Venice

by Beryl De Zoete; Mary Sturge Gretton

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. This Rio San Lorenzo is the scene of one of Gentile Bellini’s most famous pictures. We are parallel here with the Rio di Sant’ Antonin, by which we came from the basin of St. Mark. The miracle represented by Bellini as taking place here is one of those connected with a fragment of the true Cross belonging to the School of San Giovanni Evangelista. Some of the finest artistic power of Venice was lavished in honouring the virtues of this relic, and we owe to it inestimably precious records of the city in the days of her splendour. We understand in watching Bellini’s procession something of the nature of those ever-recurring ceremonies which made Casola feel that the Venetians must needs be specially beloved of God. The three-arched bridge of San Lorenzo, which is the structural centre of the composition, is thronged with a white-robed confraternity bearing splendid candles which glint among the trees that are tied upon the bridge, and that we see receding into the campo of the church which is hidden from us. In the centre of the bridge is fixed the banner of the Confraternity, waving in the wind. The throng upon the bridge is by no means idle; there is the effect of that incessant movement of which one is conscious in the densest crowd, and those at its edge are eagerly watching the doings in the water. It is indeed the water that excites our chief interest; Bellini has contrived to perpetuate numberless familiar graces and dignities in the rowers whom we see framed by the central arch of the bridge, or holding up their boats alongside of it. But it is the novel element of the swimmers in the canal which gives the picture a unique place in our regard. In the space of water between the bridge and the temporary platform in the immediate foreground, where kneels a monumental little company of Venetian gentlemen—tradition says the family of the Bellini—is an aquatic display of the most delicate order. Four of the Brothers swim in the clear green water, upheld by their flowing robes like a water-lily by its leaves, and one, the Grand Guardian—as he treads water with admirable equilibrium and an easy grace that is beyond all praise—holds up on high the precious Cross. No words can describe the delight that these swimmers afford us. Their whole heart is in the quest; two of them, an old man and a young, who have been pursuing the elusive trophy in vain, have seen the discovery and slackened their strokes; but one, who has evidently just dived off the fondamenta, is striking boldly out and trying with down-turned face to penetrate the depths of the green water. The negro, stripped, and ready for a plunge, who stands quaking on the lowest step of a wooden landing-stage opposite, affords a delightful foil to the Brothers who swim with such careless proficiency despite their encumbering robes. If he would but look up, he would see that his courage need not be put to the test—that the lost treasure is already sailing triumphantly ashore.

A VENETIAN BRIDGE.

To identify the exact scene of the picture, we shall do well to pass into the Rio San Lorenzo from the Rio del Pestrin and take up our stand a little beyond the Ponte San Lorenzo at about the point of Bellini’s wooden bridge. Looking back we have now in front of us the present Ponte San Lorenzo in place of Bellini’s beautiful three-arched bridge, spanning the canal between the long fondamenta on our left, and the campo and Church of San Lorenzo, which are still—as in the picture—wedged between the buildings on our right. The minute private fondamenta also, where in the picture kneel two of the foremost of the procession, is still in existence. On our left is the fondamenta in front of Bellini’s beautiful frescoed house, and beyond it several houses of irregular heights, as in the picture, while the horizon on this side is still filled by the main features of Bellini’s background—another Palazzo Capello bounded on three sides by water, the Rio Pestrin, the Rio San Lorenzo, and the Rio San Giovanni Laterano. The palace retains some of its grandeur; it is easily recognisable by its shape, though to-day it is one storey higher. The Capello arms are still to be seen on it, but it has been robbed of most of its glories of marble and colour. There is a certain melancholy as well as a fascination in attempting to reconstruct the scene of the picture. In the Gallery, when we are face to face with the frescoed houses that we may only see foreshortened, we long to join the spectators across the rio and complete those tantalising fragments of centaurs and figures on horseback that combine with more conventional ornaments to decorate the palace on the fondamenta. But now we are face to face with reality, the frescoes are no more. With the exception of the Palazzo Capello it is only the shape and relative position of the houses that assures to us their identity.

