to the women of the better classes. There were 1659 patrician ladies,
1230 noble girls, 2508 nuns, and 1936 women of the burgher class. What
could they do against 11,654? The note adds that all the others were
women of the people.
[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL IN SUMMER]
VI
A FEW PAINTERS, MEN OF LETTERS, AND SCHOLARS
According to some trustworthy authorities, Raphael, Martin Luther, and
Rabelais were born in the same year. The fact that they were certainly
contemporaries with each other and with many other men of genius of
contradictory types is one of the principal features of that most
contradictory age. Signor Molmenti compares the gifts of Carpaccio and
the two Bellini to rays that warm and gladden, those of Titian and
Tintoretto to lights that dazzle but give no heat. In two centuries that
immense change in art had taken place; from having spoken to the soul it
had come to appeal to the eye.
The best painters of the fifteenth century touch us, and remain
impersonal to us. What do we know, for instance, of Carpaccio’s dreams
or struggles or sufferings while he was painting his great picture of
Saint Ursula and her maiden company? We gaze upon those virgin faces,
those crowns of martyrdom, those tenderly smiling women’s lips, those
almost childlike gestures, and they touch us deeply. Perhaps we should
like to ask them the secret of Carpaccio’s melancholy soul. But the lips
move not, nor do the eyes answer; the eleven thousand maidens seem
rather to beckon us away to that place of refreshment, light and peace,
where we may hope that the great painter’s sadness ended at last. They
tell us not of him, nor of themselves, but of heaven.
A hundred years have gone by, and still artists paint pictures; but they
tell us no longer of anything but their own selves, their own lives,
their own passions. It is the world that has changed; perhaps it is not
faith that is gone, faith the evidence of things unseen, but most
assuredly belief has taken flight and left men sceptical, the belief
which is the mother of all bright dreams, and which must see in order to
believe, if only in imagination, and, believing, cannot fail to see.
The time had come when the artists were interesting for their own sakes
as well as for what they did, and when the reporter-chronicler thought
it worth while to note every anecdote of their daily lives, to put down
the names of their models, to tell us who sat to them for their
Madonnas. And those names are mostly names of good and honest women, and
we know to a nicety why they chose this face for one purpose and that
for another. There is an end of all the legends of saintly heads begun
by the artist and finished before morning by an angel’s hand. There is
an end, too, of dreams of refreshment, light and peace. The artists of
the sixteenth century are the most human of mankind, the most subject to
humanity’s passions, its weaknesses and even its madness, and their
works bear the stamp of the sensuous naturalism in which they lived.
The patrician Alvise Pisani possessed a beautiful house at San Cassian,
standing on a tongue of land called Biri Grande. From the embrasured
windows Murano could be seen, and the island of San Cristoforo, and of
Pace; beyond these, in the distance, rose the tall tower of Torcello,
and a dark line along the water marked the forest of the distant island
called Deserto; to the left rose the Euganean Hills, to the right
stretched a long beach of gleaming sand. The fishermen used to say that
when the mysterious glow spread over the waters of the lagoon at night,
the Fata Morgana had floated up the Adriatic and was bathing in the
dark.
[Illustration: AFTERGLOW, THE GRAND CANAL]
All those things might be seen from the windows of Alvise Pisani’s
house; and there dwelt Titian, no longer the thoughtless gallant of his
earlier days, but grave now, stately and magnificent. Violante is
forgotten, he lives honourably with his wife Cecilia, but he
[Illustration: EUGANEAN HILLS FROM THE LAGOON, LOW TIDE]
still keeps his love of conversation, his luxurious tastes, his lordly
manner; and now he feels himself the equal of the great of the earth,
and it amuses him to exchange letters with princes. For secretaries he
has poets, historians, and even a cardinal; he is the Titian who will
allow an emperor to stoop for the brush that has fallen from his hand.
But few men ever had such grace and winning charm, and his house is
ever open to his countless friends, a place of gathering, of wit and of
good talk, where ladies are received, some of whom a later age will call
blue-stockings, ladies who are members of learned academies, and ladies
that play the lute.
