VENICE
[Illustration:
_By permission of the late Thomas Threlfall, Esq._
THE CAMPANILE.]
VENICE
BY
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT
AND
MAY STURGE HENDERSON
ILLUSTRATED BY
REGINALD BARRATT
OF THE ROYAL WATER-COLOR
SOCIETY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1907
_Copyright, 1907_,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published, October, 1907
CONTENTS
_Page_
I
INTRODUCTORY 1
II
PHANTOMS OF THE LAGOONS 16
III
THE NUPTIALS OF VENICE 54
IV
VENICE IN FESTIVAL 74
V
A MERCHANT OF VENICE 98
VI
VENICE OF CRUSADE AND PILGRIMAGE 124
VII
TWO VENETIAN STATUES 160
VIII
VENETIAN WATERWAYS (PART I) 187
IX
VENETIAN WATERWAYS (PART II) 253
X
ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE 275
XI
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES 317
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Campanile _Frontispiece_
PAGE
View from the Gallery of San Marco 7
Santa Maria della Salute 23
The Clock Tower 37
Riva Degli Schiavoni 57
The Doorway of San Marco 71
View from Cà d’Oro 81
Courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale 91
San Giorgio 107
The Dogana 119
The Shadow of the Campanile 127
The Clock Tower from Gallery of San Marco 137
The Horses of San Marco, looking South 147
The Horses of San Marco, looking North 155
In the Piazza 175
View on the Grand Canal from San Angelo 189
Piazzetta, The Library 195
Corner of the Palazzo Dario 201
A Venetian Bridge 219
Palazzo Sanudo 231
A Side Canal 241
The Gondoliers’ Shrine 247
Entrance of the Grand Canal 257
View on the Grand Canal 269
Palazzo Rezzonico 281
Towards the Rialto San Angelo 291
Bronze Well-Head by Alberghetti--The Courtyard of Palazzo Ducale 305
Evening in the Piazzetta 313
A Palace Door 323
Zattere 331
VENICE
Chapter One
INTRODUCTORY
“Venice herself is poetry, and creates a poet out of the dullest clay.”
It was a poet who spoke, and his clay was instinct with the breath
of genius. But it is true that Venice lends wings to duller clay; it
has been her fate to make poets of many who were not so before--a
responsibility that entails loss on her as well as gain.
She has lived--she has loved and suffered and created; and the echoes
of her creation are with us still; the pulse of the life which once
she knew continues to throb behind the loud and insistent present. The
story of Venice has been often written; the Bride of the Adriatic,
in her decay as in her youthful and her mature beauty, has been the
beloved of many men. “Wo betide the wretch,” cries Landor through
the mouth of Machiavelli, “who desecrates and humiliates her; she
may fall, but she shall rise again.” Venice even then had passed her
zenith; the path she had entered, though blazing with a glory which
had not attended on her dawn of life, was yet a path of decline,
the resplendent, dazzling path of the setting sun. And now a second
Attilla, as Napoleon vaunted himself, has descended upon her. She has
been desecrated, but she has never been dethroned. She could not,
if she would, take the ring off her finger. No hand of man, however
potent, can destroy that once consummated union, however the stranger
and her traitor sons may abase her from within.
It is to her own domain, embraced by her mutable yet eternally faithful
ocean-lover, that we must still go to see the relics of her pomp. The
old sternness has passed from her face, that compelling sovereignty
which gave her rank among the greatest potentates of the Middle Age;
her features, portrayed by these latter days, are mellowed; a veil of
golden haze softens the bold outlines of that imperious countenance.
We are sometimes tempted to forget that the cup held by the enchanter,
Venice, was filled once with no dream-inducing liquor, but with a
strong potion to fire the nerves of heroes. Viewing Venice in her
greater days, it is impossible to make that separation between the
artist and the man of action so deadly to action and to art. The
portraits of the Venetian masters, supreme among the portraits
of the world, could only have been produced by men who beyond the
divine perception of form and colour were endowed with a profound
understanding and divination of human character. The pictures of
Gentile Bellini, of Carpaccio, of Mansueti, are a gallery of portraits
of stern, strong, capable, self-confident men; and Giovanni Bellini,
who turned from secular themes to concentrate his energy on the
portrayal of the Madonna and Child, endowed her with a strength and
solemn pathos which only Giotto could rival, combined with a luminous
richness of colour in which perhaps he has no rival at all.
No mystics have sprung from Venice. Her sons have been artists of
life, not dreamers, though the sea, that great weaver of dreams,
has been ever around them. Or rather it is truer to say that the
dreamers of Venice have also been men of action; strong, capable and
intensely practical. They have not turned their back on the practice
of life; they have loved it in all its forms. Even when they speak
through the medium of allegory, of symbols, the art of Carpaccio and
of Tintoretto is a supreme record of the interests of the greatest
Venetians in the actions of everything living in this wonderful world,
and in particular--they are not ashamed to own it--in their supremely
wonderful city of Venice. There are dreamers among those crowds of
Carpaccio, of Gentile Bellini; but their hands can grasp the weapons
and the tools of earth; their heads and hearts can wrestle with the
problems and passions of earth. Compare them with the dreamers of
Perugino’s school: you feel at once that a gulf lies between them; the
fabric of their dream is of another substance. The great Venetians
are giants; like the sea’s, their embrace is vast and powerful,
endowed also with the gentleness of strength. The history of Venetian
greatness in art, in politics, in theology, is the history of men who
have accepted life and strenuously devoted themselves to mastering
its laws. They were not iconoclasts, because they were not idolaters:
the faculties of temperance and restraint are apparent in their very
enthusiasms. Venice did not fall because she loved life too well, but
because she had lost the secret of living. Pride became to her more
beautiful than truth, and finally more worshipful than beauty.
