by. It lies away from the furnaces devoted to rare and subtle texture
and design, behind San Pietro Martire, among the gardens: a manufactory
of common glass for daily use, tumblers and water-bottles and other
humble ware. Here there is the swift operation of machinery, at least
among the coarser glasses, and a noise of the very inferno with
countless sweating fiends--little black-faced grinning boys, grateful
for a package full of grapes or juicy figs; there is little mystery
in the production of this coarser glass, or rather few of the obvious
accessories of mystery, the delicate slow fashioning, the infusion
of colours. Instead, the constant noise of machinery, deafening and
exhausting in its incessant motion, though even here the reign of
machinery is limited: the finer tumblers must go a longer journey to be
filed by a slower, more gradual process, the direct handiwork of man.
There is an upper circle to which we gladly pass from this inferno,
almost a paradise if we contrast it with the turmoil and heat below;
to reach it we pass by the troughs of grey sand which all day men are
trampling with the soles of their bare feet, to mould into fit temper
for the furnace. The floor of the room above is covered and the walls
lined with strange creations of cold, grey earth, fashioned by hand,
roll after roll of clay, ungainly forms to be inhabited by fire. This
upper attic, with its company of mute grey moulds, opens out upon the
vineyards of Murano, with water shimmering through the long golden
alleys, and the city visible beyond. The gardens of the Palazzo da Mula
and of San Cipriano are beside us. The bustle of the new world has
invaded the peaceful seclusion of a spot once sacred to the student
aristocracy of Venice.
For this island, famed for so glorious an industry, was beloved and
honoured by the noblest of Venetian names, Trifone Gabriele and Pietro
Bembo and Andrea Navagero. Here Navagero founded one of the first
botanic gardens of Europe--“a terrestrial paradise, a place of nymphs
and demigods”; here Gabriele wandered for hours under the thick vine
pergola walled with jessamine against the sun. And it was not only as
a temporary pleasure-ground that they loved Murano: they clung to it
as their resting-place in death. Bernardo Giustiniani desired to be
buried by his palace, at the foot of Ponte Lungo, and Andrea Navagero
in the church of San Martino in the same quarter where his house was
built. Murano was honoured by at least one royal guest. It was here
that Henry III of France, on his passage through Venice from Polonia,
was given his first lodging, and the palace which witnessed the first
transports of this rapturous monarch, the palace of Bartolomeo Capello,
still exists, close beside the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, at
the extreme western point of the city. It would thus form the most
convenient landing-place, besides commanding a view of extreme beauty;
to the left, the fine torrent-like sweep of the chief canal, with the
noble Cà da Mula a little lower on the opposite bank and its gardens
immediately over the water; Venice filling the horizon clear across
the lagoon, where the south curve of Murano ends to-day in a meadow
of rough grass and fragrant herbs; to the right the Convent of the
Angeli, leading on the eye across the lagoon to the mainland and the
distant mountains beyond. Traces of fresco remain on the outer walls
of the palazzo, and the upper hall still stretches through the whole
breadth of the house. It is on the balcony of this central hall that
Henry must have stood when he appeared before dinner to gratify the
crowds on the fondamenta and in the boats below. The view of Venice in
the evening light is exquisitely lovely, with the lagoon spread like a
mirror to reflect the delicate opaline of the sunset sky. In this hall
hung with cloth of gold and cremosine, and perhaps with the colours of
Veronese, looking over a paradise of gardens and water to the immortal
city, Henry kept his court, received the legates from the Pope and said
a thousand graceful things about His Holiness, rejoiced the natives by
his noble bearing, his perfumed gloves, his frank pleasure in their
tribute, his decision to go on foot to the Angeli to morning Mass.
Thus was he initiated to the magical city and its enchantments by
that wise providence of the Venetians, who made their islands always
stepping-stones, outer courts of the central shrine, where their
pilgrim must pause awhile to shake the dust of the mainland off his
feet, that the spell might permeate his being and fill his senses with
desire.
The fondamenta below Henry’s palace, leading to the church of the
Angeli, is one of the most desolate in Murano; the wide green campo
of the cemetery which opens from it is deserted and bare, save for a
few fowls that humbly commemorate the proud old shield. The dirt of
the children is indescribable, as they press close begging a soldino.
But their dirt is dearer to them. A bargain for a washed face, even
when the reward rings cheerily on the pavement, brings no response but
laughter and surprise. We are reminded by contrast of the tribute of
Andrea Calmo, a popular poet of the sixteenth century:
E voio tanto bene a quel Muran,
Che, per diroelo certo in veritæ,
Son in pensier de vender le mie intræ.
E venir la per starmene pì san.
Quei horti a pieni de herbe uliose
E quel canal cusi chiaro e pulio
Con quelle belle casi si aierose,
Con tante creature che par riose
Liogo che l’ha stampao Domenedio.
