§ II. The architecture raised at Venice during this period is amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men, being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest, which, exhausting itself in deformed and monstrous sculpture, can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenness. On such a period, and on such work, it is painful to dwell, and I had not originally intended to do so; but I found that the entire spirit of the Renaissance could not be comprehended unless it was followed to its consummation; and that there were many most interesting questions arising out of the study of this particular spirit of jesting, with reference to which I have called it the Grotesque Renaissance. For it is not this period alone which is distinguished by such a spirit. There is jest—perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently obscene—in the most noble work of the Gothic periods; and it becomes, therefore, of the greatest possible importance to examine into the nature and essence of the Grotesque itself, and to ascertain in what respect it is that the jesting of art in its highest flight, differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation.
§ III. The place where we may best commence our inquiry is one renowned in the history of Venice, the space of ground before the Church of Santa Maria Formosa; a spot which, after the Rialto and St. Mark’s Place, ought to possess a peculiar interest in the mind of the traveller, in consequence of its connexion with the most touching and true legend of the Brides of Venice. That legend is related at length in every Venetian history, and, finally, has been told by the poet Rogers, in a way which renders it impossible for any one to tell it after him. I have only, therefore, to remind the reader that the capture of the brides took place in the cathedral church, St. Pietro di Castello; and that this of Santa Maria Formosa is connected with the tale, only because it was yearly visited with prayers by the Venetian maidens, on the anniversary of their ancestors’ deliverance. For that deliverance, their thanks were to be rendered to the Virgin; and there was no church then dedicated to the Virgin, in Venice, except this.[27]
Neither of the cathedral church, nor of this dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful, is one stone left upon another. But, from that which has been raised on the site of the latter, we may receive a most important lesson, introductory to our immediate subject, if first we glance back to the traditional history of the church which has been destroyed.
§ IV. No more honorable epithet than “traditional” can be attached to what is recorded concerning it, yet I should grieve to lose the legend of its first erection. The Bishop of Uderzo, driven by the Lombards from his Bishopric, as he was praying, beheld in a vision the Virgin Mother, who ordered him to found a church in her honor, in the place where he should see a white cloud rest. And when he went out, the white cloud went before him; and on the place where it rested he built a church, and it was called the Church of St. Mary the Beautiful, from the loveliness of the form in which she had appeared in the vision.[28]
The first church stood only for about two centuries. It was rebuilt in 864, and enriched with various relics some fifty years later; relics belonging principally to St. Nicodemus, and much lamented when they and the church were together destroyed by fire in 1105.
It was then rebuilt in “magnifica forma,” much resembling, according to Corner, the architecture of the chancel of St. Mark;[29] but the information which I find in various writers, as to the period at which it was reduced to its present condition, is both sparing and contradictory.
§ V. Thus, by Corner, we are told that this church, resembling St. Mark’s, “remained untouched for more than four centuries,” until, in 1689, it was thrown down by an earthquake, and restored by the piety of a rich merchant, Turrin Toroni, “in ornatissima forma;” and that, for the greater beauty of the renewed church, it had added to it two façades of marble. With this information that of the Padre dell’ Oratoria agrees, only he gives the date of the earlier rebuilding of the church in 1175, and ascribes it to an architect of the name of Barbetta. But Quadri, in his usually accurate little guide, tells us that this Barbetta rebuilt the church in the fourteenth century; and that of the two façades, so much admired by Corner, one is of the sixteenth century, and its architect unknown; and the rest of the church is of the seventeenth, “in the style of Sansovino.”
§ VI. There is no occasion to examine, or endeavor to reconcile, these conflicting accounts. All that is necessary for the reader to know is, that every vestige of the church in which the ceremony took place was destroyed at least as early as 1689; and that the ceremony itself, having been abolished in the close of the fourteenth century, is only to be conceived as taking place in that more ancient church, resembling St. Mark’s, which, even according to Quadri, existed until that period. I would, therefore, endeavor to fix the reader’s mind, for a moment, on the contrast between the former and latter aspect of this plot of ground; the former, when it had its Byzantine church, and its yearly procession of the Doge and the Brides; and the latter, when it has its Renaissance church “in the style of Sansovino,” and its yearly honoring is done away.
§ VII. And, first, let us consider for a little the significance and nobleness of that early custom of the Venetians, which brought about the attack and the rescue of the year 943: that there should be but one marriage day for the nobles of the whole nation,[30] so that all might rejoice together; and that the sympathy might be full, not only of the families who that year beheld the alliance of their children, and prayed for them in one crowd, weeping before the altar, but of all the families of the state, who saw, in the day which brought happiness to others, the anniversary of their own. Imagine the strong bond of brotherhood thus sanctified among them, and consider also the effect on the minds of the youth of the state; the greater deliberation and openness necessarily given to the contemplation of marriage, to which all the people were solemnly to bear testimony; the more lofty and unselfish tone which it would give to all their thoughts. It was the exact contrary of stolen marriage. It was marriage to which God and man were taken for witnesses, and every eye was invoked for its glance, and every tongue for its prayers.[31]
§ VIII. Later historians have delighted themselves in dwelling on the pageantry of the marriage day itself, but I do not find that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions. I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed. The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino’s, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded “on ancient custom.”[32] However this may have been, the circumstances of the rite were otherwise very simple. Each maiden brought her dowry with her in a small “cassetta,” or chest; they went first to the cathedral, and waited for the youths, who having come, they heard mass together, and the bishop preached to them and blessed them: and so each bridegroom took his bride and her dowry and bore her home.