PALAZZO SANUDO.
Returning to Colleoni’s square, we again embark and continue our way down the Rio dei Mendicanti, past courtyards flooded by still rising water, and turn soon to the right, into the Rio Santa Marina—a picturesque canal, ever varying in width and angle. At the corner of the Palazzo Pisano we are confronted again by the problem of the high water. If we would include in our tour the Palazzo Sanudo, with its riches of many ages, Byzantine, early Gothic and Ogival, its two courtyards, its beautiful garden on the fondamenta and its dolphin-shaped knocker, we must turn to the right along the Rio delle Erbe. But it is useless to hope that this morning any gondola will be able to pass under its low bridges, and in consequence we must continue our way to the church of the Miracoli, by skirting the other side of the lozenge-shaped island on which it stands. We soon turn at right angles into the Rio dei Miracoli, and in a few moments we see the sun shining on the cupola of the church, gilding the marbles of the circular east tower and lighting the traceries of serpentine and porphyry and cipollino on the west front. It is a joyous and radiant aspect, this of the Miracoli, with its broad spaces of Greek marbles and its bands of Verona, its plaques of verd-antique and porphyry, its sculptured angels and grave apostles. It stands in quiet beauty on the brink of the canal. From its little campo opens the beautiful inner courtyard of the Sanudo Palace, while on another side it is bordered by the spacious and noble Corte delle Muneghe, formerly known as the Corte Cà Amadi, from the family whose arms are still to be seen on the brickwork. Close to the well in this court stood originally the image of the Madonna, thanks to whose miracles we now possess this most beautiful church built in her honour. The chronicles relate that a certain Francesco Amadi, an inhabitant of Santa Marina, had piously set up an image of the Virgin close by his house. The fame of this image as a worker of wonders grew so great that it was transferred by Angelo Amadi, in 1480, to the Corte di Cà Amadi, and set up there for popular veneration. In his Venetian Annals for 1480, Malipiero thus briefly relates the occurrence: “This year began the cult of the Madonna of Miracles which was at the door of Corte Nuova, opposite the door of the Amai in the narrow calle, and because of the crowd of people it became necessary to move the image, and carry it to the courtyard of Cà Amai, and immense offerings have been made of wax, statues, money and silver, insomuch that it has reached four hundred ducats in one month. And in process of time it amounted to three thousand ducats of alms, and with them we bought Corte Nova from the houses of the Bembo, Querini and Baroci, and there was built a most beautiful temple and convent, into which we put the nuns of Santa Chiara of Murano.” The foundation-stone was laid on February 25, 1481, when the image was moved with great pomp from the court to the little wooden shelter on the site chosen for the church. An interesting account of the move is contained in the Memorie of Angelo Amadi. It affords a vivid verbal picture of religious festivals in Venice at the time they were finding their most splendid expression on canvas. “On the day of the twenty-fifth of February,” begins Amadi, “in the name of Messer Jesus Christ and of the glorious Virgin Mary, we removed the image from our house to transfer it to the hut or house of wood where the chapel or church is to be made; at which removal were present all the Schools or Fraternities, the Battudi, that is, the School of Madonna Santa Maria della Misericordia, to which I belong, and the School of the Carità, and of San Marco, and that lately founded of San Rocco, whose brothers go about in sackcloth, beating themselves continually with scourges and iron chains.” All the Procurators of San Marco, he says, were present, with countless cavaliers and doctors and a great part of the Signoria, the Patriarch in his pontificals, and a host of vicars and canons and other clerics, all richly and splendidly clothed. The Amadi insisted on themselves carrying the portable stand that had been made for the image, covered with cloth of gold, cremosine and cloth of silver, and adorned with silver candelabra and oriental censers. “Nor would we allow any other to carry it, that we might demonstrate publicly that it belonged to us and had been made by our ancestor.” Four citizens accompanied the image-bearers, carrying poles on which to support the stage as it mounted bridges or stopped in the streets. It was followed by the dignitaries already enumerated and almost the whole Venetian populace. The procession left the house of the Amadi to the sound of trumpet and pipe; it made a circuit of the bridges, streets and squares of the city as far as Santa Maria Formosa, halting in the parish church of the Amadi for many lauds to be sung. “And along all the calli and in the squares of the churches all the people kneeling on the ground prayed devoutly with tears and hands joined on their breasts, calling aloud and raising a great outcry.” In this manner the procession returned to the shelter, and the foundation-stone was laid by the Patriarch amid the chanting of lauds. After a final Te Deum the image was left to the devotions of the people who, till night fell, continued to pour out their offerings for the building. There is something stirring in this ceremony with its popular outcry and petitions for mercy. It reminds us of that strong element of piety which in Venice went side by side with its strong commercial instincts.
