Chapter Nine
VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART II)
THE centre of our second tour is an ancient and comparatively unfrequented region in the north of Venice—that part of Cannaregio over which watches the Campanile of the Madonna dell’ Orto, with its crowning image of snowy stone and four solemn apostles looking out over city and lagoon. The beautiful figure of the Madonna, round whose feet, between the tiles of her ruddy cupola, spring little plants the birds have sown, rises day after day triumphant out of the duel between sun and mist, a pledge of the victory of light; and through all vicissitudes of weather she is seen, sometimes in dazzling outline upon the deep blue, or against a canopy of grey, sometimes herself tempered to shadowy greyness by the brilliance of the cumuli that out-rival even her snowy purity.
We will enter from the Grand Canal by the Rio San Marcuola, nearly opposite the Correr Museum, and pass below the Ponte dell’ Anconetta on the Strada Nuova, or more properly the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which in its broad and ungracious uniformity is one of the most forbidding streets in Venice. It seems at first to have no reserves into which by a little tact or sympathy we may ingratiate ourselves; yet many activities generally to be encountered in other raiment and under other auspices, lurk behind its mask. On this very Rio San Marcuola is a workshop where antiquities are fabricated for the show-rooms of the Grand Canal. We see them here in their early stages, a rude stone well-head awaiting an ancient sculpture, a Renaissance chimney-piece, a Byzantine lion in Verona marble; and the forger is no villain but an honest, genial workman skilled to do better, but content to supply what he is asked for. A little beyond the bridge we come on one of the oldest squeri or boat-building yards of Venice. Black sprites of boys pass to and fro, plunging their torches into cauldrons of burning pitch, to draw them in the wake of flaming branches along the upturned sides of the gondolas; and men, with something of the fire and of the blackness in their eyes and faces, swink like the skilled demons in Spenser’s cave of Mammon. It is outside, on the squero, that this coarser work with pitch and cauldron goes on; in the inner workshop are the frames of gondolas in making, exquisite skeletons with subtle apportioning of oak, elm, nut and larch, and long unbroken sides of beech. Opposite the squero, on our right, is the ugly new brick wall of Paolo Sarpi’s convent. Above it may be seen a weed-grown fragment of the ancient building with its relief above the door. Boni has suggested that a more appropriate memorial to Sarpi’s memory than the erection of a bronze statue might have been the preservation or renewal in its original beauty of the old convent with which he was so closely and intimately connected.
We strike almost immediately into the Rio della Misericordia, and as we look down the long vista to right and left of us, under the low bridges, we begin to realise the peculiar character of this district. It is entirely different from that of our first tour; long parallel canals run from east to west, cutting the land into narrow strips and giving the strips a curious effect of isolation. These canals are bounded on the west by the lagoon, and the effect of sunset light flooding the long waterways is strikingly beautiful. If we were to follow the Rio della Misericordia to the left, we should come to the curious wedge-shaped island of the Ghetto Nuovo and the tall deserted houses of the Ghetto Vecchio. But we will tend only slightly to the left, and passing under a low bridge continue our former course into the Rio della Sensa. This name has in it echoes of historic festivals; it originated in the fact that the stalls for the great Ascension fête on the Piazza were stored in the warehouses that stood on its banks. As late as the last celebration of this famous offshoot of the Sposalizio festival, in the year 1776, fifty-seven thousand ducats were spent on erecting the enclosure in which the stalls were set up. The Rio della Sensa has many links with the past. Above a door in a humble wall on the fondamenta hangs a shield on which is sculptured an arm cased in steel. This shield belonged to the Brazzo (Braccio) family, of Tuscan origin, who had settled in Venice and acquired much land in this district. The name is worthy of preservation; for one at least of the family has left an enduring mark in the annals of the city. “In 1437,” we read in Tassini’s Curiosità Veneziane, “a Geoffrey da Brazzo, with some companions, founded, in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the Scuola di San Marco of which he was the Grand Guardian.” Within the unpaved court the house of the worthy Geoffrey is still standing, and it preserves its early Gothic and Byzantine features but little obscured by later additions. It is not altogether gloomy though evidently inhabited by very poor people; little gardens still blossom from the leads and window boxes, and tables and chairs are set out under the vine in the yard below. In the seventeenth century the family became extinct, its history being closed by a rather sordid domestic tragedy; and it is pleasanter to revert to the earlier days of this simple, dignified citizen’s dwelling when Geoffrey and his associates discussed in it the hopes and fears of their School. Another page of Venetian history lies open for us at the Campo dei Mori further along the same rio to the right. Our attention is attracted at once by a curious figure in oriental turban, with a pack upon its head, at the corner of the square which strikes the fondamenta. Two more figures in the same style of dress are stationed at other corners of the square. The crowd of urchins who throng round us the instant we alight will tell us that these are Sior Rioba and his brothers. The key to these figures is to be found in a palace, the inner court of which opens on our right hand as we turn inwards from the canal. It belonged to three Greek brothers, by name Rioba, Sandi and Afani, of the family Mastelli, who leaving the Morea in the twelfth century, on account of disturbances there, came with great wealth to Venice and built themselves this house by the campo which has preserved their origin in its name. This family also has a noble record in Venetian annals. It took part in the Crusade of 1202, and received citizenship