Chapter Eight
VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART I)
IN Venice it is difficult to make choice of one route rather than another, when the means of transit is indeed an end in itself, and in some degree the same delight awaits us on every way we choose. We may pass hours on the Grand Canal merely combining enjoyment of its changefulness with a welcome monotony of rest; every moment the water is expressive, every moment it lives under some new impulse and reveals itself afresh. Carpaccio’s picture, The Miracle of the Holy Cross, is a marvellous rendering of the life of the Grand Canal; we are reminded of it again and again as we turn into the noble sweep of the waters at the angle of the Cà Foscari. The spirit and motion of Venice seem to be concentrated in the picture—the dark water alive with many gondolas, the fascination of the rhythmic movements of the rowers, at rest or sharply turning or slowly propelling. It has caught and embodied the genius of the canal—that ceaseless change and variation of angle which keeps it springing and full of life; that flowing spirit which unifies the palaces and waters of Venice in a conspiracy of beauty. Our gondola in some mysterious way enrols us in this conspiracy; through its motion we consent to the spirit of the place. We are not onlookers merely; the gondola pulses with the life of Venice; it is an instrument of her being. We feel as we move along that we are needed in the spectacle of Venice, that we have a share in the equilibrium which is of the essence of her power. There is no means of city transit that we can imagine to rival the gondola in its freedom from noise and jostling, in its realisation of comfort. But there are other reasons why it must remain the essential means of passage in Venice. From the gondola alone can we hope to realise how the city stands amid its waters, how living the relation between land and water is. These are not canals in the common sense of the word; they are living streams flowing among islands, each of which is individual, irregular, unique. Venice is not a tract of land cut into sections, large or small, by water, as is an inland city by its streets. A most vigilant watch was kept over the building of the houses that they should not transgress the law of the waters nor interfere with the relation of their currents to the islands. And this vigilance, perhaps, combined with the desire of each owner of land to make use of it to the last fragment, is responsible for the irregularities and varieties of angle which make the houses of Venice more individual than those of any other city. Usually a wall when it has once displayed to us its surface has finished its confidences; it has no reserves, no allurements; it is rigid and uncompromising. But one that breaks from the level, inclining its proud profile in response to the tide of the waterway below it, is a wall of far greater and more individual resources. It is only by gondola that we can appreciate this strong element of personality in the houses, and only by journeying in a gondola that we can learn to appreciate the individuality of the different quarters of Venice. It is not merely that one is peopled by the rich, another by the poor; that one region abounds in ancient palaces, another in modern buildings; nor that peculiar treasures of art are associated with each. Their characters are divergent. From the canals we realise that Venice is built upon separate islands and we see their diversity. The parochial divisions of the sestieri do not exactly follow the shape of the islands, but roughly speaking we shall find the waterways in the district covered by each sestiere distinctive in character. Castello and Cannaregio, San Polo and Dorsoduro, each has its own recognisable method of curve, broad or narrow, wayward or orderly.
VIEW ON GRAND CANAL FROM SAN ANGELO.
