unnoticed, and made the best of our way to a little green, free from
weeds or adders, bounded on one side by a miserable shed, decorated
with the name of the Podesta’s residence, and on the other by a
circular church. Some remains of tolerable antique sculpture are
enchased in the walls; and the dome, supported by pillars of a smooth
Grecian marble, though uncouth and ill-proportioned, impresses a sort
of veneration, and transports the fancy to the twilight glimmering
period when it was raised.
Having surveyed what little was visible, and given as much career to
our imaginations as the scene inspired, we walked over a soil composed
of crumbling bricks and cement to the cathedral; whose arches, turned
on the ancient Roman principle, convinced us that it dates as high as
the sixth or seventh century.
Nothing can well be more fantastic than the ornaments of this
structure, formed from the ruins of the Pagan temples of Altina, and
incrusted with a gilt mosaic, like that which covers our Edward the
Confessor’s tomb. The pavement, composed of various precious marbles,
is richer and more beautiful than one could have expected, in a place
where every other object savours of the grossest barbarism. At the
farther end, beyond the altar, appears a semicircular niche, with
seats like the gradines of a diminutive amphitheatre; above rise the
quaint forms of the apostles, in red, blue, green, and black mosaic,
and in the midst of the goodly group a sort of marble chair, cool
and penitential enough, where St. Lorenzo Giustiniani sat to hold a
provincial council, the Lord knows how long ago! The fount for holy
water stands by the principal entrance, fronting this curious recess,
and seems to have belonged to some place of Gentile worship. The
figures of horned imps cling round its sides, more devilish, more
Egyptian, than any I ever beheld. The dragons on old china are not
more whimsical: I longed to have it filled with bats’ blood, and to
have sent it by way of present to the Sabbath; I can assure you it
would have done honour to their witcheries. The sculpture is not the
most delicate, but I cannot say a great deal about it, as but little
light reaches the spot where it is fixed. Indeed, the whole church is
far from luminous, its windows being narrow and near the roof, with
shutters composed of blocks of marble, which nothing but the last
whirlwind, one would think, could move from their hinges.
By the time we had examined every nook and corner of this singular
edifice, and caught, perhaps, some small portion of sanctity by sitting
in San Lorenzo’s chair, dinner was prepared in a neighbouring convent,
and the nuns, allured by the sound of our flutes and oboes, peeped out
of their cells and showed themselves by dozens at the grate. Some few
agreeable faces and interesting eyes enlivened the dark sisterhood;
all seemed to catch a gleam of pleasure from the music; two or three
of them, probably the last immured, let fall a tear, and suffered the
recollection of the world and its profane joys to interrupt for a
moment their sacred tranquillity.
We stayed till the sun was low, and the breezes blew cold from the
ocean, on purpose that they might listen as long as possible to a
harmony which seemed to issue, as the old abbess expressed herself,
from the gates of paradise ajar. A thousand benedictions consecrated
our departure; twilight came on just as we entered the bark and rowed
out upon the waves, agitated by a fresh gale, but fearing nothing under
the protection of St. Margherita, whose good wishes our music had
secured.
WILLIAM BECKFORD.
CANAL AND BRIDGE
From the Rialto’s edge,
I looked into the waters, on whose face
Glimmered the reflex of some few faint stars,
And two far-flitting lamps of gondoliers,
That seemed on that black flat to move alone,
While, on each side, each well-known building lost
Its separate beauty in one dark long curve.
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.
The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL
The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
there never was any such city.... The Church of St. Mark, standing
so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable
pillars, is not in the least grey with time--no greyer than a Greek
lyric.
‘All has suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange,’
in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
baptism in the sea....
The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by step, into
some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up to the
pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and
purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their
heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their leafy
tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well, with
the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought for ever into the stone. Or
Venice lures you in a gondola, into one of her remote canals, where you
glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise; where the innumerable
balconies are full of the absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches.
Or if the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you
in the very places where you think her power is the weakest, and
as if impatient of your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and
enthrals with a yet more unearthly and incredible enchantment.... But
whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal?... For myself, I
must count as half lost the year spent in Venice before I took a house
upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have the perfect local
flavour. But by what witchery touched, one’s being suffers the common
sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the tide in
that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to tell.
I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and
comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us....
October is the month of the sunsets, and are best seen from the Public
Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a
broad trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea,
he had dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and
fallen and died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness
of Venice grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow
further and further) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as
we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow
canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little
rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate
beauty--all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little
palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the
Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs
an airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is
of that pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think
ourselves rich in the neighbourhood of that part of the ‘Palace of
Art,’ whereon
‘The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
Burnt like a fringe of fire.’
And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga....
