Greater than Torcello, and still maintaining, as near neighbour to Venice, something of its old activities, Murano lives, none the less, a phantom life. We would choose, as a fitting atmosphere for Murano, a day of delicate lights and pale, lucent water, with faint fine tints within the water and the sky: a day of the falling year, not expectant, only acceptant, pausing in the dim quiet of its decay. Even the hot sunshine, though it irradiates the features of Murano, cannot penetrate to that spent heart. The marvellous fascination of its Grand Canal, with its swift and unaccustomed current of blue waters, cannot draw us from the sadness, or disperse the spectral melancholy which invades the spirit and surrounds it as an atmosphere. The sun infects the dirty children with a desire to shine, and prompts somersaults for a soldino; but the weary women, the old, crouching men, still creep about the fondamenta impervious to his rays. Murano is not less disinherited, not less phantasmal, because the daylight comes to pierce the semblance of her life. It is strangely invasive and possessing, this sentiment of a life outlived, a body whose soul is fled. The long vine gardens that spread to the lagoon, dispossessed, but still apparently doing service and rich in vegetables and fruit, seem as if they would persuade us of their reality; but their walls are ruined, their ways are low and narrow; it was not thus they looked when Bembo and Navagero paced here in an earthly paradise, a haunt of nymphs and demigods. The living population of Murano seems to have fallen under the same spell. If we bestow on them more than a cursory glance as we pass along the fondamenta, we seem to detect in their faces an indescribable sense of weariness and sorrow and decay. There seem many old among them, and on the young toil and privation have already laid their hand. The strange habitual chant of priest and women and young girls, going up from tired nerveless throats in the twilight of San Pietro Martire, seemed a symbol of the voice of Murano, melancholy, mechanical, the phantom of a voice—an echo struck with the hand or by a breath of wind from a fallen instrument, an instrument that has lost its virtue and its ring, an instrument unstrung. We have seen Murano in festa. She can pay her tribute to free Italy. Ponte Lungo was hung with lamps, and the desolate campi had their share in the illumination. In the very piazza of San Donato a hawker was winding elastic strings of golden treacle, while women and children in gay dresses hurried to and fro. In another square, under the clock tower, a demagogue addressed the crowd excitedly: there was plentiful noise, plentiful determination to enjoy. The campanile looked down and wondered. O Roma o morte. Had it been Rome then and not death? Rome and freedom, freedom to destroy the historic and the old? It was a grand triumph, a triumph justly commemorated, and yet the conquerors themselves might grieve over the Italy of to-day. Mazzini, we know, struck a note of melancholy out of that proud exultation. Italy, if she lives, lives among ruins, and for the most part she is careless of her decay.
THE CLOCK TOWER.
Murano, like Torcello, is bound by one glorious link with her Byzantine past, and this one of the noblest monuments, not of the lagoons only, but of all Italy; simple, stern, august. San Donato has not, indeed, gone unscathed by time, nor by modernity. The wonders of its pavement are becoming blackened and obscured; holes are being worn in it, missing cubes leave gaps in the design. In winter it is constantly flooded by high tide, and even in other seasons the damp is ruining a pavement which rivals, if it does not surpass, that of San Marco. It is impossible to describe the beauty of the designs, the exquisite harmonics of its precious marbles, porphyry and verd-antique, Verona, serpentine and marmo greco, with noble masses of colour among the smaller fragments, and a most precious gem of chalcedony, which, if we may believe the poor old sacristan, whose complaints concerning his precious floor wake no response, an English visitor would have wished to steal. The sacristan can show to all who will lament with him the ruin wrought by sacrilegious man. But no profane hand has dared to raise itself against the Madonna of the apse. This Madonna of San Donato is even grander, more august, than that other who in Torcello conquers Time, and surely it is not without reason that we have called her the goddess of the lagoons. In perfect aloofness and secrecy she stands, but with luminous revelation in her strangely significant eyes; her white hands uplifted, her white face shining out of the darkness, the long, straight folds of her dark robe worked with gold, her feet resting, it seems, upon a golden fire. The gaze of this marvellous Madonna seems to comprehend the world. She is a sphinx who holds the key of every mystery. In her presence we are overcome by the impulse to kneel and worship. She is not, like many Byzantine Madonnas, grotesque, forbidding in her immensity, in her aloofness; for even while she rebukes and subdues our littleness of soul, she draws all our senses as a being of absolute, inexplicable beauty. She holds us rapt and will not let us go. The memory of the Duomo of San Donato is concentrated in the single magical figure of her Madonna, leaning in benediction from the golden apse.
