortified by the most loving thoroughness and patience, to the glory of
the city's architecture, character, and art.
The first church is that of the Gesuati, but it is uninteresting.
Passing on, we come shortly to a very attractive house with an
overhanging first floor, most delectable windows and a wistaria, beside
a bridge; and looking up the canal, the Rio di S. Trovaso, we see one of
the favourite subjects of artists in Venice--the huddled wooden sheds of
a squero, or a boat-building yard; and as likely as not some workmen
will be firing the bottom of an old gondola preliminary to painting her
afresh. Venice can show you artists at work by the score, on every fine
day, but there is no spot more certain in which to find one than this
bridge. It was here that I once overheard two of these searchers for
beauty comparing notes on the day's fortune. "The bore is," said one,
"that everything is so good that one can never begin."
Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most
wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his
first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was
nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist
seems to have swum for ever before his eyes. For many years after that,
whenever he took up his brush, his first thought was to record yet
another Venetian memory. In the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery
are many of the canvases to which this worshipper of light endeavoured
with such persistence and zeal to transfer some of the actual glory of
the universe: each one the arena of the unequal struggle between pigment
and atmosphere. But if Turner failed, as every artist must fail, to
recapture all, his failures are always magnificent.
There are, of course, also numbers of his Venetian water-colours.
Where Turner lived when in Venice, I have not been able to discover; but
I feel sure it was not at Danieli's, where Bonington was lodging on his
memorable sojourn there about 1825. Turner was too frugal for that. The
Tate has a brilliant oil rendering of the Doges' Palace by Bonington.
The many Venetian water-colours which he made with such rapidity and
power are scattered. One at any rate is in the Louvre, a masterly
drawing of the Colleoni statue.
To enumerate the great artists who have painted in Venice would fill a
book. Not all have been too successful; while some have borne false
witness. The dashing Ziem, for example, deprived Venice of her
translucency; our own Henry Woods and Luke Fildes endow her daughters,
who have always a touch of wistfulness, with too bold a beauty. In
Whistler's lagoon etchings one finds the authentic note and in Clara
Montalba's warm evanescent aquamarines; while for the colour of Venice I
cannot remember anything finer, always after Turner, than, among the
dead, certain J.D. Hardings I have seen, and, among the living, Mr.
Sargent's amazing transcripts, which, I am told, are not to be obtained
for love or money, but fall to the lot of such of his friends as wisely
marry for them as wedding presents, or tumble out of his gondola and
need consolation.
Bonington and Harding painted Venice as it is; Turner used Venice to
serve his own wonderful and glorious ends. If you look at his "Sun of
Venice" in the National Gallery, you will not recognize the fairy
background of spires and domes--more like a city of the Arabian Nights
than the Venice of fact even in the eighteen-thirties. You will notice
too that the great wizard, to whom, in certain rapt moods, accuracy was
nothing, could not even write the word Venezia correctly on the sail of
a ship. Whistler too, in accordance with his dictum that to say to the
artist that he must take nature as she is, is to say to the musician
that he must sit on the piano, used Venice after his own caprice, as the
study of his etchings will show. And yet the result of both these
artists' endeavours--one all for colour and the other all for form--is
by the synthesis of genius a Venice more Venetian than herself: Venice
essentialized and spiritualized.
It was from this bridge that one Sunday morning I watched the very
complete removal of a family from the Giudecca to another domicile in
the city proper. The household effects were all piled up in the one
boat, which father and elder son, a boy of about twelve, propelled.
Mother and baby sat on a mattress, high up, while two ragged girls and
another boy hopped about where they could and shouted with excitement.
As soon as the Rio di S. Trovaso was entered the oarsmen gave up rowing
and clawed their way along the wall. Moving has ever been a delight to
English children, the idea of a change of house being eternally
alluring, but what would they not give to make the exchange of homes
like this?
We should walk beside this pleasant Rio, for a little way down on the
left is the church of S. Trovaso, with a campo that still retains some
of the grass which gave these open spaces their name, and a few graceful
acacia trees. In this church is a curiously realistic "Adoration of the
Magi" by Tintoretto: a moving scene of life in which a Spanish-looking
peasant seems strangely out of place. An altar in a little chapel has a
beautiful shallow relief which should not be overlooked. The high-altar
picture--a "Temptation of S. Anthony" by Tintoretto--is now hidden by a
golden shrine, while another of the show pieces, a saint on horseback,
possibly by Jacobello del Fiore, in the chapel to the left of the choir,
is sadly in need of cleaning, but obviously deserving of every care.
We now return to the Zattere, in a house on which, just beyond the Rio
di S. Trovaso. Browning often stayed. In one of his letters he thus
describes the view from his room: "Every morning at six, I see the sun
rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which
everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view--the
still grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in
deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort
of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the ruins are on fire with
gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own
essence apparently: so my day begins."
Still keeping beside the shipping, we proceed to the little Albergo of
the Winds where the fondamenta ends. Here we turn to the right, cross a
campo with a school beside it, and a hundred boys either playing on the
stones or audible at their lessons within walls, and before us, on the
other side of the canal, is the church of S. Sebastiano, where the
superb Veronese painted and all that was mortal of him was laid to rest
in 1588. Let us enter.
