A gondola is scarcely a safe boat to sail, except in a following wind.
It has no keel, and it turns over easily, but with one of the great
oars behind it steers steadily. Once, with two rowers, I took more than
two hours to row from Venice to Torcello against the wind. I sailed
back in forty minutes. The lagoon was rough with short tossing waves
edged with foam, indescribably fresh and gay. The long boat, with its
flat bottom, flew over the surface of four or five waves together,
at a torrent speed. I never was so conscious of swiftness, and the
boat itself was alive beneath, all its will in its movement, pulling
and leaping like an Arab steed. This was delightful; nor is it less
delightful, having made friends with the owners of one of the larger
boats, to sail up and down the sea-streets of the lagoon, when the
wind is fresh and the tide running fast, and the night is dark, save
for glimpses of the hurrying moon. The steersman is silent, the sky is
silent, the soul itself is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind in the
sail and the water round the rushing prow, and these sounds deepen the
silence. That which men feel who stand sentinel on the bow of a ship in
the midst of the great Oceans, one may feel here close to a busy town.
And in the vast solitude and peace the infinite Spirit of Nature comes
home to our spirit, and we feel our own infinity.
But quiet is not always the seal of the lagoon. I have seen it
tormented and torn with wind, so ravaged that it was impossible to
cross from the Piazzetta to San Giorgio Maggiore, so furious that
the waves leaped up the quay and ran along the pavement to the space
between the orient pillars whence St. Theodore and the Lion of St.
Mark watch over the heart of Venice. Nor can I refrain from telling
here what once I saw of deadly storm out on the lagoon close by the
island of St. James of the Marsh. We had been rowing back from Torcello
under a terrible sky, very lofty, of dark purple cloud, smooth as the
inside of a cup. Across this, in incessant play, the lightning fled to
and fro, not in single flashes, but in multitudes at the same time,
ribbons and curling streamers and branching trees of white violet and
crimson light. So far away and high they were that the thunder of
their movement sent no sound to us. Towards the Alps a white arch
seemed to open under the pall of cloud, and in it were whirlings of
vapour. The gondolier bent forward and said--We must take refuge. We
must land at the island. I laughed, and said--No, we will go on; and
I heard him mutter to himself--These English have no fear. And then I
thought that he was certain to know far more than I of the lagoon, and
I turned and said: “It is not courage we have, but ignorance; do what
you think right”; and we drew the boat to the landing of San Giacomo,
and crossed the little island to the rampart that looked forth to the
mainland; and then, issuing out of the white wrath that seemed to dwell
in the cloud-arch, a palm tree of pale vapour formed itself and came
with speed. It reached the lagoon near Mestre, and towered out of it
to the heaven, its ghostly pillar relieved against the violet darkness
of the sky, its edge as clear as if cut down by a knife, and about a
yard apparently in breadth. It came rushing across the lagoon, driven
by the Spirit of wind which within whirled and coiled its column into
an endless spiral. The wind was only in it; at its very edge there was
not a ripple; but as it drew near our island it seemed to be pressed
down on the sea, and, unable to resist the pressure, opened out like
a fan in a foam of vapour. Then, with a shriek which made every nerve
thrill with excitement, the imprisoned wind leaped forth, the sea
beneath it boiled, and the island, as the cloud of spray and wind smote
it, trembled like a ship struck by a great wave. Then the whirlwind
fled on to Burano and smote the town. Next morning a number of persons
were brought into the Hospital at Venice who had been wounded by the
whirl-storm. There is wild weather in Venice and on its waters.
I have known Venice so dark under black wind and rain that it was
impossible to read at three in the afternoon in August. I have stood
on the Rialto in so heavy a snowstorm that not a single boat crossed
the empty, desolate river of the Grand Canal. The palaces were clear in
the cold light, their marbles shining in the wet. The tiled roofs were
white with snow, and the dark ranges of gondolas moored to the quays
were relieved by the snow that lay thickly upon them. The Campaniles
rose out of the mist with a touch of snow on their windward side. A
gloomier sight, a more unhappy day I never saw. Yet even in this wild
weather Venice wore her beauty like a robe and exercised her incessant
fascination. I have walked over the Piazza, crunching through the ice
that covered its inundated marbles. I have sheltered from the furious
rain and wind of a roaring Scirocco under the door of the Hospital in
the Square of SS. John and Paul, and seen through the driving slant of
rain Colleone proudly reining in his horse, his bâton in his hand, his
noble casque outlined like a falcon, and his eager and adventurous
face in profile against the dun sky. He looked as he may have looked
many a time, leading his men, when wild weather was roving over
Lombardy.