Such was Titian, and such the house in which he was rarely alone. He had
among many friends two at least with whom he was really intimate, the
sculptor Sansovino, and Pietro Aretino the man of letters. The former
was the friend of his heart and of his artistic intelligence; the latter
he himself regarded as a sort of wild beast whom he had tamed and whom
he kept to frighten his rivals and his enemies. He could not let a day
go by without seeing both, and the three were generally together. If one
of them was asked to dinner, he invariably begged his host to invite the
other two.
They certainly did not resemble one another. Aretino was an adventurer
who had tried most things: in his boyhood he had forged and stolen; in
his young prime he had been a renegade monk, and then a courtier; in his
maturity, to use one of his own expressions, he earned his living by the
sweat of his ink. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had hired a house for
[Sidenote: _Tassini, under Carbon._]
him at the Riva del Carbon, for sixty soldi yearly, on the Grand Canal,
and it was there that he followed an occupation which procured him all
the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life. He made it his
business to address the most abjectly flattering panegyrics to eminent
persons, and even to sovereigns like Francis I. and the Emperor Charles
V., and they rewarded him with presents of money or old wine. Or if some
unlucky aspirant to office was in need of popularity or favour, Aretino
quietly explained to him that a little article from his own pen could
make or mar success; and there was nothing to be done but to pay, and to
pay handsomely. Between the composition of one libel and the next, the
amiable Tuscan lived riotously on his latest earnings with his two
daughters Adria and Austria; in plain language he was a blackmailer, a
voluptuary, a man of the highest taste, and of the lowest tastes.
No one loved him, but he was generally feared, and was therefore much
sought after. His house was
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Annali._]
always full, and it was said that it was impossible to go there without
meeting a scholar, a soldier, and a monk. He himself said pleasantly
that the steps of his house were as much worn by the feet of visitors as
the pavement before the Capitol was by the cars of triumphing Roman
generals. Nor was it only those that could pay blackmail who mounted the
stairs. The man was full of contradictions; the poor crept up to his
door and did not return empty-handed. Aretino was charitable.
He could not bear to see a child crying for cold or hunger, nor to see
men or women sleeping shelterless in the streets, and often he took in
under his roof pilgrims and poor wandering gentlemen. On Easter day he
never failed to feed eighteen little beggar children at his table. But
when he was tired of his visitors, rich or poor, he took refuge with
Titian at San Cassian, for Titian was the only human being whom he loved
sincerely, and all the resources of his venomous wit and cruel pen were
at the disposal of this one friend. As for Titian’s other friends,
Aretino spared them, but the artist’s enemies he harassed without mercy.
He was a physical coward, of course, as all such men are. He hated
Jacopo Tintoretto for two reasons, first, because his growing reputation
was beginning to be a source of anxiety to Titian, and secondly, because
he was too poor to be blackmailed and too proud to show himself in
Titian’s house with the threadbare clothes which his wife, good soul,
made him wear for economy’s sake. Aretino accordingly abused him, and
Tintoretto heard of it and determined to put an end to it in his own
way.
One day he met Aretino in the street, stopped him, and proposed to paint
his portrait. The blackmailer was delighted, as the picture would cost
him nothing and would certainly be valuable, and he at once made an
appointment to go to Jacopo’s studio. On the appointed day he appeared
punctually, and seeing an empty canvas ready for the portrait, sat down
in a becoming attitude. But the painter’s turn had come. ‘Stand up!’ he
said, and Aretino obeyed. Then Tintoretto pulled out a long
horse-pistol. ‘What is this?’ asked Aretino, alarmed. ‘I am going to
measure you,’ replied the artist, and he proceeded to measure his
adversary by the length of the pistol. ‘You are two pistols and a half
high,’ he observed; ‘now go!’ and he pointed to the door. Aretino was
badly frightened, and lost no time in getting out of the house; and from
that day he neither wrote nor spoke any word that was not flattering to
Jacopo Tintoretto.
Aretino received another lesson one day from the famous Andrea Calmo.
