a curious little work of early seventeenth century, a time at which,
though Venice was moving down the path of her decay, the glorious
traditions of the past still found renewal in her present life, and the
Venetian fleet was still a triumphant symbol of Venetian greatness; the
other from the reports of her officials in the last years before her
death. Luca Assarino was one of many guests who had to say to Venice,
or to the Doge her representative, “My intellect staggers under the
weight of a memory laden with surpassing favours. You received me into
your house, did me honour, assisted me, protected me. You clothed
yourself in my desires, and promoted them on every occasion; and this
not only without having had of me any cause to honour me so highly,
but even without having ever seen me.” He feels he cannot better
discharge the burden of his gratitude than by shaping some of the
emotions inspired in him by his visit to the Arsenal. There is a touch
of sympathy and sometimes even a touch of truth and insight under the
extravagantly symbolic garb of his appreciation. “Admiring first of all
an immense number of porticoes, where as in vast maternal wombs I saw
in embryo the galleys whose bodies were being framed, I realised that
I was in the country of vessels, the fatherland of galleons, and that
those masses were so formidable as to show themselves warriors even in
their birth, fortifying themselves with countless nails and arming thus
their very vitals with iron. I considered them as wandering islands,
which, united, compose the continent of Venetian glory, the mainland
of the rule of Christendom. I admired with joy the height of their
masts and the size of their sailyards, and I called them forests under
whose shade the Empire of the sea reposed and the hopes of the Catholic
religion were fortified. And who, I said to myself, can deny that this
Republic has subjugated the element of water, when none of her citizens
can walk abroad, but that the water, as if vanquished, kisses his feet
at every step?” Like all recorders of the glories of Venice, he is
struck dumb at certain points by fear of the charge of fabling, but,
collecting himself, he proceeds to speak of the trophies and relics,
the rows of cuirasses, helmets and swords that remained as “iron
memorials to arm the years against oblivion of Venetian greatness. What
revolutions of the world, what accidents, what mutations of state, what
lakes of tears and blood did not the dim lightnings of those fierce
habiliments present to the eye of the observer?... I saw the remains of
the Venetian fleet, vessels, that, as old men, weighted no less with
years than glory, reposed under the magnificence of the arches which
might well be called triumphal arches. I saw part of those galleons to
which Christianity confesses the debt of her preservation.... And last,
I saw below the water so great a quantity of the planks from which
vessels afterwards are made, that one might truly call it a treasury
hidden in the entrails of a lake. I perceived that these, as novices
in swimming, remained first a century below the surface, to float
after for an eternity of centuries; and I remarked that they began
by acquiring citizenship in that lake, to end by showing themselves
patricians throughout the seas, and that there was good reason they
should plant their roots well under water, for they were the trees
on which the liberty of Venice was to flower.” In his peroration the
eulogist strikes a deeper note. “May it please Almighty God to preserve
you to a longest eternity; and as of old the nations surrounding you
had so high an opinion of your integrity and justice that they came to
you for judgment of their weightiest and most important cases, so may
heaven grant that the whole of Christendom may resort always to your
threshold to learn the laws of good government.”
We think sadly of his prayer among the records of abuse and corruption
in the Arsenal of two centuries later; the Venetian lawyers were still
renowned among the lawyers of the world, but the State was no longer
capable of teaching the laws of good government to Christendom. The
theatre, the coffee-house, the _ridotto_, the gay _villeggiatura_ were
now the main channels of her activity; the tide of life had flowed
back from the Arsenal and left it a sluggish marsh. In the arts of
shipbuilding no advance had been made, and the cause lay chiefly in
an extraordinary slackness of discipline by which workmen were first
allowed to serve in alternation and in the end were asked for only
one day’s service in the month. Many youths who had not even seen the
Arsenal were in receipt of a stipend as apprentices, in virtue of
hereditary right. Martinelli tells of porters, valets, novices and even
of a pantaloon in a troop of comic actors who were thus pleasantly
provided for. There was a scarcity of tools, and even the men in daily
attendance at the Arsenal spent their time in idle lounging and often
in still more mischievous occupations for lack of anything better to
do; disobedience and disloyalty were rife. The Arsenal was used by many
as a place of winter resort, as workhouses by the tramps of to-day,
and the wood stored for shipbuilding was consumed in fires for warming
these unbidden guests, or made up into articles of furniture for sale
in the open market. The report of the Inquisitors of the Arsenal,
dated March 1, 1874, which Martinelli quotes, is indeed a terrible
confession: “One sad experience clearly shows that the smallest
concession ... becomes rapidly transformed into unbridled licence.
