Venice

by Beryl De Zoete; Mary Sturge Gretton

TOWARDS THE RIALTO, SAN ANGELO.

This luminous quality of the Venetian painters is realised by them in many more general ways than in the treatment of the human form. We may consider it in Carpaccio in relation to the significance of landscape in his compositions. It is his power of treating a scene atmospherically that supplies one chief charm of his work. It is never on a day of splendour that either he or Gentile Bellini depicts Venice; but constantly on a cold, colourless day of late autumn the waters of Carpaccio seem to live again for us as we have seen them through the perspective of his arches or in the background of a city picture. We may see the Grand Canal wind into the dark city under the pale familiar gold of his Rialto sunset, and scattered sails on the cold, clear lagoon in weird contrast of orange with the steely waters or with the pale rose or white of buildings. There is a peculiar fascination in this clear neutrality of light in sky and water and buildings; it is no less a property of Venice than her more refulgent harmonies. Whatever hour of day it comes, it has the strange revelation of the dawn about it, a curious remoteness in which the works of men arrest attention as if fraught with a new purport. The emotional significance of landscape was understood by Carpaccio in a wonderful degree. How much depends, for instance, in the scene where Ursula’s father dismisses the English ambassadors, on the vista of canal across which lights fall from dividing waterways! It is the narrowest strip; but the sunlight on the houses, the exquisite arch of pale blue sky fading into white above the distant buildings, give a new value to the interior; the outside world, on which the sun is shining, seems to look into the room with the streaming light. A still more beautiful illustration of Carpaccio’s understanding of light is to be found in the room where St. Ursula lies asleep. It seems, in fact, scarcely an indoor room; through its open doors and windows it is in close touch with the air and sky; and the effect of contact with wind and sky is heightened by the real plumage of the angel’s grey wings, while the back-sweep of his robe suggests a sudden alighting after flight with the current of air still about him. We know of no picture to surpass this of Carpaccio in conveying the atmosphere of a room into which the first light is breaking—the exhilaration of an illumined wall, the waking of colour on window-ledge, chair and bedcover, the blending of luminous and shadowy. It is the light of the first dawn, the infancy of day, with a suggestion of unillumined sky, just creeping out of shadow in the expanse of open, untrellised window behind the plants, a soft, wonderful stealing green, that has not yet come into its kingdom. Even buildings are made by Carpaccio to serve an atmospheric effect. We might illustrate from almost every picture in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, but confining ourselves to the St. Ursula series, we shall find a notable illustration in the buildings seen through the water-gate in the Return of the Embassy, and in the great Renaissance loggia which fills so conspicuous a place in the foreground, and to which airiness and light have been imparted by its great arches, by the water washing round its base, and by the spring of the bridge that connects it with the campo where the King sits under his canopy. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle architectural treatment by which, in the great threefold scene of the Prince’s departure, his meeting with Ursula and their blessing by the King, Carpaccio has bestowed an atmosphere of remoteness, almost of fairy strangeness on the English harbour with its castles and walls and motley buildings soaring far up the rocky hillside into the sky, an atmosphere entirely distinct from the upper-world light and joyousness of the contrasting court of Ursula’s father.

There is an element of his native landscape that Carpaccio incorporated with singular felicity, and which is peculiarly prominent in his pictures—namely the shipping of Venice. In the great trilogy of the Prince’s departure the vessels are a masterpiece: there is nothing to surpass them in this kind. Carpaccio seems to have realised to the full their varied elements of beauty: their static properties, their weight and substance and the symmetry of their frame, combined with all the radiant light and spring of swelling sail and rigging and flag and countless trappings: all that goes to make a sailing ship a thing of music. And it is not only vessels rigged and ready to float in triumph on the high seas that Carpaccio depicts: there is a vessel also in squero, with all the song gone from it, one might think, lying uneasily on its side with its huge mast aslant across the harbour tower. It is noteworthy that all the vessels of the English King seem in course of repair; there is something in their semi-skeleton condition which singularly reinforces the dream effect that we have noticed in this portion of the picture, and the triumphant vessel that would seem to belong to the gay town on our right is united in feeling to the shadow city on the left by the exceeding mystery and beauty of its reflection. This picture supplies us with another instance of the way in which Venice operated as an inspiration in the work of Carpaccio, even when he was not directly portraying the city itself. The beautiful effect of a drawbridge over a great water, such as he knew familiarly in Venice, had impressed itself on his mind: adapting it to the requirements of his scene, he reproduces the bridge of Rialto in the city of the English King, not forgetting the significance of a crowning figure in white at the apex of the arch. We cannot indeed afford to miss a detail in Carpaccio: there is never any crowding nor taking refuge in vagueness. The varieties of shipping, the flags hung from the windows, the most distant figures, are all treated with the same clearness and precision: to each its value is assigned. This fulness of meaning is one of the sources of his fascination for us: the fact that he has done a little thing means sometimes more to us, if we can come at the prompting purpose, than a pageant of main figures. It is like the side-flash of light which a seemingly irrelevant act casts sometimes on a personality.