The last joy of one who has lived long in Venice, as well as the first of the new-comer, will be a gondola journey. It is impossible to exhaust the certain beauties of even a side canal, not to speak of its casual surprises. If we are in haste and time is precious, we do better to make our way over bridge and calle with what dexterity and speed we can; for it is an insult to ask haste of the gondola. Yet, if we accept in the right spirit the extraordinary delays and dilemmas of traffic—immense, interminable barges suddenly blocking the entire canal, or a flock of gondolas and sandolos in seemingly inextricable confusion—we shall always have our reward; not only the pleasure of watching the riddle of passage solve itself, thanks to the seeming elasticity of the rio, but a glint of sun-jewels on a new angle of the waters, some richness of ornament on house or bridge, some relic of ancient Venice, some name of calle or rio will break upon us with a fresh revelation. We cannot come to the end of Venice; she is inexhaustible: stealing about among the sudden shadows and broken lights of her waterways, sweeping in full, swift tide round unexpected corners and under diminished bridges, some new idea breaks upon us unawares with irresistible persuasion. We cannot define its meaning; we cannot say why details in Venice have so great a significance. A window opened suddenly in one of the palaces at night—why does it seem so portentous? It is another of the manifold gifts of the waters to Venice, this gift of distinction. Venice is not like other cities in which a thousand acts pass unnoted. She has the distinction of a unique individual whose smallest action is fraught with a strange immaterial fragrance that is unmistakably its own. We cannot analyse the fragrance; we only recognise that it is a spiritual gift; it emanates only from subtle and penetrating natures; it is the aroma of life itself. To it we owe the strange excitement that invades us in Venetian waters, and makes a gondola tour far more than a novel mode of traversing a city. As we watch the citizens of Venice from the water, see them crossing a bridge, pausing to lean over, or carried in the stream of passengers, they too seem endowed with a singular vitality; their passing and their standing still appear alike purposeful and portentous. What history might not be written by questioning the windows that look out on the side canals, or the tides that have ebbed and flowed in their channels? It would be a work of many volumes; for the private records of Venice are not lacking in fulness. The Piazza of Bellini’s Procession of the Cross represents one side of Venetian life, its solemnity, its assurance, its pomp and colour; but the narrow waters know another side, the domestic festivities, the courtings, weddings and banquetings, and private hates. For she was strong in deeds of darkness as in deeds of light, and echoes of them still wash against the basements of her houses. Water is a safer confidant of blood than earth, and the waters of Venice have received their full share of such confidences. Ebbing tides washed out to sea the stains of violence and flowed in to pave the city anew, yet the atmosphere of the dark waterways is more enduring than material stains, and there is no dark deed of ancient Venice to which they may not still supply a realistic setting.
The gondolier’s stock of knowledge will carry us but a small way on the lesser rios. His catalogue is ready for the Grand Canal; he can carry the reader to the obvious points of interest the guide-book enumerates, but his information does not usually comprise even the most beautiful of the palaces of the side canals, and on the more familiar routes there is much to discover for oneself. Moreover there are aspects of a gondola tour which the guide-book cannot include, but which are none the less important for those who really wish to know the physiognomy of Venice. And one is the time of day at which it is to be taken. Venice is the city of light—more luminous than any other city; and if it is true that new light or shadow everywhere alters the aspect of familiar objects, it is infinitely truer in Venice where each moment witnesses the birth of some new and wonderful offspring of the light. If one, who has known the statue of Colleoni against the intense blue of the midday sky, comes on him suddenly when the Campo is in shadow and the Scuola di San Marco alone still receives the light upon the rare marble of its upper façade, he will find that, as the definition of the stern features is lost, a note of tenderness steals into the proud assertion of the face. It seems a fresh revelation of character, this change wrought by a new light in the known and familiar, and it is one of the peculiar creative gifts of Venice.
In considering some of the most noteworthy subjects in the city as she now is, we may imagine a gondola tour on a day of the high tides in December, when the water washes in long smooth waves almost up to the feet of the Lion and St. Theodore, and gives to the Molo the exhilarating effect of a sea-shore. The spring tide spurts and bubbles through the gratings in the Piazza and Piazzetta, to unite in a lake which covers the whole pavement till it deepens in the atrium of San Marco and the heavy outer doors are closed. As the waters rise, the dominion of light is extended; the chequered marbles of the Ducal Palace take on a new brilliance, and the agate eyes of the Lion glow and sparkle as he looks across the sun-paths to the sea. We will imagine ourselves embarking at the Piazzetta and turning into Venice from the Basin of San Marco, under the Ponte della Paglia and the Bridge of Sighs. The entrance into the Rio del Palazzo is flanked on one side by what was formerly the eastern tower of the Ducal Palace. Relics of a Byzantine frieze are all that now remain of it; the rest is lost in the grand eastern wall of the palace—a superb monument of the first Renaissance. This wall would provide material for many hours of study in the rich variety of its sculptures. Not a capital or column is left unadorned, and each is particularised with an apparently inexhaustible variety of design. The two massive, projecting balconies of the Anti Sala dei Pregadi, overhanging the rio, which presented to the sculptor some at least of the problems of ceiling decoration, are richly carved beneath with deep circular roses. The remotest corners are worked with the same conscientious detail as the more conspicuous, and each with a view to its position above the rio. As our eyes grow accustomed to the comparative darkness of the canal, we see that lions look down on us from the arches of the topmost windows, and that some of the upper columns are surrounded by a band of sculpture similar to that on the pillars of the façade of the Scuola di San Rocco. Amid the wealth of sculptured stone there is an impressive severity in the discs of porphyry set at intervals along the wall; but perhaps its greatest beauty is the ducal shield bearing the Barbarigo arms. This shield, placed over a low water-door, is upheld by two winged pages with lighted torches in their hands, who are themselves like songs of light in their graceful and spirited beauty. Massiveness and grace are magnificently combined in this east wall of the Ducal Palace; it is at once solemn and brilliant; and as we look back to its angle with the Riva, the rose and snowy marbles gleam as if they were transparent.