Murano is full of corners where Gothic and Byzantine have combined to beautify portico, pillar and arch. In the Asilo dei Vecchii are two of the most ancient fireplaces known in Venice, and at Venice fireplaces were very early in use. One is a deep square hollowed in the wall, and furnished with doors that shut upon it like a panelling, while two little windows, as usual, open out behind. The other projects into the room, with sloping roof and little seats within on either side. Murano, it is well known, was the pleasure-ground of the Venetians in happier days; it was here that the men of the Great Republic had their gardens elect for solace and for beauty. But with the Republic Murano fell; the patrimonies of the patricians were scattered—gradually their palaces were snatched away, piece by piece, and fell into irrecoverable ruin. One only now retains some image of its former splendour, the famous Cà da Mula, upon the fine sweep of the Grand Canal. The Madonna of San Donato has looked down on the spoliation of her temple; she still looks on its slow decay. She has shared the proud sorrows of the campanile; in colloquy through the night what may he not have told of the passing of Murano? They have little, these solemn guardians of the past, in common with the exuberant Renaissance, but perhaps a common fate, the unifying hand of Time, may have bound their spirits in a confraternity of grief. The heart of the old campanile would be stirred with pity for the fate of those deserted palaces, the sublime Madonna would turn an eye not of scorn but of sorrow on the fading forms of those radiant women, so splendid on the frescoed palace fronts, so alluring in the smooth mirror of the canal. The work of the spoiler, so far as it was a work of violence, of a human spoiler, is done; but the slower work of nature still proceeds.
Long before Murano became a Venetian pleasure-ground, she had been famous for her painters, for her ships, for her furnaces. Like Torcello, she sent vessels to the triumph of the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, and she was conspicuous among the others, as da Canale says: “For you must know that those of Murano had on their vessels living cocks, so that they might be known and whence they came.” Molmenti thinks that Carpaccio himself belonged to a shipbuilding family of Murano, and this is the more interesting in view of the frequency and detail of shipping operations in his pictures. Murano was indeed the birthplace of Venetian art, and the riches of its furnaces glow in the garments of those early painters, Vivarini, Andrea and Quirico. From the end of the eleventh century the glass works had begun to flourish; by the thirteenth the industry was transferred wholly to Murano. The legend runs that a certain Cristoforo Briani, hearing from Marco Polo of the monopoly of agates, chalcedony and other precious stones on the coast of Guiana, set about imitating them. With Domenico Miotto to help him he succeeded, and the latter carried the art to still greater perfection, which resulted at last in the imitation of the pearl. In 1528 Andrea Vidoare received a special mariegola or charter for the fame of his wonderful pearls, polished and variegated by him to a degree unknown before. In the middle of the fifteenth century the first crystals came from the furnaces, and the following century was the golden period of the art—a period coinciding with the greatest patrician glory of the island. Murano still burns with its secular fire, winning from the old world its secrets, the old, wise world that worshipped fire, to fuse them once more in its crucible for the wonder of the new; secrets of crystal, pearl and ruby, and of the blue of the deepest ocean depths or the impenetrable night sky, imprisoning them in those transparent cenotaphs in forms of infinite harmony and grace. And it is not only in the revival of ancient memories and forgotten mysteries that the furnaces of Murano play their part; they contribute also to the present renewal of Venice: for it is here that the units of the mosaicist’s art are made. In Murano is laid the foundation-stone of its success—the quality of the colour, the depth and richness of the gold. The period of decadence in the Venetian arts is accurately reflected in its mosaics; with the decadence of conception we note also the decadence of colour. Those hard blatant tones that characterise the late mosaics of San Marco are records, too permanent, alas! of a time when the furnaces had lost their cunning, or rather when the master minds were blunted and the secret of the ancient colourists allowed to lie unquestioned under the dust of time.
