IN THE PIAZZA.
The Venice who could thus do honour to Colleoni her general was a superb Venice, superb as Colleoni himself who in his castle of Malpaga received not only embassies from kings but kings themselves; who, at the visit of Cristierino, King of Dacia, came out to meet him “on a great courser, caparisoned and equipped for war, and he, all but his head, imperially clad in complete armour, attended only by two standard-bearers carrying his helm and lance, while a little further behind followed his whole company of six hundred horse in battle array, with his condottieri and his squadrons, all gloriously and most nobly armed and mounted, with flags flying and the sound of trumpets”; who, besides making rich provision for all his children, built churches, endowed monasteries and left to the Venetians, after cancelling all their debts to him, one hundred thousand ducats of gold. The Venice that employed Colleoni was superb—we have a record of her living features in Gentile Bellini’s marvellous presentment of the procession in St. Mark’s square—the brain as flexible, the jaws as rigid as those of the mighty warrior Verocchio conceived. Yet Spino’s comment on the last tribute paid by the Venetians to their general gives us pause—“confessing to have lost the defender of their liberty.” It was a confession which could still clothe itself triumphantly in the great bronze statue, but there is an omen in the words. In this confession of 1496 is foreshadowed the fall of 1796.
Much has been written of the social life of this Venice of the Fall; there are countless sources for its history in the letters, diaries and memoirs of its citizens and of its visitors, reputable and disreputable; richest sources of all, there are the pictures of Longhi, the comedies of Goldoni. But of the Venice that lay behind this small round of conventions and refinements, laxity and tyranny, perhaps less has been said. Of many avenues by which it might be approached we shall choose one, and since the praise of Colleoni has drawn our attention to the foundations of Venetian power on land, nothing will better serve our purpose than the foundation of her power by sea, that Arsenal which Sansovino described as “the basis and groundwork of the greatness of this Republic, as well as the honour of all Italy.” The Arsenal was, next to San Marco, perhaps the sanctuary of Venetian faith. It was far more than a mere manufactory of arms and battleships. In the celebration of the Sensa its workmen held the post of honour, the rowing of the Bucintoro. Its officers were among the most reputed in the State. The Council of Ten had a room within its precincts. It was entered by a superb triumphal arch, a sight which none who visited Venice must miss. The condition of the Arsenal may well be taken as an index to the condition of Venice herself.
We may set side by side two pictures of the Arsenal, one drawn from a curious little work of early seventeenth century, a time at which, though Venice was moving down the path of her decay, the glorious traditions of the past still found renewal in her present life, and the Venetian fleet was still a triumphant symbol of Venetian greatness; the other from the reports of her officials in the last years before her death. Luca Assarino was one of many guests who had to say to Venice, or to the Doge her representative, “My intellect staggers under the weight of a memory laden with surpassing favours. You received me into your house, did me honour, assisted me, protected me. You clothed yourself in my desires, and promoted them on every occasion; and this not only without having had of me any cause to honour me so highly, but even without having ever seen me.” He feels he cannot better discharge the burden of his gratitude than by shaping some of the emotions inspired in him by his visit to the Arsenal. There is a touch of sympathy and sometimes even a touch of truth and insight under the extravagantly symbolic garb of his appreciation. “Admiring first of all an immense number of porticoes, where as in vast maternal wombs I saw in embryo the galleys whose bodies were being framed, I realised that I was in the country of vessels, the fatherland of galleons, and that those masses were so formidable as to show themselves warriors even in their birth, fortifying themselves with countless nails and arming thus their very vitals with iron. I considered them as wandering islands, which, united, compose the continent of Venetian glory, the mainland of the rule of Christendom. I admired with joy the height of their masts and the size of their sailyards, and I called them forests under whose shade the Empire of the sea reposed and the hopes of the Catholic religion were fortified. And who, I said to myself, can deny that this Republic has subjugated the element of water, when none of her citizens can walk abroad, but that the water, as if vanquished, kisses his feet at every step?” Like all recorders of the glories of Venice, he is struck dumb at certain points by fear of the charge of fabling, but, collecting himself, he proceeds to speak of the trophies and relics, the rows of cuirasses, helmets and swords that remained as “iron memorials to arm the years against oblivion of Venetian greatness. What revolutions of the world, what accidents, what mutations of state, what lakes of tears and blood did not the dim lightnings of those fierce habiliments present to the eye of the observer?... I saw the remains of the Venetian fleet, vessels, that, as old men, weighted no less with years than glory, reposed under the magnificence of the arches which might well be called triumphal arches. I saw part of those galleons to which Christianity confesses the debt of her preservation.... And last, I saw below the water so great a quantity of the planks from which vessels afterwards are made, that one might truly call it a treasury hidden in the entrails of a lake. I perceived that these, as novices in swimming, remained first a century below the surface, to float after for an eternity of centuries; and I remarked that they began by acquiring citizenship in that lake, to end by showing themselves patricians throughout the seas, and that there was good reason they should plant their roots well under water, for they were the trees on which the liberty of Venice was to flower.” In his peroration the eulogist strikes a deeper note. “May it please Almighty God to preserve you to a longest eternity; and as of old the nations surrounding you had so high an opinion of your integrity and justice that they came to you for judgment of their weightiest and most important cases, so may heaven grant that the whole of Christendom may resort always to your threshold to learn the laws of good government.”