Not to mention the immense piles of shavings, from sixty to seventy
thousand vast bundles of wood disappear annually. The wastage of so
great a mass of wood, more than the equivalent of the complete outfit
of ten or twelve entire ships of the line, is not to be accounted for
under legitimate refuse of normal work, but points plainly to the
voluntary destruction of undamaged and precious material.” It is
scarcely surprising that with so little care for the preservation of
discipline in the Arsenal and for the efficiency of its workmen Venice
fell behind. The Arsenal had indeed become, as Martinelli says, “a
monument of the generous conceptions of the past--a monument, like the
church and campanile of San Marco, beautiful, admirable, glorious, but
as completely incapable as they of offering any service to the State.”
Similar abuses existed also in the manning of the ships. The officers
were for the most part idle and incompetent, and the despatches of the
Provveditori are a tissue of lamentable statements as to the depression
of that which had been, and while Venice was to retain her supremacy,
must ever be, the mainstay of her power. There is desertion among the
crews and operatives; the outfit provided for them is unsuitable and
inadequate. Nicolò Erizzo, Provveditor Extraordinary to the Islands of
the Levant, concludes a despatch, dated October 30, 1764, as follows:
“Thus it comes about that your Excellencies have no efficient and
capable officers of marine, and if an occasion were ever to arise
when it were necessary to send them to some distant part, let me not
be deemed presumptuous if I venture frankly to assure you that they
would be in great straits. I had a proof of the truth of this when I
launched the galley recently built; for the officers themselves begged
me to put a ship’s captain on board, since at a little distance from
land they did not trust themselves, nor did they blush to confess it in
making this request.”
It was ten years earlier, in 1744, that the Ridotto, or great public
gaming-house, was closed in Venice by order of the Great Council, and
the Venetians, their chief occupation gone, were reduced to melancholy
peregrination of the Piazza. “They have all become hypochondriacs,”
writes Madame Sara Gondar. “The Jews are as yellow as melons; the
mask-sellers are dying of starvation; and wrinkles are growing on the
hands of many a poor old nobleman who has been in the habit of dealing
cards ten hours a day. Vice is absolutely necessary to the activity of
a state.” This then is the Venice against which Goldoni stands out;
and after all, the essential difference between the world reflected
in his comedies and that world of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio,
which was Colleoni’s world, is a difference of horizon. There is an
epic grandeur about Carpaccio’s world: heroes stride across it, with
lesser men and lesser interests in their train. The small affairs of
life are not neglected. There is the Company of the Stocking, who
discuss their peculiar device and the articles of their order with the
grave elaboration of State councillors. Venice was always interested
in matters of detail. But in Colleoni’s day the same seriousness of
purpose was available when larger issues were discerned: in Goldoni’s
the power to discern larger issues has disappeared. The Venetians,
lords once of the sea, can still take interest in their stockings,
but they can take interest in nothing else. The Lilliputians are
in possession. Goldoni does not quarrel with his age for not being
monumental, and we shall do well to follow his example and make our
peace with it. He looks upon the clubs of freemasons, the pedantic
literary reformers, the false romanticists, the bourgeois tyrants and
masquerading ladies, with a serene and indulgent smile. In his famous
literary dispute with Gozzi he maintains before his fiery opponent the
calm and level countenance of truth. The battles rage around him, but
he stands firm and unassailable, as Colleoni himself may once have
stood in the midst of battles how different, waged in how different a
world!
Chapter Eight
VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART I)
In Venice it is difficult to make choice of one route rather than
another, when the means of transit is indeed an end in itself, and
in some degree the same delight awaits us on every way we choose. We
may pass hours on the Grand Canal merely combining enjoyment of its
changefulness with a welcome monotony of rest; every moment the water
is expressive, every moment it lives under some new impulse and reveals
itself afresh. Carpaccio’s picture, _The Miracle of the Holy Cross_, is
a marvellous rendering of the life of the Grand Canal; we are reminded
of it again and again as we turn into the noble sweep of the waters at
the angle of the Cà Foscari. The spirit and motion of Venice seem to be
concentrated in the picture--the dark water alive with many gondolas,
the fascination of the rhythmic movements of the rowers, at rest or
sharply turning or slowly propelling. It has caught and embodied the
genius of the canal--that ceaseless change and variation of angle
which keeps it springing and full of life; that flowing spirit which
unifies the palaces and waters of Venice in a conspiracy of beauty.