I have felt as if the very waters trembled, like the palaces, with the
appalling roar and shattering clash of such a thunderstorm as I have
never known elsewhere; but the most impressive aspect of savage weather
is when, in tremendous rain, one stands sheltered under the colonnade,
at the corner where the Piazzetta turns into the Piazza. The enormous
roof of St. Mark’s, and that of the Procuratie, collect the rain and
pour it forth by the great spouts more than a yard in length which
project over the pavement from the parapets. From each of these, from
hundreds of them, a cataract leaps like a tigress, and falls resounding
on the pavement. The noise is deafening, the pavement is half a foot
deep in turbulent water, the wind screams, the men are blown across
the square, the gondolas rock at the steps and beat against the piles,
the thunder roars till the two giant columns, where St. Theodore and
the Lion stand in proud serenity, seem to shake, and through the black
sap of rain, the lightning flares the Ducal Palace into momentary
colour. It is a sight, a sound, not to be forgotten. Tintoret, with his
sympathy for the wild work of nature, has seized and recorded this in
his picture of the bearing of the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria.
The Alexandrian Square he has made into the Piazzetta of Venice. The
rain is falling in torrents, the waterspouts cascade to the pavement.
The pavement is so deep in the running water that it is looped around
the legs of the bearers of the body, fiercely swirling. It is a
splendid picture of a Venetian storm, and in the background of it, that
we may not lose the sea, the waves of the lagoon are breaking over the
quay.
But these impressions are endless. In other towns there is some
constancy in the doings of nature. The general aspect of the weather is
much the same for a month at a time. In Venice not a day passes without
many changes. The various and mutable sea-goddess has her own wild and
fickle way with her peculiar people.
Once more, before I leave the lagoon and the islands, I will record
a day I spent, when partly by gondola and partly walking, I made the
circuit of Venice in pursuit of her sea-charm. Early in the morning
I left the Piazzetta and rowed down the Riva dei Schiavoni till I
reached the public gardens. Their sea-wall dipped from a path shaded
by acacias, thick with white blossom in the spring, into the lagoon,
and at the point of the peninsula the gardens make, I looked south
along the quay into the very mouth of the Grand Canal, with the Palace
and the Campanile on one side, and the Church of the Salute and of St.
Giorgio on the other, a glorious group of buildings which seemed to
borrow splendour and delight in their own existence from the dancing,
sparkling, rippling, glancing, laughing water which surrounded them.
It was like an Empire’s gate, and the Empire was the Empire of the
Sea. Right opposite, between me and the Lido, lay the Island of Sant’
Elena, like a jewel of emerald and pearl set in the blue enamel of the
sea. Its little church was nestled in trees, and over its sea-wall hung
dark green and tangled boughs of ilex, and pale acacia, and the golden
wealth of fig trees; and all along the parapet roses trailed and the
gadding vine, and scented the sweet soft wind. I little thought that,
as I write now, there would not be left one trace of all this beauty. I
rowed out to it there and landed. The church was used as a granary, but
beside it the tiny cloister was still exquisite even in its ruin--paved
with marble and brick; its small Gothic arches and the roofs of its
remaining rooms garmented and entangled with roses. A carved well
stood in the centre, and all around the low wall of the arcades, every
leaf and flower gleaming in the sunlight, tall oleanders, pink and
white, grew in deep red pots of clay--a place so fair, so sweet and
solitary, so noiseless save for the bees, that the delicate soul of St.
Francis, whose was the church, would have prayed in it with joy, and
praised the Lord who made the world so lovely.
Then I rowed round the wall of the Arsenal to San Pietro di Castello.