Much has, with truth, been said about the destruction of Venice. Even
in those who have not known her as she was, who in presence of her
wealth remaining are unconscious of the greatness of her loss, there
constantly stirs indignant sorrow at the childish wantonness of her
inhabitants, which loves to destroy and asks only a newer and brighter
plaything. But much persists that is indestructible; and though Venice
has become a spectacle for strangers, for those who are her lovers the
old spirit lingers still near the form it once so gloriously inhabited,
wakened into being, perchance, by a motion, an echo, a light upon the
waters, and once wakened never again lost or out of mind. Does not
the silent swiftness of the Ten still haunt the sandolo of the water
police, as it steals in the darkness with unlighted lamp under the
shadow of larger craft moored beside the fondamenta, visible only when
it crosses the path of a light from house or garden? It is in her water
that Venice eternally lives; it is thus that we think always of her
image--elusive, unfathomable, though plumbed so often by no novice
hand. It is the wonder of Venice within her waters which justifies the
renewal of the old attempt to reconstruct certain aspects of a career
which has been a challenge to the world, a mystery on which it has
never grown weary of speculating. And as the light falling from a new
angle on familiar features may reveal some grace hidden heretofore
in shadow or unobserved, so, perchance, the vision of Venice may be
renewed or kindled through the medium of a new personality.
Venice is inexhaustible, and it is from her waters that her mine
of wealth is drawn. They give her wings; without them she would be
fettered like other cities of the land. But Venice with her waters is
never dead. The sun may fall with cruel blankness on calle, piazza
and fondamenta, but nothing can kill the water; it is always mobile,
always alive. Imagine the thoroughfare of an inland city on such a
day as is portrayed in Manet’s _Grand Canal de Venise_; heart and eye
would curse the sunshine. But in the luminous truth of Manet’s picture,
as in Venice herself, the heat quivers and lives. Above ground, blue
sky beating down on blue canal, on the sleepy midday motion of the
gondolas, on the brilliant blue of the striped gondola posts, which
appear to stagger into the water; and under the surface, the secret
of Venice, the region where reflections lurk, where the long wavering
lines are carried on in the deep, cool, liquid life below. When Venice
is weary, what should she do but dive into the water as all her
children do? If we look down, when we can look up no longer, still
she is there; a city more shadowy but not less real, her elements all
dissolved that at our pleasure we may build them again;
And so not build at all,
And therefore build for ever.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE GALLERY OF SAN MARCO.]
And if in the middle day we realise this priceless dowry of Venice, it
is in the twilight of morning or evening that her treasury is unlocked
and she invites us to enter. Turner’s _Approach to Venice_ is a vision,
a dream, but not more divinely lovely than the reality of Venice in
these hours, even as she appears to duller eyes. Pass down the Grand
Canal in the twilight of an August evening, the full moon already high
and pouring a lustre from her pale green halo on the broad sweeping
path of the Canal. The noble curves of the houses to west and south
shut out the light; day is past, the reign of night has begun. Then
cross to the Zattere: you pass into another day. A full tide flows
from east to west, blue and swelling like the sea, dyed in the west
a shining orange Where the Euganean hills rise in clear soft outline
against the afterglow, while to the east the moon has laid her silver
bridle upon the dim waters. Cross to the Giudecca and pass along the
narrow, crowded quay into the old palace, which in that deserted
corner shows one dim lamp to the canal. The great hall opens at the
further end on a bowery garden where a fountain drips in the darkness
and the cicalas begin their piping. Mount the winding stair, past the
kitchen and the great key-shaped reception room, and look out over the
city--across the whole sweep of the magnificent Giudecca Canal and the
basin of San Marco. The orange glow is fading and the Euganean hills
are dying into the night, while near at hand one great golden star is
setting behind the Church of the Redentore, and the moon shines with
full brilliance upon the swaying waters, upon the Ducal Palace and the
churches of the Zattere, with the Salute as their chief. The night of
Venice has begun; she has put on her jewels and is blazing with light.
