with singular felicity, and which is peculiarly prominent in his
pictures--namely the shipping of Venice. In the great trilogy of the
Prince’s departure the vessels are a masterpiece: there is nothing to
surpass them in this kind. Carpaccio seems to have realised to the
full their varied elements of beauty: their static properties, their
weight and substance and the symmetry of their frame, combined with
all the radiant light and spring of swelling sail and rigging and flag
and countless trappings: all that goes to make a sailing ship a thing
of music. And it is not only vessels rigged and ready to float in
triumph on the high seas that Carpaccio depicts: there is a vessel also
_in squero_, with all the song gone from it, one might think, lying
uneasily on its side with its huge mast aslant across the harbour
tower. It is noteworthy that all the vessels of the English King
seem in course of repair; there is something in their semi-skeleton
condition which singularly reinforces the dream effect that we have
noticed in this portion of the picture, and the triumphant vessel that
would seem to belong to the gay town on our right is united in feeling
to the shadow city on the left by the exceeding mystery and beauty
of its reflection. This picture supplies us with another instance of
the way in which Venice operated as an inspiration in the work of
Carpaccio, even when he was not directly portraying the city itself.
The beautiful effect of a drawbridge over a great water, such as he
knew familiarly in Venice, had impressed itself on his mind: adapting
it to the requirements of his scene, he reproduces the bridge of Rialto
in the city of the English King, not forgetting the significance of
a crowning figure in white at the apex of the arch. We cannot indeed
afford to miss a detail in Carpaccio: there is never any crowding nor
taking refuge in vagueness. The varieties of shipping, the flags hung
from the windows, the most distant figures, are all treated with the
same clearness and precision: to each its value is assigned. This
fulness of meaning is one of the sources of his fascination for us:
the fact that he has done a little thing means sometimes more to us, if
we can come at the prompting purpose, than a pageant of main figures.
It is like the side-flash of light which a seemingly irrelevant act
casts sometimes on a personality.
The fidelity of Bellini and Carpaccio to the facts of Venice fills
us continually with fresh wonder: it is not the fidelity of copyists
standing outside the scene they paint; their very heart is in its
stones. As we watch Gentile’s gorgeous procession sweep like a stream
from the gate of the Ducal Palace round the border of the Piazza,
with the sound of trumpets, the rustle and swing of noble garments
and the gleam of banners, we feel that the painter had heard and
felt the triumph of the music, so marvellously has he conveyed its
influence in these moving figures; we too hear the jubilation of it
as the long tubes pass out and in. With the pictures of Carpaccio and
Gentile Bellini before us we may do more than conjecture what manner
of men they were who filled the foreground of contemporary Venice.
We have not masses or dispositions of colour merely: we seem to move
through a crowd of living beings or a gallery of portraits. No one
could paint loungers as Carpaccio paints them; there is no monotony
in their inaction; the faces are as various as the men--wonderful
faces, some coarse, some refined, but almost all with that indefinable
quality of pathos in their strength which is one of the essentials
of beauty. There are perhaps comparatively few among them that would
satisfy a conventional canon of beauty: their fascination lies in the
rich combination of whimsical humour and strength, melancholy and wit;
so eloquent are they, so quick with intelligence that we are little
disposed to question their material perfection or imperfection. These
citizens of Gentile Bellini, Mansueti and above all Carpaccio--since in
him are realised a far greater variety of types--impress us profoundly
as men of calm and steady purpose, who have lived, felt and prevailed.
They are men of action, yet they are dreamers. And this was not from
incapacity in Carpaccio to express vivid motions in feature or form.
When he is more freely composing, as in the _Death of St. Ursula_, it
would be hard to rival the brilliance and vivacity with which he has
treated the turmoil of the one-sided fray. But these citizens--whether
of Venice or of Ursula’s court is immaterial--seem to be governed by
some internal harmony; there is a rhythm in their motions and in their
standing still, which reflects the spirit of their time. We have only
to compare them with the characters in Longhi’s eighteenth-century
interiors to understand that a great change has taken place. Imagine
Carpaccio and Bellini set to paint as primary interests the choosing of
a dress, the stopping of a tooth, the guessing of a riddle, a dancing
lesson, a toilette. These things were part of life, and superbly they
would have done it; they painted lesser acts than these in the corner
of their pictures, for every detail of the city life so jealously
guarded by its rulers was precious to them. But the difference lies in
the centre of interest. In the eighteenth century, the detail, the side
light, the accessory of life has swelled into the principal subject,
and the faces of the actors are vacant as never in Carpaccio. It is not
so much that they are less beautiful, that they are often witless; but
they are lacking in purpose, in subordination to a common control. The
pulse of a great civic life no longer beats in them.
