Venice on her architecture, and of the charm of it. In the mediaeval
towns of the Italian mainland, the palaces of the nobles and merchants,
even the ordinary houses, present to the street lofty and blind walls
of enormous strength, especially along the lower story. They have the
aspect of prisons, and they were made in this fashion for the sake
of defence in the incessant quarrels waged by the opponent families
and parties in the city. There is no openness, no story of hospitable
receptions, no brightness of life, no sense of peace, impressed on us
by the great buildings of the inland towns of Italy. Even when we visit
a little hill town like San Gimignano, we see that the common houses,
as well as those of the nobles, wear the appearance of fortresses. It
is quite different in Venice. The main entrance of the houses, of rich
and poor, was on the seaside, on the canal. A wide door, leading to
a long hall, opened by steps on the water. The glancing of the water
plays on the roof of the hall which goes back to a small garden. The
great staircase mounts to the first story from this hall, and that
story has wide, open-hearted windows with a deep balcony. Everything
suggests peace, fearlessness, and the welcome of humanity. The steps
seem made for the reception of crowds of guests. Tall piles, coloured
in bands of red, white, and blue, tell what hosts of warless gondolas
were moored there by the visitors. The whole of the lower story was
often an arcade. The palace seems to throw itself open to the air, the
light, and the populace. Its aspect is the aspect of friendship and
hospitality, of a city whose citizens were at peace one with another.
This makes the appearance of Venice quite different from that of any
other Italian town, and its charm is great. Nothing indeed can be
prettier or more full of the delight of changing sunshine and shade,
and of pleasant human life doing its work and having its joys in the
sun, than to row through the narrower canals, and look into these wide
open doors, and see in the glint and glimmer of the light reflected
from the water the shadowy spaces full of men and women at work, of
boys and girls playing, of tiny fishermen and tiny bathers making the
bright waters that lap their open doors their playing and their working
place. The freshness, the breadth, the joyous movement of the sea, fill
their dwelling, regulate their life, mould their character, and set the
seal of the witchery of the sea on all they feel and all they do.
* * * * *
This is the charm which the Architecture of Venice derives from the
sea. How far Venetian Painting was influenced by the position of Venice
on the sea, what charm it derived from the life of the sea, and how far
the sea was the subject of the artists, is now the question. It is not
easy to answer it, for the influence of the sea position was not direct
but indirect. It did not make the painters of Venice desire to paint
the sea or to care for it as our modern temper does, but it created,
I think, a certain spiritual or imaginative influence in their soul,
other than that produced by the landscape of the land, which, it may be
quite unconsciously, entered into their art-work and had power over it.
The landscape that Cima, Basaiti, Giovanni Bellini, Catena, loved and
painted, that Giorgione, Bonifazio, and Veronese placed in the distance
of their pictures, was that of the mainland, of the spurs of the hills
as they dipped into the Lombard plain, of the lovely network of rock
and plain, river and woodland, of scattered castles and of white towns
on the hilltops, which one sees from the heights of Verona. On the
other hand, Titian painted the landscape of his native land, where
the torrent comes down through the massive chestnuts of Cadore; where
the gray limestone peaks leap upwards thousands of feet, and follow
one another, like the waves of the sea in the tempest; and the huge
boulders, ablaze with coloured lichen lie like resting beasts on the
short sweet grass in the green shade of walnut trees, and the rude
farmhouses stand beside the groves of oak and beech. These were his
delight, but the sea is not in his work nor in that of his fellows.
What does touch the sea in their pictures are the skies they painted
above this inland landscape. Their freedom, their diffused softness,
their lofty arch, their bright and vast expanse, their lucid
atmosphere, their silver subtlety, and their involved and mighty
storm-clouds, are the creation of the wide and moving sea. Carpaccio
and Catena paint the pale and trembling azure above the afternoon on
the seacoast. Giorgione has recorded the dark purple thunder-clouds
which climb with eager speed from the horizon of the sea to threaten
the works of men. Cima of Conegliano paints the clustered flocks of
white cloudlets in a clear pale sky which are common in the Venetian
heavens, and which are born of the sea. Veronese paints the pure,
cloudless, deep blue sky swept clean by the sea-wind, and under which
the sea is radiant. In other pictures he paints a sky often seen over
the Adriatic. It is indeed a seaside sky--blue with flat white stratus
across the blue, calm, and trembling with reflections cast up from
the sea. But Titian stands apart. His skies are of his own mountain
valley. The splendours of the mountain rain, the whirling of the
mountain-clouds belong to him alone.