At the back of the house, where the lagoons lie in the shimmering
moonlight, is a silent waste of waters under the stars, broken only
by the lights of the islands. This also is Venice, this mystery of
moonlit water no less than the radiance of the city. And it is possible
to come still nearer to the lagoon. Passing along a dark rio little
changed from the past, we may cross a bridge into one of the wonderful
gardens for which the Giudecca is famous. The families of the Silvi,
Barbolini and Istoili, banished in the ninth century for stirring up
tumult in the Republic, when at last they were recalled by intercession
of Emperor Ludovico, inhabited this island of Spinalunga or Giudecca
and laid out gardens there. This one seems made for the night. The
moonlight streams through the vine pergolas which cross it in every
direction, lights the broad leaves of the banana tree and the dome
of the Salute behind the dark cypress-spire, and stars the grass with
shining petals. The night is full of the scent of haystacks built along
the edge of the lagoon, beside the green terrace which runs the length
of the water-wall. Then, as darkness deepens, we leave to the cicalas
their moonlit paradise, and glide once more into the Grand Canal. It is
at this hour, more than at any other, that, sweeping round the curves
of that marvellous waterway, it possesses us as an idea, a presence
that is not to be put by, so compelling, so vitally creative, is its
beauty. Truly Venice is poetry, and would create a poet out of the
dullest clay.
Every one will remember that a few years ago an enterprising man of
business attempted with sublime self-confidence to transfer Venice to
London, to enclose her within the walls of a great exhibition. Many
of us delighted in the miniature market of Rialto, in gliding through
the narrow waterways, in the cry of the gondoliers, and the sound of
violin and song across the water. But one gift in the portion of Venice
was forgotten, a gift which she shares indeed with other cities, but
which she alone can put out to interest and increase a thousandfold.
The sky is the roof of all the world, but Venice alone is paved with
sky; and the streets of Venice with no sky above them are like the
wings of the butterfly without the sun. Tintoret and Turner saw Venice
as the offspring of sky and water: that is the spirit in which they
have portrayed her; that is the essence of her life. It has penetrated
everything she has created of enduring beauty. Go into San Marco and
look down at what your feet are treading. Venice, whose streets are
paved with sky, must in her church also have sky beneath her feet. It
is impossible to imagine a more wonderful pavement than the undulating
marbles of San Marco; its rich and varied colours bound together
with the rarest inspiration; orient gems captured and imprisoned and
constantly lit with new and vivid beauty from the domes above. The
floor of San Marco is one of the glories of Venice--of the world; and
it is surely peculiarly expressive of the inspiration which worked in
Venice in the days of her creative life. San Marco, indeed, in its
superb and dazzling harmonies of colour, is almost the only living
representative of the Venice of pomegranate and gold which created
the Cà d’Oro, of the City of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, whose
cornice-mouldings were interwoven with glittering golden thread,
while every side canal gave back a glow of colour from richly-tinted
walls. The banners of the Lion in the Piazza no longer wave in solemn
splendour of crimson and gold above a pavement of pale luminous red; in
their place the tricolour of Italy flaunts over colourless uniformity.
The gold is fading from the Palace of the Doges, and only in a few rare
nooks, such as the Scuola of the Shoemakers in the Campo San Tomà,
do we find the original colours of an old relief linger in delicate
gradation over window or door.
Day after day some intimate treasure is torn from the heart of Venice.
Since Ruskin wrote, one leaf after another has been cut from the Missal
which “once lay open upon the waves, miraculous, like St. Cuthbert’s
book, a golden legend on countless leaves.” Those leaves are numbered
now. Year by year some familiar object disappears from bridge or
doorway, to be labelled and hoarded in a distant museum among aliens
and exiles like itself. And here, in Venice itself, a sentiment of
distress, the _fastidio_ of the Italians, comes over us as we ponder
upon the sculptured relics in the cortile of the Museo Civico. What
meaning have they here? It is atmosphere that they need--the natural
surroundings that would explain and vivify their forms. Many also of
the Venetian churches are despoiled, and their paintings hung side
by side with alien subjects in a light they were never intended to
bear. The Austrian had less power to hurt Venice than she herself
possesses. In those of her sons who understand her malady there flows
an undercurrent of deep sadness, as if day by day they watched the
ebbing of a life in which all their hope and all their love had root.
They cannot sever themselves from Venice: they cannot save her. Venice
pretending to share in the vulgar life of to-day, Venice recklessly
discarding one glory after another for the poor exchange of coin, still
has a power over us not wielded by the inland cities of Italy, happier
in the untroubled beauty of their decay. For, as you are turning with
sorrow from some fresh sign of pitiless destruction, of a sudden she
will flash upon you a new facet of her magic stone, will draw you
spell-bound to her waters and weave once more that diaphanous web of
radiant mystery:
Za per dirtelo,--o Catina,
La campagna me consola;
Ma Venezia è la sola
Che me possa contentar.
Each of us, face to face with Venice, has a new question to ask of her,
and, as he alone framed the question, the answer will be given to him
alone. Every stone has not yielded up its secret: in some there may
still be a mark yet unperceived beneath the dust. Here and there in her
manuscript there may lurk between the lines a word for the skilled or
the fortunate. Venice is not yet dumb: every day and every night the
sun and moon and star make music in her that has not yet been heard:
with patience and love we may redeem here and there a chord of those
divine musicians, or at least a tone which shall make her harmony more
full.
O Venezia benedetta,
No te vogio più lassar.
