CHURCHES AND PICTURES.
One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the
English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were
kind enough to pause before Titian’s John the Baptist. It was attention
that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs
at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually
return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger
paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the
Baptist,--one of the most impressive, if not the most religious,
that the master has painted,--and the wild and singular beauty of
the landscape made itself felt through the infinite depths of their
respectability, the father of the family and the head of the group
uttered approval of the painter’s conception: “Quite my idea of the
party’s character,” he said; and then silently and awfully led his
domestic train away.
I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that
I would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I
thought--if I really thought any thing at all--concerning the art which
I spent so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear
I should fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud,
and should presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which
I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is
the sad fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the
true and beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except
upon a few loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom
he turns in his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master,
while his own little learning has made him distrust his natural likings
and mislikings. Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have
in your study of the Venetian painters; and after reading him, and
suffering confusion and ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the
exercises by which you are chastised into admission that he has taught
you any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very favorable to your
future as a Christian. But even in this subdued state you must distrust
the methods by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you
perceive to certain civil and religious conditions: you scarcely
understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains (on one page) to paint
well any person baser than a saint or senator, and with whom “exactly
in proportion to the dignity of the character is the beauty of the
painting,”--comes (on the next page) to paint a very “weak, mean, and
painful” figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the
great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other humorous
postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere
of their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of
any picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of
it: stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader
of a painter’s coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian’s
“Assumption” is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any
one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning
critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of
Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,--that difference which no
one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking
thrice at their works? It results from all this that I must believe
special criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence
of the works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not,
in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which
would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art
than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at
all, I think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in
Venice as can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so
rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on
any of the pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the
Venetian churches.
Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to
spend the reader’s patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice;
and, looking back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the
principal edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by
name. It is possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this;
but I should regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of
the beautiful which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company
in many lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under
obligations to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly
a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some
pleasant thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in
my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some
substance that shall be sensible to the eyes that look on this print;
and I forgive myself the reluctance the more readily when I remember
how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin’s description of St. Mark’s Church,
I, who had seen it every day for three years, began to have dreadful
doubts of its existence.
To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the
descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark’s,
which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed
has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals
profoundly to the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a
sheltering friendliness in its low-hovering domes and arches, which
lures and caresses while it awes; as if here, where the meekest soul
feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest
load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of
its repentance in the temple’s dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred
with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps.
Though the temple is enriched with incalculable value of stone and
sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its
mere opulence. Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the
highest uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn
splendor, that wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and
rarely seen treasures of the church--such as the famous golden
altarpiece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in
Constantinople six hundred years ago--failed to impress me with their
pecuniary worth, though I
“Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,”
and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are
conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark’s, where every
line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels
to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence
of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other
churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of
their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of
twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces
half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble
before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all
ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours
music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones.
But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the
_Te Deum_ fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark’s
alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be
mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the
Basilica San Marco with some ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to
the patriarchate of Venice, and which consist of an unusual number of
robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this
is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar
spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the foot
of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, out-of-door
_chaussure_, and places the sacred shoes on the patriarch’s feet. A like
ceremony replaces the patriarch’s every-day gaiters, and the pious rite
ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best
adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element
of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the
low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.--Yet I do not know if I would
banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark’s. There is
certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and
its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to
your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in
the world.
The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is
to be heard at St. Mark’s, though the director of the choir always
contrives to make so odious a slapping with his _bâton_ as nearly
to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the
performance (immediately after the _Festa del Redentore_) of the Soldini
Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of
Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a
part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark,
on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three
successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his
soul a certain number of masses,--all to be done in the richest and
costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the
Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so
strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less
than four masses over and above the prescribed number. [Footnote: After
hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the _Casa di Ricovero_,
in order to look at Soldini’s will, and there I had the pleasure of
recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity
is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense
edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and
helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five
hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini;
and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the
inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and
infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and
such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise;
for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something
of the perfection of Venetian charities.
At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are
made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young
nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic.
She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help
loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except
in name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a
moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape
had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in
sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and
beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she
blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes. Poor little
mother!]
As there is so little in St. Mark’s of the paltry or revolting character
of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of
Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity
and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these
times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell
upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith
honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition
in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the
Renaissance churches,--fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming
spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of
religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has
rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its
friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life
of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of
this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to
in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in
the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child,
elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and
garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly
corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted,
silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured
a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs
by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the
column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the
miracles she has performed.