In Bellini’s time this corner by San Lorenzo was splendid indeed. The Capello family, which, according to the chroniclers, was numbered among the patricians in 1297, played a prominent part in all Venetian activities, but chiefly in war. It is a member of this family—Vittore Capello, generalissimo of Venice in the Turkish campaign of 1462 and 1465, who is represented as kneeling before Sant’ Elena in the beautiful relief above the façade of Sant’ Aponal. Another Capello—Vincenzo—in the succeeding century filled five times the office of Admiral, and in 1541 erected the façade of Santa Maria Formosa. Notoriety of a different kind was brought to the family by Bianca, who married for love and freedom, and was cheated of both, but who died Grand Duchess of Tuscany. This palace of the Capello family at San Giovanni Laterano was worthy of their fame. The superb side wall that faces us in Bellini’s picture is like a tapestry in diamonds of dusky crimson and gold. It is bordered by a design of gold below the bands of colour, which are most effectively placed immediately under the projecting roof. A beautiful design in red and green, like rich embroidery, forms a kind of flag, enclosing the Capello symbols on a shield painted in different shades of blue. Everything that conventional ornament could do to beautify the house has been done. Ornamental borders and squares are set among the bricks, and the smooth marble facings of the ogival windows are inlaid with coloured discs and knobs. The lower square house at the end of the fondamenta, divided from the Capello palace by the rio, has the same beauties of ornamental band and stripes of alternating colours beneath the roof. The single window in the wall that faces us is magnificent, grated and enclosed by gilt rope-work; the capitals of its pillars and its ogival arch are richly gilded, and in the surface of the stone above are set discs of porphyry with centre and rim of gold. Over the massive wooden entrance door is a painted frieze of green leaves, and discs with Byzantine birds are inserted in the wall above. A grand surface of wall is still left for the fresco painter, and Tintoretto was yet to come. Perhaps the most notable feature in this lower house is the carving of its chimneys; each has an individual form. The fondamenta in the picture is thronged with citizens, and the conspicuous row of stalwart ladies, who kneel on its extreme edge above the water, tradition calls Catterina Cornaro and her train. Certainly this representation of the Queen of Cyprus and her train is different from that which Bembo has given us in his delightful letters to Lucrezia Borgia from Asolo. Catherine, it is true, was no longer a girl when she went to her captivity at Asolo; but there is a lightness and freedom in Bembo’s picture of the party who told tales of love and philosophy and idled among the gardens, which leaves us unprepared for the solidity and uncomeliness of this uniform row of figures. We know little of this Queen of Cyprus, but we expect more grace of her than is possible to these matrons. They have studied so little how to please in the wearing of their sumptuous robes, that despite their jewels they produce an effect of almost conventual dulness. It is difficult to imagine anything more magnificent than the dresses of these ladies; they are literally covered with jewels. Excessively virtuous they may be, but they are also excessively lavish; they might well give ground for the legislation as to women’s dress quoted by Sanudo; but they have not taught their jewels to shine. The matron who heads the row is robed in dark velvet: her sleeves and the front of her bodice are of gold, slashed with white and trimmed with pearls. An edging of solid gold, studded with jewels, passes from her shoulders to her waist; rich lace completes the decoration of her bodice. Strings of pearls cross on her breast, and a thickly turned gold cord is round her neck and hangs in front. She wears a gold coronet set with gems, and beneath it a broad ornamental band. A transparent veil falls down her back, and is draped about her forehead and neck, covering her long ear-rings. A jewelled cross hangs on her breast, and a chain round her waist. Rings are the only possible splendour she and her ladies are without. The Venetian ladies and gentlemen standing behind this Queen of Cyprus and her train are hardly less sumptuous than they, but their robes are less rigid and uniform, and very much more gracefully worn. The men are dressed in a splendour of brocade and cloth of gold that gives out a rich and sober glow.