A little further and the waters have us in their power. The Ponte di Canonica denies us passage; the tide is too high for us to pass beneath it, and we are forced to return to the Riva degli Schiavoni. But before we turn we may see one of the most beautiful of Renaissance palaces rising in clear whiteness against the blue of the sky. The Greek marble of its surface is inlaid with circles of serpentine and porphyry; on either side of the central building two scrolls, inlaid with palm leaves, bear the words, Honor et gloria Deo solo, and higher in the wall are marble slabs most delicately designed with animals, birds and foliage. A mitre, crown, and crosier, and various other articles of head-dress are represented in the stone, but the Capello family had many branches in Venice, and of the owners of this particular palace even Tassini has no record. The most beautiful of its features is set high up, almost too high to be comfortably seen from the water—two young companion figures of the first Renaissance, full of grace and imagination and strength, each with spear, and scales, and casque surmounted by three heads. These twin warrior angels look out with serene strength into the day; they are lightly armed, but poised and ready for battle. The duplication of their winged figures, and the height at which they are placed, makes us think of them primarily as decorative sculptures; they cannot possess the intimate charm of the young warrior of the Palazzo Civran, but they endow the harmonious marbles of this palace front with a distinction and character which give it rank among the first houses of the greatest period in Venice. After the rains, these precious marbles shine with a peculiar lustre, and the Palazzo Capello as it appears to-day is worthy of comparison with the Palazzo Dario, which glows with serpentine and porphyry beside the Grand Canal, fresh and fine and delicate as on the day of its completion.
As the water is still rising and the Ponte di Canonica will not allow room to pass, we must move along the shining waters of San Marco till we find a more hospitable waterway. With difficulty we get under the Ponte del Sepolcro and thence down the Rio della Pietà in which, at the distance of a few strokes, we may land if we will at a low sotto-portico leading to San Giovanni in Bragora, where Cima’s noble picture, The Baptism of Christ, is imprisoned behind a stifling modern altar which makes it impossible to study the composition as a whole. A little farther, passing a fine ogival palace on our right, we halt before a plastered barocco house with remnants of Byzantine window-posts on an upper story. But our chief interest lies this time in the basement, in a low, narrow arch, the crowns of whose pillars, richly worked in marmo greco with griffins and lions, are, even in time of normal tides, little above the level of the water, though probably the arch once rested on pillars not less than ten feet high. This buried arch is eloquent of the rising of the waters on Venice. It arrests us by the beauty of its workmanship; but it is one of many that we must pass on each canal, though not all have placidly accepted submergence; many have kept above the water by accepting the addition of a capital or crown. Elsewhere there are notable examples of this patchwork of which Venice never is ashamed and which has produced much in her of the greatest interest. In the Salizzada di San Lio, in the sestiere of San Giustina, is a pillar, supporting one side of a sotto-portico, in which a whole page of Venetian history is comprised. Looking into it, we see that it is composed of two distinct portions, that it has in fact two capitals—a capital of the early Renaissance superimposed on a Byzantine column which retains its own. They stand happily united, these children of two ages, but we naturally ask ourselves the reason of their juncture, and the answer is that the Byzantine pillar was once sufficient to itself; it had no need of a crown to complete its dignity or service. No weight of years has shrunk it to these dwarfed proportions. It is the rising of earth from below, not pressure from above, which has reduced it. The soil of Venice has been raised, inch by inch and foot by foot, in defence against her submergence. Many basements have become uninhabitable, and Galliccioli records that in the church of SS. Vito e Modesta an ancient pavement was discovered eight feet below the existing one, while in SS. Simone e Giuda three levels were found one above another. In San Marco a confessional similar to that still at Torcello, after having been lost sight of for several centuries, was found three feet below the soil and one and a half feet below the ordinary level of the water. Our pillar, therefore, which at one time planted its foot firmly on the ground, has been gradually buried alive, and to preserve the serviceableness, as well as the dignity of the portico—in fact, to secure its existence as a sotto-portico at all—a new head had to be added to the Byzantine pillar to supply the theft at its foot. The incident is rich in suggestion of the achievement of the Venetian builders, of the delicate counterpoise and equilibrium, the ceaseless give-and-take required in this city of the sea. Venice was crowned queen, but her dominion could only be maintained by understanding and reverence of the element she ruled. To be glorious she had to be most humble; for the element she constrained is one no human power can subdue; it would kiss her feet, it would endow her with glory, but it would not surrender its life. A thousand times more glorious should be her dominion, but a thousand times more subtle must be her insight and her sway. Her finger must be ever on the pulse of this living force, she must hold the key of its temperament in her hand, she must know when to submit. The wedding of Venice and the sea was not the submersion of one personality in another, it was a union involving infinite tact, infinite insight and acceptance.