(And I wish so well to that Murano, that to tell you the sober truth
I am thinking of selling my takings and coming there to live more
healthily. The gardens there are so full of olive trees, and the
canal so clear and clean, the houses so beautiful and so airy, with
so many fair creatures that it seems a place of joy stamped by the
Lord God.) Beside the Cà da Mula, hidden among some outbuildings, from
which it has in the last years been partially released, is one of
Murano’s finest treasures, the convent front of San Cipriano, which
in the ninth century, when Malamocco was on the point of submersion,
was brought here by order of Ordelafo Faliero. Andrea Dandolo dates
the building from 881; it was rebuilt in 1109 and restored in 1605,
and its exquisite façade, still bearing the stamp of several ages,
freed somewhat from the earth about its base, stands up nobly from the
tangled garden around it. The central arch is outlined with the finest
Byzantine tracery lined with Gothic, surrounded once with coloured
marbles of which only fragments now remain, and above this is a frieze
of the best Roman of the Renaissance: slender columns, some Byzantine,
some Gothic, adorn it on either side, and fantastic Byzantine symbols
are sculptured in the stone discs that are embedded in the walls
between the arches of the cloister. A campanula on the ruined wall
to the left of the arch stands out clear and pale against the brick
building behind, where once the cloister opened out, an exquisite
harmony of lavender and rose. Fragmentary though it is, this façade of
the famous monastery is one of the most precious relics of the islands
of the lagoons.
There is an island where we cannot think of death, where decay dare
not come; though the water plants smell faint upon its shores, and the
cypresses that clothe it rise black against the sky. It is the island
that sheltered one of the most joyful spirits that has ever walked the
world, the island where the larks once sang in such prolonged impulsive
harmony of joy that the sound of their singing has never passed away;
it may seem to lie silent as a veil upon the water, but the tremor
of the sunshine will waken it to renewed harmonics of delight--San
Francesco del Deserto. We rejoice to think that the Poverello set
foot in the lagoons, that he left here in the lonely waters the
blossom of his love. St. Francis of the Desert can wake no thoughts of
melancholy, and indeed this is no deserted place, nor in the morning
of his coming, after the night of storm, can it have seemed a place
of desolation; for nothing is more wonderful, more prodigally full
of the mysterious rapture of life, than the flowing in of day upon
the lagoons after the tumult of rain and hurricane. They say that St.
Francis, coming from the Holy Land on a Venetian ship, was driven by
the storm to cast anchor near Torcello; that as he prayed, the storm
subsided, and a great calm fell on the lagoon. Then as the Poverello
set foot upon this cypress-covered shore, the sun came out--the sun
of the early summer dawn--and shone through the dripping branches of
the cypresses, covering them with glistening crystals, and shone on
the damp feathered creatures among the branches and on the larks among
the reedy grass, and as he shone a choir of voices woke in the lonely
island and a chorus of welcome burst from ten thousand throats. And
the sun shone in the heart of St. Francis also, and it overflowed with
joy; and St. Francis said to his companion, “The little birds, our
brothers, praise their Creator with joy; and we also as we walk in
the midst of them--let us sing the praises of God.” And then as St.
Bonaventura relates the legend, the birds sang so clamorously on the
branches that St. Francis had to entreat their silence till he had
sung the Lauds; but we may read another story if we will, and say that
the dewy matin song of the birds was not so clamorous as to disturb
the quiet morning gladness of the Poverello, that they sang together
in the dawn. San Francesco del Deserto is not an island of sorrow. In
the little convent inhabited still by a few quiet Franciscans, the
narrow gloomy corner is to be seen which they name St. Francis’s bed:
in the convent garden there rises a stone memorial round the tree that
flowered from the Saint’s planted staff. We know these familiar symbols
of the Franciscan convents: the brothers cling to them as to some
fragmentary testament that their eyes can read and their hand grasp
when the living spirit has fled away; everywhere among the mountain or
the valley solitudes where St. Francis dwelt, the same dark relics of
that luminous spirit are to be found, the story even of birds banished
for ever by the command of that prince of singers, as if his own voice
chanting eternal litanies could be his sole delight. They are strange
stories; we pass them by, and go out to find the Poverello where the
cones of the cypresses gleam silver-grey against the blue. His spirit
has taken happy root among the waters of the lagoons; a new joy and
glory is added to the mountains as they rise in the calm dawn, clear
and luminous from the departing rain cloud; there is joy and peace in
the raised grass walk between the cypress trees; the island is indeed
a place of life and not of death for those who have felt the suffering
and the joy of love, and who worship beauty in their hearts.
O Beata Solitudo,
O Sola Beatitudo.