The church of the Miracoli seems to belong peculiarly to Venice in the light of these stories of its birth. It is itself one of the miracles, this little Roman temple; with its quadrangular-domed choir, raised high above the nave, its marble ambones, its dark painted roof, and walls lined with marbles, it impresses us with a sense of sublimity. All here is perfectly proportioned and decorated with simple and absolute fitness. It is impossible to mount the flight of marble steps leading from nave to choir, past the wonderful little figures of St. Clare and St. Francis with his profound contemplative smile, past the Annunciation Angel and the Virgin draped like a Roman matron, into the choir where the great cross of porphyry and serpentine hangs in the apse, without feeling that we are mounting to sacrifice in a temple full of the Deity. But what part has that marvellous little company of sea youths and maidens in the tale of the Passion? They are the offspring of some delicate fantasy careless of all save itself, yet they seem to need no other passport than beauty to their place in the temple. Work of the same imaginative quality is to be seen on a pillar in the nave: not here a dream of mermaids with delicate breasts and arms and glittering tails, but a purely naturalistic subject. The artist has conspired with the stone to sing his delight in the life of the fields, and he has achieved his purpose so that the very spirit of the wild creatures lives again. A lizard with smooth scales and lithe, restless tail, ears of corn, a serpent holding a bird by its look as it rears itself for a spring, birds fighting and birds preening their breasts,—all these delicate beings, that move amid a design of admirable grace, are a field pilgrim’s scrip laid open for all who will read. These old artists were not afraid. To them all things of nature appeared symbols worthy to lay on the altar. And it is because of this permeating imaginative vision that the Church of the Miracoli is one of the jewels of Venice, instinct with life, from the grave mystery of its marble-lined walls, slab alternating with slab, Carrara cream and white, paonazetto, marmo greco, marbles of Verona red and almond, to lizard and serpent, siren and infant, from the dusky gold and colour of the ceiling to the eloquent figures that stand in constant ministration on the ambones.
Santa Maria dei Miracoli might well mark the limit of our tour; but if we go a short distance further into the Rio San Canciano we shall come on three examples of the earlier domestic architecture of Venice, which we shall do well not to miss. The first is a house by the Ponte Widmann, dating from the ninth century. It is exceedingly picturesque, with its long, low portico, and a profusion of Byzantine ornaments of most varied device on the walls—weird lions and birds and oriental beasts. The capitals of the window columns also are Byzantine, though the balconies are Renaissance. We can also distinguish, though it is immured, the ancient solario, or sun-terrace, which, in this house of old Venice, was evidently of considerable beauty and extent. Passing under another bridge after the Ponte Widmann, we come to the Ponte Pasqualigo, and landing at the calle on the left, we have on the right of us, only a few steps down, one of the oldest houses in Venice. So well cared for is it by its present owners that we seem not to be examining a relic, but to move in a living page of the past. On the morning we saw it, the sun was streaming into the court and falling on the Signora, who, in scarlet shawl, and with a brilliant kerchief round her head, was dozing in the sun. She rose and gave us a cordial welcome, and we climbed the outer stair, under an immense projecting roof, into the garden hanging above the court, full of sunshine and flowers; higher still, on the altana, was a bright line of clothing hung out to dry. The structure of the ancient roof overhanging the stair is very remarkable, with its secondary beams that jut horizontally under a long cross-beam running the whole length of the gallery. The rooms, which open out of one another from the terrace, are rich also in beams, though now for the most part covered with a foolish uniformity of ceiling. The floor of the reception room is, as usual, paved with small variegated stones, but it is remarkable for occasional little islands of mosaic, one of which, a tiny square of deep blue and gold set diamond-wise, is a veritable gem of colour. Worthy to rank with this hospitable, ample house of ancient Venice, is a courtyard opening on the water, into which we pass immediately from the Ponte Pasqualigo. The wooden barbicans of the projecting roof adjoining the portico rest on pillars of fine earliest Gothic, grave and strong and simple in their build. The sense that they are individuals bearing the burden of the beams is increased by the fact that it is not geometrically adjusted to their shoulders. It rests there because they are willing; there is an understanding, a combinazione between beam and pillar, but the two were not mechanically made to fit.
A SIDE CANAL.