We move forward again under the Ponte di Sant’ Antonin beside the Fondamenta dei Furlani or Friulani, to the little building at its further end, a sombre little building with heavily barred windows, but with a sculptured façade. Its outer door is never more than half open; it appears to admit visitors reluctantly, and, however bright the sunshine in the world outside, our first impression of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni is always gloomy. Only for two short hours, from ten to twelve in the morning, the chapel is open—short, because the sacristan keeps jealous watch upon the clock and, as if it were with the booming of the great gun from the royal palace that his true day began, hurries to close the remaining wing of the outer door, and bar the chapel into solitude and darkness. Carpaccio’s pictures were painted for the light. Their original home was not the Schiavoni chapel, but the School which, till 1451, the Confraternity of St. George and St. Triphonius owned in the convent of San Catterina in the northern extremity of Venice near the Fondamenta Nuova. The chapel of the Schiavoni needs more daylight, and even such as is obtainable is not freely enough admitted; but Carpaccio is a magician whose spell can release us from all consciousness of discomfort. The chapel is an intimate revelation of one of the most fascinating characters in Venetian history. It is the completest record of Carpaccio that exists, the series of paintings in which his imagination has the fullest range. It is not as a portrait painter of Venice and the Venetians that Carpaccio is here employed, his scope is wider and the whole spirit of his treatment is different. The St. Ursula series is not lacking in subtle personal touches; but it is not intimate in the same degree as the St. George, and it does not touch the level of personal intensity of the St. Jerome. There are psychological touches in this chapel of the Schiavoni which it would be hard to rival in modern art; we are companioned here by one of the most humorous, tender, profound and understanding of natures, one who reflects upon life in the spirit of joy and whose painful experiences never prevailed against his assurance of beauty. As is always the case with Carpaccio, each picture, though one of a series, is complete in itself. Except with St. Jerome, the painter shows even a certain carelessness of the preservation of identity in his hero: St. George becomes steadily younger from the time of his combat with the dragon, till, in the third of the series, a mere boy is represented as presiding at the baptism of the king and princess. The figure of St. George in the fight with the dragon is magnificent. No comparisons are necessary to convince us of its greatness of conception; but if we consider for a moment Basaiti’s treatment of this subject, we shall understand better the material of which Carpaccio is made. Basaiti’s St. George is a sentimentalist even in this moment of stress; his sword-thrust and the spirit expressed in his face are disconnected. With Carpaccio the source of St. George’s action is his will. The spirit of the sword-thrust is revealed in the thrilling purpose of his armoured limbs, which no metal can obscure. He is not thinking of graces, but the purpose with which he is instinct creates its own harmony; he is one who must prevail. When the stress of the action is past, his face hardly seems striking, but here it is so pierced with light, as it gleams in paleness against the aureole of hair, that it has become a living flame. Rarely has such glory of purpose and burning intensity of will been conveyed in a human face upon canvas. And all the details of this picture are invested with an accordant beauty. Even the grotesque fancy that seems to riot in the horrors of material death has had to give way before it. The face of the maiden, who lies, half-eaten, close to the dragon’s feet, is as exquisite in her death-sleep as that of St. Ursula in her royal chamber; and the mutilated youth under the body of the horse is not less lovely. The horse’s face is wonderful; his large eyes drink in the purpose of his master; his tongue lolls; his mane streams wildly as he rushes against the wind. Like Colleoni’s horse he triumphs under his rider, not so much ridden as a sharer in his progress; but he, like his master, moves in another and more romantic world than Colleoni. Never was horse more gloriously or more worthily caparisoned; his trappings are of scarlet, stamped with classic heads and chased with bronze; his bridle of the richest gilded leather set with gems. And the dragon too is beautiful. If we compare this trampling, vivid creature of the luminous