The “softness and freedom,” so characteristic of the art of the great
Venetian colourists that the phrase has almost passed into a proverb,
did not belong to the earlier schools of Venice. These qualities came
into her art with the advent of the New Learning, which reached Venice
even earlier than it reached Florence, though it was less developed
there than in Florence. As to freedom, the Spirit of the Renaissance
set free the imagination of the artists, and kindled in them a more
vivid interest in humanity, even in natural scenery. The intellectual
freedom it brought belonged to every city which it touched. It belonged
above all to Venice. The spirit of a sea-people is by nature more free
than the spirit of the people of the plains. It is as free as the
spirit of a mountain folk. And such a spirit entered into the painting
of the artists of Venice, as it did into the life of its citizens.
They painted with more boldness, originality and fire than the inland
schools. The passion of the various, even of the reckless, sea was in
their heart. And this passion was in tune with the intellectual freedom
the New Learning brought to Venice.
As to the softness which distinguished the Venetians, it was chiefly
shown in a passion for various, noble, and harmonized colour, suffused,
even to its darkest shadow, with soft and glowing light. And Venice
was already, from its eastern associations, the lover of rich colour,
softly gradated, in buildings, boats, and dress. And then, beyond this,
the colour of its seas and skies, as indeed always near the southern
coasts, was tender, subtle, delicate alike when it was strong or
evanescent, soft as a child’s cheek in slumber, but always glowing. Day
by day, this warm softness of colour was instilled into the artists
and nourished by the sea-nature of the place. It was a spirit in their
pallet and their pencil.
The capacity for receiving such an impression was strengthened by the
circumstances under which it was received. There is no place where the
reception of the elements of beauty derived from Nature is so easy,
undistracted, and uninterrupted as in Venice. Gliding in a gondola
is very different from riding, driving, or walking. It ministers to
receptivity.
Then there is the deep silence of the lagoon, in which the spirit of
Nature most speaks to man, not only by night but by day. We may be
as quiet on the Venetian lagoons--with all the sense of sight open to
receive, with the soul undisturbed by the challenge of human sounds--as
we should be in the heart of a Highland glen. All that Nature displays
of colour, form, or fancy; her mystery, her wild or mocking charm,
her solemn silence fraught with thought--sinks deep into the heart
when sunrise or sunset or starlight find us far out on the lagoon. A
whole boatful of gay people are hushed as by a spell. This ease, then,
in the reception of impressions on the senses, the quietude in which
they are received, the soft magic in the quietude, the freedom of the
waters, filled the soul of the Venetian artists, and made, as it were,
the atmosphere which their art breathed, and the inner spirit of their
pictures. It was one of the forces which made their work not only
softer and freer, but more vivid and passionate than that of any other
school in Italy.
Again, every one knows that the Venetian painters brought colour to a
greater perfection than it attained elsewhere. It came to them from the
lavish colouring of the city of which I have already written, from the
gorgeousness of the pageants, but chiefly from the natural scenery of
their home. It is true, they painted man rather than Nature. But they
felt her loveliness, and the deepest impression they received from her
daily work was of the glory and ravishment, glow and depth of colour,
varied from the most delicate to the most sombre hues in sea and sky
and along the distant range of Alpine summits. In the city itself,
from canal to canal, all the shadows are transfused with a glimmer
of blue light, or full of crimson and green fire. It is the presence
and power of the water which produces this. Over the sea, the blue of
the waters is like that of the sapphire throne Ezekiel saw above the
terrible crystal of the firmament. It is not terrible here, but deep
and tender; and, when storm is at hand, of a purple so solemn that
Tintoret often uses it for the garments of those in tragic sorrow.