There are still solitudes in the desert of the lagoon where some of us
have dreamed of beginning a new day. In the hour when the last gold has
faded from the sun-path--when those dancing gems he flings to leap and
sport upon the water have been slowly gathered in, when the churches
and palaces of the city are folded under one soft clinging veil, which
softens the outline that it does not obscure, when Torcello and Burano
lean in pallid solitude above the level disc of the marsh, and the Lido
lies like a sea-serpent coiled on itself, its spires reflected in the
motionless mirror far south to Chioggia--they steal out, these island
phantoms, faint, alluring, upon the still mosaic of the lagoon, like
black pearls in that shell-like surface of tenderest azure and rose.
Shall we not dare to wander among those lovely paths, those dimly
burning gems? None visits them, unless it be the golden stars and the
dreaming lover of Endymion: their roof is the broad rainbow spread
above them by the setting sun. They seem sometimes to welcome a spirit
that should come and dwell among them silently; one that should tread
them with loving reverence and quiet hope, seeking to set free the
fantasies with which earth has stored it, but which no power of earth
may help it to disburden.
Chapter Three
THE NUPTIALS OF VENICE
Until the fall of the Venetian Republic the rite of the _Sporalizio del
Mare_, the wedding of Venice with the sea, continued to be celebrated
annually at the feast of the Ascension. Long after the fruits of the
espousal had been gathered, when its renewal had become no more than
a ceremonious display, there stirred a pulse of present life in the
embrace; and in a sense, the significance of the ceremony never can be
lost while one stone remains upon another in the city of the sea.
For the earliest celebration of the nuptials there was need of no
golden Bucintoro, no feast of red wine and chestnuts, no damask roses
in a silver cup, not so much as a ring to seal the bond. For it was no
vaunt of sovereignty; it was a humble oblation, a prayer to the Creator
that His creature might be calm and tranquil to all who travelled over
it, an oblation to the creature that it might be pleased to assist
the gracious and pacific work of its Creator. The regal ceremony of
later times was inaugurated by the Doge Pietro Orseolo II who, having
largely increased the sea dominion of Venice and made himself lord of
the Adriatic, welded his achievement into the fabric of the state by
the ceremony of the espousal. The ring was not introduced till the year
1177, when Pope Alexander III, being present at the festival, bestowed
it on the Doge, as token of the papal sanction of the ceremony, with
the words, “Receive it as pledge of the sovereignty that you and your
successors shall maintain over the sea.” But the true importance of the
festival, whether in its primitive form or in its later elaboration, is
the development of Venetian policy which it signified--a development
which, for the purposes of this chapter, will best be considered in
relation to events separated by nearly two centuries, but united in
their acknowledgment of the growing importance of Venice on the waters.
The first is Pietro Orseolo’s Dalmatian campaign, followed in 1001
by the secret visit of the German Emperor Otho III, and the second
the famous concordat of Pope Alexander III and the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa, concluded under the auspices of Venetian statecraft in 1177.
Pietro Orseolo II appears as one of the most potent interpreters of the
Venetian spirit. He combined qualities which enabled him to gather
together the threads which the genius of Venice and the exigencies
of her position were weaving, and to fashion from them a substantial
web on which her industry might operate. He was a soldier, a great
statesman and a patriot. All the subtlety, all the ambition, all the
dreams of glory with which his potent and spacious mind was endowed,
were at his country’s service, and the material in which he had to
work was plastic to his touch. Venice lay midway between the kingdoms
of the East and West, and from the earliest times this fact had
determined her importance: she might rise to greatness or she might
be annihilated; she could not be ignored. The Venice of Orseolo was
instinct with vitality and teeming with energies, but she was divided
against herself. The foundations of her greatness were already laid,
but her general aim and tendency were not determined. She was in need
of a leader of commanding mind and capacious imagination, who could
envisage her future, and who should possess the power of inspiring
others with confidence in his dreams. Such a man was Pietro Orseolo II.
Venice had been threatened with destruction by the division of the two
interests which, interwoven, were the basis of her power. Before the
final settlement at Rialto she had been torn hither and thither by
the factions of the East and West, the party favouring Constantinople
and the party favouring the Frankish King; and at any moment still the
Doge’s policy might be wrecked by the rivalries of the two parties, if
he proved lacking in insight or capacity for uniting in his service the
interests of both.
[Illustration: RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI.]
