The sea-charm of Venice

by Stopford A. Brooke

Then there is the deep silence of the lagoon, in which the spirit of Nature most speaks to man, not only by night but by day. We may be as quiet on the Venetian lagoons—with all the sense of sight open to receive, with the soul undisturbed by the challenge of human sounds—as we should be in the heart of a Highland glen. All that Nature displays of colour, form, or fancy; her mystery, her wild or mocking charm, her solemn silence fraught with thought—sinks deep into the heart when sunrise or sunset or starlight find us far out on the lagoon. A whole boatful of gay people are hushed as by a spell. This ease, then, in the reception of impressions on the senses, the quietude in which they are received, the soft magic in the quietude, the freedom of the waters, filled the soul of the Venetian artists, and made, as it were, the atmosphere which their art breathed, and the inner spirit of their pictures. It was one of the forces which made their work not only softer and freer, but more vivid and passionate than that of any other school in Italy.

Again, every one knows that the Venetian painters brought colour to a greater perfection than it attained elsewhere. It came to them from the lavish colouring of the city of which I have already written, from the gorgeousness of the pageants, but chiefly from the natural scenery of their home. It is true, they painted man rather than Nature. But they felt her loveliness, and the deepest impression they received from her daily work was of the glory and ravishment, glow and depth of colour, varied from the most delicate to the most sombre hues in sea and sky and along the distant range of Alpine summits. In the city itself, from canal to canal, all the shadows are transfused with a glimmer of blue light, or full of crimson and green fire. It is the presence and power of the water which produces this. Over the sea, the blue of the waters is like that of the sapphire throne Ezekiel saw above the terrible crystal of the firmament. It is not terrible here, but deep and tender; and, when storm is at hand, of a purple so solemn that Tintoret often uses it for the garments of those in tragic sorrow. But it was chiefly on the lagoon that the artists saw the richest and softest colour. In subdued sunlight, such as is frequent in the haze of the sea, the soft silvery, pearly grays vary infinitely over the smooth waters. In fresher and brighter days when the wind brings the flying clouds, the colour is that which is native to a sea-atmosphere, often clear, often thrilling through veils of ruby, sapphire, and emerald vapour, steeped always in the diffused light which is felt, like joy, over wide spaces of water, and under a vast expanse of sky. To these constant impressions we owe in part the extraordinary luminousness, glow, interfusion, subtlety, tenderness, splendour in height and depth of colour in the pictures of the great Venetians.

Another characteristic of Venetian painting is also derived from the charming of the sea. It is the intense glow of the flesh colour. The deep warmth and ruddy light which seem to come from within the body to the skin in the figures of these painters, were studied direct from Nature. It is the colour of the naked body of the Venetian fishers to this day. And nothing that I know of produces it but the influence of the sea-winds combined with sunlight, and of the sunlight reflected from the waters in a soft and gracious climate. We may see something like this colour, in its coarse extreme, in the faces and hands of the boatmen on our coasts. Sea and sun have there worked with a fierce and racking climate to produce the colour, but to destroy its beauty by destroying the texture of the skin. But, at Venice, these natural forces work in a climate which does not injure the skin; and they overlay its surface with a glow of red and golden colour which is one of the loveliest hues in the world, and has the special qualities of depth and life, even of a certain passion.

There is more opportunity in Venice for its formation than in other southern sea-ports. All through the summer and autumn the Venetian youths of the people spend their time all but naked in the water. They walk, ankle-deep, over the shallows of the lagoons, fishing for sea-plunder. The men work on the embankments only in their shirts. Half their life they are practically naked;—and to look at one of these young Venetian fishers, standing in the blaze of the sun, with the greenish water glistening round him, its reflections playing on his glowing limbs, and all his body flaming soft as from an inward fire—is to see the very thing which Giorgione painted on the walls of palaces, which Bellini and Giorgione handed on to their followers, which Titian and Tintoret laid on their canvas and emblazoned in their fresco. They worked into their painting of the human body what they saw every day, and other schools of art did not attain the glory of flesh-colour Venice attained, because they did not see it.