Our gondola in some mysterious way enrols us in this conspiracy;
through its motion we consent to the spirit of the place. We are not
onlookers merely; the gondola pulses with the life of Venice; it is an
instrument of her being. We feel as we move along that we are needed
in the spectacle of Venice, that we have a share in the equilibrium
which is of the essence of her power. There is no means of city transit
that we can imagine to rival the gondola in its freedom from noise
and jostling, in its realisation of comfort. But there are other
reasons why it must remain the essential means of passage in Venice.
From the gondola alone can we hope to realise how the city stands
amid its waters, how living the relation between land and water is.
These are not canals in the common sense of the word; they are living
streams flowing among islands, each of which is individual, irregular,
unique. Venice is not a tract of land cut into sections, large or
small, by water, as is an inland city by its streets. A most vigilant
watch was kept over the building of the houses that they should not
transgress the law of the waters nor interfere with the relation of
their currents to the islands. And this vigilance, perhaps, combined
with the desire of each owner of land to make use of it to the last
fragment, is responsible for the irregularities and varieties of angle
which make the houses of Venice more individual than those of any other
city. Usually a wall when it has once displayed to us its surface has
finished its confidences; it has no reserves, no allurements; it is
rigid and uncompromising. But one that breaks from the level, inclining
its proud profile in response to the tide of the waterway below it,
is a wall of far greater and more individual resources. It is only
by gondola that we can appreciate this strong element of personality
in the houses, and only by journeying in a gondola that we can learn
to appreciate the individuality of the different quarters of Venice.
It is not merely that one is peopled by the rich, another by the
poor; that one region abounds in ancient palaces, another in modern
buildings; nor that peculiar treasures of art are associated with
each. Their characters are divergent. From the canals we realise that
Venice is built upon separate islands and we see their diversity. The
parochial divisions of the sestieri do not exactly follow the shape of
the islands, but roughly speaking we shall find the waterways in the
district covered by each sestiere distinctive in character. Castello
and Cannaregio, San Polo and Dorsoduro, each has its own recognisable
method of curve, broad or narrow, wayward or orderly.
[Illustration: VIEW ON GRAND CANAL FROM SAN ANGELO.]
The last joy of one who has lived long in Venice, as well as the
first of the new-comer, will be a gondola journey. It is impossible
to exhaust the certain beauties of even a side canal, not to speak
of its casual surprises. If we are in haste and time is precious, we
do better to make our way over bridge and calle with what dexterity
and speed we can; for it is an insult to ask haste of the gondola.
Yet, if we accept in the right spirit the extraordinary delays and
dilemmas of traffic--immense, interminable barges suddenly blocking
the entire canal, or a flock of gondolas and sandolos in seemingly
inextricable confusion--we shall always have our reward; not only the
pleasure of watching the riddle of passage solve itself, thanks to
the seeming elasticity of the rio, but a glint of sun-jewels on a new
angle of the waters, some richness of ornament on house or bridge, some
relic of ancient Venice, some name of calle or rio will break upon
us with a fresh revelation. We cannot come to the end of Venice; she
is inexhaustible: stealing about among the sudden shadows and broken
lights of her waterways, sweeping in full, swift tide round unexpected
corners and under diminished bridges, some new idea breaks upon us
unawares with irresistible persuasion. We cannot define its meaning;
we cannot say why details in Venice have so great a significance. A
window opened suddenly in one of the palaces at night--why does it
seem so portentous? It is another of the manifold gifts of the waters
to Venice, this gift of distinction. Venice is not like other cities
in which a thousand acts pass unnoted. She has the distinction of a
unique individual whose smallest action is fraught with a strange
immaterial fragrance that is unmistakably its own. We cannot analyse
the fragrance; we only recognise that it is a spiritual gift; it
emanates only from subtle and penetrating natures; it is the aroma of
life itself. To it we owe the strange excitement that invades us in
Venetian waters, and makes a gondola tour far more than a novel mode of
traversing a city. As we watch the citizens of Venice from the water,
see them crossing a bridge, pausing to lean over, or carried in the
stream of passengers, they too seem endowed with a singular vitality;
their passing and their standing still appear alike purposeful and
portentous. What history might not be written by questioning the
windows that look out on the side canals, or the tides that have ebbed
and flowed in their channels? It would be a work of many volumes; for
the private records of Venice are not lacking in fulness. The Piazza
of Bellini’s _Procession of the Cross_ represents one side of Venetian
life, its solemnity, its assurance, its pomp and colour; but the narrow
waters know another side, the domestic festivities, the courtings,
weddings and banquetings, and private hates. For she was strong in
deeds of darkness as in deeds of light, and echoes of them still wash
against the basements of her houses. Water is a safer confidant of
blood than earth, and the waters of Venice have received their full
share of such confidences. Ebbing tides washed out to sea the stains
of violence and flowed in to pave the city anew, yet the atmosphere of
the dark waterways is more enduring than material stains, and there is
no dark deed of ancient Venice to which they may not still supply a
realistic setting.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY, PIAZZETTA.]