For some time Dalmatia had been a thorn in the side of Venice, a
refuge for the disloyal, and, through the agency of the hordes of
pirates infesting the coast, a real menace to her commerce. Venice had
attempted to purchase immunity from the pirates by payment of an annual
indemnity. Orseolo decided at once to put an end to this payment, but
he realised that the price of the decision was a foothold in Dalmatia
that would need to be obtained by force of arms. For this end it was
necessary to secure harmony within the city itself, and, knowing this,
he exercised his powers to obtain approval of his expedition from
the authorities of East and of West, from the Emperors of Germany
and Byzantium. He was successful in this, and circumstances combined
further to aid his designs. The Croatians and Narentines, by wreaking
on Northern Dalmatia their anger at the loss of the Venetian indemnity,
had prepared the minds of the Dalmatians to look on the prospect of
Venetian supremacy as one of release rather than of subjugation. It
is said that they even went so far as to send a message to Orseolo
encouraging his coming. Their province was nominally under the Emperor
of Byzantium, but their overlord had decided to look favourably on a
means of securing peace and safe passage to his province at so small an
expense to himself. Orseolo set sail on Ascension Day, after a service
in the Cathedral of Olivolo (now San Pietro di Castello), fortified by
the good will of East and of West, and the united acclamations of all
parties in Venice. Pride and vigorous hope must have swelled the hearts
of these warriors. It was summer, and their songs must have travelled
across the dazzling blue of the great basin of St. Mark, and echoed
and re-echoed far out on the crystal waters of the lagoon. Triumph was
anticipated, and triumph was their portion. Orseolo’s expedition was
little less than a triumphal progress; the coast towns of Dalmatia from
Zara to Ragusa rendered him their homage. A new and immensely rich
province was acquired by Venice, and the title of Duke of Dalmatia
accorded to himself.
Soon after Orseolo’s return from this campaign, Venice, unknown to
herself, was to receive the homage of one of the emperors she had made
it her business to propitiate. There is something that stirs the
imagination in this secret visit of Otho III to the Doge. According
to the ingenuous account of John the Deacon, Venetian ambassador at
the Emperor’s court, it was merely one of those visits of princely
compliment which the age knew so well how to contrive, and loved
so well to recount--a visit in disguise for humility or greater
freedom, like that of St. Louis to Brother Giles at Perugia, where
host and guest embrace in fellowship too deep for words. The Emperor,
John the Deacon tells us, was overcome with admiration of Orseolo’s
achievements in Dalmatia, and filled with longing to see so great a
man, and the chronicler was despatched to Venice to arrange a meeting.
The Doge, while acknowledging the compliment of Otho’s message, could
not believe in its reality, and consequently kept his own counsel
about it--“tacitus sibi in corde servabat.” However, when Otho on his
travels had come down to Ravenna for Lent, John the Deacon was again
despatched, and this time from Doge to Emperor.
It was ultimately arranged that after the Easter celebration Otho with
a handful of followers should repair, under pretext of a “spring-cure,”
to the abbey of Santa Maria in the isle of Pomposa at the mouth of the
Po. He pretended to be taking up his quarters here for several days,
but at nightfall he secretly embarked in a small boat prepared by John
the Deacon, and set sail with him and six followers for Venice. All
that night and all the following day the little boat battled with the
tempest, and the storm was still unabated the next evening, when it put
in at the island of San Servolo and found itself harboured at last in
the waters of St. Mark. Venice knew nothing of this arrival; her royal
guest had taken her unawares, and her waterways had prepared him no
welcome. We may picture the anxiety of Orseolo, alone with the secret
of his expected guest, on the island of San Servolo. The journey may
well have been perilous for so small a boat even within the sheltering
wall of the Lido, and we may imagine his relief when it could at last
be descried beating towards the island through the tempestuous waters
of the lagoon. In impenetrable night, concealed from one another’s eyes
by the thick darkness, Emperor and Doge embraced. Otho was invited to
rest for an hour or two at the convent of San Zaccaria, but he repaired
before dawn to the Ducal Palace and the lodging made ready for him in
the eastern tower. There is a fascination in attempting to imagine the
two sovereigns moving amid the shadows of Venetian night, in thinking
of the Emperor watching from the vantage of his tower for daybreak
over the city. There are wonders to be seen from this eastern aspect,
but after the discomfort of his voyage to Venice the royal captive
may well have felt a longing for a sight of the city from within. It
is all rather like a children’s game--Orseolo’s feigned first meeting
with an embassy from Otho, his inquiry as to the Emperor’s health and
whereabouts, and the public dinner with the ambassadors. Venice is
robbed of a pageant, and one most dear to her, the fêting of a royal
guest; the guest is deprived of all festivities beyond a christening
of the Doge’s daughter; yet the pleasurable excitement of John the
chronicler communicates itself and disarms our criticism; and it is not
till gifts have been offered and refused--“ne quis cupiditatis et non
Sancti Marci tuæque dilectionis causa me hac venisse asserat”--till
tears and kisses have been exchanged, and the Emperor, this time
preceding his companions by a day, has set sail once more for the
island of Pomposa, that we break from the spell of the chronicler and
begin to cavil at the strange conditions of the visit.