A Wanderer in Venice

by E. V. Lucas

CHAPTER XXVI

ON FOOT. IV: FROM THE DOGANA TO S. SEBASTIANO

The Dogana—A scene of shipping—The Giudecca Canal—On the Zattere—The debt of Venice to Ruskin—An artists' bridge—The painters of Venice—Turner and Whistler—A removal—S. Trovaso—Browning on the Zattere—S. Sebastiano—The life of Paul Veronese—S. Maria de Carmine—A Tuscan relief—A crowded calle—The grief of the bereaved.

For a cool day, after too much idling in gondolas, there is a good walk, tempered by an occasional picture, from the Custom House to S. Sebastiano and back to S. Mark's. The first thing is to cross the Grand Canal, either by ferry or a steamer to the Salute, and then all is easy.

The Dogana, as seen from Venice and from the water, is as familiar a sight almost as S. Mark's or the Doges' Palace, with its white stone columns, and the two giants supporting the globe, and the beautiful thistledown figure holding out his cloak to catch the wind. Everyone who has been to Venice can recall this scene and the decisive way in which the Dogana thrusts into the lagoon like the prow of a ship of which the Salute's domes form the canvas. But to see Venice from the Dogana is a rarer experience.

No sooner does one round the point—the Punta della Salute—and come to the Giudecca canal than everything changes. Palaces disappear and shipping asserts itself. One has promise of the ocean. Here there is always a huddle of masts, both of barges moored close together, mostly called after either saints or Garibaldi, with crude pictures of their namesakes painted on the gunwale, and of bigger vessels and perhaps a few pleasure yachts; and as likely as not a big steamer is entering or leaving the harbour proper, which is at the far end of this Giudecca canal. And ever the water dances and there are hints of the great sea, of which the Grand Canal, on the other side of the Dogana, is ignorant.

The pavement of the Zaterre, though not so broad as the Riva, is still wide, and, like the Riva, is broken by the only hills which the Venetian walker knows—the bridges. The first building of interest to which we come is the house, now a hotel, opposite a little alfresco restaurant above the water, which bears a tablet stating that it was Ruskin's Venetian home. That was in his later days, when he was writing Fors Clavigera; earlier, while at work on The Stones of Venice, he had lived, as we have seen, near S. Zobenigo. Ruskin could be very rude to the Venetians: somewhere in Fors he refers to the "dirty population of Venice which is now neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman," and he was furious alike with its tobacco and its steamboats; yet for all that, if ever a distinguished man deserved honour at the hands of a city Ruskin deserves it from Venice. The Stones of Venice is such a book of praise as no other city ever had. In it we see a man of genius with a passion for the best and most sincere work devoting every gift of appraisement, exposition, and eulogy, fortified by the most loving thoroughness and patience, to the glory of the city's architecture, character, and art.

The first church is that of the Gesuati, but it is uninteresting. Passing on, we come shortly to a very attractive house with an overhanging first floor, most delectable windows and a wistaria, beside a bridge; and looking up the canal, the Rio di S. Trovaso, we see one of the favourite subjects of artists in Venice—the huddled wooden sheds of a squero, or a boat-building yard; and as likely as not some workmen will be firing the bottom of an old gondola preliminary to painting her afresh. Venice can show you artists at work by the score, on every fine day, but there is no spot more certain in which to find one than this bridge. It was here that I once overheard two of these searchers for beauty comparing notes on the day's fortune. "The bore is," said one, "that everything is so good that one can never begin."

Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist seems to have swum for ever before his eyes. For many years after that, whenever he took up his brush, his first thought was to record yet another Venetian memory. In the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery are many of the canvases to which this worshipper of light endeavoured with such persistence and zeal to transfer some of the actual glory of the universe: each one the arena of the unequal struggle between pigment and atmosphere. But if Turner failed, as every artist must fail, to recapture all, his failures are always magnificent.

There are, of course, also numbers of his Venetian water-colours.