SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.
We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of
goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into
purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came
upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and
which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of
the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by
that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian
commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and
where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of
the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal. The façade of the palace is
richly sculptured; and near one corner is the bass-relief of a camel
and his turbaned driver,--in token, perhaps, that man and beast (as
orientals would understand them) were here entertained.
We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth
while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was
attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves
in a shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the
other. The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some
edifice, on which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect
had begun his work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their
close, rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground--only high
enough, indeed, to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which
pierced them on two façades. There must have been barracks near; for on
the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers
were practicing the bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the
point. “_Ein, zwei, drei,--vorwärts! Ein, zwei, drei,--ruckwärts_!”
snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers--who
may have soon afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the
more effectively for that day’s training--stooped, writhed, and leaped
obedient. I, who had already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall
bearing the name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the
military performance on that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting
from the gondola, to get by the soldiers without being forced back at
the padded point of a pole, and offered no audible objection to their
presence.
So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel
to the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew
from their arches, and hung down like the “overwhelming brows” of age.
Within, at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of
stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic
caryatides, that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight
for their gentle beauty--and everywhere the unnamable filth with which
ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque
and historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the
senses and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this
incurable _porcheria_, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space
about six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on
closer inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of
human bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned
from the grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering;
but here!--Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so
good-naturedly,--so many men have died and passed away with their
difficult, ambitious, and troublesome little schemes,--and the great
mass of mankind is taken so small account of in the course of destiny,
that the idea of death does not appear so alien and repulsive as
elsewhere, and the presence of such evidences of our poor mortality can
scarcely offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones of the good
Servite friars who had been buried in their convent, and had been digged
up to make way for certain improvements now taking place within its
walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a rest to their bodies,
to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all in their lives
like those who have come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in
Summer, and their naked feet--poor feet! clapping round in wooden-soled
sandals over the frozen stones of Venice--were swollen and gnawed with
chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their number,
looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his nose,
came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread and
fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct wished
to see him.
The friars’ skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits,
I suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused
and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for
indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care
of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the
true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared
from the area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space,
where lovers might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might
romp and frolic, till the crumbling masonry forgot its old office of
imprisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only
think of the moping and mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not
worth remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which
he did, refused to be localized. That good is an inheritance which has
enriched the world; but the share of Venice has been comparatively
small in it, and that of this old convent ground still less. I rather
wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the trouble to look up the
place; but it is a harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go
seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm in the earth
where it struck root and flourished. So far as the lifelong presence and
the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene,
this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell
he died, a simple Servite friar--he who had caught the bolts of
excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken
them in his hand,--who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal
power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I
could not feel that the ground _was_ holy, and it did not make me think
of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold
blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable
impressions to record.
Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced
against the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later
interdict was absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth
century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting
parties--the Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of
Ferrara--had no right to make. The father of the banished prince had
displeased him by marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good
man should be turned on other things, and the son compassed the sire’s
death. For this the Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take
him back to reign over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his
rights in favor of the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the
city to its territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his
protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent
claim to Ferrara on the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians
to surrender the city, and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All
Christian peoples were commanded “to arm against the Venetians, to spoil
them of their goods, as separated from the union of Christians, and as
enemies of the Roman Church.” They were driven out of Ferrara, but
their troubles did not end with their loss of the city. Giustina
Renier-Michiel says the nations, under the shelter of the pope’s
permission and command, “exercised against them every species of
cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which they were not victims.
All the rich merchandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and
in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were arrested,
maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens had been
baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed.” Such
was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day it
is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, “_He looks as if
he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara_.”
No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict
of the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision
of the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an
interference of the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice
upon certain ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the
excommunication of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter
and the triumph of St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders
mentioned were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused,
among other things, of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico
Saraceni of Vicenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful
cousin, and who revenged himself by defaming her character, and
“filthily defacing” the doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested,
and the canon, on this lady’s complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown
into prison, and the weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their
release by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic.
In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the
Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter
grew in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his
quarrel with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt
as Sarpi to stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the
service of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual
weapons of the Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken
to annul the interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was
issued, the Republic instructed her officers to stop every copy of it
at the frontier, and it was never read in any church in the Venetian
dominions. The Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All
priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, as well as all secular
persons, were commanded to disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics
were forced to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and
Capuchins were banished; and clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in
swarms to corrupt social and family relations, by declaring an end of
civil government in Venice, and preaching among women disobedience to
patriotic husbands and fathers, were severely punished. With internal
safety thus provided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, religious,
and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who devoted himself to his
trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.
It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most
learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short
and decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most
logical resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever
been faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest
the truth of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr.
Trollope, in his _Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar_, quotes from an
“Italian author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well
qualified to speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his
fellow-countrymen.”
This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as
the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: “The Italians have
identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find
in it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable
to them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to
the national character. And whatever may be the religious system which
shall govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm
that the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those
which prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago.”
Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the “_pessimism_” of these views.
The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable
disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this
respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to
state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed
myself freely of Mr. Trollope’s delightful book--it is near being too
much of a good thing--named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to
the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar,
believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the
religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his
writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success.