We have considered hitherto the manner in which Venice used her elected
medium of expression, how her painters had understood and interpreted
the life of the city. We will turn now to ask what attitude towards the
facts of life is reflected in their canvases. And here we will attempt
again to illustrate, by certain examples, what aspects of life found
most ready acceptance by the Venetian artists of the Renaissance. We
may venture to seek an illustration of two of its broader aspects--one
foreign, the other native to the mind of Venice as reflected in her
life and in her art--in two sculptured figures by Antonio Rizzo in the
courtyard of the Ducal Palace. These two figures, of Adam and Mars,
are most original in conception. Adam holds the apple in his hand; it
seems that he has just partaken of it and that, partaking, he has been
initiated into a new vision. His beautiful clear-cut face is upturned;
his lips are open; his hand seems to hold in the tumult of his heart.
There is as yet no shame, no contrition, no sense of sin in Adam’s
look, nor in his attitude, but the immense wonder of a new experience
with its yet undetermined import; and through the ecstasy of his
vision there breaks that strange pain of the mortal man whose body can
scarcely support its spiritual burden. It seems almost as if Adam were
receiving now that vision of the ages at whose threshold he stood; he
has opened a door which can never again be shut; he has let in a flood
which is beyond his control, and he is rapt in the contemplation. The
other figure who fills with Adam a niche in the Arco Foscari is Mars,
the god of war. His body is grandly moulded, stalwart and disciplined
and ready for action; but there are no tempests in his look; there
is no herculean development of muscle nor trampling vehemence as in
the fresco of Veronese. Rizzo’s war-god is young, full of grace and
beauty, with the dream also of a poet on his sensuous lips. He is
majestic; his face is grave and thoughtful, with a strange sadness in
its vigilant wisdom. He and Adam seem to strike together the accord of
the Renaissance, the union of a great expectancy, an uncomprehended
newness, with controlled and ordered purpose and the conviction of
conquest. It is the latter aspect which seems to find reflection in the
mind of Venice not the mystic promise, the troubled vision, which the
Renaissance held for some of those on whom its influence fell. In the
Venetians of the first Renaissance there is always the note of calm and
assured knowledge; we may find it again and again in their artistic
annals. In the Casa Civran--the so-called Casa dell’ Otello beside the
Campo dei Carmini--we again recognise Rizzo’s hand in one of the most
lovely and characteristic figures of the first Renaissance, which has
fortunately survived the various restorations and spoliations of the
house and stands still intact in its lonely niche on the plastered
wall. It is impossible to convey in words the vivacity, the nobility
and grace of this young warrior: the proud and magnificent control
governing each motion of his spirited form, the rhythm in response
to which each member of him moves, so that the effect on us is indeed
that of a song, a victorious, joyful melody. Again and again we may
meet them, Mars and his young disciple, and others of their kin, in
Carpaccio’s crowds. The young Civran warrior might have stept on to his
niche from the _Death of St. Ursula_; moreover, the life that thrills
in him is felt not in single figures only, but in the entire conception
of series after series of Carpaccio, in Bellini’s _Procession of the
Cross_, in Tintoretto’s _St. Ursula and the Virgins_ in the Church of
the Mendicanti.
It was thus the Venetians confronted life. In portrait, allegory
or story, realised in varying degrees of naïvety, splendour and
refinement, with more or less penetration and psychological insight, we
find the same balance and control--a unique harmony of strength, grace
and serenity. And if we turn to the religious art of Venice we shall be
struck by a lack of anything like mystic rapture or absorption in the
sufferings of Christ. We have but two examples in Venice of Bellini’s
portrayal of the facts of Christ’s mature life, but he has treated the
theme of the Madonna and Child with a unique profundity. The mystery of
life seems to be shadowed in the face of his Madonnas; his saints and
apostles, so striking in their individuality, so virile in their piety,
have a significance beyond their perfect act of worship. No Venetian
religious painter before Tintoretto equalled Bellini in solemnity and
depth of conception; but in all we find the same pervading calm, the
same absence of tumult or the disturbing element of pain or agony.
