Venice

by Beryl De Zoete; Mary Sturge Gretton

All the languors, the fierce passions, of Venice, her vitality and her mysticism, are mirrored in the lagoons; there is no pulse of Venice that does not beat in them; in swift sequence, as in a lighter element, they reflect the phases of her being. And the islands of the lagoons are, as it were, the footsteps of young Venice. As she was passing into her kingdom, she set her feet here and there among the waters, and where she trod a life was born. Her roots are far back in the past, far up upon the mainland, where still remain some fragments of the giant growth, which, grafted in the lagoons, was to expand there into a new fulness of beauty and life. It is as if the genius that conceived Jesolo, Torcello, the Madonna of San Donato, had undergone a sea-change as it moved towards the Adriatic, as if some vision had passed before it and shaken it, as if the immutable had felt the first touch of mutability—had been endowed with a new sense born of the ebb and flow of ocean tides. In Malamocco she stepped too near the sea, and left behind the mystery of a city submerged; but no one can receive into his mind the peerless blue and green of the open water beyond the Lido, with the foam upon it, or the sound of its incessant sweep against the shore, without feeling that the spirit that had thus embraced the sea had received a new pulse into her being—a nerve of desire, of expansion, of motion, which her mountain infinitudes had not inspired. And with the new life came new dreams to Venice, dreams she was not slow to realise, and into them were woven materials for which we should seek in vain among the islands, except in so far as the reflex of her later activities fell also upon them. The Madonna of San Donato is the goddess of the lagoons; and if there are children of Venice who creep also for blessing and for protection to the borders of her dusky garment, they are but few. The mystic beauty of that Madonna was not the beauty that inspired Venice when she built upon the seas. The robe of her divinity was more akin to the dazzling incomparable blue of the bay that lies within the curve of the Schiavoni, as we may see it from the Palazzo Ducale on a morning of sunshine and east wind; that indomitable intensity of colour, unveiled, resplendent, filled to the brim with the whole radiance and strength and glory of the day—that is the girdle of Venice, the cup she drank of in her strength. But it is clear that she had bowed to a new dominion: with the ocean she wedded the world.

The lagoons are full of mysteries of light; they are a veritable treasure ground of illusion. They are not one expanse of water over which the light broods with equable influence; they form a region of various circles, as it were, of various degrees of remoteness or tangibility. Almost one feels that each circle must be inhabited by a spirit appropriate to itself, and that a common language could not be between them, so sharp are the limits set by the play of light. On an early autumn morning when the sky is clear and the sun streams full and level upon the clear blue expanse that separates Venice and Mestre, we seem to have a firm foothold on this dancing water. It is a substantial glory; but as our eye flits on from jewel to jewel in the clear blue paving, a sudden line is drawn beyond which it may not pass. The rich flood of vital colour has its bound, and beyond it lies a region bathed in light so intense that even colour is refined into a mystic whiteness—a mirror of crystal, devoid of substance, infinitely remote; and above it, suspended in that lucent unearthly atmosphere, hover the towers of Torcello and Burano, like a mirage of the desert, midway between the water and the sky. They hang there in completest isolation, yet with a precise definition, a startling clearness of contour. There is no vestige of other buildings or of the earth on which they stand, only the dome and campanile of Murano, the leaning spire of Burano and Mazzorbo’s lightning-blasted tower, their reflections distinctly mirrored in a luminous medium, half mist, half water. There is an immense awe in the vision of these phantoms, caught up into a region where the happy radiant colour dares not play; and yet not veiled—clearer in what they choose to reveal than the near city strong and splendid in the unreserve of the young day, but so unearthly, so magical, that our morning spirits scarcely dare accost them. What boat shall navigate that shining nothingness that divides them from our brave and brilliant water?