We think sadly of his prayer among the records of abuse and corruption in the Arsenal of two centuries later; the Venetian lawyers were still renowned among the lawyers of the world, but the State was no longer capable of teaching the laws of good government to Christendom. The theatre, the coffee-house, the ridotto, the gay villeggiatura were now the main channels of her activity; the tide of life had flowed back from the Arsenal and left it a sluggish marsh. In the arts of shipbuilding no advance had been made, and the cause lay chiefly in an extraordinary slackness of discipline by which workmen were first allowed to serve in alternation and in the end were asked for only one day’s service in the month. Many youths who had not even seen the Arsenal were in receipt of a stipend as apprentices, in virtue of hereditary right. Martinelli tells of porters, valets, novices and even of a pantaloon in a troop of comic actors who were thus pleasantly provided for. There was a scarcity of tools, and even the men in daily attendance at the Arsenal spent their time in idle lounging and often in still more mischievous occupations for lack of anything better to do; disobedience and disloyalty were rife. The Arsenal was used by many as a place of winter resort, as workhouses by the tramps of to-day, and the wood stored for shipbuilding was consumed in fires for warming these unbidden guests, or made up into articles of furniture for sale in the open market. The report of the Inquisitors of the Arsenal, dated March 1, 1874, which Martinelli quotes, is indeed a terrible confession: “One sad experience clearly shows that the smallest concession ... becomes rapidly transformed into unbridled licence. Not to mention the immense piles of shavings, from sixty to seventy thousand vast bundles of wood disappear annually. The wastage of so great a mass of wood, more than the equivalent of the complete outfit of ten or twelve entire ships of the line, is not to be accounted for under legitimate refuse of normal work, but points plainly to the voluntary destruction of undamaged and precious material.” It is scarcely surprising that with so little care for the preservation of discipline in the Arsenal and for the efficiency of its workmen Venice fell behind. The Arsenal had indeed become, as Martinelli says, “a monument of the generous conceptions of the past—a monument, like the church and campanile of San Marco, beautiful, admirable, glorious, but as completely incapable as they of offering any service to the State.” Similar abuses existed also in the manning of the ships. The officers were for the most part idle and incompetent, and the despatches of the Provveditori are a tissue of lamentable statements as to the depression of that which had been, and while Venice was to retain her supremacy, must ever be, the mainstay of her power. There is desertion among the crews and operatives; the outfit provided for them is unsuitable and inadequate. Nicolò Erizzo, Provveditor Extraordinary to the Islands of the Levant, concludes a despatch, dated October 30, 1764, as follows: “Thus it comes about that your Excellencies have no efficient and capable officers of marine, and if an occasion were ever to arise when it were necessary to send them to some distant part, let me not be deemed presumptuous if I venture frankly to assure you that they would be in great straits. I had a proof of the truth of this when I launched the galley recently built; for the officers themselves begged me to put a ship’s captain on board, since at a little distance from land they did not trust themselves, nor did they blush to confess it in making this request.”
It was ten years earlier, in 1744, that the Ridotto, or great public gaming-house, was closed in Venice by order of the Great Council, and the Venetians, their chief occupation gone, were reduced to melancholy peregrination of the Piazza. “They have all become hypochondriacs,” writes Madame Sara Gondar. “The Jews are as yellow as melons; the mask-sellers are dying of starvation; and wrinkles are growing on the hands of many a poor old nobleman who has been in the habit of dealing cards ten hours a day. Vice is absolutely necessary to the activity of a state.” This then is the Venice against which Goldoni stands out; and after all, the essential difference between the world reflected in his comedies and that world of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio, which was Colleoni’s world, is a difference of horizon. There is an epic grandeur about Carpaccio’s world: heroes stride across it, with lesser men and lesser interests in their train. The small affairs of life are not neglected. There is the Company of the Stocking, who discuss their peculiar device and the articles of their order with the grave elaboration of State councillors. Venice was always interested in matters of detail. But in Colleoni’s day the same seriousness of purpose was available when larger issues were discerned: in Goldoni’s the power to discern larger issues has disappeared. The Venetians, lords once of the sea, can still take interest in their stockings, but they can take interest in nothing else. The Lilliputians are in possession. Goldoni does not quarrel with his age for not being monumental, and we shall do well to follow his example and make our peace with it. He looks upon the clubs of freemasons, the pedantic literary reformers, the false romanticists, the bourgeois tyrants and masquerading ladies, with a serene and indulgent smile. In his famous literary dispute with Gozzi he maintains before his fiery opponent the calm and level countenance of truth. The battles rage around him, but he stands firm and unassailable, as Colleoni himself may once have stood in the midst of battles how different, waged in how different a world!
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.