We may well feel the inadequacy of words as We attempt to revive this wonderful painting. Bellini faithfully recorded Venice, but we cannot so faithfully record Bellini. We can only hope to call attention to the detail of what is undoubtedly one of the most valuable portraits of the Venice of the first Renaissance by one of the greatest of her citizens. When we have paused long enough on the site of the picture and go down the Rio San Giovanni Laterano, immediately in front of the Capello Palace, the high water again denies us passage; but it gives more than it withholds in compelling us to return to our former junction with the Rio Pestrin and to pass out among the coal barges making the wider circuit of the lagoon. It is a wonderful moment when we come suddenly from the narrow water into the wide expanse of the lagoon; and on this December morning a marvellous vision awaits us. The long brown line of Sant’ Erasmo lies like a dark cloud on the water; Burano, San Francesco and Torcello are isolated in a strange translucency of mist; whilst from the low tones of the water one red sail rises like a column of flame. Above Murano the smoke coils languidly; the cypresses over the cemetery wall stand out in startling blackness. A flock of gulls incessantly flickers and glitters on the surface of lucent aquamarine that stretches away to the shore where the mountains lie like purple shadows crowned with a radiancy of snow. The sunlight of the lagoon in this wintry clearness seems other than that which falls on the waterways of the city; this outer robe of Venice to-day is of so immaterial a texture that we feel the material city slipping from our grasp. We turn back into it, but by a way that can feed the visionary sense, by the Rio dei Mendicanti. It might seem, indeed, that all vision would die in the dreary, plastered uniformity of the building that stretches along the fondamenta on our left. This building was formerly the Scuola di San Marco; but the superb façade erected by the Confraternity on the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo has little in common with these white-washed walls and dreary sunless corridors. For this most famous School is now the Hospital of the Mendicanti, and it is as a visitor to the wards that we are admitted. Yet amidst these chill cloisters and corridors is kept one of the most luminous and visionary treasures of Venice—Tintoretto’s Procession of St. Ursula and The Virgins. It is the more precious as being, with Bacchus and Ariadne and The Paradise, almost the only work of Tintoretto that we can make sure of fully seeing. There is abundant light in the cold, grey church to illumine a picture which is in itself a song of light in the daybreak.

This stream of wonderful maidens moves all to one rhythm, winding with sweeping trains down out of the misty dawn to end and centre in the glorious figure of St. Ursula waiting the bishop’s consecration of her mission. She is so entrancingly radiant that the young cross-bearing bishop who stands beside her seems, as he gazes, to be illumined by her fire and joy. The ships in which the company is to embark lie like phantoms on the misty sea-line, and the long lights of dawn are above the water—pale rose and gold and purple—while the curtain of night is slowly withdrawn, leaving spaces of darker blue and glowing cloud. The early morning mists still hang about the shadowy hulks of the huge vessels and the figures near the shore, making as it were two spheres of action. The grassy slope down which the travellers come, seems in its undulations to yield itself to their motion, to reflect and echo it, and is luminous as all the figures are. The faint rainbow raiments of those distant companies that sweep forward nearer to the shore are like wings lit from the dawn and half-folded, while the foremost ranks of the procession are in the full golden light of day. Note with what daring Tintoretto has placed the strong rose-robed angel with the palms of martyrdom across the picture directly overhead. Her figure cuts across the phantom ships; one arm hides part of the procession; yet far from obscuring or diverting from the central theme, she leads the eye more directly to St. Ursula. There are no spectators of this morning procession, unless it be the marvellous group on the left. The central figure is that of a woman, meditative, gathered into herself; she scarcely seems to belong to the procession; she is dreaming apart with downbent face, and is very close in feeling to Carpaccio’s sleeping St. Ursula. Beside her is a radiant youth, his face one of Giorgione’s faces, in a helm shaped like a shell and set with pearls. There are many types of Venetian ladies in the procession, such as were idealised by one and another of the painters; all are here, in marvellous richness of raiment and jewelled headgear. We do not question whether they are fitly robed for a great journey; we only share in their joy. The wine of dawn seems to have entered into them, and to sing in every motion, every colour of the superb lyric—the intoxication of embarking on a mystic voyage in the pale radiance of dawn.

We pass out again through the long corridors under the great sculptured portal. On our left is the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, a storehouse of Renaissance art, and before us the friend of whom we never grow weary—Colleoni astride of his war-horse in the centre of the square. This paid servant, this adopted son of Venice, is not on the Piazza where it was his wish to be; but he stands even more fitly here upon this small campo beside the canal. Anywhere he would be monarch; but we are admitted here into his private presence-chamber, while the great stirring Piazza would seem but the crowded outer court. If, before leaving the campo, we make a short journey on foot along the Salizzada which passes on the south of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, we may find a treasure buried in dirt and neglect. None would guess its presence; but those who care for unfrequented paths may venture under the unattractive sotto-portico which leads to the outer staircase of a once beautiful Renaissance palace. It is given over to the poor, but a sculptured doorway still surmounts the stair; its chief beauty however is a series of delicately sculptured arches in the brickwork below, and a fine well-head half imprisoned by the chimney of a neighbouring bakery. The wall of the bakery is so near the staircase of the palace that we can get no complete conception of the arches, and the dirt and ill odours of this neglected corner are likely to daunt all but the most enthusiastic seekers after treasure. Yet these fragments, in elegance and beauty of design, may rank with the worthiest remains of the Venetian Renaissance.