Venice, indeed, at times falls under the phantom spell. In those mornings of late autumn when the duel between the sun and the scirocco seems as if it could not end till day is done and night calls up her reinforcements of mist, Venice is herself the ghost, her goblet brimming with a liquor that seems the drink of death, a perilous, grey, steely vapour. One only of her islands looms out of the enfolding, foggy blanket: it is San Michele, the island of the dead. On such a morning we may visit this abode of shadows, not at this hour more strange, more ghostly, than the city. To-day a veil is hung upon the hard, bare outline of its boundary wall, which in sunny weather is a glaring eye-sore as you travel towards Murano over the lagoon. Here, in the cloisters where once Fra Mauro dreamed and studied his famous Mappamondo, there is nothing to terrify the spirit on this morning of the mist. The black and tinsel drapings, the strange, unprofitable records of devotion and bereavement, the panoply of death—all these are veiled, and only the wild grasses glisten with their dewdrops on the graves of the very poor, or autumn leaves and flowers gleam from less humble graves, while the cypresses raise their solemn spires into the faintly dawning blue. But the cemetery island of San Michele together with the islands of the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore, of San Pietro di Castello and Sant’ Elena, with many lesser islands close to Venice, have become absorbed for us in the life of the city itself. Their bells and hers sound together; we see them as one with her, and from them look out to the wider lagoon, where the remoter islands, the true phantoms, wander. Many of those near to Venice have had their vicissitudes, their sometime glorious past, their pomp and solemn festival. But, bit by bit, it has been stolen from them, and the treasures which once they stored have been destroyed or gathered into the city. Now they serve only as shelters for those whose life is done—as places of repose for the dead or for the sick in mind and body. One only has passed from humble service into a fuller and happier present. San Lazzaro, once the shelter of lepers from the East, has become under the Armenian Benedictines a haunt of active, cultured life. It has a living industry, printing the ancient trade of Venice, and is in daily commerce with the East.

SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE.

Torcello is a città morta, but scarcely a cemetery or a ruin. Relics of a past older than even Torcello has known are gathered into the humble urn of her museum; beside it stands abandoned, but not in ruins, the group of the cathedral buildings and the vast secular campanile; beyond this there is nothing but the soil—the golden gardens of vine and pomegranate, the fields of maize and artichokes between their narrow canals. The intervening period has entirely vanished; it is like a dream. The page of populous palatial Torcello has been blotted out as if it had had no existence. No vestige remains of the churches which in the old maps flourished along the chief canal, of the names which in the documents have no unsubstantial sound. None now can remember the time when the spoiler was busy among the ruined palaces; he too has passed into the shadows, and the very stones of Torcello are scattered far and wide. There is something mysterious in this complete wiping out of a page of history, so that not time only, but even the mourners of time have disappeared. There is something unique in the isolation of the cathedral and the campanile, rising thus out of the far past—this mighty masonry alone among the herbs of the field. Of her great history Torcello brings only the first page and the last, the duomo, the peasants’ houses and the thatch shelters of their boats. Wandering along the grassy paths beside the vineyards, the pomegranates, the golden thorn bushes of Torcello, we seem in a sleepy pastoral land where the sun always shines. Torcello seems ripe, rich ground for a new life rather than the cemetery of an old; and we may feed the fancy as we will, for she does not refuse her doom; she has no hard contrasts of the old and new.