The latter was an extremely original personage, half man of letters,
half actor, whose improvised speeches in the character of Pantaloon were
so remarkable as to give rise to the mistaken belief that he had
invented that mask. He also wrote open letters to prominent men, as
Aretino did, and published them, and as his were quite as libellous as
the Tuscan’s, and sometimes even more witty, they had
[Sidenote: _Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act iv. sc. 2 (Cambridge edition,
1863)._]
an immense success. In fifty years they went through fifty editions, and
there is positive proof that Shakespeare was acquainted with them, for
he quotes a line and a half from one of Calmo’s works:--
Venetia, Venetia,
Chi non ti vede non ti pretia.
Calmo’s chief virtue was neither patience nor forbearance, and it
appears that Aretino irritated him exceedingly. One day his nerves could
[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Studi, and Nuovi Studi._]
bear no longer with the Tuscan, and he gave vent to his feelings in an
ironical open letter addressed to the object of his dislike. Here is a
fragment of it:--
‘You are not a rational, natural human being, but aërial, celestial,
deified, a devout man and a calm one, esteemed by all, adorned with
every treasure and with all the virtues that no one being possesses,
from the East to the West. You are the temple of poetry, the theatre of
invention, a very sea of comparisons--and you behave in such a manner as
to scare even the dead!’
Titian’s other friend, Jacopo Sansovino, the celebrated architect, was
also a Tuscan by birth, but was of quite another stamp. His youth had
been wild, but he had then married a woman of great beauty and
refinement whose name was Paola, and who completely dominated him. The
couple were often seen at the house at San Cassian, as Titian and
Cecilia his wife often visited them in their dwelling in Saint Mark’s
Square close by the clock tower.
Sansovino was handsome still, and rather a fashionable person, but
excitable withal and a brilliant talker; his life had been saddened for
some length of time by the wild doings of his son, but to his great
relief the young man at last took to literature and the art of printing.
The Sansovino couple also made their house the general meeting-place of
many friends, as Titian did.
Though Jacopo was a Tuscan, Venice made every effort to monopolise his
time and industry after he had become famous throughout Italy, and he
was appointed the official architect of Saint Mark’s. He was charged
with the erection of the Mint and the Library, and of
[Illustration: VENICE FROM THE GARDEN]
a new Loggia to replace the very simple one in which the patricians had
been accustomed to gather before the meetings of the Great Council, ever
since the thirteenth century. How well he succeeded in that, the
beautiful construction which fell with the Campanile amply showed.
While he was at work on the Library, Titian was called to Rome to
execute an important commission, and set out in the certainty that on
his return he should find the building finished and his friend covered
with glory. The construction grew indeed, and was soon finished, with
its two stories, of Doric and Ionic architecture, and the balustrade
that crowns the edifice, and the really royal staircase, and all the
rest.
But unhappily, on the night of the eighteenth of December 1545, the
vault of the main hall fell in, with no apparent reason. Instantly all
Sansovino’s rivals raised a terrific outcry, accusing him of having
neglected the most elementary rules of his art, and asserting that the
accident was altogether due to his negligence and incapacity. The
zealous magistrate whose duty it was to oversee the construction of
public buildings did not even wait for a proper warrant, but seized
Sansovino instantly and sent him to prison.
Paola was in despair, and when the news was generally known, early on
the following morning, the indignation of the architect’s friends knew
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Annali._]
no bounds. In a few hours Aretino wrote a consoling letter to Paola,
another to Titian, explaining to him what had happened, and a series of
libellous articles against every architect in Venice except Sansovino
himself. No one escaped who could be supposed to have uttered a single
word against the reputation of the artist in trouble. There was a
certain architect called Sanmichele, a man of great piety--greater
perhaps than his talent--a frequenter of Titian’s house, a rich man,
too, such as Aretino delighted to fleece. Possibly also the good old
artist’s character was irritating to the evil Tuscan, who could not see
why a man should be both distinguished and virtuous, nor why Sanmichele
should have a special mass said when he was about to begin an important
work. One of Aretino’s favourite tricks was to use the most frightful
language before the mild old man, till the latter, having exhausted
entreaty and finding reproach useless, was driven to buy the
blasphemer’s silence with a handsome present of rare old wine.
