Two other peculiarities, not found in the other cities of Italy, give a distinct charm to the architecture of Venice; and they are both caused by her position in the sea. The first of these is that all her important buildings are covered from cornice to foundation with precious and lovely marbles. The foundations were laid with mighty blocks of Istrian marble, brought from the mainland; but it was impossible to bring from so far enough of solid stone to build the palaces, churches, and dwellings of Venice. With rare exceptions, then, the walls were of brick; but, for beauty’s sake, the brick was overlaid, outside and inside, with thin slabs of veined and various marbles, with alabaster, with discs of porphyry, with mosaic, or with frescoes. The oversheeting marbles were brought from across the sea. The frescoes were done by the Venetian artists. Imagination, flying high, can scarcely represent to itself the glorious aspect of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, as seen from the Rialto, covered from top to bottom with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione. These have perished, but the inlaid and marble covered walls of the Venetian palaces remain, and they are like a lovely mosaic of rich colour. On their marble and alabaster the sea-winds and the sunlight have so acted that the surface has a sheen of flying and evasive colour, and a patina which I have not seen elsewhere, even in Genoa. Those accursed restorers have taken the trouble, notably in St. Mark’s, of scraping this away. It is like cleaning the patina away from a Greek bronze. Nature—sea and sun and wind—had adopted the buildings for her own, and given centuries of work to enhance the beauty of their original colour. Italy has despised and destroyed this labour of Nature. But in many places the charm remains, and it is the work, directly and indirectly, of the sea.
There is a second thing to say of the influence of the sea position of Venice on her architecture, and of the charm of it. In the mediaeval towns of the Italian mainland, the palaces of the nobles and merchants, even the ordinary houses, present to the street lofty and blind walls of enormous strength, especially along the lower story. They have the aspect of prisons, and they were made in this fashion for the sake of defence in the incessant quarrels waged by the opponent families and parties in the city. There is no openness, no story of hospitable receptions, no brightness of life, no sense of peace, impressed on us by the great buildings of the inland towns of Italy. Even when we visit a little hill town like San Gimignano, we see that the common houses, as well as those of the nobles, wear the appearance of fortresses. It is quite different in Venice. The main entrance of the houses, of rich and poor, was on the seaside, on the canal. A wide door, leading to a long hall, opened by steps on the water. The glancing of the water plays on the roof of the hall which goes back to a small garden. The great staircase mounts to the first story from this hall, and that story has wide, open-hearted windows with a deep balcony. Everything suggests peace, fearlessness, and the welcome of humanity. The steps seem made for the reception of crowds of guests. Tall piles, coloured in bands of red, white, and blue, tell what hosts of warless gondolas were moored there by the visitors. The whole of the lower story was often an arcade. The palace seems to throw itself open to the air, the light, and the populace. Its aspect is the aspect of friendship and hospitality, of a city whose citizens were at peace one with another.
This makes the appearance of Venice quite different from that of any other Italian town, and its charm is great. Nothing indeed can be prettier or more full of the delight of changing sunshine and shade, and of pleasant human life doing its work and having its joys in the sun, than to row through the narrower canals, and look into these wide open doors, and see in the glint and glimmer of the light reflected from the water the shadowy spaces full of men and women at work, of boys and girls playing, of tiny fishermen and tiny bathers making the bright waters that lap their open doors their playing and their working place. The freshness, the breadth, the joyous movement of the sea, fill their dwelling, regulate their life, mould their character, and set the seal of the witchery of the sea on all they feel and all they do.
This is the charm which the Architecture of Venice derives from the sea. How far Venetian Painting was influenced by the position of Venice on the sea, what charm it derived from the life of the sea, and how far the sea was the subject of the artists, is now the question. It is not easy to answer it, for the influence of the sea position was not direct but indirect. It did not make the painters of Venice desire to paint the sea or to care for it as our modern temper does, but it created, I think, a certain spiritual or imaginative influence in their soul, other than that produced by the landscape of the land, which, it may be quite unconsciously, entered into their art-work and had power over it.
The landscape that Cima, Basaiti, Giovanni Bellini, Catena, loved and painted, that Giorgione, Bonifazio, and Veronese placed in the distance of their pictures, was that of the mainland, of the spurs of the hills as they dipped into the Lombard plain, of the lovely network of rock and plain, river and woodland, of scattered castles and of white towns on the hilltops, which one sees from the heights of Verona. On the other hand, Titian painted the landscape of his native land, where the torrent comes down through the massive chestnuts of Cadore; where the gray limestone peaks leap upwards thousands of feet, and follow one another, like the waves of the sea in the tempest; and the huge boulders, ablaze with coloured lichen lie like resting beasts on the short sweet grass in the green shade of walnut trees, and the rude farmhouses stand beside the groves of oak and beech. These were his delight, but the sea is not in his work nor in that of his fellows.
What does touch the sea in their pictures are the skies they painted above this inland landscape. Their freedom, their diffused softness, their lofty arch, their bright and vast expanse, their lucid atmosphere, their silver subtlety, and their involved and mighty storm-clouds, are the creation of the wide and moving sea. Carpaccio and Catena paint the pale and trembling azure above the afternoon on the seacoast. Giorgione has recorded the dark purple thunder-clouds which climb with eager speed from the horizon of the sea to threaten the works of men. Cima of Conegliano paints the clustered flocks of white cloudlets in a clear pale sky which are common in the Venetian heavens, and which are born of the sea. Veronese paints the pure, cloudless, deep blue sky swept clean by the sea-wind, and under which the sea is radiant. In other pictures he paints a sky often seen over the Adriatic. It is indeed a seaside sky—blue with flat white stratus across the blue, calm, and trembling with reflections cast up from the sea. But Titian stands apart. His skies are of his own mountain valley. The splendours of the mountain rain, the whirling of the mountain-clouds belong to him alone.
The “softness and freedom,” so characteristic of the art of the great Venetian colourists that the phrase has almost passed into a proverb, did not belong to the earlier schools of Venice. These qualities came into her art with the advent of the New Learning, which reached Venice even earlier than it reached Florence, though it was less developed there than in Florence. As to freedom, the Spirit of the Renaissance set free the imagination of the artists, and kindled in them a more vivid interest in humanity, even in natural scenery. The intellectual freedom it brought belonged to every city which it touched. It belonged above all to Venice. The spirit of a sea-people is by nature more free than the spirit of the people of the plains. It is as free as the spirit of a mountain folk. And such a spirit entered into the painting of the artists of Venice, as it did into the life of its citizens. They painted with more boldness, originality and fire than the inland schools. The passion of the various, even of the reckless, sea was in their heart. And this passion was in tune with the intellectual freedom the New Learning brought to Venice.
As to the softness which distinguished the Venetians, it was chiefly shown in a passion for various, noble, and harmonized colour, suffused, even to its darkest shadow, with soft and glowing light. And Venice was already, from its eastern associations, the lover of rich colour, softly gradated, in buildings, boats, and dress. And then, beyond this, the colour of its seas and skies, as indeed always near the southern coasts, was tender, subtle, delicate alike when it was strong or evanescent, soft as a child’s cheek in slumber, but always glowing. Day by day, this warm softness of colour was instilled into the artists and nourished by the sea-nature of the place. It was a spirit in their pallet and their pencil.
The capacity for receiving such an impression was strengthened by the circumstances under which it was received. There is no place where the reception of the elements of beauty derived from Nature is so easy, undistracted, and uninterrupted as in Venice. Gliding in a gondola is very different from riding, driving, or walking. It ministers to receptivity.