For Paolo Veronese at his best, in Venice, you must go to the Doges'
Palace and the Accademia. Nearer home he is to be found in the Salon
Carré in the Louvre, where his great banqueting scene hangs, and in our
own National Gallery, notably in the beautiful S. Helena, more
beautiful, to my mind, than anything of his in Venice, and not only more
beautiful but more simple and sincere, and also in the magnificent
"House of Darius".
Not much is known of the life of Paolo Caliari of Verona. The son of a
stone-cutter, he was born in 1528, and thus was younger than Titian and
Tintoretto, with whom he was eternally to rank, who were born
respectively in 1477 or 1487 and 1518. At the age of twenty-seven,
Veronese went to Venice, and there he remained, with brief absences, for
the rest of his life, full of work and honour. His first success came
when he competed for the decoration of the ceiling of S. Mark's library
and won. In 1560 he visited Rome in the Ambassador's service; in 1565 he
married a Veronese woman. He died in 1588, leaving two painter sons.
Vasari, who preferred Tuscans, merely mentions him.
More than any other painter, except possibly Velasquez, Veronese strikes
the observer as an aristocrat. Everything that he did had a certain
aloofness and distinction. In drawing, no Venetian was his superior, not
even Tintoretto; and his colour, peculiarly his own, is characterized by
a certain aureous splendour, as though he mixed gold with all his
paints. Tintoretto and he, though latterly, in Titian's very old age,
rivals, were close friends.
Veronese is the glory of this church, for it possesses not only his
ashes but some fine works. It is a pity that the light is not good. The
choir altar-piece is his and his also are the pictures of the martyrdom
of S. Sebastian, S. Mark, and S. Marcellinus. They are vigorous and
typical, but tell their stories none too well. Veronese painted also the
ceiling, the organ, and other altar-pieces, and a bust of him is here to
show what manner of man he was.
Close to the door, on the left as you leave, is a little Titian which
might be very fine after cleaning.
There are two ways of returning from S. Sebastiano to, say, the iron
bridge of the Accademia. One is direct, the other indirect. Let us take
the indirect one first.
[Illustration: THE PALAZZO PESARO (ORFEI), CAMPO S. BENEDETTO]
Leaving the church, you cross the bridge opposite its door and turn to
the left beside the canal. At the far corner you turn into the
fondamenta of the Rio di S. Margherita, which is a beautiful canal with
a solitary cypress that few artists who come to Venice can resist.
Keeping on the right side of the Rio di S. Margherita we come quickly
to the campo of the Carmine, where another church awaits us.
S. Maria del Carmine is not beautiful, and such pictures as it possesses
are only dimly visible--a "Circumcision" by Tintoretto, a Cima which
looks as though it might be rather good, and four Giorgionesque scenes
by Schiavone. But it has, what is rare in Venice, a bronze bas-relief
from Tuscany, probably by Verrocchio and possibly by Leonardo himself.
It is just inside the side door, on the right as you enter, and might
easily be overlooked. Over the dead Christ bend women in grief; a
younger woman stands by the cross, in agony; and in a corner are
kneeling, very smug, the two donors, Federigo da Montefeltro and
Battista Sforza.
Across the road is a Scuola with ceilings by the dashing Tiepolo--very
free and luminous, with a glow that brought to my mind certain little
pastorals by Karel du Jardin, of all people!
It is now necessary to get to the Campo di S. Barnaba, where under an
arch a constant stream of people will be seen, making for the iron
bridge of the Accademia, and into this stream you will naturally be
absorbed; and to find this campo you turn at once into the great campo
of S. Margherita, leaving on your left an ancient building that is now a
cinema and bearing to the right until you reach a canal. Cross the
canal, turn to the left, and the Campo di S. Barnaba, with its archway
under the houses, is before you.
The direct way from S. Sebastiano to this same point and the iron bridge
is by the long Calle Avogadro and Calle Lunga running straight from the
bridge before the church. There is no turning.
The Calle Lunga is the chief shopping centre of this neighbourhood--its
Merceria--and all the needs of poorer Venetian life are supplied there.
But what most interested me was the death-notices in the shop windows.
Every day there was a new one; sometimes two. These intimations of
mortality are printed in a copper-plate type on large sheets of paper,
usually with black edges and often with a portrait. They begin with
records as to death, disease, and age, and pass on to eulogise the
departed. It is the encomiastic mood that makes them so charming. If
they mourn a man, he was the most generous, most punctilious, and most
respected of Venetian citizens. His word was inviolable; as a husband
and father he was something a little more than perfection, and his
sorrowing and desolate widow and his eight children, two of them the
merest bambini, will have the greatest difficulty in dragging through
the tedious hours that must intervene before they are reunited to him in
the paradise which his presence is now adorning. If they mourn a woman,
she was a miracle of fortitude and piety, and nothing can ever efface
her memory and no one take her place. "Ohè!" if only she had been
spared, but death comes to all.
The composition is florid and emotional, with frequent exclamations of
grief, and the intimations of mortality are so thorough and convincing
that one has a feeling that many a death-bed would be alleviated if the
dying man could hear what was to be printed about him.
After reading several one comes to the conclusion that a single author
is responsible for many; and it may be a Venetian profession to write
them. A good profession too, for they carry much comfort on their wings.
Every one stops to read them, and I saw no cynical smile on any face.