for its reward. Later it rested from its labours and set up a spice shop in Cannaregio at the sign of the Camel. From these avocations it passed to a more reposeful existence on the banks of the Brenta, and, like the da Brazzo family, it became extinct in the seventeenth century. The courtyard of the palace, known now as the Palazzo Camello, possesses many fascinating reminders of its past, though some of its old beauties have been taken from it even in recent years. The open arches of the sotto-portico have been filled in, and a corkscrew stair is now only recognisable by the pillars we see immured in a circular tower. The pillars that once supported the arches of the entrance portico, now half buried in the ground from the constant raising of its level, are fine and uncommon examples of the transition from Gothic to Renaissance. Above the portico are two striking projections of carved stone, once serving perhaps to support a lantern or coat of arms, and in the angle of this wall and the main building are the relics of a Gothic pedestal on which, without doubt, some image has stood. The low-beamed court to the water is still intact with its finely-carved architraves and early Gothic pillars; but beyond the point of its present habitation it has been allowed to fall into decay from the invading damp. If we venture along this outer court to the water’s edge, we shall find ourselves in the Rio della Madonna dell’ Orto almost opposite the campo and church. By the help of a barge which we may reasonably hope to find moored alongside the water-door of the court, we obtained a view of the most characteristic aspect of the Palazzo Camello. The passer-by on the fondamenta cannot fail to be impressed by its beautiful decorative balcony and windows and the Byzantine frieze in a lower storey, but above all by a camel and driver sculptured in admirable relief on the wall.
Returning to the Campo dei Mori, we make our way again to the Fondamenta della Misericordia, where we disembarked. Almost immediately on our left, backing the Palazzo Camello, and perhaps originally forming a part of it, is the house of Tintoretto. It is still unspoiled of its ancient decorations of small sculptured figures and formal designs; and, above all, it is interesting architecturally for its elaborate carved wooden cornice on the two upper storeys to which time has given the appearance of stone. Howells, in his description of Tintoretto’s house, conveys an impression of sordid desolation in the building and its inmates. It may lately have fallen on better days; for there is now nothing forbidding about it, and indeed it is a welcome refuge from the swarms of dirty and discordant children whom the presence of a stranger on this campo seems to have a peculiar power of attracting. Its upper windows look out across the rio on a garden with a majestic cypress tree, and down the long canal to the wide waters of the lagoon. And some of the inmates of the house still have a share in the ancient, though humbler, arts of Venice. There are beadmakers working, as usual in almost total darkness, in an airless room in the basement. After we have seen these rows of patient, crouching workers, bending hour after hour over their gas jets, the beads of the lamp-lit Merceria will call up irresistibly the low benches, the glittering wires, the glazed and darkened windows. For there seems a strange irony in the birth of these shining toys out of the gloom. Many unacknowledged artists have worked upon these beads; much, no doubt, of their workmanship is mechanical; but if we look into them we shall find many little originalities in the gradation of line and colour, many touches of taste and feeling in their graceful and various designs. The house is much as it might have been in Tintoretto’s day, but the walls seem empty and unresponsive and to have less part in him than those palace fronts in which some faded fresco bears witness to the magic of his hand. But there is a building near by that may rightly be called the house of Tintoretto, where we may more faithfully commune with his mind—the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, in which, Ridolfi tells us, Tintoretto worked for his keep alone “because his fertile brain was constantly boiling with new thoughts,” and thereby roused the wrath of his fellow artists. It was here that Meissonier, coming in his old age to Venice, set himself down at the feet of the master and copied Tintoretto’s Last Judgment in the choir. But it is not primarily for the artist’s great works in the choir that we return again and again to the Madonna dell’ Orto. It is for a painting no less the work of a giant, but of a giant gifted with tenderness equal to his strength. The Presentation of the Virgin has been moved from its original place on the organ to a side chapel in which both light and space are inadequate, so that, coming on it first out of the daylight, we receive only a vague impression of its greatness. It is only gradually that it breaks on us in its combination of vigorous motion and life with sublime repose, and that we come to distinguish the elements that make up its power and to appreciate the singleness and intensity of vision which, amid all its wealth of resource, never wavers in loyalty to the central idea. In Titian’s Presentation, the mountain background, the crowd of Venetian citizens, the old egg woman, the Virgin, the High Priest, appear as separate interests; in Tintoretto’s Presentation all the elements are unified; there is but one moment, one point, to which everything tends. The lovely women in the foreground, the mighty figures reclining on the stair, the mysterious trio behind in the shadow of the balustrade, all subserve the quiet, yet passionate drama enacted above in the meeting of the High Priest and Virgin. At last, as at first, these two figures fill our mind; their mutual contemplation is compelling. The Virgin is set against the sky, near the top of the stair she is ascending with blithe and childlike confidence, her right hand over her heart. She has no eyes except for the High Priest. She moves up to him without hesitation or drawing back. And he is bent on her entirely. From the height of his great stature, with the supreme majesty of his office about him, the High Priest, between his robe-bearers, extends his hands above the ascending childish figure—a world of thought, of awe, of worship, in that mysterious and lofty benediction.