We will choose an example from Basaiti--the most perfect, perhaps,
of all his works--in illustration of what seems to us a prevailing
characteristic of the Venetian mind both for strength and weakness--his
_Gesu morto con due Angeli_. It is striking in its originality of
conception and full of noble and tender sentiment. There are no weeping
women, no agonised apostles round the body of Jesus; only the very
young keep watch beside him, two winged infants, at his head and at
his feet. They have found him here, this young dead god, laid out as
if asleep upon the flat stone by the rock--no blasted rock, its crags
are covered with living shrubs and plants. And he is in the light:
there is no ghostly pallor in his face upturned to the sky, upon his
long, dark hair; so beautiful a brow, such tender cheeks, so strong
and brave a neck they have never seen. And he is so still, he lies
without fear, not heeding them. They must not wake him from his sleep.
The infant at his head, whose exquisitely moulded face is full of
that strangely pathetic, antique wisdom of the very young, half-elfish,
half-infantile, feels the burden of his sagacity upon him. Why had
that brow a crown of thorns instead of flowers about it? This youth
to whom they will now bear company had not chosen well his pillow or
his crown--though he is so beautiful he was not wise enough to know
that thorns are not for those who would be at rest. In the picture the
wise infant has taken off the prickly crown that it may not pierce and
rend the dream that holds the sleeper there so long; he is full of the
knowledge of his triumph, half-fearful lest it should not be complete.
The crown of thorns hangs on his own left arm, which he raises half in
warning, half in wonder, feeling as his elbow bends the thorns upwards
on his arm from what pain he has saved that beautiful but foolish
youth. And with his right hand he fondles the hair of Jesus, drawing
it a little back from his forehead to be sure that in his stealthy
theft he has not left some scratch, some mark of pain. But there are
no traces of the crown in any sign of pain, only a faint, faint band
beneath the hair he has drawn back--a shadow, as it were, of Christ’s
regality. _He saved others, Himself He cannot save._ Now with this
little Saviour, this guardian of his pillow, he can at last sleep
in peace. The infant at the feet is more babylike, less wise, more
gleefully wondering. He has found no thorns on that beautiful, still
body, but he has found another wonder at the feet. The toes of one he
holds in his tiny hand, stroking it in his delight: he has found, it
seems, a little hole upon the instep bone that the feet of humans are
not wont to wear, and he points in musing, half-delighted wonder to the
other foot, where he spies the same strange mark. It is a game to this
curly headed cherub. He has not yet dreamed of contact with something
beyond the reach of his baby wisdom. There is not yet in his chubby
face that look which has stolen into the face of his brother and which
now seems to put a world between them, a look that amid all its elfish
aloofness is akin to the solicitude of human love. What dream was this
of Basaiti--the figure of this young God of Light--perfect in form,
luminous and strong, unspoiled and untroubled in his sleep of death?
His eyes if they were open would be fountains fed from the beauty of
the world, but he has borne no burden of humanity. There is power to
suffer in that strong and beautiful young face, but it is not the power
of the Man of Sorrows. This is not Jesus who agonised in the garden,
or who wrote upon the ground; it is not the man from whom Pilate
turned away his face.
[Illustration: BRONZE WELL-HEAD BY ALBERGHETTI, COURTYARD OF PALAZZO
DUCALE.]