eyes with the crawling worm against which St. George raises his sword in the succeeding picture, we shall feel something of the meaning of the breath of life. The very colour of his skin seems to have flowed through him with his blood; he is abjectly grey when dragged on to the Piazza. This transformation of the dragon is a great feat, the greater when we remember that even when he first appears, the virtue is beginning to go out of him, his claws are already beating the air with growing impotence. This first picture of the St. George series is the most complete lyric of Carpaccio’s that we possess; it is an episode of high romance, and its landscape is conceived in the spirit of romantic fantasy. We have noted elsewhere the treatment of the buildings, the way the city, which at first sight seems of a dreamlike quality, like the port whence St. Ursula’s prince sets out, defines itself gradually as a solid, fortified citadel, half hidden behind oriental watch-towers. But we have still to note the inspiration with which Carpaccio has unified these defences with the grand sweep of the coast-line. The huge cliffs which enclose the bay on the left, stretching out to the yellow light, are worthy to rank with those in Turner’s Ulysses and Polyphemus. The landscape to the right of the bay is freer and more fanciful. A cupolaed duomo crowns the cliff behind the princess. Men and horses move on the huge projecting rock, joined to the main cliff only by a natural arch and by a high-swung delicate bridge. The houses among the trees and the horsemen moving over the dizzy bridge enhance the romantic strangeness of effect. The framing by this rugged arch of a full-rigged vessel upon the open sea is one of Carpaccio’s happiest fancies. The devastated shore, the sea flowing into the city, the yellow of the sky above the horizon passing into a troubled paleness of cloud-flecked blue, the wind-driven vessel on the high sea, the suggestion of vast ocean spaces—all these combine in the imaginative grandeur of effect. The second picture of the series, St. George’s Return, is very different in atmosphere. It is filled with sunlight, the trampling of victory and the sound of music. Its keynote is victorious joy and pomp of festival, sounded in the spacious sunniness of the Piazza and the horizon of slope and mountains beyond; sustained in the buildings that surround the square and the airy pinnacles and balconies crowded with onlookers, and in the flags that fly round the octagonal building winging it with air. The radiant flowered brocades compete with the trappings of the horses to perfect the scene; and through it, and round it, sounds the music of drum and trumpet from the turbaned band which forms a background to the royal party, drawing them, as it were, into the sweep of the central square where St. George officiates. All moves to the measure of glad yet solemn music; here is no lightning stroke, no sudden motion; the muscles of action are relaxed, in slow measure the horses paw the ground. The third picture, The Baptism of King and Princess, is still pervaded with music. The musicians lead in the scene; the three foreground trumpeters, conspicuous on the carpeted dais, seem to be trumpeting for their lives. The golden, cavernous trumpet-mouth pointing directly at us has a strangely inspiring effect, seeming to invade us with sound breaking on the heavy roll of the meditative drummer. The music connects itself with the background and helps to widen the horizon. There is not one of these pictures which is not enlarged by the suggestion, at least, of some wide background of nature. Sometimes, as in these jubilant scenes, it enhances and extends the gladness of the festival, sometimes it wings our spirits amid conditions that burden and confine. In the first of the St. Jerome series, for instance, where the lion arrives, the first point that strikes us is the obvious humour of the scene, the effect of the entry of this gentlest and most companionable of beasts on the Brethren of the cloister. They do not wait to determine its intentions: it is a lion. It is wounded and asking sympathy, but the Brothers have attention for nothing but their fears. But below the humour there is tragedy. It is not the quaintness of the lion, or the scattering monks, or the beasts on the grassy square, or all the varied monotony of that beautiful frescoed cloister, that claim our attention as the heart of the picture. It is the bent and aged figure of St. Jerome. His features are the same as in the study scene, but his mature youth has given place to snowy age. And another change has come over his face; the radiance of the study scene is replaced by bewildered