The black skeleton—I had not thought before that skeletons could be negro—flourishes a scroll which ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of Solomon and an implacable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a tablet held by one of the giant negroes announces
“Aureum inter optimos principes vides.”
Aureum indeed! Doubtless only some faint sense that sheen and death are discrepant held back the Doges from being buried in golden caskets. The Doge lives again in this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can only reflect that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the middle of the seventeenth century, actum est de republicâ might have been written long before Napoleon. Fortunately for the memory of the Pesaro family it finds a nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the great Titian altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the Queen of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its episcopal representative, and St. Francis and St. Anthony grace by their presence the symbols of its victory over the Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.
But the dead Doges lie mostly in S. S. Giovanni e Paolo, where their funeral service was performed. It is the very church for Their Sublimities—floods of light, pillared splendour, imposing proportions. Their tombs protrude from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on their backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on cushions. Even when we are reminded of the finer things for which the Republic stood, there is an echo of material opulence.
“Steno, olim Dux Venetiorum, amator
Justitiæ, Pacis, et Ubertatis anima.”
Ubertatis anima! The soul of prodigal splendour! Even spiritual metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.
But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant. Horatio Baleono, who died in 1617, “hostes post innumeros stratos,” has for monument a cavalier (of course, gilded) riding rough-shod over writhing forms and a broken-down cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts itself “ex hostium manubiis,” stands defiant on the summit of his sarcophagus, which is upborne by a trinity of figures.
What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of Doges! Remove their memorials and mausolea from this church and you would half empty it of monuments. Tintoretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their triumphal car. There is an Adoration of the Saviour at Vicenza, which might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise Mocenigo, who is in the centre of the picture. For though he is kneeling, he has all the air of sitting, and all the other figures—the worshippers, the angel flying towards him, and the Christ flying down to him—converge towards him like a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Marino Faliero, the decapitated Doge of Byron’s drama, whose dubious sarcophagus was shown to the poet in the outside wall of this church.
Nor could Padua, Venice’s neighbour, fall behind her in mortuary magnificence.