The gondolier’s stock of knowledge will carry us but a small way on the
lesser rios. His catalogue is ready for the Grand Canal; he can carry
the reader to the obvious points of interest the guide-book enumerates,
but his information does not usually comprise even the most beautiful
of the palaces of the side canals, and on the more familiar routes
there is much to discover for oneself. Moreover there are aspects of
a gondola tour which the guide-book cannot include, but which are none
the less important for those who really wish to know the physiognomy of
Venice. And one is the time of day at which it is to be taken. Venice
is the city of light--more luminous than any other city; and if it is
true that new light or shadow everywhere alters the aspect of familiar
objects, it is infinitely truer in Venice where each moment witnesses
the birth of some new and wonderful offspring of the light. If one,
who has known the statue of Colleoni against the intense blue of the
midday sky, comes on him suddenly when the Campo is in shadow and the
Scuola di San Marco alone still receives the light upon the rare marble
of its upper façade, he will find that, as the definition of the stern
features is lost, a note of tenderness steals into the proud assertion
of the face. It seems a fresh revelation of character, this change
wrought by a new light in the known and familiar, and it is one of the
peculiar creative gifts of Venice.
In considering some of the most noteworthy subjects in the city as
she now is, we may imagine a gondola tour on a day of the high tides
in December, when the water washes in long smooth waves almost up to
the feet of the Lion and St. Theodore, and gives to the Molo the
exhilarating effect of a sea-shore. The spring tide spurts and bubbles
through the gratings in the Piazza and Piazzetta, to unite in a lake
which covers the whole pavement till it deepens in the atrium of San
Marco and the heavy outer doors are closed. As the waters rise, the
dominion of light is extended; the chequered marbles of the Ducal
Palace take on a new brilliance, and the agate eyes of the Lion glow
and sparkle as he looks across the sun-paths to the sea. We will
imagine ourselves embarking at the Piazzetta and turning into Venice
from the Basin of San Marco, under the Ponte della Paglia and the
Bridge of Sighs. The entrance into the Rio del Palazzo is flanked on
one side by what was formerly the eastern tower of the Ducal Palace.
Relics of a Byzantine frieze are all that now remain of it; the rest
is lost in the grand eastern wall of the palace--a superb monument
of the first Renaissance. This wall would provide material for many
hours of study in the rich variety of its sculptures. Not a capital or
column is left unadorned, and each is particularised with an apparently
inexhaustible variety of design. The two massive, projecting balconies
of the Anti Sala dei Pregadi, overhanging the rio, which presented to
the sculptor some at least of the problems of ceiling decoration, are
richly carved beneath with deep circular roses. The remotest corners
are worked with the same conscientious detail as the more conspicuous,
and each with a view to its position above the rio. As our eyes grow
accustomed to the comparative darkness of the canal, we see that lions
look down on us from the arches of the topmost windows, and that some
of the upper columns are surrounded by a band of sculpture similar to
that on the pillars of the façade of the Scuola di San Rocco. Amid
the wealth of sculptured stone there is an impressive severity in the
discs of porphyry set at intervals along the wall; but perhaps its
greatest beauty is the ducal shield bearing the Barbarigo arms. This
shield, placed over a low water-door, is upheld by two winged pages
with lighted torches in their hands, who are themselves like songs of
light in their graceful and spirited beauty. Massiveness and grace are
magnificently combined in this east wall of the Ducal Palace; it is at
once solemn and brilliant; and as we look back to its angle with the
Riva, the rose and snowy marbles gleam as if they were transparent.
A little further and the waters have us in their power. The Ponte
di Canonica denies us passage; the tide is too high for us to pass
beneath it, and we are forced to return to the Riva degli Schiavoni.