There is a humbler department of the glass works which we must not pass by. It lies away from the furnaces devoted to rare and subtle texture and design, behind San Pietro Martire, among the gardens: a manufactory of common glass for daily use, tumblers and water-bottles and other humble ware. Here there is the swift operation of machinery, at least among the coarser glasses, and a noise of the very inferno with countless sweating fiends—little black-faced grinning boys, grateful for a package full of grapes or juicy figs; there is little mystery in the production of this coarser glass, or rather few of the obvious accessories of mystery, the delicate slow fashioning, the infusion of colours. Instead, the constant noise of machinery, deafening and exhausting in its incessant motion, though even here the reign of machinery is limited: the finer tumblers must go a longer journey to be filed by a slower, more gradual process, the direct handiwork of man. There is an upper circle to which we gladly pass from this inferno, almost a paradise if we contrast it with the turmoil and heat below; to reach it we pass by the troughs of grey sand which all day men are trampling with the soles of their bare feet, to mould into fit temper for the furnace. The floor of the room above is covered and the walls lined with strange creations of cold, grey earth, fashioned by hand, roll after roll of clay, ungainly forms to be inhabited by fire. This upper attic, with its company of mute grey moulds, opens out upon the vineyards of Murano, with water shimmering through the long golden alleys, and the city visible beyond. The gardens of the Palazzo da Mula and of San Cipriano are beside us. The bustle of the new world has invaded the peaceful seclusion of a spot once sacred to the student aristocracy of Venice.
For this island, famed for so glorious an industry, was beloved and honoured by the noblest of Venetian names, Trifone Gabriele and Pietro Bembo and Andrea Navagero. Here Navagero founded one of the first botanic gardens of Europe—“a terrestrial paradise, a place of nymphs and demigods”; here Gabriele wandered for hours under the thick vine pergola walled with jessamine against the sun. And it was not only as a temporary pleasure-ground that they loved Murano: they clung to it as their resting-place in death. Bernardo Giustiniani desired to be buried by his palace, at the foot of Ponte Lungo, and Andrea Navagero in the church of San Martino in the same quarter where his house was built. Murano was honoured by at least one royal guest. It was here that Henry III of France, on his passage through Venice from Polonia, was given his first lodging, and the palace which witnessed the first transports of this rapturous monarch, the palace of Bartolomeo Capello, still exists, close beside the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, at the extreme western point of the city. It would thus form the most convenient landing-place, besides commanding a view of extreme beauty; to the left, the fine torrent-like sweep of the chief canal, with the noble Cà da Mula a little lower on the opposite bank and its gardens immediately over the water; Venice filling the horizon clear across the lagoon, where the south curve of Murano ends to-day in a meadow of rough grass and fragrant herbs; to the right the Convent of the Angeli, leading on the eye across the lagoon to the mainland and the distant mountains beyond. Traces of fresco remain on the outer walls of the palazzo, and the upper hall still stretches through the whole breadth of the house. It is on the balcony of this central hall that Henry must have stood when he appeared before dinner to gratify the crowds on the fondamenta and in the boats below. The view of Venice in the evening light is exquisitely lovely, with the lagoon spread like a mirror to reflect the delicate opaline of the sunset sky. In this hall hung with cloth of gold and cremosine, and perhaps with the colours of Veronese, looking over a paradise of gardens and water to the immortal city, Henry kept his court, received the legates from the Pope and said a thousand graceful things about His Holiness, rejoiced the natives by his noble bearing, his perfumed gloves, his frank pleasure in their tribute, his decision to go on foot to the Angeli to morning Mass. Thus was he initiated to the magical city and its enchantments by that wise providence of the Venetians, who made their islands always stepping-stones, outer courts of the central shrine, where their pilgrim must pause awhile to shake the dust of the mainland off his feet, that the spell might permeate his being and fill his senses with desire.
The fondamenta below Henry’s palace, leading to the church of the Angeli, is one of the most desolate in Murano; the wide green campo of the cemetery which opens from it is deserted and bare, save for a few fowls that humbly commemorate the proud old shield. The dirt of the children is indescribable, as they press close begging a soldino. But their dirt is dearer to them. A bargain for a washed face, even when the reward rings cheerily on the pavement, brings no response but laughter and surprise. We are reminded by contrast of the tribute of Andrea Calmo, a popular poet of the sixteenth century:
E voio tanto bene a quel Muran,