ASIDE from the cathedral of St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace and the Academy or Venetian gallery of old masters, I could find little of artistic significance in Venice—little aside from the wonderful spectacle of the city as a whole. As a spectacle, viewed across the open space of water, known as the Lagoon, the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute with their domes and campaniles strangely transfigured by light and air, are beautiful. Close at hand, for me, they lost much romance which distance gave them, though the mere space of their interiors was impressive. The art, according to my judgment, was bad and in the main I noticed that my guide books agreed with me—spiritless religious representations which, after the Sistine Chapel in Rome and such pictures as those of Michelangelo’s “Holy Family” and Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence, were without import. I preferred to speculate on the fear of the plague which had produced the Salute and the discovery of the body of St. Stephen, the martyr, which had given rise to San Giorgio, for it was interesting to think, with these facts before me, how art and spectacle in life so often take their rise from silly, almost pointless causes and a plain lie is more often the foundation of a great institution than a truth. Santa Maria didn’t save the citizens of Venice from the plague in 1630, and in 1110 the Doge Ordelafo Faliero did not bring back the true body of St. Stephen from Palestine, although he may have thought he did,—at least there are other “true bodies.” But the old, silly progress of illusion, vanity, politics and the like has produced these and other institutions throughout the world and will continue to do so, no doubt, until time shall be no more. It was interesting to me to see the once large and really beautiful Dominican monastery surrounding San Giorgio turned into barracks and offices for government officials. I do not see why these churches should not be turned into libraries or galleries. Their religious import is quite gone.
In Venice it was, I think, that I got a little sick of churches and second- and third-rate art. The city itself is so beautiful, exteriorly speaking, that only the greatest art could be tolerated here, yet aside from the Academy, which is crowded with canvases by Bellini, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese and others of the Venetian school, and the Ducal Palace, largely decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese, there is nothing, save of course St. Mark’s. Outside of that and the churches of the Salute and San Giorgio,—both bad, artistically, I think,—there are thirty-three or thirty-four other churches all with bits of something which gets them into the catalogues, a Titian, a Tintoretto, a Giorgione or a Paolo Veronese, until the soul wearies and you say to yourself—“Well, I’ve had about enough of this—what is the use?”
There is no use. Unless you are tracing the rise of religious art, or trying to visit the tombs of semi-celebrated persons, or following out the work of some one man or group of men to the last fragment you might as well desist. There is nothing in it. I sought church after church, entering dark, pleasant, but not often imposing, interiors only to find a single religious representation of one kind or another hardly worth the trouble. In the Frari I found Titian’s famous Madonna of the Pescaro family and a pretentious mausoleum commemorating Canova, and in Santa Maria Formosa Palma Vecchio’s St. Barbara and four other saints, which appealed to me very much, but in the main I was disappointed and made dreary. After St. Peter’s, the Vatican, St. Paul’s Without the Walls in Rome, the cathedrals at Pisa and elsewhere, and the great galleries of Florence, Venice seemed to me artistically dull. I preferred always to get out into the streets again to see the small shops, to encounter the winding canals, to cross the little bridges and to feel that here was something new and different, far different and more artistic than anything which any church or museum could show.
One of the strangest things about Venice to me was the curious manner in which you could always track a great public square or market place of some kind by following some thin trickling of people you would find making their way in a given direction. Suddenly in some quite silent residence section, with all its lovely waterways about you, you would encounter a small thin stream of people going somewhere, perhaps five or six in a row, over bridges, up narrow alleys, over more bridges, through squares or triangles past churches or small stores and constantly swelling in volume until you found yourself in the midst of a small throng turning now right, now left, when suddenly you came out on the great open market place or piazza to which they were all tending. They always struck me as a sheep-like company, these Venetians, very mild, very soft, pattering here and there with vague, almost sad eyes. Here in Venice I saw no newspapers displayed at all, nor ever heard any called, nor saw any read. There was none of that morning vigor which characterizes an American city. It was always more like a quiet village scene to me than any aspect of a fair-sized city. Yet because I was comfortable in Venice and because all the while I was there it was so radiantly beautiful, I left it with real sorrow. To me it was perfect.
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The one remaining city of Italy that I was yet to see, Milan, because already I had seen so much of Italy and because I was eager to get into Switzerland and Germany, was of small interest to me. It was a long, tedious ride to Milan, and I spent my one day there rambling about without enthusiasm. Outside of a half-dozen early Christian basilicas, which I sedulously avoided (I employed a guide), there was only the cathedral, the now dismantled palace and fortress of the Sforzas masquerading as a museum and the local art gallery, an imposing affair crowded with that same religious art work of the Renaissance which, one might almost say in the language of the Milwaukee brewer, had made Italy famous. I was, however, about fed up on art. As a cathedral that of Milan seemed as imposing as any, great and wonderful. I was properly impressed with its immense stained-glass windows, said to be the largest in the world, its fifty-two columns supporting its great roof, its ninety-eight pinnacles and two thousand statues. Of a splendid edifice such as this there is really nothing to say—it is like Amiens, Rouen, and Canterbury—simply astounding. It would be useless to attempt to describe the emotions it provoked, as useless as to indicate the feelings some of the pictures in the local gallery aroused in me. It would be Amiens all over again, or some of the pictures in the Uffizi. It seemed to me the newest of all the Gothic cathedrals I saw, absolutely preserved in all its details and as recently erected as yesterday, yet it was begun in 1386.
The wonder of this and of every other cathedral like it that I saw, to me, was never their religious but their artistic significance. Some one with a splendid imagination must always have been behind each one—and I can never understand the character or the temper of an age or a people that will let anything happen to them.
But if I found little of thrilling artistic significance after Rome and the south I was strangely impressed with the modernity of Milan. Europe, to me, is not so old in its texture anywhere as one would suppose. Most European cities of large size are of recent growth, just as American cities are. So many of the great buildings that we think of as time-worn, such as the Ducal Palace at Venice, and elsewhere, are in an excellent state of preservation—quite new looking. Venice has many new buildings in the old style. Rome is largely composed of modern tenements and apartment houses. There are elevators in Perugia, and when you reach Milan you find it newer than St. Louis or Cleveland. If there is any medieval spirit anywhere remaining in Milan I could not find it. The shops are bright and attractive. There are large department stores, and the honk-honk of the automobile is quite as common here as anywhere. It has only five hundred thousand population, but, even so, it evidences great commercial force. If you ride out in the suburbs, as I did, you see new houses, new factories, new streets, new everything. Unlike the inhabitants of southern Italy, the people are large physically and I did not understand this until I learned that they are freely mingled with the Germans. The Germans are here in force, in control of the silk mills, the leather manufactories, the restaurants, the hotels, the book stores and printing establishments. It is a wonder to me that they are not in control of the Opera House and the musical activities, and I have no doubt that they influence it greatly. The director of La Scala ought to be a German, if he is not. I got a first suggestion of Paris in the tables set before the cafés in the Arcade of Vittorio Emanuele and had my first taste of Germany in the purely German beer-halls with their orchestras of men or women, where for a few cents expended for beer you can sit by the hour and listen to the music. In the hotel where I stopped the German precision of regulation was as marked as anywhere in Germany. It caused me to wonder whether the Germans would eventually sweep down and possess Italy and, if they did, what they would make of it or what Italy would make of them.