Later we idled along between the columns supporting the roof, and wandered up behind the altar, the whole interior aglow with the afternoon sun, stopping at the monument of the great Titian and the tomb of Canova. To his credit be it said, the Professor had no raptures over this outrage in marble. And around all the other stone sepulchres of doge, ambassador, and noble, lingering in the open door for a last glance back into its rich interior—certainly, after San Marco, the most picturesque and harmonious in coloring of all the churches in Venice—until we emerged into the sunlight and lost ourselves in the throngs of people blocking up the Campo. Then we turned the corner and entered San Rocco.
It was the festa day of the Frari, and the superb staircase of the Scuola di San Rocco, lined with the marvellous colorings of Titian and Tintoretto, was thronged with people in gala costume, crowding up the grand staircase to the upper sala, the room once used as an assembly-room by the Brotherhood of the Order. I had seen it often before, without the Professor, for this was one of my many pilgrimages. Whenever you have an hour to spare, lose half your breath mounting this staircase. You will lose the other half when this magnificent council chamber bursts upon your view. Even the first sight of the floor will produce that effect.
You have doubtless, in your youth, seen a lady’s brooch, fashionable then, made of Florentine mosaic,—a cunning, intricate joining of many-colored stones,—or perhaps a paper-weight of similar intricate design, all curves and scrolls. Imagine this paper-weight, with its delicacy of fitting, high polish, and harmony of color, enlarged to a floor several hundred feet long, by a proportionate width,—I have not the exact dimensions, and it would convey no better idea if I had,—and you will get some faint impression of the quality and beauty of the floor of this grand sala. Rising from its polished surface and running half way up the four walls, broken only by the round door you entered, with the usual windows and a corner chapel, is a wainscoting of dark wood carved in alto relievo, in the last century, by Marchioni and his pupils. Above this is a procession of pictures, harmonizing in tone with the carvings and mosaics, and over all hangs a scroll-like ceiling incrusted with gold, its seven panels made luminous by Tintoretto’s brush.
These panels are not his masterpieces. The side walls are equally unimportant, so far as the ravings of experts and art critics go. Even the carvings, on close inspection, are labored, and often grotesque. But to the painter’s eye and mind this single sala of San Rocco, contrasted with all the other stately banquet halls and council chambers of Europe, makes of them but shelters to keep out the weather.
Filled with peasants and gala people in brilliant costumes on some festa day, when all may enter, the staircase crowded, its spacious interior a mass of colored handkerchief, shawl, and skirt, all flooded with the golden radiance of the sun, it is one of the rare sights of Venice. But even empty, with only your footfall and that of the bareheaded custodian to break the profound stillness, it is still your own ideal princely hall,—that hall where the most gallant knight of the most entrancing romance of your childhood could tread a measure with the fairest ladye of the loftiest, cragged-stepped castle; that salon where the greatest nobles of your teeming fancy could strut about in ermine and cloth of gold; where the wonderful knights held high revel, with goblets of crystal and flagons of ruby wine, and all the potentates from the spice-laden isles could be welcomed with trumpet and cymbal. Here you are sure Desdemona might have danced, and Katharine; and here Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, received the ambassadors of her promised kingdom. As you stand breathless, drinking in its proportions, you feel that it is a sala for pomps and ceremonies, not for monkish rites; a sala for wedding breakfasts and gay routs and frolicsome masquerades and bright laughter, rather than for whispered conferences in cowl and frock. Even its polished floor recalls more readily the whirl of flying slippers than the slow, measured tread of sandalled feet.
The Professor himself, I regret to say, was not wildly enthusiastic over this interior. In fact he made no remark whatever, except that the floor was too slippery to walk upon, and looked too new to him. This showed the keynote of his mind: the floor was laid within a century of the preceding generation. Nothing less than two centuries old ever interests the Professor!
However, despite his peculiarities, it is delightful to go about with the old fellow, listening to his legends. Almost every palace and bridge stirs into life some memory of the past.
“Here,” he says, “was where the great Doge Foscari lived, and from that very balcony were hung his colors the day of his abdication,—the colors that four hours later were draped in black at his tragic death. On that identical doorstep landed the ex-Queen of Cyprus on the eventful morning when she returned to Venice an exile in her own land.” And did I know that on this very bridge—the Ponte dei Pugni, the bridge of the fisticuffs—many of the fights took place between the two factions of the gondoliers, the Nicoletti and the Castellani? If I would leave the gondola for a moment he would show me the four impressions of the human foot set into the marble of the two upper steps, two on each side. Here each faction would place its two best men, their right feet covering the stone outline; then at a given signal the rush began. For days these fights would go on and the canal be piled up with those thrown over the railless bridge. Soon the whole neighborhood would take sides, fighting on every street and every corner; and once, so great was the slaughter, the tumult could only be quelled by the Archbishop bringing out the Host from the Church of Santa Barnaba, not far off, thus compelling the people to kneel.
When the day was over and we were floating through the little canal of San Trovaso, passing the great Palazzo Contarini, brilliant in the summer sunset, the Professor stopped the gondola and bade me good-by, with this parting comment:—
“It was either in this palace, in that room you see half way up the wall, where the pointed Gothic windows look out into the garden, or perhaps in one of the palaces of the Procuratie, I forget which, that the King of Denmark, during the great fêtes attendant upon his visit in 1708, trod a measure with a certain noble dame of marvelous beauty, one Catarina Quirini, the wife of a distinguished Venetian. As he wheeled in the dance his buckle tore a string of priceless pearls from her dress. Before the King could stoop to hand them to his fair partner, her husband sprang forward and crushed them with his foot, remarking, ‘The King never kneels.’ Charming, was it not?”