Far beneath these two men in talent, but invaluable as a chronicler of Venetian life, is Canaletto’s son-in-law, Bellotti, who, in a stiff topographical manner, has faithfully and minutely recorded every detail of eighteenth-century life on the canals. Being of interest only to the student of manners, he is seldom represented in the public galleries; but many private collections in the north of Italy contain a series of his pictures, giving all the Venetian festivals, from the Marriage of the Adriatic to the great feat of the Vola, which took place in the Piazzetta on the last Thursday before Lent.
As unknown to the general public as Bellotti, but more sought after by connoisseurs than any other Italian artist of the eighteenth century save Tiepolo, is Pietro Longhi, the genre-painter, whose exquisite little transcripts of Venetian domestic life now fetch their weight in gold at Christie’s or the Hôtel Drouot. Longhi’s talent is a peculiar one. To “taste” him, as the French say, one must understand the fundamental naïveté of that brilliant and corrupt Venetian society, as it is revealed in the comedies of Goldoni and in the memoirs of contemporary writers. The Venetians were, in fact, amoral rather than immoral. There was nothing complex or morbid in their vice; it was hardly vice at all, in the sense which implies the deliberate saying of “Evil, be thou my good.” Venetian immorality was a mere yielding to natural instincts, to the joie de vivre of a gay and sensuous temperament. There was no intellectual depravity in Venice because there was hardly any intellect: there was no thought of evil because there was no thought. The fashionable sinners whom posterity has pictured as revelling in the complexities of vice sat enchanted before the simple scenes of Goldoni’s drama, and the equally simple pictures of their favourite genre-painter. Nor must it be thought that this taste for simplicity and innocence was evidence of a subtler perversion. The French profligate sought in imagination the contrast of an ideal world, the milk and rose-water world of Gessner’s Idylls and the bergerie de Florian. But Goldoni and Longhi are not idealists, or even sentimentalists. They draw with a frank hand the life of their day, from the fisherman’s hut to the patrician’s palace. Nothing can be more unmistakable than the realism of Goldoni’s dialect plays, and a people who could enjoy such simple pictures of the life about them must, in a sense, have led simple lives themselves.
Longhi’s easel-pictures record every phase of Venetian middle-class and aristocratic existence. To some, indeed, it is difficult to find a clue, and it has been conjectured that these represent scenes from the popular comedies of the day. The others depict such well-known incidents as the visit to the convent parlour, where the nuns are entertaining their gallants with a marionette-show; the masked nobil donna consulting the fortune-teller, or walking with her cicisbeo in Saint Mark’s square; the same lady’s lever, where she is seen at her toilet-table surrounded by admirers; the family party at breakfast, with the nurse bringing in a swaddled baby; the little son and heir riding out attended by his governor; the actress rehearsing her aria with the maestro di cappella; the visit to the famous hippopotamus in his tent in the Piazzetta; the dancing-lesson, the music-lesson, the portrait-painting, and a hundred other episodes of social and domestic life. The personages who take part in these scenes are always of one type: the young women with small oval faces, powdered but unrouged, with red lips and sloping foreheads; the men in cloaks and masks, or gay embroidered coats, with square brows and rather snub features, gallant, flourishing, empressés, but never in the least idealized or sentimentalized. The scenes of “high life” take place for the most part in tall bare rooms, with stone window-frames, a family portrait of a doge or an admiral above the chimney-piece, and a few stiff arm-chairs of the heavy Venetian baroque. There is nothing sumptuous in the furnishing of the apartments or in the dress of their inmates. The ladies, if they are going abroad or paying a visit, wear a three-cornered hat above the black lace zendaletto which hides their hair and the lower part of the face, while their dresses are covered by the black silk bauto or domino. Indoors, they are attired in simple short gowns of silk or brocade, with a kerchief on the shoulders, and a rose or a clove-pink in the unpowdered hair. That pleasure in the painting of gorgeous stuffs, and in all the material splendours of life, derived by Tiepolo from his great predecessors of the Renaissance, was not shared by Longhi. His charm lies in a less definable quality, a quality of unstudied simplicity and naturalness, which gives to his easel-pictures the value of actual transcripts from life. One feels that he did not “arrange” his scenes, any more than Goldoni constructed his comedies. Both were content to reflect, in the mirror of a quietly humorous observation, the every-day incidents of the piazza, the convent and the palace.