The fidelity of Bellini and Carpaccio to the facts of Venice fills us continually with fresh wonder: it is not the fidelity of copyists standing outside the scene they paint; their very heart is in its stones. As we watch Gentile’s gorgeous procession sweep like a stream from the gate of the Ducal Palace round the border of the Piazza, with the sound of trumpets, the rustle and swing of noble garments and the gleam of banners, we feel that the painter had heard and felt the triumph of the music, so marvellously has he conveyed its influence in these moving figures; we too hear the jubilation of it as the long tubes pass out and in. With the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini before us we may do more than conjecture what manner of men they were who filled the foreground of contemporary Venice. We have not masses or dispositions of colour merely: we seem to move through a crowd of living beings or a gallery of portraits. No one could paint loungers as Carpaccio paints them; there is no monotony in their inaction; the faces are as various as the men—wonderful faces, some coarse, some refined, but almost all with that indefinable quality of pathos in their strength which is one of the essentials of beauty. There are perhaps comparatively few among them that would satisfy a conventional canon of beauty: their fascination lies in the rich combination of whimsical humour and strength, melancholy and wit; so eloquent are they, so quick with intelligence that we are little disposed to question their material perfection or imperfection. These citizens of Gentile Bellini, Mansueti and above all Carpaccio—since in him are realised a far greater variety of types—impress us profoundly as men of calm and steady purpose, who have lived, felt and prevailed. They are men of action, yet they are dreamers. And this was not from incapacity in Carpaccio to express vivid motions in feature or form. When he is more freely composing, as in the Death of St. Ursula, it would be hard to rival the brilliance and vivacity with which he has treated the turmoil of the one-sided fray. But these citizens—whether of Venice or of Ursula’s court is immaterial—seem to be governed by some internal harmony; there is a rhythm in their motions and in their standing still, which reflects the spirit of their time. We have only to compare them with the characters in Longhi’s eighteenth-century interiors to understand that a great change has taken place. Imagine Carpaccio and Bellini set to paint as primary interests the choosing of a dress, the stopping of a tooth, the guessing of a riddle, a dancing lesson, a toilette. These things were part of life, and superbly they would have done it; they painted lesser acts than these in the corner of their pictures, for every detail of the city life so jealously guarded by its rulers was precious to them. But the difference lies in the centre of interest. In the eighteenth century, the detail, the side light, the accessory of life has swelled into the principal subject, and the faces of the actors are vacant as never in Carpaccio. It is not so much that they are less beautiful, that they are often witless; but they are lacking in purpose, in subordination to a common control. The pulse of a great civic life no longer beats in them.