About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto
market, bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the mainland; and
far into the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress
of the boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we
looked out again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice
shadowily happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which
had so loved Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps
where her feet seemed to rest.
W. D. HOWELLS.
BROWNING’S FUNERAL
VENICE, DEC. 15, 1889
Now ‘past they glide,’ and bear the flower-wreathed bier
Across the soundless waters, cold and grey,
Ere Night falls, sable-vestured and austere,
And Day dies in one roseate flush away,
While they who follow, tearful, in the train
See wonted sights with unfamiliar eyes;--
Like dreams, amid the fevered sleep of pain,
Rich domes and frescoed palaces arise.
Yet haply, mixed with sorrow, dawns the thought
How fit such obsequies for him whose pen
Hath given a wondrous poem,[3] passion-fraught,--
Breathing of love and Venice,--unto men:
And so hath added to her deathless glory
A shining scroll of pure and ageless story.
MACKENZIE BELL.
[3] See ‘In a Gondola,’ p. 136.
BYRON ON THE GRAND CANAL
We started together, Lord Byron and myself, in my little Milanese
vehicle, for Fusina,--his portly gondolier, Tito, in a rich livery and
most redundant mustachios.... As we proceeded across the lagoon in
his gondola, the sun was just setting, and it was an evening such as
Romance would have chosen for a first sight of Venice, rising with her
‘tiara of bright towers’ above the wave; while to complete, as might be
imagined, the solemn interest of the scene, I beheld it in company with
him who had lately given a new life to its glories, and sung of that
fair City of the Sea, thus grandly:
‘I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs.’
But, whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under
other circumstances, have inspired within me, the mood of the mind in
which I now viewed it was altogether the very reverse of what might
have been expected. The exuberant gaiety of my companion, and the
recollections--anything but romantic--into which our conversation
wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetic and historical
associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of
uninterrupted merriment and laughter, till we found ourselves at the
steps of my friend’s palazzo on the Grand Canal.
THOMAS MOORE.
BELOW THE RIALTO: MORNING
Could I but place the reader at the early morning on the quay below
the Rialto, when the market boats, full laden, float into groups of
golden colour; and let him watch the dashing of the water about their
glittering steely heads, and under the shadows of the vine leaves; and
show him the purple of the grapes and the figs, and the glowing of the
scarlet gourds carried away in long streams upon the waves; and among
them, the crimson fish baskets, plashing and sparkling, and flaming as
the morning sun falls on their wet tawny sides; and above, the painted
sails of the fishing boats, orange and white, scarlet and blue; and
better than all such florid colour, the naked, bronzed, burning limbs
of the seamen, the last of the old Venetian race, who yet keep the
right Giorgione colour on their brows and bosoms!
JOHN RUSKIN.
A VENETIAN MARKET
The gondola was waiting as usual at the corner; it took them but a
very little way, and landed them on the quay near the Rialto.... All
the pictures out of all the churches were buying and selling in this
busy market; Virgins went by, carrying their Infants; St. Peter is
bargaining his silver fish; Judas is making a low bow to a fat old
monk, who holds up his brown skirts and steps with bare legs into a
mysterious black gondola that has been waiting by the bridge, and
that silently glides away.... A girl came quietly through the crowd,
carrying her head nobly above the rest, and looking straight before
her with a sweet and generous face. ‘What a beautiful creature! Brava,
brava!’ shrieked Lady W. The girl hung her sweet head and blushed.
Titian’s mother, out of the ‘Presentation,’ who was sitting by with her
basket of eggs, smiled and patted the young Madonna on her shoulder.
‘They are only saying good things; they mean no harm,’ said the old
woman.... Then a cripple went along on his crutches; then came a
woman carrying a beautiful little boy, with a sort of turban round
her head.... One corner of the market was given up to great hobgoblin
pumpkins; tomatoes were heaped in the stalls; oranges and limes were
not yet over; but perhaps the fish-stalls are the prettiest of all.
Silver fish tied up in stars with olive-green leaves, golden fish, as
in miracles, with noble people serving. There are the jewellers’ shops
too, but their wares do not glitter so brightly as all this natural
beautiful gold and silver.
LADY RITCHIE.