But it was chiefly on the lagoon that the artists saw the richest and
softest colour. In subdued sunlight, such as is frequent in the haze of
the sea, the soft silvery, pearly grays vary infinitely over the smooth
waters. In fresher and brighter days when the wind brings the flying
clouds, the colour is that which is native to a sea-atmosphere, often
clear, often thrilling through veils of ruby, sapphire, and emerald
vapour, steeped always in the diffused light which is felt, like joy,
over wide spaces of water, and under a vast expanse of sky. To these
constant impressions we owe in part the extraordinary luminousness,
glow, interfusion, subtlety, tenderness, splendour in height and depth
of colour in the pictures of the great Venetians.
Another characteristic of Venetian painting is also derived from the
charming of the sea. It is the intense glow of the flesh colour. The
deep warmth and ruddy light which seem to come from within the body to
the skin in the figures of these painters, were studied direct from
Nature. It is the colour of the naked body of the Venetian fishers to
this day. And nothing that I know of produces it but the influence of
the sea-winds combined with sunlight, and of the sunlight reflected
from the waters in a soft and gracious climate. We may see something
like this colour, in its coarse extreme, in the faces and hands of the
boatmen on our coasts. Sea and sun have there worked with a fierce
and racking climate to produce the colour, but to destroy its beauty
by destroying the texture of the skin. But, at Venice, these natural
forces work in a climate which does not injure the skin; and they
overlay its surface with a glow of red and golden colour which is one
of the loveliest hues in the world, and has the special qualities of
depth and life, even of a certain passion.
There is more opportunity in Venice for its formation than in other
southern sea-ports. All through the summer and autumn the Venetian
youths of the people spend their time all but naked in the water.
They walk, ankle-deep, over the shallows of the lagoons, fishing for
sea-plunder. The men work on the embankments only in their shirts. Half
their life they are practically naked;--and to look at one of these
young Venetian fishers, standing in the blaze of the sun, with the
greenish water glistening round him, its reflections playing on his
glowing limbs, and all his body flaming soft as from an inward fire--is
to see the very thing which Giorgione painted on the walls of palaces,
which Bellini and Giorgione handed on to their followers, which Titian
and Tintoret laid on their canvas and emblazoned in their fresco. They
worked into their painting of the human body what they saw every day,
and other schools of art did not attain the glory of flesh-colour
Venice attained, because they did not see it.
The naked body of the Bacchus of Tintoret, who comes wading through the
lagoon water to meet Ariadne, is differently, but as richly and nobly,
coloured as that of the Bacchus of Titian in the National Gallery.
Reflections from the water glow and quiver on his limbs. He is truly a
creature of dew and fire. There is a young and naked St. Sebastian by
Titian at the Salute which might stand for one of the fishers of the
lagoon. His long wet hair streams dark on his shoulders. In his face is
all the freedom of the sea, and the soft warm rich glow of his body and
limbs is indescribable. He is not St. Sebastian, but one of the gods of
the peaceful sea.
When Giovanni Bellini painted the naked body, there is nothing better
in colour in the whole world. In San Grisostomo the Saint sits in front
of the bending stem of a great fig tree, on which he rests his book.
His white beard flows down over his breast. Bellini’s certainty,
firmness, enduringness of colour, are here at their very best. The glow
and subdued flaming of the flesh, varied from point to point with an
exquisite joy in the work, is beautiful beyond all praise. The glow
of Giorgione’s flesh-colour is as deep, but thrilled through with a
greater softness. In Tintoret’s hands the flesh-colour became more
sombre, and in the faces of his many portraits had a curious dignity,
as if, I have often thought, the royalty of the Sun had entered into it.