Behind that church and the Arsenal is the most wretched part of Venice,
where the people are poorest and wildest, and the lanes most unkempt
and uncared for. Yet it was here, on this outlying island, that for
many centuries the Cathedral of Venice claimed the reverence of the
city. The old church has long perished, and its unhappy successor
stands now in a deserted square with plots of dry and melancholy grass
where the fishermen dry their nets, nor has it any dignity or beauty
of its own. But I loved the place for its loneliness, and for its wide
view across the shining lagoon to the misty plain of the mainland, and
beyond to the “eagle-baffling” rampart of the Alps. That wide-expanding
view is no longer visible, for the Arsenal has been extended, and shut
out its glory. The square is now quite desolate, but it is still worth
visiting for its associations. Here every year the Brides of Venice
were dowered by the State; here their ravishment by the pirates took
place. It was Magnus, Bishop of Altinum, that set up here the first
Church of Venice, the same Magnus to whom the Lord appeared in vision
and told him to build a Church (St. Salvador) in the midst of the city
on a plot of ground above which he should see a red cloud rest. A
different vision built San Pietro. St. Peter himself appeared to Magnus
and commanded him to set up a Church in his name, where he should find
on Rivo Alto oxen and sheep feeding on the meadows. The grass of the
Campo still recalls the ancient legend.
Even now, as I write, I see the Tower and the paved square, and the
gardens behind, and recall a favourite picture in the church which,
amid the desolation of the island, is like a lovely maid in a deserted
wood. It is said to be by Basaiti, and pictures St. George and the
Dragon. It is arched at the top, and the arch is filled with a pale
evening sky of rosy light, soft as a dream, and faintly barred with
lines of vaporous blue. Into this tender sky rises on the left a
mountain, broad and alone, and below the mountain a ranging hill, and
below the hill the walls, towers and gates of a city, and below the
city a two-arched bridge, and below the bridge a flowing river, and on
the bank of the river St. George on his horse, his head bent down to
his horse’s neck with the couching of his spear, and on the spear the
formless dragon, and above the dragon on the right, Sabra, clinging in
lingering flight to the trunk of a great fig tree that flings into the
rosy sky three long branches sparsely clothed with leaves. They hang,
as if to crown the victor, over the head of St. George, whose face,
young, yet full of veteran experience and holiness, is of the same
grave tenderness as the sky. This is Basaiti in his noblest vein and
manner, and the picture has on the whole escaped the restorers.
I left the square, with this noble painting in my mind, and rowed
on to the Sacca della Misericordia beyond the Canal, which leads to
the Church of SS. John and Paul. This is a great square piece of the
lagoon, surrounded on three sides by sheds and houses, where all the
wood used for building in Venice is brought from the mainland, and left
floating on the water. The place has always fascinated me, I scarcely
know why--for the view of San Michele and Murano and the Alps beyond
is seen as well from other points--but I think it partly is that the
great trunks and beams, and the sawn planks seasoning in the water,
bring back to me the mountain valleys, torrents and knolls of rock
where the trees were hewn down, and fill the sea-city with images of
the wild landscape of the land; and partly that one seems to see in
the waiting wood all that human hands will make of it--houses, roofs,
furniture, bridges, gondolas, barks that will meet the beating of the
Adriatic waves, piles that will build foundations for new buildings.
The coming human activity moves like a spirit over the floating masses
in this tract of water.