Chapter Two
PHANTOMS OF THE LAGOONS
We have called them the phantoms of the lagoons, those islands that
lie like shadows among the silver waters; for it is in this likeness
that they appear to us of the city--strangely mirrored, remote, a group
of clustering spirits, whose common halo is the sea. They are a choir
of spirits, yet each has a mute music of its own, and accosting them
one by one--slowly and in the silence entering into their life--we may
come to know and love the several members of this company of the blest,
till our senses grow alive to their harmony as they sing together,
sometimes in the clear, cold light of the spreading dawn, sometimes in
the evening twilight--when peak after peak is lit with the flame of
sacrifice and, in the Titanic memory of the sunset cloud, the great
fire lit on earth burns up with solemn flames into the sky.
All the languors, the fierce passions, of Venice, her vitality and
her mysticism, are mirrored in the lagoons; there is no pulse of
Venice that does not beat in them; in swift sequence, as in a lighter
element, they reflect the phases of her being. And the islands of the
lagoons are, as it were, the footsteps of young Venice. As she was
passing into her kingdom, she set her feet here and there among the
waters, and where she trod a life was born. Her roots are far back in
the past, far up upon the mainland, where still remain some fragments
of the giant growth, which, grafted in the lagoons, was to expand there
into a new fulness of beauty and life. It is as if the genius that
conceived Jesolo, Torcello, the Madonna of San Donato, had undergone
a sea-change as it moved towards the Adriatic, as if some vision had
passed before it and shaken it, as if the immutable had felt the first
touch of mutability--had been endowed with a new sense born of the
ebb and flow of ocean tides. In Malamocco she stepped too near the
sea, and left behind the mystery of a city submerged; but no one can
receive into his mind the peerless blue and green of the open water
beyond the Lido, with the foam upon it, or the sound of its incessant
sweep against the shore, without feeling that the spirit that had thus
embraced the sea had received a new pulse into her being--a nerve of
desire, of expansion, of motion, which her mountain infinitudes had
not inspired. And with the new life came new dreams to Venice, dreams
she was not slow to realise, and into them were woven materials for
which we should seek in vain among the islands, except in so far as
the reflex of her later activities fell also upon them. The Madonna of
San Donato is the goddess of the lagoons; and if there are children of
Venice who creep also for blessing and for protection to the borders of
her dusky garment, they are but few. The mystic beauty of that Madonna
was not the beauty that inspired Venice when she built upon the seas.
The robe of her divinity was more akin to the dazzling incomparable
blue of the bay that lies within the curve of the Schiavoni, as we
may see it from the Palazzo Ducale on a morning of sunshine and east
wind; that indomitable intensity of colour, unveiled, resplendent,
filled to the brim with the whole radiance and strength and glory of
the day--that is the girdle of Venice, the cup she drank of in her
strength. But it is clear that she had bowed to a new dominion: with
the ocean she wedded the world.
The lagoons are full of mysteries of light; they are a veritable
treasure ground of illusion. They are not one expanse of water over
which the light broods with equable influence; they form a region
of various circles, as it were, of various degrees of remoteness or
tangibility. Almost one feels that each circle must be inhabited by
a spirit appropriate to itself, and that a common language could not
be between them, so sharp are the limits set by the play of light.
On an early autumn morning when the sky is clear and the sun streams
full and level upon the clear blue expanse that separates Venice and
Mestre, we seem to have a firm foothold on this dancing water. It is
a substantial glory; but as our eye flits on from jewel to jewel in
the clear blue paving, a sudden line is drawn beyond which it may not
pass. The rich flood of vital colour has its bound, and beyond it
lies a region bathed in light so intense that even colour is refined
into a mystic whiteness--a mirror of crystal, devoid of substance,
infinitely remote; and above it, suspended in that lucent unearthly
atmosphere, hover the towers of Torcello and Burano, like a mirage
of the desert, midway between the water and the sky. They hang there
in completest isolation, yet with a precise definition, a startling
clearness of contour. There is no vestige of other buildings or of the
earth on which they stand, only the dome and campanile of Murano, the
leaning spire of Burano and Mazzorbo’s lightning-blasted tower, their
reflections distinctly mirrored in a luminous medium, half mist, half
water. There is an immense awe in the vision of these phantoms, caught
up into a region where the happy radiant colour dares not play; and
yet not veiled--clearer in what they choose to reveal than the near
city strong and splendid in the unreserve of the young day, but so
unearthly, so magical, that our morning spirits scarcely dare accost
them. What boat shall navigate that shining nothingness that divides
them from our brave and brilliant water?
