Another Doge, whose craft, or inoffensiveness kept his head upon his shoulders, takes up the indefinite series beyond the accusing tablet.
Many of the historical pictures are by noted artists. Paul Veronese and his pupils appear most prominently in the catalogue, although Tintoretto and Bassano did their part, under princely patronage, toward commemorating the glories, civic, ecclesiastic, and naval, of Venice. So much Doge and Pope drove us from the field of observation by the time we had spent an hour in the immense room. The Voting Hall, visited next, afforded neither change nor relief. Thirty-nine Doges could not be forced into the Council Chamber. The faithful Venetians have made a frieze of them, also, at the end of which we read aloud and thankfully, the name of Manini. We had seen his tomb, and remembered him as the last of the worthy old gentlemen. Here we read the history of the Republic again on ceiling and walls, except where a “Last Judgment”—pertinent, but not complimentary—over the entrance, broke the line of battle, which was, invariably, Venetian victory.
The notorious Bocca di Leone is a slit by the side of a door in a second-story room. We were passing it, without notice, when the guide pointed it out. It is no larger than the “slide” in a post-office door, and like it in shape. If it could give breath to all the secrets it swallowed when the Bridge of Sighs was a populous pathway to the dungeons that meant death; when nocturnal hangings, with no public preamble of trial or sentence, were legal executions—the little hole in the wall would be as the mouth—not of the lion—but of hell!
This Palace, whose foundations were laid A. D. 800, is a superb fabric. It was finished in the fourteenth century. It faces the sea on one side, upon another the Piazzetta, where St. Theodore stands aloft, shield and spear in hand, the crocodile under his feet, and the Winged Lion holds open the Book of the Gospels with his paw. A double colonnade of more than a hundred columns, runs around both of these sides. We counted carefully from the main entrance to the ninth and tenth pillars. They are of rich red marble, and between them, in the prosperous days of the Republic, stood the herald while he cried aloud the sentences of death just decreed in the Great Hall. The Doges were crowned upon the upper landing of the Giant’s Staircase. An inner stairway is known as the Scala d’Oro, or Golden Stairs, and in the same Republican age, none could tread it who were not registered among the nobility. We saw the table around which convened the Council of Ten,—perhaps the same over which the Spanish conspiracy was discussed, and on which the death-warrants were penned.
Then we rejoined patient Antonio at the foot of the Piazzetta, and were rowed—or spirited—by winding ways, to the beautiful church of the Franciscans, to see Canova’s monument. It was erected five years after his death, from his own design for Titian’s tomb. The artist within whose soul the exquisite conception grew into form should rest in this mausoleum and none other. The door of the pyramidal tomb is pushed open by a bending figure, (life-size,) in trailing weeds, who looks longingly, yet fearfully, into the inner darkness. She is followed up the short flight of steps by a procession of mourners,—Poetry, and Sculpture, and Painting, among them,—bearing laurels and funereal emblems. Titian’s monument, in another aisle, is a tasteless monstrosity, in comparison with this “rejected” design.
The Franciscan Monastery adjoining the church, contains the archives of Venice since 883. There are not less than fourteen million documents in the collection. So boast the custodians. Three hundred rooms are appropriated for their accommodation.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Bologna.
