From this throng of figures the principal characters detach themselves with a kind of delicate splendour. Royal Egypt,
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
in her brocaded gown of white and gold, with a pearl collar about her throat, and a little toy spaniel playing at her feet, is an eighteenth-century Dogaressa; Antony is a young Procurator travestied as a Roman hero; while the turbaned black boy, the maid-servants, the courtiers, the pages, are all taken sur le vif from some brilliant rout in a Pisano or Mocenigo palace. And yet—here comes the wonder—into these “water-flies” and triflers of his day, the ladies engrossed in cards and scandal, the abatini preoccupied with their acrostics, the young nobles intriguing with the prima amorosa of San Moisè or engaged in a sentimental correspondence with a nun of Santa Chiara—into this throng of shallow pleasure-seekers Tiepolo has managed to infuse something of the old Roman state. As one may think of Dante beneath the vault of the Gesuati, one may recall Shakespeare in the presence of these rouged and powdered Venetians. The scene of the landing suggests with curious vividness the opening scene of “Antony and Cleopatra”—
Look where they come!
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool—
and one can almost hear the golden Antony, as he brushes aside the importunate Roman messengers, whispering to his Queen: “What sport to-night?”
Still more Shakespearian is the scene of the pearl. Cleopatra, enthroned in state at the banqueting-table, lifts one hand to drop the jewel into her goblet, and in her gesture and her smile are summed up all the cruel grace of the “false soul of Egypt.” It is Tiepolo’s best praise that such phrases and associations as these are evoked by his art, and that, judged from the painter’s standpoint, it recalls the glory of another great tradition. Studied in the light of Venetian painting, Tiepolo is seen to be the direct descendant of Titian and Veronese. If the intervening century has taken something from the warmth of his colour, leaving it too often chalky where that of the Renaissance was golden, he has recovered the lines, the types and the radiant majesty of the Venetian cinque cento, and Veronese’s Venice Enthroned, in the Ducal Palace, is the direct forbear of his Virgins and Cleopatras.
VII
It is perhaps no longer accurate to describe Tiepolo as forming a part of the Venetian background. Recent criticism has advanced him to the middle distance, and if there are still comparatively few who know his work, his name is familiar to the cultivated minority of travellers.
Far behind him, however, still on the vanishing-point of the tourist’s horizon, are the other figures of the Venetian background: Longhi, Guardi, Canaletto, and their humbler understudies. Of these, Canaletto alone emerges into relative prominence. His views of Venice are to be found in so many European galleries, and his name so facilitates the association of ideas, that, if few appreciate his work, many are superficially acquainted with it; whereas Guardi, a painter of greater though more unequal talent, is still known only to the dilettante.
The work of both is invaluable as a “document” for the study of eighteenth-century Venice; but while Canaletto in his charming canvases represented only the superficial and obvious aspect of the city, as it might appear to any appreciative stranger, Guardi, one of the earliest impressionists, gives the real life of the streets, the grouillement of the crowd in Saint Mark’s square, the many-coloured splash of a church procession surging up the steps of the Redentore, the flutter of awnings over market-stalls on a fair-day, or the wide black trail of a boat-race across the ruffled green waters of the Canalazzo.