There is one only--the last and greatest of the Venetians of the
Renaissance--who could sound all notes of tragedy and pathos as well as
notes of joy. Tintoretto, the supreme Venetian, the greatest exponent
of the essential spirit of Venice, is the son of a wider kingdom
than hers and of a greater age than the Renaissance. Unsurpassed as
designer and colourist, he is endowed throughout with the peculiar
gifts of Venice; but during those years of passionate study, in which
he was winning here and there the secrets of his art, hungry for
knowledge, careless of gain, and bargaining only for material in which
to realise his conceptions--during those years in which he lived alone
in continual meditation on some fresh labour, he was probing the deep
and passionate things of humanity as no Venetian artist had ever probed
them before. The streets and churches of the city seem to echo still to
the steps of this genius at once so robust, so tender, so profound and
so joyous. Ridolfi laments the lavishness of his production, arguing
that restraint of his overflowing fantasy would have strengthened his
conceptions. But Tintoretto had to work in his own way; the instinct
that flowered in the Scuola di San Rocco, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
and the _Paradiso_, might be trusted to choose the manner of its
relaxation as well as of its labour. No painter, perhaps, has so
wonderfully combined the dramatist and lyrist; for Tintoretto with all
his vast imaginative strength had power also over the tenderest springs
of melody. There is hardly a picture of his in which some exquisite
face of youth or woman will not strike a note of tenderness, and we
need only call to mind the _Visitation_ in the Scuola di San Rocco,
to know what Tintoretto’s tenderness could be. He had that power, the
gift only of the greatest, so intensely to imagine his central theme
that the most perfectly executed and conspicuous detail does not divert
us into lesser issues. It is exactly here that his distinguishing
greatness reveals itself He is completely sincere. His vision is too
comprehensive to overlook what really filled the foreground; his skill
of hand too great to allow its inclusion to be other than an element in
the realisation of his central theme; his concentration too intense to
make him fear lest an accessory should become a primary interest. We
may pause for a moment in consideration of his greatest tragic triumph,
the _Crucifixion_, in the Scuola di San Rocco. The theme is immense,
and, like the _Death of Abel_, it is treated in a great elemental
spirit. Amid all the throes of nature and the sufferings of the Son of
Man, the world goes on its way. The ghostly figure of the Arab on his
camel, and the caravan winding down from the city to depart into the
desert, the two splendid knights who gaze without pity or understanding
on this spectacle of the death of slaves, the man who leans from his
donkey behind the Cross of Christ, all are as prominent to their little
circle as they would be in life; and they have just that prominence for
us--the immediate participators in the tragedy--that they would have
in life. As always in Tintoretto, the horizon is vast. Wide ranges of
blue, undulating country extend to the mountains, above which breaks
his peculiar, tender, yellow light of dawn; he has made them recede
into unimagined distance by setting across the mountains and the light
the raised arm of a mounted figure. There is a great calm in this
horizon, while in the middle distance above the Arab the wind has set
the leaves quivering on a tree whose thin and twisted branches sway
wildly against the blackness of the storm. The most impressive light
for this picture is obtained when the setting sun illuminates the
marvellous group of mourners at the foot of the Cross, so that they
stand out in startling brightness against the heightened depths of
the vast background, while Christ hangs above them dark within the
darkness.
[Illustration: EVENING IN THE PIAZZETTA.]
The Scuola di San Rocco is the supreme monument to Tintoretto’s poetic,
as to his plastic genius. If we are justified in feeling that his
understanding of the life of Christ may be a true touchstone of a
man’s philosophy, it will become a matter of first interest to us to
know how so profound a thinker as Tintoretto approached the subject.
There is no lack here indeed of tragic depth. _The Temptation of
Christ_ is sufficient alone to vindicate Tintoretto as gifted with
understanding above his fellows. Another might have compassed the
tumultuous, beautiful earth-spirit, with muscular, proud, uplifted
arms, and face burning with desire; but who else could have added that
touch of impotence to his restless, aspiring gesture, or have dreamed
the tenderness in the lovely, sorrowful face of Christ that looks
down on this radiant creature of desire, entirely without judgment or
stern denial, but as if too remote from the appeal to make reply? The
exceeding pathos of this picture would have been missed if Lucifer,
the brightest of the spirits that fell, were a whit less radiant;
if Christ’s face had one shade less of compassion in its wondering
aloofness. And for our last example we may choose a picture in which
the strength of Tintoretto is realised in quietness so complete
that a hush seems to lie about it. No painting of his is greater in
conception than that of _Christ before Pilate_. The moment he has
chosen is that in which Pilate performs his vain ablution before the
multitude who lightly accept the guilt he attempts to transfer, in
the awful cry, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Tintoretto
has set Pilate’s face in shadow: a single ray falls across the pillar
behind his head. He looks away from Christ but not towards the crowd:
he has spoken: he would fain make an end of this drama. It is the
fine, thoughtful, astute face of a Venetian councillor that Tintoretto
has depicted. Christ stands before him in the full light--removed
only by a single step--a motionless white figure above the restless
crowd, complete in control, gathered into himself and folded in a
great silence and calm; yet not now more alone than when the crowds
cried after him day and night for a sign. His head is bowed upon his
breast: his closely folded robe follows the slight curve of his body:
his bound hands lie nerveless in their cords: yet beside the strength
of this bound prisoner the animation of the foreground figure who
grips the cord is impotence indeed. Most wonderful of all perhaps is
the contrast of a busy scribe at his table below the judgment-seat,
pausing with suspended pen for the words that shall convict, with
the majestic, motionless figure of Christ. We seem to hear the words
proceeding from those closed lips: he would utter them so, not moving.