With his women, a difference arose. At first he painted them in the
full Venetian manner. But afterwards, with his impatience of monotony
or repetition, he changed the type. It alters from the full, opulent,
rose-coloured women of Titian, Palma, Veronese, to a lithe, lissome,
tall, rather thin woman, alive with youthful energy of fire, of the
most gracious and subtle curves, exquisitely made, with a small head
and lovely face. With his invention of this type, he invented a
new method of colouring, marked by a temperance in its use and glow
which is strange in one so often accused, and sometimes guilty, of
intemperance. He sent across the naked body alternate shafts of
sunlight and of shade, and amused himself by painting the colour of
flesh under these varied conditions. The result--since in all the
shadow as in the light there was colour, and colour at its subtlest--is
the loveliest, freest, and most delightful thing in Venetian art. “The
Graces” in the Ducal Palace are an example of this. Any one can see
another example in the picture of the “Origin of the Milky Way” in the
National Gallery. It may be only a fancy of mine, but I cannot help
thinking that Tintoret had seen such girls bathing from the Lido on
days when the sunlight was broken over the sea by racing clouds. There
is a freshness, an open-air purity and light in these images of his
which it pleases me to think would be absent if these lovely bodies
had been painted in the rooms of palaces or in their gardens. The winds
of heaven appear to blow around them from the unencumbered sea. The
light of an ocean sky, the dance of reflected light from moving water
seem to play upon them.
Again, the Venetian painters saw day by day the human body in graceful
and incessantly changing movement, and the charm of it was derived from
the sea-life of Venice. There are few attitudes and movements in any
human work more graceful than those of the single rower of a gondola.
He is so placed, and his peculiar method of rowing is such, that his
labour educates him in lovely movement, and of movement altering almost
at every instant to meet new circumstances. He is unable to take an
awkward attitude. If he does, so lightly poised is he, he is tossed
out of the boat; and it is only, I believe, because the attitudes are
so various, so momentary, so hard to see before they change, that
sculptors have not reproduced them. It is plain that this incessantly
beautiful movement of the human body had a great influence on the
painters of Venice. Their eye was unconsciously trained from youth to
realize the body of man in lovely poise and change.
Their eye was also trained to realize the aspect of stately, grave,
and reverent signiors and merchants in the rich robes of the days of
pageants; or in the quiet robes of councillors and citizens; and there
are no more noble, dignified representations of men of honour, weight,
and civic business, than those made by the Venetian artists. The only
way in which this view of their art can be connected with the sea is
that, owing to the commerce of Venice on every sea, there existed in
the town a wise, wealthy, honoured middle class, different from the
middle class in the other sea-towns of Italy, having worthy connections
with the East, and sharing in a greater degree than elsewhere in the
government and culture of the city.
Moreover, the wonderful splendour of the pageants and triumphs of the
town, most of which were bound up with the sea, enabled painters like
Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and Veronese, to display in decorative art
the most gorgeous colour in dress and festive show. The processions in
Venice, the festal days at the Salute and the Redentore, the marriage
of Venice to the sea, were a varied blaze of radiant colour.
Finally, on this matter of painting, there are very few direct
representations of sea-scenery in Venetian art. I have said that Titian
painted the woods, rocks, and mountains of his native Cadore. Once
only, if I remember rightly, he drew the lagoon and the plain below
the Alps, and Antelao above the mist, soaring as if it would pierce
the very rampart of heaven. Every day and evening he saw, from his
garden at Casa Grande, the lagoon near San Michele filled with joyous
gondolas and alive with light and colour, but it never occurred to him
to paint it. The mountain valleys, their groves and torrents were his
home. They did not permit him, in their jealousy, to perceive the sea.
Only one among the greater Venetian painters seems to have cared at
all, and that very little, for the sea in the lagoons--and he lived
all his life in Venice. This was Tintoret. Sometimes, as in one of
the Halls of the Ducal Palace, the background of his picture is made
by the green waves of the lagoon beating on its scattered islands, or
in another picture by the glittering surface of its water with the
boats crimson in the sunlight. The green sea of the lagoon, prankt
with flitting azures, soft, and shot with changing hues, is painted by
him with a rapturous pleasure in his picture of Bacchus and Ariadne.
A sea-going ship with its sails set is making its way, behind the
figures, out to Malamocco. There is a picture of his in Santa Maria
Zobenigo where St. Justina and Augustine are kneeling on the seashore,
and the gray-blue lagoon, in short leaping waves, is enriched by the
scarlet sail of a Venetian bark. The sea in the St. George in the
National Gallery breaks in low waves of bluish green, edged with foam,
gloomy under a dark sky, upon a desolate coast. It is as like the water
of the lagoon when storm is drawing near as it can be painted. Then he
painted on the ceiling of the great hall in the Ducal Palace, Venice
enthroned as the Queen of the Sea. A huge, globed surge of oceanic
power and mass rises at her feet, and on it are afloat the sea-gods
and goddesses, Tritons and monsters of the deep who bring the gifts
of the sea to the feet of the Sea-Queen. It might be an illustration
of the subject of this Essay, and it proves that the subject was not
unconceived by Tintoret.