The few natives whom foreign gold supports upon this island of malaria, have their chief haunts in the cathedral campo, keeping guard over the treasures of the past. For here upon the campo stands the urn where Torcello keeps the ashes of her ancestors—strange relics of old Altinum, pathetic household gods, forks and spoons and safety-pins, keys and necklaces, lamps and broken plates and vases, chains and girdles and mighty bracelets, some of delicate and some of coarser make, with more ambitious works of mosaic and relief, Greek and Roman and Oriental. There is little in all; yet as we stand here in the museum, looking out through the sunny window on the hazy autumn gold of earth and the shimmering water beyond, this little speaks eloquently to the mind. Even to Torcello, the aged, these things are ancestral; their life was in the old Altinum when Torcello lay still undreamed-of in the womb of time. Climb the campanile, and you will wonder no more at the passing of the city at its feet; it is so mighty, so self-contained and now so voiceless with any tongue that earth can hear and understand; almost it seems as if that iron clapper, lying mute below the bell, were symbol of Torcello’s farewell to the busy populous world that needs the call to prayer. The great tower is given up to mighty musings, and we upon its summit speculate no more on the forgotten Middle Age; we are content in the golden earth beneath our feet, in the soft dreamy azure of the encircling lagoon, where in the low tide the deep tracks wind and writhe like glistening water-snakes, or lie, like the faint transparent veining of a leaf, upon that smooth expanse of interchanging marsh and water, the uncertain dominion over which Torcello towers. For the campanile, in its vast simplicity of structure, its loneliness, its duration, is of kin with those great sentinels of the desert in which the Egyptians embodied their giant dreams of power. It is here that the soul of Torcello still abides, to dream out upon the mystery of day and night to the mountains and the city and the sea. And even if the sunlight is rich and jubilant in the yellow fields below, where the autumn has such fitting habitation, it spreads upon the waters a broad path of silver that gleams mysteriously like moonlight upon the distant spaces of the ocean shield, waking points of light out of the immense surrounding dimness. And it is most of all in the deep night that the gulf of the centuries may be bridged. The monotonous piping of the cicalas rises even to this height in the darkness, but no other sound is heard. It is a strangely moving, melancholy landscape, half hidden, half revealed, still holding in its patient, silent heart the tragic sorrows, the hopes and shattered longings, the courageous struggle of the past ages, the fierce cry of desolation, the flames of cities doomed to destruction in the darkness of night, and their ruins outspread beneath the unsparing sun. It has lain now so long deserted, a presence from which the stream of life has flowed away, carrying with it all the agitations of joy and sorrow, that among the fluctuating marshes the key for its deciphering has been lost.

As we have said, whole pages are torn from the history of Torcello. Fragments only remain. But here and there is a word or two that may be gathered into a sentence. If we approach the island from the east, by the waterway between Sant’ Erasmo and Tre Porti instead of by the narrow channels of the inner lagoon, we may receive some impression of the relation it once bore to the mainland. We may see how Torcello stands as the entrance of the lagoon north of Venice, the last outpost of the mainland, the first-fruits of a new career—recognise that she was once through the Portus Torcellus in closest touch with the high seas. In the ninth century it was one Rustico of Torcello who combined with Buono of Malamocco to carry the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria to Venice. In 1268 Torcello is specially mentioned by da Canale among the “Contrees, que armerent lor navie, et vindrent a lor signor Mesire Laurens Teuple (Lorenzo Tiepolo) li haut Dus de Venise, et a Madame la Duchoise” on the occasion of Tiepolo’s election. Torcello contributed three galleys completely equipped for the Genoese war, and in 1463 sent one hundred crossbowmen in the service of the Republic against Trieste.

What is left of this city, which shared the early glory if not the later pomp of Venice? Where are her palaces, her gardens, her bridges, her waterways? Where are her piazzas and calles and fondamentas, her churches and rich convents? We pass their names in the old chronicles: Piazza del Duomo, Rio Campo di San Giovanni, Fondamenta dei Borgognoni, Calle Santa Margherita, Fondamenta Bobizo, Ponte di Chà Delfino, Ponte de Pino, and the rest. Many of these were of very old foundation: their stones and traces of their construction have been discovered from time to time under the mud of the canals. In the poor houses of the peasants traces still remain of original windows, cornices and pillars; the main canal is still spanned by the beautiful ruined bridge of the Diavolo. But for the rest the grass piazza with its little group of buildings, its museum flanked by the cathedral, is the sole echo, itself no more than an echo of the past.