Then I rowed on till, crossing the southern entrance of the Grand
Canal, I touched on the low wall of the little grassy campo in front of
the Church of San Andrea. It looked over the lagoon, the water of which
lapped its sea-wall, to the mainland. Opposite it was the Island of San
Giorgio in Aliga, its dark tower black against the pale pearl and rose
of the late afternoon sky; on its left, seeming to lie on the water,
the violet range of the volcanic Euganeans, so far, so delicate, so
ethereal, that they appeared to be made of the evening sky. The rest of
the heaven was cloudy, but the sweetness of solitude, and the peace of
this deserted place, and the spirit of the coming evening, were so full
of grace that I landed, dismissed my gondola, and stood under the porch
of the late Gothic church, enjoying the silence. There is a carving
over the door, so simple and childlike in feeling that it is hard to
believe it is Renaissance work. It is of St. Peter walking on the water
and of St. Andrew close at hand in his boat, with a gondolier’s oar
floating in the water, and beyond a piece of broken landscape. This
little invention into which the sculptor had put his soul suited the
quiet square, not larger than a large room. Thought and imagination
seemed to be limited by the narrow space, but only seemed, for in front
opened out to the south the broad lagoon and the wide plain of the
mainland, and I knew that to the north rose into an infinite sky the
peaks of the Alps, aspiring to reach the celestial City. I lingered
long, hoping that the clouds would clear away, but it was not then
I had that revelation. Afterwards, when walking somewhere near San
Sebastiano, I came to a small bridge and there I beheld what seemed to
be the gates of Paradise. The clouds had lifted to the north and the
south-west. They rolled away like a folding scroll, and what I saw was
the clear light of the setting sun on one side, and on the other the
whole range of the Julian Alps, with the rose of the sunset on their
freshly fallen snows. I crossed a muddy canal and found myself with an
unimpeded view on the grassy and deserted ground of the Campo Marte.
It ran out then into the lagoon, and I stood on its wild beach looking
out upon the waters. Sea-marsh and lonely piles and flitting sea birds
and a solitary fishing boat on the rippling surface, growing gold and
crimson, led my eyes to the black tower of San Giorgio and to the hills
of Padua, and then to the purple bases of the Alps rising into tender
gray and shadowy blue; and above, tossed and recessed and fretted into
a thousand traceries, the great waves of the snow peaks, all suffused
with a divine rose. Slowly the evanescent tenderness departed, but with
ceaseless change of rose and violet and gray. Only above the engrailed
summits the pale azure was steadfast, the clear shining after rain. I
watched the sun go down, I listened to the roar of the Adriatic as it
came to me, a low murmur over the solitary field; I heard the Ave Maria
peal sweetly from all the bells of Venice, and I thought of the Mother
and the Child who saved the world. And then I went away, having seen a
vision.[1]
I visited then a garden and friends I knew and when night fell rowed
home down the Grand Canal. The moon had risen, and her light, in a sky
now clear save of flying clouds, was intensely brilliant. The great
sea-river, strangely quiet, almost magical in its stillness and in the
flood of white luminousness that seemed poured upon it in streams,
shimmered like liquid cornelian, a milky expanse among ghostly palaces
on either hand. The mighty masses of the Renaissance palaces which,
in losing all their irritating and confusing ornaments in the dim
and melting moonlight, reveal their noble and beautiful proportions,
supplanted the smaller palaces of Byzantine and Gothic form which
depend so much for the impression they make on their lovely ornament
and colour, both of which disappear in the moonlight. Above me, as I
rowed, the glorious blue of the sky, across which darted now and then
a shooting star, appeared to watch over its beloved city. The moon
seemed racing in it, so swift in the fresh sea-wind was the motion
of the white clouds across her disk. Each as it crossed took rainbow
colours, and threw a mystic shadow on the world below. Only one gondola
passed me by, a lantern burning on its prow, and its rower, silent as
his boat, looked like a spirit in the moonlight. Then the deep shadow
of the Rialto hid the moon, and I found my lodging.
* * * * *
It is time now to turn to a different matter--What was the influence,
towards the power to charm, of this water-life of the sea on the arts
in Venice?
First, architecture was made different by it from all that it was in
other Italian towns. The commerce and the wars of Venice in the East
caused her nobles and merchant princes to study the buildings of the
East. Rome did not influence them so much as Constantinople, Asia
Minor, and the Holy Land. It was long before the northern Gothic,
chiefly Franciscan, had any power in Venice, and when it had, it
was apart from the spirit of the city. The Church of St. Mark is an
Eastern not a Western Church. Many of the palaces along the Grand Canal
were built in imitation of palaces the merchants had seen when they
anchored in Orient ports. Often, as one wanders in the narrow streets,
a window, a door-head, a disc in the wall, will remember us of the
Byzantine Empire. There is a disc near San Polo where the Emperor of
Eastern Rome sits in full imperial robes and crown, just as Justinian
is represented in the mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. At Ravenna, we
are still closer to the architecture of that Empire, but here, and this
is characteristic of early Venetian architecture, there is a greater
liberty, a more individual choice and treatment of buildings than there
is at Ravenna. It is scarcely imitation which we see, but Eastern
ideas of architecture freely modified and recreated into new forms
by the architects. It is as if the free life of the sea itself had
instilled its wild originality, variety and beauty into the imagination
of the builders.
