and aristocratic existence. To some, indeed, it is difficult to find
a clue, and it has been conjectured that these represent scenes from
the popular comedies of the day. The others depict such well-known
incidents as the visit to the convent parlour, where the nuns are
entertaining their gallants with a marionette-show; the masked _nobil
donna_ consulting the fortune-teller, or walking with her _cicisbeo_
in Saint Mark’s square; the same lady’s _lever_, where she is seen at
her toilet-table surrounded by admirers; the family party at breakfast,
with the nurse bringing in a swaddled baby; the little son and heir
riding out attended by his governor; the actress rehearsing her aria
with the _maestro di cappella_; the visit to the famous hippopotamus
in his tent in the Piazzetta; the dancing-lesson, the music-lesson,
the portrait-painting, and a hundred other episodes of social and
domestic life. The personages who take part in these scenes are always
of one type: the young women with small oval faces, powdered but
unrouged, with red lips and sloping foreheads; the men in cloaks and
masks, or gay embroidered coats, with square brows and rather snub
features, gallant, flourishing, _empressés_, but never in the least
idealized or sentimentalized. The scenes of “high life” take place
for the most part in tall bare rooms, with stone window-frames, a
family portrait of a doge or an admiral above the chimney-piece, and a
few stiff arm-chairs of the heavy Venetian baroque. There is nothing
sumptuous in the furnishing of the apartments or in the dress of their
inmates. The ladies, if they are going abroad or paying a visit, wear
a three-cornered hat above the black lace _zendaletto_ which hides
their hair and the lower part of the face, while their dresses are
covered by the black silk _bauto_ or domino. Indoors, they are attired
in simple short gowns of silk or brocade, with a kerchief on the
shoulders, and a rose or a clove-pink in the unpowdered hair. That
pleasure in the painting of gorgeous stuffs, and in all the material
splendours of life, derived by Tiepolo from his great predecessors of
the Renaissance, was not shared by Longhi. His charm lies in a less
definable quality, a quality of unstudied simplicity and naturalness,
which gives to his easel-pictures the value of actual transcripts from
life. One feels that he did not “arrange” his scenes, any more than
Goldoni constructed his comedies. Both were content to reflect, in the
mirror of a quietly humorous observation, the every-day incidents of
the piazza, the convent and the palace.
The fact that Longhi, in his _genre_-pictures, sought so little
variety of grouping, and was content to limit his figures to so small
a range of gestures, has given rise to the idea that he was incapable
of versatility and breadth of composition. To be undeceived on this
point, however, one has only to see his frescoes in the Palazzo Grassi
(now Sina) on the Grand Canal. This fine palace, built about 1740
by Massari, the architect of the Gesuati, has a magnificent double
stairway leading from the colonnaded court to the state apartments
above; and on the walls of this stairway Longhi, for once laying aside
his small canvases and simple methods, has depicted, in a series of
charmingly-animated groups, the members of the Grassi family leaning
over a marble balustrade to see their guests ascending the stairs.
The variety of these groups, the expressiveness of the faces, and the
general breadth of treatment, prove that Longhi had far more technical
and imaginative power than he chose to put into his little pictures,
and that his naïveté was a matter of choice. Probably no one who knows
his work regrets this self-imposed limitation. Additional movement and
complexity of grouping would destroy the sense of leisure, of spacious
rooms and ample time, of that absence of hurry and confusion so typical
of a society untroubled by moral responsibilities or social rivalries,
and pursuing pleasure with the well-bred calmness which was one of the
most charming traits obliterated by the French Revolution.
VIII
On a quiet canal not far from the church of the Frari there stands an
old palace where, in a series of undisturbed rooms, may be seen the
very setting in which the personages of Goldoni and Longhi played out
their social comedy.
The Palazzo Querini-Stampaglia was bequeathed to the city of Venice
some fifty years since by the last Count Querini, and with its gallery,
its library and its private apartments has since then stood open to
a public which never visits it. Yet here the student of Venetian
backgrounds may find the unchanged atmosphere of the eighteenth
century. The gallery, besides some good paintings of earlier schools,
contains a large collection of Bellotti’s pictures, representing all
the great religious and popular festivals of Venice, as well as a
half-dozen Longhis and a charming series of _genre_-pictures by unknown
artists of his school.