We have considered hitherto the manner in which Venice used her elected medium of expression, how her painters had understood and interpreted the life of the city. We will turn now to ask what attitude towards the facts of life is reflected in their canvases. And here we will attempt again to illustrate, by certain examples, what aspects of life found most ready acceptance by the Venetian artists of the Renaissance. We may venture to seek an illustration of two of its broader aspects—one foreign, the other native to the mind of Venice as reflected in her life and in her art—in two sculptured figures by Antonio Rizzo in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace. These two figures, of Adam and Mars, are most original in conception. Adam holds the apple in his hand; it seems that he has just partaken of it and that, partaking, he has been initiated into a new vision. His beautiful clear-cut face is upturned; his lips are open; his hand seems to hold in the tumult of his heart. There is as yet no shame, no contrition, no sense of sin in Adam’s look, nor in his attitude, but the immense wonder of a new experience with its yet undetermined import; and through the ecstasy of his vision there breaks that strange pain of the mortal man whose body can scarcely support its spiritual burden. It seems almost as if Adam were receiving now that vision of the ages at whose threshold he stood; he has opened a door which can never again be shut; he has let in a flood which is beyond his control, and he is rapt in the contemplation. The other figure who fills with Adam a niche in the Arco Foscari is Mars, the god of war. His body is grandly moulded, stalwart and disciplined and ready for action; but there are no tempests in his look; there is no herculean development of muscle nor trampling vehemence as in the fresco of Veronese. Rizzo’s war-god is young, full of grace and beauty, with the dream also of a poet on his sensuous lips. He is majestic; his face is grave and thoughtful, with a strange sadness in its vigilant wisdom. He and Adam seem to strike together the accord of the Renaissance, the union of a great expectancy, an uncomprehended newness, with controlled and ordered purpose and the conviction of conquest. It is the latter aspect which seems to find reflection in the mind of Venice not the mystic promise, the troubled vision, which the Renaissance held for some of those on whom its influence fell. In the Venetians of the first Renaissance there is always the note of calm and assured knowledge; we may find it again and again in their artistic annals. In the Casa Civran—the so-called Casa dell’ Otello beside the Campo dei Carmini—we again recognise Rizzo’s hand in one of the most lovely and characteristic figures of the first Renaissance, which has fortunately survived the various restorations and spoliations of the house and stands still intact in its lonely niche on the plastered wall. It is impossible to convey in words the vivacity, the nobility and grace of this young warrior: the proud and magnificent control governing each motion of his spirited form, the rhythm in response to which each member of him moves, so that the effect on us is indeed that of a song, a victorious, joyful melody. Again and again we may meet them, Mars and his young disciple, and others of their kin, in Carpaccio’s crowds. The young Civran warrior might have stept on to his niche from the Death of St. Ursula; moreover, the life that thrills in him is felt not in single figures only, but in the entire conception of series after series of Carpaccio, in Bellini’s Procession of the Cross, in Tintoretto’s St. Ursula and the Virgins in the Church of the Mendicanti.

It was thus the Venetians confronted life. In portrait, allegory or story, realised in varying degrees of naïvety, splendour and refinement, with more or less penetration and psychological insight, we find the same balance and control—a unique harmony of strength, grace and serenity. And if we turn to the religious art of Venice we shall be struck by a lack of anything like mystic rapture or absorption in the sufferings of Christ. We have but two examples in Venice of Bellini’s portrayal of the facts of Christ’s mature life, but he has treated the theme of the Madonna and Child with a unique profundity. The mystery of life seems to be shadowed in the face of his Madonnas; his saints and apostles, so striking in their individuality, so virile in their piety, have a significance beyond their perfect act of worship. No Venetian religious painter before Tintoretto equalled Bellini in solemnity and depth of conception; but in all we find the same pervading calm, the same absence of tumult or the disturbing element of pain or agony. We will choose an example from Basaiti—the most perfect, perhaps, of all his works—in illustration of what seems to us a prevailing characteristic of the Venetian mind both for strength and weakness—his Gesu morto con due Angeli. It is striking in its originality of conception and full of noble and tender sentiment. There are no weeping women, no agonised apostles round the body of Jesus; only the very young keep watch beside him, two winged infants, at his head and at his feet. They have found him here, this young dead god, laid out as if asleep upon the flat stone by the rock—no blasted rock, its crags are covered with living shrubs and plants. And he is in the light: there is no ghostly pallor in his face upturned to the sky, upon his long, dark hair; so beautiful a brow, such tender cheeks, so strong and brave a neck they have never seen. And he is so still, he lies without fear, not heeding them. They must not wake him from his sleep. The infant at his head, whose exquisitely moulded face is full of that strangely pathetic, antique wisdom of the very young, half-elfish, half-infantile, feels the burden of his sagacity upon him. Why had that brow a crown of thorns instead of flowers about it? This youth to whom they will now bear company had not chosen well his pillow or his crown—though he is so beautiful he was not wise enough to know that thorns are not for those who would be at rest. In the picture the wise infant has taken off the prickly crown that it may not pierce and rend the dream that holds the sleeper there so long; he is full of the knowledge of his triumph, half-fearful lest it should not be complete. The crown of thorns hangs on his own left arm, which he raises half in warning, half in wonder, feeling as his elbow bends the thorns upwards on his arm from what pain he has saved that beautiful but foolish youth. And with his right hand he fondles the hair of Jesus, drawing it a little back from his forehead to be sure that in his stealthy theft he has not left some scratch, some mark of pain. But there are no traces of the crown in any sign of pain, only a faint, faint band beneath the hair he has drawn back—a shadow, as it were, of Christ’s regality. He saved others, Himself He cannot save. Now with this little Saviour, this guardian of his pillow, he can at last sleep in peace. The infant at the feet is more babylike, less wise, more gleefully wondering. He has found no thorns on that beautiful, still body, but he has found another wonder at the feet. The toes of one he holds in his tiny hand, stroking it in his delight: he has found, it seems, a little hole upon the instep bone that the feet of humans are not wont to wear, and he points in musing, half-delighted wonder to the other foot, where he spies the same strange mark. It is a game to this curly headed cherub. He has not yet dreamed of contact with something beyond the reach of his baby wisdom. There is not yet in his chubby face that look which has stolen into the face of his brother and which now seems to put a world between them, a look that amid all its elfish aloofness is akin to the solicitude of human love. What dream was this of Basaiti—the figure of this young God of Light—perfect in form, luminous and strong, unspoiled and untroubled in his sleep of death? His eyes if they were open would be fountains fed from the beauty of the world, but he has borne no burden of humanity. There is power to suffer in that strong and beautiful young face, but it is not the power of the Man of Sorrows. This is not Jesus who agonised in the garden, or who wrote upon the ground; it is not the man from whom Pilate turned away his face.