A RIALTO SCENE
The traveller who delights to linger on St. Mark’s Place, in the
Basilica, at the Ducal Palace, in the museums and churches, should also
halt long and often at the Rialto. This is a corner with a character
quite its own; here crowd together, laden with fruit and vegetables,
the black boats that come from the islands to provision Venice,
the great hulls laden with _cocomeri_, _angurie_, with gourds and
water-melons piled in mountains of colour; there the gondolas jostle,
and the gondoliers chatter like birds in their Venetian idiom; there,
too, are the fishermen in their busy, noisy, black-looking market, an
assemblage of strange craft and strange types of humanity; and as a
pleasant contrast, on the steps of the bridge and stepping before the
jewellers’ shops, are girls from the different quarters of Venice,
from Canareggio, Dorso Duro, San Marco, and Sante Croce, and from
every corner of the town, come to buy the coloured handkerchiefs they
deck themselves in, and jewellery of delicately worked gold, or bright
glass beads from Murano, or glass balls iridescent with green, blue,
and pink; while, wrapped in old grey shawls and showing only their
wrinkled profiles and silver locks, the old women of the Rialto drag
their slippers up the steps, and glide among the crowd, hiding under
the folds of their aprons the strange fries they have just bought from
those keepers of open-air provision stalls who ply their trade on the
approaches to the Rialto.
CHARLES YRIARTE.
THE GRAND CANAL
It was not five o’clock before I was aroused by a loud din of voices
and splashing of water under my balcony. Looking out, I beheld the
Grand Canal so entirely covered with fruits and vegetables, on rafts
and in barges, that I could scarcely distinguish a wave. Loads of
grapes, peaches, and melons arrived, and disappeared in an instant,
for every vessel was in motion; and the crowds of purchasers, hurrying
from boat to boat, formed one of the liveliest pictures imaginable.
Amongst the multitudes I remarked a good many whose dress and carriage
announced something above the common rank; and upon inquiry I found
they were noble Venetians, just come from their casinos, and met to
refresh themselves with fruit, before they retired to sleep for the day.
Whilst I was observing them, the sun began to colour the balustrades of
the palaces, and the pure exhilarating air of the morning drawing me
abroad, I procured a gondola, laid in my provision of bread and grapes,
and was rowed under the Rialto, down the Grand Canal, to the marble
steps of S. Maria della Salute, erected by the Senate in performance
of a vow to the Holy Virgin, who begged off a terrible pestilence
in 1630. I gazed, delighted with its superb frontispiece and dome,
relieved by a clear blue sky. To criticize columns or pediments of the
different façades would be time lost; since one glance upon the worst
view that has been taken of them conveys a far better idea than the
most elaborate description. The great bronze portal opened whilst I was
standing on the steps which lead to it, and discovered the interior of
the dome, where I expatiated in solitude; no mortal appearing except an
old priest who trimmed the lamps, and muttered a prayer before the high
altar, still wrapped in shadows. The sunbeams began to strike against
the windows of the cupola just as I left the church, and was wafted
across the waves to the spacious platform in front of St. Giorgio
Maggiore, by far the most perfect and beautiful edifice my eyes ever
beheld.
When my first transport was a little subsided, and I had examined
the graceful design of each particular ornament, and united the just
proportion and grand effect of the whole in my mind, I planted my
umbrella on the margin of the sea, and reclining under its shade, my
feet dangling over the waters, viewed the vast range of palaces, of
porticos, of towers, opening on every side and extending out of sight.
The Doge’s residence and the tall columns at the entrance of the place
of St. Mark, form, together with the arcades of the public library, the
lofty Campanile and the cupolas of the ducal church, one of the most
striking groups of buildings that art can boast of. To behold at one
glance these stately fabrics, so illustrious in the records of former
ages, before which, in the flourishing times of the republic, so many
valiant chiefs and princes have landed, loaded with the spoils of
different nations, was a spectacle I had long and ardently desired. I
thought of the days of Frederic Barbarossa, when looking up the piazza
of St. Mark, along which he marched in solemn procession, to cast
himself at the feet of Alexander the Third, and pay a tardy homage
to St. Peter’s successor. Here were no longer those splendid fleets
that attended his progress; one solitary galeass was all I beheld,
anchored opposite the palace of the Doge, and surrounded by crowds
of gondolas, whose sable hues contrasted strongly with its vermilion
oars and shining ornaments. A party-coloured multitude was continually
shifting from one side of the piazza to the other; whilst senators and
magistrates in long black robes were already arriving to fill their
respective charges.
I contemplated the busy scene from my peaceful platform, where nothing
stirred but aged devotees creeping to their devotions; and, whilst I
remained thus calm and tranquil, heard the distant buzz and rumour
of the town. Fortunately a length of waves rolled between me and its
tumults; so that I ate my grapes, and read Metastasio, undisturbed by
officiousness or curiosity.
WILLIAM BECKFORD.
SOME VENETIAN PHASES
Venice ... is a poetical place; and classical, to us, from
Shakespeare and Otway.... Venice pleases me as much as I
expected, and I expected much. It is one of those places
which I know before I see them, and has always haunted me
the most, after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety of their
gondolas, and the silence of their canals. I do not even
dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the
singularity of its vanished costume.
