The centre and heart of all this activity, good and bad, was the bridge of the Rialto. We find it hard to realise that until near the end of the sixteenth century it was still built of wood with a movable drawbridge in the middle to admit the passage of larger vessels. Carpaccio, who lived in the fifteenth century, has left us a faithful representation of it as it remained for nearly a hundred years afterwards. It would be interesting to place beside that picture Turner’s lost painting of the same subject, a very beautiful canvas which I have twice had the good fortune to see in the course of its more than mysterious peregrinations. I last heard of it, though not certainly, as being in the south of France.
The present bridge was begun after infinite hesitation in 1588, and was built after the designs of Antonio da Ponte, whose name was certainly prophetic of his career. Twelve thousand elm piles had to be driven into the soil on each side of the canal to a depth of sixteen feet to make the foundations of the arch. The construction occupied three years, and is said to have cost 250,000 ducats, presumably of silver. The bridge as it stands is a remarkable piece of work, and would be beautiful if the hideous superstructure of shops could be removed. It is interesting to note that fifty years before its completion, Michelangelo offered the Doge Andrea Gritti a plan for a bridge, as is amply proved by the existence of a picture in the Casa Buonarotti in Florence representing the subject.
EVENING OFF S. GEORGIO
V
CONCERNING SOME LADIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The clever modern Italian playwright, Signor Martini, makes one of his witty characters say that there are ‘women,’ but that there is no such thing
Martini, ‘Chi sa il giuoco non l’ insegni.’
as ‘woman’ in the abstract. In other words, ‘women’ are a fact, but ‘woman’ is a myth. Though this may be a little paradoxical, there are certainly distinct types of women in each class of life. The smart society woman of to-day and the labourer’s wife, like the Venetian patrician lady of the sixteenth century and the fisher-wives of Chioggia, have in common only their sex, their weaknesses and their sufferings; there is very little resemblance between their virtues, and none at all between their joys.
The noble ladies of Venice in the sixteenth century were as idle and frivolous as Orientals. The fact must be admitted by any one who studies the times; and if it is not of a nature to please those who idealise that period, it may be partly excused by the consideration that the Venetian nobleman treated his womankind very much as a Turk treats his harem. He was not jealous, as lovers understand jealousy; granted a certain degree of beauty and a dowry of a certain value, he cared very little whom he married. When Kugler, the famous art critic, says of Titian’s picture of the Schiava, the Slave, in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, that the name is utterly meaningless, he shows that he knew nothing of Venetian life. The slave in the sixteenth century not seldom meant everything, where the wife meant nothing; and if the wives were idle and frivolous, we must remember that when they were young and good-looking, they often found themselves in competition with beautiful Georgian and Circassian women for their masters’ favour. Where women are plentiful, beautiful, and not clever, the men who love them are rarely jealous. But those grave and magnificent Venetians, who had not a scruple in politics, nor in matrimony, were excessively sensitive about anything which touched their technical honour, and it seemed to them altogether safer and wiser to teach their wives and daughters what they were pleased to call ‘habits of domestic seclusion.’ To be plain, they encouraged them to stay at home; and sometimes, by way of making obedience easier, they locked them up. M. Yriarte says with partial truth that their ‘seclusion’ was that of the harem, not that of the classic gynaeceum; he did not realise that the latter was nothing but a harem too, and that if the Greeks kept their wives at home, it was that they might sup undisturbed in the society of Phryne.
The influence of the East on everything connected with private life in Venice increased with the Renascence, and is even more perceptible then than during the nominal domination of the Byzantine Empire, when Roman traditions still had great force, and new currents of thought reached Venice from the Lombards.