We will go back again along the Rio della Sensa to the point where we entered it, turning now to the right under the Ponte Rosso into the Rio dei Trasti which soon Widens into a broad way of unbridged water leading out to the lagoon and dividing the island of the Madonna dell’ Orto from that of Sant’ Alvise. The rio into which we have now come is the third long parallel waterway we have struck in our journey through this district. It stretches on either side of us, spanned by wooden bridges, between the west lagoon and the Sacca della Misericordia. We will follow it for a short distance to the left to the little campo of Sant’ Alvise from which it takes its name. Here, in the church hangs that series of strange little canvases that Ruskin did not hesitate to attribute to Carpaccio. They are hung on a wall near the entrance door without order or precaution, signed in great sprawling childish characters Vetor Carpacio. Perhaps our pleasure at penetrating the by-ways of the city to this remote little island makes us at first uncritically appreciative of the quaint square canvases. Ruskin thought them the works of Carpaccio at eight or nine years of age, but he was confessedly writing from memory, and face to face with the reality might have reconsidered his verdict. The paintings seem too sophisticated for a young Carpaccio, too feeble for an older one. The architectural details belong in many respects to a period of the Renaissance later than that which Carpaccio knew, and though, behind their technical incompetence and absurd anachronisms, we seem to catch glimpses of the masterful imaginativeness of Carpaccio, we shall probably feel Molmenti’s verdict against their authenticity to be more substantial than Ruskin’s reminiscence which was framed in the enthusiasm of his discovery of one of the greatest of Venetian artists. One of the paintings, The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, has an interest apart from its quaint fancy. We may conjecture that the artist was drawing on a memory of some work from the east; for the wooden bridge and the figures wavering at each end of it, the winding river, the little round Renaissance building to symbolise Jerusalem, and, above all, the swans in the stream below, and the tall blue peaks in the background, remind us of nothing so much as the willow pattern plate familiar to our childhood. We will leave on one side the scenes from Christ’s Passion by Tiepolo, which by some incongruous chance also are preserved in this humble aisleless church, merely remarking that it is necessary to arrive here early; for the sacristan, whose duties extend to both the churches on the two neighbouring islands, hurries off at half-past nine for the office at the Madonna dell’ Orto, and Sant’ Alvise is shut.
We will return along the rio, past the Madonna dell’ Orto and the Palazzo Camello to the Sacca della Misericordia. We shall have occasion elsewhere to speak at length of this unfrequented square of water. It looks out to Murano and the mountains, and is bounded on the south and west by the Abazia della Misericordia and the garden of the Casa degli Spiriti. The Abazia della Misericordia is one of the most beautiful ruins in all Venice. It has its roots far back in the past; for the abbey church was built in 939 and handed over to hermits and, later, to Augustinian Brothers, who added to it a convent. A school was erected beside the church in 1308, and this was later enlarged and extended by a hospital and chapel. In the sixteenth century the old hospice was given over to the silk-weavers, and another, more spacious and magnificent, was substituted. On the Fondamenta dell’ Abazia, close beside the Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia, is a wonderful relief, over the entrance to the hospice for poorer members of the confraternity, bearing the date 1505. It represents the Virgin with robes outspread to enclose and shelter a little company of hooded Brothers who kneel around her; the relief is beautiful in workmanship, and there are traces of lovely colour in the folds of the Virgin’s garments. An exquisite square campanile rises in the part of the abbey buildings that is still inhabited by Franciscan Brothers, but the northern front which overlooks the Sacca is a long, roofless, two-storeyed wall of brick with closed shutters—the façade of a weed-grown ruin. This isolated northern wall is exquisite in colouring: its pink plaster has been partly worn away to the red bricks, partly tempered to soft coral where it still lies on the hoary stone. Sparse weeds cover the top, outlined against the sky, and plants which no hand of man has sown spring from the crevices in the brick. In the early morning the Abazia is in shade, and its image in the smooth, shining water is gifted with a new beauty and strength. Looking back upon the east wall, part of which is in ruins, we see the broad Rio di Noale branching in two smaller channels right and left of the garden wall of the police station. This wall has a central window looking out to the lagoon, and often towards evening two figures may be seen through it, framed against the green and taking their pleasure in the garden as in some old picture.