Venice, indeed, at times falls under the phantom spell. In those
mornings of late autumn when the duel between the sun and the scirocco
seems as if it could not end till day is done and night calls up
her reinforcements of mist, Venice is herself the ghost, her goblet
brimming with a liquor that seems the drink of death, a perilous, grey,
steely vapour. One only of her islands looms out of the enfolding,
foggy blanket: it is San Michele, the island of the dead. On such a
morning we may visit this abode of shadows, not at this hour more
strange, more ghostly, than the city. To-day a veil is hung upon the
hard, bare outline of its boundary wall, which in sunny weather is a
glaring eye-sore as you travel towards Murano over the lagoon. Here,
in the cloisters where once Fra Mauro dreamed and studied his famous
Mappamondo, there is nothing to terrify the spirit on this morning
of the mist. The black and tinsel drapings, the strange, unprofitable
records of devotion and bereavement, the panoply of death--all these
are veiled, and only the wild grasses glisten with their dewdrops on
the graves of the very poor, or autumn leaves and flowers gleam from
less humble graves, while the cypresses raise their solemn spires
into the faintly dawning blue. But the cemetery island of San Michele
together with the islands of the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore,
of San Pietro di Castello and Sant’ Elena, with many lesser islands
close to Venice, have become absorbed for us in the life of the city
itself. Their bells and hers sound together; we see them as one with
her, and from them look out to the wider lagoon, where the remoter
islands, the true phantoms, wander. Many of those near to Venice have
had their vicissitudes, their sometime glorious past, their pomp and
solemn festival. But, bit by bit, it has been stolen from them, and
the treasures which once they stored have been destroyed or gathered
into the city. Now they serve only as shelters for those whose life
is done--as places of repose for the dead or for the sick in mind and
body. One only has passed from humble service into a fuller and happier
present. San Lazzaro, once the shelter of lepers from the East, has
become under the Armenian Benedictines a haunt of active, cultured
life. It has a living industry, printing the ancient trade of Venice,
and is in daily commerce with the East.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE.]
Torcello is a _città morta_, but scarcely a cemetery or a ruin. Relics
of a past older than even Torcello has known are gathered into the
humble urn of her museum; beside it stands abandoned, but not in ruins,
the group of the cathedral buildings and the vast secular campanile;
beyond this there is nothing but the soil--the golden gardens of vine
and pomegranate, the fields of maize and artichokes between their
narrow canals. The intervening period has entirely vanished; it is like
a dream. The page of populous palatial Torcello has been blotted out as
if it had had no existence. No vestige remains of the churches which in
the old maps flourished along the chief canal, of the names which in
the documents have no unsubstantial sound. None now can remember the
time when the spoiler was busy among the ruined palaces; he too has
passed into the shadows, and the very stones of Torcello are scattered
far and wide. There is something mysterious in this complete wiping out
of a page of history, so that not time only, but even the mourners of
time have disappeared. There is something unique in the isolation of
the cathedral and the campanile, rising thus out of the far past--this
mighty masonry alone among the herbs of the field. Of her great history
Torcello brings only the first page and the last, the duomo, the
peasants’ houses and the thatch shelters of their boats. Wandering
along the grassy paths beside the vineyards, the pomegranates, the
golden thorn bushes of Torcello, we seem in a sleepy pastoral land
where the sun always shines. Torcello seems ripe, rich ground for a new
life rather than the cemetery of an old; and we may feed the fancy as
we will, for she does not refuse her doom; she has no hard contrasts of
the old and new.
The few natives whom foreign gold supports upon this island of malaria,
have their chief haunts in the cathedral campo, keeping guard over
the treasures of the past. For here upon the campo stands the urn
where Torcello keeps the ashes of her ancestors--strange relics of old
Altinum, pathetic household gods, forks and spoons and safety-pins,
keys and necklaces, lamps and broken plates and vases, chains and
girdles and mighty bracelets, some of delicate and some of coarser
make, with more ambitious works of mosaic and relief, Greek and Roman
and Oriental. There is little in all; yet as we stand here in the
museum, looking out through the sunny window on the hazy autumn
gold of earth and the shimmering water beyond, this little speaks
eloquently to the mind. Even to Torcello, the aged, these things are
ancestral; their life was in the old Altinum when Torcello lay still
undreamed-of in the womb of time. Climb the campanile, and you will
wonder no more at the passing of the city at its feet; it is so mighty,
so self-contained and now so voiceless with any tongue that earth can
hear and understand; almost it seems as if that iron clapper, lying
mute below the bell, were symbol of Torcello’s farewell to the busy
populous world that needs the call to prayer. The great tower is given
up to mighty musings, and we upon its summit speculate no more on the
forgotten Middle Age; we are content in the golden earth beneath our
feet, in the soft dreamy azure of the encircling lagoon, where in the
low tide the deep tracks wind and writhe like glistening water-snakes,
or lie, like the faint transparent veining of a leaf, upon that smooth
expanse of interchanging marsh and water, the uncertain dominion over
which Torcello towers. For the campanile, in its vast simplicity of
structure, its loneliness, its duration, is of kin with those great
sentinels of the desert in which the Egyptians embodied their giant
dreams of power. It is here that the soul of Torcello still abides, to
dream out upon the mystery of day and night to the mountains and the
city and the sea. And even if the sunlight is rich and jubilant in the
yellow fields below, where the autumn has such fitting habitation, it
spreads upon the waters a broad path of silver that gleams mysteriously
like moonlight upon the distant spaces of the ocean shield, waking
points of light out of the immense surrounding dimness. And it is most
of all in the deep night that the gulf of the centuries may be bridged.
The monotonous piping of the cicalas rises even to this height in
the darkness, but no other sound is heard. It is a strangely moving,
melancholy landscape, half hidden, half revealed, still holding in
its patient, silent heart the tragic sorrows, the hopes and shattered
longings, the courageous struggle of the past ages, the fierce cry of
desolation, the flames of cities doomed to destruction in the darkness
of night, and their ruins outspread beneath the unsparing sun. It has
lain now so long deserted, a presence from which the stream of life has
flowed away, carrying with it all the agitations of joy and sorrow,
that among the fluctuating marshes the key for its deciphering has been
lost.