Of far greater interest, however, are the private apartments, with
their seventeenth and eighteenth century decorations still intact,
and the walls lined with the heavy baroque consoles and arm-chairs
so familiar to students of Longhi’s interiors, and of the charming
prints in the first edition of Goldoni. Here is the typical _chambre
de parade_, with its pale-green damask curtains and bed-hangings, and
its furniture painted with flowers on a ground of pale-green _laque_;
here the tapestried saloon with its Murano chandeliers, the boudoir
with looking-glass panels set in delicately carved and painted wreaths
of flowers and foliage, and the portrait-room hung with pictures of the
three great Querini: the Doge, the Cardinal and the Admiral. Here, too,
is the long gallery, with a bust of the Cardinal (a seventeenth-century
prince of the Church) surrounded by marble effigies of his seven
_bravi_: a series of Berniniesque heads of remarkable vigour and
individuality, from that of the hoary hang-dog scoundrel with
elf-locks drooping over an evil scowl, to the smooth young villain with
bare throat and insolent stare, who seems to glory in his own sinister
beauty.
These busts give an insight into a different phase of Italian life:
the life of the violent and tragical seventeenth century, when every
great personage, in the Church no less than in the world, had his
bodyguard of hardened criminals, outlaws and galley-slaves, who
received sanctuary in their patron’s palace, and performed in return
such acts of villany and violence as the Illustrissimo required. It
seems a far cry from the peaceable world of Goldoni and Longhi to this
prelate surrounded by the effigies of his hired assassins; yet _bravi_,
though no longer openly acknowledged or immortalized in marble, lurked
in the background of Italian life as late as the end of the eighteenth
century, and Stendhal, who knew Italy as few foreigners have known
it, declares that in his day the great Lombard nobles still had their
retinue of _bauli_, as the knights of the stiletto were called in the
Milanese.
It is not in art only that the _bravi_ have been commemorated. Lovers
of “I Promessi Sposi,” the one great Italian novel, will not soon
forget the followers of Don Rodrigo; and an idea of the part they
played at the end of the eighteenth century may be obtained from the
pages of Ippolito Nievo’s “Confessioni di un Ottuagenario,” that
delightful book, half romance, half autobiography, which, after many
years of incredible neglect, has just been republished in Italy.
Ippolito Nievo, one of Garibaldi’s young soldiers, was among those
who perished in the wreck of the _Ercole_, on the return from Palermo
in 1860. He was but twenty-nine at the time of his death, and it is
said that his impatience to see a lady to whom he was attached caused
him, despite the entreaties of his friends, to take passage in the
notoriously unseaworthy _Ercole_. Four years earlier he had written the
“Confessioni,” a volume which, for desultory charm and simple rendering
of domestic incidents, is not unworthy to take rank with “Dichtung
und Wahrheit,” while its capricious heroine, La Pisana, is as vivid a
creation as Goethe’s Philina or (one had almost said) as the Beatrix of
Thackeray.
Ippolito Nievo was himself a native of the Veneto, and intimately
acquainted, through family tradition, with the life of the small
towns and villa-castles of the Venetian mainland at the close of the
eighteenth century. The “Confessioni” picture the life of a young
lad in a nobleman’s castle near the town of Portogruaro, and later
in Venice; and not the least remarkable thing about the book is the
fact that, at a period when other Italian novelists were depicting the
high-flown adventures of mediæval knights and ladies, its young author,
discarding the old stage-properties of romanticism, should have set
himself to recording, with the wealth of detail and quiet humour of a
Dutch _genre_-painter, the manners and customs of his own little corner
of Italy, as his parents had described it to him. Nievo’s account of
the provincial nobles in the Veneto shows that to the very end of the
eighteenth century, mediæval customs, with all their violence and
treachery, prevailed within a day’s journey of polished and peaceful
Venice. His nobles in their fortified castles, of which the drawbridges
are still raised at night, have their little trains of men-at-arms,
composed in general of the tattered peasantry on their estates, but
sometimes of professional fighters, smugglers or outlaws, who have been
taken into the service of some truculent lord of the manor; and Nievo
describes with much humour the conflicts between these little armies,
and the ruses, plots and negotiations of their quarrelsome masters.