But before we turn we may see one of the most beautiful of Renaissance
palaces rising in clear whiteness against the blue of the sky. The
Greek marble of its surface is inlaid with circles of serpentine and
porphyry; on either side of the central building two scrolls, inlaid
with palm leaves, bear the words, _Honor et gloria Deo solo_, and
higher in the wall are marble slabs most delicately designed with
animals, birds and foliage. A mitre, crown, and crosier, and various
other articles of head-dress are represented in the stone, but the
Capello family had many branches in Venice, and of the owners of this
particular palace even Tassini has no record. The most beautiful of its
features is set high up, almost too high to be comfortably seen from
the water--two young companion figures of the first Renaissance, full
of grace and imagination and strength, each with spear, and scales, and
casque surmounted by three heads. These twin warrior angels look out
with serene strength into the day; they are lightly armed, but poised
and ready for battle. The duplication of their winged figures, and the
height at which they are placed, makes us think of them primarily as
decorative sculptures; they cannot possess the intimate charm of the
young warrior of the Palazzo Civran, but they endow the harmonious
marbles of this palace front with a distinction and character which
give it rank among the first houses of the greatest period in Venice.
After the rains, these precious marbles shine with a peculiar lustre,
and the Palazzo Capello as it appears to-day is worthy of comparison
with the Palazzo Dario, which glows with serpentine and porphyry beside
the Grand Canal, fresh and fine and delicate as on the day of its
completion.
[Illustration: CORNER OF THE PALAZZO DARIO.]
As the water is still rising and the Ponte di Canonica will not allow
room to pass, we must move along the shining waters of San Marco till
we find a more hospitable waterway. With difficulty we get under the
Ponte del Sepolcro and thence down the Rio della Pietà in which,
at the distance of a few strokes, we may land if we will at a low
sotto-portico leading to San Giovanni in Bragora, where Cima’s noble
picture, _The Baptism of Christ_, is imprisoned behind a stifling
modern altar which makes it impossible to study the composition as a
whole. A little farther, passing a fine ogival palace on our right,
we halt before a plastered barocco house with remnants of Byzantine
window-posts on an upper story. But our chief interest lies this time
in the basement, in a low, narrow arch, the crowns of whose pillars,
richly worked in marmo greco with griffins and lions, are, even in
time of normal tides, little above the level of the water, though
probably the arch once rested on pillars not less than ten feet high.
This buried arch is eloquent of the rising of the waters on Venice.
It arrests us by the beauty of its workmanship; but it is one of many
that we must pass on each canal, though not all have placidly accepted
submergence; many have kept above the water by accepting the addition
of a capital or crown. Elsewhere there are notable examples of this
patchwork of which Venice never is ashamed and which has produced
much in her of the greatest interest. In the Salizzada di San Lio, in
the sestiere of San Giustina, is a pillar, supporting one side of a
sotto-portico, in which a whole page of Venetian history is comprised.
Looking into it, we see that it is composed of two distinct portions,
that it has in fact two capitals--a capital of the early Renaissance
superimposed on a Byzantine column which retains its own. They stand
happily united, these children of two ages, but we naturally ask
ourselves the reason of their juncture, and the answer is that the
Byzantine pillar was once sufficient to itself; it had no need of a
crown to complete its dignity or service. No weight of years has shrunk
it to these dwarfed proportions. It is the rising of earth from below,
not pressure from above, which has reduced it. The soil of Venice has
been raised, inch by inch and foot by foot, in defence against her
submergence. Many basements have become uninhabitable, and Galliccioli
records that in the church of SS. Vito e Modesta an ancient pavement
was discovered eight feet below the existing one, while in SS. Simone
e Giuda three levels were found one above another. In San Marco a
confessional similar to that still at Torcello, after having been lost
sight of for several centuries, was found three feet below the soil and
one and a half feet below the ordinary level of the water. Our pillar,
therefore, which at one time planted its foot firmly on the ground, has
been gradually buried alive, and to preserve the serviceableness, as
well as the dignity of the portico--in fact, to secure its existence
as a sotto-portico at all--a new head had to be added to the Byzantine
pillar to supply the theft at its foot. The incident is rich in
suggestion of the achievement of the Venetian builders, of the delicate
counterpoise and equilibrium, the ceaseless give-and-take required in
this city of the sea. Venice was crowned queen, but her dominion could
only be maintained by understanding and reverence of the element she
ruled. To be glorious she had to be most humble; for the element she
constrained is one no human power can subdue; it would kiss her feet,
it would endow her with glory, but it would not surrender its life.
A thousand times more glorious should be her dominion, but a thousand
times more subtle must be her insight and her sway. Her finger must
be ever on the pulse of this living force, she must hold the key of
its temperament in her hand, she must know when to submit. The wedding
of Venice and the sea was not the submersion of one personality in
another, it was a union involving infinite tact, infinite insight and
acceptance.