LORD BYRON.
All the world repaire to Venice to see the folly and
madnesse of the Carnevall; the women, men, and persons of
all conditions disguising themselves in antiq dresses,
with extravagant musiq and a thousand gambols, traversing
the streetes from house to house, all places being there
accessible and free to enter. Abroad, they fling eggs
fill’d with sweete water.... The youth of the severall
wards and parishes contend in other masteries and pastimes,
so that ’tis impossible to recount the universal madnesse
of this place during this time of licence. The greate banks
are set up for those who will play bassett; the comedians
have liberty, and the operas are open; witty pasquils are
thrown about, and the mountebanks have their stages at
every corner.
JOHN EVELYN.
THE COLOUR OF VENICE
Venice is a delightful place for a man sick or well.... No noise, no
flies, no dust. An air so gentle that it could scarce be called a
breeze. A sun that warms and rarely burns: a light, veiled white and
soft, and lets one read without glare-made fatigue; a climate which
asks no man to do anything, and is answered affirmatively by all. So
we, too, should have been content not to do.
The more so that in Venice there is no monotony. Of all places on earth
it is the most variable in its moods. The changes in its colour are
as great from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, as in more
northern climes from month to month, or even from season to season.
This variableness, the despair of her studious student, is the joy of
her loitering lover. The painter finds a lovely subject, indeed they
are all around him, and goes from his first day’s work, and perhaps his
second, content that he has caught the tone that charmed him. Even as
he says so a change comes on that makes him doubtful of that work. The
golden light has become silver, the cool blue shadows are swimming in a
_cinque cento_ richness. He must alter his whole scheme of colour or go
home. The next day it may be worse, and he may wait for weeks for the
effect that he had not quite time to render. Thus it is that finished
studio-painted pictures of Venice so rarely tell of Venice to the man
who knows it, whilst the quick sketches made by the artist who can
see, and is possessed of the hand that can render, faithful to his eye
and taste, are so very lovely.
To the idle man this change of mood and colour is, or should be,
perfection. He should never tire, and rarely does so, of his fickle
mistress. He is floating to-day where he floated yesterday. The lagoon,
the island, the buildings are all the same, but how different. The
Euganean Hills, or perhaps the Alps, that spoke to him of Shelley, or
of snow, the distant line of terra-firma that held, as in a fine cut
frame, the steely lagoon waters, are now hidden in a mist of light.
The Ducal Palace, the Salute’s dome, that yesterday appeared clear and
earthly, the grand campanile of San Marco--alas! that it has fallen
a victim to its own weight and Time’s corrosion--the scarcely less
beautiful campanile of San Giorgio, whose clean outlines stood out so
sharply in the atmosphere of vivid blue, to-day all swim ethereal in
a golden haze. ’Tis all there, but a dream rather than a reality, a
spirit picture more than a motive for a sketch.
F. EDEN.
THE GLORY OF COLOUR IN ITALY
You learn for the first time in this Italian climate what colours
really are. No wonder it produces painters. An English artist of any
enthusiasm might shed tears of vexation to think of the dull medium
through which blue and red come to him in his own atmosphere, compared
with this. One day we saw a boat pass us, which instantly reminded us
of Titian, and accounted for him: and yet it contained nothing but an
old boatman in a red cap, and some women with him in other colours, one
of them in a bright yellow petticoat. But a red cap in Italy goes by
you, not like a mere cap, much less anything vulgar or butcher-like,
but like what it is, an intense specimen of the colour of red. It is
like a scarlet bud in the blue atmosphere. The old boatman, with his
brown hue, his white shirt, and his red cap, made a complete picture;
and so did the woman and the yellow petticoat. I have seen pieces of
orange-coloured silk hanging out against a wall at a dyer’s, which gave
the eye a pleasure truly sensual. Some of these boatmen are very fine
men. I was rowed to shore one day by a man the very image of Kemble. It
was really grand to see the mixed power and peacefulness with which all
his limbs came into play as he pulled the oars, occasionally turning
his heroic profile to give a glance behind him at other boats.
LEIGH HUNT.
VENICE THE UNFALLEN
The barge of the ambassador met them at Fusina, and when Venetia beheld
the towers and cupolas of Venice, suffused with a golden light and
rising out of the bright blue waters, for a moment her spirit seemed
to lighten. It is indeed a spectacle as beautiful as rare, and one to
which the world offers few, if any, rivals. Gliding over the great
lagoon, the buildings, with which the pictures at Cherbury had already
made her familiar, gradually rose up before her; the mosque-like Church
of St. Marc, the tall Campanile red in the sun, the Moresco Palace of
the Doges, the deadly Bridge of Sighs, and the dark structure to which
it leads.