Returning to the Rio dei Miracoli we leave the church on our left, and crossing the Rio Santa Marina and the Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo, we pass directly into the Rio del Teatro, leaving the water-entrance to Marco-Polo’s palace on our right. This corner is one of the most beautiful in the canals of Venice. It is rich in palaces and fragments of ancient ornament, and full of strange interplay of lights from the many tortuous ways that converge here. There is a constant fascination in the broad sweep of water at the crossways, in the problems of traffic, in the warning cries that herald boat or barge passing under the many bridges. There is perhaps no spot in Venice so full of ancient mystery, of the gloom, the light, the sound and stillness of her waterways. A little further on we pass into the Rio della Fava, full also of delightful and unexpected corners; and looking back from the Ponte di San’ Antonio we see the site of Mansueti’s picture commemorating another miracle of the Holy Cross; or rather we see one corner of the picture; for Mansueti has cut away the whole length of a calle and all the houses between this bridge of San’ Antonio and the Campo di San Lio, so that in his painting, for obvious artistic reasons, the waters of the canal flow directly in front of the campo, which he has narrowed to little more than a fondamenta. In a sketch for this picture now in the Uffizi at Florence, Mansueti has more faithfully transcribed the actual surroundings of the Campo di San Lio. His picture illustrates a miracle of the Cross that would seem to offer small scope for artistic treatment. A member of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Evangelista, on being invited by another Brother to attend the Cross in procession, impiously replied, “I will neither accompany it, nor do I care whether it accompanies me.” Within a short while, continues Flamino Corner, the perverse man died and the School assembled for his burial; but when the procession reached the Ponte di San Lio, the parish of the dead man, the Holy Cross became so heavy that no force could avail to move it. While all stood appalled and dismayed by such an occurrence, the friend of the dead man recalled the impious words he had spoken, and made known the reason of the refusal of the Cross. It was removed from the procession, and, the chronicler informs us, withheld henceforth from any but public solemnities. In Mansueti’s composition a number of Brothers are gathered on the bridge attempting to drag the Cross, and the clergy of San Lio and a group of citizens are waiting on the campo to receive it. There is much quaintness in the rendering of this rather humorous incident, and the picture is full of rich and homely detail, in the houses and in the doings of their inhabitants, the chase of a cat, the hanging of a clothes line, the stacking of the pliant rods on which the clothes are hung. The windows, with closed or open gratings, are thronged with onlookers, chiefly splendid ladies. In Bellini, the windows are unpeopled, but here there is scarcely one uncarpeted, and without its contingent of festive heads and shoulders; whilst in one of the windows, in the house we can still identify, a fascinating infant prances against the grating and pokes a fist through the bars. The bridge in the picture is obviously too low for any gondola to pass under it; it is merely a temporary private way thrown across the rio, which it is easy to believe that Mansueti has substituted in order that we may see above it the procession winding out of the Rio del Piombo. As we look back from the Ponte San’ Antonio we may get, in spite of Mansueti’s changes, a distinct impression of his scene; the sun, shining through the small circular ogival window in the house that still bounds our horizon, lights up a gay interior of green walls draped in crimson and gold with singular richness of effect.
THE GONDOLIERS’ SHRINE.
The name of the Rio della Fava, the Canal of the Bean, boasts a traditional derivation that throws a curious light on Venetian pieties. It appears that in 1480, the same year in which was initiated the cult of the Madonna dei Miracoli at the Cà Amadi, another wonder-working image, under the patronage of the same family, was thought worthy of a chapel in San Lio. This chapel was named Santa Maria della Consolazione, or della Fava, from its proximity to the Ponte della Fava. “The ecclesiastical writers,” says Tassini, “recount that the bridge was so named because a man living by it, who had hidden some contraband salt under some sacks of beans, a vegetable he dealt in, when warned that the police were approaching threw himself at the feet of the said miraculous image for succour and obtained this favour—that the Justices, despite their search, found nothing in the house but simple beans.” This naïve faith in the willingness of the Madonna to meet all contingencies survives among the humbler citizens of Venice to-day. A proof is provided by the personal experience of a friend who had bespoken overnight a gondola for the station in the dark early hours of the next morning. The gondolier duly arrived and set out with his fare from San Marco. But they had gone no further than the church of the Salute when his lamp gave out and he halted and asked leave to replenish it. No place for procuring oil was apparent, but the gondolier knew one. He went to the shrine of the Madonna and addressed the figure thus, “Blessed Madonna, thou thinkest harm of no man and thou wouldst not that harm should come to any. I turn to thee for help in my need. The police are not like thee. They will have no pity in their fine if they see me at the station with my lamp unlit. I beg thy lamp for this little while.” And, as there was-no sign of refusal, the Madonna’s lamp was taken to the station and returned on the homeward journey.