The occasion of Sansovino’s imprisonment seemed to Aretino an excellent
opportunity for venting his spleen against the devout artist, and at the
same time for obtaining a lucrative return for his industry. He
therefore accused Sanmichele of being the direct cause of his friend’s
arrest, and the abuse heaped upon him was so virulent and so persistent
that its victim was obliged to have recourse to the usual bribe, which
this time consisted of a fine basket of fish.
Sansovino’s friends soon triumphed, for they were many and powerful. I
do not know whether a vaulted ceiling only just constructed can suddenly
collapse and fall in of itself without some fault on the part of the
architect, but Sansovino was unanimously declared to be entirely
innocent, and the unlucky magistrate who, with some show of reason, had
ordered his arrest was thrown into prison in his place.
His brilliantly successful career continued until he was eighty years of
age, when, being too old for work, he was succeeded in the post of
architect to the Republic by the celebrated Palladio. After that he
lived eleven years longer in the society and friendship of Titian, who
was two years older then he. On the register in the church of San Basso
is to be found the following entry: ‘On November the seventh 1570 died
Jacopo Sansovino, architect of the Church of Saint Mark; he was
ninety-one years old and he died of old age.’
Aretino’s life had come to an abrupt close fourteen years earlier. I
find in Tassini under the name ‘Carbon,’ Aretino’s place of residence, a
statement of the singular fact that Aretino’s death was predicted a few
months before it took place, though he was at that time perfectly well.
The author of the _Terremoto_, addressing the Tuscan man of letters,
says: ‘In this year LVI thou shalt
[Sidenote: _1556._]
die; for the appearance of the star to the Wise Men at the birth of Our
Lord was held to be a great sign, and I now hold the comet of this year
to be a little sign which comes on thy account, because thou art against
Christ.’ In that year Aretino actually died. It is said that his death
was caused by his falling off his chair when convulsed with laughter at
an abominable story, and though there may be some exaggeration about the
tale, the physiognomy of the man might justify it. No one regretted
him. In the State Archives of Florence a letter from a Venetian has been
found which says: ‘The mortal Pietro Aretino was taken to another life
on Wednesday evening at the third hour of the night by a (literally)
cannonade of apoplexy, without leaving any regret or grief in any decent
person. May God have pardoned him.’
Titian died six years after Sansovino, surviving to be the last of the
triad of inseparable friends. He was then ninety-nine years of age, and
was carried off by the plague when, judging from the picture he was
painting at the time of his death, he was still in full possession of
his amazing powers. Of all the victims of the terrible epidemic, amongst
tens of thousands of dead, he was the only one to whom the Republic
granted a public funeral.
If we ask what was the ‘social standing’ of Titian and of some of the
most famous Venetians, we shall find that they were simple members of a
Guild, and were reckoned with the working men. The Golden Book was the
register of the nobles, the Silver Book was reserved for the class of
the secretaries, that is, of the burghers or original citizens; but he
who exercised an art such as painting, sculpture, or architecture,
belonged to the people. Like the commonest housepainter, or the painter
of gondolas and house furniture, Titian and Tintoretto were subject to
the ‘Mariegola,’ or charter of their Guild, and had to pass through the
degrees of apprentice and fellow-craftsman before becoming masters.
The law was that ‘no painter, either Venetian or foreign, should be
allowed to sell his paintings unless he was inscribed on the register of
painters and had sworn to conform to the rules of that art,’ in other
words, to the charter of the Guild. Furthermore, if
[Illustration: HOUSE OF TINTORETTO]
he sold his work anywhere except in his shop, he was liable to a fine of
ten lire.
We know that neither Titian nor any of the great artists of his time
rebelled against these regulations. They were all their lives ‘brethren’
of their Guild, and every one of them was obliged to obey the chief of
the corporation in all matters concerning that fraternity, though he
might be a mere painter of doors and windows. It was not until the
eighteenth century that the artist painters organised themselves in a
separate body called the College of Painters. The examination of Paolo
Veronese, which I have translated in speaking of the Holy Office, shows
clearly enough what a poor opinion the authorities had of artistic
inspiration.