Indeed, if the soaring figure, which in the picture of the Paradise at
the Ducal Palace, rises with uplifted arms and face from the angle
above the Chair of the Doge as he sat in council, towards the figure
of Christ at the summit of the canvass, be in truth, as some have
conjectured, the Angel of the Sea, whose nursling was Venice--Tintoret,
setting this incarnation of the history of the city above its senate in
council, among the saintly host, and aspiring to the throne of God, did
most nobly and religiously conceive the sea as the mother and guard and
glory of Venice.
But more remarkable than these few reminiscences of the sea were the
skies which Tintoret painted from those he saw over the sea and the
lagoon. Sometimes the sky is pure, but the blue is full of white light,
such as the sea mists make when they rise into the heaven. Sometimes
his sky is full of dark gray cloud, threatening ruin or heavy sorrow.
When Christ descends through the sky to welcome his martyrs or answer
the prayers of Venice, he bursts through the clouds as through a sea,
and they ripple away from Him in rosy concentric circles. It is an
effect he may have seen from a seashore, but not on land. But, chiefly,
with his stormy and stern nature, Tintoret--who had seen the skies of
Venice when the tempest had come in from the sea--filled his heaven,
especially when he paints the tragedies of earth, with the heavy bars
of purple, mingled with angry gold which I have often seen after a
thunderstorm at Venice, descending like stairs from the zenith to
the horizon. And once at least, below the clouds, he has painted the
lagoon, black and tortured by the wind.
I have said nothing of Canaletto or of Guardi. They seem to belong
to another world than that of the great Venetians. But it would be
uncourteous to omit them. Canaletto, or Il Canale, was really fond
of the waters of Venice, much fonder of them than his predecessors
were; and when he painted the long reaches of the Grand Canal, he
managed to represent one aspect at least of that wonderful sea-street,
when under a faint wind it trembles into multitudinous small curving
ripples that annihilate all reflections. He does not often vary from
this, and when he varies he does not succeed so well. But he painted
the buildings with a real desire to impress us with their nobility and
largeness of design, with no special care for accuracy of detail, but
with great care to give fully a sense of their splendour of situation
and of architecture. And he drew over the scene--and this he did
excellently--a clear, pure, luminous, tenderly gradated, but rather
hard atmosphere, in which the buildings were frankly visible, and the
waters almost austere. The pictures are so decorative that many of them
tend to weary the eyes, and we turn with some relief to those other
pictures of his in which the sky is dark, and a more grave and homelier
representation is made of the Venice of his time. I have not seen any
pictures by him of the lagoons. But I have seen a set of drawings of
the islands in the lagoon done in Indian ink, which in their slight
and careless drawing pleased me because he seemed to love what he was
doing, and to feel delicately the magical reflectiveness and charm of
the waters of the lagoon.
Guardi cares more than Il Canale for the waters of Venice. He did his
best to represent their lovely trembling in the light, and the images
they made in their mirror of the buildings above them and of the life
which moves upon them. It is easy, when one does not require the best,
to admire, even to have a special liking for, his pictures. As to what
the moderns have done for the Venetian waters, what the sea-charm of
the city has impelled on their canvas--it would require an essay as
long as this to tell the tale of it.
* * * * *
These things, with regard to Venetian painting, are part of the charm
which the sea exercised on the artists. One other charm is also derived
from the sea. The sea and its life have largely made the character of
the Venetian people. That is too great a matter to discuss fully, but
if those who visit Venice will make friends with the fisher people,
they will soon discover the historical character of the Venetian
people as distinguished from the upper classes. It is salted with the
nature of the sea. A wild, free, open, dashing, quiet and tempestuous
character, too much the sport of circumstance and impulse, yet capable
of a steady exercise of power when it loves or desires greatly--it
is the human image of the sea on which they live. It is one of the
pleasantest charms of Venice to know it, and be friends with it.