BRONZE WELL-HEAD BY ALBERGHETTI, COURTYARD OF PALAZZO DUCALE.

There is one only—the last and greatest of the Venetians of the Renaissance—who could sound all notes of tragedy and pathos as well as notes of joy. Tintoretto, the supreme Venetian, the greatest exponent of the essential spirit of Venice, is the son of a wider kingdom than hers and of a greater age than the Renaissance. Unsurpassed as designer and colourist, he is endowed throughout with the peculiar gifts of Venice; but during those years of passionate study, in which he was winning here and there the secrets of his art, hungry for knowledge, careless of gain, and bargaining only for material in which to realise his conceptions—during those years in which he lived alone in continual meditation on some fresh labour, he was probing the deep and passionate things of humanity as no Venetian artist had ever probed them before. The streets and churches of the city seem to echo still to the steps of this genius at once so robust, so tender, so profound and so joyous. Ridolfi laments the lavishness of his production, arguing that restraint of his overflowing fantasy would have strengthened his conceptions. But Tintoretto had to work in his own way; the instinct that flowered in the Scuola di San Rocco, the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Paradiso, might be trusted to choose the manner of its relaxation as well as of its labour. No painter, perhaps, has so wonderfully combined the dramatist and lyrist; for Tintoretto with all his vast imaginative strength had power also over the tenderest springs of melody. There is hardly a picture of his in which some exquisite face of youth or woman will not strike a note of tenderness, and we need only call to mind the Visitation in the Scuola di San Rocco, to know what Tintoretto’s tenderness could be. He had that power, the gift only of the greatest, so intensely to imagine his central theme that the most perfectly executed and conspicuous detail does not divert us into lesser issues. It is exactly here that his distinguishing greatness reveals itself He is completely sincere. His vision is too comprehensive to overlook what really filled the foreground; his skill of hand too great to allow its inclusion to be other than an element in the realisation of his central theme; his concentration too intense to make him fear lest an accessory should become a primary interest. We may pause for a moment in consideration of his greatest tragic triumph, the Crucifixion, in the Scuola di San Rocco. The theme is immense, and, like the Death of Abel, it is treated in a great elemental spirit. Amid all the throes of nature and the sufferings of the Son of Man, the world goes on its way. The ghostly figure of the Arab on his camel, and the caravan winding down from the city to depart into the desert, the two splendid knights who gaze without pity or understanding on this spectacle of the death of slaves, the man who leans from his donkey behind the Cross of Christ, all are as prominent to their little circle as they would be in life; and they have just that prominence for us—the immediate participators in the tragedy—that they would have in life. As always in Tintoretto, the horizon is vast. Wide ranges of blue, undulating country extend to the mountains, above which breaks his peculiar, tender, yellow light of dawn; he has made them recede into unimagined distance by setting across the mountains and the light the raised arm of a mounted figure. There is a great calm in this horizon, while in the middle distance above the Arab the wind has set the leaves quivering on a tree whose thin and twisted branches sway wildly against the blackness of the storm. The most impressive light for this picture is obtained when the setting sun illuminates the marvellous group of mourners at the foot of the Cross, so that they stand out in startling brightness against the heightened depths of the vast background, while Christ hangs above them dark within the darkness.