As we have said, whole pages are torn from the history of Torcello.
Fragments only remain. But here and there is a word or two that may
be gathered into a sentence. If we approach the island from the east,
by the waterway between Sant’ Erasmo and Tre Porti instead of by the
narrow channels of the inner lagoon, we may receive some impression
of the relation it once bore to the mainland. We may see how Torcello
stands as the entrance of the lagoon north of Venice, the last outpost
of the mainland, the first-fruits of a new career--recognise that she
was once through the Portus Torcellus in closest touch with the high
seas. In the ninth century it was one Rustico of Torcello who combined
with Buono of Malamocco to carry the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria
to Venice. In 1268 Torcello is specially mentioned by da Canale among
the “Contrees, que armerent lor navie, et vindrent a lor signor Mesire
Laurens Teuple (Lorenzo Tiepolo) li haut Dus de Venise, et a Madame la
Duchoise” on the occasion of Tiepolo’s election. Torcello contributed
three galleys completely equipped for the Genoese war, and in 1463 sent
one hundred crossbowmen in the service of the Republic against Trieste.
What is left of this city, which shared the early glory if not the
later pomp of Venice? Where are her palaces, her gardens, her bridges,
her waterways? Where are her piazzas and calles and fondamentas, her
churches and rich convents? We pass their names in the old chronicles:
Piazza del Duomo, Rio Campo di San Giovanni, Fondamenta dei Borgognoni,
Calle Santa Margherita, Fondamenta Bobizo, Ponte di Chà Delfino, Ponte
de Pino, and the rest. Many of these were of very old foundation: their
stones and traces of their construction have been discovered from time
to time under the mud of the canals. In the poor houses of the peasants
traces still remain of original windows, cornices and pillars; the main
canal is still spanned by the beautiful ruined bridge of the Diavolo.
But for the rest the grass piazza with its little group of buildings,
its museum flanked by the cathedral, is the sole echo, itself no more
than an echo of the past.
When Altinum and her neighbouring cities roused themselves from the
crushing desolation of conquest which had driven them forth to the
remote borders of the mainland, they began to desire to live anew
in the lagoons. There is no reason to question Dandolo’s statement
that Torcello and the group of surrounding islands, Burano, Mazzorbo,
Constanziana, Amoriana and Ammiana, were named from the gates of
Altinum--a pathetic attempt to perpetuate the ruined city. Nuovo Altino
was indeed the name for Torcello, and when the terror of invasion had
momentarily passed, the fugitives ventured back to the mainland, and
brought down to the soft-soiled island the stones of their ancient
city. Torcello was built from the stones of Altinum; her very stones
were veterans, the stamp of old times was upon them, the stamp of
thoughts that were often sealed for those men of a later day who built
them anew into their temples. The steps up to the pulpit in the duomo
are perhaps the most striking instance of this ingrafting of the old
upon the new, the naïve earnestness, perhaps the urgent haste and need
of builders who did not fear to set an old pagan relief to do service
in this temple of their Christian God. There are various theories as
to the meaning of the wonderful relief which forms the base of the
pulpit stair, cut like its companion slabs to meet the requirements
of the stair without regard to its individual existence. We cannot
help pausing before it; for it is unique among the monuments of the
estuary, so unique that it seems incredible it should have been the
work of those late Greek artists who executed the wonderful beasts
and birds of the sanctuary screen. On the right is a woman’s figure,
of Egyptian rather than Greek or Roman mould, standing with averted
face and head resting on her arms, in melancholy thought. Beside her
a man, like her resigned and meditative in attitude, but not yet with
the resignation of despair, raises his left arm as if to ward off a
blow. The blow is dealt left-handed by one who in his right hand holds
a pair of scales and advances swiftly on winged wheels. He, again,
is met in his advance by a fourth figure whom we only see in part,
his right side having been almost completely cut away. He is fronting
us, however--his feet planted firmly on the ground, his right hand
folded on his breast, while with his left he grasps the forelock of
the impetuous figure of the winged wheels and balances. Thanks to the
happy discovery by Professor Cattaneo of part of the fragment missing
to the design, we know that a woman’s figure stood beyond him, holding
in her left hand a palm and in her right a crown which she raises to
the stalwart conqueror’s head. It is a simple but daring and most
spirited composition. It seems to belong to a far remoter past than
that of the earliest building of Torcello. Professor Cattaneo explains
it as an allegory of the passage of Time, who on his winged wheels has
already passed one man by, as he stands stroking his beard, while
tears and sorrow await him in the form of the woman on his right in
mourning guise and posture; the stalwart man on the left is he who
faces Time and takes him by the forelock, and for him the crown and
palm of victory are in waiting. But Professor Cattaneo seems to give a
needlessly limited significance to the idea of Time. It is to him the
Time which God offers to man that he may do what is just and combat his
own evil passions; this seems to him to be expressed by the scales and
the stick he grasps in his hand. Perhaps it is enough to think merely