When Altinum and her neighbouring cities roused themselves from the crushing desolation of conquest which had driven them forth to the remote borders of the mainland, they began to desire to live anew in the lagoons. There is no reason to question Dandolo’s statement that Torcello and the group of surrounding islands, Burano, Mazzorbo, Constanziana, Amoriana and Ammiana, were named from the gates of Altinum—a pathetic attempt to perpetuate the ruined city. Nuovo Altino was indeed the name for Torcello, and when the terror of invasion had momentarily passed, the fugitives ventured back to the mainland, and brought down to the soft-soiled island the stones of their ancient city. Torcello was built from the stones of Altinum; her very stones were veterans, the stamp of old times was upon them, the stamp of thoughts that were often sealed for those men of a later day who built them anew into their temples. The steps up to the pulpit in the duomo are perhaps the most striking instance of this ingrafting of the old upon the new, the naïve earnestness, perhaps the urgent haste and need of builders who did not fear to set an old pagan relief to do service in this temple of their Christian God. There are various theories as to the meaning of the wonderful relief which forms the base of the pulpit stair, cut like its companion slabs to meet the requirements of the stair without regard to its individual existence. We cannot help pausing before it; for it is unique among the monuments of the estuary, so unique that it seems incredible it should have been the work of those late Greek artists who executed the wonderful beasts and birds of the sanctuary screen. On the right is a woman’s figure, of Egyptian rather than Greek or Roman mould, standing with averted face and head resting on her arms, in melancholy thought. Beside her a man, like her resigned and meditative in attitude, but not yet with the resignation of despair, raises his left arm as if to ward off a blow. The blow is dealt left-handed by one who in his right hand holds a pair of scales and advances swiftly on winged wheels. He, again, is met in his advance by a fourth figure whom we only see in part, his right side having been almost completely cut away. He is fronting us, however—his feet planted firmly on the ground, his right hand folded on his breast, while with his left he grasps the forelock of the impetuous figure of the winged wheels and balances. Thanks to the happy discovery by Professor Cattaneo of part of the fragment missing to the design, we know that a woman’s figure stood beyond him, holding in her left hand a palm and in her right a crown which she raises to the stalwart conqueror’s head. It is a simple but daring and most spirited composition. It seems to belong to a far remoter past than that of the earliest building of Torcello. Professor Cattaneo explains it as an allegory of the passage of Time, who on his winged wheels has already passed one man by, as he stands stroking his beard, while tears and sorrow await him in the form of the woman on his right in mourning guise and posture; the stalwart man on the left is he who faces Time and takes him by the forelock, and for him the crown and palm of victory are in waiting. But Professor Cattaneo seems to give a needlessly limited significance to the idea of Time. It is to him the Time which God offers to man that he may do what is just and combat his own evil passions; this seems to him to be expressed by the scales and the stick he grasps in his hand. Perhaps it is enough to think merely of the club as that with which a more familiar Time is wont to deal back-handed blows at those who are so idle or so sluggish as to let him pass. At any rate the men of Torcello could comprehend this language of the rough stone. What matter if the oracles were dumb? Which of them had not wept to see the face of Time averted, which of them had not felt the weight of his backward blow? And yet this symbol of old Time must have been mute to them before the great solemn Madonna in the dusky, golden circle of the apse; she looks beyond all fortunes and vicissitudes of man. How should they dare to pray to her? Worship they may, and rise with strength to contend with Time and conquer him, with a weapon to face the mystery of life; but they meet here no smile of comfort, no companionable grace. To those men who dreamed this figure, to us who look upon her and worship, the dominion of Time is a forgotten thing; we ask no pity for our human woes; they have passed, they have crumbled: she gives us a better gift than pity, insight into the hidden things of life and of art; she wings with hope, if with stern hope, our dream of beauty. The mosaics on the west wall of the cathedral have the same stern character, with less of beauty than the Madonna of the apse: the great angels on either side the weird central Christ in the upper division have a strangely oriental effect. They might be Indian gods. They hold the Christian symbols, but with how abstracted, how remote a gaze they look out from their aureoles! They are at one with the noble simplicity and strength and greatness of the spirit of the building they adorn. Somehow they seem to us the oldest thing within it; we begin to be drawn by them into mysteries older than the caves of Greece whence the pillars of this duomo came; we begin to share their watch over a vast desert where all the faiths and imaginings of men may move and mingle, and find a common altar under the dome of the evening sky.