The naked body of the Bacchus of Tintoret, who comes wading through the lagoon water to meet Ariadne, is differently, but as richly and nobly, coloured as that of the Bacchus of Titian in the National Gallery. Reflections from the water glow and quiver on his limbs. He is truly a creature of dew and fire. There is a young and naked St. Sebastian by Titian at the Salute which might stand for one of the fishers of the lagoon. His long wet hair streams dark on his shoulders. In his face is all the freedom of the sea, and the soft warm rich glow of his body and limbs is indescribable. He is not St. Sebastian, but one of the gods of the peaceful sea.

When Giovanni Bellini painted the naked body, there is nothing better in colour in the whole world. In San Grisostomo the Saint sits in front of the bending stem of a great fig tree, on which he rests his book. His white beard flows down over his breast. Bellini’s certainty, firmness, enduringness of colour, are here at their very best. The glow and subdued flaming of the flesh, varied from point to point with an exquisite joy in the work, is beautiful beyond all praise. The glow of Giorgione’s flesh-colour is as deep, but thrilled through with a greater softness. In Tintoret’s hands the flesh-colour became more sombre, and in the faces of his many portraits had a curious dignity, as if, I have often thought, the royalty of the Sun had entered into it.

With his women, a difference arose. At first he painted them in the full Venetian manner. But afterwards, with his impatience of monotony or repetition, he changed the type. It alters from the full, opulent, rose-coloured women of Titian, Palma, Veronese, to a lithe, lissome, tall, rather thin woman, alive with youthful energy of fire, of the most gracious and subtle curves, exquisitely made, with a small head and lovely face. With his invention of this type, he invented a new method of colouring, marked by a temperance in its use and glow which is strange in one so often accused, and sometimes guilty, of intemperance. He sent across the naked body alternate shafts of sunlight and of shade, and amused himself by painting the colour of flesh under these varied conditions. The result—since in all the shadow as in the light there was colour, and colour at its subtlest—is the loveliest, freest, and most delightful thing in Venetian art. “The Graces” in the Ducal Palace are an example of this. Any one can see another example in the picture of the “Origin of the Milky Way” in the National Gallery. It may be only a fancy of mine, but I cannot help thinking that Tintoret had seen such girls bathing from the Lido on days when the sunlight was broken over the sea by racing clouds. There is a freshness, an open-air purity and light in these images of his which it pleases me to think would be absent if these lovely bodies had been painted in the rooms of palaces or in their gardens. The winds of heaven appear to blow around them from the unencumbered sea. The light of an ocean sky, the dance of reflected light from moving water seem to play upon them.

Again, the Venetian painters saw day by day the human body in graceful and incessantly changing movement, and the charm of it was derived from the sea-life of Venice. There are few attitudes and movements in any human work more graceful than those of the single rower of a gondola. He is so placed, and his peculiar method of rowing is such, that his labour educates him in lovely movement, and of movement altering almost at every instant to meet new circumstances. He is unable to take an awkward attitude. If he does, so lightly poised is he, he is tossed out of the boat; and it is only, I believe, because the attitudes are so various, so momentary, so hard to see before they change, that sculptors have not reproduced them. It is plain that this incessantly beautiful movement of the human body had a great influence on the painters of Venice. Their eye was unconsciously trained from youth to realize the body of man in lovely poise and change.

Their eye was also trained to realize the aspect of stately, grave, and reverent signiors and merchants in the rich robes of the days of pageants; or in the quiet robes of councillors and citizens; and there are no more noble, dignified representations of men of honour, weight, and civic business, than those made by the Venetian artists. The only way in which this view of their art can be connected with the sea is that, owing to the commerce of Venice on every sea, there existed in the town a wise, wealthy, honoured middle class, different from the middle class in the other sea-towns of Italy, having worthy connections with the East, and sharing in a greater degree than elsewhere in the government and culture of the city.

Moreover, the wonderful splendour of the pageants and triumphs of the town, most of which were bound up with the sea, enabled painters like Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and Veronese, to display in decorative art the most gorgeous colour in dress and festive show. The processions in Venice, the festal days at the Salute and the Redentore, the marriage of Venice to the sea, were a varied blaze of radiant colour.