It is less the originality of this picture that impresses us than
its profound directness and truth, comparable only to the story it
illustrates. In understanding none has surpassed the conception of
that single, solitary figure, face to face with the vast fabric of
the judgment-hall, weighted with its burden of custom and tradition;
none has more profoundly imagined the tragic triumph in that entire
loneliness of the great and good before the tribunal of man.
Chapter Eleven
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES
On an evening of late September Venice revealed herself to one of
her lovers amidst a spectacle beyond any range of dreams. Evening
was closing in upon the city with cloud and breeze. In the church of
San Giorgio Maggiore the Tintorettos gleamed dimly from the walls;
daylight was gone. But in the tower high overhead, clear of the shadows
of confining buildings, the day had still a course to run. The tide
was low, and land and water stretched out in interchanging coils of
olive and azure beneath a purple storm-cloud, whilst ever against the
bar of the Lido rolled the sea, dyed with that celestial blue that
sometimes steals from the Adriatic into the basin of San Marco to
prostrate itself at the conquering Lion’s feet. And there lay Venice,
her form outlined against a flood of pearl, the water bending in a
tender, luminous bow behind her towers. Far away, across the mysterious
expanse of low lagoon, Torcello and Burano gleamed out in startling
pallor against the storm, amid a wild confusion of dark earth and
glittering water. The Northern Alps were hidden in darkness at the
horizon, but westward across the mainland the clear, sharp peaks of
the Euganean hills rose up behind the city’s pearly halo, behind the
deep blue of the surging lowlands, in almost unearthly outline against
the sunset sky. In front of them a livid fire rolled sullenly along
the valley, sending up purple smoke into the cloud. The storm genie,
summoned by nether powers, was descending to his fearful tryst behind
the Euganeans, but, as he sank, he bent his face upon the pale form
of Venice, his enchantress, and the fire of his wonder and of his
adoration kindled in all her slumbering limbs a glow of responsive
life. A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and
her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy
petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which
sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their
retinue--this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a
temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her
immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her
great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures. For
Venice is not a dead body: she is a living soul. Overflowing all
moulds in which we may think to contain her, she reveals herself
continually in new mystery, new wonder. We spoke of Venice as being
paved with sky, and every day there is cast upon her pavement a
fresh revelation of changefulness and beauty. A thousand forms and
patterns move in procession over the water, passing each instant
into something “rich and strange,” a fleeting succession of aerial
designs drawn with tremulous pencil in colours which never lived
on the palette of a mortal artist. There is a body of truth at the
root of the old fancy which gifted water-maidens with subtler, more
perilously powerful allurements than their sisters of the land. Their
element is mutability, but they are not soulless, as men have said: it
is only that their soul is as the soul of water--luminous, flowing,
mutable, reflective, musical, profound: for, though they are mutable,
they are not shallow; it is a part of their being that they should
be susceptible of change. They cannot tire their victims, they whose
beauty is continually renewed; and yet it may be that men do well to
fear them, for they have secret communings with things men do not dream
of. Venice has held men, she holds them still, with the fascination
of a water spirit; they yield to her, they grasp her, but she is
still before them, never mastered, never fully known. Let those for
whom conquest is the ideal in love beware of Venice the incomparable,
the uncompassable: they who would win her must have power to worship
what they cannot comprehend, they must desire to leave her spirit
free. Then she will unfold her heart to them, she will give herself
in a moment when the pursuit is still. And to those who can receive
the gift, she will give herself again and yet again; only they must
come freshly expectant of each fresh revelation, not clinging to past
impressions, not claiming a memory to be revived. For each renewal is
a transformation, and we must bring new senses to receive it, senses
alive and fresh as earth each morning to the touch of the old sun ever
new.