of the club as that with which a more familiar Time is wont to deal
back-handed blows at those who are so idle or so sluggish as to let him
pass. At any rate the men of Torcello could comprehend this language
of the rough stone. What matter if the oracles were dumb? Which of
them had not wept to see the face of Time averted, which of them had
not felt the weight of his backward blow? And yet this symbol of old
Time must have been mute to them before the great solemn Madonna in
the dusky, golden circle of the apse; she looks beyond all fortunes
and vicissitudes of man. How should they dare to pray to her? Worship
they may, and rise with strength to contend with Time and conquer
him, with a weapon to face the mystery of life; but they meet here no
smile of comfort, no companionable grace. To those men who dreamed this
figure, to us who look upon her and worship, the dominion of Time is a
forgotten thing; we ask no pity for our human woes; they have passed,
they have crumbled: she gives us a better gift than pity, insight into
the hidden things of life and of art; she wings with hope, if with
stern hope, our dream of beauty. The mosaics on the west wall of the
cathedral have the same stern character, with less of beauty than the
Madonna of the apse: the great angels on either side the weird central
Christ in the upper division have a strangely oriental effect. They
might be Indian gods. They hold the Christian symbols, but with how
abstracted, how remote a gaze they look out from their aureoles! They
are at one with the noble simplicity and strength and greatness of the
spirit of the building they adorn. Somehow they seem to us the oldest
thing within it; we begin to be drawn by them into mysteries older
than the caves of Greece whence the pillars of this duomo came; we
begin to share their watch over a vast desert where all the faiths and
imaginings of men may move and mingle, and find a common altar under
the dome of the evening sky.
Greater than Torcello, and still maintaining, as near neighbour to
Venice, something of its old activities, Murano lives, none the less,
a phantom life. We would choose, as a fitting atmosphere for Murano, a
day of delicate lights and pale, lucent water, with faint fine tints
within the water and the sky: a day of the falling year, not expectant,
only acceptant, pausing in the dim quiet of its decay. Even the hot
sunshine, though it irradiates the features of Murano, cannot penetrate
to that spent heart. The marvellous fascination of its Grand Canal,
with its swift and unaccustomed current of blue waters, cannot draw us
from the sadness, or disperse the spectral melancholy which invades the
spirit and surrounds it as an atmosphere. The sun infects the dirty
children with a desire to shine, and prompts somersaults for a soldino;
but the weary women, the old, crouching men, still creep about the
fondamenta impervious to his rays. Murano is not less disinherited, not
less phantasmal, because the daylight comes to pierce the semblance of
her life. It is strangely invasive and possessing, this sentiment of a
life outlived, a body whose soul is fled. The long vine gardens that
spread to the lagoon, dispossessed, but still apparently doing service
and rich in vegetables and fruit, seem as if they would persuade us
of their reality; but their walls are ruined, their ways are low and
narrow; it was not thus they looked when Bembo and Navagero paced here
in an earthly paradise, a haunt of nymphs and demigods. The living
population of Murano seems to have fallen under the same spell. If
we bestow on them more than a cursory glance as we pass along the
fondamenta, we seem to detect in their faces an indescribable sense of
weariness and sorrow and decay. There seem many old among them, and on
the young toil and privation have already laid their hand. The strange
habitual chant of priest and women and young girls, going up from
tired nerveless throats in the twilight of San Pietro Martire, seemed
a symbol of the voice of Murano, melancholy, mechanical, the phantom
of a voice--an echo struck with the hand or by a breath of wind from
a fallen instrument, an instrument that has lost its virtue and its
ring, an instrument unstrung. We have seen Murano in festa. She can
pay her tribute to free Italy. Ponte Lungo was hung with lamps, and
the desolate campi had their share in the illumination. In the very
piazza of San Donato a hawker was winding elastic strings of golden
treacle, while women and children in gay dresses hurried to and fro.
In another square, under the clock tower, a demagogue addressed the
crowd excitedly: there was plentiful noise, plentiful determination to
enjoy. The campanile looked down and wondered. _O Roma o morte._ Had
it been Rome then and not death? Rome and freedom, freedom to destroy
the historic and the old? It was a grand triumph, a triumph justly
commemorated, and yet the conquerors themselves might grieve over the
Italy of to-day. Mazzini, we know, struck a note of melancholy out of
that proud exultation. Italy, if she lives, lives among ruins, and for
the most part she is careless of her decay.
[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER.]
Murano, like Torcello, is bound by one glorious link with her Byzantine
past, and this one of the noblest monuments, not of the lagoons only,
but of all Italy; simple, stern, august. San Donato has not, indeed,
gone unscathed by time, nor by modernity. The wonders of its pavement
are becoming blackened and obscured; holes are being worn in it,
missing cubes leave gaps in the design. In winter it is constantly
flooded by high tide, and even in other seasons the damp is ruining
a pavement which rivals, if it does not surpass, that of San Marco.