sorrow slightly touched with contempt. A loneliness is now in his face. In his study he was at peace communing with other minds or with the mind of God. But here with the monks he is bewildered—bewildered and oppressed. We seem to see him ageing as he eyes his foolish companions. Is this, he seems to question, the fruit of his long sojourn? He has asked the sympathy of the Brothers, and they are beside themselves with fear. There is deep pathos in this aged figure making his appeal in vain, and if the cloister filled the horizon, the effect on our spirits would be stifling. But there is a great sky overhead, there is an orange tree, “that busy plant,” there is a winding way amidst the vista of palm trees and blue hills, there is the great desert whence the lion has come. The Death of St. Jerome affords a still more impressive example of this kind of relief. Here we are not walled in, the desert is around us; we see it through the gateway by the well and through the porticoes of the buildings, and above it in purple outline rise the snow-capped mountains. And this wide horizon is peculiarly welcome as an escape from the confinement of spirit expressed in the funeral procession. The gladness of the open country, the hills and mountains, the palm-tree signposts along the desert way, are a relief to the lion’s agony. For the lion is the keynote of the picture, though it is struck so quietly that at first we may even be unconscious of its sounding. In the foreground on a narrow strip of pavement lies the body of St. Jerome. His head rests upon a stone and his long beard lies straight and smooth upon his breast. It is quite lifeless, this body, but the kneeling Brothers think their master is before them. There are wonderful character studies among these Brothers, sensual and simple and devout. Those Carpaccio has chosen to read the Office for the Dead are the most lifeless. The skull on the blasted tree trunk, which his love of the grotesque has inserted in the angle of the wall, seems a fit symbol of the sovereignty they acknowledge. But we have already noted the existence of another actor in the scene. In front of a little group of buildings under a broad rustic portico lies the lion, not inert like his master or like the monks who perform the rites of the dead, not now a suppliant, deprecating lion. His paw tears the ground, his head is raised; he roars in the agony of his bereavement. He is no longer feared, it seems; custom has staled the terrors of him. To the Brothers he is merely another animal of the menagerie, one of the last whims of Brother Jerome. Yet he understands that his master is not here in this square of the convent. He has long been content; but now the desert calls to him and he answers with the voice of the desert that he had unlearned for a while. We have mentioned only a few of the series of paintings in this wonderful chapel, and even of them the greater part has been left unsaid. Each picture requires the whole of the two hours, the Scuola allows, for study of them all; but, in coming to them from time to time for a few moments only, we may constantly discover some new token of their artist’s insight and understanding, some richness of composition, some delicacy of colour, some intimate detail of workmanship which makes us feel Carpaccio’s presence. The beauties of St. Jerome’s study are almost inexhaustible; the details of this exquisite room will reveal to us much of Carpaccio and of Venice. Nothing is in it by chance or because space has to be filled. The gold and rose of the apse, the marble of its pillars, the painted ceiling and richly bound manuscripts, the delicate bronzes, the colouring of the walls, the tiny white dog (forerunner of the lion), the crosier and crimson cushion, all are expressive. And there is one touch—for which we give thanks to the artist—unobtrusive but surely significant; the candles on either wall are held in the bronze fore-paws of a lion. This Chapel of the Schiavoni has not gone unscathed; during a fire that two years ago destroyed a warehouse on the opposite bank of the canal, the water from the engines poured through the roof of the chapel, injuring the pictures on the wall nearest the rio—the Combat of St. George and his Return with the Dragon.
Leaving the sestiere of Santa Giustina, with its relics of ancient Venice and its famous Palace of the Contarini, on our right, and also on our right, the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, where in the darkness of the Giustiniani Chapel are preserved some of the most beautiful sculptures of the Lombardi, we turn sharply to the left into the Rio del Pestrin, and again to the left into the Rio San Lorenzo. Thi
