Venice

by Beryl De Zoete; Mary Sturge Gretton

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 LIBRARY, PIAZZETTA.

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.

CORNER OF THE PALAZZO DARIO.

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.