It is impossible to describe the beauty of the designs, the exquisite
harmonics of its precious marbles, porphyry and verd-antique, Verona,
serpentine and marmo greco, with noble masses of colour among the
smaller fragments, and a most precious gem of chalcedony, which, if we
may believe the poor old sacristan, whose complaints concerning his
precious floor wake no response, an English visitor would have wished
to steal. The sacristan can show to all who will lament with him the
ruin wrought by sacrilegious man. But no profane hand has dared to
raise itself against the Madonna of the apse. This Madonna of San
Donato is even grander, more august, than that other who in Torcello
conquers Time, and surely it is not without reason that we have called
her the goddess of the lagoons. In perfect aloofness and secrecy she
stands, but with luminous revelation in her strangely significant eyes;
her white hands uplifted, her white face shining out of the darkness,
the long, straight folds of her dark robe worked with gold, her feet
resting, it seems, upon a golden fire. The gaze of this marvellous
Madonna seems to comprehend the world. She is a sphinx who holds the
key of every mystery. In her presence we are overcome by the impulse to
kneel and worship. She is not, like many Byzantine Madonnas, grotesque,
forbidding in her immensity, in her aloofness; for even while she
rebukes and subdues our littleness of soul, she draws all our senses as
a being of absolute, inexplicable beauty. She holds us rapt and will
not let us go. The memory of the Duomo of San Donato is concentrated in
the single magical figure of her Madonna, leaning in benediction from
the golden apse.
Murano is full of corners where Gothic and Byzantine have combined to
beautify portico, pillar and arch. In the Asilo dei Vecchii are two of
the most ancient fireplaces known in Venice, and at Venice fireplaces
were very early in use. One is a deep square hollowed in the wall, and
furnished with doors that shut upon it like a panelling, while two
little windows, as usual, open out behind. The other projects into the
room, with sloping roof and little seats within on either side. Murano,
it is well known, was the pleasure-ground of the Venetians in happier
days; it was here that the men of the Great Republic had their gardens
elect for solace and for beauty. But with the Republic Murano fell; the
patrimonies of the patricians were scattered--gradually their palaces
were snatched away, piece by piece, and fell into irrecoverable ruin.
One only now retains some image of its former splendour, the famous Cà
da Mula, upon the fine sweep of the Grand Canal. The Madonna of San
Donato has looked down on the spoliation of her temple; she still looks
on its slow decay. She has shared the proud sorrows of the campanile;
in colloquy through the night what may he not have told of the passing
of Murano? They have little, these solemn guardians of the past, in
common with the exuberant Renaissance, but perhaps a common fate, the
unifying hand of Time, may have bound their spirits in a confraternity
of grief. The heart of the old campanile would be stirred with pity
for the fate of those deserted palaces, the sublime Madonna would turn
an eye not of scorn but of sorrow on the fading forms of those radiant
women, so splendid on the frescoed palace fronts, so alluring in the
smooth mirror of the canal. The work of the spoiler, so far as it was a
work of violence, of a human spoiler, is done; but the slower work of
nature still proceeds.
Long before Murano became a Venetian pleasure-ground, she had been
famous for her painters, for her ships, for her furnaces. Like
Torcello, she sent vessels to the triumph of the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo,
and she was conspicuous among the others, as da Canale says: “For you
must know that those of Murano had on their vessels living cocks, so
that they might be known and whence they came.” Molmenti thinks that
Carpaccio himself belonged to a shipbuilding family of Murano, and
this is the more interesting in view of the frequency and detail of
shipping operations in his pictures. Murano was indeed the birthplace
of Venetian art, and the riches of its furnaces glow in the garments
of those early painters, Vivarini, Andrea and Quirico. From the end
of the eleventh century the glass works had begun to flourish; by the
thirteenth the industry was transferred wholly to Murano. The legend
runs that a certain Cristoforo Briani, hearing from Marco Polo of
the monopoly of agates, chalcedony and other precious stones on the
coast of Guiana, set about imitating them. With Domenico Miotto to
help him he succeeded, and the latter carried the art to still greater
perfection, which resulted at last in the imitation of the pearl.
In 1528 Andrea Vidoare received a special mariegola or charter for
the fame of his wonderful pearls, polished and variegated by him to
a degree unknown before. In the middle of the fifteenth century the
first crystals came from the furnaces, and the following century was
the golden period of the art--a period coinciding with the greatest
patrician glory of the island. Murano still burns with its secular
fire, winning from the old world its secrets, the old, wise world that
worshipped fire, to fuse them once more in its crucible for the wonder
of the new; secrets of crystal, pearl and ruby, and of the blue of the
deepest ocean depths or the impenetrable night sky, imprisoning them
in those transparent cenotaphs in forms of infinite harmony and grace.
And it is not only in the revival of ancient memories and forgotten
mysteries that the furnaces of Murano play their part; they contribute
also to the present renewal of Venice: for it is here that the units of
the mosaicist’s art are made. In Murano is laid the foundation-stone
of its success--the quality of the colour, the depth and richness of
the gold. The period of decadence in the Venetian arts is accurately
reflected in its mosaics; with the decadence of conception we note also
the decadence of colour. Those hard blatant tones that characterise the
late mosaics of San Marco are records, too permanent, alas! of a time
when the furnaces had lost their cunning, or rather when the master
minds were blunted and the secret of the ancient colourists allowed to
lie unquestioned under the dust of time.