Many writers, amongst whom Monsieur Yriarte is an exception, have told
us that literature and the sciences were not cultivated with any success
in Venice during the sixteenth century. It is at least true that the few
who occupied themselves with those matters displayed qualities not far
removed from genius.
It was very common for the great Venetian nobles to play patron to
poets, painters, and architects, and almost every name that became
famous in the arts and sciences recalls that of some patrician or
secretary who protected the artist, the writer, or the student. The
Republic was often the refuge of gifted men whom political or personal
reasons had exiled from their homes. Roman, Tuscan, and Lombard
celebrities spent their lives in Venice and added their glory to hers.
Who remembers that Aldus Manutius was a Roman? Or that Gaspara Stampa,
who is always counted as one of the best of Venetian poets, was born in
Milan? The Venetians, too, showed a wonderful tact in the degree of the
hospitality they accorded. One need only compare the reception Petrarch
met with in the fourteenth century, which was nothing less than royal,
with the good-natured toleration shown to Pietro Aretino two hundred
years later. The Republic’s treatment of the two men is the measure of
the distance that separates the immortal poet from the brilliant and
vicious pamphleteer. If the latter spent some agreeable years in Venice,
that was due much more to the protection of a few friends than to any
privileges granted him by the government.
[Illustration: HOUSE OF ALDUS]
There were certainly a great many intellectual centres in Venice at that
time, and one might fill many pages with the names of the so-called
academies that were founded and that flourished for a time. Almost every
special tendency of human thought was represented by one of them, from
the Aldine, devoted enthusiastically to classic Greek, to those
academies which adorned their emptiness with such titles as ‘The
Seraphic,’ ‘The Uranian,’ and the like, and which gave themselves up to
the most unbridled extravagance of taste. Of such follies I shall only
quote one instance, which I find in Tassini under the name ‘Bernardo.’
In the year 1538 the will of that academician was opened. He therein
directed his heirs to have his body washed by three famous physicians
with as much aromatic vinegar as would cost forty ducats, and each
physician was to receive as his fee three golden sequins absolutely
fresh from the mint. The body was then to be wrapped in linen clothes
soaked in essence of aloes, before being ‘comfortably’ laid to rest in a
lead coffin and enclosed in one of cypress wood. The coffin was then to
be placed in a marble monument to cost six hundred ducats. The
inscription was to enumerate the actions and virtues of the deceased in
eight Latin hexameters, of which the letters were to look tall to a
spectator placed at a distance of twenty-five feet. The poet who
composed the verses was to receive one sequin for each. Moreover, the
history of the dead man’s family was to be written out in eight hundred
verses, and seven psalms were to be composed after the manner of the
Psalms of David, and twenty monks were to sing them before the tomb on
the first Sunday of every month.
We read without surprise that this will was not executed to the letter,
and the tolerably reasonable monument erected to Pietro Bernardo by his
descendants,
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE SACRISTY, FRARI]
twenty years after his death, may still be seen in the church of the
Frari.
There were also academies which bore names, devices, and emblems of a
nature that might well shock and surprise us, were they not the natural
evidences of that coming decadence, moral and artistic, whereof all
Italy, and Venice in particular, already bore the germs.
Amongst the great names that belong to the end of the fifteenth century,
as well as to the sixteenth, hardly any has more interesting
associations for scholars than that of Aldus Manutius.
The founder of the great family of scholars and printers was born at
Sermoneta in the Pontifical States in 1449, and was over forty years old
when he finally established himself in Venice.
[Sidenote: _Firmin-Didot, Alde Manuce._]
He had been tutor in the princely family of Pio, where he had educated
the eldest son, and he himself added the name to his own, though he did
not transmit it to his descendants.
One of the legends about the origin of printing tells that it was
invented in the Venetian city of Feltre, by a certain Castaldi, who was
robbed of his invention by Germans, presumably Faust and Guttenberg.
There is probably no foundation for this tale, but it is certain that
the Venetians brought the art of printing to something near perfection
within a few years of its creation, and that the government protected it
by laws of singular wisdom and great severity, in an age when the idea
of copyright was in its infancy.