Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy

by George Edmund Street

The return to Venice was more pleasant than the journey out had been. The water had risen enough to cover the mud everywhere, and now a vast expanse of apparent sea was lighted up by the hot sun, and in the far-off distance the horizon was lined with the long picturesque range of the Alps, tender and transparent in hue, and sweet reminders to the dwellers on this monotonous lagoon of the world which lay outside their boundaries in the far north. On the road we stopped at Mazzorbo, where there is a dated example of a Gothic doorway. This has a square-headed opening, and above this an ogee canopy or label over a figure of Our Lord, and some kneeling figures. The date inscribed on it is A.D. 1368.

Farther on Murano is passed, and a halt made for a visit to the church of San Donato—once a building of the highest interest and well known to all readers of Mr. Ruskin’s books. Unfortunately my first visit to this church was after it had been in part “restored,” in the largest and worst sense of the word. The old brickwork was being renewed, plastered, and painted up, till most of its interest had vanished; and now, I fear, only those who saw San Donato some ten years ago can have any idea of its architectural value and interest. This was chiefly centred in the east front, where there is a central apse with a lean-to end to the aisle on either side. The wall is divided into two stages, by a bold string-course and double line of chevrons formed by recessing the brickwork and inserting panels of coloured and carved white marble. The lower stage is arcaded mainly in red brick, whilst the upper has a wall deeply recessed behind arcades under the eaves, with delicate balustrades between the columns which carry the arcades. This upper part of the building is mainly of buff-coloured bricks, with thin lines of red to mark the pattern of arches, and it is curious that the light bricks are much larger than the red.[37] The pavements here are very fine examples of Opus Alexandrinum, with a more than usual proportion of black marble, and there is a grand mosaic in the apse, of the B. V. Mary and Our Lord on a gold ground.

One or two Gothic houses in semi-ruinous condition, and a very fine fragment of late Byzantine work quite in ruins—the Palazzo da Mula—remain in Murano, but of these there is such good store in Venice itself that we may pass them by.

Most visitors, I suppose, go to Murano in order to visit Dr. Salviati’s glass and mosaic manufactory. He has succeeded in reproducing a material quite equal to that used in the old mosaics. Still more difficult feat—he has succeeded also in making glass so like the old Venetian glass in colour, texture, and design, as to puzzle all ordinary judges. I cannot sufficiently admire or praise the singular power which Dr. Salviati has shewn in the education of his men. A party of six or eight made for me before my eyes, in a few minutes, a tall, delicate, and richly adorned goblet, in which every part was done by eye and fancy; no modern accuracy was attempted, and the result was a thoroughly beautiful and artistic work. All artists know how difficult it is to get a workman nowadays out of the hard mechanical groove of dull uniformity, and Dr. Salviati’s success is an encouragement to all of us when we are tempted to despair of making the attempt.

From Murano a few minutes take us again into the watery streets of Venice. We have now seen the two buildings which ought first of all to be studied—Torcello and S. Mark’s, and in them we have the key to everything that follows. The Venetians commenced in their earliest buildings with works which shewed but little original invention or power. It was their fortune to have, by reason of their situation and their commerce, a great connection with the East. They received, therefore, a great impetus at the first from Byzantine art. Nowhere in Europe was so great an influence of the kind exerted; and to us, whose early architecture was almost entirely Romanesque in its origin, it has a special interest and novelty. But if the early Venetians copied Byzantine models, employed Byzantine workmen, and thought rather more of the beautiful colours for which their Eastern acquaintances gave them a taste than did their neighbours on the mainland, it must be frankly conceded that in later times they developed a very original form of Gothic out of these very materials, and owed comparatively little to any external aid in their great works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The first business of a tourist in Venice is to secure a gondolier with intelligence enough to understand his proclivities, and patience enough to humour them. I have more than once or twice had to thank my gondolier for shewing me old work which otherwise I should never have seen, and I am grateful accordingly. I am grateful, too, whenever I think of a gondola, for the most luxurious machine for sketching from which has ever been constructed; and the more so, when I recollect how for an hour at a time I have been persecuted in most Italian towns by all the idlest, dirtiest, and worst-behaved people of the place whilst I have made my sketches of their buildings. In a gondola in Venice one knows no such troubles, and the sketcher’s life, as long as he can work in it, is as happy and undisturbedly serene as is possible. But no artist must suppose that everything worth seeing can be seen from the water: a few walks will convince him that, in the narrow calli as well as on the water-side, much that is interesting is to be found; and when he has studied Venice both by boat and by pavement, he will find, as I do, that the subject is too large for a chapter, and requires rather a volume for its thorough elucidation.

The buildings of Venice divide themselves into two great classes—the churches and the civil buildings; of these the former is the smaller and the less interesting class. But as we have already seen at S. Mark’s and Torcello the earliest examples of the churches, it will be best to say all that has to be said about them here, and to take the palaces and houses by themselves afterwards.

We have seen that S. Mark’s was built in the eleventh and twelfth, and largely altered in the fourteenth century. Between these two periods little if anything was done in church-building in Venice; or if it was, it has disappeared. Just as in Germany, the thirteenth century seems hardly to have existed for Venice, and we go at a bound from the simple nervous round-arched work of S. Mark’s to the here somewhat poor and tasteless churches of the fourteenth century. One or two small campanili—San Polo, San Samuele, and San Barnaba are the best—remain to show what the size and character of the earlier work were. They have plain arcades in the walls, rising from the ground to the belfry, and this has generally windows of two or three lights carried on shafts. At San Barnaba[38] a spire with parapets and pinnacles was added to such a steeple in the fourteenth century, the spire being circular in plan and built of round-ended bricks. San Paterniano has an hexagonal brick tower with two light belfry windows, also of Romanesque character. The whole of these works are of brick, and usually the walls batter outward towards the base. In this respect, as in the general design, the great tower of S. Mark’s follows those early examples, as also in its means of access to the top, which is a continuous slope in the thickness of the wall in place of the newel staircase in use all over the North of Europe. Finally, all these older works are very small and modest in scale and design.

Let us now give up all thought of early works, and see what the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did for Venice in the way of churches. Taking them in their order of merit, we will go first to the Frari, the church of the Franciscans, thence to SS. Giovanni e Paolo, that of the Dominicans, to the Madonna dell’ Orto, San Stefano, the desecrated church of the Convent of La Carità, now forming part of the Accademia, San Gregorio, Santa Zaccaria, San Giacomo del Rialto, and some smaller fragments.

I must confess that on the whole, in spite of the grand size of some of them, I was rather disappointed on first seeing these buildings. One cannot but be impressed with the magnificent size of such a church as the Frari, with its many interesting details, and its monuments and woodwork. But in spite of all this, there is something wanting. I had not expected larger churches, but I had imagined that their style would be more pure, and at the same time more unlike what I was accustomed to elsewhere. The impression they left on my mind was decidedly that they were very inferior in almost every respect to churches of the same size and degree of ornament in the North of Europe, whilst in scarcely any point did they seem to me to have features which could with any advantage be imitated by us. I had allowed myself to expect a very different result, and was proportionately disappointed. There is no church in Venice—(in what I am now saying I mean always to except S. Mark’s)—comparable either to Sta. Anastasia or to the cathedral at Verona in the interior; and the exteriors, though fine as examples of the bold use of brick, are nevertheless not first-rate, nor at all superior to what one sees elsewhere.