The continual change of the sea and its novelty entered not only into
public but domestic architecture. All along the canals, the private
houses built by the earlier architects of Venice change incessantly
their form. In every house the ornament is individual. Moreover, in the
work itself, there is a finish, a delicate delight in perfection of
minute carving, a lavish invention which belongs to the best Oriental
work. Its finish was always precious; and this ideal of finish entered
also into the first buildings of the Renaissance in Venice, and made
their sculpture and decoration more lively and more exquisite than
elsewhere in Italy. This charm in ornament belonged to Venice, because
it was the Queen of the Mediterranean Sea, the mistress of the East.
The Orient brought over the sea the subtlety, the delicate finish, and
the golden beauty of its art to Venice.
From the East also--and learnt because Venice was a sea-power--came
the extraordinary love of colour which must have made mediaeval Venice
like a city built of rainbows. It passed, as I have said, into the
fishing boats and their sails. It belonged to the poorest houses on
the distant islands. It made the Venetian painters the first masters
of colour. We have some notion of it from the exterior of St. Mark’s,
which even by moonlight blazes like a breast-plate of jewels; from
its interior, which, subdued into dark but glowing sanctities of
colour, solemnizes the spirit. But in ancient days the colour-glory of
St. Mark’s was extended over the whole city. It shone with gold and
crimson, with azure and burning green, with deep purple and the blue of
the sea waves. The sailors and merchants of the East when they visited
Venice saw in her architecture colour as brilliant as that of their
own cities, and felt themselves at home. The architects, lavishing
colour everywhere, made a water street in Venice as decorative as the
title-page of a Missal.
Again, that element of charm arising from the double life of all
things through reflection in still water, entered, I believe, into the
soul of every architect in Venice, and modified his work. He knew, or
unconsciously felt as he built, that each palace, church, tower, and
dwelling house would often have, in unconscious nearness, each its own
image and a second heaven in a mirrored beauty; that each would be in
the centre of another fair world of its own in the water beneath it. He
was inspired to greater excellence than in a city on the land, by the
knowledge that all his work, reflected by the sea, would be seen for
ever in a twofold loveliness.
Two other peculiarities, not found in the other cities of Italy,
give a distinct charm to the architecture of Venice; and they are
both caused by her position in the sea. The first of these is that
all her important buildings are covered from cornice to foundation
with precious and lovely marbles. The foundations were laid with
mighty blocks of Istrian marble, brought from the mainland; but it
was impossible to bring from so far enough of solid stone to build
the palaces, churches, and dwellings of Venice. With rare exceptions,
then, the walls were of brick; but, for beauty’s sake, the brick was
overlaid, outside and inside, with thin slabs of veined and various
marbles, with alabaster, with discs of porphyry, with mosaic, or with
frescoes. The oversheeting marbles were brought from across the sea.
The frescoes were done by the Venetian artists. Imagination, flying
high, can scarcely represent to itself the glorious aspect of the
Fondaco dei Tedeschi, as seen from the Rialto, covered from top to
bottom with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione. These have perished, but
the inlaid and marble covered walls of the Venetian palaces remain,
and they are like a lovely mosaic of rich colour. On their marble and
alabaster the sea-winds and the sunlight have so acted that the surface
has a sheen of flying and evasive colour, and a patina which I have
not seen elsewhere, even in Genoa. Those accursed restorers have taken
the trouble, notably in St. Mark’s, of scraping this away. It is like
cleaning the patina away from a Greek bronze. Nature--sea and sun and
wind--had adopted the buildings for her own, and given centuries of
work to enhance the beauty of their original colour. Italy has despised
and destroyed this labour of Nature. But in many places the charm
remains, and it is the work, directly and indirectly, of the sea.