In another novel, published at about the same time, Pietro Scudo,
a Venetian who wrote in French, has drawn, with far less talent, a
picture of another side of Venetian life: the life of the musical
schools and the Opera, which George Sand had attempted to represent in
“Consuelo.” Scudo’s book, “Le Chevalier Sarti,” has fallen into not
unmerited oblivion. It is written in the insipid style of the romantic
period--that style which Flaubert, in a moment of exasperation,
described as “les embêtements bleuâtres du lyrisme poitrinaire”; and
its heroine, like Châteaubriand’s unhappy Madame de Beaumont, dies of
the fashionable ailment of the day, _une maladie de langueur_. The
book, moreover, is badly constructed to the verge of incoherence, and
the characters are the stock mannikins of romantic fiction; yet in
spite of these defects, Scudo has succeeded (where George Sand failed)
in reproducing the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Venice. He has
done this not by force of talent but by the patient accumulation of
detail. Though not the most important feature in the construction
of a good historical novel, this is an essential part of the
process. George Sand, however, was above such humble methods. Totally
lacking in artistic sensibility and in its accompanying faculty,
the historic imagination, she was obliged to confine herself to the
vaguest generalities in describing scenes and manners so alien to the
“romantic” conception of life. Nature and passion were the only things
which interested her, and in the Venice of the eighteenth century
there was no nature and little passion. Hence the Venetian scenes of
“Consuelo” give the impression of having been done _de chic_, while
Scudo’s bear the impress of an unimaginative accuracy. In “Le Chevalier
Sarti” the lover of “decadent” Venice will find innumerable curious
details, descriptions of life in the villas of the Brenta, of concerts
in the famous Scuole, carnival scenes at the ridotto, and _parties
fines_ at the Orto di San Stefano, the favourite resort of the world
of gallantry; while the minor characters of the book, who have escaped
the obligatory romanticism of the hero and heroine, help to make up the
crowded picture of a world as bright and brittle as a sun-shot Murano
glass.
IX
But it is, after all, not in Nievo or Scudo, nor even in Longhi
and Goldoni, that one comes closest to the vanished Venice of the
eighteenth century.
In the Museo Correr, on the Grand Canal, there has recently been opened
a room containing an assemblage of life-sized mannikins dressed in the
various costumes of the _sette cento_.
Here are the red-robed Senator, the proud Procuratessa in brocade and
Murano lace, the Abatino in his plum coloured taffeta coat and black
small-clothes, the fashionable reveller in _bauto_ and mask, the
lacquey in livery of pale-blue silk, the lawyer, the gondolier, the
groom, and the noble Marquess in his hunting-dress of white buckskin.
Surely nowhere else does one come into such actual contact with that
little world which was so essentially a world of _appearances_--of fine
clothes, gay colours and graceful courtly attitudes. The mannikins
indeed are not graceful. The Cavaliere Leandro can no longer execute a
sweeping bow at the approach of the Procuratessa, or slip a love-letter
into the muff of the charming Angelica; the Senator may stare as
haughtily as he pleases at the Abate and the lawyer, without compelling
those humble clients to stir an inch from his path; and the noble
Marquess, in his spotless buckskin leggings and gauntlets, will never
again be off to shoot thrushes from a “bird-tower” in the Euganeans.
But the very rigidity of their once supple joints seems an allegory of
their latter state. There they stand, poor dolls of destiny, discarded
playthings of the gods, in attitudes of puzzled wonder, as if arrested
in their revels by the stroke of the dread Corsican magician--for it
was not Death but Napoleon who “stepped tacitly and took them” from the
plots and pleasures, the sunshine and music of the canals, to that pale
world of oblivion where only now and then some dreamer curious of the
day of little things revisits their melancholy ghosts.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.
The spelling of non-English words was not checked.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Redundant chapter titles removed by Transcriber.