The Sacca della Misericordia has a majestic corner-stone in the Casa degli Spiriti, the long garden of which is joined to the island of the Abazia by the Ponte della Sacca, a beautiful bridge of pale rose stone bound and lined with white marble. To those who live overlooking the Sacca, the House of the Spirits becomes an inseparable part of the landscape of the lagoon. Modern incredulity has preferred to talk of smugglers instead of spirits, or to find in the weird echoes which inhabit the Sacca and the neighbouring waterways an explanation of its name. Others maintain that it owes it to the companies of wit and intellect that gathered there in the days of Titian and Aretino; no proofs, however, have been offered in support of this alluring suggestion. But if modernity has driven out the spirits, the house itself has become a ghost. In the midst of the thunderstorms which from time to time break over the lagoon the Casa degli Spiriti stands out a ghostly landmark, framed suddenly by a sickle of gold or flashing silver, or illuminated by a level flood of purple, a place of revel for the spirits of the storm. In the calm moonlight it appears more pallid than the moon herself; in the black starless night still the huge corner-stone looms out on the edge of the lagoon. And there is no watch-tower to equal the Casa degli Spiriti for the spectacle of dawn upon the mountains. Those who wake within Venice under a glimmering grey sky, with rifts of remote, transparent blue, hear talk of coming rain. But the House of Spirits which kept watch all night upon the north lagoon, has had its day already in one short hour of dawn. It has seen the Alps rise blue and clear behind the low green line of the mainland; it has seen the ruby fire drawn from them by the dawn; it has seen the crystal path of the lagoon fade to the dove’s neck with its waves of peacock green; it has seen the fishing-boats come pressing with their many-coloured sails against the sunrise, each, as it turned before the wind, sealed with a golden blessing from the god of day.
But the House of the Spirits which dominates these, the immaterial glories of the lagoon, rules over a domain of vivid colour and activity. For from the early hours of the morning there is continual traffic down the Sacca of fruit barges bound for Rialto from Sant’ Erasmo, the garden of Venice, and of milk barges from the mainland. It is not always an easy life, that of the feeders of the city—in which, as Sansovino says, nothing grows, but everything is found. There are many days when cold and rain and adverse winds mean real suffering to the sellers of fruit and milk. Again and again one is reminded of T. E. Brown’s wonderful description of the fishing-boat, with its dirt, its noise, its foul-mouthed crew transformed beneath “the broad benediction of the west” as one sees a milk barge toiling up the channel against wind and tide, with its crowd of men and women. The men begin to hoist the sail with loud excited cries; the women crouch low for shelter, smoking or munching their crusts. They seem lumpish leaden combatants in the lists against the elements, with small hope of conquest. Then, suddenly, as it rounds the corner of the Casa degli Spiriti, the ponderous boat with its dejected crew spreads its sails like a bird, a thing of swift delight lifted into the strong hand of the wind.
If we halt but for an hour in the shadow of the Abazia, we may have a glimpse of many aspects of the city’s floating life; joy and mourning follow in unplanned succession, strong passion and the merchandise of every day jostle each other. Now there passes down the Sacca a gondola bearing a coffin to San Michele, now a slow-creeping barge under a mountain of planks, now a little company of lowing calves who can have but one destination in this city without pasture, now a barge of necklaces from Murano that lie coiled together like shining fish of many colours.
There is a moment of late August when all seasons seem to meet and lavish their brightest colours on Rialto, and on the many fruit-stalls of Venice and on the barges that creep leisurely up and down the canals. If we turn again to the heart of the city in the wake of one of those fruit barges, we may imagine ourselves sharing in ancient pomps and festivals. For their tapestry is gorgeous; pyramids of peaches bound about with green leaves, of tomatoes and brilliant pepper pods, huge watermelons cut open to show the crisp, rosy pulp; piles of figs, brown and green; pears, apples, grapes; and choicest of all, the delicious red fragola or strawberry-grape. All these and many more make up the brilliant burden of the barges from Sant’ Erasmo. We may follow them as they wind through the lesser waterways, now in sun, now in shadow, till the pageant is welcomed in the full flowing day of the Grand Canal and the barges empty themselves at Rialto.