The fact that Longhi, in his genre-pictures, sought so little variety of grouping, and was content to limit his figures to so small a range of gestures, has given rise to the idea that he was incapable of versatility and breadth of composition. To be undeceived on this point, however, one has only to see his frescoes in the Palazzo Grassi (now Sina) on the Grand Canal. This fine palace, built about 1740 by Massari, the architect of the Gesuati, has a magnificent double stairway leading from the colonnaded court to the state apartments above; and on the walls of this stairway Longhi, for once laying aside his small canvases and simple methods, has depicted, in a series of charmingly-animated groups, the members of the Grassi family leaning over a marble balustrade to see their guests ascending the stairs. The variety of these groups, the expressiveness of the faces, and the general breadth of treatment, prove that Longhi had far more technical and imaginative power than he chose to put into his little pictures, and that his naïveté was a matter of choice. Probably no one who knows his work regrets this self-imposed limitation. Additional movement and complexity of grouping would destroy the sense of leisure, of spacious rooms and ample time, of that absence of hurry and confusion so typical of a society untroubled by moral responsibilities or social rivalries, and pursuing pleasure with the well-bred calmness which was one of the most charming traits obliterated by the French Revolution.
VIII
On a quiet canal not far from the church of the Frari there stands an old palace where, in a series of undisturbed rooms, may be seen the very setting in which the personages of Goldoni and Longhi played out their social comedy.
The Palazzo Querini-Stampaglia was bequeathed to the city of Venice some fifty years since by the last Count Querini, and with its gallery, its library and its private apartments has since then stood open to a public which never visits it. Yet here the student of Venetian backgrounds may find the unchanged atmosphere of the eighteenth century. The gallery, besides some good paintings of earlier schools, contains a large collection of Bellotti’s pictures, representing all the great religious and popular festivals of Venice, as well as a half-dozen Longhis and a charming series of genre-pictures by unknown artists of his school.
Of far greater interest, however, are the private apartments, with their seventeenth and eighteenth century decorations still intact, and the walls lined with the heavy baroque consoles and arm-chairs so familiar to students of Longhi’s interiors, and of the charming prints in the first edition of Goldoni. Here is the typical chambre de parade, with its pale-green damask curtains and bed-hangings, and its furniture painted with flowers on a ground of pale-green laque; here the tapestried saloon with its Murano chandeliers, the boudoir with looking-glass panels set in delicately carved and painted wreaths of flowers and foliage, and the portrait-room hung with pictures of the three great Querini: the Doge, the Cardinal and the Admiral. Here, too, is the long gallery, with a bust of the Cardinal (a seventeenth-century prince of the Church) surrounded by marble effigies of his seven bravi: a series of Berniniesque heads of remarkable vigour and individuality, from that of the hoary hang-dog scoundrel with elf-locks drooping over an evil scowl, to the smooth young villain with bare throat and insolent stare, who seems to glory in his own sinister beauty.
These busts give an insight into a different phase of Italian life: the life of the violent and tragical seventeenth century, when every great personage, in the Church no less than in the world, had his bodyguard of hardened criminals, outlaws and galley-slaves, who received sanctuary in their patron’s palace, and performed in return such acts of villany and violence as the Illustrissimo required. It seems a far cry from the peaceable world of Goldoni and Longhi to this prelate surrounded by the effigies of his hired assassins; yet bravi, though no longer openly acknowledged or immortalized in marble, lurked in the background of Italian life as late as the end of the eighteenth century, and Stendhal, who knew Italy as few foreigners have known it, declares that in his day the great Lombard nobles still had their retinue of bauli, as the knights of the stiletto were called in the Milanese.
It is not in art only that the bravi have been commemorated. Lovers of “I Promessi Sposi,” the one great Italian novel, will not soon forget the followers of Don Rodrigo; and an idea of the part they played at the end of the eighteenth century may be obtained from the pages of Ippolito Nievo’s “Confessioni di un Ottuagenario,” that delightful book, half romance, half autobiography, which, after many years of incredible neglect, has just been republished in Italy. Ippolito Nievo, one of Garibaldi’s young soldiers, was among those who perished in the wreck of the Ercole, on the return from Palermo in 1860. He was but twenty-nine at the time of his death, and it is said that his impatience to see a lady to whom he was attached caused him, despite the entreaties of his friends, to take passage in the notoriously unseaworthy Ercole. Four years earlier he had written the “Confessioni,” a volume which, for desultory charm and simple rendering of domestic incidents, is not unworthy to take rank with “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” while its capricious heroine, La Pisana, is as vivid a creation as Goethe’s Philina or (one had almost said) as the Beatrix of Thackeray.