These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions
of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is
dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited,
is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and
hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her
interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the
ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman
in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the
havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds,
leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of
glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from
destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus
recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the
little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the
second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be
painted and hung at the Madonna’s shrine. Now and then you also find
offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good
crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of
silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has
caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine,
is to be seen in the church of San Nicolò dei Tolentini, where I should
think there were three hundred.
Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent
times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is
good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church
of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of
her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense
concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and
vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of
votive offerings in the temple,--though the great silver lamp placed
there by the city, in memory of the Madonna’s goodness during the
visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as
representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb
church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do
not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other
temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine
effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic
breadth of steps rising from the water’s edge, and the many-statued
sculpture of its façade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its
high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble
group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away
the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand
Tintoretto in the sacristy.
The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni
e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say,
after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San
Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that,
in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he
failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made
by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side
of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this
figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose
drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and
who broods, with a horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on
something which she supports with her left hand upon her knee. It is a
round of marble, and if you have the daring to peer under the arm of
the debauchee, and look at it as she does, you find that it contains the
bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing more ghastly and abominable
than the whole thing can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type
of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for one even less Ruskinian
than I might have fancied that in the sculptured countenance could be
seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, from time
to time, death confronted her amid her revels.
People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of
Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a
painting of equal size by John Bellini,--the Madonna, Child, and Saints,
of course,--and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points
in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment
of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the
greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that
indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that
brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and
ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of
note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having
also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but
at last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some,
and tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which
gave me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio,
and a few others of that school and time.
Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian
convent adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since
the monks were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now
the headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade
surrounding the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of
this court are remains--very shadowy remains indeed--of frescos painted
by Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it
is said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural
story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to
repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very
vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow
more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish
to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own
pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can
nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between
the painters was partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of
their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who
is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her
lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this
idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk,
Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano,
and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco
Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians
are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those fervent
preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent. The monks are
gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract
immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among ourselves.
It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of the
churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable,
the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent
the sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more
abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to
the scattered kneelers on the floor,--the foul old women and the young
girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies
of the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men
proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy
water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with
the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young
fellows of low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough
to tap themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar;
and lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces
of the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently,
and the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman,
kneeling before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her
head to the ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about
the great picture of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings
the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in
a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually expels her with the
visitors, and at one o’clock locks the door and goes home.
By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o’clock mass
in the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have
come to market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle
or basket. At this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges
uncertainly at the tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his
manner to the congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is
altogether rasped and nervous. I think it is best to be one’s self a
little sleepy,--when the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the
church of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several centuries
back from you, and of saying mass to the patrician ghosts from the
tombs under your feet and there is nothing at all impossible in the
Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and fatly tumbling
about on the broken arches of the altars.
I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep
cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of
sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek
and portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of
perfect understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with
the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the
sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association
with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe
or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great
brazier in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the
slightest interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the
sacristy; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs
in the church. I have no doubt he has passed through the open door
of Canova’s monument, and that he sees some coherence and meaning in
Titian’s; he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro,
and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the
midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides.
This profound and awful animal I take to be a blood relation of the
cat in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian
during divine service, and loves a certain glorious bed on the top of a
bench, where the sun strikes upon him through the great painted window,
and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and crimsons.
The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom
their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of
visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely
opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag
the deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of
the absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories
rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a
national antipathy toward those troops of German tourists, who always
seek the Sehenswürdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty,--the men
wearing their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as
much like English people as possible; while their valet marshals them
forward with a stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single
punctuation point. These wise cats know the real English by their
“Murrays;” and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us
Americans by the speed with which we pass from one thing to another, and
by our national ignorance of all languages but English. They must also
hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land in unpleasant comparisons,
and I do not think they believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I
am sure they would say to us, if they could, “_Quando finirà mai quella
guerra? Che sangue! che orrore_!” [Footnote: “When will this war ever be
ended? what blood! what horror!” I have often heard the question and the
comment from many Italians who were not cats.] The French tourist they
distinguish by his evident skepticism concerning his own wisdom in
quitting Paris for the present purpose; and the traveling Italian, by
his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, with whom he is now
making his wedding trip.
I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in
Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is
obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners,
to show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of
pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be
impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as
if in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be
a kind of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests
standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding.
In San Giovanni e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear
through an opening in the roof, and descend by means of some hundred
feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which made us ache with fear,
delighted his companions so much that their applause was scarcely
subdued by the sacred character of the place. As soon as he reached the
ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured looking priest took him by the
arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for a painter.