He was the heart and brain of the Republic’s whole resistance,--he
supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,--and, though
tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to
her.
As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only
so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned;
for at the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the
ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except
the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any
act of humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it
remained despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be
persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments
appointed him by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in
council at the Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the
cloister. After the harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the
unyielding Republic forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against
the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He
had been tried for heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again,
during the progress of St. Mark’s quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had
been questioned; and now that all was over, and Rome could turn
her attention to one particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed,
commanded to come to her, and put her heart at rest concerning these old
accusations. But Sarpi was very well in Venice. He had been appointed
Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and had received free admission
to the secret archives of the State,--a favor, till then, never bestowed
on any. So he would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to take his
life. One evening, as he was returning from the Ducal Palace in company
with a lay-brother of the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and
helpless, he was attacked by these _nuncios_ of the papal court: one of
them seized the lay-brother, and another the patrician, while a third
dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and the
ruffians made off in the confusion.
Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the
Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying
that Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was
particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made
to take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced
against them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi,
and extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for
his safety.
And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and
beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good
shaping his last utterance: “I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and
I have much to do.”
Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For
though the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even
at that time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and
forever, an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.
I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old
convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi
had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently,
to gather some trace of his presence there--to have, perhaps, the spot
on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of
Sarpi, while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed
on the subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another,
till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my
questions anew. He was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair
red-and-white complexion that he impressed me as having escaped from
a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised to find him a wax
figure in point of intelligence. He seemed to think my questions the
greatest misfortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard each
suggestion of Sarpi--_tempo della Repubblica--scomunica di Paolo
Quinto_--as an intolerable oppression. He could only tell me that on
a certain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in the demolished
church, there had been found a stone with Sarpi’s name upon it.
The padrone, who had the contract for building the new convent, had
said,--“Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;” but the stone had been
broken, and he did not know what had become of it.
And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the
convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little
tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin
announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust
was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I
had no humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar
was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it?
Finding it, could I have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now
have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary
with his long walk from St. Mark’s, and pacing with downcast eyes,--the
old patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and
stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I
should have found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it,
and brought away in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a
straggling boy with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.
On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the
corner and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba,--this time to go into the house
of Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay.
The house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it
is large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a
now illegible tablet describing it as the painter’s dwelling, and
a medallion portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had
contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long
narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house,
I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of
commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must
say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in
the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and
answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if this
were really Tintoretto’s house.
Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian’s
house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of
the church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an
intolerable bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in
upon their privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and
assure the strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as
they behold it without (and it _is_ extremely restored), that it merely
occupies the site of the painter’s dwelling, and that there is nothing
whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance
after these protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom
I had the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a
story of rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in
the new one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found
that so far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates
had been apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed
to know of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready
for protest, before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy
women, the worthless men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood,
gathered round to witness the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded
to ring (I was again in company with ladies), and try to force the
place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening
their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by
this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer’s
boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board,
inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us
to enter: _“Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran
pittore, l’immortale Tiziano,--suoni, signore!_” (Ring, by all means,
sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal Titian.
Ring!) _Da capo_. We retired amid the scorn of the populace. But
indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of Titian’s house; and were
I condemned to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curiosity,
flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to the verge of man-traps
and shot-guns to protect myself.
This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date,
had in the painter’s time an incomparably “lovely and delightful
situation.” Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it
looked out over the lagoon,--across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San
Michele,--across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the
bell-towers of her churches,--to the long line of the sea-shore on the
right and to the mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon
islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in
front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and
purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds. It had a
pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into which the painter descended
by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have studied the famous
tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he entertained the great and
noble of his day, and here he feasted and made merry with the gentle
sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend, the rascal-poet
Aretino. The painter’s and the sculptor’s wives knew each other, and
Sansovino’s Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio; [Footnote:
The wife of Titian’s youth was, according to Ticozzi, named Lucia. It is
in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of the _Annali
Urbani_, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings of Titian and
Sansovino, says,--“Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un amore fatto sacro
dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una Cecilia.” I would not
advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any thing concerning the
house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of the painter, while
Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who is wise enough not
to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies there, talking at
an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden, where their husbands
walk up and down together in the purple evening light.
In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new
room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed
his immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the
house when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said,
though I was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of
Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari,
and on the Calle del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible
pastry. It is known by an inscription, and by the medallion of the
dramatist above the land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the
court on the ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque
old stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with
many little heads of lions.
Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello’s birthplace,
but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant’ Appollinare
near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to
the water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly
canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At
the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out
clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing
this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her
appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another
occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has
since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.
The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly
newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on
the Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one’s interest. The
custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept,
and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door
that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of
these interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese
shop which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant’ Angelo to
San Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat
melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron’s memory is not a presence which I
approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when
I thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his
lordship there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in
Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a _cosa
di Venezia_, and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed
out to you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made
the acquaintance of an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who
said he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from
the Port of San Nicolò to his palace-door. The distance is something
over three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat
was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a
mill-race. I think it would be impossible to make the distance against
the tide.